Pyro Canyon

by Robert Appleton

  “Sounds good, kid. Over and out.”

  After swallowing the lump in his throat—my God, have I really done all this?—he glanced over his shoulder at Hera, who was doing the rounds in Mission Control, biting her nails. The spokeless wheels of her chair skidded, rolled and jerked as they flashed the sunset’s reflection. She caught his gaze and smuggled him a personal salute before resuming her mobile orchestrations.

  A glib swell lifted him with muscleless ease, as though he were all cybernetic and suddenly freed from a stubborn tractor beam. Automatic wipers blinked across the windows almost too fast to see, clearing the glass of every drop of moisture. The wizard’s cloak of night coolly wrapped the last pink-orange blade on the horizon, kick-starting the full, awesome illumination of Altimere. Flanking lights lunged along each landing strip in turn, a mile or so into the darkness, painting the fliers in warm copper and shadow, cross-beaming into the night air as the swords of sentient guards, arrayed for this ceremonial flight.

  Any moment now, Cardie and Brink would rise vertically at the head of their new-old squadron. Any moment now, the eyes of a hundred worlds would begin to tear up. Nostalgically? Fearfully? Proudly? Hopefully all of the above. But any moment now, he would become a mere spectator to the events unfolding around him. His part was done. The last reams of his imagination fed into the propaganda machine, and there it went. Beyond his control.

  All cameras running in sync for this inaugural flight, those inside the cockpits arguably the most important of all, as they would put a human face on this prayer for public action. The camaraderie. The sweat. The fierce stares. The mastering of unimaginable fear. The personalized badges, graffiti, swaying hula girls on the dashes. The photographs of loved ones and the messages of death and destruction, some of them censored, others blackly humorous. In the next few days, the entire breadth of man’s colonized space would be shrunk to those few square feet of cramped living space around each and every flier in Fifth Condor.

  Whatever happened, Cardie and Brink would have to win this first victory.

  * * *

  It’s time.

  Some had called it sangfroid, some arrogance, others a natural gift. To Cardie, her utter lack of doubt in her own abilities in the cockpit had a darker origin, one she’d shared with Scott but no one else. Alone in the vastness of space, she had no fear of death—facing it, wreaking it, summoning it a hundredfold with the flick of her wrist or the jerk of her thumb.

  Over a thousand enemy kills to her name and how did she feel now? Inadequate. Remiss in her duty. The Sheikers and Finaglers had so far dealt with jittery opponents in this campaign, ISPA aces wing-clipped by political brinkmanship along the 100z border. They had fought husbands and fathers and wives and mothers, fliers who would always hold something back because back was where they really needed to be. Home. Brave men and women, perhaps braver than Cardie and Brink could ever be, because they risked so much and knew it every step of the way.

  But she had a capacity, a deep, stone-cold vault inside her that muted all self-preservation and conscience during flight, a place of atavistic austerity that made her insuperable in battle and occasionally reckless at the joystick. It made her Cardie, the only woman alive who could shoot down a squadron of enemy fighters and knit a cardigan in the same day. She sniffed, savored the smell of moist warm rubber in her helmet. Scott knew her all right, what made her tick. Today, the only concern she felt was a tightly riveted anxiety at the back of her mind, that they might have to go AWOL from the squadron once again if there was a direct threat to Pyro Canyon.

  “It’s all yours, Squadron Leader.” Puppy dog words. Heinemann, a flat-faced rookie with a swagger.

  “Understood. Follow my lead, Condors. I hope you’re all hungry.”

  She powered up her Stymphalian Mk 4 bird and sucked in heady déjà vu as the finger-tingling whir in the cockpit and the gravelly rumble from the initial thrusters lifted her drunkenly off the ground. Her wings dipped a little either side as she compensated. Umpteen practice flights under the neutrino shield had been nice refreshers but not really necessary—she’d flown every week since leaving ISPA, if just for recreation in her thermal glider.

  “Brink, rendezvous in high orbit, set fliers for warp-gate filing. Mine first.”

  “Understood. Skipped breakfast, did we?”

  “Only the unhealthy parts. Now I’m craving some deep-space cholesterol.”

  “Sounds deadly.”

  She grinned. “The female of the species…”

  “The bane of the species, more like. Okay, we’ve just over half a squadron in the air. I’m telling them to lower the neutrino shield. Full thrusters everyone, on my mark.”

  As she hovered her finger over the Primary Boost control, she looked in the rearview display on her console. The spindly bridges fanning out from Altimere Hub faded to half-drowned bones in a smooth and Stygian sea, disappearing under a layer of cloud. The lighthouse blazed red, amber, red, amber…then green.

  “All Condors, full thrusters now!”

  Scott’s sharp command left her giddy, elated. Fifteen years vanished in the press of a button as the sudden gees flexed her taut, snapping her head back against the foam of her helmet, pulling, restringing her jaw and stomach like a bowman with a vendetta. She broke orbit at full velocity.

