They leveled out just above the ground and stopped. Blade saw that the street was blocked by smoking rubble piled two stories high. Thick smoke screened it to a height of several hundred feet. It was impossible to see the Looters through that smoke.
Blade and his three opponents skirmished through the streets of the dead city with grim caution for half an hour. The Looter machines were certainly under living control. Blade was also beginning to suspect that those living beings were getting nervous. Several times he heard the crackle of the red ray many streets away, as the Looters fired at phantoms of their own imagination. The crackle was always followed by the crash and rumble of falling wreckage and new billowing clouds of smoke.
That was fine with Blade. He knew the streets of Miros as well as he knew the West End of London. If the Looters wanted to make it even harder for them to find their way around a city they didn't know in any case, that was their problem, not his. He was the hunter; he could choose his own time to move out.
At the end of the half hour Blade decided the time had come. Half of the city's streets were fogged with gray, brown, and black smoke. Piles of rubble that offered concealment lay almost everywhere.
Like a prowling cat Blade's machine glided through the smoky streets, only a few feet above the ground. He headed for one of the Looters' flanks, to slip around and come in behind them.
Suddenly a mass of gleaming metal shone through the smoke a hundred yards down a street to the right. Blade sent his machine darting for cover as the red ray crackled past. The people felt only a mild prickling as the fringes brushed them. But thirty feet of pavement and the front of a three-story building rose into the air and came down in a rain of smoking bits and pieces.
Instantly Blade was heading back out into the street, into the smoke boiling up from where the ray struck. The gaping front of the building loomed through the smoke. Blade swung the machine inside and perched it precariously on the heaped-up rubble fallen from the upper floors.
«We'll need somebody to go outside for the next move,» said Blade. He explained briefly what he wanted. Naturally all seven immediately volunteered. Blade picked out one of the men and gave him the signal baton, then opened the hatch briefly. Smoke swirled into the cabin, setting everybody coughing. The man slipped out into the street and was gone.
A moment later Blade had the machine in motion again, backing away into the building. A few hard shoves against the rear door enlarged the opening until the machine could slip through. Once back out in the street, Blade swung around until he was back in the first street, where the Looter machine stood. He was able to sneak into cover behind the smoke and the wall of piled rubble. But the observer high in the building they had left could see the Looters, and signal their movements to Blade.
Flick, flick, flick went the baton. Two Looter machines were coming straight down the street. They were getting rattled if their tactics were becoming this sloppy.
The baton flicked downward. The first Looter machine was passing the observer's position, only a hundred feet away. Blade wanted it to get still closer. He used two of the tentacles to grasp two large chunks of rubble.
Now the first Looter machine was practically on top of them. Blade's hands danced over the controls and his machine rose into the air only yards in front of the first Looter machine. As it rose Blade sent the tentacles whipping about, hurling their hundred-pound missiles at the second machine behind. They sailed through the air, dropped toward the street, and disintegrated in smoke and dust as the red ray caught them.
But they didn't absorb more than a small fraction of the red ray's power. The second machine's ray tore with deadly force into the first one. The ray turret on top flew off its mounting and crashed into the street. Antennae melted like candy canes in the sun. Metal buckled and bulged and gaped, letting out vast clouds of smoke from burning and exploding machinery inside. Blade backed hastily away as he saw molten metal beginning to ooze from the Looter machine.
The red ray wasn't quite as hard on Looter machines as it was on Tharnian buildings. But that first machine was no good for anything now except scrap metal.
Blade continued to back away until he was several hundred yards down the street and completely invisible behind clouds and piles of rubble. By that time the cheering had died down and Chara had stopped trying to throw her arms around him.
«Mazda, you have done it! You have done it! It is dead, and we have won!»
«No,» said one of the other women. «There are two more of the big ones, besides the small ones. Mazda will not rest until he has destroyed all of them, or he is dead.»
Blade nodded. He headed down a parallel street until he reached the point for picking up the observer. He saw the man run out of the smoke and leap on the platform. The hatch opened for a moment and the man darted inside. Then Blade lifted the machine again and headed away through the smoking streets of Miros, once again on the prowl.
Chapter 20
If the Looters had been nervous before, now they would probably be scared stiff. Blade had half a dozen other tricks up his sleeve. If he could move fast, before the Looters decided to bring the smaller war machines into the city, he could press home his advantage.
The machine darted through the streets at high speed. In a few minutes Blade knew he had come far enough to be behind the second Looter machine. He wanted to pick it off first, then move in on the command machine with fewer worries about his flanks and rear.
Blade landed on a roof surrounded by high walls that kept the machine entirely hidden from below but provided excellent perches for observers. This time he stationed four observers on the walls, one looking in each direction.
In five minutes the second machine stopped beside a damaged building less than three hundred yards away. Apparently the Looters had realized that roaming around the streets of Miros might not be the wisest thing to do now. The command machine was nowhere in sight. Had it left the city?
Another five minutes passed. Blade knew he couldn't safely wait any longer before launching his attack on the second machine. He called in the observers and lifted off the roof, heading for the building beside his target.
One particularly wild ray-blast had chewed out a three-story hole in the building nearly five hundred feet above the street. Blade's machine darted from the cover of one building to the cover of another, moving across the city street by street. At last he landed on the roof of a building across the street from his target, a roof almost on a level with the gaping hole. He waited until the wind sent smoke swirling more thickly than usual across the street. Then he sent his machine plunging out across the street and into the hole.
They landed with a crunch. Blade felt the floor sag and groan under the weight of the machine. He would have to work fast. He backed well inside the building, swung the turret to the rear, then ordered everyone to hang on tight. Then he slammed the machine sideways into the outer wall of the building, the wall directly above the Looter machine on the street below.
The building shook and the machine vibrated like a drum. The wall showed no sign of damage. Fortunately neither did the machine. Blade drove it sideways again. This time the wall showed cracks, and bulged outward at the bottom. A third time, a fourth, a fifth. The wall was unmistakably weakening, but it was still there. Blade was beginning to wonder whether the wall or the machine would give up first.