“My father,” Meg said. She mashed her lips together. She felt some kind of an outburst coming on. What had Axel said in the clinic? Let’s get away. If only they could.
Emnl swayed out of the water and padded up to Nicholas on her wet, sandy, four-toed feet. “Do you teach karate, as well?”
“Ah, no. I teach English literature.”
“‘True Thomas lay oer yond grassy bank, and he beheld a ladie gay’?”
“Walter Scott.”
“That lady was my six-times-great-grandmother. Her horse was a Walking Gun Her jewels were sensors.”
“Fascinating!” Nicholas flickered an academic’s automatic smile: on, off.
*
While Emnl was talking to Nicholas Smythe, Philip drew Axel aside. “Can you fly that ship of yours remotely?”
“It’s not my ship, but yeah.”
“It is now. Bring it down to the beach.”
“What?”
“Sand makes a fine launch pad. Might fuse some. Who cares? The sentrienza are going to fuse it all when they get here, anyway.”
“We’re going to kick their asses,” Axel said automatically. He was watching Meg.
His father sighed. “Son, we’re not going to win. Long term, it won’t make a lick of difference if we have those Walking Guns or not. Maybe we’ll win a couple more victories, but at the end of the day, they have five hundred star systems, and we have one.”
“Dad …” Axel was shocked. His father wasn’t meant to say this kind of thing. Being negative and defeatist was Axel’s role.
“Just telling it like it is,” his father said with a faint smile. Then he changed gears. “I heard what you said to Meg in the clinic. I want you to do it. Go.”
Axel stared at him.
“Take her back to Earth. You’re right. There’s one place in the galaxy where the sentrienza fear to tread, because the Ghosts are all over it like flies on shit. And that is Earth.”
“I was talking out of my ass.”
“No, you weren’t. Quit underselling yourself, Axel.” The crows’-feet around Philip’s eyes deepened. He clapped Axel on the shoulder. “Now get that ship down here … and save my grandchild.”
CHAPTER 16
MEG HARDLY NOTICED THE roar in the sky, as she’d been hearing a similar noise all day. Then she remembered that the Walking Guns had all landed. She looked up as Axel’s spiffy new fighter lowered itself towards the beach. People scattered. The ship settled, blowing clouds of sand into the water.
Emnl broke off her conversation with Nicholas Smythe. When the noise died down, she buzzed at Axel, “You are going? Good. Please do not return. Meg does not require your presence.”
Meg herself felt that way quite often, but God, hearing it from Emnl made her blood boil.
Axel moved slowly in the direction of the ship, looking back at her entreatingly.
She had to at least say goodbye. She started to walk towards him.
“No,” Emnl said sharply. “Stay here.”
“Excuse me,” Nicholas Smythe said. He was already pink from the sun but now he turned pinker. “You’ve got no right to order my daughter around. Go on, Meggie.”
Emnl chittered. “You have always loved your books better than you loved Meg. She told me so.”
“Shut up!” Meg screamed at Emnl.
“Hush, Meg,” her father said. “I love you.”
Then he threw himself at Emnl.
He couldn’t fight, Nicholas Smythe. He had never understood Meg’s karate practise, let alone her career in the Fleet. Her mother used to whale on him when she got really upset; Nicholas would just stand there and stoically fend her off. He swung his fists at Emnl as if they were rocks that happened to be attached to his arms, and the only reason one of them connected with her face was because the attack completely flat-footed Emnl, as well as everyone else.
Then she whirled her sunshade, sending the parasol part spinning away onto the sand. What remained was a three-foot spear with a glittering point. She ran Nicholas through.
Philip K. Best caught Meg by the shoulders as she started towards her father. “Run,” he said.
“Dad. DAD!”
“He’s distracting her so you can get away. Go. Save my grandchild—and his.”
Meg ran. As she neared the stairs of the ship, a Walking Gun loped out of the sea to intercept her. Then it fell on its side. Axel stood on the cockpit steps, aiming a combi. The Walking Gun—unhurt, of course—rolled over and picked itself up, but by then Meg was on the steps.
