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Then her burgeoning career—she had settled on battleaxe—had been nipped in the bud. She was assigned to one of the first Screaming Meemie units, a system officially referred to as the M-179 "Rosser" Medium Anti-Lander System, and, when it became apparent that the system was suicidal and useless against landers, there she had been left. There was no definable utility for the Meemies, but it was too much trouble to reconvert the Abrams tanks that they had been designed around back to direct fire systems and although the Meemies were very effective there were other systems that were just about as good. So for the last five years she had been shuttled around from one corps to another, shoring up a defense here and there, but generally shuttled back out of the way; nobody knew quite what to do with Meemies and few cared to learn.
At the moment she would have happily traded her current position for any of those other corps or any of those boring useless, days. It was apparent that this corps was in full flight, and driving forward to slow the Posleen down sounded like a permanent solution to a temporary problem; there was no way that one Meemie unit could stop a Posleen assault of this magnitude.
However, here she was. And maybe, just maybe, the company would survive. All they had to do was shoot down these . . . whatever they were.
"The computer's balking," Specialist Gle
Chan sighed and slipped down into the turret. She was fairly sure she knew what was happening. The computer software had been pulled from the long defunct Sergeant York program. That system had been a nightmare from the word go, but it was the closest analogue to the Screaming Meemies, so the software had been assumed to be similar.
"Assumed" had so many co
With the commander's machine gun; the ro-ro would probably miss.
She rolled her shoulders and shrugged. "Okay, Gle
"Yes, ma'am," the gu
"Use up a shitload of ammo," she answered, switching the gun to manual.
She watched the . . . whatever they were for a moment. They would come sweeping in, high, really high, behind the SheVa, fire a few rounds into the back deck then bank off and come around for another shot. She considered it for a moment and hit another control.
"All tanks, flip your guns to remote control," she said over the company net then switched to the SheVa's frequency. "SheVa Nine, I need you to turn to the east and take a constant bearing for a few minutes, please."
* * *
Mitchell felt like he was driving a wounded elephant. The SheVa was barely lumbering along and smoke was streaming from multiple strikes. So the call from the Meemie commander fell on welcome ears.
"I'd wondered where you'd gone," he said. "Roger that, will do."
He flipped to intercom and checked his screen. "Schmoo, turn east and head up the slope; don't worry about going at max speed, just keep a constant course."
"Yes, sir," the private said, turning the lumbering gun to the east.
"Major Mitchell," the warrant called. "This is Indy. We're getting hammered, sir. We're taking damage belowdecks."
"I know," Mitchell called back. "How bad is it?"
"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 gu
"Yes, sir," the gu
"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," Gle
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 gu
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!"