by David Drake
But he didn't have to, because Captain Broglie's command tank nailed the Hindi vehicle. Plates of massive steel armor flew in all directions even though the bolt failed to detonate the target's munitions.
Score one for Broglie, the bastard; and if he'd brought the rest of the platoon along with Des Grieux, maybe Gangbuster II wouldn't be swinging in the breeze right now.
Hindi tanks were firing all along the line. They ignored Gangbuster II because the tanks destroyed to the immediate north and south of the causeway blocked the aim of their fellows.
The Hindi CAP guns were useless except against armored vehicles—their solid projectiles had no area effect whatever. Against armor, they were neither quite as effective shot for shot, nor quite as quick-firing as the Slammers' 20cm guns.
They were effective enough, though, and there was a bloody swarm of them.
Broglie and his two overwatching companions hit half a dozen of the Hindi vehicles, destroying them instantly even though most of the cyan bolts struck the thickest part of the targets' frontal armor. Then the surviving Hindis got the range and volleyed their replies.
A shot hit the cupola above Broglie. Ammo burned in the feed tube of Honey Girl's tribarrel. A blue-white finger poked skyward, momentarily dimming the rising sun. Des Grieux's display cross-hatched Dixie Dyke as well, indicating the north-flank tank had been damaged as Peres raked Hindi lines with both main gun and tribarrel. All three units jerked backward to turret-down positions as quickly as their drivers could cant their fans.
"Driver!" Des Grieux said as Gangbuster II, its front skirts dragging sparks from the stone road surface,crossed the canal bridge."Turn us and we'll hit the bastards from behind. Booster, gimme a fucking city map!"
The cheap buildings of Morobad's canal district were ablaze. Some of the walls were plastered wattle-and-daub; other builders had hung painted sheetiron on scantlings of flimsy wood.Neither method could resist the two main-gunrounds Des Grieux snapped toward the town when Gangbuster II started its rush. The bolts had the effect of flares dropped into a tinder box.
The tank drove into a curtain of flame at ninety kph. There was something in the way,a wrecked vehicle or the corner of a building. Gangbuster's skirts shunted it aside with no more commotion than the clang the automatic defense system made when it went off.
The tank's AI obediently replaced the topographic display on the left screen with a map of Morobad from Gangbuster II's data banks.The streets were narrow and twisting, even the thoroughfare leading west from the causeway.
Two hundred meters from the canal was a market square bordered by religious and governmental buildings. That would give Pesco room to turn. When Gangbuster II roared out of the city again and took the turretless Hindi tanks in the rear, it'd be all she wrote.
The air cleared at street level. Gangbuster II scraped the brick facade of a three-story tenement which started to collapse on them. At least a score of Hindi soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons. Bullets ricocheted from the sloped iridium armor, scything down the shooters and their fellows. Cells of the automatic defense system fired, louder and more lethal still.
Haze closed in momentarily, but a telltale in the fighting compartment informed Des Grieux that Pesco had already switched to sonic imaging instead of using the electro-optical spectrum to drive. Gangbuster II swept into the market square, pulling whorls of smoke into the clear, sunlit air.
A six-tube battery of 170mm howitzers was set up in the square. Empty obturator disks and unneeded booster charges in white silk littered the cobblestones behind the weapons. The crews were desperately cranking their muzzles down to fire point-blank at Gangbuster II. Hindi infantry cut loose with small arms from all windows facing the square and from the triple tile overhangs of the large temple behind the walled courtyard to the south.
As Des Grieux squeezed both firing tits,a hundred-kilogram shell hit the turret. The round was a thin-cased HE, what the crew happened to have up the spout when they got warning of the tank's approach. The red flash destroyed thirty percent of Gangbuster II's forward sensors and rocked the tank severely, but the hatches were sealed and the massive turret armor was never even threatened.
"Driv—" Des Grieux started to say as his hazy screens showed him Hindi gunners doubling up, flying apart, burning in puffs of vaporized steel as the powergun sights slid across the battery.
