Des Grieux breathed deeply. He didn't really notice the smell; other things could get in his way, but not that. He adjusted the nacelle angle to a balance between lift and thrust. He hoped he had the mixture right, but whatever he came up with would have to do.
Des Grieux had been a lousy driver; he was far too heavy-handed, forcing the controls the way he forced himself.
For this particular job, a heavy hand was the only choice.
The fans hummed, running at full speed though the throttles were at their idle setting. With the pitch at zero, the leading edges of the blades knifed the air with minimal resistance. Gangbuster II began to resonate with a bell-note deeper than usual because the hull didn't hang free in the air.
Des Grieux sucked in another breath. His right hand drew the linked throttles full on, while his left thumb adjusted the pitch to sixty degrees. The tank wheezed and bucked like a choking lion. Des Grieux scrambled backward out of the hatch.
The empties jounced on the floor with the violence of Gangbuster II's attempts to draw air through choked intakes. Des Grieux threw himself into his seat and grasped the gunnery joysticks. The orange pippers glowed against a background of uniform gray because the visual pickups were shrouded.
Des Grieux twisted the left joystick.Metal screeched as the turret began to swing clockwise against its weight of rubble. Hot insulation tinged the atmosphere of the fighting compartment as the turret drive motors overloaded.
Des Grieux twisted the control in the opposite direction. The turret reversed a few centimeters. There was a squalling crash as the mass of overburden shifted and slid away from Gangbuster II's turret and deck. The tank bobbed like a diver surfacing through a sea of rubble.
The fan blades bit the air for which they had been starving. Uncontrolled, Gangbuster II lurched backward at an accelerating pace.
Des Grieux shouted with glee as he rotated his turret and cupola controls again. Now he had a sight picture and targets.
Gangbuster II had hit the temple facade nose on. Now it backed through the hole it had torn in the wall, bucking over and plowing through tiles and masonry from the building's upper stories.
The Hindis were using the temple's forecourt as a field hospital for casualties from Des Grieux's initial attack.Medics and the wounded who could move under their own power ran or crawled from Gangbuster II's bellowing reappearance.
Des Grieux ignored them. The gap his tank had smashed in the courtyard wall showed a tone edge of his gunnery screen,and a pair of Legion3cm carriages were visible through it. The Legion guns were firing upward at a 40° angle, snapping incoming shells from the air as soon as they notched the horizon.
The tribarrel's solid sight indicator covered the Legion weapons an instant before the main gun swung on target. Brilliant cyan bolts raked the Legion crews and the receivers of their guns. A pannier of ammunition exploded with a flash like that of a miniature nova. It destroyed everything within a five-meter sphere, pavement included.
Gangbuster II slewed across the courtyard in a scraping, sparking curve. The tank wasn't going to follow the track by which it had plunged in from the market square. The gap in the courtyard wall foreshortened into solidity as the damaged skirts slid the tank toward a point twenty meters west of its initial entry. The screams of wounded men in the vehicle's path were lost in the howl of steel on stone.
Des Grieux took his right hand from the joystick long enough to close the commo breaker. "Blue Three to Big Dog One-niner!" he shouted hoarsely to battalion fire control. "Get some arty on top of us! Get us—"
Gangbuster II struck the courtyard wall for the second time. The shock threw Des Grieux forward into his harness.Redoubled pain shrank objects momentarily to pinhead size in his vision, but he did not black out.
The tank's iridium hull armor smashed through the brickwork, but the impact stripped off the already-damaged skirts. Momentum drove Gangbuster II partway into the market square. The vehicle halted there because half the plenum chamber was gone.
"—some firecracker rounds!"Des Grieux gasped to artillery control, demanding anti-personnel shells as his hands worked his joysticks.
Two of the 3cm pieces were undamaged. The crew of the gun nearest the ammunition blast was dead or writhing shrivelled on the pavement, but the gunners of the fourth piece were cranking down their twin muzzles to bear on the unexpected threat.
A bolt from Gangbuster II's main gun struck the shield just below the stubby barrels of the artillery-defense weapon. The gun seemed to suck in, then flash outward as a ball of sunbright vapor.
A loader had turned to run when she saw death pointing down Gangbuster II's 20cm bore. Gaseous metal enveloped all of the Legion soldier but her outflung hand. When the glowing ball condensed and vanished, the hand remained like a wax dummy on a framework of carbonized sticks.
Des Grieux's tribarrel raked the Legion command group. The plating of the vehicles' boxy sides was thick enough to turn about half the 2cm bolts—but at this short range, only half.
Gangbuster II's main gun continued to rotate on target. One of the three vans already sparkled with electrical shorts, while another puffed black smoke from the holes the powergun had blown across its flank.
"Blue Leader to Blue Three," Captain Broglie cried across the crackling, all-band static of powergun discharges. "Abandon your vehicle immediately! Anti-tank rounds are incoming on your location!"
"Screw you, Broglie!" Des Grieux screamed as his main gun slammed a bolt into the central command track, the one that was bow-on with its thicker frontal armor toward Gangbuster II's tribarrel. The 20cm bolt blew out the vehicle's back and sides with a piston of vaporized metal which had been the glacis plate a microsecond earlier.
The Legion tank destroyer entering the square from the west snapped a bolt from its 15cm powergun into Gangbuster II's turret. The tank rocked backward under the impact.
Des Grieux slammed into the seat. The screens and regular lighting went out, but the inner face of the turret armor glowed a sulphurous yellow.
Heat clawed at the skin of Des Grieux's face and hands. He started to draw in a breath. The air was fire, but he had to breathe anyway.
Gangbuster II's nacelles stopped bucking in the stripped plenum chamber when the power shut off. Now the tank shuddered with heat stresses.
Des Grieux punched the reset switch. A conduit across the turret burst with a green flash. The holographic displays quivered to life, then went blank.
A salvo of shells landed near enough to rock the tank with their crump crump crump-CRUMP! They were HE Common, not anti-tank. The rounds had been in flight before the battery commander knew there was a hole blasted in the Legion's artillery defenses.