A Hindi soldier stood transfixed, halfway out of a spider hole in the hedge on the other side of the road. His rifle was pointed forward, but he was too terrified to sight down it toward the tank's huge, terrible bow. Des Grieux cranked the tribarrel with his right joystick.
Gangbuster II rose in a slurp of mud as dark and fluid as chocolate cake dough. The Hindi disappeared, not into his hole but by jumping toward the paddies north of the causeway. A Han gunner, lucky or exceptionally skillful, caught the Hindi in mid-leap. A splotch of blood hung in the air for some seconds after the corpse hit the water.
An anti-tank shot struck the rear of Gangbuster II's turret. The bustle rack tore away in a scatter of the tankers' personal belongings, many of them a fire.Impact of the dense penetrator on comparably dense armor heated both incandescent, enveloping the clothes and paraphernalia in a haze of gaseous osmium and iridium.
The projectile had only a minuscule direct effect on the inertia of Gangbuster's 170 tonnes, but the shock made Pesco's hand twitch on the control column. The tank lurched sideways. The lights in the fighting compartment darkened and stayed out,but the screens only flickered as the AI routed power through pathways undamaged when the jolting impact severed a number of conduits.
The second shot blew through the northern hedge a half-second later. Pesco was fighting for control. The projectile hit, but only a glancing blow this time. The shot ricocheted from high on the rear hull, leaving a crease a half-meter long glowing in the back deck.
Des Grieux spun the tribarrel because the cupola responded more quickly than the massive turret forging, but he didn't have a clear target—and the anti-tank gunner didn't need one.
Powergun bolts would dump all their energy on the first solid object they touched. It was pointless trying to shoot at a target well to the other side of dense vegetation. Heavy osmium shot, driven by a jolt of plasma generated in a chamber filled with liquid propellant, carried through the hedge with no significant degradation of its speed or stability.
Gangbuster II hesitated while Pesco swung the bow to port, following the causeway, and coarsened the fan pitch to regain the speed lost in climbing the embankment. The tank was almost stationary for the moment.
Hindi soldiers rose from spiderholes in the hedge and raised buzzbomb launchers. One of the rocketeers was a hundred meters ahead of Gangbuster II; the other was an equal distance behind, his position already enveloped by the Han advance.
Des Grieux's tribarrel was aimed directly to starboard, and even the main gun was twenty degrees wide of the man in front. The tanker's right hand strained against the joystick anyway. The Hindis fired simultaneously.
The third shot from the anti-tank gun punched in the starboard side of the tank's plenum chamber and exited to port in a white blaze of burning steel. Each hole was approximately the size of a human fist.Air roared out while Gangbuster II rang like a struck gong. The fan nacelles were undamaged, and the designers had overbuilt pressurization capacity enough to accept a certain amount of damage without losing speed or maneuverability.
The rocket from the man in the rear hit the hedge midway between launcher and the huge intended target. The buzzbomb's pop-out fins caught in the interlaced branches; the warhead did not go off.
The other buzzbomb was aimed well enough as to line, but the Hindi soldier flinched upward as he squeezed the ignition trigger. The rocket sailed over Gang-buster II in a flat arc and exploded in the dirt at the feet of the other Hindi. The body turned legless somersaults before flopping onto the causeway again.
Des Grieux and Broglie fired their 20cm guns together. The Hindi rocketeer and thirty meters of hedge behind him blazed as Gangbuster II's bolt raked along it. Through the sudden gap, Des Grieux saw the cyan-hearted fireball into which Broglie's perfect shot converted the Hindi gun that had targeted the tank on the causeway.
"Go, driver!" Des Grieux shouted hoarsely, but Pesco didn't need the order. Either he understood that their survival lay in speed, or blind panic so possessed him that he had no mind for anything but accelerating down the hedged three-kilometer aisle.
The Black Banner Guards were charging at brigade strength. It was a bloody shambles. The Hindis might have run when they saw the snouts of hundreds of armored personnel carriers bellowing toward them—
But they hadn't. More than a score of anti-tank guns unmasked and began firing, now that the contest was clearly a slugging match and not a game of cat-and-mouse.It took less than a second to purge the chamber of a Hindi gun,inject another projectile and ten liters of liquid propellant, and convert a tungsten wire into plasma in the center of the fluid.
Each shot was sufficiently powerful to lance through four APCs together if they chanced to be lined up the wrong way. Broglie, Peres, and Medrassi ripped away at the luxuriance of targets as fast as they could, but the paddies were already littered with torn and blazing Han vehicles.
The heavy anti-tank weapons were only part of the problem. Hindi teams of three to six men crouched in holes dug into the sides of the dikes, then rose to volley buzzbombs into the oncoming vehicles at point-blank range. Some of the rockets missed, but the hollow whoomp! of a single warhead was enough to disable any but the luckiest APC.
For those targets which the first volley missed, additional buzzbombs followed within seconds.
The jet of fire from a shaped charge would rupture fuel cells behind an APC's thin armor. Diesel fuel atomized an instant before it burst into flame. Hindi machine gunners then shot the Han crews to dog-meat as they tried to abandon their burning vehicles.
Des Grieux knew that green locals always broke if you charged them. His mind hadn't fully metabolized the fact that these Hindis might not be particularly accurate with their weapons, but they sure as blood weren't running anywhere.
As for the Han, who'd already lost at least a quarter of their strength in an unanswered turkey shoot . . . well,Des Grieux had problems of his own."Booster!" he said. "Clear vision!"
The images echoed onto the left side of his visor from Gangbuster II's central screen vanished, leaving the screen itself sharp and at full size. Normally Des Grieux would have touched a finger to his helmet's mechanical controls, but this wasn't normal and both his hands were on the gunnery joysticks.
Gangbuster II was so broad that the tank's side skirts brushed one, then the other, hedge bordering the causeway. Morobad was a distant haze at the end of an aisle as straight as peasants with stakes and string could draw it. Des Grieux's right hand stroked the main gun counterclockwise to center its hollow pipper on the community. He didn't need or dare to increase the display's magnification to give him actual images.
A Hindi soldier aimed a buzzbomb out of the left-hand hedge. The man's mottled green uniform was so new that the creases were still sharp. His dark face was as fixed and calm as a wooden idol's.