The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2 полностью

The Hindi weapon was dug in low; it had fired through a carefully cut aisle. Now the gunners waited to shoot again, hoping for more of a target than Des Grieux's helmeted head bobbing over the planted dikes between them. None of the three Slammers' tanks providing the base of fire could bear on the anti-tank gun even now that it had exposed itself by firing.Gangbuster II's main gun was masked by the vegetation, also, but Des Grieux's personal weapon spat three times on successive bounces as the tank porpoised forward. The gun's frontal camouflage flashed and burned when a 2cm bolt flicked it. Han officers, guided by the powergun, sent a dozen ropes of tracer arcing toward the Hindi weapon from the cupolas of their APCs. Hindi gunners splashed away from the beaten zone, hampered by the mud and raked by the hail of explosive bullets.

Thepeepeepeepin Des Grieux's earphones warned him to attend to the miniature carat on his visor: Threat Level I, a laser rangefinder paintingGangbuster IIfrom the hedge bordering the causeway. No way to tell what weapon the rangefinder served, but somebody thought it could kill a Slammers' tank . . . .

Des Grieux rotated the turret with the joystick, thrusting hard as though his muscles rather than the geartrain were turning the massive weight of iridium. "Driver, hard right!" he screamed, because the traversing mechanism wasn't going to slew the main gun fast enough by itself.

And maybe nothing was going to slew the main gun fast enough.

Des Grieux shot twice with the carbine in his right hand. His bolts splashed near the bottom of the hedge. One round blew glassy fragments of mud in the air; the other carbonized a gap the size of a pie plate at the edge of the interwoven stems of native shrub.

The laser emitter itself was two meters high in the foliage, but that was only a bead connected to the observer's hiding place by a coaxial optical fiber. The observer was probablycloseto the emitter, though; and if the weapon itself was close to the observer, it would simply pop up and make parallax corrections.

Soldiers liked things simple.

Pesco was trying to obey Des Grieux's order, butGangbuster IIhad enormous forward momentum and there was the dike they were approaching to consider, also.A sheet of spray lifted to the tank's port side as the driver dumped air beneath the left skirt. The edge of the right skirt dipped and cut yellow bottom clay to stain the roostertail sluicing back on that side.