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."
Gale, the veteran trooper, had already shifted his position behind the right wing gun so that he was facing backward at 120° to the combat car's direction of travel. Suilin obediently tried to do the same, but he found that stacked ammo boxes and the large cooler made it difficult for him to stand. By folding one knee on the cooler, he managed to aim at the proper angle, but he wasn't sure he'd be able to hit anything if a target appeared.
Flamethrower was gathering speed. They'd crawled up the slope, matching their speed to that of the tank ahead of them. That vehicle in turn was trying not to overrun the combat cars pausing at the hillcrest.
The first series of the loud shocks occurred before Suilin's car was properly beyond the berm of Camp Progress. After that, the hidden fighting settled down to the vicious sizzle of powerguns. Each bolt sounded like sodium dropping into water in blazing kilogram packets.
When Flamethrower topped the ridgeline, offset to the left of the last tank in Task Force Ranson, Suilin saw the remains of Happy Days.
Four days before, he'd thought of the place as just another of the sleazy Strips that served army bases all over Prosperity—all over the human universe. Now it was a roiling pit, as smoky as the crater of a volcano and equally devoid of life.
"Blue Two," said a voice in Suilin's earphones, "this is Tootsie One-two. We're comin' through right up yer ass, so don't change yer mind, all right?"
It was probably Cooter speaking, but the reporter couldn't be sure. The helmets transmitted on one sideband, depriving the voices of normal timbre, and static interrupted the words every time a gun fired.