The Consie mortarmen were turned to stare with amazement at the commotion behind them. The sparkling impact as Wager's tank landed, half on the pavement and half off, scattered the crew a few paces, but the tanker's shot was in time . . . .
The center of the cyclo vanished: Wager had used his main gun. The 20cm bolt was so intense that the explosion of cases of mortar ammo followed as an anticlimax.
Several of the mortar shells were filled with white phosphorous. None of the crewmen had run far enough to be clear of the smoky tendrils whose hearts would blaze all the way through the victims on which they landed.
The nameless tank swept past flaming heaps of food, bedding, and material. Ammunition burned in harmless corkscrews through the sky and an occasional
More shells from Camp Progress howled overhead and detonated, six of them almost simultaneously this time. A curtain of white fire cloaked the siege lines as hundreds of anti-personnel bomblets combed crevices to lick Consie blood.
The leading vehicles,
The artillery had flung dozens of bodies and bodyparts out of eviscerated bunkers. Holman slowed to a crawl so that Wager could pick his targets on the reverse slope.
Men in black uniforms were climbing or crawling from trenches which shells had turned into abattoirs. Wager ignored them. His AI highlighted the firing slits of bunkers which the shells had spared.
Every time his pipper settled, his foot trod out another 20cm bolt.
Jets of plasma from powerguns travelled in a straight line and liberated all their energy on the first solid object they touched. Wager's bolts couldn't penetrate the earth the way armor-piercing projectiles did—but their cyan touch could shake apart hillsides in sprays of volcanic glass.
The interior of a bunker when a megajoule of plasma spurted through the opening was indescribable Hell.
