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

man appeared to be injured.
    Moden grabbed them both in his huge arms. “Where’s Sergeant Filkerson?” he demanded.
    “Via, he’s back there!” one of the troopers screamed. “The shack came down on him and we couldn’t get him out!”
    Moden flung the pair out toward safety. He’d thought of ordering them to help him, but they didn’t look to be in shape to do that or anything else just now.
    The guard shack had been to the immediate right of the dump entrance. It was constructed of dirt, stabilized with a plasticizer and compacted.
    The locally made pyrotechnics had been off-loaded adjacent to the shack, as good a place as any since they couldn’t be processed at the moment. When the pile exploded, the shock wave shattered the near wall of the building and collapsed the rest onto Filkerson, inside using the radio. It was hard to believe that anybody beneath the heavy slabs could be alive, but Filkerson’s voice still moaned through the commo helmet. The sergeant had been—in a manner of speaking—lucky.
    The floodlights went out. The dump glowed red in a dozen locations, bunkers where further material had been ignited by the previous blasts. Moden thumbed his helmet visor to light-amplification mode and began shifting the ruin of the guard shack, chunk by chunk.
    The choice was speed or caution, and under the present conditions speed won going away. Moving the mass of shattered walls was much like playing pick-up sticks. There was always a chance that when Moden’s huge muscles bunched to hurl a block clear, the remaining slabs would shift and crush Filkerson like a caterpillar on the highway; but if Moden waited for specialized rescue equipment, blast shocks were going to make the pile settle anyway.
    Besides, there was nothing else Sten Moden could do except watch helplessly the destruction caused by his failure to do his duty.
    The edges of the crumbled guard shack were jagged rather than sharp. Moden should have been wearing gloves for the job. The pain didn’t bother him, but the film of blood was slippery until it dried to tackiness.
    Moden grasped a shard, found it set firmly, and stepped to the side to take instead the 80-kilo block that held the previous one in place. He lifted and threw the block aside. Filkerson’s head and torso were beneath. The man moaned softly.
    A bunker on the other side of the dump erupted in orange flame. The initial open-air blast had shifted the armored doors of some bunkers. With the volume of sparks and larger chunks of burning debris, it was inevitable that the fire would spread.
    The Lord only knew how it had started. Perhaps a fuze had been defective, perhaps a ruptured membrane had brought two reactive compounds in contact. Perhaps there’d been no manufacturing flaw whatever, but one of the crates had been crushed with disastrous results when the load was dumped unceremoniously.
    If lightning had struck the pyrotechnics, it would still have been Sten Moden’s fault. The only reason the load was in the dump this night was that he had accepted it improperly.
    Moden gripped the slab lying on Filkerson’s legs, so that the whole weight wouldn’t shear down on flesh like the blade of a roller mill. “It’s okay, Sergeant,” he murmured.
    Only when Moden spoke did he realize how loud the background rumble was. The ground trembled at a low frequency that tried to loosen his bowels.
    Filkerson’s eyes opened. “Via, Cap’n,” he said. “Get me out of here, right?”
    He was still speaking on the unit push. Despite the radio augmentation, Moden understood the words only because he watched Filkerson’s lips form them.
    Another bunker blew up, belching the roof of steel planks and tonnes of dirt overburden. Moden staggered forward. He turned and lifted Filkerson onto his back. His left hand cushioned the man’s buttocks while his right gripped Filkerson’s arms, flopped over Moden’s shoulders and across his chest.
    Moden stepped carefully through the tumble