The sky in the direction of Hill 661 quivered white with the almost-constant muzzle flashes. Shells, friction-heated to a red glow by the end of their arc into the Federal encampment,then flashed orange.Artillery rockets moved too slowly for the atmosphere to light their course, but the Reps put flare pots in the rockets' tails so that the gunners could correct their aim.
"Sarge?" said Kuykendall tightly. "Where we going?"
Des Grieux's index finger drew a circle on the topographic display.
"Oh, lord . . ." the driver whispered.
But she didn't slow or deviate from the course Des Grieux had set her.
Warrior proceeded at approximately forty kph; a little faster on downslopes, a little slower when the drive fans had to fight gravity, as they did most of the time now. That was fast running over rough, unfamiliar terrain. The tank's night-vision devices were excellent, but they couldn't see that the opposite side of a ridge dropped off instead of sloping, or the tank-sized gully beyond the bend in a swale.
Kuykendall was getting them to the objective surely, and that was soon enough for Des Grieux. Whether or not it would be in time for the Federals on Hill 541 North was somebody else's problem.
The Republicans' right-flank assault was in disarray,probably terminal disarray, but the units committed to the east slope of the Federal position were proceeding more or less as planned. At least one of the Slammers' tanks survived, because the night flared with three cyan blasts spaced a chronometer second apart.
Probably Broglie, who cut his turds to length. Everything perfect, everything as ordered, and who was just about as good a gunner as Slick Des Grieux.
Just about meant second best.
Shells crashed down unhindered on 541N. Some of them certainly fell among the Rep assault forces because the attack was succeeding. Federal guns slammed out rapid fire with the muzzles lowered, slashing the Reps with canister at point-blank range. A huge explosion rocked the hilltop as an ammo dump went off, struck by incoming or detonated by the defenders as the Reps overran it.
Des Grieux hadn't bothered to cancel his earlier command: Booster, enemy defenses in marked area. When his fingertip circled Hill 661 to direct Kuykendall, the artificial intelligence tabulated that target as well.
Twenty artillery pieces, ranging from 2cm to a single stub-barreled 30cm howitzer which flung 400-kilogram shells at fifteen-minute intervals.
At least a dozen rails to launch 20cm bombardment rockets.
A pair of calliopes,powerguns with eight2cm barrels fixed on a carriage.They were designed to sweep artillery shells out of the sky, but their high-intensity charges could chew through the bow slope of a tank in less than a minute.
Approximately a thousand men: gunners, command staff, and a company or two of infantry for close-in security in case Federals sortied from their camp in a kamikaze attack.
All of them packed onto a quarter-kilometer mesa, and not a soul expecting Warrior to hit them from behind. The Republicans thought of tanks as guns and armor; but tanks meant mobility, too, and Des Grieux knew every way a tank could crush an enemy.
Reflected muzzle blasts silvered the plume of dust behind Warrior. The onrushing tank would be obvious to anyone in the firebase who looked north—
But the show was southwest among the Federal positions, where the artillerymen dropped their shells and toward which the infantry detachment stared—imagining a fight at knifepoint, and thinking of how much better off they were than their fellows in the assault waves.
Warrior thrust through a band of stunted brush and at a flat angle onto a stabilized road, the logistics route serving the Republican firebase.
"S—" Kuykendall said.
"Yes!" Des Grieux shouted. "Goose it!" Kuykendall had started to adjust her nacelles even before she spoke, but vectored thrust wasn't sufficient to steer the tank onto a road twenty meters wide at the present speed. She deliberately let the skirts drop, using mechanical friction to brake Warrior's violent side-slipping as the bow came around.
The tank tilted noticeably into the berm, its skirt plowed up on the high side of the turn. Rep engineers had treated the road surface with a plasticizer that cushioned the shock and even damped the blaze of sparks that Des Grieux had learned to expect when steel rubbed stone with the inertia of 170 tonnes behind it.
Kuykendall got her vehicle under control, adjusted fan bite and nacelle angle, and began accelerating up the 10° slope to the target. By the time Warrior reached the end of the straight, half-kilometer run, they were travelling at seventy kph.
Two Republican ammunition vans were parked just over the lip of Hill 661. There wasn't room for a tank to go between them.
Kuykendall went through anyway. The five-tonne vehicles flew in opposite directions. The ruptured fuel tank of one hurled a spray of blazing kerosene out at a 30° tangent to the tank's course.
The sound of impact would have been enormous, were it not lost in the greater crash of Warrior's guns.
The tank's data banks stored the image of bolts from the calliopes. Booster gave Des Grieux a precise vector to where the weapons had been every time they fired. The Republican commander could have ordered the calliopes to move since Federal incoming disappeared as a threat, but that was a chance Des Grieux had to take.
He squeezed both tits as Warrior crested the mesa, firing along the preadjusted angles.
The night went cyan, then orange and cyan.
The calliopes were still in their calculated positions. The tribarrel raked the sheet-metal chassis of one. Ready ammunition ignited into a five-meter globe of plasma bright enough to burn out the retinas of anyone looking in the wrong direction without protective lenses.
There was a vehicle parked between the second calliope and the onrushing tank. It was the ammunition hauler feeding a battery of 15cm howitzers. It exploded with a blast so violent that the tank's bow lifted and Des Grieux slammed back in his seat. Shells and burning debris flew in all directions, setting off a second vehicle hundreds of meters away.
The shockwave spilled the air cushion from Warrior's plenum chamber. The tank grounded hard, dangerously hard, but the skirts managed to stand the impact. Power returned to Warrior's screens after a brief flicker, but the topographic display faded to amber monochrome which blurred the fine detail.
"S'okay . . ." Des Grieux wheezed, because the seat restraints had bruised him over the ribs when they kept him from pulping himself against the main screen. And it was all right, because the guns were all right and the controls were in his hands.