by David Drake
The display still showed 2nd to have four vehicles. Everybody in the shelter knew that rear-guard actions always meant casualties—and didn't always mean survivors.
Medrassi grunted into his hands.
"The hogs'll provide maximum effort when the time comes," Broglie said. "The locals have about thirty self-propelled guns, also, but their fire direction may leave something to be desired."
"It's not," Peres said, "going t' be a lot of fun. Until the rest of our people come in."
"The battle depends on 2nd Platoon," Broglie said flatly. "You're all highly experienced, and mostly your drivers are as well. Slick, how do you feel about your driver, Pesco? He's the new man."
Des Grieux shrugged. "He'll do," he said. Des Grieux was looking at nothing in particular through the side of the tent.
Broglie stared at Des Grieux for a moment without expression. Then he resumed, "Colonel Hammer put Major Chesney in command of this operation, but it's not going to work unless 2nd does its job. That's why I'm here with you. We've got to convince the Hindis—and particularly Baffin—that the attack is real and being heavily supported by the Slammers. After the locals pull back—"
He looked grimly at the display, though its image—enemy forces trapped in a pocket while artillery hammered them into surrender—was cheerful enough for Pollyanna.
"After the Han pull back," the captain continued softly, "it's up to us to keep the planned withdrawal from turning into a genuine rout. Echo can't hold by itself if Baffin's Legion slams into them full tilt . . . and if that happens—"
Broglie smiled the hard, accepting smile of a professional describing events which would occur literally over his own dead body.
"—then Baffin can choose which of our separated flanking forces he swallows up first, can't he?"
A Han laser slashed the empty darkness from the perimeter.
"Bloody marvelous,"Peres murmured."But I suppose if they knew what they was doing, they wouldn't need us t' do it for them."
Medrassi laughed. "Dream on," he said.
"Do you all understand our mission, then?" Broglie asked. "Sergeant Peres?"
"Yes sir," Peres said with a nod.
"Sergeant Medrassi?"
"Yeah, sure. I been in worse."
"Slick?"
Des Grieux stared at the wall of the shelter. His mind was bright with the rich, soul-devouring glare of a tank's main gun.
"Sergeant Des Grieux," Broglie said. His voice was no louder than it had been a moment before,but it cut like an edge of glass."Do you understand the operation we will carry out tomorrow?"
Des Grieux looked at his commanding officer. "Chesney never came up with anything this cute," he said mildly. "This one was your baby? Sir."
"I had some input in the planning, that's right," Broglie said tonelessly. "Do you understand the operation, Slick?"
"I understand that it makes a real pretty picture, Cap'n Broglie," Des Grieux replied. "Tomorrow we'll see how it looks on the ground, won't we?"
Outside the shelter, machine gun fire etched the sky in pointless response.
The Han armored personnel carrier was supposed to be amphibious, but it paused for almost thirty seconds on the first dike. The wheels of the front two axles spun in the air; those of the rear pair churned in a suspension of mud and water with the lubricating properties of motor oil.
A Hindi anti-tank gun ripped the APC with a 50mmosmium penetrator. Half of the carrier's rear-mounted engine blew through the roof of the tilted vehicle with a crash much louder than the Mach 4 ballistic crack of the shot.
The driver hopped out of the forward hatch and fell down on the dike. His legs continued to piston as though he were running instead of thrashing in mud. Side-hatches opened a fraction of a second later and a handful of unhurt infantrymen flopped clear as well.
Inertia kept the APC's front wheels rotating for some seconds.A rainbow slick of diesel fuel covered the rice paddy behind the vehicle. It did not ignite.
Des Grieux smiled like a shark from his overwatch position on the first terrace east of the floodplain. He traversed his main gun a half degree. The Hindi antitank gun was a towed piece with optical sights. It had no electronic signature to give it away, and Gangbuster II's magnetic anomaly detector was far too coarse a tool to provide targeting information at a range of nearly a kilometer.
When the weapon fired, though—
Des Grieux stroked his foot-trip and converted the anti-tank gun into a ball of saturated cyan light.
Han vehicles hosed the landscape with their weapons. Bullets from APC turrets and the secondary armament of laser-vehicles flashed as bright explosions among the foliage growing on dikes and made the mud bubble.
