Noritai, Sankoh, and Haledor were flat on the ground, rifles jutting out over the top of the hill. Noritai roared orders as he sprayed gunfire at the approaching soldiers, his rounds bounced off their shields in firestorms of sparks. “Stop them gaining the hill!”
Haledor fired a full clip directly at a single target, shorting out the Repulsor shield and killing the soldier behind it. Sankoh fired into the breach, wounding two others. They fired and reloaded, muzzles glowing hot with the passage of thousands of caseless rounds a minute. Ubra raked her gunsight left and right, trying to slow them down with the kinetic energy as much as the penetrating power of her bullets. She disintegrated one unlucky soldier’s foot in a bloody spray, and as he fell he knocked down the shield he was carrying. Instantly, the three Defiant next to her focused their fire into the chink in the armor. Six or seven went down before the integrity of the Repulsor wall returned.
It didn’t matter. Twenty more meters and they’d be up on the crest of the digging site, in overwhelming numbers. They were the Defiant, but you could only defy mathematics for so long.
She took her eyes off the targets and saw someone running down the side of the hill at right angles to the attack, and heard Noritai’s irritable voice on the comms.
“Jagomir? What the fuck are you doing?”
“Don’t make me explain it. It’ll jinx it entirely.”
“Are you running away?”
“Don’t worry about me. Just keep shooting.”
Ubra continuing her suppressive fire, denying them as much ground as possible, until her Meshuggahtech jammed with overheating. She discarded it, drew a pistol, continued turning the hill into an avalanche of howling metal.
She kept casting eyes towards Jagomir. Incredibly, he’d reached the glasslike cupola of the downed Spidermecha on the hill, and was entering it. A single shot would have put him down, but the phalanx of Solar Arm troops only had eyes for the defenders at the drilling site.
“Hold them. Hold them. Don’t look at me. Just hold them.”
He got behind the controls, and the Spidermecha thrummed to life. Its eight pendulous legs straightened, flexing with hyperteflon cords within as it straightened itself. On the ground, they looked ungainly and awkward, a tangled nest of steel surrounded by an egglike cupola. Upright, they were monsters.
The Solar Arm attackers noticed the new enemy on their flank at the exact moment its chainguns whirred to life.
The Repulsor shields only faced the front.
A barrage of hundreds of white-hot tracer rounds lanced into their side, tearing through like a knife through a soft throat. Half a dozen men were torn to pieces on the first sweep, bullets chewing through men and vomiting them over the harsh blue surface.
The Defiant on the hill redoubled their fire, and the soldiers found themselves caught between a hammer and an anvil. Their advance broke down.
Noritai took advantage of the confusion, and sent three men to the other side, flanking them completely and impaling them on three points. The explosive rounds scythed through them, hurling the advance back.
With a metallic spang one of the legs on the Spidermecha snapped off, and the assemblage sagged heavily on the left, throwing Jagomir’s aim off. Ubra got a long-distance look at his face as he gritted his teeth and reangled the guns, firing relentlessly.
The advance stalled, stopped, then evaporated into a full retreated. Ubra, Zelity, and Emeth stood at the top of the hill, not even trying to hide, just nailing man after man in their exposed backs.
Only thirty of the attackers made it back, leaving half of their number strewn on the hill.
There was no shouting, only silence. Noritai dropped his gun, letting the barrel wreath him in smoke. Then he was back, examining the devastation inside the camp.
“What a fucking load of bullshit,” he said over comms. “How did they get so close? They were right on top of us.”
“More heat shielding’s my guess,” Zelity said, “while we were dealing with the LRAD they chucked a bunch of heat suppression pop-ups on the hillside. If you’re watching, you can see the heat shimmer, but I guess none of us were paying attention. They moseyed right up to our doorstep, and didn’t even have the courtesy to knock.”
The two perimeter watchers were dead – turns out the perimeter was watching them – Ubra thought grimly.
