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

Des Grieux fired both weapons together.

It took a dozen rounds from the tribarrel before the carrier blew up. By then, the screaming Hashemite riders were torches flopping over the rocks.

The main gun's 20cm bolt vaporized several square meters of the fire-support vehicle's armor. Ammunition the Thunderbolts hadn't expended on Sincanmo targets were sufficient to blow a passing APC against the far wall of the Notch; the crumpled wreckage then slid forward, down the slope, shedding parts and flames.

Nothing remained of the fire-support vehicle except its axles and wheels, stripped of their tires.

Des Grieux left his main gun pointed as it was. He worked the tribarrel up the line of easy targets against the slanted rock, giving each half-track the number of cyan bolts required to detonate its fuel, its on-board ammunition, or both. Secondary explosions leaped onto the slope like the footprints of a fire giant.

Nothing more came through the Notch after the 20cm bolt ripped it, but Screen #1 showed the Legion tank destroyer accelerating at its best speed to reach a firing position.

Des Grieux's face was terrible in its joy.

So long as H271 was shut down and covered by broken rock, it was virtually undetectable. When Des Grieux opened fire, anybody but a blind man could call artillery in on the tank's position. A number of Thunderbolt Division personnel survived long enough to do just that.

Four HE shells landed between ten and fifty meters of H271 as Des Grieux walked 2cm bolts across an open-topped supply truck with armored sides. His sight picture vanished for a moment in the spouting explosions. A fifth round struck in a scatter of gravel well up the side of the mesa. It brought down a minor rockslide, but no significant chunks landed near the tank.

Des Grieux ignored the artillery because he didn't have any choice. He'd ignited alleight of the supplytruck's low-side tires with the initial burst. When the debris of the shellbursts cleared, the vehicle was toppling sideways. Its cargo compartment was full of wounded troops who screamed as they went over.

Twenty or thirty shells landed within a dozen seconds.A few of the Thunderbolt gun crews had switched to armor piercing, but none of those rounds scored a direct hit on the tank. A heavy shell burst on H271's rock-covered back deck. The shock made all the displays quiver. The air of the fighting compartment filled with dust shaken from every minute crevice.

Screen #1 showed the Legion tank destroyer's orange symbol entering the Notch from the south side. The heavy vehicle had collided with several Thunderbolt Division APCs in its haste to reach a position from which it could fire at the Slammers' tank.

Des Grieux slapped the plate that set his tribarrel on Automatic Air Defense. He said in a sharp,clear voice,"Booster,sort incoming from the southeast first," as his foot poised on the firing pedal for the main gun.

The 20cm weapon was already aligned. The eighty-times magnified tube of the tank destroyer's gun slid into the hollow circle on Screen #2. More shells burst near H271, but not very near, and the tribarrel was already snarling skyward at the anti-tank rounds which the Legion battery hurled.

The tank destroyer's glacis plate filled Des Grieux's display. He rocked forward on the foot-trip. The saturated blue streak punched through the mantle of the 15cm weapon before the Legion gunner could find his target.

The tank destroyer's ready magazine painted the Notch cyan. Then the reserve ammunition storage went off and lifted the vehicle's armored carapace a meter in the air before dropping it back to the ground.

The iridium shell glowed white. Nothing else remained of the tank destroyer or its crew.

Des Grieux laughed with mad glee. "Have to do better 'n that, Broglie!" he shouted as he slid his aiming point down the slope. He fired every time the hollow pipper covered an undamaged vehicle.

There were seventeen 20cm rounds remaining in H271's ready magazine. Each bolt turned a lightly armored truck or APC into a fireball that bulged steel plates like the skin of a balloon. The last two half-tracks Des Grieux hit had already been abandoned by their crews.

Artillery fire slackened, though Des Grieux's tribarrel snarled uninterruptedly skyward. A delay-fused armor-piercing shell struck short of H271 and punched five meters through the hard soil before going off. The explosion lifted the tank a hand's breadth despite the mass of rock overburden, but the vehicle sustained no damage.

Screen#1showed a killing zone south of the Escarpment,where fleeing troops bunched and the Slammers maneuvered to cut them apart. Because the powerguns were deadly at any range so long as they had a sight line, every knob of ground Hammer's troops took cut a further swath through far-distant enemy positions.

When the Legion and Thunderbolt artillery directed its fire toward Des Grieux, the cupola guns of the tanks were freed to kill. The process of collapse accelerated as tanks and combat cars took the howitzer batteries themselves under direct fire.

Des Grieux waited. H271's fighting compartment was a stinking furnace. Empties from the rapidly fired main gun loosed a gray haze into the atmosphere faster than the air conditioning could absorb it. The tank chuckled mechanically as it replenished the ready magazine from storage compartments deep in its armored core.

Fuel fires lighted the slope all the way to the Notch. Hashemite, Sincanmo, and Thunderbolt vehicles—all wrecked and burning. Flames wove a dance of victory over a landscape in which nothing else moved.

Hundreds of terrified soldiers were still alive in the wasteland. The survivors remained motionless. Incoming artillery fire had ceased, giving Des Grieux back the use of his tribarrel. He used it and H271's night vision equipment to probe at whim wherever a head raised.

Des Grieux waited as he watched Broglie's two tank destroyers.

They were no longer the rear guard for the Central Sector refugees. The tank destroyers moved up to the Notch at a deliberate pace which never exposed them to the guns of the panzers south of the Knifeblade Escarpment. Always a cunning bastard, Broglie . . . .

Ammunition in a supply truck near the bottom of the slope cooked off. The blast raised a mushroom-shaped cloud as high as the top of the Escarpment. Two kilometers away, H271 shook.

The battle was going to be over very soon. The Thunderbolt Division's horrendous butcher's bill gave its commander a legitimate excuse for surrendering whether his Hashemite employers did so or not. The bodies heaped on both sides of the Notch would ransom the lives of their fellows.

It occurred to Des Grieux that he could probably drive H271 away, now. Incoming shells had done a day's work for excavating equipment in freeing the tank from his deliberate rockfall.

There wasn't anyplace else in the universe that Des Grieux wanted to be.

Screen #1 showed the tank destroyers pausing just south of the Notch. A 15cm bolt stabbed across the intervening kilometers and vaporized a portion of the mesa's rim. Sonic echoes of the plasma discharge rumbled across the plain below.

Des Grieux blinked, then understood. When the Slammers in Task Force Kuykendall moved out, they'd abandoned the sensor pack they'd placed on the butte. H271 wasn't connected to the pack, but Broglie didn't know that.