The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2 полностью

The garrison of Hill 541N, the Slammers included, had the supplies they started the siege with. Ground routes were blocked. Aerial resupply would be suicide because of the Rep air-defense arsenal on the encircling hills.

The sniper fired again. The bolt hit even farther away, but he was probably aiming at Des Grieux anyhow. Nothing else moved on this side of the encampment except swirls of wind-blown sand.

A shell fragment the size of a man's palm stuck up from the ground. It winked jaggedly in the blue light of the bolt.

Warriorwas within a hundred meters. Des Grieux continued to walk deliberately.

The hilltop's soil blurred all the vehicles and installations into identical dinginess. The dirt was a red without life, the hue of old blood that had dried and flaked to powder.

The sniper gave up.A gunon541Scougheda shell which Broglie'sHoney Girlblew from the sky a moment later.

Every five minutes; but not regularly, and twice the Reps had banged out more than a thousand rounds in a day, some of which inevitably got through . . . .

"That you, Slick?" Kuykendall called from theWarrior's cupola.

"Yeah, of course it's me," Des Grieux replied. He stepped onto a sandbag lip, then hopped down toWarrior's back deck. His boots clanked.

The tanks were dug in along sloping ramps. Soil from the trenches filled sandbag walls rising above the vehicles' cupolas. Lieutenant Lindgren was afraid that powerguns from 661—and the Reps had multi-barreled calliopes to provide artillery defense—would rake the Slammers' tanks if the latter were visible.

Des Grieux figured the answer tothatthreat was to kick the Reps the hell off Hill 661. By now, though, he'd learned that the other Slammers were just going to sigh and look away when he made a suggestion that didn't involve waiting for somebody else to do the fighting.

Kuykendall slid down from the cupola into the fighting compartment. She was a petite woman, black-haired and a good enough driver. To Des Grieux, Kuykendall was a low-key irritation that he had to work around, like a burr in the mechanism that controlled his turret's rotation.

A driver was a necessary evil, because Des Grieux couldn't guide his tank and fight at the same time. Kuykendall took orders, but she had a personality of her own. She wasn't a mere extension of Des Grieux's will, and that made her more of a problem than someone blander though less competent would have been.