She managed one glance back. Emnl squatted over Nicholas’s body. The ends of her lavender hair trailed in his blood, while the Walking Guns bristled around them, keeping the horrified bystanders at a distance.
Axel shoved her into the main cabin. She tottered to the nearest couch and sat down. Her mind was a vortex of white noise. The emotions stirred up by her father’s sacrificial attack were so unbearable she couldn’t feel them.
“Launching in three,” Axel barked. “Two. One.”
The ship lifted off in a boiling cloud of plasma.
The Walking Guns pursued it into the air.
*
“Keep going,” Sully Tan said over the radio. “I’ve got your back.”
The Vienna’s guns reared skywards. They spat flame. Heat-seeking projectiles cruised at trans-sonic speed through the evening sky and locked onto the Walking Guns. Fireworks dotted the sea as Axel climbed higher. Of course, the Walking Guns would be down but not out. That was good enough for Axel. He just needed to outdistance them.
“You’re the man, Sully.”
“You’ve still got a bunch of them on your tail.”
“I see them.”
Axel was dividing his attention. Esthesia made it possible for him to multitask. He felt the atmosphere thinning around his hull, the warmth of air morphing into the tingle of vacuum. He saw Meg lying with her eyes closed in a couch—the same one, in fact, her father had used. He also saw the evil hot spots of the Walking Guns climbing into the stratosphere behind him. He counted forty-two of them, their wings folded into stabilizer fins, their legs folded back along their bodies.
“Shit,” Sully said. “Those fuckers are fast.”
“They’ve got black holes in their guts.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard.”
That was why people said a Walking Gun could destroy a planet. If you fired a black hole—even a small one, as long as it was large enough to not spontaneously evaporate—into the center of a large mass, such as a planet, it was sayonara. The internal pressure of the planet would keep pushing matter into the hole, until it was all gone.
Axel wondered if Emnl would destroy Juradis in revenge for their defiance. His courage wavered.
Sully came back on the radio. “I’m patching Gil through. If I don’t talk to you again, Godspeed and semper fi, you crazy bastard.”
“Hello, Axel,” said the distinctive growly voice of the queazel. He had returned from Barjoltan with Axel to visit his estate at the north pole. “What sort of firepower do you have on your new ship?”
“Charged particle cannon,” Axel said. “Medium railgun. Kinetic rounds, a few nukes.”
“Use the nukes,” Gil said.
“Gil. You cannot nuke a black hole. Whatever you throw at it just turns it into a bigger black hole.” That was why few people tried to destroy Walking Guns, and no one ever succeeded. They literally soaked up kinetic impactors by allowing them to pass through the black hole containment fields inside their compact little bodies.
“I know that,” Gil said. “You are not going to nuke them. Here is what you must do …”
*
The Shihoka soared into orbit. The Fleet carrier Indomitable was also orbiting Juradis at 150 kilometers, surrounded by a gaggle of Hail Mary hulks. Axel took the Shihoka higher, keeping the planet between himself and the fragile human fleet.
The Walking Guns accelerated to catch up. Axel allowed them to rise past him into a higher orb
it. They crossed like a flock of starlings across the orb of Betelgeuse. They thought they were cutting off his escape.
He took a deep breath. “Meg?”
“What?” She was supine in the couch, floating in her straps, clutching something in her hands.
“Watch this.”
Praying that Gil’s information was correct, he launched all five of his nuclear rounds.
They streaked off the rails faster than the eye could see. Seconds later, they exploded amidst the flock of Guns—a short-lived fireworks display, washed out by the light of the red giant.
“You didn’t hit any of them,” Meg said.
“I wasn’t trying to.”
Nuclear explosions produced powerful electromagnetic pulses. At close range, the pulses would overwhelm the Walking Guns’ hardened electronics. That would set off a cascade of failures …
With his infrared eyes, Axel watched the Walking Guns’ heat signatures slowly fade. “It worked,” he exulted. “It worked!”
The Walking Guns’ black hole containment fields had failed, decoupling the inertia of the black holes from the inertia of the Guns themselves. Their own acceleration had pushed them into the black holes. They were being eaten from the inside out by their own ammunition.
