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

montage of his partner in various stages of what had happened next.
    First Vierziger’s left hand lifted his 2-cm weapon up toward his shoulder, the girlishly perfect fingers of his right hand curving to the grip. Then Vierziger faced the back of the alley, the shoulder weapon out to his side and the pistol, again the pistol, pointing.
    Three shots, strobe-light quick, winking on the face of the man lifting the manhole cover from beneath. Cratering the flesh, rupturing the skull itself with the pressure of gasified nerve tissue. The eyes blanking, the sub-machine gun dropping back into the utility passage converted to an underground escape route; the cover clanking down, catching the dead man’s fingers for a moment before gravity tugged them loose.
    Vierziger holstered the pistol. He bent, switched on the jeep’s drive fans, and hopped out beside the vehicle. “Come on!” he ordered. “Watch our back.”
    “What?” Malaveda said. He jumped clear of the jeep. He felt as though he was partnered with a ticking bomb. He didn’t understand what was happening, but he was afraid not to obey the newbie absolutely.
    Vierziger revved the fans to full lift and reached for the steering yoke. The bottom half-meter of a second-floor window across the street blew outward, shattered by the muzzle blast of a machine gun firing explosive bullets.
    Distortion through the window pane caused the gunner to aim his initial burst high. Chunks blew off the facades of the buildings to either side, hiding the alley mouth for an instant in a cloak of brick dust. Other projectiles burst in vivid red florets on the walls and among the garbage well behind the jeep.
    The gunner didn’t get a chance to correct his aim.
    Surrounded by the blam!blam!blam! of projectiles and whizzing bits of casings mixed with brick chips, Malaveda spun and aimed. He walked a line of cyan flashes across ten centimeters of wall, up the transom, and into the window—
    As Vierziger reholstered his glowing pistol. He’d drawn and fired twice in an eyeblink. His bolts had punched the gunner in the face, one to either side of the nose. The barrel of the machine gun tilted up and vanished as the gunner slumped.
    “Watch our back!” Vierziger repeated. He slammed the jeep’s control yoke forward. The little vehicle skittered ahead. It held its alignment but slid slightly to the right when it emerged from the alley and met a breeze down the main boulevard.
    The manhole cover hadn’t budged since Vierziger shot the man who’d lifted it. Malaveda kept the steel disk at the corner of his eyes as his conscious mind followed what his partner was doing.
    Vierziger’s holster was metal or a temperature-stable plastic, because it didn’t melt or burn from contact with the pistol’s glowing iridium muzzle. Judging from the way he’d drawn it both times that speed was an absolute essential, the richly decorated handgun was Vierziger’s weapon of choice.
    He nonetheless handled the heavy 2-cm powergun with an ease that belied his slight frame, as well as with flawless accuracy; and it was with the shoulder weapon presented that he waited now.
    The jeep was too light to be stable without a man aboard. Its flexible skirts hopped on irregularities in the pavement, spilling air from the plenum chamber.
    Vierziger fired twice as the vehicle bobbled its way toward the building. His first bolt ignited the interior of a room whose window had shivered away in the bomb blast. Malaveda hadn’t seen a human target, but Vierziger probably had, and the baby-faced killer had hit everything he’d aimed at this night.
    The flare of cyan plasma filled the enclosed space momentarily. An instant later everything flammable, including the paint, was a mass of orange flame. The transom belched a great fireball when something, munitions or an accelerant, added its energy to the inferno.
    Vierziger’s second shot was into the window from which the machine gun had fired. Malaveda hadn’t noticed