Gangbuster II's sensors noted a human within five meters. They tripped the automatic defense system attached to a groove encircling the tank just above the skirts. A 50x 150mm strip of high explosive fired, blowing its covering of steel polygons into the Hindi like the blast of a huge shotgun.
The Hindi and his rocket launcher, both riddled by shrapnel, hurtled backward. Leaves and branches stripped from the hedge danced in the air, hiding the carnage.
A second rocketeer leaned out of the hedge three steps beyond the first. The ADS didn't fire because the cell that bore on the new target had just been expended on his comrade. The Hindi launched his buzzbomb from so close that the standoff probe almost touched the tank's hull.
The distance was too short for the buzzbomb's fuse to arm. The missile struck Gangbuster II's gun mantle and ricocheted upward instead of exploding. A bent fin made the buzzbomb twist in crazy corkscrews.
Now another explosive/shrapnel cell aligned. The automatic defense system went off, shredding the rocketeer's torso. Useless, except as revenge for the way the Hindi had made Des Grieux's heart skip a beat in terror—
But revenge had its uses.
Des Grieux put one, then another 20cm bolt into Morobad without bothering to choose specific targets—if there were any. All he was trying to do for the moment was shake up the town. Some of the Legion's anti-artillery weapons were emplaced in Morobad. If the other side kept its collective head, Gangbuster II was going to get a hot reception.
Deafening, dazzling bolts from a tank's main gun pretty well guaranteed that nobody in the impact zone would be thinking coolly.
That was all right, and Des Grieux's tank was all right so far, seventy kph and accelerating. Gangbuster II pressed a broad hollow down the causeway. The surface of dirt and rice-straw matting rippled up to either side under the tank's 170 tonnes, even though the weight was distributed as widely as possible by the air cushion.
The Han brigade that Des Grieux had led to attack was well and truly fucked.
Smoke bubbled from burning vehicles, veiling and clearing the paddies like successive sweeps of a bullfighters cape.Some APCs had been abandoned undamaged. Their crews cowered behind dikes while Hindi buzzbomb teams launched missile after missile at the vehicles.
The rocketeers weren't particularly skillfuclass="underline" buzzbombs were reasonably accurate to a kilometer, but bits were a toss-up for most of the Hindis at anything over 100 meters. Determination and plenty of reloads made up for deficiencies in skill.
Han gunfire was totally ineffective. The officer manning the cupola machine gun also had his vehicle itself to command. As the extent of the disaster became clear, finding a way to safety overwhelmed any desire to place fire on the Hindis concealed by earth and foliage.
The infantry in the APC cargo compartments had individual gunports, but the Lord himself couldn't have hit a target while looking through a view slit and shooting from the port beneath it. The APCs bucked and slipped on the slimy terrain. In the compartments, men jostled one another and breathed the hot, poisonous reek of powder smoke and fear. Their bullets and laser beams either vanished into the landscape or glanced from the sideplates of friendly vehicles.
Des Grieux hadn't a prayer of a target either. He was trapped within the strait confines of the hedges for the two minutes it would take Gangbuster II to travel the length of the causeway.
His tribarrel raked the margins of the road, bursts to the right and left a hundred meters ahead of the tank's bluff bow. Stems popped like gunfire as they burned. That might keep a few heads down, but it wasn't a sufficient use for the most powerful unit on the battlefield.
Des Grieux could order his driver into the paddies again, but off the road the tank would wallow like a pig. This time there would be Hindi rocketeers launching buzzbombs from all four sides. Des Grieux no longer thought the local enemy would panic because it was a shark they had in the barrel to shoot at.
By contrast, the remaining Slammers' tanks were having a field day with the targets Des Grieux and the Han had flushed for them. Tribarrels stabbed across a kilometer of paddies to splash cyan death across Hindis focused on nearby APCs. Straw-wrapped packets of buzzbombs exploded, three and four at a time, to blow gaps in the dikes.
The left-hand situation display in Gangbuster's fighting compartment suddenly lighted with over a hundred red carats. The tanks of a Hindi armored brigade, lying hidden on the east side of the canal which formed the eastern boundary of Morobad, had been given the order to advance. When the drivers lighted their gas turbine powerplants, Gangbuster's sensors noted the electronic activity and located the targets crawling up onto prepared firing steps.
Morobad was less than a kilometer away. Hindi tanks maneuvered on both sides of the causeway to bring the guns fixed along the centerline of their hulls in line with Gangbuster II. The Hindi vehicles mounted combustion-augmented plasma weapons, like the anti-tank guns but more powerful because a tank chassis permitted a larger plasma generator than that practical on a piece of towed artillery.
Des Grieux's situation display showed the condition clearly. The visuals on his gunnery screen were the same as they'd been for the past minute and a half: unbroken hedgerows which would stop bolts from his powerguns as surely as thirty centimeters of iridium could.
A Hindi shot cracked left-to-right across the road, a tank's length behind Gangbuster II. Somebody'd gotten a little previous with his gunswitch, but the tank that had fired was still backing one track to slew its weapon across the Slammers' vehicle.
Des Grieux traversed his main gun, panning the target, and rocked the foot-trip twice. Instinct and the situation display at the corner of his eye guided him: the orange circle on the gunnery screen showed only foliage.
The first bolt flash-fired the wall of hedge. The second jet of cyan plasma crashed through the gap and made a direct hit on the Hindi tank.
The roiling orange fireball rose a hundred meters. The column of smoke an instant later mounted ten times as high before flattening into an anvil shape which dribbled trash back onto the paddies. The compression wave of the explosion flattened an expanding circle of new-planted rice. Rarefaction following the initial shock jerked the seedlings upright again.
A tank on the north side of the causeway slammed a shot into Gangbuster II's bow. A hundred kilos of iridium armor and #2 fannacelle turned into white-hot vapor which seared leaves on which it cooled.
Pesco shouted and briefly lost control of his vehicle. The tank's enormous inertia resisted turning and kept the skirts on the road despite a nasty shimmy because of the drop in fan pressure forward.
Des Grieux tried to traverse his main gun to bear on the new danger, but the turret had seventy-five degrees to swing clockwise after its systems braked the momentum of the opposite rotation. He wasn't going to make it in the half-second before the next Hindi shot transfixed Gangbuster II's relatively thin side armor—