Axel cued the comms. “Gil? It worked. We now have forty-two micro black holes spiraling out on a course that will eventually carry them out of the system. Warn the Rat.”
“You might do that yourself.”
Axel didn’t think the Rat would be very happy to hear from him right now. Another concern thrust its way into his mind. “Could you get in touch with my father, as well? Tell him …”
“I already have,” Gil said. “He said to tell you to expect a care package.”
“A care package?”
“A resupply capsule, to be precise. You have not enough food and water for the journey, do you? The capsule will contain everything you need. It will rendezvous with you before you reach the zero-gravity point.”
Axel swallowed. “Thanks, Gil. Tell him … thanks.”
He went back into the main cabin. Meg held up the object in her hands. It was a small computer. “Dad forgot his books,” she said, and burst into tears.
Deciding that the Shihoka could fly itself for a while, Axel went over and held her.
CHAPTER 17
ILFENJIUM WAS BURNING.
Smoke smudged the sky above the city. Paler explosions flowered where mortar shells fell short in the slums below the dam. Colm had seen this kind of thing on colony worlds when the Ghosts overran human settlements. Now it was happening to the Ghosts themselves. He felt shamefully glad that he was too far away to see the faces of the people running out of the burning buildings, only to be cut down in the streets.
He sat astride the sorrel mare the Lizps had given him, on the road that wound down from the pass into the Great River valley. Two miles away, Ilfenjium huddled below a dam built on a pharaonic scale from dressed granite. The suburbs metastasized into monoculture fields like nappy velvet, brown and green. The reservoir behind the dam was a bowlful of reflected clouds. Fancy villas looked down upon it. There was no one left alive up there. Ghost war was total war. Ilfenjium had been the most populous city on Kisperet this morning. By nightfall, it wouldn’t be.
A deafening boom interrupted the thunder of the Lizp artillery from higher up in the pass. The mare put her ears back. Colm patted her neck, to steady himself as much as the horse. When he looked up, he saw soil and broken trees cascading across the road. Well, crap. Twenty feet to the left and he’d have been dead.
He rode downhill, guiding the mare around the landslide. He had got a lot better at riding. The Navy pilot who had landed here in a shivering heap five months ago would hardly have recognized the tough-faced horseman, his forest-green cloak flapping over a sword-belt, his knee boots shiny and his shirt snowy white, his ginger hair covered by a forage cap, who rode into the boggy hollow concealed behind a crag from the city. Only the quivering heart in his chest remained the same.
His power cart stood beside a stream that trickled through the hollow. It looked like a holiday caravan, with some branches tied on the roof—Diejen’s idea of camouflage, after a few drinks. Every ten seconds or so, a soldier in Lizp livery scrambled out of the cart, clutching a rifle, and clomped through the mud. By twos and fives, they scrambled over the lip of the hollow and sneaked downhill to join the battle. All of them were gaunt, dark-haired men with thick eyebrows and a noticeable scar on their chins. They were older versions of the Ghosts that had invaded Kuiper Belt Object 11890 when Colm was working there. They were also identical to the man who sat on a camp stool under the trees, next to Diejen Lizp. He had a sad, beaten-down expression, and stroked the rifle across his knees as if it were a child. Diejen had her arm around his shoulders. She seemed to be comforting him. In reality she was copying him. One every ten seconds. A rate never previously achieved by mobile forces on Kisperet. And it was Colm who’d made it possible.
He shouted, “They’ve ranged in on this location. We’ve got to move the cart.”
Diejen was concentrating, he knew, and hadn’t really heard him, so he slid off the mare’s back and floundered over to her.
“We’ve got to move the cart! These lads weren’t careful enough staying under cover. The enemy spotters must’ve seen where they’re all coming from.”
This time the man sitting next to Diejen looked up. “Sorry,” he said, abashed. “I’ll be more careful.”
