The trucks which’d been ferrying people in now landed in line across the Axis, forming a barrier behind the crowd. Grayle was doing everything she could to prevent her demonstration from melting away before the roaring bulk of the armored vehicles.
A good half of the mob was shouting and waving their fists in the air, often holding a club or a bludgeon. The other half seemed more scared than not, but they were in it now and knew there was no easy way out.
“What d’ye guess, El-Tee?” Deseau said. “Maybe three thousand of ’em?”
“Maybe more,” Huber said. “Just stay calm and let Tranter do the work. Ready, Sarge?”
“Roger that, sir,” Sergeant Tranter said, brightly cheerful. “Any time you say.”
It’d been a worse run for Tranter than for the line troopers—they were used to the hammering, or at least to some degree of it. Now at last Tranter was in his element, moving a combat car in precise, minuscule increments. As a repair technician, he’d regularly shifted cars and tanks in crowded maintenance parks where the tolerances were much tighter than anything combat troops dealt with in the field.
“Execute, then!” Huber said.
Huber felt the fans speed up through the soles of his feet; Fencing Master shivered. The crowd was shouting in unison, “Free-dom! Free-dom!” Compared to the intake roar, the sound of so many voices was no more than bird cries against the boom of the surf.
A dozen meters from the crowd, Tranter tilted the nacelles vertical and brought the fans up to maximum output so that the car drifted to a quivering halt. Dinkybob continued sliding forward till its bow slope overlapped Fencing Master’s stern. If they’d been directly in line, there’d have been a collision.
While Fencing Master balanced in place, dust and grit billowed out all around beneath her lifted skirts. Some flew toward the crowd, forcing the thugs in the front rank to cover their faces or turn their heads away.
“Watch the guys in the back!” Huber ordered, gripping the tribarrel with his thumbs deliberately lifted clear of the butterfly trigger. “Watch for anybody aiming at us!”
With the skill of a ballerina, Tranter cocked the two bow nacelles forward at the same time as he angled the six other fans slightly to the rear. The blast from the bow nacelles dug like a firehose into the gravel roadway, then sprayed the spoil into the crowd with the energy required to float thirty tonnes of combat vehicle.
The crowd broke. Those in the direct blast could no more stand against it than they could’ve swum through an avalanche. Spun away, battered away—some of the gravel was the size of a clenched fist—frightened away; blind from the dust and deafened by the howling air, they drove against those behind them.
The rout was as sudden and certain as the collapse of a house of cards. Tranter adjusted his throttles with the care of a chemist titrating a solution. The thugs at the front and the gunmen at the rear were no threat compared to the iridium sandstorm that ground forward, minutely but inexorably.
Dinkybob held station at Fencing Master’s left flank, her mass even more of a threat than the gape of her main gun’s pitted bore. She and the tank echeloned to the right behind her, Doomsayer, were buttoned up. There was nothing human about any of them, not even the mirrored facelessness of the gunners behind the combat car’s tribarrels.
When panic started the crowd running, it continued till there was nothing left but the sort of detritus a flood throws up at the edge of its channel: clothing, clubs, papers of all manner and fashions, whirling in the wind from beneath Fencing Master’s steel skirts. A few bodies lay in the street as well: people who’d been trampled, people who’d been squeezed breathless; probably a few who’d fainted.
Tranter cut his fan speed, adjusting the nacelles in parallel again to bring Fencing Master back into normal operation. They resumed forward movement at a walking pace.
Arne Huber relaxed for the first time in . . . well, he wasn’t sure how long. He raised his faceshield and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.