The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 Read Free Page A

communications.”
    For stiffening, actually, but the lie was a harmless one. When he’d gotten down to serious planning, he realized that he didn’t dare saddle Frisians—his troops—with any of the National Army units in the fortress. The locals lacked noise discipline, fire discipline, and target identification skills. A Frisian combat car was the largest thing around and therefore the most likely target for the National troops who did manage to shoot.
    Furthermore, the locals lacked guts.
    “I said I’d think about it,” Bradkopf said, “and now I find you’ve stripped me of all my protection! Are you a traitor?”
    “No sir,” Coke said, “I’m not a traitor. I—”
    I screwed up badly, but Bradkopf wasn’t the man to admit that to. Coke had taken the chance that the Marquis wouldn’t notice the two combat cars—not tanks—normally parked near his quarters were missing. If Bradkopf hadn’t decided to shoot off flares for his party, Coke would have gotten away with it.
    If.
    Coke couldn’t quarrel with Bradkopf’s assumption that the commander of an 8,000-troop base was unprotected if two foreign combat vehicles left his presence. It was just that protecting this commander was in no sense a military priority for Coke.
    “Six, this is Four-four,” Sergeant Dubose reported tensely through Coke’s commo helmet. “The troops are moving out of Three in civilian trucks and wagons. Over.”
    “General Bradkopf!” Coke said. “Association forces are maneuvering to attack this base tonight.”
    Not in a few days: in a few hours.
    Fear of a bad rating in his personnel file had turned Coke’s skin hot and prickly. The prospect of imminent combat washed him cool again. Major Matthew Coke was a professional and an employee; but first of all he was a soldier.
    “What?” blurted the Marquis, sounding amazingly like the gunner on phone watch at Battery 7. “An attack where? Have you gone mad?”
    “Six, this is Four-Two,” Sergeant Lennox reported. There was a lilt, almost a caress in her voice despite the flattening of spread-band radio communication. “The rocket pod’s moved out of Two. It’s being pulled by a tractor, now. I’d say it was time, boss. Over.”
    The partygoers gaped without understanding at the multidirectional byplay. Most of them were drunk or nearly drunk. Captain Wilcken was white-faced but sober. The glance he exchanged with Colonel Jaffe, equally well-born and head of the garrison’s supply department, held more terror than confusion.
    Coke keyed his helmet. “Six to Four elements,” he said. “Take th—”
    He didn’t get the last word, “them,” out of his mouth before the split display behind him ignited with gunfire and explosions.
    “I’m sounding the general alarm,” Coke said calmly as he turned his back on the Marquis. He uncaged and pressed one of the special-use switches at the side of his console’s keyboard. The artificial intelligence sent an alert signal to every node on Fortress Auerstadt’s communications network. The siren on the roof of the TOC began to wind.
    The holographic display shimmered with the cyan hell engulfing Parcotch.
    A Frisian combat car mounted three tribarrels in its open fighting compartment. Each weapon fired 2-cm powergun ammunition at a cyclic rate of about 500 rounds per minute. Because the barrels rotated through the firing position and had time to cool between shots, a tribarrel could fire sustainably for several minutes before burning out. In that time, the powerful bolts of ionized copper atoms could peck halfway through the side of a mountain.
    Nothing Mother Love and The Facts of Life faced at Parcotch had armor protection. The targets, unprepared Association soldiers and the civilian helpers driving the vehicles, wilted like wax in a blowtorch.
    The Facts of Life’s two wing guns hit the trailer of anti-tank rockets and the tractor towing it. That was overkill—a single tribarrel should have been sufficient—but