“Too late now.” Colm waded through the mud to the cart. He wished he had ear protectors. At close range, the violent thudding from inside the cart drowned out the artillery. The cart had double wheels on reinforced axles. A steel pipe stuck out of the top, belching white wood smoke. Actually, it was quite possible that the Magistocracy’s spotters had seen the smoke, although Colm had had a look through a telescope from the eastern approach this morning, and decided that it was impossible to distinguish it from the gunsmoke rolling out of the Lizp mortar positions a hundred yards higher up … especially if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
Steam power had been unknown on Kisperet. The Magistocracy’s war on humanity had come at a time when humanity’s only reciprocating steam engines were in museums. The Magistocracy might have built steam turbines, copying those used in human power plants to this day, and in fact Colm had seen an entire coal-fired power plant, stolen piece by piece from the New Seattle Power Authority on Gliese 581g, languishing unused in a pig barn. Colm had tinkered with it while the slaves butchered the pigs, but had given up hope of getting it working. He had had a hard enough time building half a dozen wood-burning steam engines on the Lizp estate while he waited, with less and less optimism, for Dhjerga to come back.
He ducked inside the cart. Heat blasted into his face. The engine stretched the length of the cart. Pistons thudded and the flywheel whirred, driving a DC generator that fed a voltaic pile in the front of the cart. Two freemen, stripped to the waist, shovelled wood chunks into the voracious little furnace. Their teeth and eyes glistened in faces black with soot. Colm made them understand with sign language that he was going to shut the engine down. He topped off the boiler to draw down the engine’s steam production—carefully, carefully. Two boilers had exploded during his prototyping phase, and in fact he shouldn’t be doing this himself if he ever wanted to get home. Leave it to the slaves. But how could he ask a slave to do what he wouldn’t do himself? He probably wasn’t ever going to get home anyway. Dhjerga had been gone for months. The Betelgeuse system was a dangerous place for a Ghost. So, when they’d raked out the fire, Colm handed the mare’s reins to a small Lizp cousin and swung up onto the bench of the power cart. He stroked the lash over the backs of the dray horses and drove the cart down towards the crucible of Ilfenjium.
Diejen caught up with him. She had Janz, the freeman she’d been copying, trailing after her on a broken-down gelding. “Where are you going?”
“Taking the cart closer to the
Electrical Quarter.”
The Electrical Quarter was the name for the bit of Ilfenjium directly below the dam, where the hydroelectric generators were. Every city on Kisperet had an Electrical Quarter. These, of course, were the source of the enemy’s power. Colm knew the drill by now. Go in under cover of darkness, set fires, and send small squads to knock out the generators. It had worked great for a couple of months. Then the Magistocracy had started reinforcing their standing garrisons, and to hell with the harvest. Dryjon’s forces had been bogged down in the city center all morning—two and a half standard Earth days, by Colm’s increasingly unreliable body clock. So they’d brought up more artillery, but damned if that was doing the job, either. The mortars nibbled daintily at the colossal blockhouse below the dam. Even when the gunners landed a bullseye, the shells barely left scuff marks. Dryjon needed reinforcements in the city proper, and he needed them now.
The tree cover ended a mile from the city limits. Colm had planned to park the power cart at the treeline, but the lack of corpses in the fields gave him courage. And the houses he could see in the distance were no longer on fire. So he drove the cart across the fields. Sweet-smelling flowers foamed on the verges of the road. The millet was rotting on the stalk. It had rained a lot recently.
The horses clip-clopped through the blackened brick warrens of Ghost suburbia. The very mud in the streets steamed from the lingering heat of the fires. It was eerily quiet after the constant noise up at the artillery lines. Corpses, both burnt and fresh, littered the streets. Some of them were not dead yet. The Lizp troops paused to bayonet them as they passed by.
A stadium loomed over the rooftops like a rising granite moon. Colm had observed this from the hillside and wondered what it was. The freeman Janz glanced at it and smiled nostalgically.
Diejen said, “That is the arena where they held the Games. I wonder if there’ll ever be Games again.”
“Games?” Iomacht, his voice echoed, telling him nothing new.
“The War Games. Every fifty days—” that was about one standard Earth year, since a Kisperet ‘day’ was eight days long— “the Magistocracy used to hold competitions here. Shooting, running, obstacle courses, that kind of thing.”
The Nuclear Druid: A Hard Science Fiction Adventure With a Chilling Twist (Extinction Protocol Book 2) Page 10
