by David Drake
"Booster," Des Grieux said, switching on the artificial intelligence which controlled the tank's systems. "Enemy activity, one kay, now!"
Warrior shuddered as Kuykendall increased the fan bite. Sandy soil mushroomed from the trench walls and upward as the hull lifted and air leaked beneath Warrior's skirts. Des Grieux's direct vision blurred in a gritty curtain, but the data his AI assembled from remote sensors was sharp and clear in the upper half of his helmet visor.
The ground fell away from the top of Hill 541 North in a 1:3 slope, and the tank positions were set well back from the edge of the defenses. Even when Warrior backed from her trench, Des Grieux would not be able to see the wire and minefields which the garrison had laid at mid-slope to stop an enemy assault.
Ideally, the tanks would have access to the Slammers' own remote sensors. Conditions were rarely ideal, and on Hill 541N they never even came close. Still, the Federals had emplaced almost a hundred seismic and acoustic sensors before the Republicans tightened the siege. Most of the sensors were in the wire, but they'd dropped a few in the swales surrounding the bill, a kilometer or so out from the hilltop.
Acoustic sensors gathered the sound of voices and equipment, while seismic probes noted the vibration feet and vehicles made in the soil. The information, flawed by the sensors' relative lack of sophistication and the haphazard way the units were emplaced, was transmitted to the hilltop for processing.
Des Grieux didn't know what the Feds did with the raw data, but Warrior's AI turned it into a clear image of a major Republican attack.
There were two thrusts, directed against the east and the northwest quadrants of the Federal positions. The slope at those angles was slightly steeper than it was to the south, but the surface fell in a series of shallow steps that formed dead zones, out of the fire from hilltop bunkers.
A siren near the Federal command post wound up. Its wail was almost lost in the shriek of incoming.
The Reps had ten or a dozen shells in the air at any one time. The three tanks still working air defense slashed arcs across the sky. Powerguns detonated much of the incoming during its fifteen-second flight time, but every minute or so a round got through.
Most of the hits raised geysers of sand from the hilltop. Only occasionally did a bunker collapse or a shellburst scythe down troops running toward fighting positions in the forward trenches, but even misses shook the defenders' morale.
Booster thought the attack on the northwest quadrant was being made by a battalion of infantry, roughly 500 troops, behind a screen of sappers no more than a hundredstrong.The eastern thrust was of comparable size,but even so it seemed a ludicrously small force to throw against a garrison of over 5,000 men.
That was only the initial assault; a larger force would get in its own way during the confusion of a night attack.Booster showed several additional battalions and a dozen light armored vehicles waiting in reserve among the yellow-brown scrub of the valleys where streams would run in the wet season.
As soon as the leading elements seized a segment of the outer bunker line in a classic infiltration assault, the Republican support troops would advance in good order and sweep across the hilltop. There was no way in hell that the Federal infantry, demoralized by weeks of unanswerable shelling, was going to stop the attack.
They didn't have to. Not while Des Grieux was here.
"Clear visor," Des Grieux said. He'd seen what the sensors gave him, and he didn't need the display anymore. He tugged the crash bar, dropping his seat into the fighting compartment and buttoning the hatch shut above him.
Warrior 's three holographic screens cast their glow across conduits and the breech of the squat main gun.
"Driver, advance along marked vector."
Default on the left-hand screen was a topographic display. Des Grieux drew his finger across it in a curving arc, down from the hilltop in a roughly northwestward direction. The AI would echo the display in Kuykendall's compartment. A trackway, not precisely a road but good enough for the Rep vehicles and sure as hell good enough for Warrior, wound north from the swale in the direction of the Republican firebase on Hill 504.
"Gun it!" Des Grieux snarled. "Keep your foot on the throttle, bitch!"
It didn't occur to him that there was another way to give the order. All Des Grieux knew was that Warrior had to move as he desired, and the commander's will alone was not enough to direct the vehicle.
Kuykendall touched Warrior to the ground, rubbing off some of the backing inertia against the sand. She rotated the attitude control of the drive fans,angling the nacelles so that they thrust Warrior forward as well as lifting it again onto the air cushion.
