The gunsight pipper on Screen Two dimmed to half its previous orange brilliance. armed appeared in the upper left corner of the screen, above range to target and length of footprint.
Magenta tracks, narrowed toward the top by foreshortening, overlay the image of the settlement toward which Blue Three was slipping with the slow grace of a beer stein on a polished bar.
Instead of aligning with the pavement, the aiming tracks skewed across the right half of the Strip.
“Holman!” Wager screamed. “Straighten up! Straighten the fuck out! With the road!”
Sparrow’s Deathdealer had reached the end of the built-up Strip. The turret was rotated back at a 220° angle to the tank’s course. Its main gun fired, a blacked-out streak on Blue Three’s screens and a dazzle of cyan radiance through her open hatch.
Wager heard the fan note rise as his driver adjusted nacelles #1S and #2S and boosted their speed. The nameless tank seemed to hesitate, but its attitude didn’t change.
“Range,” Wager called to his artificial intelligence. They were about a hundred meters from the nearest buildings. Since they were still moving forward maybe he ought to—
Whang!
Wager looked up in amazement. The bullet that had flattened itself against the cupola’s open hatch dropped onto his cheek. It was hotter than hell.
“Sonuvabitch!” Wager shouted.
“Blue Two,” ordered the radio, “move into position and lay down a clearance charge!”
“Sergeant,” begged Holman over the intercom channel, “do you want me to stop us or—”
She’d straightened ’em out all right, for about a millisecond before the counter-clockwise rotation began to swing the tank’s bow out of alignment again in the opposite direction. The aiming tracks marched across the screen with stately precision.
The volume of fire from the combat cars slackened because Wager’s tank blocked their aim. Another bullet rang against the hatch; this one ricocheted glowing into the darkness. Bloody good thing Wager wasn’t manning the cupola tribarrel himself just now. . . .
“Fire!” Wager ordered his AI.
He didn’t know what the default setting was. He just knew he wasn’t going to wait in his slowly-revolving tank and get it right some time next week.
Blue Three chugged, a sound much like that of a mortar firing nearby. The charge, a net of explosive filaments deploying behind a sparkling trio of rocket drivers, arched from a bow compartment.
As soon as the unit fired, the computed aiming tracks transformed themselves into a holographic overlay of the charge being laid—the gossamer threads would otherwise have been invisible.
The net wobbled outward for several seconds, shuddering in the flame-spawned air currents. It settled, covering five-hundred meters of pavement, the road’s left shoulder, and the fronts of most of the buildings on the left side.
Muzzle flashes continued to wink from the stricken ruins of Happy Days.
The charge detonated with a white flash as sudden as that of lightning. Dust and ash spread in a dense pall that was opaque in the thermal spectrum as well as to normal optics.
Hundreds of small mines popped and spattered gravel. The explosive-filled cavity whose image, remoted from Deathdealer and frozen for reference on Wager’s Screen Three, didn’t go off.
Fuckin’ A.
Hans Wager shifted Screen Two to millimetric radar and gripped his gunnery control. “Holman, drive on,” he ordered, aware as he spoke that Blue Three was already accelerating.
Holman hadn’t waited to be told. She knew as sure as Wager did that if the big mine went off, it was better that a tank take the shock than the lesser mass of a combat car.
Better for everybody except maybe the tank’s crew.
Wager triggered the main gun and coaxially-locked tribarrel simultaneously, throwing echoing swirls onto his display as the dense atmosphere warped even the radar patterns.
“Tootsie Six,” he said as he felt the tank beneath him build to a lumbering gallop. “This is Blue Three. We’re going through.”
Flamethrower cleared the rise. The settlement was a scene from Brueghel’s Hell, and Dick Suilin was being plunged into the heart of it.
Cooter looked back over his shoulder at the reporter. His voice in Suilin’s earphones said, “Watch the stern, turtle. Don’t worry about the bow—we’ll go through on Ortnahme’s coattails.”