Gangbuster II's turret traversed four degrees to starboard on its magnetic gimbals. The cupola tribarrel snarled up at incoming artillery fire,but the only sound within the fighting compartments was the whine of the turret drive motors and the whistling intake of Des Grieux's breath as he prepared to kill a . . . .
The target vanished in the blue-white glare of Honey Girl's bolt. Broglie had beaten Des Grieux to the shot again, and fuck that the target was in Honey Girl's primary fire zone.
"Blue Three,"Broglie ordered with his usual insouciant calm."On command, advance two, I repeat two, dikes. Remaining elements, look sharp."
"Driver," Des Grieux ordered, "you heard the bastard."
Medrassi fired, but he didn't have a bloody target for a main-gun bolt, there wasn't one. A section of dike flash-baked and blew outward as ceramic shards, but Via! what did a couple Hindi infantry matter?
Des Grieux ordered, "Booster, echo main screen, left side of visor, out," and pulled up hard on the seat-control lever. The seat rose. Des Grieux's head slid out of the hatch just as the cupola rotated around him and the tribarrel spat three rounds into the western sky with an acrid stench from the ejected empties.
"Blue Three, go!"
"Goose it, driver!"Des Grieux said as he unclipped the shoulder weapon from his seat and felt Gangbuster II rise beneath him on the thrust of its eight drive fans to mount the dike.
The Han advance was proceeding in reasonable fashion, though at least a score of APCs hung back at the start point. Several laser-vehicles were moving also. The inaction of the rest was more likely the bog than cowardice, though cowardice was never an unreasonable guess when unblooded troops ran into their first firefight.
One laser-vehicle balanced on top of a dike. The fore and aft axles spun their tires in the air, while the grip of the central wheels was too poor to move them off the slick surface. Hindi skirmishers lobbed their buzzbombs at long range toward the teetering vehicle, but the anti-tank guns contemptuously ignored it to wait for a real threat.
To wait for the Slammers' tanks.
Des Grieux's eyes were four meters above the ground surface, higher than the tank's own sensors, when Gangbuster II humped itself over the dike. Through the clear half of his visor Des Grieux saw the movement, the glint of the plasma generator trunnion-mounted to an anti-tank gun, as it swung beneath its overhead protection.
The little joystick in the cupola was meant as a manual control for the defense array, but it was multi-function at need—and Des Grieux needed it. He rotated and depressed the main gun with his left hand as Gangbuster II started her fierce rush down the reverse side of the dike and the Hindi weapon traversed for the kill.
The pipper on the left side of Des Grieux's visor merged in a stereo image with the view of his right eye. He thumbed the firing tit with a fierce joy, knowing that nobody else was that good.
But Slick Des Grieux was. As the tank bellied down into the spray of her fans, a yellow fireball lifted across the distant fields. A direct hit, snap-shooting and on the move, but Des Grieux was the best!
Broglie fired also, from the other side of the empty road to Morobad. He must've got something also, because a secondary explosion followed the bolt, but the Hindis—strictly locals, no sign at all of the Legion—weren't done yet. A hypervelocity shot spanged from Gangbuster's turret. Kinetic energy became heat with a flash almost as bright as that of a plasma bolt, rocking Des Grieux backward.
He turned toward the shot, pointing his short-barreled shoulder weapon as though it were a heavy pistol. The tank bottomed on the paddy, then bounced upward nearly a meter as water rushed in to fill the cavity, sealing the plenum chamber to maximum efficiency.
The Hindi weapon was dug in low; it had fired through a carefully cut aisle. Now the gunners waited to shoot again, hoping for more of a target than Des Grieux's helmeted head bobbing over the planted dikes between them. None of the three Slammers' tanks providing the base of fire could bear on the anti-tank gun even now that it had exposed itself by firing. Gangbuster II's main gun was masked by the vegetation, also, but Des Grieux's personal weapon spat three times on successive bounces as the tank porpoised forward. The gun's frontal camouflage flashed and burned when a 2cm bolt flicked it. Han officers, guided by the powergun, sent a dozen ropes of tracer arcing toward the Hindi weapon from the cupolas of their APCs. Hindi gunners splashed away from the beaten zone, hampered by the mud and raked by the hail of explosive bullets.
The peepeepeep in Des Grieux's earphones warned him to attend to the miniature carat on his visor: Threat Level I, a laser rangefinder painting Gangbuster II from the hedge bordering the causeway. No way to tell what weapon the rangefinder served, but somebody thought it could kill a Slammers' tank . . . .
Des Grieux rotated the turret with the joystick, thrusting hard as though his muscles rather than the geartrain were turning the massive weight of iridium. "Driver, hard right!" he screamed, because the traversing mechanism wasn't going to slew the main gun fast enough by itself.
And maybe nothing was going to slew the main gun fast enough.
Des Grieux shot twice with the carbine in his right hand. His bolts splashed near the bottom of the hedge. One round blew glassy fragments of mud in the air; the other carbonized a gap the size of a pie plate at the edge of the interwoven stems of native shrub.
The laser emitter itself was two meters high in the foliage, but that was only a bead connected to the observer's hiding place by a coaxial optical fiber. The observer was probably close to the emitter, though; and if the weapon itself was close to the observer, it would simply pop up and make parallax corrections.
Soldiers liked things simple.
Pesco was trying to obey Des Grieux's order, but Gangbuster II had enormous forward momentum and there was the dike they were approaching to consider, also.A sheet of spray lifted to the tank's port side as the driver dumped air beneath the left skirt. The edge of the right skirt dipped and cut yellow bottom clay to stain the roostertail sluicing back on that side.
Gangbuster II started to lift for the dike. That was almost certainly the Hindi aiming point, but Des Grieux had the sight picture he wanted, he needed—
Des Grieux tripped the main gun.Five meters of mud and vegetation exploded as the 20cm bolt slanted across the base of the hedge.