by David Drake
* * *
The flooded rice paddies slowed the tank considerably. One hundred seventy tonnes were too much for even the eight powerful drive fans to lift directly. The vehicle floated on a cushion of air, but that high-pressure air required solid support, also.
The water and thin mud of the paddies spewed from the plenum chamber. Gangbuster II rode on the clay undersurface—but the liquid still created drag on the outside of the skirts as the tank drove through it. To make the speed Des Grieux knew it needed to survive, Gangbuster II had to have a smooth, hard surface beneath her skirts.
The causeway was such an obvious deathtrap that none of the Han vehicles had even attempted it—but the locals didn't have vehicles with the speed and armor of a Slammers tank.
And anyway, they didn't have Des Grieux's awareness of how important it was to keep the enemy off balance by punching fast as well as often.
Des Grieux latched the 2cm carbine back against his seat. The barrel, glowing from the half magazine the veteran had fired through it, softened the patch of cushion it touched. The stench intertwined with that oozing from the main gun empties on the floor of the turret basket.
Gangbuster II was now leading the Han advance instead of supporting it. Three Hindi soldiers got up and ran, left to right, across a dike two hundred meters west of the tank. All were bent over, their bodies tiger-striped by foliage. The trailing pair carried a long object between diem, a machine gun or rocket launcher.
Maybe the Hindis thought they were getting into a better position from which to fire at Gangbuster II. Des Grieux's tribarrel, his tribarrel again, sawed the men down in a tangle of flailing limbs and blue-white flashes.
Des Grieux didn't need to worry about indirect fire anymore,because the Hindi artillery wouldn't fire into friendly lines . . . and besides, Gangbuster II was moving too fast to be threatened by any but the most sophisticated terminally guided munitions. The locals didn't have anything of that quality in their arsenals.
Baffin's Legion did have tank-killing rounds that were up to the job. Still, the cargo shells which held two or three self-forging fragments—shaped by the very blasts that hurled them against the most vulnerable spots in a tank's armor—were expensive,even for mercenary units commanding Baffin's payscale,or Hammer's.
For the moment, the guns on both sides were flinging cheap rounds of HE Common at one another, knowing that counterfire would detonate the shells harmlessly in the air no matter what they were.
It'd take minutes—tens of seconds, at least—for Legion gunners to get terminally guided munitions up the spout. That would be plenty of time for the charge Des Grieux led to blast out the core of enemy resistance.
"Hang on!" Pesco cried as though Des Grieux couldn't see for himself that Gangbuster II was about to surge up onto the causeway.
A Hindi soldier stood transfixed, halfway out of a spider hole in the hedge on the other side of the road. His rifle was pointed forward, but he was too terrified to sight down it toward the tank's huge, terrible bow. Des Grieux cranked the tribarrel with his right joystick.
Gangbuster II rose in a slurp of mud as dark and fluid as chocolate cake dough. The Hindi disappeared, not into his hole but by jumping toward the paddies north of the causeway. A Han gunner, lucky or exceptionally skillful, caught the Hindi in mid-leap. A splotch of blood hung in the air for some seconds after the corpse hit the water.
An anti-tank shot struck the rear of Gangbuster II's turret. The bustle rack tore away in a scatter of the tankers' personal belongings, many of them a fire.Impact of the dense penetrator on comparably dense armor heated both incandescent, enveloping the clothes and paraphernalia in a haze of gaseous osmium and iridium.
The projectile had only a minuscule direct effect on the inertia of Gangbuster's 170 tonnes, but the shock made Pesco's hand twitch on the control column. The tank lurched sideways. The lights in the fighting compartment darkened and stayed out,but the screens only flickered as the AI routed power through pathways undamaged when the jolting impact severed a number of conduits.
The second shot blew through the northern hedge a half-second later. Pesco was fighting for control. The projectile hit, but only a glancing blow this time. The shot ricocheted from high on the rear hull, leaving a crease a half-meter long glowing in the back deck.
Des Grieux spun the tribarrel because the cupola responded more quickly than the massive turret forging, but he didn't have a clear target—and the anti-tank gunner didn't need one.
Powergun bolts would dump all their energy on the first solid object they touched. It was pointless trying to shoot at a target well to the other side of dense vegetation. Heavy osmium shot, driven by a jolt of plasma generated in a chamber filled with liquid propellant, carried through the hedge with no significant degradation of its speed or stability.
Gangbuster II hesitated while Pesco swung the bow to port, following the causeway, and coarsened the fan pitch to regain the speed lost in climbing the embankment. The tank was almost stationary for the moment.
Hindi soldiers rose from spiderholes in the hedge and raised buzzbomb launchers. One of the rocketeers was a hundred meters ahead of Gangbuster II; the other was an equal distance behind, his position already enveloped by the Han advance.
Des Grieux's tribarrel was aimed directly to starboard, and even the main gun was twenty degrees wide of the man in front. The tanker's right hand strained against the joystick anyway. The Hindis fired simultaneously.