Sigrid was badly hurt, clutching a sucking chest wound. She thrashed back and forth with the rhythm of a demon-possessed puppet, a thin trail of blood leaking from her mouth.
“We need to polyflesh her, and we need to polyflesh her five minutes ago,” snapped Noritai. “Can someone get up to the Skyfortress and bring the last device? We just have to hope that they’re distracted.”
“On it,” Zelity said. “Need your Vyres, Ubra. If I come back in one piece, so do they.”
“Thanks.”
He strapped the wings to his back and took off into the sky. Ubra watched him go, seeking daylight stenciling through the bullet hole in the wing. That would affect his stability in flight. She hoped he didn’t have far to go.
“Hey, can someone help me out here?” Called Jagomir from the slope. “This thing’s collapsed on me, with the door to the ground. I’m okay, but I can’t get out. I guess the joint welds weren’t as strong as I thought.”
“What do you need?”
“A ticket off this planet. Failing that, a metal cutter.”
Zelity gained altitude, feeling an awkward drag on his left-hand wing. He tried to compromise by switching his weapon to his right hand. A stopgap solution in a world full of stopgap solutions.
The Vyres churned the thin air, propelling him upwards. He had zero memories of ever using them, but he instinctively knew how to fly and control them.
Yep, he thought. It’s a fake memory. Just about every damned thing in my mind is wrong. Was that necessary, Mykor? Couldn’t you have won me over to your side via Socratic debate?
Below, bodies were strewn that fallen leaves. Hopefully the next moon to pass would bury them. The only trouble was that the moons had a propensity to bury the living as well.
But there were still plenty of living soldiers, and they seemed to be gathering for another attack. He saw search parties, no doubt discovering more unpleasant toys to drive the defenders from the ridge.
Shouts of alarm reached his pain-scorched ears. He didn’t try to kid himself that they weren’t shouting about him.
He closed his eyes. I hope I don’t die in the next two seconds.
Gunshots came from the ground. Vicious buzzing shots stitching lines of fire past him, easily outracing him to the heavens.
He knew he was in dozens of crosshairs. He started swerving and banking, making his path upwards as unpredictable as possible. Tried not to think about it, about the bullet about to tear a wing from his shoulder and send him crashing to the ground, a hundred feet below. It would either happen or it wouldn’t.
At some point, he realized the shooting had stopped, and allowed himself to breathe. He was outside their effective firing range.
This could not go on. The center could not hold. Against overwhelming numbers, they needed to make something happen, and fast.
And he couldn’t see how the polyfleshing tool was that thing. Healing wounds doesn’t do a damned when there’s two hundred more men lining up to make fresh ones.
But he thought of Sigrid, and her agony. She’d almost certainly die before his return, but that didn’t matter. They survived as a brotherhood, or sisterhood, each one taking the other’s cause and playing it down to the wire. He owed it to her to try and save her, even against long odds.
He was near the cloud canopy now – a thick, oppressive overcoat of air that made it impossible to see the Skyfortress. He activated the transponder, and compass directions flashed up in his HUD. He had about twenty kilometers to travel, due southwest.
Moisture gathered on his helmet, and settled on his wings. Each flap sent droplets fanning out around him, droplets that would po
ison you if you tried to drink them. Caitanya-9’s atmosphere was breathable, but not in arbitrarily thick quantities. Gaseous diffusion was necessary to filter the air into clean drinking water.
Ubra’s reappearance had shocked him more than he’d ever admit. Not just because his brain kept insisting to itself that he’d never seen her.
Memories felt so real, so intimate, that it was easy to forget that they were vapour.
I was a young boy. Mykor showed me how to fly a Sphere for the first time. It wormed its way into my skin, and I told him it tickled. I remember the sensation so well. It had to have happened.
But memories were still memories. Try to close your hand on any of them and you got a handful of mist, no more substantial than the clouds he was flying through.
