Lindgren insisted on a bunker next to his vehicle. He was sure that he would go mad if his whole existence, on duty and off, was bounded by the steel and iridium shell of his tank.
Des Grieux went the other way around. He slept in the fighting compartment while his driver kept watch in the cupola above. The deck was steel pressed with grip rosettes. He couldn't stretch out. His meter-ninety of height had to twist between the three-screen control console and the armored tube which fed ammunition to the autoloading 20cm main gun.
Nobody called the fighting compartment a comfortable place to sleep; but then, nobody called Des Grieux sane, either.
A storm of Republican artillery fire screamed toward Hill 541N. Some of the shells would have gotten through even if Des Grieux had left Warrior in the defensive net. That was somebody else's problem. The Reps didn't have terminally guided munitions that would target the Slammers' tanks, so a shell that hit Warrior was the result of random chance.
You had to take chances in war; and anyway, Warrior oughta shrug off anything but a heavy-caliber armor-piercing round with no more than superficial damage.
Kuykendall switched her fans on and brought them up to speed fast with their blades cutting the airstream at minimum angle. Warrior trembled with what Des Grieux anthropomorphized as eagerness, transferring his own emotions to the mindless machine he commanded.
A Slammers' tank was a slope-sided iridium hull whose turret, smooth to avoid shot traps, held a 20cm powergun. The three-barreled automatic weapon in the cupola could operate independently or be locked to the same point of aim as the main gun. Eight intake ducts pierced the upper surface of the hull, feeding air down to drive fans in armored nacelles below.
At rest, the tanks sat on their steel skirts. When the vehicles were under way, they floated on a cushion of air pressurized by the fans.At full throttle,the power required to drive a tank was enormous, and the fusion bottle which provided that power filled the rear third of the hull.
The tanks were hideously expensive. Their electronics were so complex and sensitive that at least a small portion of every tank's suite was deadlined at any one time. The hulls and running gear were rugged, but the vehicles' own size and weight imposed stresses which required constant maintenance.
When they worked, and to the extent they worked, the Slammers' tanks were the most effective weapons in the human universe. As Warrior was about to prove to two divisions of Republican infantry . . . .
"Back her out!" Des Grieux ordered. If he'd thought about it, he would have sounded a general alarm because he knew this was a major attack,but he had other things on his mind besides worrying about people he wasn't planning to kill.
"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.