by Eric Flint
Petty dodged out of the way of the explosion, looking just like one of Granny's panicked chickens. Angrily, the slan hunter pointed his pistol toward Jem Lorry and began taking potshots at his arch-enemy, who bolted for the corner of Granny's house, crashing through her rose bushes.
Flying in tight formation, the newly arrived tendrilless engaged the secret police ships. The invaders' weapons were hot cutting beams that gutted Petty's squadron. More explosions blasted the ground. Two secret police ships erupted in a cloud of smoke and metal debris.
Flown expertly, both sets of dogfighting ships raced and dodged like swordsmen in a deadly duel. A near miss blew off the corner of Granny's roof and mangled one of her gutters.
Kathleen grabbed her father's arm. "Come on! To the hangar shed before it's destroyed. Jommy's rocket-plane!"
Gray immediately understood. "There's no better time to learn how to fly than right now."
"Granny! Come with us!" Kathleen shouted back at the house.
Petty shot twice at them as they ran to the hangar shed, but then he ran out of bullets. He cursed at his gun, then gestured wildly in the air, trying to direct his own ships to bombard the house. Instead, one of the tendrilless craft began strafing the ground, kicking up hot divots around him. The secret police chief ran for his life toward the split-rail fence, cursing over the roar of battle.
As Kathleen and her father raced to the hangar, she saw a defiant Granny emerge from her home. The old woman stood on the doorstep holding her shotgun, then she marched down the sidewalk, pointed the shotgun up at the attacking ships in the air, and unloaded both barrels. She didn't seem to care which side she was aiming at. "Who said you could bomb Granny's property?"
Her blast peppered the underbelly of one low-flying ship, and smoke began to boil from its engines. Granny busily plugged more shells into her shotgun while the two sides in the dogfight circled and dropped their bombs. She fired another round at the oncoming ships before the whole yard exploded around her. The crotchety old woman vanished in a splash of flames and dirt.
Gray yanked Kathleen's arm, dragging her along. "Come on! We couldn't save her." He shoved aside the rolling metal door of the hangar shed.
Jommy's sleek rocket-plane looked like a bird of prey, fully fueled and ready to go. Kathleen scrambled up the metal-runged ladder into the cockpit while her father operated the motor that ground open the corrugated metal roof. By the time he swung up beside her into the cockpit, she was already scanning the controls.
The engines coughed to life, then simmered, building up power. Exhaust shot out in expanding conical plumes that boiled white inside the hangar. She studied the gauges. "Warming up. Another five seconds."
Gray disengaged the landing clamps, and the rocket-plane began to move forward, unable to contain its own energy. "We're ready to launch." He looked up from the readings. "I wish I had coordinates to tell you, Kathleen. I wish I had an idea of a safe place we could go."
"I know where to go." Another gift from Jommy. She reminded him about the secret slan hideout that Peter Cross had described in his notebooks. The exact directions and coordinates were burned indelibly in her mind. "Jommy would want us to go there."
She hit the launch button, and the rocket plane burst like an arrow out of the hangar shed. They streaked away, startling the opposing squadrons of tendrilless and secret police. Below, the bombardment of the ranch continued. Over half of the ships were now knocked out of the skies and lay in smoking wreckage amid the burning conflagration of Granny's house. Even the armored walls and roof couldn't withstand it all. She saw no one alive down there.
Before any of the ships could target them, the rocket-plane raced toward freedom across the sky.
CHAPTER 37
Anthea held her baby on the comfortable cot, alone but at peace. She tucked one of the dark gray blankets around her, then drifted off to sleep, dreaming about her husband.
She smiled as she dozed, wanting to stay with Davis and his infectious grin, wanting to forget all the things that had happened. She could never get the echoes of those final gunshots out of her head. With some part of her, she knew that the tiny boy had joined her like an eavesdropper in the dreams, getting to know his own father. . . .
She awoke restless. With the bright, steady lights in the underground chamber, she couldn't tell whether it was day or night outside. Maybe she would never see open daylight or breathe fresh air again.
Anthea showered and dressed, putting on a new set of clean clothes she'd found stored in bins. After being on the run, dirty and weary, she finally began to feel refreshed, able to consider the future. She and her baby might have to spend years here, live out their lives in an unknown hideout. This complex had all the necessities she and the baby could ever ask for. Except for a real life. She couldn't just surrender like that.
She found a communications monitoring room full of visiplates and speakers tuned to numerous channels. Anthea listened to emergency reports, gathering background on the attack. In the past couple of days, she had been so frantic to save her baby, on the run from slan hunters and looters, that she'd never received explanations about the unexpected war that had engulfed the Earth.
The base's sensors and radar systems had detected a much larger occupation fleet approaching from Mars. Panicked-sounding broadcasters railed about the impending slan attack, an insidious plot that had been brewing for decades if not centuries.