A legless Hindi battery captain jerked the lanyard of his last howitzer. The shell was a capped armor-piercing round. Even so, the round would not have penetrated Gangbuster II's frontal armor if it had struck squarely. Instead, it hit Pesco's closed hatch edge-on and spalled the backing plate down through the driver's helmet and skull.
Pesco convulsed at the controls of Gangbuster II. The tank skidded across the square, swapping ends several times. The courtyard wall braked but did not stop the careening vehicle. Des Grieux shouted curses, but words had no effect on the tank or its dead driver.
Gangbuster II slid bow-first into the stone-built temple. Blocks and tiles from the multiple roofs cascaded onto the tank and over the courtyard beyond.
All Gangbuster II's systems crashed at the massive overload.
Des Grieux knew nothing about that. Despite his shock harness, his head slammed sideways into the map display so that he shut down an instant before his tank did.
Existence was a pulsing red blur until Des Grieux opened his eyes. The pulsing continued every time his heart beat, but now he could see real light: the tiny yellow beads of Gangbuster II's standby illumination system.
The air in the fighting compartment was hot and foul. When the power went off, so did the air conditioning. The expended 20cm casings on the floor continued to radiate heat and complex gases.
Des Grieux reached for the reset switch to bring Gangbuster II's systems alive again. Movement brought blinding pain. The tank's shock harness had retracted when movement stopped, but the straps left tracks in the form of bruises and cracked ribs where they had gripped Des Grieux to prevent worse.
His mouth tasted of blood, and there seemed to be a layer of ground glass between his eyes and their lids.
"Blood and martyrs,"Des Grieux whispered.The taste in his mouth came from his tongue, which had swollen to twice its normal size because he had bitten it.
When the world ceased throbbing and his stomach settled again, Des Grieux finished his movement to the reset switch. Pain just meant you were alive. If you were alive, you could do for the bastard who'd done you.
The snarl of powerguns dimly penetrated to the tank's interior. Neither of the indig forces had powerguns of their own. Either the Slammers had entered Morobad, or Baffin had committed his Legion to exploit the ratfuck the Black Banner Guards had made when they tried to follow Gangbuster II's lead.
Des Grieux knew which alternative he'd put his money on.
Gangbuster II came to life crisply and fast. That was better than the man in her fighting compartment had managed.
"Booster," Des Grieux said. His injured tongue slurred his words. "Order of Battle on Number One."
Screen #1, the left-hand unit, came up with the map of Morobad Des Grieux had ordered onto it before the crash and shutdown.The new overlay showed Des Grieux just what he'd bloody expected, the orange symbols of Legion vehicles streaming through the town and fanning out when they crossed the canal.
This was no feint or stiffening force. Baffin was committing his entire battalion-strength command to end the war here on the Western Wing.
"Like bloody hell . . ." Des Grieux muttered. "Driver! Report!"
Nothing. "Pesco?"
Nothing. Des Grieux would have to crawl forward and see what the hell was going on; but first he checked the condition of his tank.
Gangbuster II was fully operable. The tank was down one fan and had five fist-sized holes in her skirts. Des Grieux had no recollection of several of those hits. Both guns were all right, and sixty percent of the massively redundant sensor suite checked out as well.
The only pr
oblem was that, according to the echo-ranging apparatus, the tank was covered by several meters of variegated rubble: bricks, tiles, wooden beams, and the bodies of Hindi soldiers who'd been shooting from the temple roofs up to the moment Gangbuster II brought the building's facade down on itself. All the visual displays were blank because the pickups were buried.
Of course,if the Slammers' vehicle hadn't been so completely concealed,Baffin's troops would have finished Des Grieux off by reflex. Veteran mercenaries were generally men who'd survived by never trusting a corpse until they'd put in a bayonet of their own.
A four-ship platoon of Baffin's tank destroyers slid eastward across the map of Morobad. They were air-cushion vehicles mounting 15cm power guns behind frontal armor almost as thick as that of the Slammers' tanks.The main guns were in centerline mountings like those of the Hindi tanks—turrets were relatively heavy, and an air-cushion vehicle could rotate easily in comparison to wheeled or track-laying armor.