The huge tank slid toward the edge of the encampment in front of a curling billow of dust. Size made the vehicle seem to accelerate slowly.
"Oyster Leader to Oyster Two," said Lieutenant Lindgren over the platoon's commo channel. "Hold your position. Break. Oyster four—" Hawes "—move up to support Oyster Two. Over."
The note of Warrior's fans changed. Massive inertia would keep the vehicle gliding forward for a hundred meters, but the sound meant Kuykendall was obeying the platoon leader's orders.
"Driver!" Des Grieux shouted. "Roll it! Now!" Kuykendall adjusted her nacelles obediently. Warrior slid on momentum between a pair of bunkers as the fans swung to resume their forward thrust.
The Federal positions were dugouts covered by transportation pallets supported by a single layer of sandbags. Three or four additional sandbag layers supplied overhead protection, though a direct hit would crumple the strongest of them. The firing slits were so low that muzzle blasts kicked up sand to shroud the red flashes of their machine guns.
Warrior 's sensors fed the main screen with a light-enhanced 120° arc to the front. The tank's AI added in a stereoscopic factor to aid depth perception which the human brain ordinarily supplied in part from variations in light intensity.
The screen provided Des Grieux with a clear window onto the Republican attack. A two-man buzzbomb team rose into firing position at the inner edge of the wire. Instead of launching their unguided rockets into the nearest bunkers, they had waited for the tank they expected.
Des Grieux expected them also.He stunned the night with a bolt from Warrior's main gun.
Des Grieux used his central display for gunnery. It had two orange pippers, a 2cm ring and a 1cm dot for the main gun and tribarrel respectively. The sensor array mounted around Warrior's cupola gave Des Grieux the direction in which to swing his weapon. As soon as his tank rose into a hull-down position that cleared the 20cm powergun, he toggled the foot-trip.
Because the tribarrel was mounted higher, Des Grieux could have killed the Reps a moment sooner with the automatic weapon; but he wanted the enemy's first awareness of Warrior to be the cataclysmic blast of the tank's main gun.
The cyan bolt struck one of the Rep team squarely and converted his body into a ball of vapor so hot that its glowing shockwave flung the other victim's torso and limbs away in separate trajectories. The secondary explosion of the anti-tank warheads was lost in the plasma charge's flashcrash.
Honking through its intakes, Warrior thundered down on the Republican attack.
Guns in dozens of Federal bunkers fired white tracers toward the perimeter of mines and wire. Heavy automatic weapons among the Republican support battalions answered with chains of glowing red balls.
The Federal artillerymen in the center of Hill 541 North began slamming out their remaining ammunition in the reasonable view that unless this attack was stopped, there was no need for conservation. Because of their hilltop location, the guns could not bear on the sappers. To reach even the Republican support troops, they had to lob their shells in high, inaccurate arcs. The pair of calliopes on Hill 661 burst many of the Federal rounds at the top of their trajectory.
Instead of becoming involved in firefights, the Rep sappers did an excellent job of pathclearing for the main assault force. A few of the sappers fell, but their uniforms of light-absorbent fab
ric made them difficult targets even now that Federal starshells popped to throw wavering illumination over the scene.
A miniature rocket dragged its train of explosive across the perimeter defenses. The line exploded with a yellow flash and a sound like a door slamming. Sand and wire flew to either side. Overpressure set off a dozen anti-personnel mines to speckle the night.
There were already a dozen similar gaps in the perimeter. An infiltration team had wormed through the defenses before the alarm went off.one of its members hurled a satchel charge into a bunker, collapsing it with a flash and a roar.
Warrior drove into the wire. Bullets, some of them fired from the Federal bunkers, pinged harmlessly on the iridium armor. A buzzbomb trailing sparks and white smoke snarled toward the tank's right flank. Five meters out,the automatic defense system along the top edge of Warrior's skirts banged. Its spray of steel pellets ripped the buzzbomb and set off the warhead prematurely.
