“You hurt two,” Gelai told him. “They’re backing off.”
“Hurt? Great.”
“Come on,” Monica said. “We can get to the cars.” She raised her voice.
“Random suppression fire, vertical. I want those bastards fleeing us. Okay, move.”
Eight machine guns opened fire into the overhead lattice as everyone rushed towards the hole in the wall.
High above them, and safe in his web of metal cables, Baranovich looked out of a filthy window at the three Tonalan police cars drawn up outside.
There were long skid marks in the snow behind each of them, evidence of their hard braking. One other surviving police car was chasing after the twenty-first-century rally car, siren blaring and lights flashing as they both tore along the bottom of the shed wall. Dark-clad officers were advancing towards the embassy cars.
“Let’s liven things up a little,” he said above the fractious roar of the machine guns and whining ricochets. He joined hands with the three possessed beside him. Together they launched a huge fireball and sent it curving down on one of the stationary police cars.
The response was immediate and overwhelming. After having their car processors glitched, then crashing, being shot at by starship X-ray lasers, losing their suspects, and now having to verify whether the embassy cars were occupied by armed ESA operatives, the Tonalan security police were by now understandably a little tense. Every weapon they had was abruptly trained on Disassembly Shed Four.
Monica was twenty metres from the smashed door when the ancient, brittle panels were bombarded by hollow-case bullets, TI pulses, maser beams, and small EE rounds. Blinding light ruptured the gloom ahead of her. She hit the floor hard as white-hot fragments slashed through the air. Smoking particles rained down around her, sizzling on the moist concrete. Several landed on her head, singeing through her hair to sting her scalp.
“THIS IS THE POLICE. ABANDON YOUR WEAPONS. COME OUT ONE AT A TIME WITH YOUR BLOCKS AND IMPLANTS DEACTIVATED. YOU WILL NOT BE TOLD AGAIN.”
“Holy fuck,” Monica grunted. She raised her head. A huge strip of the wall had vanished; maleficent shifting light from the orbital battle shone in. It illuminated a multitude of broken girders whose fractured ends dripped glowing droplets. The framework structure emitted a distressed groan; weakened junctions were snapping under the stress of the new loading, starting a chain reaction. She could see whole levels of metal bending then dropping in juddery motions.
“Move!” she shouted. “It’s going to land on us.”
A flare of white fire billowed down out of the darkness, pummelling an operative to her knees. Her screams vanished beneath the plangent crackling of her armour suit and skin igniting.
Four machine guns opened up in response.
“No,” Monica said. That was exactly what they wanted. It was a near-perfect snare manoeuvre, she admitted angrily as she flung her arms over her head again. And we blundered right into it.
The security police heard the machine guns and opened fire once more.
Baranovich hadn’t been expecting quite such an emphatic rejoinder from the forces of law and order—these modern weapons were so fearsomely powerful. Twice now the weakened framework had shifted around him, forcing him to snatch at the girders and reinforce their solidity with his energistic power. That was dangerous. The metal was grounding out the EE rounds, and while he was some distance away from their impact zone, those kind of voltages were lethal to a possessed and it only took one wild shot.
When the second round of shooting started he jumped down onto the nearest walkway and sprinted away. His impressive costume’s shiny leather boots changed to yankee-style trainers with inch-thick soles; a fervent hope in his mind that imagined rubber would be as effective an insulator as the real stuff. He could sense others of his group on the move, shaken by the ferocity of the attack.
Joshua looked up to see the last frayed streamers of electrons writhing down the metal pillars. The whole of the smashed-up framework above and around him was grinding loudly. It was going to collapse any second.
Self-preservation kicked in strong—fuck Mzu, I’m going to die if I stay here. He scrambled to his feet and slapped Melvyn, who still had his hands over his head, face jammed against the floor.
“Shift it, both of you, now!” He started running, out from under the framework, and angling away from the gigantic hole the police had blown in the wall. There were a lot of footsteps splashing through the puddles behind him. He scanned around quickly. It wasn’t just Melvyn, Dahybi, and Keaton who were following him; all the agency operatives and Mzu’s wacko entourage were coming too. Everybody racing across the Disassembly Shed’s high bay floor in pursuit as if he were showing them the way to salvation. “Jesus wept!” He didn’t want this! Just having Melvyn and Dahybi coming with him across an open space would have proved tempting for the possessed, but Mzu too …
Unlike the Baranovich group who had set up the meeting, the ESA and the Edenists who had unlimited access to the Kulu embassy’s memory files, and the security police who knew their home territory, Joshua didn’t quite appreciate the layout of the Disassembly Sheds. Even their madcap drive through the foundry yard hadn’t conclusively demonstrated to him that the canals ran straight through the centre of every shed. So he certainly didn’t know that the only way over the water was a bridge which ran along the door above the smaller canal.
