Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  “I’d like to get him back before we leave,” said Tamiko. “We’re almost done, you know.”

  “Then tell them that.” Sunglow did not think Tamiko had noticed what had drawn her attention. She shifted her gaze to the door behind her visitor, to the sliding doors of empty cupboards, to the blank screen, everywhere but that pocket and its contents. “Tell them that you have finally destroyed everything that’s worth destroying. Tell them the libraries and books and plaques are gone. The universities and factories. Everything, and now we must rebuild it all.”

  “But now what you build will be all yours. Pure native coon, uncontaminated by the Gypsies.”

  “Tell them that too. And then, even then, if they—if we—really believe it will make you go away and not come back, we will give him back.”

  Chapter Twenty Six

  The tunnels that had led them to safety beneath the ruins of Worldtree City were now choked with rubble. The warplanes overhead had dropped bombs and fired missiles. Dark tunnel maws had vomited flame and smoke and roared with pain. Ceilings had collapsed. Shock waves had rumbled through the deeper caverns. Dust had ridden a gust of wind and sifted from the walls.

  And the warplanes had gone, their human pilots surely grinning in their satisfaction at a job well done. They could not have known how deep the tunnels led, how extensive the network of caverns beneath the surface, how numerous the refugee Racs who waited for a time when they could emerge to reclaim their world and not just by ones and twos at night to bury their dead.

  The remnant stink of high explosives drifted even here, where the roadway widened to form a parking area. The tiles that covered the walls were missing in spots, broken loose by the shaking of the rock. Window glass sparkled on the pavement. Doorways and window openings were crowded with refugees despite signs that said they had once belonged to food shops and bookstores.

  The chamber’s bright lights seemed to pool near the edge of the roadway like the spotlights of a theater stage. The eyes of every watcher were drawn inexorably to the two surviving APVs, gouged and dented and torn, their metal gleaming where cannon shells and shrapnel had stripped away their drab paint. Their crates of guns and ammunition had already been removed, delivered to the Racs who would use them. The ground-to-air missiles were laid out on the pavement beside them in three rows of half a dozen each, all that had survived the journey to the cavern.

  The dust stirred up by the humans’ futile attack had mixed with the storm water that still clung to the vehicles. The resulting mud had had time to dry. Now Dotson Barbtail stood beside the APV he had driven so desperately. One hand brushed at a clot of dirt in front of the windshield, over and over, even after the dirt had crumbled to dust again and fallen to the pavement below. One foot was awash in a puddle of engine oil or coolant, but he barely noticed that either. He was exhausted. He craved a quiet corner in which to fall asleep. He wanted to see Gypsy Blossom and hear her latest discoveries. He ached to get Sunglow out of the human clutch.

  Lined up on the other side of the ranks of missiles were nine small trucks of the sort Racs who spent their days behind desks had once used to pretend they were country folk. Their paint jobs were bright and flashy, their transmissions provided power to all four wheels, and their tires had treads more suitable for mountainsides than paved roads. In case of accidents, they had roll bars. Each truck bed was large enough to hold two missiles.

  Edge-of-Tears rounded the front of the APV and cocked his head. “Go to bed,” he said.

  “I’d never wake up,” Dotson mumbled.

  “You’ll pass out. You’ll miss the excitement for sure then.” He pointed at the nearest truck. “The seat’s soft enough. And the driver’ll have to push you out of the way.”

  Dotson knew the soldier was right. He was swaying on his feet. “I am a driver.”

  “Not in that condition.”

  “Where are the rest of them?”

  “The drivers? In bed. We can’t do a thing till dark. You know that.”

  “They’ll still see us.”

  “By then it’ll be too late.”

  * * * *

  “Dotson?”

  He grunted. He tried to avoid the hand that tugged at his shoulder by rolling over, but something stopped him. It pressed against his muzzle, rough fabric, stiff but yielding, curved.

  He opened his eyes. Stripes. Blue and mauve stripes. Above him a low roof and a tiny light.

  His bed lurched and rocked. Something made a metallic bang.

  “We need the truck, Dotson.”

  The truck. Memory returned. He let himself fall flat on his back, and there was a face framed in the open door of the cab. A human face but topped with petals instead of hair. “Gypsy Blossom. Did you see … ?”

  “Yes. I saw you wave. They’re safe. So far. And we’re ready to go.”

  He pushed himself into a sitting position. He peered groggily through the windshield. The walls were lined with refugees, many more than had been leaning out of the shop doors and windows that morning. The APVs were gone. The trucks in front of him each held a pair of missiles, their noses pointing over the downfolded tailgates. Technicians labored over them, making last-minute adjustments, readying them for the task ahead. To one side was a single pipework rack, slanting nearly horizontal instead of vertical, a launch-stand for a missile.

  “Not you,” he said.

  “Yes, me,” said the bot. “You know I have to come. The honeysuckle.”

  He yawned and licked his teeth. They tasted vile. Gypsy Blossom passed him a bottle of fruit juice. He twisted off the cap and drank.

