He lowered the muzzle slightly and squeezed off. This time the projectile burst just where he wanted it, in the swale whose lips were lighted by the tribarrel’s crackling bolts.
Suilin didn’t see the figure leap from concealment until the powerguns clawed the Consie dazzlingly apart.
“That’s right!” his guide screamed from the right-hand gun. “Flush the bastards for us!”
The grenade launcher’s recoil woke a familiar warmth from the reporter’s shoulder. He swung his weapon slightly and walked three shots down the hidden length of the swale. The last was away before the first was cratering the darkened turf.
An empty clip ejected from the weapon after the fifth round. Both tribarrels fired. There was a disemboweled scream as Dick Suilin reached for the bandolier, groping for more ammunition. . . .
* * *
The turret hatch clanged above Birdie Sparrow; he wasn’t shivering any more. Albers, his driver, hadn’t boarded yet, so Birdie brought Deathdealer up himself by touching the main switch. The displays lighted softly on auxiliary power while the fusion bottle built pressure.
Deathdealer’s hull deadened most sounds, but mortar fragments rang on her skirts like sleet on a window. “Booster, Screen Three,” Birdie said, ordering the tank’s artificial intelligence to bring up Screen Three, which he habitually used for non-optical sensor inputs.
The tracks of mortar shells were glowing holographic arcs, red for the first salvo and orange for the second. Birdie computed a vector and overlaid it on his main screen at the same time he fed the data to fire control. The turret began to rotate on its frictionless magnetic bearings; the breech of the main gun raised a few centimeters as the muzzle dipped onto its aiming point.
Deathdealer grunted as her fans took a first bite of air. Albers had boarded, so they were fully combat ready.
Light enhancement on the main screen showed the shell tracks arcing from a copse 1800 meters from the berm at a deflection of forty-three degrees east of true north. The orange pipper on Screen Two, the gunnery display, was centered on that point.
The Consies might be in a gully hidden by the trees, and there was a limit to the amount of dirt and rock even a 20cm powergun could excavate, but—
Birdie rocked his foot switch, sending two rounds from his main gun crashing downrange.
Deathdealer shook. The amount of copper plasma being expelled was only a few grams, but when even that slight mass was accelerated to light speed, its recoil force shifted the tank’s 170 tonnes. Spent casings ejected onto the turret floor, overwhelming the air conditioning with the stench of hot matrix.
The copse exploded in a ball of fire and live steam. A tree leaped thirty meters skyward, driven by the gout of energy that had shattered the bole at root level.
Birdie chuckled and coughed in the atmosphere of reeking plastic. The mortar crew might not’ve bought it this time, but they bloody sure weren’t going to call attention to themselves for a while. DJ’d have appreciated that.
The main screen highlighted movement in blue: two figures hunched with the weight of the burden they carried between them toward the berm.
Birdie’s left thumb rocked the gun control from main to coax while his right hand expertly teased the joystick to bring the pipper onto his targets. They went to ground just as his foot was tensing on the gunswitch, disappearing into a minute dip that meant the difference between life and death.
Birdie started to switch back to the main gun and do the job by brute force, but—
Y’ know it’s gonna happen, DJ had said in his dream. Birdie waited, ten seconds, twenty. . . .
The Consies popped up from cover, their figures slightly blurred by phosphor delays in the enhanced hologram. Birdie’s foot pressed down the rest of the way. A drive motor whirred as the cupola tribarrel thumped out its five-round burst. Cyan impacts flung the targets to left and right as parts of their bodies vaporized explosively.
Death had waited; thirty seconds for that pair, years for other men. But Death didn’t forget.
Birdie was safe. He was inside the heaviest piece of land-based armor in the human universe.