The red ray wasn't quite as hard on Looter machines as it was on Tharnian buildings. But that first machine was no good for anything now except scrap metal.
Blade continued to back away until he was several hundred yards down the street and completely invisible behind clouds and piles of rubble. By that time the cheering had died down and Chara had stopped trying to throw her arms around him.
«Mazda, you have done it! You have done it! It is dead, and we have won!»
«No,» said one of the other women. «There are two more of the big ones, besides the small ones. Mazda will not rest until he has destroyed all of them, or he is dead.»
Blade nodded. He headed down a parallel street until he reached the point for picking up the observer. He saw the man run out of the smoke and leap on the platform. The hatch opened for a moment and the man darted inside. Then Blade lifted the machine again and headed away through the smoking streets of Miros, once again on the prowl.
Chapter 20
If the Looters had been nervous before, now they would probably be scared stiff. Blade had half a dozen other tricks up his sleeve. If he could move fast, before the Looters decided to bring the smaller war machines into the city, he could press home his advantage.
The machine darted through the streets at high speed. In a few minutes Blade knew he had come far enough to be behind the second Looter machine. He wanted to pick it off first, then move in on the command machine with fewer worries about his flanks and rear.
Blade landed on a roof surrounded by high walls that kept the machine entirely hidden from below but provided excellent perches for observers. This time he stationed four observers on the walls, one looking in each direction.
In five minutes the second machine stopped beside a damaged building less than three hundred yards away. Apparently the Looters had realized that roaming around the streets of Miros might not be the wisest thing to do now. The command machine was nowhere in sight. Had it left the city?
Another five minutes passed. Blade knew he couldn't safely wait any longer before launching his attack on the second machine. He called in the observers and lifted off the roof, heading for the building beside his target.
One particularly wild ray-blast had chewed out a three-story hole in the building nearly five hundred feet above the street. Blade's machine darted from the cover of one building to the cover of another, moving across the city street by street. At last he landed on the roof of a building across the street from his target, a roof almost on a level with the gaping hole. He waited until the wind sent smoke swirling more thickly than usual across the street. Then he sent his machine plunging out across the street and into the hole.
They landed with a crunch. Blade felt the floor sag and groan under the weight of the machine. He would have to work fast. He backed well inside the building, swung the turret to the rear, then ordered everyone to hang on tight. Then he slammed the machine sideways into the outer wall of the building, the wall directly above the Looter machine on the street below.
The building shook and the machine vibrated like a drum. The wall showed no sign of damage. Fortunately neither did the machine. Blade drove it sideways again. This time the wall showed cracks, and bulged outward at the bottom. A third time, a fourth, a fifth. The wall was unmistakably weakening, but it was still there. Blade was beginning to wonder whether the wall or the machine would give up first.
A sixth time. Now he was hitting the wall higher up, to distribute the impacts evenly. A seventh. An eighth. Backing off and going in for a-
Crrunnnnk! Almost elegantly, seventy or eighty feet of wall detached itself, sagged outward into thin air, and vanished from sight. The floor under it began to crumble away, then the ceiling began to sag down.
In seconds Blade had the machine racing out through the hole into the open air, so fast that he nearly rammed the building across the street. He swung up over the roof with feet to spare. A ray blast crackled through the air just below him, a wild shot that chewed away much of the wall surrounding the roof but didn't touch Blade's machine. Then the falling piece of building came down on the Looter machine.
The Looter machines were built strongly, but they weren't built strongly enough to stand a direct hit by a twenty-ton slab of building falling five hundred feet. The machine quivered, vanished in a cloud of dust and smoke, then seemed to burst apart in flame. The spare rockets exploded, shooting up huge gouts of yellow orange flame and spraying bits of hot metal in all directions. The top of the machine opened up like a sardine can and more explosions sent more bits flying. High above, Blade felt his machine rock from the concussion.
The blast must have also been the final blow to the tall building, already torn by the ray and by the impacts of Blade's machine: Slowly its top three hundred feet leaned forward, crumbling away at the bottom as it did. Then suddenly gravity took a firmer grip and the whole ponderous mass plunged downward. Blade darted clear a moment before the falling mass came down on the building across the street like a piledriver. The second building seemed to burst outward from the impact, pieces as big as small houses flying in all directions and crashing through the walls of its neighbors. Rubble poured down, more smoke and dust rose up in a cloud that swiftly blotted out the whole scene, and the world was filled with thunderings and crashings that rose to an ear-splitting roar.
Blade waited only long enough for the smoke and dust to clear away enough to give a good view. Both buildings had collapsed into the streets below, burying the Looter machine under a pile of rubble a hundred feet high. It would take a thousand men a month's work to dig out what was left of it.
Blade sent the machine spiraling downward. As it dove, he snapped out orders to Chara and the six members of the attack team. The Looters in the command machine should be hopelessly stunned and bewildered by what had happened. There would never be a better chance to attack them. He saw fierce grins on the faces around him as all seven started checking their weapons and equipment.
As the machine dove, Blade saw metal glinting through the smoke half a mile away. That would have to be the command machine! He headed for it as fast as he could twist and turn his own machine through the streets of Miros, only inches above the pavement. Several times they hit chunks of rubble with bone-jarring crashes. Blade did not stop or slow down. Nothing was more important now than speed and more speed. It didn't matter if his own machine didn't survive the coming battle. He and his fighters could evade the smaller machines and walk out. But they had to get the Looter commanders!
The machine plunged out into the open street. A hundred feet away stood the command machine, its turret with the ray-tube pointing away from them. Blade did not slow down. His machine bounced off a building across the street as it turned. But the impact and the controls hurled it in the same direction. The command machine's turret swung toward Blade. Before it could take aim, Blade's machine smashed down onto the turret.
Metal clanged and crunched and sparks flew as electrical equipment died spectacularly. The turret ground to a stop. Blade backed his machine away, one hand on the controls and the other furiously pressing buttons to extend the tentacles. He hoped they still worked. For a moment he wished he had three or four extra hands.
The tentacles lashed out. The tentacle with the heavy sensor-knob at the end snapped downward at the bubble dome at the front of the other machine. The transparent material shivered and cracked under the impact. A second blow and it splintered and smashed inward.