"We've taken some damage to the gun mounts which is really bad," the warrant called back. "But they've got some redundancy in them. I think we can still fire. But if we take many more hits we're going to be useless."
"What's the status on power?" Mitchell asked. "If we can speed up we can throw them off some. They aren't coming down to engage; I guess SheVa Fourteen's demise has put a scare in them."
"I've restarted the reactors, sir," the engineering officer replied. "But the turbines have a required warmup period; you really don't want me to override it. Another five to seven minutes."
"Okay," the commander sighed. "It will have to do." Mitchell considered his readouts and looked over at the gunner. "You gonna be up to this, Pruitt?"
"Yes, sir," the gunner said. "We've only got two rounds left."
"I can read," the commander said, gesturing at his controls. "I'll call for a reload, but we're going to have to put some distance between us and them first." He shook his head at the next series of plasma strikes. "And get rid of our companions; I don't want them shooting at our reloads."
"Oh, good God no," Pruitt chuckled.
"If I recall correctly, the fuel bunker for a Command Dodec is just below center," Mitchell mused. "I think the next shot you get, they'll be closer than they have been; under ten klicks. . . ."
"You want me to try to get the fuel bunker," Pruitt said.
"Simply aim with great care," Mitchell said. "Let's see how it goes."
* * *
"Okay, here goes nothing," Chan said. She watched the six circles rotating around the sky—she had hooked all six "tanks" together and now had them all under manual control—and picked a point above and behind the SheVa gun. "We really don't want to shoot that thing in the ass."
"Oh, no," Glenn said, clamping her hands on either side of her helmet. "This is gonna SUCK."
The Screaming Meemie was so named due to its passing resemblance to the WWII German mortar system of the same name. The "gun" was mounted on top of the tank on a very heavy-duty rotating pintle that replaced the turret; the tank commander and a gunner were shoehorned into what had been the bottom of the turret with the driver at the traditional position at the front. The gun itself was more or less circular in appearance with six distinct bulges or lobes on the side. The difference between the systems being that the German weapon, properly called the Neubelwerfer, was a multi-barreled mortar system. The modern Screaming Meemie was a MetalStorm 105 twelve-pack.
MetalStorm's name said it all; each pack could throw up to twelve hundred 105mm discarding sabot rounds into the air in less than a minute. The rounds were packed "nose to tail" into twelve tubes that were both barrel and breach. The system was electrical and could fire either one round or a series at very high rates of fire. Once clear of the "barrel" the rounds, accelerated at slightly different velocities due to the nature of the system, dropped their plastic "shoes" and a sixty-millimeter dart of tungsten headed downrange at tank-killing speeds. With a hundred rounds packed into each tube, and the rounds going off at an electronically controlled sequence, the air quickly became saturated with tungsten and steel.
The amount of energy involved in firing the system led to an enormous number of compromises. One of these was that the system could only shoot "forward" unless it deployed its firing spades or "jacks" as they were called. Otherwise the sheer energy involved in twelve hundred rounds of discarding penetrator heading down-range would flip the massive tank over on its side.
While this had been found to be insignificant against landers, six of the tanks firing into the space the tenaral were passing through was another story.
* * *
Tensalarial flapped his crest within the armored enclosure and keyed his microphone. "We need to get lower to destroy this thing; we can't hit it flying by from this height."
"Fuscirto uut," Allansiar replied. "I'm not getting any closer than this! Even this is too close! You saw what happened to Pacalostal!"
Tensalarial flapped his crest again and snarled. It was like something in Posleen was hard coded; when you got one with the sense to do something besides lead an oolt and charge the guns, they also started getting . . . cautious. The smartest Posleen of all seemed to be Kenstain, which he preferred not to consider too closely.
"Our . . . mission is to stop this so the landers can destroy it," Tensalarial said in response, with a tooth snap that was audible over the communicator. "We will perform that mission."
"Then shoot the tracks," Allansiar snarled in reply. "Not the body: that is where the fuel and weapons are that blow up. There is nothing to blow up in the wheels!"
"Very well," the Kessentai replied after a moment. "We shall shoot the tracks on the next pass."
"Lining up," Allansiar said. "I'll even get lower for that."
"Let us go in one behind the other," Tensalarial commented. "That way the ones behind can gauge their firing on the basis of the leader. I shall lead."
"Why not?" Allansiar said with a grunt. "You're not going to hit anything anyway."
Tensalarial ignored the jibe and turned the tenaral towards the ground, lining up the manual aiming reticle on the slowly moving treads. The groups had had little opportunity to practice firing before the assault and they were learning by trial and error that the rounds did not go where the aiming reticle was pointed. The reticle was computer generated, but the system was not an actual auto-aiming device; it was simply a heads-up-display of where Goloswin thought the target was going to be. Since all Posleen aiming was done with advanced targeting systems—which Goloswin had never bothered to reverse engineer—the tenaral were beginning to realize that there were some basic concepts missing in the aiming system. Two of the missing concepts were "parallax" and "bore-sighting"; configured as they were, the guns were the functional equivalent of plasma blunderbusses and just about as accurate.
Stooping like a falcon, the Kessentai began dropping plasma rounds all over the landscape.
* * *
The target recognition system for the Meemies was sometimes a bit messed up and the radar integration system often malfunctioned. But the manual firing system was mostly taken from a standard M-1 Abrams design and worked rather well.
In this case a laser swept the sky until it got a return, estimated the range, found it to be functionally close to the one that Captain Chan had keyed in manually and began a series of calculations. It checked wind-speed, air temperature, humidity and whether the StormPack had been previously fired. Then it ran a rapid series of calculations and adjusted the aiming point appropriately. And the unknown programmer who had originally designed the system had heard of parallax.
For Captain Chan it was simplicity in itself. She pointed the red circles at the descending tenaral and waited until they flashed green. This took approximately half a second. Then she flipped the thumb selector from "safe" to "full," closed her eyes, clamped down on the firing lever and held on for dear life.
* * *
"Holy shit!" Pruitt called. He had flipped to a screen where he could watch the funny looking tanks arrayed along the top of the ridgeline and now they had disappeared in a wall of smoke and fire. "Did they just get hit?"
"Nah," Major Mitchell said, flipping momentarily to the same screen. "That's what they always look like."
The tanks appeared to have exploded. The air above and to the side was nothing, but smoke, fire and smoking plastic shredding itself on the dense air. Somewhere in there, presumably, were people and functional vehicles, but it seemed impossible that they could have survived. After only a few seconds the firing stopped and the air started to clear, revealing the Meemies, apparently undamaged.