The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

A pair of L’Escorials, stoned on gage and bold to the point of lunacy, leaped aboard the converted bulldozer. Astras fired wildly from ports in the headquarters building, but most of the shots were aimed at fireflies which existed only in the gunmen’s minds.

Powergun bolts traced magenta afterimages across unprotected retinas; terror turned the shudder of color into the fireflies’ static suspension system, though all the little devices were at the moment being reloaded.

The bulldozer grunted to life. One of the L’Escorials jumped from the hatch again. He was immediately shot in half by gunmen from both syndicates. The remaining man backed the converted vehicle with a skill that its regular driver couldn’t have managed with leisure and full daylight.

The door to the underground garage was open; an armored truck was driving up the ramp. The bulldozer crashed into the flimsier armored vehicle, blocking the exit completely.

The L’Escorial driver jumped out and scampered away, miraculously unhurt by the sleet of bolts and bullets which pursued him. A L’Escorial armored car nosed through the opened gateway. Its three tribarrels fired point-blank at the rocket pod mounted on the converted bulldozer.

The dozer was armed with hypervelocity rockets which didn’t have explosive warheads. The rocket fuel deflagrated with what was only technically a fire rather than an explosion.

A ball of yellow light enveloped the front of Astra headquarters and the vehicles in the garage beneath the building. More fuel and munitions went off in a second blast a heartbeat after the first. The building’s protective facade lifted as a piece, then settled again in slabs and pieces that crumbled away.

A L’Escorial armored car raked the courtyard wall with fléchette rockets. Almost all the hundreds of osmium penetrators punched through the cast concrete, each drilling a finger-sized hole on entry and blowing a divot the size of a soup plate from the inner face as the projectile keyholed out. Backblast from the powerful rockets incinerated dozens of L’Escorials who had sheltered behind the launcher.

Wreathed in smoke from its rocket exhausts, the vehicle that fired the salvo drove into the weakened portion of concrete. Metal shrieked, but a ten-meter stretch of wall collapsed inward.

A cloud of white dust enveloped Astra headquarters. Scores of L’Escorial guns fired with no target beyond the silent building itself. Another armored car rumbled through the gap. Its sole functioning tribarrel ripped a rich cyan line across and through the building’s inner fabric. There was no return fire, but ricocheting projectiles spun several of the red-clad gunmen.

“About now, I’d say,” Mary Margulies prompted. She gripped the large hasp to open the unlocked front door.

“Not yet!” Coke ordered. His mind tried to fill the immediate future, encompassing every possible event and side effect. The task was beyond his conscious intellect, but instinct told him that the moment was not—

A white flag—a scrap of sheet—waved from a hole on the ground floor of Astra headquarters. Bob Barbour gestured minusculely to the keyboard of the console at which he sat.

The holographic screen split. The lower half showed the interior of the building. Audio was from one of the laminar bugs Daun set during the initial visit to Astra HQ. Visuals came through miniature cameras at roof level across the street, processed to an illusory slickness by the console’s artificial intelligence.

“Luria!” the Widow Guzman shouted through a bullhorn, toward a hole torn into the wall by powergun bolts. “We surrender! We’re coming out!”

Three Astra gunmen and Adolpho Peres crouched with the Widow in what had been her private office. In the outer area, another gunman stood behind the thickest remaining portion of the building’s facade, waving the white flag. There were dozens of bodies around him, most of them mangled beyond recognition of their species.

The fireflies, their magazines reloaded, curved toward the riddled building like swarming hornets.

“Bob, you’re control,” said Matthew Coke as he stepped to the door of Hathaway House. “The rest of us—now!”

Margulies put her weight against the inertia of the door, then stepped out behind her commander.

The Lurias had left a six-man guard at the gate to their headquarters. By this stage in the fighting the gunmen stood in the middle of the street to watch the battle in the near distance.

Coke didn’t make the mistake of using his sub-machine gun as an area weapon when he had individual targets. Three-round bursts spun two of the L’Escorials an instant before Margulies blew a third nearly in half with her 2-cm weapon. The last three syndicate gunmen went down in a ripple of cyan as all four Frisians fired simultaneously.

The brief fusillade didn’t arouse the attention of the fighters half a kilometer away, locked in the death throes of the Astra syndicate. Coke and his team sprinted across the street and through the open door into L’Escorial headquarters.