The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2 полностью

A pair of calliopes,powerguns with eight2cm barrels fixed on a carriage.They were designed to sweep artillery shells out of the sky, but their high-intensity charges could chew through the bow slope of a tank in less than a minute.

Approximately a thousand men: gunners, command staff, and a company or two of infantry for close-in security in case Federals sortied from their camp in a kamikaze attack.

All of them packed onto a quarter-kilometer mesa, and not a soul expectingWarriorto hit them from behind. The Republicans thought of tanks as guns and armor; but tanks meant mobility, too, and Des Grieuxknewevery way a tank could crush an enemy.

Reflected muzzle blasts silvered the plume of dust behindWarrior.The onrushing tank would be obvious to anyone in the firebase who looked north—

But the show was southwest among the Federal positions, where the artillerymen dropped their shells and toward which the infantry detachment stared—imagining a fight at knifepoint, and thinking of how much better off they were than their fellows in the assault waves.

Warriorthrust through a band of stunted brush and at a flat angle onto a stabilized road, the logistics route serving the Republican firebase.

"S—" Kuykendall said.

"Yes!" Des Grieux shouted. "Goose it!" Kuykendall had started to adjust her nacelles even before she spoke, but vectored thrust wasn't sufficient to steer the tank onto a road twenty meters wide at the present speed. She deliberately let the skirts drop, using mechanical friction to brakeWarrior's violent side-slipping as the bow came around.

The tank tilted noticeably into the berm, its skirt plowed up on the high side of the turn. Rep engineers had treated the road surface with a plasticizer that cushioned the shock and even damped the blaze of sparks that Des Grieux had learned to expect when steel rubbed stone with the inertia of 170 tonnes behind it.

Kuykendall got her vehicle under control, adjusted fan bite and nacelle angle, and began accelerating up the 10° slope to the target. By the timeWarriorreached the end of the straight, half-kilometer run, they were travelling at seventy kph.

Two Republican ammunition vans were parked just over the lip of Hill 661. There wasn't room for a tank to go between them.

Kuykendall went through anyway. The five-tonne vehicles flew in opposite directions. The ruptured fuel tank of one hurled a spray of blazing kerosene out at a 30° tangent to the tank's course.