What he did know was that there was a perilously dark and wide gulf in the floor ahead of him, and getting closer very fast. Only now did he hear the gentle slopping of the water, and realize what it was. He nearly went sprawling headlong as he came to a confounded halt a metre from the edge, arms flapping eccentrically for balance. He turned to see everyone rushing en masse towards him, because they’d thought he knew what he was doing, and there hadn’t been time to ask questions. Behind them, Baranovich’s possessed were mustering on the walkway, garish costumes agleam in the rainy dusk.
Alkad was running with her head ducked down, forcing her game leg along.
Gelai and Ngong were on either side of her, holding her tight. A bubble of air around the three of them swirled with tiny glimmers of silver light.
Baranovich’s laughter poured out into the vast enclosed space of the central high bay. He pointed, and Joshua could do nothing but stare dumbly as the bolt of white fire streaked across the intervening space straight at him.
Dick Keaton was leading the pack of desperadoes on the floor of the high bay, running hard. He was less than four metres from an aghast Joshua when Baranovich’s fire bolt hit the data security expert clean between his shoulder blades. It burst open in a spectacular cloud of dancing twisters that drained away into the drizzle. And Dick Keaton was completely unharmed.
“Close one,” he jeered happily. His arms wrapped around Joshua, momentum carrying the pair of them over the edge of the central basin just as the mutilated framework collapsed. Fractured girders were tossed out of the crumpling wreckage in all directions, clanging loudly as they hit the floor. A huge split tore up the wall like a lightning bolt in reverse. It was a hundred and seventy metres high when it finally stopped. The framework structure settled into an uneasy silence.
The black water in the ironberg basin was freezing. Joshua yelled out as it closed around him, seeing bubbles bumble past his face. The cold shock was intense enough to make his heart jump—frightening him badly. Salt water rushed into his open mouth. And—Jesus, thank you—his neural nanonics came back on-line.
Nerve impulse overrides squeezed his throat muscles tight, preventing any water flooding his lungs. Analysis of his spinning inner ears revealed his exact orientation. His thrashing became purposeful, shunting him straight up.
He broke surface to draw down a huge desperate gulp of air. People in flexible armour suits were flying through the air above him; human lemmings landing in the basin with a tremendous splash. He saw Mzu, her small figure unmistakable in its prim business suit.
Keaton shook his head dog
-fashion, blowing his cheeks out. “Hell, it’s cold.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Joshua demanded. “They hit you dead on, and it never even blistered you.”
“Right question, sir, but unfortunately the wrong pronoun. As I once said to Oscar Wilde. Stumped him completely; he wasn’t quite as hot on the riposte as legend says.”
All Joshua could do was cough. The cold was crippling. His neural nanonics were battling hard to prevent his muscles from cramping. And they were going to lose.
White fire smashed against the basin rim five metres above him. Radiant dribbles of magma ran down the basin wall.
“What in God’s name did you bring us here for?” Monica shouted.
“I didn’t fucking bring you!”
Her hand grabbed the front of his ship-suit. “How do we get out?”
“Jesus, I don’t know.”
She let go, her arm shaking badly. Another strike of white fire lashed above them. The rim was outlined like a dawn horizon from orbit.
“They can’t hit us here,” Samuel said, his long face was dreadfully strained.
“God, so what,” Monica answered. “They’ve only got to walk over here and we’ll be dead.”
“We won’t last that long. Hypothermia will get us before then.”
Monica glared at Joshua. “Can anyone see some steps?”
“Dick,” Joshua said. “Are your neural nanonics working?”
“Yes.”
“Access the shed’s management computer. Find us a way out. Now!”
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“Half the shed’s processors are glitched,” Dick Keaton said. “The rest are in standby mode. It’s been mothballed.”
“What?” Joshua had to shout to make his mouth work. His kicks to tread water were difficult now.
“Mothballed. That’s why there’s no ironberg in here. The small canal leaks. They drained it for repairs.”
“Drained it? Let me have the file.”
Keaton datavised it over, and Joshua assigned it to a memory cell.
Analysis programs went primary, tearing into the information. What he wanted was a way to drain the basin, or at the very least a ladder. Which wasn’t quite what he found when the schematics display rose into his mind. “Ione!” he shouted. “Ione.” His voice was pathetically weak. He worked his elbows, swivelling around to face Samuel. “Call her.”
“Who?” the bewildered Edenist asked.
“Ione Saldana, the Lord of Ruin. Call her with affinity.”
“But—”
“Do it or we’re going to die in here.”
The gee force on Lady Macbeth’s bridge began to abate, sliding down from a tyrannical eight to an unpleasant three.
He certainly flies the same way as Joshua, Sarha thought. The few seconds she’d spared from fire control to monitor their vector had shown her a starship which was keeping pretty close to the course which the navigation program had produced. Not bad for a daydreamer novice.
“The Urschel is accelerating,” Beaulieu said. “Seven gees, they’re going for altitude. Must be a jump.”
“Good,” Sarha said firmly. “That means no more of those bloody antimatter combat wasps.”
All three of them had cheered when the Pinzola was struck by a fusion blast. The resulting explosion as all the frigate’s antimatter confinement chambers were destroyed had blown half of Lady Mac’s sensors, and Pinzola had been eleven thousand kilometres away, almost below the horizon.