There were drugs you could take, apparently, that gave you vivid hallucinations. You would spend three hours listening to a talking lightbulb explain the mysteries of the universe, or having a dragon lecture you on how to open your third eye. None of it was real. You’d piss it out and feel substantially worse than normal. But it not being real convinced none of its users not to take it. The party line was that if the subjective experience is the same, what did the reality matter?
And that was all very well, until you took a subjective perception of immortality and tried to walk off a cliff.
He flew blind through the clouds, eyeless and guided only by the compass and altimeter now on the heads-up display. The hole in his wing was badly dragging him, and he kept on having to overcorrect. Fatigue started to sink in.
There was a constant stream of terrible news from the ground.
“Hey, Yen, we’re getting heat shimmers to the south and southwest. No visuals. Probably best you don’t return by that route. If you do, let us know what they’re cooking up.”
“Hey, they seem to be setting up some long-range artillery on a hill. It looks bad, but they haven’t fired it yet, so maybe it’s an empty weapon they’re trying to scare us with.”
“I can’t get Jagomir free, the polyglass on the Spidermecha is too thick. He’s comfortable and safe, but at the moment we’re down another man.”
“Sigrid just died. She said a few words, but her mouth was full of blood and I couldn’t hear them.”
His heart heavy, he was unprepared for the Skyfortress when he came to it.
A dark stentorian hulk loomed out of the mist. It filled his vision, and he realized he was on collision course. If he hadn’t tucked his knees at the right moment, they might have been cut off by the sharp metal platform.
He landed on it, and entered the protective bubble of air.
It was a few hundred meters across, a large cross hidden in the clouds by a raft of balloons. Gun emplacements, firing the same phase-coherent energy the Spheres did. This place was survival – the untrackable location and safe refuge.
It was Vanitar technology, retrofitted by large swatches of Solar Arm technology that had been stolen over the years. Water condensers. Phosphorescent farm beds. It was a self-sustaining habitat, invisible from surface or space. It could be propelled with simple hydrogen fuel rockets, raised and lowered by a conflux of balloons and ballast.
In wars past, guerilla armies used holes in the ground to escape enemies. On Caitanya-9, that was impossible. So they used holes in the clouds.
Why are we defending that patch of ground? Zelity thought. We should be up here, capitalizing on our strengths.
The speaker coiled next to his ear buzzed.
It was Ubra.
“Hurry. We’re running out of time.”
The Defiant were being pressed in on every side.
Shots continued pounding the defenses as infantry advanced, protected by dozens of Repulsors. Behind a crude improvised wall of rocks, sand, and trashed machinery, the Defiant dug in and sniped. Less and less accuracy was required as the distance closed, something that gave them precisely zero satisfaction.
The mood was grim among the seven survivors. Ubra took careful shots, conserving ammunition, trying to hold them back. Sankoh had taken a wound to her upper arm, and had rigged a clumsy sling with a series of belts so she could continue to shoot.
Haledor stared down the terminating vector of a gun, biding his time, waiting for a gap to appear in the shield wall. They were held by hand, and as the columns of shock troops advanced, sometimes gaps appeared.
Haledor bided his time, and he saw a hole appear in the shield wall. Just a few seconds, and just a few centimeters. But he fired into it.
The three-round burst of explosive shots streaked down the hill into the formation. Two of them exploded harmlessly off the Repulsors. The third went through the gap, blowing apart a man's chest and taking off the arm of the woman beside him.
He dropped behind cover as return fire scorched and singed overheat. He had a smile of quiet satisfaction.
Jagomir was still down there, trapped inside the Spidermecha. They hadn't been able to free him. Emeth's orders were to play dead, and hope none of the enemy were observant enough to make playing unnecessary.
He might outlive all of us, Ubra thought.
Their supplies of ammunition, salvaged from the debris field, were running low. The enemy was so numerous that strategy or tactics were impossible. They could just bury the Defiant in bodies and bullets until they all died.
The clock was winding down on them.
"Enough of this," Sankoh said. "Do we have any way of communicating with them?"
