David Drake - The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Des Grieux felt a sudden emptiness; but it was too late now to change, and anyway, it didn't matter. He slid down into H271 and tried his gunnery controls again. Added weight resisted the turret motors briefly, but this time it was only gravel and smaller particles which could rearrange themselves easily.

The sight picture on H271's main screen rotated: off the blank wall of the butte and across open desert, to the Notch that marred the otherwise smooth profile of the Knifeblade Escarpment. Des Grieux raised the magnification. Plus twenty; plus forty, and he could see movement as Hashemites crawled forward, over rocks split and glazed by blue-white bolts, to see why the punishing fire had ceased; plus eighty—

A Hashemite wearing a turban and a dark blue jellaba swept the night with the image-intensifying sight of his back-pack missile.

He found nothing. Des Grieux stared at the Hashemite's bearded face until the man put down his sight and called his fellows forward. His optics were crude compared to those of H271, and the Hashemite didn't know where to look.

Des Grieux smiled grimly and shut down all his tank's systems. From now until he slammed home the main switch again, Des Grieux would wait in a silent iridium coffin.

It wasn't his turn. Yet. He raised his head through the cupola hatch and watched.

Because of the patient silence the Sincanmos had maintained, Des Grieux expected the next stage to occur in about half an hour. In fact, it was less than five minutes after the Slammers' armored vehicles had noisily departed the scene before one of the outposts switched the minefield controls to Self-destruct.Nearly a thousand charges went off simultaneously, any one of them able to destroy a 4x4 or cripple a tank.

An all-wheel drive truck laden with towel-heads lurched over the lip of the Notch and started for the plains below.

The locals on both sides were irregulars, but the Sincanmos in ambush had something concrete to await. All the Hashemite guards knew was that a disaster had occurred south of the Escarpment, and that they had themselves been released from a danger unguessed until the Slammers drove off through the night. They saw no reason to hold position, whatever their orders might be.

Three more trucks followed the first—a family battle group, organized like those of the Sincanmos. One of the vehicles towed a railgun on a four-wheeled carriage. The slope was a steep twenty percent. The railgun threatened to swing ahead every time the towing vehicle braked, but the last truck in the group held the weapons barrel with a drag line to prevent upset.

The Sincanmos did not react.

A dozen more trucks grunted into sight. H271's sensors could have placed and identified the vehicles while they were still hidden behind the lip of rock, but it didn't matter one way or the other to Des Grieux. Better to keep still, concealed even from sensors far more sophisticated than those available to the indigs.

More trucks. They poured out of the Notch, three and four abreast, as many as the narrow opening would accept. Forty, sixty—still more. The entire outpost was fleeing at its best speed.

The Hashemites must have argued violently. Should they go or stay? Was the blocking force really gone, or did it lurk on the other side of the butte, waiting to swing back into sight spewing blue fire?

But somebody was bound to run; and when that group seemed on the verge of successful escape, the others would follow as surely as day follows night.

There would be no day for most of this group of Hashemites. When their leading vehicles reached the bottom of the slope, the Sincanmos opened up with a devastating volley.

The two-kilometer range was too great for sidearms to be generally effective, though Des Grieux saw a bolt from a semiautomatic powergun—perhaps Chief Diabate's personal weapon—light up a truck cab. The vehicle went out of control and rolled sideways. Upholstery and the driver's garments were afire even before ammunition and fuel caught.

Mostly the ambush was work for the crew-served weapons. For the Sincanmo gunners, it was practice with live pop-up targets. Dozens of automatic cannon punched tracers into and through soft-skinned vehicles, leaving flames and torn flesh behind them. Mortars fired, mixing high explosive and incendiary bombs. Truck-mounted lasers cycled with low-frequency growls, igniting paint, tires, and cloth before sliding across the rock to new targets.

A pair of perfectly aimed bombardment rockets landed within the Notch itself, causing fires and secondary explosions among the tail end of the line of would-be escapees. The smooth, inclined surface of the Escarpment provided no concealment, no hope. Hashemites stood or ran, but they died in either case.

Des Grieux smiled like a sickle blade and pulled the hatch closed above him. He continued to watch through the vision blocks of the cupola.

Truckloads of Sincanmo troops drove up out of their concealment, heading for the loot and the writhing wounded scattered helplessly on the slope.

Have fun while you can, wogs, Des Grieux thought. Because you won't see the morning either.

Thirty-seven minutes after Chief Diabate sprang his ambush, Sincanmo troops in the Notch began firing southward. The shooters were the bands who'd penetrated farthest in their quest for loot and throats to cut. Other bright-robed irregulars were picking over the bodies and vehicles scattered along the slope. When the guns sounded, they looked up and began to jabber among themselves in search of a consensus.

Des Grieux watched through his vision blocks and waited. H271's fighting compartment was warm and muggy with the environmental system shut down, but a cold sweat of anticipation beaded the tanker's upper lip.

Half—apparently the junior half—of each Sincanmo battle group waited under camouflage film in the gullies to provide a base of fire for the looters. The Sincanmos were not so much undisciplined as self-willed, and they had a great deal of experience in hit-and-run guerrilla warfare.

The appearance of a well-prepared defense was deceptive, though. The heavy weapons that were effective at a two-kilometer range had expended much of their ammunition in the first engagement; and besides, the irregulars were about to find themselves out of their depth.

They were facing the first of the retreating Thunderbolt Division troops. The Thunderbolts weren't much; but they were professionals, and this lot had Luke Broglie with them . . . .

At first the Sincanmos in the Notch fired small arms at their unseen targets; automatic rifles pecked the night with short bursts. Then somebody got an abandoned Hashemite railgun working. The Notch lighted in quick pulses, the corona discharge from the weapon's generator. The crack crack crack of hyper-velocity slugs echoed viciously.

A blue-white dazzle outlined the rock surfaces of the Notch. A Legion tank destroyer kilometers away had put a 15cm bolt into the center of the captured outpost. Two seconds later the sound reached Des Grieux's ears, the glass-breaking crash as rock shattered under unendurable heat stresses.

Three Sincanmo survivors scampered down the Escarpment. One man's robe smoldered and left a fine trail of smoke behind him. The men were on foot, because their trucks fed the orange-red flames lighting the Notch behind them.