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

the rocket pod was the only real danger to the Frisian vehicles, and Lennox hadn’t survived to become a veteran by taking needless risks.
    Cyan bolts licked the pod. The solid rocket fuel burned in a huge yellow ball, technically not an explosion but wholly destructive of everything within its ten-meter diameter.
    At least one of the missile warheads did detonate. The white flash of forty kilos of HE punctuated the saffron fireball. The tractor-trailer combination blew apart. Blazing debris rained across the landscape, igniting the houses of Hamlet 2 and the heads of the ripe grain in the paddies.
    On the other side of the display, Mother Love’s three tribarrels clawed the infantry packed into the civilian vehicles. Ammunition and grenades went off in secondary explosions, but the stabbing cyan plasma itself did most of the damage. The Association troops were too crowded to fight or flee in the first instants of the ambush, and those instants were all that remained to scores of them.
    A stray bolt ruptured the fuel tank under a truck cab. Kerosine, superheated and atomized by the plasma, expanded into an explosive mixture with the surrounding atmosphere—
    And flash ignited, just as it would normally have done when injected into the cylinders of the truck’s diesel engine. Bodies and body parts flew up in the mushrooming flame, but most of the Association troops had already been killed by gunfire.
    “You wanted to know what?” Coke shouted over the wail of the siren. He gestured to the screen which glowed with the light of the scenes it displayed. “That’s what, General, and there’s a lot more Association units out there tonight than those.”
    An automatic cannon opened fire from a bunker on the perimeter of Fortress Auerstadt. The gunners probably didn’t have a real target. They were shooting at shadows or livestock.
    That was the right response to the present circumstances. With the base fully alerted, any attack Association troops made would be fragmentary instead of coordinated and overwhelming. In all likelihood there would be no attack. At daybreak the National Army would be able to concentrate on scattered companies of their opponents.
    “Why that’s . . .” the Marquis said, staring at the console display. “That’s a massacre!”
    Coke was surprised that his nominal superior had enough military knowledge to make that perfectly accurate assessment of what was happening in Parcotch.
    As soon as the shooting started, the combat cars’ drivers fed full power to the lift fans. Howling like banshees as the fans sucked in vast quantities of air to pressurize the plenum chambers, spraying water and soupy mud in all directions from beneath their skirts, the fifty-tonne behemoths accelerated toward Parcotch Hamlet 3 from two directions.
    While her wing gunners destroyed the rocket launcher, Sergeant Lennox had opened fire on the community itself. Lennox didn’t have a line of sight to the vehicles leaving the hamlet eastward from The Facts of Life’s starting position half a klick distant. Instead she shot up the buildings.
    The structures had thatch walls and roofs of corrugated plastic sheeting, supported by wood or plastic frames. All the construction materials were flammable at the temperature of copper plasma. Houses, the school building, and the community center all burst into flame, spreading panic and confusing the enemy.
    Everything moving this night was a foe and a target. The Frisians’ only chance was to hit hard and keep on hitting before the enemy forces could organize their superior numbers. In the morning, every corpse in Hamlet 3 would be tagged as an Association soldier or an Association supporter. Like other forms of history, after-action reports are written by the survivors.
    Mother Love bounced onto the Auerstadt Road from the dike which had concealed the vehicle in the darkness. The gunners depressed their tribarrels, raking the troops who’d jumped into the fields to either side