Felix dropped her rifle, eyeballing the plume of smoke belching from the side of the building. "Whipsaw on artillery suppression," she snapped, gesturing for the squad support weapon fireteam to head for the main buildings. "Get onto the roof, cover these skyscrapers, torch anything that moves!"
Then she had time to turn back to the shuttle. The aircraft was engulfed in flame, the entire rear third smashed into ruin. Oily black smoke roared up from burning vegetation all around. One wing had been torn straight off and now tipped forward at an awkward angle. The matching landing gear was skewed out like a broken leg.
"Sho-sa Kosho!" Felix felt her stomach twist into a cruel knot. She scrambled forward through smoldering rose bushes. "Second team, with me. We've got to get Fleet out of there!"
Waves of heat beat at her face and the Heicho wished she were in full powered armor. She ducked under the broken wing once she saw the entire rear loading ramp structure was twisted into a snarl of blackened metal and armor plating. The fire-suppression system inside the aircraft was coughing foam, but failing to dampen the blaze. The hex-skin of the shuttle popped and hissed, glowing cherry red. She ran forward, wondering if the forward crew doors were still operable.
The door seemed intact, but the access plate cover was bent and refused to open under her reaching fingers. I'm too damn short, she snarled to herself, quick fingers unfolding a cutting tool. "Carlyle! Get over here and lift me up -"
A white-hot point appeared at the edge of the door. The two Marines who'd come at her call fell back, surprised. Felix watched for a bare second – saw the point travel upwards, shearing through the armored door – and jumped out of the way before the cutting torch beam clove through her right arm.
"Stand back," she shouted, ducking down under the curve of the shuttle body itself. She was sweating furiously – the whole shuttleskin was bleeding heat at a tremendous rate – and the grass under her boots crisped black.
The cutting torch cut off, a ringing clang followed and the entire lock mechanism flew out. Two Marines reached up as the door ground up and seized hold of the first body pushed out of the stricken aircraft. Felix wiped her brow, half blinded by sweat, and keyed up her all-units channel.
"Form on the shuttle," she barked. "We've got wounded and we need to get them under cover to medical."
Another explosion shook the grounds and the upper floor of the Library tumbled down into an ornamental pool. The staccato roar of the Whipsaw followed before the rumbling boom of the rocket blast had faded. Felix slid out into the open, turning to cover the gardens with her rifle, and caught sight of a dull black Fleet z-suit being lowered from the shuttle door. Helsdon was silhouetted there, his back to raging flames, face tight with pain, hands steady as he handed Sho-sa Kosho down to Carlyle.
The commander's face was sheened with crimson and her visor was gone, ripped away by the explosion. Long black hair, matted with blood, clung to her neck and suit. Felix felt time slow, hand reaching out to seize the woman's medband and turn the strip of metal around. There were too many winking red lights.
"Let's go!" The Heicho slapped Carlyle on his shoulder, shoving him and his burden towards the Residence. "Go-go-go!" Felix reached up, took Helsdon's hand and helped the engineer jump down. The broken shuttle groaned, metal twisting in the inferno burning inside, and they ran across the flat, trimmed sward of a zenball field towards the garden doors.
The Whipsaw on the roof roared again, now mounted on a tripod and slaved to the gunner's suit sensors. Another rocket shrieked across the grounds and brushed a stream of flechettes. The weapon staggered in the air, belching flame. Riddled with millimeter-wide punctures, the remains of the missile plowed through the rose bushes, crashed into a low brick wall and failed to detonate.
A Sub-Basement The District of Poisoners, Parus
Lachlan scowled, black hair falling into his eyes, and thumbed up a system status display on his primary v-pane. He itched, his stomach was cramped from hunger, and the entire room smelled very sharply of sweat, fatigue and half-heated threesquares. Dozens of tiny rectangles appeared on the v-pane, showing the status of his surveillance network in the cities of the Phison valley. Two-thirds or more of the v-feeds were blank or showing a skull-glyph indicating the spyeye or stationary relay camera was dead or unreachable.
A truly enormous headache was being held at bay by his medband, but the Йirishman could still feel the pressure behind a thin drug-induced veil.
