"Blood and martyrs,"Des Grieux whispered.The taste in his mouth came from his tongue, which had swollen to twice its normal size because he had bitten it.
When the world ceased throbbing and his stomach settled again, Des Grieux finished his movement to the reset switch. Pain just meant you were alive. If you were alive, you could do for the bastard who'd done you.
The snarl of powerguns dimly penetrated to the tank's interior. Neither of the indig forces had powerguns of their own. Either the Slammers had entered Morobad, or Baffin had committed his Legion to exploit the ratfuck the Black Banner Guards had made when they tried to follow Gangbuster II's lead.
Des Grieux knew which alternative he'd put his money on.
Gangbuster II came to life crisply and fast. That was better than the man in her fighting compartment had managed.
"Booster," Des Grieux said. His injured tongue slurred his words. "Order of Battle on Number One."
Screen #1, the left-hand unit, came up with the map of Morobad Des Grieux had ordered onto it before the crash and shutdown.The new overlay showed Des Grieux just what he'd bloody expected, the orange symbols of Legion vehicles streaming through the town and fanning out when they crossed the canal.
This was no feint or stiffening force. Baffin was committing his entire battalion-strength command to end the war here on the Western Wing.
"Like bloody hell . . ." Des Grieux muttered. "Driver! Report!"
Nothing. "Pesco?"
Nothing. Des Grieux would have to crawl forward and see what the hell was going on; but first he checked the condition of his tank.
Gangbuster II was fully operable. The tank was down one fan and had five fist-sized holes in her skirts. Des Grieux had no recollection of several of those hits. Both guns were all right, and sixty percent of the massively redundant sensor suite checked out as well.
The only problem was that, according to the echo-ranging apparatus, the tank was covered by several meters of variegated rubble: bricks, tiles, wooden beams, and the bodies of Hindi soldiers who'd been shooting from the temple roofs up to the moment Gangbuster II brought the building's facade down on itself. All the visual displays were blank because the pickups were buried.
Of course,if the Slammers' vehicle hadn't been so completely concealed,Baffin's troops would have finished Des Grieux off by reflex. Veteran mercenaries were generally men who'd survived by never trusting a corpse until they'd put in a bayonet of their own.
A four-ship platoon of Baffin's tank destroyers slid eastward across the map of Morobad. They were air-cushion vehicles mounting 15cm power guns behind frontal armor almost as thick as that of the Slammers' tanks.The main guns were in centerline mountings like those of the Hindi tanks—turrets were relatively heavy, and an air-cushion vehicle could rotate easily in comparison to wheeled or track-laying armor.
Companies of infantry preceded and followed the tank destroyers in four air-cushion carriers apiece. Baffin carried his infantry in large, lightly armored vehicles; Hammer mounted his men on one-man skimmers with their heavy weapons on air-cushion jeeps. Either method worked well with good troops; and both of these units were very good indeed.
Gangbuster II shone brightly on Des Grieux's display as a cross-hatched blue symbol, but the Legion troops advancing through Morobad showed no sign of awareness. Their screens would be tuned to the Han/Slammers defenses kilometers to the east . . . if there were any Han troops left to thicken the line of cursing Slammers infantry and the survivors of 2nd Platoon.
Not all the Legion equipment in the square outside the collapsed temple was moving. Des Grieux's #1 display marked four of Baffin's 3cm twin guns, half the Legion's anti-artillery defenses, with neat orange symbols. The weapons were emplaced to either side of the thoroughfare.Support troops had hastily bulldozed the wreckage of the Hindi battery out of the way.
Ideally, artillery-defense guns should have a clear view to the horizon on all sides. In practice, crews preferred to set up in defilade where they were safe from hostile direct-fire weapons.Even so,the buildings surrounding the market square reduced the defended area to what seemed at first an unusually narrow cone.
Three command vehicles, armored air-cushion vans filled with communications gear, were parked back-to-back in a trefoil at the northwest corner of the square. That was what the 3cm guns were protecting: Baffin in his advanced command post.
Des Grieux's muscles began to tremble with reaction. He no longer felt the pain in his ribs; fresh adrenaline smoothed the knotted veins flowing to his brain. Baffin himself, a hundred and fifty meters from Gangbuster II's main gun . . . .
"Pesco, you lazy bastard!" Des Grieux snarled, but he'd already given up on raising a response from his driver. He climbed out of his seat and slid between the hull and the frame of the turret basket.
Thick 20cm disks littered the deck, the empty matrixes that had aligned the copper atoms which the powerguns released as plasma. One disk blocked the small hatch separating the fighting compartment from the driver's compartment. Des Grieux tossed the empty angrily behind him. The polyurethane was hot and still tacky; it clung to his fingertips.
As soon as he opened the hatch, the smell told Des Grieux that his driver was dead. Pesco had voided his bowels when the fragment sliced off the upper half of his skull. The liters of blood his heart pumped before the autonomic nervous system shut down had already begun to rot in the warm compartment.
Des Grieux swore.The hatch—the part of it that hadn't decapitated Pesco—was jammed beyond opening by anything short of rear-echelon maintenance. He didn't know what the bloody hell he was going to do with the driver's body.
He released the seat latch so that the back flopped down. The remaining contents of Pesco's cranial cavity slopped over Des Grieux's hands. He rotated the seat forty-five degrees to its stop, then tilted the corpse sideways out onto the forward deck of the compartment. There it blocked the foot pedals, but Des Grieux wouldn't be able to use those anyway.
Des Grieux leaned over the bloody seat, set the blade angles at zero incidence, and switched on the drive fans. All the necessary controls were on the column; the duplicate nacelle-attitude controls on the foot pedals permitted a driver to do four things simultaneously in an emergency—
But Gangbuster II didn't have a driver anymore.
Seven green lights and a red one marked the fan status screen beneath the main driving display, but that was only half the story. Des Grieux knew the intake ducts were blocked as surely as Gangbuster II's hatches. That didn't matter at the moment, but it would as soon as he rotated the pitch control and the fans started to suck wind.
No choice. Des Grieux could only hope that vibration as the nacelles drew against the rubble above them would help to clear the vehicle. Because that was what he needed to do first.