High-powered lasers raised clouds of steam wherever their pale beams struck, but they were not very effective. The lasers were line-of-sight weapons like the Slammers' powerguns. The gunners could hit nothing but the next hedge over while the firing vehicles sheltered behind dikes themselves.
The entire Han advance stopped when the Hindis fired their first gun.
Des Grieux had a standard 2cm Slammers carbine clipped to the side of his seat. Over his head, Gangbuster's tribarrel pumped short bursts into the heavens in automatic air-defense mode. The sky, still a pale violet color in the west, was decorated with an appliquéé of shell tracks and the bolts of powerguns which detonated the incoming.
Both sides' artillery fired furiously. Neither party had any success in breaking through the webs of opposing defenses, but there was no question of taking Gangbuster II out of AAD. The infantry carbine and the tank's main gun were the only means of slaughter under Des Grieux's personal control.
"Blue Two,"Captain Broglie's voice ordered."On command, advance one dike. Remaining elements look sharp."
Blue Two, Dar es Salaam, was on the southern edge of the advance, half a kilometer from Gangbuster II. Broglie's command tank, Honey Girl, was a similar distance to starboard of Des Grieux; and Blue One, Peres, backstopped the Han right flank a full kilometer north of Gangbuster II. The causeway carrying the main road to Morobad was the axis of the Strike Force advance.
The dikes turned the floodplain into a series of ribbons, each about a hundred meters wide. By advancing one at a time from their overwatch positions behind the Black Banner Guards, maybe the Slammers' tanks could get the Han force moving again . . . .
Though if instead the four tanks burst straight ahead in a hell-for-leather dash, they'd open up the Hindi lines like so many bullets through a can of beans.
"Blue Two, go."
Medrassi's tank lurched forward at maximum acceleration. The driver—Des Grieux didn't know his name; her name, maybe—had backed thirty meters in the terraced paddy to give himself a run before they hit the dike.
Water and bright green rice shoots, hand-planted only days before, spewed to either side as the fans compressed a cushion of air dense enough to float 170 tonnes. For a moment, Dar es Salaam's track through the field was a barren expanse of wet clay; then muddy water slopped back to cover the sudden waste.
The tank didn't lift quite high enough to clear the dike, but the driver didn't intend to. The belly plates were the vehicle's thinnest armor. Hindi gunners, much less the Legion mercenaries, could penetrate even a Slammers' tank if it waved too much of its underside in the direction of the enemy.
Dar es Salaam's bow skirts rammed the top layer of the bank ahead of the tank. Fleshy-branched native osiers flailed desperately as they fell with the dike in which they had grown.
Honey Girl fired its main gun. Des Grieux didn't see Broglie's target but there was a target, because the bolt detonated an anti-tank gun's 400-liter bottle of liquid propellant in a huge yellow flash. The barrel of the Hindi weapon flew toward the Han lines. The bodies of the gun crew shed parts all around the hemispherical blast.
Des Grieux didn't have a target. That bastard Broglie was good, Lord knew.
A pair of Han laser-vehicles resumed the planned advance; or tried to, they'd bog
ged in the muck when they stopped. Spinning wheels threw brown undulations to either side but contributed nothing to the forward effort. The Han vehicles were supposed to be all-terrain,but they lacked the supplementary treads the Hindi tanks used. The paddies might have been too much for the balloon tires even if the heavy vehicles had kept moving.
Four APCs grunted into motion—drawn by Dar es Salaam and encouraged by the deadly 20cm powerguns on the mercenary tanks. The carriers found the going difficult also, but their lower ground pressure made them more mobile than the laser-vehicles were.
Thirty or more of the APCs joined the initial quartet. The advance, one or two vehicles revving into motion at a time, looked like individual drivers and officers making their own decisions irrespective of orders from above—but it had the effect of a planned leapfrog assault.
"Blue One," Broglie ordered. "On command, advance one dike. Remaining elements look sharp." Only buzzbombs and a few light crew-served weapons replied to the empty storm of Han fire. The Hindis kept their heads down and picked their targets.
