The fourteen man crew of the SheVa knew that once a breacher round was on the hull, it was virtually impossible to remove; your best bet of survival was bailing out. The three Taylor Class Heavy Armored Escape Vehicles dropped from under the SheVa and bolted to the rear. They were picked off by plasma fire from the Posleen redoubt even as the SheVa gouted fire from every hatch and the six thousand ton turret lifted fifty meters into the air on an actinic ball of nuclear fire.

As soon as the last SheVa was eliminated, the Posleen popped up a casta round. The maneuvering HVM quickly scattered its load of antimatter bomblets across the front of the approaching line of ACS and disintegrated as the last one detonated.

One hundred and ninety-nine more bomblets detonated almost simultaneously, each the equivalent of sixteen megatonnes of TNT.

As soon as the icon of the casta round appeared on his heads up display, Private Julio Garcia dropped a foxhole round to the ground and crouched, hoping against hope that the round would dig out a hole for him before the casta went off. Shooting the bomblets was futile, that would only make them detonate earlier. The only thing that the armored combat suit corps could do was dig in and try to ride out the detonation. The Indowy manufactured battle armor was very tough indeed but a 16 megaton explosion had a better than even chance of ripping even an ACS suit into itsy bitsy pieces.

As the dirt of R-1496 Delta fountained upwards the armored infantryman dove for the hole. It was times like this that he seriously reconsidered his decision to leave the hell of New Chicago.