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

The Royalist howitzers had their own power supplies to adjust elevation and traverse; they could even crawl across terrain by themselves, though very slowly. The northern weapon was now live, a bright image on Ruthven’s display and a whine through the hatch as its pumps pressurized the hydraulic system.

“Fire Central, this is Echo One-six,” Ruthven said, calling the Regiment’s artillery controller but distributing the exchange to his troopers on an output-only channel. “Request Fire Order One …”

Targeting the rebels approaching from the northeast. They were coming uphill by now. That plus the stumps and broken rocks of the roughly cleared terrain had slowed them.

“ …HE, repeat HE only, we’re too close for firecracker rounds, time of impact fifty-five, repeat five-five seconds from …”

His index finger tapped a marker into the transmission.

“ …now, over.”

“Roger, Echo One-six,” replied a voice barely identifiable as female through the tight compression. She was so calm she sounded bored. Then, “On the way, out.”

“Echo One-Four-six,” Ruthven said. I probably sound bored too. “This is Six. Take the wall down in three-five, I repeat three-five, seconds. Break. Unit, wait for our hogs, don’t get hasty. Then its time to kick ass, troopers, out!”

The command car’s fans were howling. The vehicle slid forward; forty tonnes accelerates slowly, so Melisant was getting an early start. They’ll hear us, but screw’em. They’ll hear more than our fans real soon.

Ruthven started to close the back ramp but Melisant had already taken care of that. He went up through the roof hatch and took the tribarrel’s grips in his hands.

There were a lot of reasons to stay down in the body. Communications with E/1 and Central were better inside; he could operate the gun just as well from the console and had a better display than his visor gave him; and the vehicle’s armor, though light, might save him from shrapnel or a bullet that’d otherwise rob the platoon of its commander. There wasn’t a trooper in E/1 who’d think their El-Tee was a coward if he stayed in the compartment.

But Ruthven himself’d worry that he was a coward in the dark silences before dawn, especially if he survived and some of his troopers didn’t. And somebody was going to die. That was as sure as sunrise, even if E/1 got luckier than any veteran expected.

The long-barreled 120-mm howitzer belched a bottle-shaped yellow flash toward the perimeter wall; companion flares spewed out and back from both sides through the muzzle brake’s baffles. The tube recoiled and the blast slapped Ruthven. The commo helmet’s active sound cancellation saved his hearing, but the shockwave pushed him against the hatch ring. Even at this distance, unburned powder grains speckled his throat and bare hands.

The wall erupted, leaking the shellburst’s red flash through the treetrunks it blew apart. Royalist shanties flattened, flung outward in a cone spreading from the howitzer. A huge dust cloud rose from the shock-pummeled compound.

The command car hit the ground, plowing a track through the hard soil. The steel skirt rang, scattering sparks when it hit embedded stones as the vehicle bucked and pitched.

Either the shockwave had startled Melisant into chopping her throttles, or she’d realized it’d be a disaster to get in front of the howitzer while it was still firing. The Regiment used rocket howitzers rather than tube artillery. She probably hadn’t expected the muzzle blast of a long-range gun to be so punishing.

Ruthven hadn’t expected it either. Being told something by an Academy lecturer wasn’t the same as being hit by what felt like a hundred-kilo sandbag in the field.

The howitzer returned to battery and slammed again, then again, again, and again. The interval between shots was less than two seconds. The last shell screamed toward the northwest horizon as the gun fell over on its side. Rapid fire at zero elevation had lifted the recoil spades at the end of the gun’s trail.

Between the third round and the fourth, the salvo from the hogs at Firebase Groening burst outside the encampment as a white glare which silhouetted the flying treetrunks. Central’d fused the shells to go off just above the surface instead of burying themselves before exploding.

Fragments of casing screeched across the hillside in an interlocking web more deadly than any spider’s. A large chunk …maybe the baseplate of a Royalist shell …howled through Firebase Courage in a flat red streak. It didn’t miss the command car by much, but it missed….

“Go!” Ruthven shouted. “Go! Go! Go!”

The car was accelerating again. After Melisant’d gotten them stopped the first time, she’d gimbaled the nacelles vertical and kept the fans at maximum output. They’d been hovering at ten centimeters on a pillow of air, not exactly flying—the vehicle remained in ground effect—but shuddering to every shockwave.

The elevation, though slight, gave the car a gravity boost when Melisant shoved the steering yoke forward. They gathered speed quickly despite ticks and bounces from debris scattered across the interior of the firebase. Flames spurted beneath the plenum chamber when they crossed the former perimeter; the 120-mm shells had started small fires in the wood, and the drive fans whipped them into hungry enthusiasm.

There were some larger chunks for them to kick aside, but the trees no longer formed an interlocked mass that could resist a forty-tonne battering ram. Showers of sparks and blazing torches flew ahead of the skirts. Then the car was through and heading down the slope into what remained of a company of the Lord’s Army.

Ruthven snapped a short burst at what looked in his visor’s thermal image like a rebel kneeling only twenty meters away. The car skidded enough to throw his bolts wide, but before he could correct he realized that he was shooting at a legless, headless torso impaled on a sapling.

Cyan bolts snapped through the night, igniting the brush. Nobody could aim accurately from a skimmer at speed, but in the corner of his eye Ruthven saw a secondary explosion. A trooper’d gotten lucky, hitting a rebel’s buzzbomb and detonating the warhead.

Red tracers and muzzle flashes danced in the darkness also, but most of the rebels firing were in the companies to the south and east. The party on which the hogs had unloaded were largely silent, dead or stunned by the 20-cm shells. One rebel opened up from a gully to E/1’s left front, but at least a dozen powerguns replied to the chattering rifle. Either somebody hit the reb, or he decided that huddling out of sight was a better idea than martyrdom for the Prophet after all; at any rate, the shooting stopped.

The command car reached the ground slope rising toward Second Squad. The brush and canes hadn’t been cleared here; they averaged maybe two meters high, and there were occasional much taller trees.

Melisant kept moving, but she had to slow to twenty kph. They’d drawn well ahead of the jeeps and skimmers on the downhill run, but now the smaller vehicles were able to slip between clumps which the car had to fight through.

For a wonder, Sergeant Sellars was keeping her Royalists from shooting down at Ruthven’s force. Maybe Second Squad was holding the locals at gunpoint to enforce fire discipline …and then again, maybe that detached platoon’d bugged out when the shooting started. Either way, Ruthven was going to put Sellars in for both a medal and a promotion when this was over.

If I’m around to make the recommendation. If she’s around to get it.

Badly aimed rifle fire had been zipping overhead since the beginning of the breakout, but now a machine gun on a fixed mount cut branches nearby. Ruthven rotated his tribarrel to the right. Bullets whanged off the car’s high side. The machine gunner was part of the unit that’d been waiting down the road for the Royalist garrison. He was bloody good to hit a moving target at 600 meters, even with the advantage of a tripod.