David Drake - The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Huber’s third target exploded in a mushroom of crimson flame. As he hammered through the cab of the fourth and last, he saw Deseau’s and Learoyd’s guns crossing his burst to slaughter the soldiers bailing out of the vehicles Frenchie had disarmed.

The infantry weren’t much of a threat now even if they got clear, but Huber shifted his own fire onto a car that his troopers hadn’t hit yet. Body parts flew up at his lash before a secondary explosion finished the job in a saffron fireball.

Despite the filters over Huber’s nostrils, Fencing Master stank of ozone and the vile slickness of burned metal. Vaporized iridium had burned the side of his neck, and his seared left sleeve stuck to his elbow. Blood and Martyrs, that was close!

Fencing Master jumped again. We’re hit! but it wasn’t incoming: a strip of the automatic defense array at the top of the skirts had gone off, sending a load of small osmium slugs out toward the left front. They met the anti-tank missile homing on the combat car.

The warhead detonated partially in a red flash. Bits of the debris sprayed Fencing Master. The concussion staggered Huber and a chunk of the rocket motor whanged the hull, but that was a cheap price. If the round’d hit squarely, the jet from its shaped charge would’ve gutted Fencing Master like a trout.

A 25-cm bolt hit close by, vaporizing a combat car forward of the rear bulkhead. A cloud of glowing iridium shimmered through all the colors of the spectrum, turning the ridgeline as bright as noon in Hell.

“Shall I back up? Shall I back us up?” Padova shouted into the intercom. Fencing Master lifted, quivering on plenum chamber pressure instead of resting its skirts firmly on the ground.

“Set us down!” Huber shouted, swinging his gun onto the pair of Nonesuch tanks sheltering at the side of a starship like tortoises in the lee of a high cliff. His tribarrel floated on a frictionless magnetic bearing, but inertia made slewing it a deliberate business. “Give us a solid—”

He had his target, not the glacis that could resist a tank’s main gun nor the treads which a tribarrel could weld, immobilizing the huge vehicle without affecting its firepower. Huber aimed at the bore of the main gun, the 25-cm tunnel glowing from the bolt with which it had turned a combat car and its crew into fiery gases.

“—platform!”

Fencing Master thudded back to the ground as Huber’s thumbs squeezed, but the stabilizer was locked on. His stream of blue-green bolts flared and sparkled against the tank’s muzzle, its gun tube, and the mantle which covered the glacis opening.

A 25-cm bolt put such stresses on the bore that the guns’ rate of fire was necessarily low, no more than two rounds per minute. Huber’d laid his tribarrel on the first tank nonetheless because that gunner’d proved he had the Slammers’ elevation. Even the centerline gun’s limited traverse would be sufficient to sweep six or eight vehicles to either side of the one it’d destroyed.

It was a calculated gamble, though, because the other tank was able to fire now. When a vivid cyan flash enveloped it, instinct told Huber this was a bolt which might blast Fencing Master and its crew to dissociated atoms.

The Nonesuch tank hadn’t fired. A pair of 20-cm bolts had hit it simultaneously, lighting the concrete field with a rainbow bubble similar to what the combat car had become a moment before. Huber’s faceshield blacked out almost totally. He kept his thumbs on the trigger, burning out his bores as he slashed his own massive target.

His faceshield cleared except for the streams from Fencing Master’s three tribarrels and the smudge of reflection where they hammered together into the Nonesuch tank. Then the tank and the world vanished again.

The protective black curtain cleared seconds later as the shock-wave reached the ridgeline. The roof of the tank’s fighting compartment toppled back toward the chassis which had been cleaned of its contents like a raccoon-licked clamshell. The tank’s gunner had chambered another round. 2-cm bolts glancing down the bore from Fencing Master had detonated it before the breech was fully locked.

Focused on his gunsight, Huber hadn’t heard the freight-train roar of 200-mm rockets passing low overhead, nor the plop plop plop of small charges ejecting sub-munitions from the carrier shells. The Nonesuch air defenses had been able to stop most of the incoming while it was simply them against the hogs, but when the Slammers’ vehicles appeared on the ridgeline the Nonesuch tribarrels were switched to direct fire. There was nothing to stop salvos from the batteries surrounding Port Plattner.

Each shell’s twelve sub-munitions went off between twenty and forty meters above the ground, a yellow flash and a rag of smoke as the explosive charge forged a plate of uranium into a white-hot spike and drove it downward toward the Nonesuch vehicle its sensors had chosen. The hogs were firing anti-tank shells, not firecracker rounds that barely scratched the paint of armored vehicles.

The self-forging fragments shattered the Nonesuch defenses already bruised by powerguns firing from the high ground surrounding the port. They punched through roof plating, relatively thin even on the tanks. Inside, the friction-heated uranium turned into balls of flame enveloping everything in the penetrated compartment. Hundreds of Nonesuch vehicles vanished into simultaneous blow-torch flames: fuel, flesh and munitions, all pulverized, all burning at the temperature of a star’s surface.

Two more salvos popped in the air and raged on the ground. The thunderclaps of detonations died away, though some of the burning vehicles screamed as they lit the night with jets of fire.

Huber’s gun had jammed, but nobody in 1st Squadron was shooting anymore. There were cyan flickers on the pad’s northern perimeter, but that might have been guns continuing to fire as they melted into the vehicles on which they were mounted.

“Cease fire!” Colonel Hammer rasped. “All Slammers units, cease fire! Nonesuch representatives on the starships have offered their surrender. Cease fire, troopers, it’s over!”

Huber took his hands from the grips of his weapon. The barrel cluster continued to spin, a white blur that made the air throb as it threw off heat. Huber had a multi-tool in his belt pouch, but when he reached for it to clear the jam he realized that his fingers didn’t want to close properly.

Deseau’s tribarrel had jammed also. He held his backup 2-cm weapon, but he wasn’t shooting into the thousands of helpless human targets sprawling and staggering on the concrete below. The hell-strewn carnage was enough even for Frenchie.

Learoyd took off his commo helmet to rub his bald scalp with his left hand. The skin of his chin and throat below the faceshield’s protection was black where iridium vaporized from his gun bores had redeposited itself. He looked older than Huber had ever seen him before.

“Fox Three-six to Fox Three,” Huber said in a voice that caught at every syllable. “Good work, troopers. Nobody ever commanded a better unit than I did tonight.”

He swallowed and added the words that almost hadn’t gotten past his swollen throat. “Three-six out.”

Then, because his head throbbed and any constriction was an agony he couldn’t bear for the moment, Huber took off his helmet. He regretted the decision immediately with the first breath he took of the unfiltered atmosphere.

He turned and vomited over the side of the fighting compartment. No matter how often he encountered it, the smell of burned human flesh always turned Arne Huber’s stomach.

“Hey El-Tee!” said Deseau, standing with Padova on the plenum chamber to brace the replacement plate while Learoyd applied the cold weld. “That black-haired piece you met the first time the wogs threw in the towel? She’s coming to see you.”