Happy Days was a ghost town.
Deathdealer was proceeding at forty kph, fractionally slower than her speed a few moments before. Warmonger started to close the 200-meter separation, but Willens throttled back and swung to the left of the road as the combat car topped the rise. Ranson’s left hand switched her visor off remote; her right was firm on the tribarrel’s grip.
Happy Days hadn’t been damaged in the previous night’s fighting. The buildings crowded the stakes marking the twenty-meter right of way, but their walls didn’t encroach—another regulation Banyussuf had enforced, with bulldozers when necessary.
Half the width was road surface which had been stabilized with a plasticizer, then pressure-treated. The lead tank slipped down the incline on the right shoulder behind a huge cloud of dust.
Nothing moved in the settlement.
A few of the structures were concrete prefabs, but most were built of laths covered with enameled metal. Uncut sheets already imprinted with the logos of soups or beers gleamed in an array more colorful than that of a race course. Behind the buildings themselves, fabric barriers enclosed yards in which further business could be conducted in the open air.
The lead tank was almost between the rows of buildings. Ranson’s visor caught and highlighted movement of the barred window of a popular knocking-shop across the street and near the far end of the strip. She switched her display to thermal.
Stolley swung his tribarrel toward the motion.
“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 hammerblows 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, OK?”
“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 degree 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 shop-fronts further down the Strip in a long burst. The bolts flashed at an increasing separation because the tank was accelerating.
Deathdealer’s turret rotated counter-clockwise, 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.