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

Margulies’ world reformed as she lay prone on soggy ground. She wasn’t sure whether or not she’d been unconscious. Her skin crawled, and all her senses were preternaturally sharp.

Twenty meters away the leading road train was skewed across the gravel. The rear segment lay on its side, but the coupling still held. The segment had acted as an anchor, bringing the huge vehicle to a dead halt. The cab door was open. A splotch of blue uniform marked the driver huddling in the ditch beside his abandoned charge.

The combat cars maneuvered violently, engaging the weapons shooting at them. Explosive shells raked the road train, igniting the two upright segments. Margulies thought part of the cargo was ammunition. Tracers or rocket exhaust trails fanned from a position at the treeline.

The second road train had tried to pass on the right side of its disabled fellow, but the ground to that side was apparently even softer than that on which Margulies lay. The vehicle had sunk in over its running gear, hopelessly mired. The gun crew jumped from the tub and hid between the bogies.

The driver fired a pistol from his cab doorway. Machine gun bullets sparkled on the armor, starred the windscreen opaque, and punched the driver’s lungs out through the back of his rib cage.

Margulies had lost her 2-cm powergun and her commo helmet. She didn’t wear a pistol because it got in the way in a jeep’s tight seating. Anyhow, she couldn’t hit anything with a handgun. She wished she had one now. Her legs ached so fiercely that she had to look down to be sure that they hadn’t been blown off at the knees.

Angel Tijuca ran toward her. A guerrilla machine gun combed for him, aiming low and making the black soil spurt upward. Angel tumbled, slapping at his pelvis.

Powerguns and automatic cannon fired at the rear of the convoy, out of sight around the curve. Small arms were probably involved also, but the sound was lost in the blasts of the heavier weapons.

Margulies tried to crawl toward the center of the convoy. Ash on the ground made her sneeze violently. The machine gunner shifted his aim toward her. The guerrilla wasn’t very good, but it could be only a matter of time before he found the range.

Angel jumped to his feet, scooped Margulies up, and staggered toward the road with her in a packstrap carry. “Fucking ricochet,” he said. “Knocked me—down!”

Margulies’ toes dragged the ground. The pain in her shins was indescribable. Angel’s normally olive complexion had paled to a jaundiced yellow, and his skin gleamed with perspiration.

“Not there!” Margulies cried. She wasn’t sure if she was speaking audibly. “That truck’ll blow any minute now!”

“That’s—” her driver gasped “—the next—thing, M-Missie.”

He tumbled into the mine crater with his burden and released her. The pulverized soil was pillow-soft, but the reek of explosive residues clung to the pit chokingly. The machine gun sent a last spiteful burst of white tracer over the jeep’s crew before casting off for other targets.

Angel had lost his helmet and sub-machine gun, but the butt of a pistol projected from the left cargo pocket of his trousers. He drew the weapon as he lurched out of the crater.

Margulies tried to follow her sergeant, using her knees and elbows for purchase on the loose soil. It was like swimming through molasses. Every pulse tightened a red-hot vise on her lower legs.

Angel ran to the coupling which linked the overturned third segment to the pair whose running gear was undamaged. The machine gun and the guerrillas’ light cannon traversed toward the motion, but the Frisian was fairly well covered by the bogies of the second segment. Cannon shells fanned the flames already snorting through holes in the cargo box.

The coupling was torqued and immobile. Angel aimed his pistol at it point-blank, covered his eyes with his right forearm, and fired. The 1-cm powergun bolt sprayed blazing steel in all directions.

Angel’s battle dress smoldered in a score of places. He squinted, fired again, and again, and again.

At the fourth bolt, the coupling parted with the sound of a shattered bell. The overturned segment slid a meter from the remainder of the burning vehicle.

Margulies knelt at the top of the mine crater and waved her arms. She knew what Angel intended to do, knew also that she couldn’t stop him as she wished she could. But if the guerrilla gunners concentrated on her, then there was at least a chance Angel would succeed.

The light cannon shifted aim toward Margulies. It had a three-round charger, so the tracers snapped out in trios. They left tight gray helices in the air, like the tailings of a metal drill.

Angel ran toward the road train’s open cab. The machine gun pursued him, bullets flickering against the chassis and treads a half-step behind. The cargo boxes breathed blowtorch flames from every shell hole.

An explosive bullet buried itself in the rim of loose dirt beneath Margulies and detonated. The shock threw her back as though she’d been hit by a medicine ball. She lay at the bottom of the crater, wheezing and blinking at the sky for a moment before she resumed crawling upward.

When Margulies regained the crater lip, the only combat car she could see had been hit in the skirts by a shoulder-launched rocket. Air gushing through the jagged hole in the plenum chamber slowed the vehicle’s motions to those of a half-crushed cockroach, but the tribarrels were still in action.

The two-segment road train staggered across the cleared ground like a drunken streetwalker. When one bogie or another found a soft spot the gigantic vehicle lurched, but each time inertia dragged it from the potential bog.

Angel was steering toward the guerrillas’ automatic cannon.

Three buzzbombs like the one that had disabled the combat car burst on the road train’s bow. The shaped-charge warheads went off with hollow thocks, like the sound of boards being slapped together. The cannon, the machine gun, and at least a dozen guerrilla riflemen were firing at the vehicle.

Ricochets and explosive shells danced across the cab like a fireworks display. The protective windows were starred white, the armor was holed in a hundred places, and gray smoke or coolant trailed back from the power plant to mix with the flames shooting from the cargo boxes.

The cab door opened fifty meters from the treeline. Angel somersaulted from the vehicle. He splashed into a muddy trench gouged by a main-gun bolt in the earlier ambush. He didn’t move. A machine gun had hosed the side of the cab as the Frisian left it.

A guerrilla stood up in plain view to aim her buzzbomb at the road train. Smoke spurted from the back of the launcher as a rocket motor lobbed the missile into a near-side bogie. The warhead’s pearly flash enveloped the running gear for an instant. The track broke, shedding links behind it and pulling the vehicle slightly to the left as it continued to trundle onward.

A single cyan bolt winked past the guerrilla’s face. She dropped her useless rocket launcher and unslung the automatic rifle from her back. Angel’s second pistol shot hit her in the chest. She spun as she fell to the ground.

The road train kept up a walking pace as its battered bow crunched through the stunted trees. A guerrilla leaped desperately for the cab, caught his sandal in metal torn by gunfire, and toppled screaming beneath the second set of bogies. It wouldn’t have made much difference if he’d set his feet properly, because an instant later the munitions in the second segment exploded.

The first charge bulged the sides of the cargo box. Margulies ducked in time, before the shock wave compressed the mass of burning propellants and detonated them. A blast hugely greater than that of the guerrilla mine flattened vegetation in a hundred-meter radius and sent tonnes of excavated soil skyward on an orange fireball.