Buttoned up, the tank was a sealed system whose thick armor protected the crew from the blast's worst effects. The Reps, even those in bunkers, were less fortunate. The calliope which Des Grieux missed lay on its side fifty meters from its original location. Strips of flesh and uniforms, the remains of its crew, swathed the breech mechanisms.
"Booster," Des Grieux said, "mark movement," and his tribarrel swept the firebase.
The Republicans' guns were dug into shallow emplacements. Incoming wasn't the problem for them that it had been for the Federals, pecked at constantly from three directions.
The gunners on Hill 541 North hadn't had enough ammunition to try to overwhelm the Rep defenses. Besides, calliopes were designed for the job of slapping shells out of the sky. In that one specialized role, they performed far better than tank tribarrels.
Previous freedom from danger left the Republican guns hopelessly exposed now that a threat appeared, but Des Grieux had more important targets than mere masses of steel aimed in the wrong direction. There were men.
The AI marked moving objects white against a background of gray shades on the gunnery screen. Warrior wallowed forward again, not fully under control because both Kuykendall and the skirts had taken a severe shock. Des Grieux used that motion and his cupola's high-speed rotation to slide the solid pipper across the display. Every time the orange bead covered white, his thumb stroked the firing tit.
The calliopes had been the primary danger. Their multiple bolts could cripple the tank if their crews were good enough—and only a fool bets that an unknown opponent doesn't know his job.
With the calliopes out of the way, the remaining threat came from the men who could swarm over Warrior like driver ants bringing down a leopard. The things that still moved on Hill 661 were men, stumbling in confusion and the shock of the massive secondary explosions.
Des Grieux's cyan bolts ripped across them and flung bodies down with their uniforms afire.Artillerymen fleeing toward cover, officers popping out of bunkers to take charge of the situation, would-be rescuers running to drag friends out of the exploding cataclysm—
All moving, all targets, all dead before anyone on the mesa realized that there was a Slammers' tank in their midst, meting out destruction with the contemptuous ease of a weasel in a hen coop
Des Grieux didn't use his main gun; he didn't want to take time to replenish the ready magazine before he completed the final stage of his plan. Twice Warrior's automatic defense system burped a sleet of steel balls into Reps who ran in the wrong direction, but there was no resistance.
Mobility, surprise,and overwhelming firepower. One tank, with a commander who knew that you didn't win battles by crouching in a hole while the other bastard shoots at you . . . .
A 20cm shell arced from an ammo dump. It clanged like the wrath of God on Warrior's back deck. The projectile was unfuzed . It didn't explode.
Only Warrior and the flames now moved on top of Hill 661. Normally the Republican crews bunkered their ammunition supply carefully, but rapid fire in support of the attack meant ready rounds were stacked on flat ground or held in soft-skinned vehicles. A third munitions store went up, a bunker or a vehicle, you couldn't tell after the fireball mushroomed skyward.
The shockwave pushed Warrior sideways into a sandbagged command post. The walls collapsed at the impact. An arm stuck out of the doorway, but the tribarrel had severed the limb from the body moments before.
The tank steadied. Des Grieux pumped deliberate bursts into a pair of vans. One held 30cm ammunition, the other was packed with bombardment rockets. A white flash sent shells tumbling skyward and down. Rockets skittered across the mesa.
"Booster," said Des Grieux. "Topo blowup of six-six-one. Break. Driver—"
A large-scale plan of the mesa filled the left-hand display. Warrior was a blue dot, wandering across a ruin of wrecked equipment and demolished bunkers.
"—put us there—" Des Grieux stabbed a point on the southwestern margin of the mesa. He had to reach across his body to do so, because his left hand was welded to the tribarrels controls "—and hold. Break. Booster—"
Kuykendall swung the tank. Warrior now rode nose down by a few degrees. The bow skirts were too crumpled to seal at the normal attitude.
"—give me maximum magnification on the main screen."
Debris from previous explosions still flapped above Hill 661 like bat-winged Death. A fuel store ignited. The pillar of flame expanded in slow motion by comparison with the previous ammunition fires.
Though the main screen was in high-magnification mode, the right-hand display—normally the commo screen, but De Grieux had shut off external commo—retained a 120° panorama of Warrior's surroundings. Images shifted as the tank reversed through the ruin its guns had created. Air spilling beneath the skirts stirred the flames and made their ragged tips bow in obeisance.
A Rep with the green tabs of a Central Command officer on his epaulets knelt with his hands folded in prayer. He did not look up as Warrior slid toward him, though vented air made his short-sleeved khaki uniform shudder.
Des Grieux touched his left joystick. The Rep was already too close to Warrior for the tribarrel to bear; and anyway . . .
And anyway, one spaced-out man was scarcely worth a bolt.
Warrior howled past the Rep officer. A crosswind rocked the tank minusculy from Kuykendall's intended line, so that the side skirt drifted within five meters of the man.
Sensors fired a section of the automatic defense system. Pellets blew the Republican backward, as loose-limbed as a rag doll.
Kuykendall ground the skirts to bring the tank to a safe halt at the edge of the mesa. Warrior lay across a zigzag trench, empty save for a sprawled corpse. The drive fans could stabilize a tank in still air, but shockwaves and currents rushing to feed flames whipped the top of Hill 661.
Des Grieux depressed the muzzle of his main gun slightly. On Warrior's gunnery screen, the hollow pipper slid over a high-resolution view of Republican positions on Hill 504.
The mesa on which Warrior rested was 150 meters higher than the irregular hillock on which the Reps had placed their western firebase.The twelve kilometers separating the two peaks meant nothing to the tank's powerguns.
On Hill 504, a pair of bombardment rockets leapt from their launching tubes toward the Federal encampment. The holographic image was silent, but Des Grieux had been the target of too many similar rounds not to imagine the snarling roar of their passage. He centered his ring sight on the munitions truck bringing another twenty-four rounds to the launchers—