Hammer's Slammers 06 - The Sharp End by Drake David

Author:Drake, David [Drake, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780671876326
Google: beMWTd04CzMC
Amazon: 0671876325
Publisher: Baen
Published: 1994-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

The outer fence surrounding L’Escorial’s gage warehouse was woven wire, five meters high and topped with a Y of razor ribbon. The forest had grown to and entwined with the wire despite evidence of desultory attempts to burn it back The diamond teeth of Coke’s powered cutting bar opened a man-sized hole with one sweep of his arm.

The vegetation in the four meters between the fencelines was cut to knee-height scrub. There was a single row of buried toe-poppers, located so that the mower could straddle them. Daun marked a safe pathway with white tape.

The sensor-controlled directional mines placed every ten meters along the inner fence were even less of a danger. Daun turned them all off with a deactivation signal, just as the watchmen would have done while mowing or carrying out other maintenance operations.

“Who do these bozos think they’re dealing with?” the sensor tech muttered disdainfully to Coke.

“Bozos like the Astras behind us,” Coke replied.

Well behind them. Coke had decided he and Daun would breach the defenses alone. Vierziger wasn’t happy to be a kilometer back in the forest along the road, but that was the only way Coke could be sure the Astras would stay where they belonged.

The last thing Coke wanted was a line of trucks to come driving up while he and Niko were in the middle of the wire. He’d seen relief in the sensor tech’s eyes when they went over the plan the first time. Daun had more reason than most to doubt the competence of indig forces.

“Wait here, sir,” Daun said crisply.

The sensor tech darted across the cleared area to the nearest directional mine, a lump against the inner fence. After a moment’s manipulation there, he moved ten meters down the line to another lump. He tossed something to the ground.

“All right, sir,” Daun said, this time using helmet intercom. “I’ve pulled the fuzes. I didn’t want somebody turning them on again at a bad time. It can happen by accident, even, lightning or a plasma discharge.”

“No, we wouldn’t want that,” Coke agreed under his breath.

He was smiling. He remembered he’d had doubts about how the kid would perform after the experience which got him transferred to a survey team. Just fine, so long as Daun could be confident of his back-up . . . and for that, so far, so good.

The warehouse was a huge hangar constructed primarily of structural plastic, but strengthened at the corners by pillars of reinforced concrete. A bank of lights on the roof was intended to flood the interval between the fencelines. Many of the bulbs had failed without being replaced.

It didn’t really matter. The guards didn’t patrol the exterior, and there were no windows in the building proper from which to observe their surroundings.

The gage syndicates had achieved parity of incompetence. That was fine until somebody arrived who knew his ass from a hole in the ground.

Daun set a small transducer close to the nearest of the inner fencepoles. He stepped swiftly toward the next

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