The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Des Grieux slapped the plate that set his tribarrel on Automatic Air Defense. He said in a sharp,clear voice,"Booster,sort incoming from the southeast first," as his foot poised on the firing pedal for the main gun.

The 20cm weapon was already aligned. The eighty-times magnified tube of the tank destroyer's gun slid into the hollow circle on Screen #2. More shells burst near H271, but not very near, and the tribarrel was already snarling skyward at the anti-tank rounds which the Legion battery hurled.

The tank destroyer's glacis plate filled Des Grieux's display. He rocked forward on the foot-trip. The saturated blue streak punched through the mantle of the 15cm weapon before the Legion gunner could find his target.

The tank destroyer's ready magazine painted the Notch cyan. Then the reserve ammunition storage went off and lifted the vehicle's armored carapace a meter in the air before dropping it back to the ground.

The iridium shell glowed white. Nothing else remained of the tank destroyer or its crew.

Des Grieux laughed with mad glee. "Have to do better 'n that, Broglie!" he shouted as he slid his aiming point down the slope. He fired every time the hollow pipper covered an undamaged vehicle.

There were seventeen 20cm rounds remaining in H271's ready magazine. Each bolt turned a lightly armored truck or APC into a fireball that bulged steel plates like the skin of a balloon. The last two half-tracks Des Grieux hit had already been abandoned by their crews.

Artillery fire slackened, though Des Grieux's tribarrel snarled uninterruptedly skyward. A delay-fused armor-piercing shell struck short of H271 and punched five meters through the hard soil before going off. The explosion lifted the tank a hand's breadth despite the mass of rock overburden, but the vehicle sustained no damage.

Screen#1showed a killing zone south of the Escarpment,where fleeing troops bunched and the Slammers maneuvered to cut them apart. Because the powerguns were deadly at any range so long as they had a sight line, every knob of ground Hammer's troops took cut a further swath through far-distant enemy positions.

When the Legion and Thunderbolt artillery directed its fire toward Des Grieux, the cupola guns of the tanks were freed to kill. The process of collapse accelerated as tanks and combat cars took the howitzer batteries themselves under direct fire.