She felt for the device and lifted it. “Great,” she said. “Now all we have to do is try and find a way out of this place.”
“If I may make a suggestion,” Feril said, its voice calm. “While I was standing near it earlier I had the opportunity of scanning the monowheeled vehicle taken from the tower. It appears to be in working order.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Or we could just wait here for my cousin to appear.”
“Ah,” Feril said carefully. “I am not sure about that.”
“You’re not?”
“I was able to observe the action taking place on the desert surface and in the nearby hills by way of the high-definition screens built into the walls of this place. Those in the first wave of comparatively lightly armed attackers were not identifiable. However, those in the second wave, who seemed to be fighting both the Keep’s defending forces as well as the first wave of attackers, were almost certainly Huhsz.”
“Huhsz?” she said into the darkness.
“I believe so. There were certain insignia on the wings of the aircraft forming—”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“I am sure of what I saw on the screens,” Feril said cautiously.
“Fate,” she said. Then, “But if Geis is mad enough to start crossing the Areas, they certainly are.” She hoisted the gun to her hip, holding it like a child. “Where’s the monowheel?”
“This way.”
The floor bucked beneath them, almost throwing her off her feet. Another devastating crash sounded from a distant part of the bunker.
The android helped her into the monowheeled vehicle’s open cockpit. She shoved the Lazy Gun into the long footwell past what felt like a pair of hanging pedals, then she sat. There was a small compartment just to the rear of the cockpit; Feril climbed up and stuck its legs into it, sitting on the rear of the vehicle just in front of the tilted monowheel. The vehicle moved fractionally, with the hint of a whine.
“Now what?” Sharrow said, raising her voice above a roaring noise coming from somewhere ahead in the darkness. A gust of hot air blew around them, flinging dust into her face. She closed her eyes.
“Try this,” it said. “Excuse me.” She felt it lean over her, bending her forward; she heard a click, then lights glowed. The android leaned back again. She looked round at it; its face gleamed softly in the green light spilling from the vehicle’s screen and instruments.
“Perhaps you should drive,” she said.
“The position here is a little exposed,” it told her. “Allow me to navigate.”
“All right.” She turned back and studied the controls; a twin-stalk hand-grip with various buttons arranged on the columns, two pedals for her feet; various dials, screens and touch-holos, and a head-up display seemingly hovering in midair in front of her.
She pressed a pedal; the monowheel’s nose dipped. The other pedal brought it level again. She took the hand controls and squeezed both; her left hand was stiff and hurt a little, but it was bearable. There was a beeping noise from the instruments. Nothing else happened until she let go the left grip. The monowheel leaped forward, banging her head against the seat’s head-rest.
“Stop!” Feril yelled.
She released the grip and they stopped quickly. She sensed the android turning behind her.
“Oh well,” it said, turning back. “I don’t believe you were too keen on that young man, anyway.”
“Dead?” she asked.
“Thoroughly,” Feril said.
She found the lights and another holo display, switchable between radar, ultrasound and passive EM. “Hell,” she said, “I had a unit like this on a bike once.” She adjusted the display to optimum on EM.
She was sitting on the safety harness; she lifted, pulled the straps out and fastened them round her. The holo display showed the whole bunker ahead of her in gray; the roof had collapsed in at least two places. The ramp she had been brought up was lying off to her left.
There was a muffled rumble from above, followed by another hot gust of air.
“I think we should leave this place fairly soon,” Feril said.
“So do I,” she said. “Ready?”
“Ready. I suggest you head for the ramp.”
“On my way.” She pressed the right grip lightly, sending the monowheel humming forward over the floor, then tipped the wheel; the vehicle turned. She looked at the squashed body of the young emissary she’d kicked and then run over. The monowheel was obviously quite heavy.
The other emissary lay still at the foot of the dais. His chest, neck and face were still cooling. She thought she heard him moan.
She took the laser from her jacket, reached out over the side of the cockpit and shot him twice in the head.
She paused just once more, at the other cooling body on the floor, then left her image lying there and powered the monowheel down the ramp.
There was a door.
“Just a minute,” Feril said. “This seems to require a fairly simple radio code.”
The door trundled aside, revealing the short corridor walled with roller doors.
“Well done,” she said, moving the monowheel forward.
“My pleasure.” The second roller door on the left rippled as a rumble of noise sounded all about them. “The door opposite that, I think,” Feril said. “It will require the vehicle’s cannon.”
“Cannon?” she said, looking round at the android.
It nodded. “I believe this was a robo-tank hunter; a sporting vehicle used by the Vrosal Moguls following the—”
Another blast shook the roller door.
“Aiming and firing controls?” she said quickly.
“You aim the whole vehicle,” Feril said. “The pedals control nose angle, the red cursor on the head-up is aim-point and the red button on top of the left hand-grip fires.”
She fired at the door; there was a burst of light from beneath the monowheel vehicle, an ear-ringing bang and a single small hole appeared in the roller door. An instant later the door bulged and burst open as the shell exploded behind it.