"Sir?"
He looked up and saw one of the surveillance technicians, her shirt stained with sweat, standing up at her console, an old-fashioned landline phone in her hands. "What is it?"
"I've…I've got a call for you, sir." The technician held out the ancient-looking, enameled plastic device. "From a long-distance office in Gandaris. It's the Resident's wife, Mrs. Petrel. She says…she says the city has risen up against the Imperial presence, Prince Tezozуmoc has disappeared, there's rioting in the streets and she needs immediate extraction for herself and her ladies-in-waiting."
Lachlan rubbed his eyes. This just gets better and better, doesn't it? He cleared away the spyeye diagnostic with a sweep of his hand and tapped up a map of the northern city. "We've no way to pick her up by air. She'll have to make her way out on the ground. Where exactly are they?"
The technician mumbled into her phone – the Йirishman stifled a brittle laugh, amused to see her using such an antiquated device. But here? It's the very latest in native-tech! When the Old Woman had pressed him to use the ancient native telecom network linking Parus and some of the larger cities, he'd balked – arguing their work crews and technicians would be better employed ramping up the comm relay network – but she'd insisted on having a backup for the backup. Now six-hundred-year-old cables are carrying nearly a third of our data traffic…
Until the arrival of the Imperials, the old Arthavan-period fiber-optic network buried beneath Takshila, Parus and the other cities had gone unused and apparently forgotten. The sealed cables and their conduits were still in place – the lack of tectonic activity in the land of the Five Rivers had allowed them to remain mostly untouched as the centuries passed – but the new Jehanan civilization struggling up from the ruins had lost the equipment to access the physical network. Rigging adapters to allow Imperial comm to use the outmoded multiplexed fiber had been a bit tricky, but Mirror technicians were nothing if not resourceful.
"She says they're hiding in one of our safe houses downtown. Number sixteen, on Quelling Tongue street." The technician rubbed her ear, waiting for Lachlan to consider the alternatives displayed on the map.
"I see. They're four blocks from the railway terminal." He tapped up a timetable, nodded to himself and tabbed through a series of native agent biographies the comp had on hand. "Tell her to get to the station and find a ticket clerk named Hundun Pao – he's one of ours – there should be an express train to Parus leaving in about…three hours." The Йirishman smiled grimly. "Assuming the trains are still running, and Petrel and her girls aren't killed or captured on the way."
The technician swallowed and began speaking rapidly into the phone.
I'm a travel service, Lachlan thought, rather bitterly. What a disaster… Fetching and carrying for the Anglish of all people!
The District of Open Eyes Takshila, Where Once Sra Haykan Devised a Perfect Grammar
Gretchen was running along a walkway, dusky-yellow flowers carpeting the rooftops on either side of her, when the overcast sky turned the color of spoiled milk. Her comm had only just woken to life, and she caught Magdalena's voice growling imprecations at Parker, when a roar of static drowned everything out and her earbug squealed painfully.
Disoriented, she fell sprawling on the wooden planks. Her right knee twisted painfully and the survey comp jammed into her stomach.
"Oooof!" Anderssen dug out the earbug, eyes watering, and flung away the suddenly-hot metal, a brief spark of metallic glitter disappearing into the field of poppylike flowers. "Damn!"
Ging
erly, she rubbed her ear, wondering if she'd been burnt. The queer light in the sky began to fade and Gretchen looked up, childhood memories waking in response to the odd radiance stabbing through the clouds.
A misaligned three-d projector is buzzing behind her, casting an image of gray seas under a leaden sky at the front of her classroom. A shape moves beneath the waters, an enormous black whale of steel and carbon-composite fibers. Hatches open, something bursts forth from the heaving sea, an engine ignites and a sleek dagger roars away across the wave tops. Rain hammers down from the storm clouds, muting the distinctive sound of the launch.
The Swedish Royal Navy cruise missile extends stubby wings and increases its speed, darting in and out of wave troughs thrown up by the storm. The North Sea is blanketed by a raging gale, the first onset of winter pressing down from the pole. Under the cover of howling winds, three Vasa -class attack submarines lead off the strike against the Skawtish mainland.
