The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2 полностью

Warriorhowled past the Rep officer. A crosswind rocked the tank minusculy from Kuykendall's intended line, so that the side skirt drifted within five meters of the man.

Sensors fired a section of the automatic defense system. Pellets blew the Republican backward, as loose-limbed as a rag doll.

Kuykendall ground the skirts to bring the tank to a safe halt at the edge of the mesa.Warriorlay across a zigzag trench, empty save for a sprawled corpse. The drive fans could stabilize a tank in still air, but shockwaves and currents rushing to feed flames whipped the top of Hill 661.

Des Grieux depressed the muzzle of his main gun slightly. OnWarrior's gunnery screen, the hollow pipper slid over a high-resolution view of Republican positions on Hill 504.

The mesa on whichWarriorrested was 150 meters higher than the irregular hillock on which the Reps had placed their western firebase.The twelve kilometers separating the two peaks meant nothing to the tank's powerguns.

On Hill 504, a pair of bombardment rockets leapt from their launching tubes toward the Federal encampment. The holographic image was silent, but Des Grieux had been the target of too many similar rounds not to imagine the snarling roar of their passage. He centered his ring sight on the munitions truck bringing another twenty-four rounds to the launchers—

And toed the foot-trip.

Warriorrocked with the trained lightning of its main gun. The display blanked in a cataclysm: pure blue plasma; metal burning white hot; and red as tonnes of warheads and solid rocket fuel exploded simultaneously. The truck and everything within a hundred meters of it vanished.

Des Grieux shifted his sights to what he thought was the Republican command post. He was smiling.

He fired. Sandbags blew outward as shards of glass. There were explosives of some sort within the bunker, because a moment after the rubble settled, a secondary explosion blew the site into a crater.

Concussion from the first blast had stunned or killed the crew of the single calliope on Hill 504. The weapon was probably unserviceable, but Des Grieux's third bolt vaporized it anyway.

"I told you bastards . . ." the tanker muttered in a voice that would have frightened anyone who heard him.