Another incoming shell detonated a kilometer short of Hill 541 North.The Republicans knew they couldn't do serious physical damage so long as the position was guarded by the Slammers' tanks . . . but they knew as well the psychological effect the constant probing fire had on the defenders.
For an instant Broglie's hard smile was back. "Or not a puzzle," he added. "A gun. Every part has to do the right job, or the gun doesn't work."
"Okay, we had our unit meeting," Des Grieux said. He squeezed his hands together so fiercely that his fingers were dark with trapped blood between the first and second joints. "Now can I get back to my tank where I can maybe do some good?"
"The AAD does everything that can be done, Sergeant," Lindgren said."That's what we need now. That and discipline."
Des Grieux stood up, though he had to bend forward to clear the bunker's low ceiling."Having the computer fire my guns,"he said with icy clarity, "is like jacking off. With respect."
Lindgren grimaced. "All right," he said. "You're all dismissed."
In an attempt to soften the previous exchange,he added,"There shouldn't be more than a few days of this."
But Des Grieux, ignoring the incoming fire, was already out of the bunker.
A howitzer fired from the center of the Federal position. The night outside the bunker glowed with the bottle-shaped yellow flash. There were fifteen tubes in the Federal batteries, but they were short of ammunition and rarely fired.
When they did, they invariably brought down a storm of Republican counterfire.
Des Grieux continued to walk steadily in the direction of Warrior; his tank, his home.
Not his reason for existence, though. Des Grieux existed to rip the enemy up one side and down the other. To do that he could use Warrior, or the pistol in his holster, or his teeth; whatever was available. Lieutenant Lindgren was robbing Des Grieux of his reason for existence . . . .
He heard the scream of the shell—one round, from the northwest. He waited for the sky-tearing sound of Warrior's tribarrel firing a short burst of cyan plasma, copper nuclei stripped of their electron shells and ravening downrange to detonate or vaporize the shell.
Warrior didn't fire.
The Reps had launched a ground-hugging missile from the lower altitude of Hill 504. Warrior and the other Slammers' tanks couldn't engage the round because they were dug in behind the bunker line encircling the Federal positions. The incoming missile would not rise into the line-of-sight range of the powerguns until—
There was a scarlet streak from the horizon like a vector marker in the dark bowl of the sky. A titanic crash turned the sky orange and knocked Des Grieux down. Sandy red dust sucked up and rolled over, forming a doughnut that expanded across the barren hilltop.
Des Grieux got to his feet and resumed walking. The bastards couldn't make him run, and they couldn't make him bend over against the sleet of shell fragments which would rip him anyway—running or walking, cowering or standing upright like a man.
The Republicans fired a dozen ordinary rounds. Tank tribarrels splashed each of the shells a fraction of a second after they arched into view. The powerguns' snarling dazzle linked the Federal base for an instant to orange fireballs which faded into rags of smoke. There were no more ground-huggers.
An ordinary shell was no more complex than a hand grenade. Ground-hugging missiles required sophisticated electronics and a fairly complex propulsion system. There weren't many of them in the Rep stockpiles.
Ground-huggers would be as useless as ballistic projectiles if Lindgren used his platoon the way tanks should be used, as weapons that sought out the enemy instead of cowering turret-down in defilade.
Blood and Martyrs! What a way to fight a war.
The top of Hill 541 North was a barren moonscape. The bunkers were improvised by the troops themselves with shovels and sandbags. A month ago, the position had been merely the supply point for a string of Federal outposts. No one expected a siege.
But when the Republicans swept down in force, the outposts scrambled into their common center, 541N. Troops dug furiously as soon as they realized that there was no further retreat until Route 7 to the south was cleared from the outside.
If Route 7 was cleared. Task Force Howes, named for the CO of the Slammers 2nd Battalion, had promised a link-up within three days.
Every day for the past two weeks.
A sniper on Hill 661, twelve kilometers away, fired his powergun. The bolt snapped fifty meters from Des Grieux, fusing the sandy soil into a disk of glass which shattered instantly as it cooled.
Kuykendall, Warrior's driver, should be in the tank turret. If Des Grieux had been manning the guns, the sniper would have had a hot time of it . . . but Des Grieux was walking back from a dickheaded meeting, and Kuykendall wasn't going to disobey orders to leave the tribarrel on Automatic Air Defense and not, under any circumstances, to fire the 20cm main gun since ammunition was scarce.
The garrison of Hill 541N, the Slammers included, had the supplies they started the siege with. Ground routes were blocked. Aerial resupply would be suicide because of the Rep air-defense arsenal on the encircling hills.
The sniper fired again. The bolt hit even farther away, but he was probably aiming at Des Grieux anyhow. Nothing else moved on this side of the encampment except swirls of wind-blown sand.
A shell fragment the size of a man's palm stuck up from the ground. It winked jaggedly in the blue light of the bolt.
Warrior was within a hundred meters. Des Grieux continued to walk deliberately.
The hilltop's soil blurred all the vehicles and installations into identical dinginess. The dirt was a red without life, the hue of old blood that had dried and flaked to powder.
The sniper gave up.A gunon541Scougheda shell which Broglie's Honey Girl blew from the sky a moment later.
Every five minutes; but not regularly, and twice the Reps had banged out more than a thousand rounds in a day, some of which inevitably got through . . . .
"That you, Slick?" Kuykendall called from the Warrior's cupola.
"Yeah, of course it's me," Des Grieux replied. He stepped onto a sandbag lip, then hopped down to Warrior's back deck. His boots clanked.
The tanks were dug in along sloping ramps. Soil from the trenches filled sandbag walls rising above the vehicles' cupolas. Lieutenant Lindgren was afraid that powerguns from 661—and the Reps had multi-barreled calliopes to provide artillery defense—would rake the Slammers' tanks if the latter were visible.
Des Grieux figured the answer to that threat was to kick the Reps the hell off Hill 661. By now, though, he'd learned that the other Slammers were just going to sigh and look away when he made a suggestion that didn't involve waiting for somebody else to do the fighting.