A red light winked in a sidebar of the main screen, indicating that Deathdealer’s integrity had been breached: the driver’s hatch was open. In the panoramic display Albers, horizontally compressed by the hologram, was abandoning the vehicle.
“Better ditch too, Birdie,” said the horribly-ruined corpse of DJ Bell. “This is when it’s happening.”
“Booster!” Sparrow screamed to his AI. “Air defense! Sort by size, largest first!”
If it’d been two anti-tank rounds, no sweat. The handful of submunitions in each cargo shell would’ve been blasted in a few seconds, long before they reached their own lethal range and detonated.
“Hey, there’s still time.” DJ’s face was changing; but this time his features knitted, healed, instead of splashing slowly outward in a mist of blood and bone and brains. “Not a lot, but there’s time. You just gotta leave, Birdie.”
A pair of firecracker rounds, that was fine too. Their tiny bomblets wouldn’t more than etch Deathdealer’s dense iridium armor when they went off. Hard lines for the combat cars, but that was somebody else’s problem . . . and anyway, none of the bomblets were going to land within a kilometer of the task force.
The heavy anti-tank submunitions weren’t aimed at this side of the river either. If the shell had been of ordinary construction, it would’ve impacted on a bunker somewhere far distant from the friendly tanks.
But the submunitions had seeker heads. As they spun lazily from the casing that bore them to the target area, sophisticated imaging systems fed data to their on-board computers.
A bunker would’ve done if no target higher in the computers’ priorities offered.
A combat car would’ve done very well.
But if the imaging system located a tank, then it was with electronic glee that the computer deployed vanes to brake and guide the submunition toward that prime target.
Too little time.
Birdie Sparrow slammed the side of his fist into the buckle to disengage himself from the seat restraints. A fireball lighted the gunnery screen as Deathdealer’s reprogrammed tribarrel detonated a larger target than the anti-personnel bomblets to which the law of averages had aimed it.
“Birdie, quick,” DJ pleaded. His face was almost whole again.
Sparrow sank back onto his seat as the screen flared again. “No,” he whispered. “No. Not out there.”
DJ Bell smiled at his friend and extended a hand. “Welcome home, snake,” he said.
There was a white flash.
Chapter Ten
“Watch it,” warned Cooter, ducking beneath the level of his gunshield. Part of Dick Suilin’s mind understood, but he continued to stand upright and stare.
The dawn sky was filthy with rags of black smoke, tiny moth-holes streaming back in the wind when bomblets exploded. That was nothing, and the crackle of two tank tribarrels still firing as the remaining anti-personnel cloud impacted on the far ridge was little more.
Deathdealer was devouring itself.
The submunition’s location, as well as its attitude and range in respect to Deathdealer, were determined by a computer more sophisticated than anything indigenously built on Prosperity. The computer’s last act was to trigger the explosion that shattered it in an orange fireball high above the tank.
The blast spewed out a projectile that rode the shockwave, molten with the energy that forged and compressed it. It struck Deathdealer at a ninety degree angle where the tank’s armor was thinnest, over the rear turtleback covering the powerplant.
Hammer’s anti-tank artillery rounds were designed to defeat the armor of the most powerful tanks in the human universe. This one performed exactly as intended, punching its self-forging fragment through the iridium armor and rupturing the integrity of the fusion bottle that powered the huge vehicle’s systems.
Plasma vented skyward in a stream as intensely white as the heart of a star. It etched and ate away the edges of the hole without rupturing the unpierced portion of the armor. The internal bulkheads gave way.
Plasma jetted from the driver’s hatch an instant before the cupola blew open. Stored ammunition flashed from underdeck compartments. It stained the blaze cyan and vaporized the joint between hull and skirts.
The glowing husk of what had been Deathdealer settled to the ground. Where the hull overlay portions of the skirt, the thick steel plates melted from the iridium armor’s greater residual heat.