Tron Read Free Page B

contracted into its smoother form once more.
    “You said it,” Clu agreed wholeheartedly. “One of those Recognizers comes after me, I’m gonna hafta jump clear out of the data stream.” If I can , he added to himself; escape was by no means a certainty. He’d tangled with Recognizers before, and knew what the odds would be if he was forced to join combat.
    He leaned to his scope again, setting it for target acquisition. His hands never strayed far from the cannon’s fire controls. Abruptly, the scope was filled with the dreaded shape of one of the Master Control Program’s Recognizers. It was enormous, many times the size of the tank, a glittering, metallic blue-black. The Reco glided toward him, not yet sure that he was an intruder.
    It flew lightly, quickly, an inverted U of armor-plated battleship, shaped from field-bonded polyhedrons, its turret-head dangerously alight. Clu wondered if its crew, there in that fortress of a cranium, had identified him yet.
    A second Reco floated into sight behind the first, its black component modules outlined in crimson energy. The two swooped toward Clu’s tank, their pairs of gigantic pincers opened wide, the inverted U’s at maximum deployment. Either ship could easily have gathered up a half-dozen tanks in a single clutch.
    “Oh my! The long arm o’ the law!” Clu spat in consternation. But even as he did, he acted, a stranger to indecision. He watched his scope reticle and his hands flew across the controls as rapidly and surely as Flynn’s had across the keyboard of his computer terminal.
    The tank’s turret swung, its gun ranging. The long cannon elevated and its wide, flat muzzle erupted. The cannon bolt was a white chevron of energy, flashing point-foremost at the Reco. Clu’s mastery of his controls was complete; he’d aimed and fired before either Recognizer crew had had the chance to take the offensive.
    The first Reco was just beginning an evasive maneuver, its crew’s reflexes no match for Clu’s, when the V of energy struck it dead center in its head. Light leaped outward from the hit like an expanding bull’s-eye. There was a flash that made Clu blink, and an eruption of force, a secondary explosion from the Reco’s power banks that shook the canyon walls and even jostled the massive form of the other Reco. Its binding and supportive fields gone, the wounded Reco fell like a dropped safe to the canyon floor, where its components flew apart in a fireworks display of freed energy.
    But the second Reco was still to be dealt with. And Clu didn’t doubt for a moment that more were on the way. He maneuvered frantically. The tank turned, its light-treads blurring, and scuttled into a side way as enemy reinforcements began showing up for the kill.
    Clu plied his controls grimly, evading and dodging through the defile. The machine lurched and bucked, throwing him hard against his safety belt and chair back, even though the command sphere’s gymbals compensated for much of the punishment.
    A second Reco closed in; again the tank’s main gun gushed white annihilation. The Reco fired a return volley, its beam springing from a point between the tips of its colossal pincers.
    Clu sought to avoid the shot—flicking the controls with delicate precision—but there was only one way to do that, and his evasive maneuver slammed the tank against a nearby wall. The collision made the gymbals whine and nearly shook the command sphere from its mountings; Clue reeled, dizzy with the impact. The engines cut out automatically to avert an internal explosion and the tank went silent, its interior dark but for emergency lights. The cannon had bent against the wall, crumpling to uselessness.
    Clu staggered to the turret’s main hatch, seized it, and heaved against it with his shoulder. The hatch fell open and Clu dragged himself out of the turret. A Reco closed in, pincers spread. Clu stepped out onto the turret as the Bit came shooting out of the tank, looped, and hovered