  “Better,” he said. A moment later, he sighed. “You’re right.” And she was, of course. She and the honeysuckle were their only hope of avoiding traps or knowing when the humans launched their counterattack.

  The technicians were done. Two collapsed the launch-stand into a compact bundle of pipes and braces and tucked it between a missile and the side of a truck. There was a similar bundle beside the other missile. They wedged themselves into the narrow spaces that were left, and then they cradled rifles and antitank missile launchers in their arms.

  Engines were starting.

  He was awake enough now. He slid beneath the wheel.

  “You’re driving?” She sounded surprised.

  “Climb in and sit down.” Did she think he would want to miss this moment? It was their last hope. If it failed, they were doomed. If it succeeded …

  “Follow them.”

  “I know.” They could not reach the surface by the same tunnels that had led them here. But there were others, including some that reached the surface much closer to their targets. He remembered the briefing that morning, before he had let exhaustion claim him. He remembered the route. He remembered what they planned to do.

  Or try to do. There were no guarantees of success. But this was the last chance that they could see to claim any sort of victory.

  They would have to get as close as possible. Or the humans would have too much time to respond. Enough time to doom them all.

  He let his teeth show and curled his upper lip in a way that said he intended nothing resembling a smile. Then he stepped on the throttle and steered the truck into its place in the procession.

  The refugees who watched from the cavern’s edges said nothing. They did not cheer or wave or wish good luck aloud. But they too, every one of them, showed teeth in as feral a display as his.

  If the humans in their ships could only see it …

  One could. There was Marcus Aurelius Hrecker, standing near the dark opening where the road left the wide parking area. Flanked by two burly guards, he was watching the trucks and the missiles, absorbing the preparations for departure. He spotted Dotson and raised one stiff-bladed hand to the level of his chest. The arm of the guard on that side lifted
briefly, tugged by the chain that bound Rac and human together. The guard scowled and jerked his arm. Mark’s hand came down, and his face looked pained.

  The other humans would only laugh, he thought.

  Teeth were no threat to them.

  But he stared at the back of the truck ahead of him. The technicians grinned back at him, showing their teeth too.

  Marcus Aurelius Hrecker had been sidelined. So too would every other human be. For just a moment Dotson thought that might even, someday, include the Gypsies, the Remakers, the gods of the Racs themselves.

  But then he snorted and shook his head and stared at the two missiles that pointed their noses at him. He hoped their engines would not ignite prematurely.

  * * * *

  The opening from which they finally emerged was surrounded by jagged walls of masonry. The only way they could be seen was from directly overhead, and when Dotson looked up, he could see no stars.

  “It’s still cloudy,” said Gypsy Blossom. She shivered, and for a moment Dotson was aware despite his pelt of the chill in the air. “But the rain is past. Most of it. It’s pouring on the coast.”

  “The honeysuckle, right?” He felt her nod in the flexing of the seat. “They’ll see us anyway, as soon as we can see them.”

  Perhaps they could see already, he thought. The Ajax was in orbit, high above, looking down, and it had sensors that would not be blocked by clouds. On the other hand, if the rain would only return, the drops of falling water might confuse a radar image. It depended on the frequency they used.

  Whether the Racs could see the Ajax or not, as soon as there was a line of unobstructed sight between them and the ship, the humans might be alerted.

  Racs, like their wild predecessors, had good night vision. But this night was dark even so, too dark, as much an obstacle to them as to the humans, and to prove it the truck lurched as a tire sank into a crater in the pavement. Dotson wished they dared to use headlights as they had the night before.

  A small hand-held light bloomed in the back of the truck ahead of him. He glimpsed the missiles it carried, the feet of two armed technicians, the road before him. He spun the wheel to avoid another pothole.

  The other trucks now had lights as well, and he could see that there were still walls between them and that spot in the sky where the Ajax hung. The lights ahead of him swung from side to side as the lead truck stopped. There was no flare of brake lights; they had been disconnected.

  “This is where I check the ground ahead.” Gypsy Blossom was already climbing from the truck’s cab and walking toward a large bank of honeysuckle beside the road. Someone aimed a light ahead of her, but she flapped an arm to say she did not need the help. The first raindrops hit the windshield.

  The bot did not push into the viny thicket. She stopped even before her feet touched the outlying shoots. She unfurled the ruff around her shins and burrowed her roots into the soil. She stood still, moving only when she slowly turned to face the way they had been going down the road.

  A few minutes later, she was walking along the line of trucks, saying, “There’s no one ahead of us. They’re inside, out of the weather.”

  “The robots?”

  “They don’t leave the valley. You know that.”

  “Then let’s move.”

  “Use your dimlights,” said the bot. “It’s safe enough.”

  It was raining harder when she sat down again beside Dotson, smelling of wet and soil. He turned on both the windshield wiper and the small lights set in the ends of his front bumper.

  The trucks ahead began to move. They accelerated, speeding up as much as the improved visibility permitted in the rain. Five of the trucks turned right, onto a road that would lead them to the edge of the bluff overlooking the valley. The other four kept on straight, heading for an overlook that would give them a clear view of the Gypsies’ old landing field.