"Eighty percent of the electronic gear is fried, and they've switched up their channels as soon as it started falling into our hands. They're not here to talk."
"We can surrender."
"They won't hear it, Sankoh," Emeth said. "There's no tactical advantage to be gained here, and they know it. It's a war about nothing. They're just a striking fist without a brain at this point."
She didn’t seem to be listening. "Where's a white material?"’
“What the fuck are you doing?”
He cursed as Sankoh abandoned her post, and started searching through the piled up, ripping up the floorboards of dune buggies, anything that wasn’t dull camouflage or injection-moulded gray plastic.
Finally, she found a white piece of cloth, comically oversized. She bunched it up, raised it above her head, and left cover.
“What is she doing?” Jaginov said quietly through comms from his position on the slope.
“Don’t talk. They’ll see your mouth moving.” Ubra smiled for a moment in disbelief as Sankoh started running down the slope, right into the face of the enemy.
Only a small smile.
And then she imagined high-velocity rounds passing through the cloth, imagined red flecks spattering the cloth, imagined it landing on a corpse-shaped lump, and the smile vanished.
Sankoh only had seconds to live.
Fuck.
“We surrender!” She bellowed from behind the huge white cloth. “Please give us your terms! Nobody has to die”
The shooting stopped.
Sankoh kept running down the hill, no longer shouting messages of peace, just holding out the cloth and letting the universal message of surrender do the talking.
As the slapback echoes of gunshots stilled, the remaining six Defiant cast disbelieving glances at each other. The quietness was pristine, divine, almost perfect. As if on a battlefield of twisted chaos they’d discovered an undamaged porcelain teacup.
“I don’t believe it,” Ubra muttered. “It actually worked, they actually…”
Then the shooting started again. A deafening barrage that shook the hilltop, with Sankoh at its center.
She paid no attention whatsoever, she just kept running heedlessly forward until she was swallowed by a disintegrating tide of bullets. Blood splashed the rocks.
Ubra looked away, sickened.
“Take a lesson,” Noritai said. “We stay in this position. If you want to run, it had better be on bulletproof legs.”
Zelity couldn’t find the fucking polyfleshing device
.
He’d never used one before. Their rarity and value meant that only Mykor and his daughter Zandra had access to them. He’d seen them clipped to belts, and even used in the field a few times, but he simply couldn’t remember where they were kept.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
He’d left the entire Skyfortress a mess. Hammocks and bunk bed were upturned. Precious supplies of H2O were knocked to the ground. Everything they had – field notes, arcane Vanitar instruments that nobody understood, sentimental keepsakes from Terrus – was strewn all over the ground, in a polyalloy of trash.
He’d risked too much to come back empty handed.
He was pausing to catch his breath when he got a message over his commsuit from Ubra.
“Don’t come back,” she said.
“I’m sorry, what was that?”
“I can’t talk loudly or Noritai will hear me. Don’t come back. Just stay away. I don’t know what you’re going to do, but you’re better off leaving this mess alone.”
Her words were an insult. “No. Forget it. We’re part of a larger purpose.”
“No we’re not. We’re dying. They’re coming up the hill, hundreds of them. They shot Sankoh when she tried to surrender. I’m sorry, but this can’t be stopped. Goodbye, Yen.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”
“Yen…”
He silenced the commlink, rage boiling through the confusion like heat clearing turbid water.
He stood alone, a tiny figure on the vast crosslike platform.
Suddenly, it wasn’t an arcane piece of alien technology. It was a puzzle. Something he could solve.
The hydrogen-fuelled jets could be attached and detached at various points on the Skyfortress. In the precious minutes he had left, he strapped them in, primed the pumps, and plugged them in to the main compute apparatus.
He performed some rough physics calculations on his stolen suit’s computer. Calculated the drag, the thrust, the gravity. Figured out how many balloons he’d have to detach to lose altitude at a rate of two meters a second.
Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2) Page 7