Wreckage tumbled past them; she ducked, glanced back at Feril, who seemed to be unharmed, then eased the monowheel over the remains of the door. The vehicle rolled with uncanny smoothness into a circular-section tunnel fitted with twin toothed-metal rails. There were flat rail-cars sitting on the rails; beyond them the tunnel spiraled upward.
“This is how I was brought in,” Feril said. “I believe it leads to just below the surface.”
“Maybe so, but how do we get over these flat cars?”
“I believe this vehicle is quite sophisticated for our day; I suggest just driving at them.”
“All right,” she said. She sent the monowheel forward slowly; it climbed over the flat cars as though they weren’t there. She looked back and shrugged, then powered on up the spiral tunnel.
There were blast doors but they had all been opened.
The monowheel hummed up the spiral tunnel for several minutes without incident, eventually emerging into an underground marshaling yard. She heard heavy-caliber gunfire echoing in the distance and saw flashes reflect off the ribbed gray concrete of the ceiling.
“That way, I think,” Feril said, pointing past some supporting columns, away from the firing but toward an area of the yard where the view was hazed with smoke.
The monowheel raced over a tracery of tracks, keeping perfectly stable. The vehicle crossed a bridge over another level of the underground yard where smoke billowed up; past the smoke they found the bodies of a Keep guard and one of the original attackers. The Keep guard still clutched his rifle. He had been beheaded, presumably by the bloody sword hanging by its lanyard from the hand of the other dead man, who lay against the railings of the underground bridge, his tunic blown almost right off by the grenade explosion that had killed him.
She started at the man’s naked right arm as they passed, slowing down for a better look.
She shook her head and accelerated again. The
black mouth of another tunnel expanded to swallow the speeding monowheel.
The Advance Tactical Command Team entered the Deep Citadel through an aperture in the roof. They were covered in dust and stank of smoke. A couple of them had been lightly wounded, though really they had been almost unopposed. The Keep’s own defenders seemed to have been effectively disarmed by their original attackers, who themselves had not been equipped with heavy ordnance.
One of the Keep’s defenders had been captured and made to cooperate; he had guided them here, to the throne room.
The throne itself had gone, vanished into the roof; tech teams were still trying to break into the secure tunnels on the two levels immediately above. They suspected the master of this underground maze had flown, and taken their quarry with him. There were many tunnels and escape routes into the desert and the mountains around and they had not been able to find all of them in the short time they’d had available, between being granted permission to make this incursion and the launch of the attack itself, precipitated by that of the quaintly mounted and lightly armed forces who had preceded them.
They explored the remains of the circular chamber, using nightsights.
Ghosts, thought the Priest Colonel. We are like ghosts.
They were almost a kilometer underground, and they feared that once the man who had ruled over this sunken fortress had made good his escape, it would all be destroyed.
“Sir!” a yearfellow shouted from the other side of the black column that filled the middle of the dark chamber.
The Priest Colonel and his aides approached the yearfellow, standing pointing his quivering gun at the body on the floor.
They all looked at it for a while.
A couple of his men wept; several offered up muttered prayers of thanks.
“It’s her,” a voice said.
“Analysis,” the Priest Colonel said. One aide crouched down to the body, unstrapping a bulky piece of equipment from his backpack. “Send the results direct to the Shrine,” the Priest Colonel said. Another aide knelt, unhitching a powerful comm unit.
The Priest Colonel knelt too and removed one of his armored gloves. He reached out and touched the dead woman’s pale, cold hand.
“I want physical tissue samples sent immediately to the Shrine,” he said. The first aide took a small vial from his tunic and tore off a strip of flesh left near what had been the woman’s right eye. He sealed the bloody scrap in the vial and handed it to another of the faithful, the young yearfellow who had first discovered the corpse.
“Take my own craft,” the Priest Colonel told him, removing a ring from his finger and handing it to the yearfellow. “Fly straight to the Shrine. God go with you.”
The yearfellow saluted and ran off.
The Priest Colonel stared at the body lying on the floor, as the gene-sampling machine hummed and clicked.
The battle had extended far and wide. The bandamyion-mounted troops had been de-planed from their transports, drawn up ready to attack, and had just begun their advance after the electronic disablement of the Keep’s defenses when they had themselves been overwhelmed by the Huhsz forces, their light-harness cannon, laser-carbines, pistols and ceremonial swords no match for the Huhsz high-velocity projectile weapons, smart missiles, pulse-shaped tunneling demolition charges and airborne X-ray lasers.
The monowheel sped through the shattered iris of a door low in the foothills above the desert, then turned smartly and accelerated up the hillside, every traversed ridge and boulder a soft ripple of movement as its wheel flowed or its body leaped over the obstructions, leaving only a faint trace of dust behind, while its camouflage-skinned body flowed with constantly changing patterns and shades of ochre and gray. Air roared; the transparent cockpit-screen rose liquidly around her of its own accord, reducing the wind-blast.
She pressed the accelerator grip a little harder; the monowheel screamed still faster uphill, forcing her head back against the seat. She let the grip go; they coasted toward the summit of the ridge.
She braked the monowheel with the left-hand grip. The vehicle purred to a halt, then stood perfectly still and silent on its one slanted wheel.
