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 buzzbomb 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 Deathdealer raced toward the far end of the settlement, he panned the weapon counter-clockwise and stuttered bursts low into shop fronts. 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.
Deathdealer bucked and pitched like a bull trying to pin a tiger to the jungle floor. The collision was almost as bad as the one for which Sparrow had prepared himself, but the tank never quite lost forward way. They staggered onward, cascading chunks of wall, curtains, and gambling tables.
The tank’s AI threw up a red-lit warning on Screen Three. Deathdealer’s ground-penetrating radar showed a thirty-centimeter tunnel drilled beneath the road’s hard surface from the building they’d just demolished. The cavity was large enough to contain hundreds of kilos of explosive—
And it almost certainly did.