"No!" June Ranson shouted.
The wing gunner's short burst snapped through the air like a single streak of cyan,past Deathdealer and into a white coruscance as the window's iron grillwork burned at the impacts.
A buzzbomb arced from the left and exploded in the middle of its trajectory as the tank's close-in defense system fired with a vicious crackling.
At least twenty automatic weapons volleyed orange tracers from Happy Days. The bullets ricocheted from Deathdealer and clanged like hammer blows on Warmonger's hull and gunshields.
"All Tootsie elements!" Ranson shouted. Willens had chopped his throttles; Warmonger's skirts tapped the soil. "Bandits! Blue One—"
But it was too late to order Blue One to lay a mine-clearing charge down the road. The great tank accelerated toward Happy Days in a spray of dust and pebbles, tribarrel and main gun blasting ahead of it.
"Hey, snake?" said DJ Bell from the main screen as bolts from a powergun cracked past Deathdealer. "Watch out for the Pussycat, okay?"
"Go 'way, DJ!" Birdie Sparrow shouted. "Albers! Goose it! Fast! Fast!"
The sound of bullets striking their thick armor was lost in the roar of the fans whose intakes suddenly tried to gulp more air than fluid flow would permit. The impacts quivered through Sparrow's boots on the floorplate like the ticks of a mechanical clock gone haywire.
Sparrow gripped a gunnery joystick in either hand. Most tankers used only one control, thumb-switching from main gun to tribarrel and back at need. He'd taught himself years ago to operate with both sticks live. You didn't get sniper's precision that way, but—
"Bandits!" cried the captain. "Blue One—"
Whatever she wanted would wait.
—when it was suppressing fire you needed, like now—
Whatever anybody else wanted could wait.
Using the trigger on the right joystick,Sparrow rapped a five-round burst from the tribarrel across a shop midway down the Strip on the left side. Sheet metal blew away from the wood beneath it, fluttering across the street as if trying to escape from the sudden blaze behind it.
The main screen was set on a horizontally compressed 360° panorama. Sparrow was used to the distortion. He caught the puff of a buzzbomb launch before his electronics highlighted the threat.
A defensive charge blasted from above Deathdealer's skirts. It made the hull ring as none of the hostile fire had managed.
Sparrow's tribarrel raked shopfronts further down the Strip in a long burst.The bolts flashed at an increasing separation because the tank was accelerating.
Deathdealer's turret rotated counterclockwise, independently of the automatic weapon in the cupola. The left pipper, the point-of-aim indicator for the main gun, slid backward across the facade of one of the settlement's sturdier buildings.
The neon sign was unlighted, but Sparrow knew it well—a cat with a Cheshire grin, gesturing with a forepaw toward her lifted haunches.
That was where the buzzbomb had come from. Three more sparks spat in the darkness—light, lethal missiles, igniting in the whorehouse parlor—just as Sparrow's foot stroked the pedal trip for his 20cm cannon.
Deathdealer's screens blacked out the cyan flash. The displays were live again an instant later when dozens of ready missiles went off in a secondary explosion that blew the Pussycat's walls and roof into concrete confetti.
"Blue Three," the command channel was blatting, "move forward and—"
Albers brought Deathdealer into the settlement with gravity aiding his desperately accelerating fans. He was hugging the right side of the Strip, too close for a buzzbomb launched from that direction to harm. Anti-personnel mines banged harmlessly beneath them.
"—lay a clearing charge before anybody else proceeds!"
Across the roadway, shopfronts popped and sizzled under the fire of Sparrow's tribarrel and the more raking bolts of combat cars pausing just over the ridgeline as Tootsie Six had ordered.
Deathdealer brushed the front of the first shop. The building collapsed like a bomb going off.
The tank accelerated to eighty kph. Albers used his mass and the edge of his skirts like a router blade, ripping down the line of flimsy shops. The fragments scattered in the draft of his fans.
A Consie took two steps from a darkened tavern, knelt, and aimed his buzz-bomb down the throat of the oncoming tank.
Sparrow's foot twitched on the firing pedal. The main gun crashed out a bolt that turned a tailor's shop across the road into a fireball with a plasma core. The blast was twenty meters from the rocketeer, but the Consie flung away his weapon in surprise and tried to run.
A combat car nailed him, half a pace short of the doorway that would have provided concealment if not protection.
Sparrow had begun firing with his tribarrel at a ten o'clock angle. As Death-dealer raced toward the far end of the settlement, he panned the weapon counterclockwise and stuttered bursts low into shopfronts. Instants after the tribarrel raked a facade, his main gun converted the entire building into a self-devouring inferno.
Two controls, two pippers sliding across a compressed screen at varying rates. The few bullets that still spattered the hull were lost in the continuous rending impact of Albers' 170-tonne wrecking ball.
Choking gases from the cannon breech, garbled orders and warnings from the radio.
No sweat, none of it. Birdie Sparrow was in control, and they couldn't none of 'em touch him.
Another whorehouse flew apart at the touch of Deathdealer's skirt. A meter by three-meter strip of metal enameled with a hundred and fifty bright Lion Beer logos curled outward and slapped itself over the intake of #1 Starboard fan.
The sudden loss of flow dipped the skirt to the soil and slewed Deathdealer's bow before plenum-chamber pressure could balance the mass it carried. The stern swung outward, into the clang-clang impact of bolts from a combat car's tribarrel. Fist-sized chunks vaporized from iridium armor that had ignored Consie bullets.
Sparrow rocked in his turret's stinking haze, clinging grimly to the joysticks and bracing his legs as well. The standard way to clear a blocked duct was to reverse the fan. That'd ground Deathdealer for a moment, and with the inertia of their present speed behind that touchdown—
Albers may have chopped his #1S throttle but he didn't reverse it—or try to straighten Deathdealer's course out of the hook into which contact had canted it. They hit the next building in line, bow-on at seventy kph—shattering panels of pre-stressed concrete and sweeping the fan duct clear in the avalanche of heavy debris.