With all she had learned from the library archives, however, Anthea couldn't believe that the surviving slans would choose that course of action. There had to be something more behind this devastating conflict.
When she came back into the sleeping area and saw the contented baby among his blankets, she felt an odd thought echo in her mind, a soothing confidence. Though the infant didn't even know his name, he somehow assured her that he was the key. Even a child, the right child, could solve such dire problems, given time. Anthea didn't know what to think, but she smiled down at her little son.
Suddenly, proximity alarms began to ring, warning systems coming alive. A grating noise ratcheted like a washboard on her nerves. Anthea didn't know what to do. The deep hideout had been discovered! Someone had hunted them down.
She turned away from the deafening alarms, only to see something even more incomprehensible. One of the hideout's steel-armored walls began to shimmer and grow hot, and then it melted in front of her.
With the baby safe in the other room, Anthea ran to grab one of the strange stunner weapons that she had taken from the skeletal bodies. After experimentation, she had found only one of them that still had any charge left—but she would use it to make a good accounting of herself. A last stand.
She stood bravely, holding the weapon in her trembling hands as the rest of the wall dissolved into a curtain of boiling rock and metal steam. Something large and dark came rumbling through.
CHAPTER 38
With the disintegrator beam playing ahead of the car, Jommy drove into dense strata through new tunnels of his own making. A straight line down into the secret base, where he hoped to rally hundreds of surviving slans.
They followed the beacon signal, listening to the repeated recording of his father's voice. The car rumbled along fused rock, going deeper and deeper. Jommy was eager to find the underground slan society, to reunite with a whole settlement of his people and convince them to help save the Earth.
If necessary, he would act as their leader, convince them to gather their weapons—maybe they all had disintegrator tubes, like his own. Together they could rush back to the summit meeting at Granny's ranch and make a show of strength that Jem Lorry would never suspect. With sufficient persuasion, they could make the tendrilless come to terms that would allow survival for all the races of humanity.
Rarely in his life had he known so precisely where he was supposed to go. The first slan hideout he'd discovered, years ago, was full of wonders, heavy machinery, and stored records, but it was empty of the people he so desperately sought. Someb
ody had to be in the tremendous complex up ahead, since someone had activated the distress beacon. He counted on finding new allies who could help him and explain what had happened to the rest of the slan race.
Jommy broke through a thick curved wall and drove his car forward, switching off the front-mounted disintegrator weapon. If necessary, he could always collapse the tunnel behind him to seal and protect the buried redoubt again. For now, he felt this was the only way he could get to the hideout swiftly enough.
Once he drove the car into the giant underground complex, melting through the steel plates, he brought the vehicle to a halt. He and Joanna emerged from the car filled with a sense of wonder, expecting to find a large greeting party.
Instead, he faced a haggard-looking woman pointing a weapon at them. One woman. The rest of the facility seemed deserted.
Jommy stepped forward, raising his hands, trying to be calm. "You have nothing to fear from us." He took a gamble. "We're slans. This is a slan place."
The woman had hard blue eyes and an intelligent expression. Her hair was strawberry blonde, her cheekbones high, and her nose pointed. Her lips barely moved as she spoke. "Prove to me who you are."
But Jommy no longer had tendrils, and Joanna had not been born with them. "I understand your fear. My parents were both slans, and both of them were killed by the secret police. I know what it's like, whatever happened to you."
Joanna remained at his side. "Tell us what you're doing here. How did you find this place?"
Her grip on the weapon was unwavering. "I received . . . instructions. An ancient beacon calling me here."
"And so did we. I followed the signal, a homing message that comes from here. It originated with my father." He saw her expression change. "His name was Peter Cross."
"Peter Cross?" Her shoulders slumped, and she finally lowered her weapon. "And I'm Anthea . . . Anthea Stewart. I have a baby, a newborn. He's got tendrils. I don't know how, because neither my husband nor myself are slans. I don't understand it."
Jommy felt his heart swell. He stepped forward, looking at the amazing expanse of the underground complex. "I had hoped to discover other slans here, but maybe I'll find what I need regardless."
* * *
After they had introduced themselves and briefly told their stories, Joanna busied herself in the communications room to study the progress of the approaching occupation fleet. Meanwhile, Jommy explored the remarkable base. Each step he took through the amazing chambers and laboratory rooms filled him with awe and anticipation. He felt he could learn something important from each document or piece of machinery. Though he was disappointed to find no large settlement of hidden slans, the other wealth of information was significant.
Anthea came up behind him, standing at a doorway. "I have something to show you. Something from Peter Cross."
He hadn't even noticed her watching him. He felt so helpless and blind without his tendrils. "Yes!"
She led him to the table where she had arranged a video viewer and a stack of old film loops. She activated the player and stepped back while Peter Cross gave his moving speech. Jommy listened with tears in his eyes, looking again and again at the image of a man he barely remembered. His mother had told him that her husband had been killed when Jommy was only six. Fortunately, she and the boy hadn't been with him. On the projected image, Jommy could see echoes of himself in the older man's handsome face.
