Des Grieux had only been joking. Had he been serious, he'd have put the first round into the fuel tank beneath the truck's cab. Only then would he rake his bolts along the men screaming as they tried to jump from the inferno of blazing kerosene. He'd done that often enough before.
The artificial intelligence rotated three-dimensional images of Hindi armor onto the left side of the visor in obedience to Des Grieux's command. The schematic of a tank as flat as a floor tile lifted to display the balloon tires, four per axle, which supported its weight. In particularly marshy spots—and the rice paddies on both sides of the border area were muddy ponds for most of the year—the tires could be covered with one-piece tracks to lower the ground pressure still further.
The tank did not have a rotating turret. Its long, slim gun was mounted along the vehicle's centerline.The weapon used combustion-augmented plasma to drive armor-piercing shots at velocities of several thousand meters per second.
Comparable Han vehicles mounted lasers in small turrets. Neither technology was quite as effective as the powerguns of the Slammers—and Baffin's Legion; but they would serve lethally, even against armor as thick as that of Des Grieux's tank.
The AI began to display a Hindi armored personnel carrier, also running on large tires behind a thin shield of armor. Des Grieux switched his helmet to direct vision. The images continued to flicker unwatched on the left-hand screen below in the fighting compartment. Adrenaline from the bottle incident left the mercenary too restless to pretend interest in mere holograms.
There were hundreds of vehicles behind Des Grieux's tank. The convoy snaked down and across the valley floor for as far as he could see without increasing his visor's magnification. Most of the column was of Han manufacture: laser vehicles, troop transports, maintenance vans. Huge, articulated supply trucks with powerplants at both ends of the load;
Des Grieux didn't care about the logistics vehicles, whether indigenous or the Slammers' own. His business was with things that shot, things that fought. If he had a weapon, the form it took didn't matter.A tank like the one he commanded now was best; but if Des Grieux had been an infantryman with nothing but a semiautomatic powergun, he'd have faced a tank and not worried about the disparity in equipment. So long as he had a chance to fight . . . .
