The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

“I suppose not,” Huber said. He tried to make his mind go blank, but he couldn’t manage it. “Sir, if you don’t have any further duties for me here …?”

“You don’t like our company?” Steuben said, his smile flashing on and off like a strobe light. “All right, Lieutenant. You’re free to leave.”

Major Steuben rotated his chair toward Huber again. His face, too pretty to be handsome in a man, was suddenly as hard as chilled steel. “The offer remains open, Lieutenant,” he said. “You should feel flattered, you know.”

“I appreciate your confidence, sir,” Huber said. He turned to the hatch; it opened before he could touch the control plate.

Huber stepped into the gathering darkness. Grenade launchers continued to work, the choonk/wham! choonk/wham! punctuating the sound of drive fans and power tools. Troopers were pulling maintenance on their vehicles with spares the column had brought from Base Alpha. The white flashes of the bombs were quick speckles through the fabric of tents bulging outward before they collapsed.

Mauricia Orichos saw Huber come out of the command car. She stepped away from the group she was with and waved to him.

Huber looked at her, then slipped his faceshield down and quickened his stride in the direction of Fencing Master. As he’d told Major Steuben, he could find his own company. And he wasn’t going to find it there.

Neck or Nothing

“Red Section, pull back two hundred meters!” Lieutenant Arne Huber ordered over the platoon channel. A laser from one of the hostile hovertanks touched a tree to the right, blasting a ten-meter strip off the trunk. Fragments of bark and sapwood stung Huber and the two gunners with him in the combat car’s open fighting compartment. “Blue, we’ll hold till Red’s in position! Six out.”

The artificial intelligence in Huber’s commo helmet imposed a translucent red caret on his faceshield, warning of movement to the left. Huber was Fencing Master’s left wing gunner as well as commander of platoon F-3. At the moment, swinging his tribarrel onto the threat took precedence over controlling the platoon’s other five cars.

The motion was the hull of a hovertank from a mercenary unit hired by Solace in its war with the Outer States. The vehicle was three hundred meters away, much farther than you could generally see in the forests of Plattner’s World, and the tank’s two crewmen probably weren’t aware of Fencing Master as they drove across the battlefront hoping to take F-3 in the flank.

The target quivered in Huber’s holographic sight picture. He settled his weapon and squeezed the butterfly trigger with both thumbs. The cluster of iridium barrels rotated as they fired, giving each tube a moment to cool after spewing a bolt of ionized copper downrange at the speed of light.

The narrow window didn’t allow Huber to choose a particular spot on his target, but the energy a 2-cm powergun packed made most things vulnerable. The compartment holding the hovertank’s crew was armored with ceramic layered in ablative sheets, proof against single bolts or even a short burst, but the skirts enclosing the plenum chamber were light plastic to keep the weight down. Huber raked the bulge where the two joined.

A fireball erupted from the tank’s port side: the cyan plasma had converted the plastic into its constituent elements—which recombined explosively. The flash ignited even the loam of the forest floor.

“I can’t see it!” screamed Frenchie Deseau at Fencing Master’s bow gun. “Padova, pull up, for Hell’s sake! I can’t see the target!”

The hostile was directly ahead of Fencing Master, so by rights it should’ve been Deseau’s target while Huber watched the left flank the way Trooper Learoyd was doing the right from the other wing gun. It was a chance of visibility that made the tank Huber’s prey while the trees concealed it from Deseau.

The tank rocked to the right, then slewed to a halt because Huber’d ripped its skirts wide open. The tank’s gunner tried to rotate his roof-mounted laser, but Huber’s tribarrel blew the weapon to fiery slag an instant before rupturing the crew compartment itself.

What mattered was that somebody got the tank before it took F-3 from the rear; but if F-3 didn’t fall back quickly, another tank or tanks were going to circle them. There were too many hostiles for a single platoon of combat cars to deal with for long. Where the bloody hell was Ander’s Legion, the combined arms battalion that was supposed to follow when F-3 seized the knoll in the face of the advancing Solace column?