The tank rang like a bell when its defensive array fired, but the hollow whoomp of the shaped-charge warhead was lost in the battle's general clamor. Shards of buzzbomb casing knocked down a sapper. He thrashed through several spasms before he lay still.
Warrior passed the Federal minefield in a series of sprouting explosions and the spang of fragments which ricocheted from the skirts. The pressure of air within the tank's plenum chamber was high enough to detonate mines rigged to blow off a man's foot. They clanged harmlessly as a tocsin of the huge vehicle's passage.
The tank's bow slope snagged loops of concertina wire which stretched and writhed until it broke. Republican troops threw themselves down to avoid the unexpected whips of hooked steel. Men shouted curses,although the gap Warrior tore in the perimeter defenses was broad enough to pass a battalion in columns of sixteen.
Des Grieux ignored the sappers.They could cause confusion within the bunker line, but they were no threat to the ultimate existence of the Federal base. The assault battalion, and still more the thousands of Republican troops waiting in reserve, were another matter.
Warrior had two dual-capable gunnery joysticks.Most tank commanders used only one, selecting tribarrel or main gun with the thumbswitch. Des Grieux shot with both hands.
He'd pointed the main gun 30° to starboard in order to blast the team of tank killers. Now his left hand swung the cupola tribarrel a few degrees to port. He didn't change either setting again for the moment. Not even Des Grieux's degree of skill permitted him to aim two separate sights from a gun platform travelling at fifty kph and still accelerating.
But he could fire them, alternately or together, whenever Warrior's forward motion slid the pippers over targets.
The tribarrel caught a squad moving up at a trot to exploit pathways the sappers had torn. The Republicans were so startled by the bellowing monster that they forgot to throw themselves down.
Three survivors turned and fired their rifles vainly as the tank roared past fifty meters away. The rest of the squad were dead, with the exception of the lieutenant leading them. He stood, shrilling insane parodies of signals on his whistle.
The tribarrel had blown off both his arms.
Des Grieux's right thumb fired the main gun at another ragged line of Republican infantry. The 20cm bolt gouged the earth ten meters short, but its energy sprayed the sandy soil across the troops as a shower of molten glass. One of the victims continued to pirouette in agony until white tracers from a Federal machine gun tore most of his chest away.
Fires lighted by the cyan bolts flared across the arid landscape.
Hawes in Susie Q tried to follow. His tribarrel slashed out a long burst. Sappers jumped and ran. Two of them stumbled into mines and upended in sprays of soil.
Susie Q eased forward at a walking pace. Hawes' driver was proceeding cautiously under circumstances where speed was the only hope of survival. Halfway to the wire, a buzzbomb passed in front of the tank. It was so badly aimed that the automatic defense system didn't trip.
Susie Q braked and began to turn. Hawes sprayed the slope wildly with his tribarrel. A stray bolt blew a trench across Warrior's back deck.
A Rep sapper ran toward Susie Q's blind side with a satchel charge in his hands. The automatic defense system blasted him when he was five yards away, but two more buzzbombs arced over his crumpled body.
The section of the ADS which had killed the sapper was out of service until its strip charge could be replaced. The rockets hit, one in the hull and the other in the center of Susie Q's turret. Iridium reflected the warheads' white glare.
The tank grounded violently. The thick skirt crumpled as it bulldozed a ripple of soil. Susie Q's status entry on Warrior's right-hand display winked from solid blue to cross-hatched, indicating that an electrical fault had depowered several major systems.
Des Grieux ignored the readout. He had a battle to win.
Under other circumstances,Des Grieux would have turned to port or starboard to sweep up one flank of the assault wave, but the Republican reserves were too strong. Turning broadside to their fire was a quick way to die.Winning—surviving—required him to keep the enemy off balance.
Warrior bucked over the irregular slope, but the guns were stabilized in both elevation and traverse. Des Grieux lowered the hollow pipper onto the swale half a kilometer away, where the Republican supports sheltered.
Several of the armored cars there raked the tank with their automatic cannon. Explosive bullets whanged loudly on the iridium.