Companies of infantry preceded and followed the tank destroyers in four air-cushion carriers apiece. Baffin carried his infantry in large, lightly armored vehicles; Hammer mounted his men on one-man skimmers with their heavy weapons on air-cushion jeeps. Either method worked well with good troops; and both of these units were very good indeed.
Gangbuster II shone brightly on Des Grieux's display as a cross-hatched blue symbol, but the Legion troops advancing through Morobad showed no sign of awareness. Their screens would be tuned to the Han/Slammers defenses kilometers to the east . . . if there were any Han troops left to thicken the line of cursing Slammers infantry and the survivors of 2nd Platoon.
Not all the Legion equipment in the square outside the collapsed temple was moving. Des Grieux's #1 display marked four of Baffin's 3cm twin guns, half the Legion's anti-artillery defenses, with neat orange symbols. The weapons were emplaced to either side of the thoroughfare.Support troops had hastily bulldozed the wreckage of the Hindi battery out of the way.
Ideally, artillery-defense guns should have a clear view to the horizon on all sides. In practice, crews preferred to set up in defilade where they were safe from hostile direct-fire weapons.Even so,the buildings surrounding the market square reduced the defended area to what seemed at first an unusually narrow cone.
Three command vehicles, armored air-cushion vans filled with communications gear, were parked back-to-back in a trefoil at the northwest corner of the square. That was what the 3cm guns were protecting: Baffin in his advanced command post.
Des Grieux's muscles began to tremble with reaction. He no longer felt the pain in his ribs; fresh adrenaline smoothed the knotted veins flowing to his brain. Baffin himself, a hundred and fifty meters from Gangbuster II's main gun . . . .
"Pesco, you lazy bastard!" Des Grieux snarled, but he'd already given up on raising a response from his driver. He climbed out of his seat and slid between the hull and the frame of the turret basket.
Thick 20cm disks littered the deck, the empty matrixes that had aligned the copper atoms which the powerguns released as plasma. One disk blocked the small hatch separating the fighting compartment from the driver's compartment. Des Grieux tossed the empty angrily behind him. The polyurethane was hot and still tacky; it clung to his fingertips.
As soon as he opened the hatch, the smell told Des Grieux that his driver was dead. Pesco had voided his bowels when the fragment sliced off the upper half of his skull. The liters of blood his heart pumped before the autonomic nervous system shut down had already begun to rot in the warm compartment.
Des Grieux swore.The hatch—the part of it that hadn't decapitated Pesco—was jammed beyond opening by anything short of rear-echelon maintenance. He didn't know what the bloody hell he was going to do with the driver's body.
He released the seat latch so that the back flopped down. The remaining contents of Pesco's cranial cavity slopped over Des Grieux's hands. He rotated the seat forty-five degrees to its stop, then tilted the corpse sideways out onto the forward deck of the compartment. There it blocked the foot pedals, but Des Grieux wouldn't be able to use those anyway.
Des Grieux leaned over the bloody seat, set the blade angles at zero incidence, and switched on the drive fans. All the necessary controls were on the column; the duplicate nacelle-attitude controls on the foot pedals permitted a driver to do four things simultaneously in an emergency—
But Gangbuster II didn't have a driver anymore.
Seven green lights and a red one marked the fan status screen beneath the main driving display, but that was only half the story. Des Grieux knew the intake ducts were blocked as surely as Gangbuster II's hatches. That didn't matter at the moment, but it would as soon as he rotated the pitch control and the fans started to suck wind.
No choice. Des Grieux could only hope that vibration as the nacelles drew against the rubble above them would help to clear the vehicle. Because that was what he needed to do first.
Des Grieux breathed deeply. He didn't really notice the smell; other things could get in his way, but not that. He adjusted the nacelle angle to a balance between lift and thrust. He hoped he had the mixture right, but whatever he came up with would have to do.
Des Grieux had been a lousy driver; he was far too heavy-handed, forcing the controls the way he forced himself.
For this particular job, a heavy hand was the only choice.