The recorded voice sounded achingly familiar, much clearer than in the Porgrave transmission. "I will never stop my work," Dr. Cross said. The words struck directly at Jommy's heart. "Not until I succeed in making a better world so that my wife and baby son no longer have to live in fear."
He played each one of the recordings three times, though he had instantly memorized them. He found his father's voice and his image to be strangely comforting and compelling.
Marshalling his courage and his determination, Jommy went to the boxes of bones that Anthea had gathered. She had been careful to mark the location of each body and noted any details. Jommy could only imagine the battle that had occurred here.
He stopped in front of the box that, as far as he could tell, contained what was left of his father. He looked down at the skull, trying to imagine the man's features. After all his searching, Jommy was finally at home, but this wasn't the home he had been looking for.
CHAPTER 39
The pulse beacon continued to send out its insistent signal, calling any slans, but Jommy had begun to lose hope that more of his comrades would arrive. It would be up to them.
Before he could plan his next step, he and Joanna needed to assess all the equipment and weapons available in the redoubt. How could it help President Gray? He couldn't begin to understand the large banks of twirling discs and blinking lights, the powerful generators and the purported "life imprint" machinery that dated back to the days of the first slans. He studied his father's notes again, thought about the single disintegrator tube he possessed. Though it was a formidable weapon, it wasn't enough to take back an entire conquered planet. He needed far more help than that.
But where were all the slans?
Together, the three of them listened to the staccato radio reports and wireless bursts from small groups of survivors. They told horrific stories of human renegades and tendrilless squadrons who shot humans for the mere sport of it. As usual, everything was blamed on the "evil slans." Anthea wept, as much for her murdered husband as for the future of her baby.
Joanna tried to comfort her. "I wouldn't believe all those reports, Miss. For years the tendrilless distorted and manufactured news reports. They're doing the same thing now. Notice nobody is reporting about the tendrilless? Not a single broadcast."
Jommy called them over to a large set of external screens in the monitoring room. The slow-moving force of enormous wheel-shaped battleships cruised inexorably closer, atomic-powered disks filled with armaments and tendrilless soldiers. The images were crystal clear, disturbingly close to the approaching armada. It was enough to strike cold fear into any observer.
Anthea's face was gray with dismay. "You mean the fleet that attacked us in the first place was just a . . . a warmup exercise?"
Joanna's lips formed a bitter smile. "The tendrilless have been planning this takeover for a very long time. They didn't just want to win the battle, but to exterminate every one of their enemies." She spoke as if she no longer considered herself part of her race.
Jommy was puzzled by another question, though. "Where are these images coming from? The tendrilless wouldn't be broadcasting this, and it's certainly not a news broadcast from out in space—" He turned dials, scanned through the available visiplates, then he smiled. "These are our own satellites, watchdog probes. The true slans must have put up a monitoring network as well! Look, these pictures are from sentry probes beyond the orbit of the Moon."
The great slow ships cruised by, filling the view, not knowing—or else not caring—that they were observed. Each vessel looked large enough to swallow a building. The decks were marked by twinkling lights.
Joanna measured the speed and finished her calculations. "They should be here within two days. That's what the Authority projected."
"Then that's how much time we have." Anthea sounded determined rather than panicked. "What are we going to do?"
Jommy decided he would scour through all of his father's laboratory notes, maybe race back to Granny's ranch to get the rest of the journals—and bring Kathleen and President Gray with him. Perhaps all together . . .
Suddenly new alarms screeched through speakers in the underground base. He and Joanna scoured the numerous visiplates, switching to local scanners and trying to discover the source of the warning. In the past when this underground base had been fully occupied by slans, whole groups must have monitored these stations, constantly manning the hideout's defenses.
Joanna finally discovered the reason for the alarm. "It's another ship approaching, Jommy . . . high-technology configuration, an advanced model tha
t I've never seen before."
"A secret tendrilless weapon? Another air raid?"
"It doesn't look like something the Cimmerium shipyards would build." She worked with the visiplates, trying to switch through any still-functioning cameras implanted in the city buildings, though many of the lenses were now dark, buried under the rubble of collapsed skyscrapers. "Ah, here it is!"
Finally, she locked on and increased the magnification as a silver and red ship streaked in, burning hot like a spear point just taken out of a forge. "Looks dangerous—and it's homing in on our location—no doubt about it!"
Anthea's face was both frightened and angry. "Have we been discovered?"
The image sharpened as the ship turned about and fired blazing orange retrorockets to slow its descent. As it lowered upon a pillar of fire into the ruins of the city very close to the base's access point, Jommy laughed with blessed relief. "We're not under attack! That's a rocket-plane—my rocket-plane. I left it in a hangar at Granny's ranch."
