Free The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 by David Drake Page B

the engineer compound. Scores of troops clung to the cab and body. Some of them shot wildly.
    Democrat riflemen and machine gunners opened fire. Bullets sparked on the frame and slapped troops from the vehicle. The truck continued to accelerate, skidding on the slick surface. Its eight driven wheels cast up a rooster-tail of mud, water, and duckboards.
    Two buzzbombs sputtered toward the moving target. One missed high, sailing over the berm to vanish. The other went off close alongside. Would-be escapees tumbled from the bed, but the run-while-flat tires permitted the truck to keep going.
    The gate to the road south from Bulwark Base was three X-frames connected by a horizontal pole and strung with barbed wire. A flangelike extension of the berm was intended to force vehicles to slow for a right-angle turn when entering or leaving the base.
    The truck hit the gate, crushed it down, and roared over the berm’s sloped extension in low gear. A Central States soldier ran along behind the vehicle, trying to climb aboard. He lost his footing on the berm and sprawled.
    As the truck disappeared, the soldier rose to one knee and tried to shoot at the vehicle. Mud clogged his rifle. He flung the useless weapon after the truck. A moment later, a Democrat machine gun nailed him into the berm with a burst of golden tracers.
    The leg Daun had flung around the mast cramped because of the awkward angle. That pain was lost in the red throb of blood returning to his left arm now that he didn’t dangle by it.
    With no tools and one good hand, Daun couldn’t unwrap the guy wire that held him. It was spliced into his safety belts and apparently pinched by a fold of the slowly collapsing mast. He’d lost the wrist light when the first missile went off.
    He supposed that was a good thing, because otherwise he’d have been a lighted target. He giggled hysterically.
    Daun heard a thump over the shooting. He looked down. A dark parcel lay on an expanse of softly reflectant aluminum. Someone had tossed a satchel charge onto the roof of the battery commander’s trailer.
    Daun clutched the mast with his free arm and tried to find footing for his other leg. He closed his eyes instinctively. Blood vessels in his eyelids reddened the yellow flash that streamed through them.
    The blast flattened the trailer and flung Daun upward like a yo-yo shooting the moon. The guy wire broke again, but the safety belts held.
    The mast toppled with the grace of a falling tree, slowly at first but accelerating as it neared the ground. Daun was underneath. Remaining guy wires zinged as they parted.
    A Democrat parachute flare drifted down through the overcast to illuminate the encampment. The mast rotated as light bloomed. Daun stared down through the latticework at the ruin of Bulwark Base instead of up into the clouds that would otherwise have been the last thing he saw.
    A pole in the base section had broken, causing the mast to twist on the remaining verticals before it hit the ground. Daun slammed into the mud, beside rather than beneath the structure to which he was bound.
    The impact knocked all the breath out of his body. The antenna capsule snapped off and bounced twice before coming to rest beside the technician. He didn’t quite lose consciousness, but the shots and screams around him faded into a thirty-cycle hum for a few seconds.
    The rain had almost ceased. The flare sank lower. Vertical objects cast jagged shadows that cut like saw-teeth across the surface of Bulwark Base.
    Daun lay with the mast on one side of him and on the other the low sandbag wall that had once protected the Technical Detachment’s tent. The missile had destroyed the wall it hit and the structure beyond, but it spared the sandbags on the opposite side.
    Someone just across the wall was moaning.
    Daun tried to free himself from the tangle in which he lay. His left leg was pinned and his left arm was still tethered to the mast. He could move his head as far as his neck flexed, but