The third shot from the anti-tank gun punched in the starboard side of the tank's plenum chamber and exited to port in a white blaze of burning steel. Each hole was approximately the size of a human fist.Air roared out while Gangbuster II rang like a struck gong. The fan nacelles were undamaged, and the designers had overbuilt pressurization capacity enough to accept a certain amount of damage without losing speed or maneuverability.
The rocket from the man in the rear hit the hedge midway between launcher and the huge intended target. The buzzbomb's pop-out fins caught in the interlaced branches; the warhead did not go off.
The other buzzbomb was aimed well enough as to line, but the Hindi soldier flinched upward as he squeezed the ignition trigger. The rocket sailed over Gang-buster II in a flat arc and exploded in the dirt at the feet of the other Hindi. The body turned legless somersaults before flopping onto the causeway again.
Des Grieux and Broglie fired their 20cm guns together. The Hindi rocketeer and thirty meters of hedge behind him blazed as Gangbuster II's bolt raked along it. Through the sudden gap, Des Grieux saw the cyan-hearted fireball into which Broglie's perfect shot converted the Hindi gun that had targeted the tank on the causeway.
"Go, driver!" Des Grieux shouted hoarsely, but Pesco didn't need the order. Either he understood that their survival lay in speed, or blind panic so possessed him that he had no mind for anything but accelerating down the hedged three-kilometer aisle.
The Black Banner Guards were charging at brigade strength. It was a bloody shambles. The Hindis might have run when they saw the snouts of hundreds of armored personnel carriers bellowing toward them—
But they hadn't. More than a score of anti-tank guns unmasked and began firing, now that the contest was clearly a slugging match and not a game of cat-and-mouse.It took less than a second to purge the chamber of a Hindi gun,inject another projectile and ten liters of liquid propellant, and convert a tungsten wire into plasma in the center of the fluid.
Each shot was sufficiently powerful to lance through four APCs together if they chanced to be lined up the wrong way. Broglie, Peres, and Medrassi ripped away at the luxuriance of targets as fast as they could, but the paddies were already littered with torn and blazing Han vehicles.
The heavy anti-tank weapons were only part of the problem. Hindi teams of three to six men crouched in holes dug into the sides of the dikes, then rose to volley buzzbombs into the oncoming vehicles at point-blank range. Some of the rockets missed, but the hollow whoomp! of a single warhead was enough to disable
any but the luckiest APC.
For those targets which the first volley missed, additional buzzbombs followed within seconds.
The jet of fire from a shaped charge would rupture fuel cells behind an APC's thin armor. Diesel fuel atomized an instant before it burst into flame. Hindi machine gunners then shot the Han crews to dog-meat as they tried to abandon their burning vehicles.
Des Grieux knew that green locals always broke if you charged them. His mind hadn't fully metabolized the fact that these Hindis might not be particularly accurate with their weapons, but they sure as blood weren't running anywhere.
As for the Han, who'd already lost at least a quarter of their strength in an unanswered turkey shoot . . . well,Des Grieux had problems of his own."Booster!" he said. "Clear vision!"
The images echoed onto the left side of his visor from Gangbuster II's central screen vanished, leaving the screen itself sharp and at full size. Normally Des Grieux would have touched a finger to his helmet's mechanical controls, but this wasn't normal and both his hands were on the gunnery joysticks.
Gangbuster II was so broad that the tank's side skirts brushed one, then the other, hedge bordering the causeway. Morobad was a distant haze at the end of an aisle as straight as peasants with stakes and string could draw it. Des Grieux's right hand stroked the main gun counterclockwise to center its hollow pipper on the community. He didn't need or dare to increase the display's magnification to give him actual images.
A Hindi soldier aimed a buzzbomb out of the left-hand hedge. The man's mottled green uniform was so new that the creases were still sharp. His dark face was as fixed and calm as a wooden idol's.
Gangbuster II 's sensors noted a human within five meters. They tripped the automatic defense system attached to a groove encircling the tank just above the skirts. A 50x 150mm strip of high explosive fired, blowing its covering of steel polygons into the Hindi like the blast of a huge shotgun.
The Hindi and his rocket launcher, both riddled by shrapnel, hurtled backward. Leaves and branches stripped from the hedge danced in the air, hiding the carnage.
A second rocketeer leaned out of the hedge three steps beyond the first. The ADS didn't fire because the cell that bore on the new target had just been expended on his comrade. The Hindi launched his buzzbomb from so close that the standoff probe almost touched the tank's hull.
The distance was too short for the buzzbomb's fuse to arm. The missile struck Gangbuster II's gun mantle and ricocheted upward instead of exploding. A bent fin made the buzzbomb twist in crazy corkscrews.
Now another explosive/shrapnel cell aligned. The automatic defense system went off, shredding the rocketeer's torso. Useless, except as revenge for the way the Hindi had made Des Grieux's heart skip a beat in terror—
But revenge had its uses.
Des Grieux put one, then another 20cm bolt into Morobad without bothering to choose specific targets—if there were any. All he was trying to do for the moment was shake up the town. Some of the Legion's anti-artillery weapons were emplaced in Morobad. If the other side kept its collective head, Gangbuster II was going to get a hot reception.