Bullet impacts glittered on the glacis plate of an APC driving parallel to the causeway. The commander had been conning his vehicle with his head out of the cupola hatch. He ducked down immediately. The driver must have ducked also, even though he was using his periscopes. The APC ran halfway up the side of the causeway and overturned.
"Blue One, go!"
As Peres' driver kicked Dixie Dyke forward, Des Grieux's gunnery screen marked a target with a white carat. The barrel of a Hindi gun was rotating to bear when Peres' tank exposed its belly. Excellent camouflage concealed the motion from even the Slammers' high-resolution optics, but the magnetic anomaly detector noticed the shift against the previous electromagnetic background.
Gangbuster II's turret traversed four degrees to starboard on its magnetic gimbals. The cupola tribarrel snarled up at incoming artillery fire,but the only sound within the fighting compartments was the whine of the turret drive motors and the whistling intake of Des Grieux's breath as he prepared to kill a . . . .
The target vanished in the blue-white glare of Honey Girl's bolt. Broglie had beaten Des Grieux to the shot again, and fuck that the target was in Honey Girl's primary fire zone.
"Blue Three,"Broglie ordered with his usual insouciant calm."On command, advance two, I repeat two, dikes. Remaining elements, look sharp."
"Driver," Des Grieux ordered, "you heard the bastard."
Medrassi fired, but he didn't have a bloody target for a main-gun bolt, there wasn't one. A section of dike flash-baked and blew outward as ceramic shards, but Via! what did a couple Hindi infantry matter?
Des Grieux ordered, "Booster, echo main screen, left side of visor, out," and pulled up hard on the seat-control lever. The seat rose. Des Grieux's head slid out of the hatch just as the cupola rotated around him and the tribarrel spat three rounds into the western sky with an acrid stench from the ejected empties.
"Blue Three, go!"
"Goose it, driver!"Des Grieux said as he unclipped the shoulder weapon from his seat and felt Gangbuster II rise beneath him on the thrust of its eight drive fans to mount the dike.
The Han advance was proceeding in reasonable fashion, though at least a score of APCs hung back at the start point. Several laser-vehicles were moving also. The inaction of the rest was more likely the bog than cowardice, though cowardice was never an unreasonable guess when unblooded troops ran into their first firefight.
One laser-vehicle balanced on top of a dike. The fore and aft axles spun their tires in the air, while the grip of the central wheels was too poor to move them off the slick surface. Hindi skirmishers lobbed their buzzbombs at long range toward the teetering vehicle, but the anti-tank guns contemptuously ignored it to wait for a real threat.
To wait for the Slammers' tanks.
Des Grieux's eyes were four meters above the ground surface, higher than the tank's own sensors, when Gangbuster II humped itself over the dike. Through the clear half of his visor Des Grieux saw the movement, the glint of the plasma generator trunnion-mounted to an anti-tank gun, as it swung beneath its overhead protection.
The little joystick in the cupola was meant as a manual control for the defense array, but it was multi-function at need—and Des Grieux needed it. He rotated and depressed the main gun with his left hand as Gangbuster II started her fierce rush down the reverse side of the dike and the Hindi weapon traversed for the kill.
The pipper on the left side of Des Grieux's visor merged in a stereo image with the view of his right eye. He thumbed the firing tit with a fierce joy, knowing that nobody else was that good.
But Slick Des Grieux was. As the tank bellied down into the spray of her fans, a yellow fireball lifted across the distant fields. A direct hit, snap-shooting and on the move, but Des Grieux was the best!
Broglie fired also, from the other side of the empty road to Morobad. He must've got something also, because a secondary explosion followed the bolt, but the Hindis—strictly locals, no sign at all of the Legion—weren't done yet. A hypervelocity shot spanged from Gangbuster's turret. Kinetic energy became heat with a flash almost as bright as that of a plasma bolt, rocking Des Grieux backward.
He turned toward the shot, pointing his short-barreled shoulder weapon as though it were a heavy pistol. The tank bottomed on the paddy, then bounced upward nearly a meter as water rushed in to fill the cavity, sealing the plenum chamber to maximum efficiency.