Dozens more cruise missiles, interspersed with decoys and Shrike -class radar jammers burst from the waters.
The cruise missile flashes across the Firth of Forth, dappled skin matching the waves, countermeasures shrugging aside the backscatter of Imperial over-the-horizon radar watching the sky and sea. The complex of submarine nets beneath the water do nothing to slow the missile and the choppy whitecaps confuse the low-altitude radar mounted on Arthur's Seat above the city. Even the coast watch is inside, huddled around their heaters. The winters have been growing worse again – too much atmospheric dust remains from the Blow at the beginning of the war. The bleating of alarms from their comm panels is ignored for a moment – the European Alliance fleet has been nosing about for months, tripping the sensors deployed across the sea floor – and until today there had never been a hint of actual hostilities.
At the mouth of the river Forth, the missile pops up above the dockyards, maneuvering vents jetting flame, and at last exposes itself to the fortifications on the hills above the bombed-out town. The nearest air-defense bunker retracts its armored dome, gatling cannon nosing out. But the guns react a fraction too slowly to prevent the cruise missile from detonating.
For the first time in the European theatre of war, an atomic weapon is used. Everything is blotted out by a sun-bright flash as the Varkan -class tactical nuclear warhead detonates. The city districts nearest the river mouth are instantly engulfed in raging, superheated plasma. A shockwave batters the town, toppling the ancient walls of the Castle, smashing windows and crumpling houses all up the long valley of the Forth. Buildings shatter, trapping thousands of women and children in their shelters. Every radar installation within line of sight is blinded and most are wrecked outright. The Imperial troops in the fortifications around the Firth are incinerated or stunned by the glare of the pocket-sized star.
Further north, Aberdeen and Dundee suffer similar fates. The entire air-defense network of eastern Skawtland fails, mortally wounded. At sea, wrapped in the raging storm, a combined Swedish-Russian-Danish fleet races forward. Already steam catapults are hurling aircraft from the decks of the carriers, filling the sky with a raging howl as they race treacherously westward against the island fortress…
For a moment Anderssen saw nothing but rushing clouds heavy with rain. Then a tumbling, flashing spark of light caught her eye. One of the archaic aircraft was spinning out of control, plunging towards the city. Anderssen watched in fascinated horror as the raptor-winged jet whistled down, engines dead, and plowed directly into the side of one of the towering khus rising from the center of the city. The metallic shape slammed into a cliff of yellowed concrete in a gout of dust and black smoke. A dirty cloud roiled out, spilling glittering debris down the face of the apartment building. A tongue of flame stabbed through the dust, followed by a rush of black smoke. In the blink of an eye, the aircraft was gone, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the khus. Dull reddish light spread across the row of windows.
Gretchen turned her wrist over, exposing her medband. A warning glyph flashed, indicating a radiation exposure warning. She bit her lip, watching the indicator change. Not bad, she saw. Still a good thing I've got a medband and my allotment of children. "Beautiful…all our comms will be shot."
The clatter of broad, leathery feet on wooden planks made her turn. Huffing and puffing, long snout gaping wide, Malakar approached at a run. Seeing the human had stopped, the Jehanan slowed in exhaustion and dropped long hands to the walkway.
"What – hoooooo, I've not been so hot in an age! – makes you pause in your flight, little thief?"
"Did you see the lights in the sky?" Gretchen was breathing shallowly and felt a little dizzy. The medband was dumping radiation cleansers into her bloodstream and they made her skin itch. "The crashing aircraft?"
"I did." Malakar slumped forward. Her back scales flexed up on ridges of muscle beneath the integument, increasing her surface area and making the Jehanan look like a huge porcupine. "This makes you give pause? Pricks your conscience?"
Gretchen shook her head. "You've no stories of Arthava's Fire in communal memory? No tales of the heavens bleeding flame or cruel killing light stretching from horizon to horizon?"
"Hrrrr…" The Jehanan looked up, eyes searching the clouds. They continued to roll past, spitting rain over some neighborhoods, parted here and there by gusts in the upper air. "I see no demons towering over the sky, flesh made of smoke, eyes roaring pits of fire…"
"No, not today. You're describing a citykiller cloud. This was an ECOM suppression blast at the edge of the Jaganite atmosphere." She tapped her ear, trying to muster a wry smile. "Every unshielded electronic device in this hemisphere will have just died. Every exposed comp will be scrambled."
