KCR: Complete Hammer's Slammers Volume 1, 2, and 3 (scifi, war)

Cover of Hammer's SlammersDavid Drake was in the military and his Hammer's Slammers is basically the US Cavalry unit with rayguns, as he puts it, and hoverjeeps and hovertanks. The rest of the stuff... he was able to come up with some relatively solid sci-fi technobabble to explain it all. The rest, as they say, is history.

To give you a short history, Hammer's Slammers is a regiment of mercenaries, complete with support units such as artillery, military police, transport, interrogation, tanks, combat cars, and skimmers for the regular grunts, plus rear echelon like repair depot, resupply, kitchen, and so on. There is no aircraft, because they would not survive against "powerguns".

Powergun can be thought of as "plasma in a disc". Pistols and submachine guns shoot 1cm discs. Personal assault rifles shoot 2 cm discs. This goes up to main tank guns that shoots 20 cm discs, and those can punch through other tank's armor, or blow up a small hill. Add to that calliopes, which are multi-barreled powerguns, and it gets nasty. The discharge is lightspeed, so anything it sees, it can shoot down. Tanks and Combat cars can set tribarrels (3-barrel powergun) to air defense mode and it will automatically deal with incoming artillery.  Combat cars and tanks are fusion-powed hovercrafts that can go over 100 kph offroad in almost any terrain, but CAN be destroyed, as armor technology have not fully caught up.

Colonel Alois Hammer is the leader, and he is assisted by Joachim Steuben, his personal bodyguard and head of the "White Mice", HQ platoon, elite killers. Joachim is the fastest pistolero ever. He can fire off multiple shots from his custom powergun pistol before you can blink. Under them are variety of soldiers and commanders, some of them good, some of them loyal, some of psychotic, but all of them loyal.

Complete Hammer's Slammers is their story, including all short stories, novelettes, and novels combined into three volumes, in best order as re-arranged by the author, with some background material and/or new short stories added by David Drake.

Not all stories are about the Slammers. There are a few about other people around the Slammers. One is about the commandant of a rear rest-and-refit port, and how he had to deal with some... personal and personnel issues up tlose and personal. Another is about some rebels who managed to steal one of Slammer's Tanks, and their little adventure on how they deal with their own people and the Slammers chasing them. There's another story about how a kid helped Slammers deal with a traitor who's about to entrap them and turn them over to a rival merc unit.

The stories are varied, but invariably about warriors dealing with death, some with brutality, some with indifference, some with joy... and some just stop caring. But war is hell, and sometimes, you need demons to fight the wars... as long as they are on your side. Many of the stories were inspired by historical events... There's the story about how a band of mercenaries bottled all the rebels in a stadium and went in and just about slaughtered EVERYBODY... clearly inspired by the story from the Roman times (AFAIK).

If you like your war stories with a bit of sci-fi, David Drake is your man. I didn't quite like his "Cinnabar" series as it's a bit too "light" to my taste, and too adventure-y, but they are interesting as well.

Rating: Try it, get it it you like the genre.

I actually have all the books in individual volumes, but I bought these any way. :)