Deafening, dazzling bolts from a tank's main gun pretty well guaranteed that nobody in the impact zone would be thinking coolly.
That was all right, and Des Grieux's tank was all right so far, seventy kph and accelerating. Gangbuster II pressed a broad hollow down the causeway. The surface of dirt and rice-straw matting rippled up to either side under the tank's 170 tonnes, even though the weight was distributed as widely as possible by the air cushion.
The Han brigade that Des Grieux had led to attack was well and truly fucked.
Smoke bubbled from burning vehicles, veiling and clearing the paddies like successive sweeps of a bullfighters cape.Some APCs had been abandoned undamaged. Their crews cowered behind dikes while Hindi buzzbomb teams launched missile after missile at the vehicles.
The rocketeers weren't particularly skillful: buzzbombs were reasonably accurate to a kilometer, but bits were a toss-up for most of the Hindis at anything over 100 meters. Determination and plenty of reloads made up for deficiencies in skill.
Han gunfire was totally ineffective. The officer manning the cupola machine gun also had his vehicle itself to command. As the extent of the disaster became clear, finding a way to safety overwhelmed any desire to place fire on the Hindis concealed by earth and foliage.
The infantry in the APC cargo compartments had individual gunports, but the Lord himself couldn't have hit a target while looking through a view slit and shooting from the port beneath it. The APCs bucked and slipped on the slimy terrain. In the compartments, men jostled one another and breathed the hot, poisonous reek of powder smoke and fear. Their bullets and laser beams either vanished into the landscape or glanced from the sideplates of friendly vehicles.
Des Grieux hadn't a prayer of a target either. He was trapped within the strait confines of the hedges for the two minutes it would take Gangbuster II to travel the length of the causeway.
His tribarrel raked the margins of the road, bursts to the right and left a hundred meters ahead of the tank's bluff bow. Stems popped like gunfire as they burned. That might keep a few heads down, but it wasn't a sufficient use for the most powerful unit on the battlefield.
Des Grieux could order his driver into the paddies again, but off the road the tank would wallow like a pig. This time there would be Hindi rocketeers launching buzzbombs from all four sides. Des Grieux no longer thought the local enemy would panic because it was a shark they had in the barrel to shoot at.
By contrast, the remaining Slammers' tanks were having a field day with the targets Des Grieux and the Han had flushed for them. Tribarrels stabbed across a kilometer of paddies to splash cyan death across Hindis focused on nearby APCs. Straw-wrapped packets of buzzbombs exploded, three and four at a time, to blow gaps in the dikes.
The left-hand situation display in Gangbuster's fighting compartment suddenly lighted with over a hundred red carats. The tanks of a Hindi armored brigade, lying hidden on the east side of the canal which formed the eastern boundary of Morobad, had been given the order to advance. When the drivers lighted their gas turbine powerplants, Gangbuster's sensors noted the electronic activity and located the targets crawling up onto prepared firing steps.
Morobad was less than a kilometer away. Hindi tanks maneuvered on both sides of the causeway to bring the guns fixed along the centerline of their hulls in line with Gangbuster II. The Hindi vehicles mounted combustion-augmented plasma weapons, like the anti-tank guns but more powerful because a tank chassis permitted a larger plasma generator than that practical on a piece of towed artillery.
Des Grieux's situation display showed the condition clearly. The visuals on his gunnery screen were the same as they'd been for the past minute and a half: unbroken hedgerows which would stop bolts from his powerguns as surely as thirty centimeters of iridium could.
A Hindi shot cracked left-to-right across the road, a tank's length behind Gangbuster II. Somebody'd gotten a little previous with his gunswitch, but the tank that had fired was still backing one track to slew its weapon across the Slammers' vehicle.
Des Grieux traversed his main gun, panning the target, and rocked the foot-trip twice. Instinct and the situation display at the corner of his eye guided him: the orange circle on the gunnery screen showed only foliage.
The first bolt flash-fired the wall of hedge. The second jet of cyan plasma crashed through the gap and made a direct hit on the Hindi tank.
The roiling orange fireball rose a hundred meters. The column of smoke an instant later mounted ten times as high before flattening into an anvil shape which dribbled trash back onto the paddies. The compression wave of the explosion flattened an expanding circle of new-planted rice. Rarefaction following the initial shock jerked the seedlings upright again.
A tank on the north side of the causeway slammed a shot into Gangbuster II's bow. A hundred kilos of iridium armor and #2 fannacelle turned into
white-hot vapor which seared leaves on which it cooled.
Pesco shouted and briefly lost control of his vehicle. The tank's enormous inertia resisted turning and kept the skirts on the road despite a nasty shimmy because of the drop in fan pressure forward.
Des Grieux tried to traverse his main gun to bear on the new danger, but the turret had seventy-five degrees to swing clockwise after its systems braked the momentum of the opposite rotation. He wasn't going to make it in the half-second before the next Hindi shot transfixed Gangbuster II's relatively thin side armor—
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.