The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Des Grieux could see both north and south of the Knifeblade Escarpment from where he sat on top of the burned-out tank destroyer. Smudgy fires still burned over the sloping plain where the Slammers' artillery and sharp-shooting powerguns had slashed the Hashemite center into retreat, then chaos.

Clots of surrendered enemies waited to be interned. Thunderbolt Division personnel rested under tarpaulins attached to their vehicles and a stake or two driven into the soil. The defeated mercenaries were not exactly lounging: there were many wounded among them, and every survivor from the punished battalions knew at least one friend who hadn't been so lucky.

But they would be exchanged back to their own command within hours or days. A mercenary's war ended when the fighting stopped.

The Hashemite survivors were another matter. They huddled in separate groups. Many of their trucks had been disabled by the rain of anti-personnel bomblets which the armor of the mercenary half-tracks had shrugged off. The Hashemites' personal weapons were piled ostentatiously at a slight distance from each gathering.

That wasn't necessarily going to help. Sincanmo irregulars were doing the heavy work of interning prisoners: searching, sorting, and gathering them into coffles of two hundred or so to be transferred to holding camps. The Slammers overseeing the process wouldn't permit the Sincanmos to shoot their indig prisoners here in public.

What happened when converted cargo vans filled with Hashemites were driven ten kays or so into the desert was anybody's guess.

A gun jeep whined its way up the south face of the Escarpment. Victorious troops and prisoners watched the vehicle's progress. The jeep's driver regarded them only as obstacles, and the passenger seated on the other side of the pintle-mounted tribarrel paid them no attention at all.

Des Grieux rolled bits of ivory between the ball of his thumb and his left hand. He turned his face toward the north, where H271 sat in the far distance with a combat car and a heavy-lift vehicle from the Slammers' maintenance battalion in attendance.

Des Grieux wasn't interested in the attempts to dig out H271, but he was unwilling to watch the jeep. Funny about it being a jeep. He'd expected at least a combat car; and Joachim Steuben present, not some faceless driver who wasn't even one of the White Mice.