The Han armored personnel carrier was supposed to be amphibious, but it paused for almost thirty seconds on the first dike. The wheels of the front two axles spun in the air; those of the rear pair churned in a suspension of mud and water with the lubricating properties of motor oil.
A Hindi anti-tank gun ripped the APC with a 50mmosmium penetrator. Half of the carrier's rear-mounted engine blew through the roof of the tilted vehicle with a crash much louder than the Mach 4 ballistic crack of the shot.
The driver hopped out of the forward hatch and fell down on the dike. His legs continued to piston as though he were running instead of thrashing in mud. Side-hatches opened a fraction of a second later and a handful of unhurt infantrymen flopped clear as well.
Inertia kept the APC's front wheels rotating for some seconds.A rainbow slick of diesel fuel covered the rice paddy behind the vehicle. It did not ignite.
Des Grieux smiled like a shark from his overwatch position on the first terrace east of the floodplain. He traversed his main gun a half degree. The Hindi antitank gun was a towed piece with optical sights. It had no electronic signature to give it away, and Gangbuster II's magnetic anomaly detector was far too coarse a tool to provide targeting information at a range of nearly a kilometer.
When the weapon fired, though—
Des Grieux stroked his foot-trip and converted the anti-tank gun into a ball of saturated cyan light.
Han vehicles hosed the landscape with their weapons. Bullets from APC turrets and the secondary armament of laser-vehicles flashed as bright explosions among the foliage growing on dikes and made the mud bubble.
High-powered lasers raised clouds of steam wherever their pale beams struck, but they were not very effective. The lasers were line-of-sight weapons like the Slammers' powerguns. The gunners could hit nothing but the next hedge over while the firing vehicles sheltered behind dikes themselves.
The entire Han advance stopped when the Hindis fired their first gun.
Des Grieux had a standard 2cm Slammers carbine clipped to the side of his seat. Over his head, Gangbuster's tribarrel pumped short bursts into the heavens in automatic air-defense mode. The sky, still a pale violet color in the west, was decorated with an appliquéé of shell tracks and the bolts of powerguns which detonated the incoming.
Both sides' artillery fired furiously. Neither party had any success in breaking through the webs of opposing defenses, but there was no question of taking Gangbuster II out of AAD. The infantry carbine and the tank's main gun were the only means of slaughter under Des Grieux's personal control.
"Blue Two,"Captain Broglie's voice ordered."On command, advance one dike. Remaining elements look sharp."
Blue Two, Dar es Salaam, was on the southern edge of the advance, half a kilometer from Gangbuster II. Broglie's command tank, Honey Girl, was a similar distance to starboard of Des Grieux; and Blue One, Peres, backstopped the Han right flank a full kilometer north of Gangbuster II. The causeway carrying the main road to Morobad was the axis of the Strike Force advance.
The dikes turned the floodplain into a series of ribbons, each about a hundred meters wide. By advancing one at a time from their overwatch positions behind the Black Banner Guards, maybe the Slammers' tanks could get the Han force moving again . . . .
Though if instead the four tanks burst straight ahead in a hell-for-leather dash, they'd open up the Hindi lines like so many bullets through a can of beans.
"Blue Two, go."
Medrassi's tank lurched forward at maximum acceleration. The driver—Des Grieux didn't know his name; her name, maybe—had backed thirty meters in the terraced paddy to give himself a run before they hit the dike.
Water and bright green rice shoots, hand-planted only days before, spewed to either side as the fans compressed a cushion of air dense enough to float 170 tonnes. For a moment, Dar es Salaam's track through the field was a barren expanse of wet clay; then muddy water slopped back to cover the sudden waste.
The tank didn't lift quite high enough to clear the dike, but the driver didn't intend to. The belly plates were the vehicle's thinnest armor. Hindi gunners, much less the Legion mercenaries, could penetrate even a Slammers' tank if it waved too much of its underside in the direction of the enemy.
Dar es Salaam's bow skirts rammed the top layer of the bank ahead of the tank. Fleshy-branched native osiers flailed desperately as they fell with the dike in which they had grown.
Honey Girl fired its main gun. Des Grieux didn't see Broglie's target but there was a target, because the bolt detonated an anti-tank gun's 400-liter bottle of liquid propellant in a huge yellow flash. The barrel of the Hindi weapon flew toward the Han lines. The bodies of the gun crew shed parts all around the hemispherical blast.
Des Grieux didn't have a target. That bastard Broglie was good, Lord knew.
A pair of Han laser-vehicles resumed the planned advance; or tried to, they'd bogged in the muck when they stopped. Spinning wheels threw brown undulations to either side but contributed nothing to the forward effort. The Han vehicles were supposed to be all-terrain,but they lacked the supplementary treads the Hindi tanks used. The paddies might have been too much for the balloon tires even if the heavy vehicles had kept moving.
Four APCs grunted into motion—drawn by Dar es Salaam and encouraged by the deadly 20cm powerguns on the mercenary tanks. The carriers found the going difficult also, but their lower ground pressure made them more mobile than the laser-vehicles were.
Thirty or more of the APCs joined the initial quartet. The advance, one or two vehicles revving into motion at a time, looked like individual drivers and officers making their own decisions irrespective of orders from above—but it had the effect of a planned leapfrog assault.
"Blue One," Broglie ordered. "On command, advance one dike. Remaining elements look sharp." Only buzzbombs and a few light crew-served weapons replied to the empty storm of Han fire. The Hindis kept their heads down and picked their targets.
Bullet impacts glittered on the glacis plate of an APC driving parallel to the causeway. The commander had been conning his vehicle with his head out of the cupola hatch. He ducked down immediately. The driver must have ducked also, even though he was using his periscopes. The APC ran halfway up the side of the causeway and overturned.
"Blue One, go!"
As Peres' driver kicked Dixie Dyke forward, Des Grieux's gunnery screen marked a target with a white carat. The barrel of a Hindi gun was rotating to bear when Peres' tank exposed its belly. Excellent camouflage concealed the motion from even the Slammers' high-resolution optics, but the magnetic anomaly detector noticed the shift against the previous electromagnetic background.