The orbital conflict had been played out hard and fast over the last eleven minutes. Several starships had been hit, but over fifteen had risen to a jump altitude and escaped. There were no more SD platforms left in low orbit, although plenty of combat wasps were still prowling.
But they were all a long way from Lady Mac. That was Sarha’s prime concern. As Beaulieu had said, the old girl could cope with Nyvan’s geriatric weapons. They had a couple of new scars on the hull from kinetic debris, and three radioactive hot spots from pulser shots. But the worst of it was over now.
“Gravitonic distortion,” Beaulieu said. “Another voidhawk has left.”
“Sensible ship,” Sarha muttered. “Liol, how long until we’re over Joshua’s horizon?”
“Ninety seconds—mark.”
She datavised an order into the starship’s communications system. The main dish slid out of its recess and swung around, pointing at the horizon ahead.
Ione eased herself around the metal pillar to take another look into the shed’s high bay. The possessed up on the walkway were squirting a continual stream of white fire at the rim of the basin. That must mean Joshua and the others were still alive.
Now appeared to be the optimum time to enter the fray. She had hung back ever since she’d sprinted into the shed ahead of the agency operatives.
This whole situation was so fluid, the outcome could well be decided by who had the greatest tactical reserve. She wasn’t quite sure where that decision had come from; some tactics file her ‘original’ self and Tranquillity had loaded into the serjeant, or internal logic. How much inventiveness she owned in this aspect she wasn’t sure of. But wherever it had come from, it had been proved right.
She had watched the events play out from the cover of the framework, hovering on the brink of intervention. Then the police had arrived and fouled up everything. And Joshua had fled across the high bay to the basin.
She couldn’t work that one out. It was seawater in the basin, which must be close to the freezing point. Now he was pinned down.
If she could get a clear shot at the walkway the possessed were using, she might be able to bring them all crashing down. But she wasn’t sure how effective even the heavy-calibre rifle would be against such a concentration of energistic power.
<
Cold accompanied the affinity call, she knew exactly what it was like to be immersed in the basin. <
<>
He widened his mind still further. She looked out at anguished heads bobbing in the water. Joshua was right in front of her, hair plastered down over his forehead. His throat laboured hard to force the words out.
“Ione—shoot—out—the—small—canal—lock—gate—blow—that—fucker—away—good—and—be —quick—we—can’t—last —long.”
She was already running towards the end of the shed. There was a rectangular gap in the framework structure over the small canal. It framed the door which slid up to allow the ironberg segments through. The bottom of the door closed to within a metre of the water itself. Below that, she could see the two lock gates which held back the water while the canal outside was being repaired. They were solid metal, tarnished by age, and thick with fronds of sapphire-coloured seaweed.
She squatted down beside the edge of the canal and fired the heavy-calibre rifle. Trying to puncture the gates themselves would be hopeless, they weren’t made from any modern laced-molecule alloy, but their thickness made them completely impenetrable. Instead, the explosive-tipped shells pounded into the canal’s old carbon-concrete walls, demolishing the hinges and their mountings.
The gates moved slightly as water squirted around the crumbling concrete.
Their top hinges were almost w
recked, making them gradually pivot downwards, a motion which prised them further apart. A V-shaped gap appeared between them, with water gushing out horizontally. Ione fired again and again, concentrating on one wall now, mauling it to smithereens. One of the hinges gave way.
<
Ione saw the shadows shifting behind her, knowing what it meant. Then the shadows were fading away as the light grew brighter. She switched her aim to the stubborn gate itself, using the explosions to punch it down, adding their weight to that of the water.
White fire engulfed her.
The gates were wrenched apart, and the water plummeted into the empty canal beyond.
“Go with it,” Joshua datavised as the first stirrings of a current stroked his faltering legs. “Stay afloat.”
A waterfall roar reverberated around the shed’s high bay, and he was pulled along the basin wall. The others were twirling around him. Quiet, unseen currents sucked them towards the end of the basin where it narrowed like a funnel into the small canal. They started to pick up speed as they drew closer to the mouth. Then the basin was behind them.
Water was surging along the canal.
“Joshua, please acknowledge. This is Sarha, acknowledge please, Joshua.” His neural nanonics told him the signal was being routed to his communication block via the spaceplane. Everyone, it seemed, had survived the orbital battle.
“I’m here, Sarha,” he datavised. The canal water was boiling tempestuously as it flowed under the door, dipping down sharply; and he was racing towards it at a hazardous rate. It was becoming very hard to keep afloat, even here where the level was sinking. He tried a few feeble side-strokes to get away from the wall where the churning was at its worst.
“Joshua, you’re entering into an emergency situation.”
Two curling vortex waves recoiled off the canal walls to converge above him as he passed under the shed door. “No shit!” The waves closed over his head. Neural nanonics triggered a massive adrenaline secretion, enabling him to fight his way back to the surface with recalcitrant limbs. Distorted daylight and iron-hard foam crashed around him as he floundered back into the air.
The Neutronium Alchemist Page 112