  There were only four of the human ships left on First-Stop. Two, the Drake and the Saladin, were in the valley. The other pair, the Gorbachev and the Bonami, sat on the landing field.

  When Dotson and his companions reached the brink of the valley, they found the human ships standing high but not quite so high as the bluff tops, seeming almost close enough to reach out and touch. They quickly turned their vehicles to face away. The technicians leaped from their niches in the back and hurriedly set up the launch-stands on the ground.

  Dotson looked over his shoulder in time to see them heft the first missile into position. They had debated firing them from the backs of the trucks. The effects of the missiles’ exhaust on truck cabs and drivers and chances to get away alive had almost persuaded them against that option. But then Edge-of-Tears had said, “We are expendable. We have to be, for if we give them any chance at all to anticipate our blow, we will fail. They will be safe.”

  “But,” had said a technician, “a launch-stand is stabler. We’ll have a better chance of hitting them if we take just a little more time.”

  The rain grew gentler. Just above the far rim of the valley, Dotson saw a few stars. It was clearing then. Perhaps by the time they were done with this night’s work, the sky would be clear and the few humans left alive would be able to look down and see what the Racs had done.

  The two ships in the valley sparkled with lights. Dotson saw them as things of beauty and dread and envy. “We’ll have our own one day,” he said, and he felt more than saw Gypsy Blossom nod beside him.

  Something was happening in the valley. More lights were gleaming. Weapons ports were opening. A spot high on the Saladin glowed hot, and the third truck to the left flashed into vapor and slag, missiles and all.

  But the other missiles were on their stands and ready. As one the remaining technicians punched the launch buttons. The missiles’ engines ignited. Plumes of flame and smoke splashed against the ground and the rears of the trucks. One fuel tank exploded. Something metallic slammed against the side of Dotson’s truck, and his leg went numb.

  The humans’ particle beams caught two of the missiles while they were still in the air. Two of the remaining six missiles struck that remnant of Worldtree Center the humans had occupied for their own purposes. The other four struck the ships, two apiece, and ripped gaping holes in their sides.

  At the same time, two dozen lines of fire reached from the ruins in the valley below the bluffs as other Racs fired antitank missiles. More explosions peppered the sides of the ships. They seemed puny beside the earlier blasts, but they still gouged more deeply into the enemy fortresses.

  Fire bloomed in the ships’ wounds. Alarms hooted. Particle beams and missiles and cannon sought targets both on the bluff and in the valley.

  Yet their aim was not precise. The rain of fire hesitated oddly, beams lost their focus, targets were missed. The effect was of a giant who had lost his only eye and must blindly flail after a horde of tormentors.

  Dotson felt the technicians leaping into the back of the truck. He hit the throttle as hard as he could. Wheels spun and gripped. The truck beside him lurched ahead, and then he was behind it, accelerating, leaving the overlook just as the ground where he had been turned into an expanding cloud of incandescent vapor.

  Neither Dotson nor the other surviving drivers went very far. As soon as there was a mound of rubble between them and the sight of war, they turned parallel to the valley. When they found another opening, they stopped.

  Dotson had to peel his leg from the seat. His fingers found the stickiness of blood and the open lips of a gash high on his thigh. Briefly he wondered why the wound did not hurt, but then he saw the others were not waiting for him. They were already silhouetted against the glow of fire and the flash of ordnance in the valley, their legs moving slowly, cautiously toward the valley’s rim.

  He hobbled after them until he too could see what was going on, and there they stood, toge
ther. Dotson and the other drivers, Gypsy Blossom, the remaining technicians, watching as the humans fired every weapon at their command. It was clear, however, that that defense could not be enough. The blow Dotson and his fellows had struck from atop the bluffs had crippled the ships, and the Racs below were unleashing every gun and missile that remained to them.

  They must know, Dotson thought, that their ships will never fly again. We have done that much, and now their deaths are only a matter of time. No one will want to take prisoners. We will kill them all. Or they will hide within their ships until they starve.

  He hoped those who had gone to attack the ships on the landing field had fared as well.

  The battle below was as desperate as any battle could possibly be, yet the din of war seemed distant, muted. When Gypsy Blossom touched his arm and quietly said, “There’s still the Ajax,” he had no trouble hearing her.

  “What can they do?”

  “They can’t land, but Mark said they have nuclear bombs and warheads.”

  “They wouldn’t use them.” He hoped he was right. “They wouldn’t dare.”

  But she was shaking her head. “If they are anything like the Engineers the honeysuckle remembers …”

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Tamiko Inoue hovered just within the door of the room that was Sunglow’s prison chamber. Her hands were behind her back, taut muscles in her arms and neck shouting that they were clenched in desperation. Her face was frozen stiff and pale, her mouth a grim line, her eyes wide and frightened. Her forehead glistened.

  Sunglow could only stare and replay the words the human had uttered as soon as the door had slid shut behind her.

  “You’ve won,” Tamiko had said.

  “What do you mean?” What could she mean? Had Dotson somehow forced the Engineers to say they would release her, set her back on her own world, send her back to him? How could he have done that?