The Tank Lords by David Drake

After the second injection sped into his system, the sergeant opened his eyes. Rob was already trying to straighten the entrapping tube. “Forget it,” Worzer ordered weakly. “It’s inside, too . . . damn armor musta flexed. Oh Lord.” He closed his eyes, opened them in time to see another head peak cautiously from the tunnel mouth. “Bastard!” he rasped, and faster than he spoke he triggered his powergun. Its motor whined spitefully though the burst went wide. The head disappeared.

“I want you to run back to the gully,” the sergeant said, resting his eyes again. “You get there, you say ‘Fire Central.’ That cuts in the arty frequency automatic. Then you say, ‘Bunker complex . . .’ ” Worzer looked down. ” ‘Six-one-four, five-seven-nine.’ Stay low and wait for a patrol.”

“It won’t bend!” Rob snarled in frustration as his fingers slid again from the blood-slick tubing.

“Jenne, get your ass out of here, now.”

“Sergeant—”

“Lord curse your soul, get out or I’ll call it in myself! Do I look like I wanna live?”

“Oh, Via . . .” Rob tried to reholster the pistol he had set on the bloody floor. It slipped back with a clang. He left it, gripping the sidewall again.

“Maybe tell Dad it was good to see him,” Worzer whispered. “You lose touch in this business, Lord knows you do.”

“Sir?”

“The priest . . . you met him. Sergeant-Major Worzer, he was. Oh Lord, move it—”

At the muffled scream, the recruit leaped from the smashed war-car and ran blindly back the way they had come. He did not know he had reached the gully until the ground flew out from under him and he pitched spread-eagled onto the sand. “Fire Central,” he sobbed through strangled breaths, “Fire Central.”

“Clear,” a strange voice snapped crisply. “Data?”

“Wh-what?”

“Lord and martyrs,” the voice blasted, “if you’re screwing around on firing channels, you’ll wish you never saw daylight!”

“S-six . . . oh Lord, yes, six-one-four, five-seven-nine,” Rob sing-songed. He was staring at the smooth sand. “Bunkers, the sergeant says it’s bunkers.”

“Roger,” the voice said, businesslike again. “Ranging in fifteen.”

Could they really swing those mighty guns so swiftly, those snub-barreled rocket howitzers whose firing looked so impressive on the entertainment cube?

“On the way,” warned the voice.

The big tribarrel whined again from the combat car, the silent lash of its bolts answered this time by a crash of rifle shots. A flattened bullet burred through the air over where Rob lay. It was lost in the eerie, thunderous shriek from the northwest.

“Splash,” the helmet said.

The ground bucked. From the grainplot spouted rock, smoke and metal fragments into a black column fifty meters high.

“Are we on?” the voice demanded.

“Oh, Lord,” Rob prayed, beating his fists against the sand, “Oh Lord.”

“Via, what is this?” the helmet wondered aloud. Then, “All guns, battery five.”

And the earth began to ripple and gout under the hammer of the guns.

Rolling Hot

Chapter One

The camera light threw the shadow of the Slammers’ officer harshly across the berm which the sun had colored bronze a few moments ago as it set. Her hair was black and cut as short as that of a man.

“For instance, Captain Ranson,” Dick Suilin said, “here at Camp Progress there are three thousand national troops and less than a hundred of your mercenaries, but—”

shoop

Ranson’s eyes widened, glinting like pale gray marble. Fritzi Dole kept the camera focused tightly on her face. He’d gotten an instinct for a nervous subject in the three years he’d recorded Suilin’s probing interviews.

“—the cost to our government—”

shoop-shoop

“—is greater for your handful of—”

“Incoming!” screamed Captain June Ranson as she dived for the dirt. It wasn’t supposed to be happening here—

But for the first instant, you never really believed it could be happening, not even in the sectors where it happened every bleeding night. And when things were bad enough for one side or the other to hire Hammer’s Slammers you could be pretty sure that there were no safe sectors.

Camp Progress was on the ass end of Prosperity’s inhabited continent—three hundred kilometers north of the coast and the provincial capital, Kohang, but still a thousand kays south of where the real fighting went on in the areas bordering the World Government enclaves. Sure, there’d been reports that the Conservatives were nosing around the neighborhood, but nothing the Yokel troops themselves couldn’t handle if they got their thumbs out.

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