"And so, why do you – ah, your stolen data is no more." Malakar trilled heartily. "The grilled skomsh has fallen to the ground! Soiled! Inedible! All your clever tools and devices rendered useless…" She laughed again, bellowlike lungs heaving.
Anderssen grimaced, stung by the accusation of theft. Cheater! A voice from memory cried, sounding very much like little Isabelle. You took my share!
"I don't care about the data right now," she said. "My friends have fled that khus and they're in danger and I can't find them without my comm."
The Jehanan looked up, nostrils wrinkling. "Why would they flee a fine warm sleeping pit?"
Gretchen pointed across the rooftops towards the southeast. "Someone is attacking Imperial citizens, remember? Our landlord will inform the authorities of our presence… Who else but the kujen could have attack craft likethose?"
"Hoooo… Some truth there." Malakar swung her head from side to side. "The kujen has a face of paper and ink, he does. He snuffles in the dirt before the asuchau and then spits on their tails as they turn away." A claw scratched the side of her jaw. "One wonders…Rumor has long legs among our people; often soft voices flutter about the lamps in the night, telling tales of secret excavations in the old cities and forgotten machines made whole again…"
"Like the kalpataru," Anderssen said grimly, testing her knee and wincing a little. "I need to find my friends. My apologies, but I must go."
"Hooo now!" Malakar levered herself up, alarmed. "Do not be rash! There is the matter of the divine tree…" Her voice trailed off abruptly.
Gretchen unsealed the pouch around her comp and removed the device. The screen was dull, showing no lights. "You see? It's been fried like a skomsh. I'll need another undamaged comp to extract the data from this one. Then I'll need time to analyze the remains… I don't know ifI would be able to answer any of our questions. Please, let me go. My friends may be hurt, or taken prisoner or dead."
"Then leave them behind!" The old Jehanan reached out a claw, beckoning for the comp. "I know places to hide, perhaps we can even find a working one of…these things…from a merchant."
"I'm sorry." Gretchen placed the comp in Malakar's hand. "Magdalena and Parker aren't quite my hatchlings, but they are my family. I won't abandon them." She straightened her shoulders, gave Malakar a sharp lo
ok and turned away.
"Hoooo! You can't…come back here! Human! Where are you going?"
The sound of glass shattering and angry hooting gave Anderssen pause. She had been following a lane heading down towards the khus holding their rooms and now the narrow street had reached a boulevard. A steep flight of steps led down to the edge of the curving road. Pressing herself against a plastered wall, she peered around the corner.
The broad avenue was empty of runner-carts and wagons and the usual throng of busy citizens – but a large crowd of Jehanan youths were busily smashing windows and dragging merchandise out onto the sidewalks. One store was on fire, belching clouds of heavy white smoke. An angry, grumbling sound filled the air. Gretchen squinted, letting the goggles zoom in, and saw two short-horns then hurl an Imperial three-d set into the flames with a resounding crash. A hooting cheer rose at the burst of sparks.
"Well, that's just typical…" Anderssen looked the other direction. More gangs of youths in fancy scale-paint and masks prowled the avenue, smashing windows and throwing firebombs into the shops. Some of the short-horns had bags of loot hanging from their shoulders. A bitter, sharp smell of burning wood and plastic permeated the air. Thin, flat drifts of smoke coiled between the ancient trees lining the road.
There seemed to be no way to reach the khus without crossing into plain view.
Worried, Gretchen turned, wondering if she could find a way around on the rooftops. The walkways above had been completely deserted and she guessed the more sensible locals had gotten the hatchlings inside, locked their doors and were going to wait out the rioting with eyes closed. The tall shape of the apartment building seemed intact but she couldn't get close enough to see the lobby entrance.
Malakar was waiting, looming over her, the dead comp strapped to her chest bone beneath the usual Jehanan harness. Anderssen flinched and made a face, angry with herself for not hearing the creature creep up behind her.
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