The Hindi weapon was dug in low; it had fired through a carefully cut aisle. Now the gunners waited to shoot again, hoping for more of a target than Des Grieux's helmeted head bobbing over the planted dikes between them. None of the three Slammers' tanks providing the base of fire could bear on the anti-tank gun even now that it had exposed itself by firing. Gangbuster II's main gun was masked by the vegetation, also, but Des Grieux's personal weapon spat three times on successive bounces as the tank porpoised forward. The gun's frontal camouflage flashed and burned when a 2cm bolt flicked it. Han officers, guided by the powergun, sent a dozen ropes of tracer arcing toward the Hindi weapon from the cupolas of their APCs. Hindi gunners splashed away from the beaten zone, hampered by the mud and raked by the hail of explosive bullets.
The peepeepeep in Des Grieux's earphones warned him to attend to the miniature carat on his visor: Threat Level I, a laser rangefinder painting Gangbuster II from the hedge bordering the causeway. No way to tell what weapon the rangefinder served, but somebody thought it could kill a Slammers' tank . . . .
Des Grieux rotated the turret with the joystick, thrusting hard as though his muscles rather than the geartrain were turning the massive weight of iridium. "Driver, hard right!" he screamed, because the traversing mechanism wasn't going to slew the main gun fast enough by itself.
And maybe nothing was going to slew the main gun fast enough.
Des Grieux shot twice with the carbine in his right hand. His bolts splashed near the bottom of the hedge. One round blew glassy fragments of mud in the air; the other carbonized a gap the size of a pie plate at the edge of the interwoven stems of native shrub.
The laser emitter itself was two meters high in the foliage, but that was only a bead connected to the observer's hiding place by a coaxial optical fiber. The observer was probably close to the emitter, though; and if the weapon itself was close to the observer, it would simply pop up and make parallax corrections.
Soldiers liked things simple.
Pesco was trying to obey Des Grieux's order, but Gangbuster II had enormous forward momentum and there was the dike they were approaching to consider, also.A sheet of spray lifted to the tank's port side as the driver dumped air beneath the left skirt. The edge of the right skirt dipped and cut yellow bottom clay to stain the roostertail sluicing back on that side.
Gangbuster II started to lift for the dike. That was almost certainly the Hindi aiming point, but Des Grieux had the sight picture he wanted, he needed—
Des Grieux tripped the main gun.Five meters of mud and ve
getation exploded as the 20cm bolt slanted across the base of the hedge.
The jolt of sun-hot plasma certainly blinded the laser pickup. It probably incinerated the observer as well: no mud burrow could withstand the impact of a tank's main gun.
The causeway was gouged as if a giant shark had taken a bite out of it. The soil steamed. Fragments of hedge blazed and volleyed orange sparks for twenty meters from where the bolt hit.
The weapon the observer controlled, a rack of four hypervelocity rockets dug into the edge of the causeway ten meters west of the rangefinder,was not damaged by the bolt. The observer's dying reflex must have closed the firing circuit.
Asection of causeway collapsed from the rockets' back blast. Gangbuster II's automatic defense system fired too late to matter. The sleet of steel pellets disrupted the razor-sharp smoke trails, but the projectiles themselves were already past.
The exhaust tracks fanned out slightly from the launcher. One of the four rockets missed Gangbuster's turret by little more than the patina on the iridium surface. The sound of their passage was a single, brittle c-c-crack!
Because Gangbuster II was turning in the last instant before the missiles fired—and because the main gun had blasted the observer into stripped atoms and steam before he could correct for the course change—the tank was undamaged, and Des Grieux was still alive to do what he did best.
It was time to do that now, whatever Broglie's orders said.
"Driver, steer for the road!" Des Grieux ordered. "Highball! We're goanna gut 'em like fish, all the way t' the town!"
"Via, we can't do that!" Pesco blurted. Gangbuster II dropped off the dike in a flurry of dirt, water, and vegetation diced by the fans. "Cap'n Broglie said—"
Des Grieux craned his body forward and aimed his carbine. He fired, dazzling the direct vision sensors built into the driver's hatch coaming. The bolt vaporized a tubful of water ahead of Gangbuster II and sent cyan quivers through a semicircle of the paddy.
