The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2 полностью

The initial results were unremarkable.A knoll shifted,settled; a hundred meters south of that knoll, dust rose in a spout like that of a whale venting its lungs; a further hundred meters south, black smoke puffed—not from the hilltop but well beneath the crest where raw dirt marked the mouth of a recently excavated tunnel.

The knoll erupted, then settled again into a cavity that could have held a tank.

Blue light fused and ignited dust as a store of powergun ammunition devoured itself and the weapon it was meant to feed.

The tunnel belched orange flame; sucked in its breath and blazed forth again. The second time, the edge of the shock wave propelled a human figure.

Three more shells streaked the sky. One of them hit well to the south. The others were aimed at targets across the estuary.

Deathdealerraked the far ridge with both main gun and tribarrel. The combat cars shot up sandbag-covered supply dumps on both sides of the road. Most of the armed Consies would be in bunkers, but any figure seennowwas fair game for as many guns as could bear on it.

Long before they topped the ridge, Wager had known what his own target would be.

A mortar firing at night illuminates a thirty-meter hemisphere with its skyward flash. There'd been such a flash, needlessly highlighted by the tank's electronics, before the Consies realized they were being taken in the rear.

Wager hated mortars. Their shells angled in too high to be dealt with by the close-in defense system, and a direct hit would probably penetrate the splinter shield of a combat car.

Now a mortar and its crew were in the center of Wager's gunnery screen.

Normally the greatest danger to a mortar was counterfire from another mortar. A shell's slow, arching trajectory was easy for radar to track, and the most rudimentary of ballistic computers could figure a reciprocal. The guerrillas here had been smart: they'd mounted their tube on the back of a cyclo, a three-wheeled mini-truck of the sort the civilians on Prosperity used for everything from taxis to hauling farm produce into town.

At the bottom of the slope, work crews had cleared a path connecting several firing positions. The cyclo had just trundled into a revetment. Shell cartons scattered outside the position 200 meters up the track showed where the crew had fired the previous half-dozen rounds.