But he didn't have to, because Captain Broglie's command tank nailed the Hindi vehicle. Plates of massive steel armor flew in all directions even though the bolt failed to detonate the target's munitions.
Score one for Broglie, the bastard; and if he'd brought the rest of the platoon along with Des Grieux, maybe Gangbuster II wouldn't be swinging in the breeze right now.
Hindi tanks were firing all along the line. They ignored Gangbuster II because the tanks destroyed to the immediate north and south of the causeway blocked the aim of their fellows.
The Hindi CAP guns were useless except against armored vehicles—their solid projectiles had no area effect whatever. Against armor, they were neither quite as effective shot for shot, nor quite as quick-firing as the Slammers' 20cm guns.
They were effective enough, though, and there was a bloody swarm of them.
Broglie and his two overwatching companions hit half a dozen of the Hindi vehicles, destroying them instantly even though most of the cyan bolts struck the thickest part of the targets' frontal armor. Then the surviving Hindis got the range and volleyed their replies.
A shot hit the cupola above Broglie. Ammo burned in the feed tube of Honey Girl's tribarrel. A blue-white finger poked skyward, momentarily dimming the rising sun. Des Grieux's display cross-hatched Dixie Dyke as well, indicating the north-flank tank had been damaged as Peres raked Hindi lines with both main gun and tribarrel. All three units jerked backward to turret-down positions as quickly as their drivers could cant their fans.
"Driver!" Des Grieux said as Gangbuster II, its front skirts dragging sparks from the stone road surface,crossed the canal bridge."Turn us and we'll hit the bastards from behind. Booster, gimme a fucking city map!"
The cheap buildings of Morobad's canal district were ablaze. Some of the walls were plastered wattle-and-daub; other builders had hung painted sheetiron on scantlings of flimsy wood.Neither method could resist the two main-gunrounds Des Grieux snapped toward the town when Gangbuster II started its rush. The bolts had the effect of flares dropped into a tinder box.
The tank drove into a curtain of flame at ninety kph. There was something in the way,a wrecked vehicle or the corner of a building. Gangbuster's skirts shunted it aside with no more commotion than the clang the automatic defense system made when it went off.
The tank's AI obediently replaced the topographic display on the left screen with a map of Morobad from Gangbuster II's data banks.The streets were narrow and twisting, even the thoroughfare leading west from the causeway.
Two hundred meters from the canal was a market square bordered by religious and governmental buildings. That would give Pesco room to turn. When Gangbuster II roared out of the city again and took the turretless Hindi tanks in the rear, it'd be all she wrote.
The air cleared at street level. Gangbuster II scraped the brick facade of a three-story tenement which started to collapse on them. At least a score of Hindi soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons. Bullets ricocheted from the sloped iridium armor, scything down the shooters and their fellows. Cells of the automatic defense system fired, louder and more lethal still.
Haze closed in momentarily, but a telltale in the fighting compartment informed Des Grieux that Pesco had already switched to sonic imaging instead of using the electro-optical spectrum to drive. Gangbuster II swept into the market square, pulling whorls of smoke into the clear, sunlit air.
A six-tube battery of 170mm howitzers was set up in the square. Empty obturator disks and unneeded booster charges in white silk littered the cobblestones behind the weapons. The crews were desperately cranking their muzzles down to fire point-blank at Gangbuster II. Hindi infantry cut loose with small arms from all windows facing the square and from the triple tile overhangs of the large temple behind the walled courtyard to the south.
As Des Grieux squeezed both firing tits,a hundred-kilogram shell hit the turret. The round was a thin-cased HE, what the crew happened to have up the spout when they got warning of the tank's approach. The red flash destroyed thirty percent of Gangbuster II's forward sensors and rocked the tank severely, but the hatches were sealed and the massive turret armor was never even threatened.
"Driv—" Des Grieux started to say as his hazy screens showed him Hindi gunners doubling up, flying apart, burning in puffs of vaporized steel as the powergun sights slid across the battery.
A legless Hindi battery captain jerked the lanyard of his last howitzer. The shell was a capped armor-piercing round. Even so, the round would not have penetrated Gangbuster II's frontal armor if it had struck squarely. Instead, it hit Pesco's closed hatch edge-on and spalled the backing plate down through the driver's helmet and skull.
Pesco convulsed at the controls of Gangbuster II. The tank skidded across the square, swapping ends several times. The courtyard wall braked but did not stop the careening vehicle. Des Grieux shouted curses, but words had no effect on the tank or its dead driver.
Gangbuster II slid bow-first into the stone-built temple. Blocks and tiles from the multiple roofs cascaded onto the tank and over the courtyard beyond.
All Gangbuster II's systems crashed at the massive overload.
Des Grieux knew nothing about that. Despite his shock harness, his head slammed sideways into the map display so that he shut down an instant before his tank did.
Existence was a pulsing red blur until Des Grieux opened his eyes. The pulsing continued every time his heart beat, but now he could see real light: the tiny yellow beads of Gangbuster II's standby illumination system.
The air in the fighting compartment was hot and foul. When the power went off, so did the air conditioning. The expended 20cm casings on the floor continued to radiate heat and complex gases.
Des Grieux reached for the reset switch to bring Gangbuster II's systems alive again. Movement brought blinding pain. The tank's shock harness had retracted when movement stopped, but the straps left tracks in the form of bruises and cracked ribs where they had gripped Des Grieux to prevent worse.
His mouth tasted of blood, and there seemed to be a layer of ground glass between his eyes and their lids.