“Where are you?” she snapped.
“About four hundred meters behind the SheVa, ma’am,” the platoon leader said calmly. In the background she could hear the snarl of a Gatling gun. “It’s a pretty exciting place to be at the moment.”
She popped up through the TC hatch and looked around. “We’re coming up behind you, about a klick back and catching up,” she said then paused. “Be advised there’s a Posleen group to your left rear.” She grabbed the pintle-mounted Gatling gun and sent a stream of fire into the mass as she keyed the intercom. “Gunner! Target ten o’clock!”
Otinanderal couldn’t decide where to turn. The humans, who normally fought like abat, were everywhere. His oolt had poured fire into the massive human tank but it was as if they were scratching the sides of an oolt’pos. Now the human tanks were flying forward all around him and he couldn’t decide where to target his fire. But when one of them started firing at him it was pretty plain.
“For what we are about to receive…” Glennis muttered as she hit the seat switch and dropped into the belly of the tank. The vehicle shuddered and the temperature jumped noticeably as a plasma round glanced off the front glacis plate. A moment later an HVM round ripped her hatch cover away into the night and filled the interior with reflected searing white light and heat. But by then the gunner had slewed the main gun on target and opened up with main and coaxial.
The Abrams Main Battle Tank was originally designed for the sole purpose of killing other tanks, almost assuredly Soviet and ex-Soviet designs. It had advanced composite armor, a quick-firing, stabilized 120mm main gun, sophisticated targeting systems, nuclear, biological and chemical protection and an amazing turn of speed supplied by its Lycomings jet-turbine engine. Furthermore, on battlefields across the globe, it had proven itself the finest machine in the world for that task, able to both out-fight and outmaneuver any other tank on the planet, seventy plus tons of fast-rolling incredibly deadly meanness. But with the coming of the Posleen, changes in design were inevitable; the Posleen didn’t really have anything worth hitting with a 120mm depleted uranium dart. Or, if they did, it was too large to care about being scratched by an Abrams.
However, the base tank was the finest piece of war machinery ever designed and it seemed a shame to simply throw all that engineering away. At first, when they turned out to be highly vulnerable to plasma and even 3mm railgun fire, the tanks seemed doomed. But technology came to their aid in the form of new, and lighter, armor materials. The M-1A4’s turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.
From the side it was not so well armored but if the Posleen were on your flank you were screwing up anyway.
To reduce the possibility of being flanked, and to deal with the main problem of the Posleen, the fact that there were just way too many of them, the gunnery of the tanks was modified. On either side of the turret “add-on” weapons were installed. These were 25mm cannons like the main gun of a Bradley, but where a Bradley had one gun the Abrams were mounted with first two, one on either side, then four and finally eight. The .50 caliber TC gun was replaced with a 7.62 Gatling gun capable of hurling 8000 rounds a minute and the “coaxial” 7.62 machine gun mounted alongside the main gun was switched out for another. Even excepting their main gun, the “A4” Abrams could hurl an amazing mass of lead.
The main gun, however, remained a problem. It seemed a shame to pull the weapon, since it was about as good as it got from a cannon perspective. Finally, it was decided to leave the cannon in place and simply change the ammo mix. The ammo bin still carried a few “silver bullets” for old time’s sake, but the majority of the rounds stored in an A4 were canister.
Unlike the complex depleted uranium or High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds, canister was simplicity in itself; in effect it was a giant shotgun shell. Each round held 2000 flechettes packed in ahead of a powerful firing charge.
As Glennis’ seat hit the bottom of its elevation and another plasma round glanced off the armored front plate, the gunner laid his reticle on the company of Posleen, toggled his joystick to “All” and hit the firing button.
The Abrams didn’t fire quite as many rounds, or as quickly, as the MetalStorm but the effect was similar. There was a blast of what looked like liquid fire and then the Posleen company started to come apart. The fire had only put one round of canister downrange but it had taken out the center third of the company by itself and as the gunner swept the tank’s “secondary” weapons from side to side the rest ceased to exist.
“And that’s what we call balling the jack,” the gunner muttered as the loader slammed in another round of canister. The entire engagement had taken less than four seconds.
“Good job,” LeBlanc said, keying her microphone. “SheVa Nine, this is Captain LeBlanc. We’re closing on your six. What’s your situation?”
Mitchell grimaced and looked over at Indy’s panels; half the systems were yellow and there were an increasing number of red lights. “Well, we were getting the shit shot out of us, but other than that…” He looked around and realized that fire had started to fall off. “Is it just me or… ?”
“Major, I personally don’t believe it, but it looks like we’re clearing this valley,” the battalion commander replied with a grin that could be heard over the radio.
Mitchell looked at his monitors and snorted. The largest remaining group of Posleen were those around the humans, which he intentionally had not engaged. And it was less than a company. Other than those, and a few leakers in the side valleys, the way was totally cleared. He snorted again and then began to laugh hysterically.
“Major?” Reeves called. They were alone in the compartment but Mitchell had shut off his radio and was rolling around in his chair laughing as if he couldn’t stop. “Sir?!”
“Oh!” The major gasped, getting some control over his laughter. “Oh! Oh, shit. Sorry, Reeves. Shit!”
“What’s so funny, sir?” the driver yelled. “I mean, we still have to get those guys out of there!”
“I know,” Mitchell said, wiping his eyes. “Oh. It’s just what went through my mind. I was looking around and all I could think…” He started laughing again until he was heaving.
“What?”
“I was just thinking: ‘Ka-CLICK!’ ”
Simosin’s driver had clearly taken him at his word. Either that or the boy was just insane. They hit the slope for Deere Creek so fast the Bradley was momentarily airborne and then slammed into the far slope.
The general pulled himself upright and waved at the TC. “Tell him he doesn’t have to go that fast!” he shouted, pulling himself around to look out one of the vision blocks. There wasn’t much that could be seen that way so he waved at the TC again and forced him out of his hatch.
When the general finally got up where he could see, it took him a moment to get his bearings. For just a second he was afraid that they had gotten out ahead of the SheVa or that the division was just gone. But he quickly noted the light fire going on to either side and the somewhat heavier fire, including the occasional blossom of a plasma gun, at the end of the valley. The problem to either side was the lack of fire. And the reason for the lack of fire was a lack of targets; the Bradley was lurching over a carpet of centauroid corpses.