The jolt of sun-hot plasma certainly blinded the laser pickup. It probably incinerated the observer as welclass="underline" no mud burrow could withstand the impact of a tank's main gun.
The causeway was gouged as if a giant shark had taken a bite out of it. The soil steamed. Fragments of hedge blazed and volleyed orange sparks for twenty meters from where the bolt hit.
The weapon the observer controlled, a rack of four hypervelocity rockets dug into the edge of the causeway ten meters west of the rangefinder,was not damaged by the bolt. The observer's dying reflex must have closed the firing circuit.
Asection of causeway collapsed from the rockets' back blast. Gangbuster II's automatic defense system fired too late to matter. The sleet of steel pellets disrupted the razor-sharp smoke trails, but the projectiles themselves were already past.
The exhaust tracks fanned out slightly from the launcher. One of the four rockets missed Gangbuster's turret by little more than the patina on the iridium surface. The sound of their passage was a single, brittle c-c-crack!
Because Gangbuster II was turning in the last instant before the missiles fired—and because the main gun had blasted the observer into stripped atoms and steam before he could correct for the course change—the tank was undamaged, and Des Grieux was still alive to do what he did best.
It was time to do that now, whatever Broglie's orders said.
"Driver, steer for the road!" Des Grieux ordered. "Highball! We're goanna gut 'em like fish, all the way t' the town!"
"Via, we can't do that!" Pesco blurted. Gangbuster II dropped off the dike in a flurry of dirt, water, and vegetation diced by the fans. "Cap'n Broglie said—"
Des Grieux craned his body forward and aimed his carbine. He fired, dazzling the direct vision sensors built into the driver's hatch coaming. The bolt vaporized a tubful of water ahead of Gangbuster II and sent cyan quivers through a semicircle of the paddy.
"Drive, you son of a bitch!" Des Grieux shouted.
Pesco resumed steering to starboard, increasing the slant Gangbuster II had taken to bring the 20cmgun to bear.The gap that bolt had blown in the causeway's border steadied across the tank's bow slope.
A dozen Hindi machine guns in the dikes and causeway rang bullets off Gang-buster II's armor. One round snapped the air close enough to Des Grieux's face to fluff his moustache. It reminded him that he was still head and shoulders out of the cupola.
He shoved down the crash bar and dumped himself back into the fighting compartment. The hatch clanged above him, shutting out the sound of bullets and Gangbuster II's own tribarrel plucking incoming artillery from the air.
Des Grieux slapped the AAD plate to put the tribarrel under his personal control again.
All three of the tanks in overwatch fired within split seconds of one another. A column of flame and smoke mounted far to the north, suggesting fuel tanks rather than munitions were burning.
Of course, the victim might have been one of the Han vehicles.
The topographic display on Gangbuster II's left-hand screen showed friendly units against a pattern of fields and hedges. The entire Han line was in motion, spurred by the mercenaries' leapfrog advance and the Han's own amateur enthusiasm for war.
They'd learn. At least, the survivors would learn.
"General push," Des Grieux said, directing the tank's artificial intelligence to route the following message so that everyone in the Strike Force—locals as well as mercenaries—could receive it. "All units, follow me to Morobad!"
His hand reached into the breaker box and disconnected Gangbuster II from incoming communications.
* * *
The flooded rice paddies slowed the tank considerably. One hundred seventy tonnes were too much for even the eight powerful drive fans to lift directly. The vehicle floated on a cushion of air, but that high-pressure air required solid support, also.
The water and thin mud of the paddies spewed from the plenum chamber. Gangbuster II rode on the clay undersurface—but the liquid still created drag on the outside of the skirts as the tank drove through it. To make the speed Des Grieux knew it needed to survive, Gangbuster II had to have a smooth, hard surface beneath her skirts.
The causeway was such an obvious deathtrap that none of the Han vehicles had even attempted it—but the locals didn't have vehicles with the speed and armor of a Slammers tank.
And anyway, they didn't have Des Grieux's awareness of how important it was to keep the enemy off balance by punching fast as well as often.
Des Grieux latched the 2cm carbine back against his seat. The barrel, glowing from the half magazine the veteran had fired through it, softened the patch of cushion it touched. The stench intertwined with that oozing from the main gun empties on the floor of the turret basket.
Gangbuster II was now leading the Han advance instead of supporting it. Three Hindi soldiers got up and ran, left to right, across a dike two hundred meters west of the tank. All were bent over, their bodies tiger-striped by foliage. The trailing pair carried a long object between diem, a machine gun or rocket launcher.
Maybe the Hindis thought they were getting into a better position from which to fire at Gangbuster II. Des Grieux's tribarrel, his tribarrel again, sawed the men down in a tangle of flailing limbs and blue-white flashes.
Des Grieux didn't need to worry about indirect fire anymore,because the Hindi artillery wouldn't fire into friendly lines . . . and besides,Gangbuster II was moving too fast to be threatened by any but the most sophisticated terminally guided munitions. The locals didn't have anything of that quality in their arsenals.
Baffin's Legion did have tank-killing rounds that were up to the job. Still, the cargo shells which held two or three self-forging fragments—shaped by the very blasts that hurled them against the most vulnerable spots in a tank's armor—were expensive,even for mercenary units commanding Baffin's payscale,or Hammer's.
For the moment, the guns on both sides were flinging cheap rounds of HE Common at one another, knowing that counterfire would detonate the shells harmlessly in the air no matter what they were.
It'd take minutes—tens of seconds, at least—for Legion gunners to get terminally guided munitions up the spout. That would be plenty of time for the charge Des Grieux led to blast out the core of enemy resistance.
"Hang on!" Pesco cried as though Des Grieux couldn't see for himself that Gangbuster II was about to surge up onto the causeway.