The fans hummed, running at full speed though the throttles were at their idle setting. With the pitch at zero, the leading edges of the blades knifed the air with minimal resistance. Gangbuster II began to resonate with a bell-note deeper than usual because the hull didn't hang free in the air.
Des Grieux sucked in another breath. His right hand drew the linked throttles full on, while his left thumb adjusted the pitch to sixty degrees. The tank wheezed and bucked like a choking lion. Des Grieux scrambled backward out of the hatch.
The empties jounced on the floor with the violence of Gangbuster II's attempts to draw air through choked intakes. Des Grieux threw himself into his seat and grasped the gunnery joysticks. The orange pippers glowed against a background of uniform gray because the visual pickups were shrouded.
Des Grieux twisted the left joystick.Metal screeched as the turret began to swing clockwise against its weight of rubble. Hot insulation tinged the atmosphere of the fighting compartment as the turret drive motors overloaded.
Des Grieux twisted the control in the opposite direction. The turret reversed a few centimeters. There was a squalling crash as the mass of overburden shifted and slid away from Gangbuster II's turret and deck. The tank bobbed like a diver surfacing through a sea of rubble.
The fan blades bit the air for which they had been starving. Uncontrolled, Gangbuster II lurched backward at an accelerating pace.
Des Grieux shouted with glee as he rotated his turret and cupola controls again. Now he had a sight picture and targets.
Gangbuster II had hit the temple facade nose on. Now it backed through the hole it had torn in the wall, bucking over and plowing through tiles and masonry from the building's upper stories.
The Hindis were using the temple's forecourt as a field hospital for casualties from Des Grieux's initial attack.Medics and the wounded who could move under their own power ran or crawled from Gangbuster II's bellowing reappearance.
Des Grieux ignored them. The gap his tank had smashed in the courtyard wall showed a tone edge of his gunnery screen,and a pair of Legion3cm carriages were visible through it. The Legion guns were firing upward at a 40° angle, snapping incoming shells from the air as soon as they notched the horizon.
The tribarrel's solid sight indicator covered the Legion weapons an instant before the main gun swung on target. Brilliant cyan bolts raked the Legion crews and the receivers of their guns. A pannier of ammunition exploded with a flash like that of a miniature nova. It destroyed everything within a five-meter sphere, pavement included.
Gangbuster II slewed across the courtyard in a scraping, sparking curve. The tank wasn't going to foll
ow the track by which it had plunged in from the market square. The gap in the courtyard wall foreshortened into solidity as the damaged skirts slid the tank toward a point twenty meters west of its initial entry. The screams of wounded men in the vehicle's path were lost in the howl of steel on stone.
Des Grieux took his right hand from the joystick long enough to close the commo breaker. "Blue Three to Big Dog One-niner!" he shouted hoarsely to battalion fire control. "Get some arty on top of us! Get us—"
Gangbuster II struck the courtyard wall for the second time. The shock threw Des Grieux forward into his harness.Redoubled pain shrank objects momentarily to pinhead size in his vision, but he did not black out.
The tank's iridium hull armor smashed through the brickwork, but the impact stripped off the already-damaged skirts. Momentum drove Gangbuster II partway into the market square. The vehicle halted there because half the plenum chamber was gone.
"—some firecracker rounds!"Des Grieux gasped to artillery control, demanding anti-personnel shells as his hands worked his joysticks.
Two of the 3cm pieces were undamaged. The crew of the gun nearest the ammunition blast was dead or writhing shrivelled on the pavement, but the gunners of the fourth piece were cranking down their twin muzzles to bear on the unexpected threat.
A bolt from Gangbuster II's main gun struck the shield just below the stubby barrels of the artillery-defense weapon. The gun seemed to suck in, then flash outward as a ball of sunbright vapor.
A loader had turned to run when she saw death pointing down Gangbuster II's 20cm bore. Gaseous metal enveloped all of the Legion soldier but her outflung hand. When the glowing ball condensed and vanished, the hand remained like a wax dummy on a framework of carbonized sticks.
Des Grieux's tribarrel raked the Legion command group. The plating of the vehicles' boxy sides was thick enough to turn about half the 2cm bolts—but at this short range, only half.