Des Grieux set Warrior's turret to rotate at one degree per second and stepped on the foot-trip. The main gun began to fire as quickly as the system could reload itself. Cyan hell broke loose among the packed reserves.
The energy liberated by a single 20cm bolt was so great that dry brush several meters away from each impact burst into flames. Infantrymen leaped to their feet, colliding in wild panic as they tried to escape the sudden fires.
An armored car took a direct hit. Its diesel fuel boomed outward in a huge fireball which engulfed the vehicles to either side. Crewmen baled out of one of the cars before it exploded. Their clothes were alight, and they collapsed a few steps from their vehicle.
The other car spouted plumes of multi-colored smoke. Marking grenades had ignited inside the turret hatch, broiling the commander as he tried to climb past them. Ammunition cooked off in a flurry of sparks and red tracers.
While Warrior's main gun cycled its twenty-round ready magazine into part of the Republican reserves, Des Grieux aimed his tribarrel at specific targets to port. The tank's speed was seventy kph and still accelerating. When the bow slid over the slope's natural terracing, it spilled air from the plenum chamber. Each time, Warrior's 170 tonnes slammed onto the skirts with the inevitability of night following day.
Though the tribarrel was stabilized, the crew was not. The impacts jounced Des Grieux against his seat restraints and blurred his vision.
It didn't matter. Under these circumstances, Des Grieux scarcely needed the sights. He knew when the pipper covered a clot of infantry or an armored car reversing violently to escape what the crew suddenly realized was a kill zone.
Two-cm bolts lacked the authority of Warrior's main gun, but Des Grieux's short bursts cut with surgical precision. Men flew apart in cyan flashes. The thin steel hulls of armored cars blazed white for an instant before the fuel and ammunition inside caught fire as well.Secondary explosions lit the night as tribarrel bolts detonated cases of rocket and mortar warheads.
Warrior 's drive fans howled triumphantly.
Behind the rampaging tank, Rep incoming flashed and thundered onto Hill 541 North. Only one tribarrel from the Federal encampment still engaged the shells.
Federal artillery continued to fire. A "friendly" round plunged down at a 70° angle and blew a ten-meter hole less than a tank's length ahead of Warrior. Kuykendall fought her controls, but the tank's speed was too high to dodge the obstacle completely. Warrior lurched heavily and rammed some of the crater's lip back to bury the swirling vapors of high explosive.
A score of Rep infantry lay flat with their hands pressing down their helmets as if to drive themselves deeper into the gritty soil. Warrior plowed through them. The tank's skirt was now here more than a centimeter off the ground.The victims smeared unnoticed beneath the tank's weight.
Warrior boomed out of the swale and proceeded up the curving track toward Hill 504.
The main gun had emptied its ready magazine. Despite the air conditioning, the air within Warrior's fighting compartment was hot and bitter with the gray haze trembling from the thick 20cm disks which littered the turret basket. The disks were the plastic matrices that had held active atoms of the powergun charge in precise alignment. Despite the blast of liquid nitrogen that cleared the bore after each shot, the empties contained enormous residual heat.
Des Grieux jerked the charging lever, refilling the ready magazine from reserve storage deep in Warrior's hull. The swale was blazing havoc behind them. Silhouetted against the glare of burning brush, fuel, and ammunition, Republican troops scattered like chickens from a fox.
Ten kilometers ahead of the tank, the horizon quivered with the muzzle flashes of Republican artillery.
"Now we'll get those bastards on 504!" Des Grieux shouted—
And knew, even as he roared his triumph, that if he tried to smash his way into the Republican firebase, he would die as surely and as vainly as the Rep reserves had died when Warrior ripped through the center of them
So long as Des Grieux was in the middle of a firefight, his brain had disconnected the stream of orders and messages rattling over the commo net. Now the volume of angry sound overwhelmed him: "Oyster Two, report! Break! Oyster four, are you—"
The voice was Broglie's rather than that of Lieutenant Lindgren. The Lord himself had nothing to say just now that Des Grieux had time to hear.Des Grieux switched off the commo at the main console.
"Booster," he ordered the artificial intelligence, "enemy defenses in marked area."