The woman and the android looked down into the bowl of the desert. The battle was a great broad, slow column of smoke and dust over the center of the depression. A dozen or so craters had been punched into the surface of the desert, each a hundred meters or more across and half that deep; smoke piled out of three of them.
As they watched, a gray shape rose quickly out of one of the other craters, twisted once in the air and powered away, climbing rapidly as it angled northeast and took on the color of the sky. Its sonic boom sounded almost soft amongst the crackling detonations of munitions in the desert below.
She watched the aircraft go, its half-seen outline disappearing over the pink-lit mountain peaks, then she turned and squinted downward. She dragged the Lazy Gun out of the footwell and pointed it over the edge of the monowheel’s cockpit, bringing its sights down to her eyes.
Perhaps six score bandamyions lay strewn across the desert, in small groups. A few of their riders were still firing, some of them using the bodies of their dead mounts as barely effectual cover from the armored Huhsz troops.
She looked up to see Huhsz weapon platforms cruising above the killing ground, firing monofilament bi-missiles and cluster rounds almost casually into the fray, their every discharge turning a few more of the fallen bandamyions into chopped meat and killing a rider or two.
A couple of arrowhead shapes circled high above, black on blue. To the south, beyond a distant filigree of contrails, the sky sparkled sporadically. The Lazy Gun showed no more detail.
She moved the monowheel fifty meters along the ridge to where a dead bandamyion rider lay, crushed underneath his fallen mount.
She looked, frowning, at his out-thrown arm.
“They seem better armed,” Feril said.
She turned and caught sight of a last group of riders; just a few black dots against the cinder-gray of the hills four or five kilometers away. A Huhsz gun platform exploded in the air near the group of riders and fell smoking to the ground.
She looked through the Lazy Gun again, turning up the magnification.
The view wavered. The bandamyion riders were like ghosts against the trembling image of the barren earth of the mountains. The group of ten riders ascended quickly to a pass in the mountains, then stopped. One of them stood up in his saddle. Another raised something to his shoulder and a pink spark flamed, washing out the view in the Gun’s sights for a moment; she looked away and up and saw first one, then both of the arrowhead shapes high above blossom with silent fire against the blue, and start to fall.
She looked back through the Gun’s sights.
The rider standing in the saddle—outlined against the start of the sunset, body made thin and stick-like by the wash of pastel light behind—seemed to look down into the desert.
She thought she saw him shake his head, but the quivering image made it hard to be certain.
“That is, perhaps, your cousin,” Feril said quietly. “I might be able to contact him, if you like.”
She looked up at the android, then over to the rider crushed under his dead mount.
“No,” she said, putting the Gun down. “Don’t do that.” The group of riders at the pass in the distant mountains were barely visible dots, a tiny, dark flaw against the pale sunset light. “Just a moment,” she said.
The monowheel dipped millimetrically and made the tiniest of whining noises as she got down from it and walked to where the dead man’s arm stuck out across the dust from beneath the tawny pelt of the dead bandamyion. The rider’s gun lay nearby.
She lifted the rider’s cold, gray hand up; the sleeve of his tunic fell further back. She inspected the mark on his wrist.
“What do you see, Feril?” she asked.
“I see a patch of slightly abraded, calloused skin which I would guess extends to a two-centimeter-wide ring round the dead man’s
wrist,” Feril said. “There are two immediately adjacent outer rings which look as though they formed the limits of a wider band of callusing in the past.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I see, too.”
She let the dead man’s hand fall back to the dust and picked up the light laser-carbine that had fallen from his hand.
She walked round the bandamyion, looking for anything else, and saw the Keep-uniformed body of a guard lying half in and half out of a shallow trench downhill. She turned him over; he’d been shot with a small-beam laser.
She tried to fire the guard’s gun but it only clicked.
She looked into the distance. “Mind Bomb,” she whispered.
She returned to the other side of the dead animal and looked up at the darkening blue vault above, then at the android sitting patiently to the rear of the perfectly still vehicle’s cockpit, the tilted monowheel itself curving out behind Feril’s slender body like a rounded fin.
“Do you know roughly where we are?” she asked.
“Only to within about one or two hundred kilometers,” Feril said apologetically.
“That’ll do,” she said. “Think this glorified monocycle could take me to Udeste?” She dusted off her hands as she walked back to the vehicle.
“Udeste?” Feril’s head moved back a fraction.
“Yes,” she said. “I was thinking of heading into the sunset and turning right when I saw the ocean, but maybe you can find a more direct route, if this thing has the range.”
“Well,” Feril said. “I suppose I could, and I suppose this could, technically. But aren’t there forces between here and there who might attempt to stop us?”
“There are indeed,” she said, swinging back up into the cockpit. She patted the Lazy Gun. “Though if we can get the lock off this, they won’t be able to stop us.”
“I am not sure that will be easy,” Feril said. “What if we cannot release the weapon?”
She looked into the machine’s sunglass-eyes, seeing herself reflected twice. She watched her tiny, distorted images shrug.
Against a Dark Background Page 52