  The co-op display on her dash showed the squadron was still in formation. Well-trained pilots. They were the best and the last of the current crop until Trillion’s propaganda worked its magic and stirred the colonies from their slumber.

  If not, this was all for nothing.

  The road to the Altimere warp gate was smooth, straightforward. At least it should have been. Glassy worms on her retina, as though she’d been staring too long into the sun, plagued her peripheral vision. She blinked them away. Odd. They oughtn’t be so easy to dispel. Her eyesight might be playing tricks after the violent ascent but damn it, it never had before. Stars slivered to her starboard. No ships were there, so it couldn’t be the wash from a psammeticum engine. She looked again. More blink-or-miss-them slivers, this time all around. They faded to ghost trails of various sizes snaking the void like the echoes of confetti streamers.

  Nothing on radar. What the hell?

  “Brink, come in.”

  “Brink here. What’s up, Cardie?”

  “Check your flanks. I’m seeing some bizarre space distortions, almost like the shimmers from engine wash but too many to count. Raining all around us. Wow—” She jerked sideways as the whole of space outside her starboard window appeared to liquefy, to run past her as a glacier river. It thinned and twizzled and vanished. She was flying at a fair clip, so the phenomenon had to be of significant length.

  Then the thought hit her—is it moving too? Something that’s leaving a trail? But here—now? In the opposite direction…

  “Brink, this is Cardie. My guess is it’s some kind of extreme-velocity wake, possibly high-end psammeticum, but nearer warp distortion, somewhere between the two. It’s something we haven’t seen before.”

  “Understood. I can see them now. Appear to be random.”

  “Not from where I’m looking, they don’t. I’m hailing Altimere, see if they have a make on these things.”

  “Agreed. We’ll hold our approach till then. Whatever these things are, their timing sucks.”

  Hmm, or maybe not.

  Chapter Eleven

  By the time the shooting stars showered the sky above Altimere, Fifth Condor was already in orbit, far beyond the neutrino shield. A wave of chatter crossed the hub tower as consoles and planetary alerts went ape, colorfully lighting the place like a toyshop full of educational gizmos for toddlers. Though the language used by the operators would not be found in any toyshop.

  Gus hobbled to the center of the room to catch the clear vertical view as the dome’s shell parted in tw
o halves. A large number of black streaks scorched the sky. They were descending, like meteorites, directly overhead. Umpteen crimson explosions battered the neutrino shield above them. Enemy projectiles? In moments, a barrage of distant rifle reports clapped the air.

  Whatever these things are, they’ve just broken the sound barrier.

  “We’re not taking any chances. This smells like a timed attack. Hub cannons, open fire!” Hera accelerated her wheelchair to Gus’s side and peered up, adjusting her visor display. “Scramble all remaining craft. Hit them with everything we’ve got.”

  The entire tower seemed to leap a foot into the air, then a further several feet all at once, as the cannons opened up on the black falling stars. A few lit up right away, splintered into blinding amethyst shards before ballooning as dirty static clouds. L.B. raced to his side through the frantic comings and goings and quickly led him by the arm toward the elevator that led deep underwater, to Altimere’s emergency bunker.

  He tried to shrug her off—damn it, he needed to see what happened here—but she was insistent and so was Hera, barking orders he only dimly heard beneath the cannon blasts and the iron voice in his head saying, You have survived. You have adapted. You are you father’s son. Grow a pair.

  The tug-of-war inside him felt as though it was unstitching the new from the old.

  He wanted to stay and fight but he was not Max Trillion, nor was he the Gus Trillion who’d volunteered for Sigma Protection duty on Ambassador Shin Gunto’s ship. He was something else, spliced, an adaptation, a cutis nova with the chameleonic skin on the inside, only he hadn’t realized it until this moment. This was the first time he’d faced real danger since the explosion that had ripped him in two.

  “L.B.” Hers was the only face he saw, the only one that mattered.

  “Right here.” She tugged hard, then lent him the wing of her cloak, tugged gently. “Come on, Gus, sweetheart. It’s all right. We need to go. This is no place for us.”

  He watched her dew-blue eyes for signs of disappointment, of regret. He’d let her down at a crucial time, shown just how indecisive, how soft-gutted a man he really was. His metal parts had seized up and the rest of him wasn’t worth a goddamn. Trapped inside his trauma, all he could do was twist and scrutinize her reaction to him, the way a dog, licking its wounds after losing a fight, might look up forlornly and study its master, hoping for reassurance, fearing imminent abandonment.

  “You’re not going anywhere?”

  “No.” She meant it, and he followed her. He’d have followed her anywhere. “The elevator’s taking one last group down, then it’s our turn. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Everything unfolded muffled and truant and slick, like the sub-lucid slipstream of a strong anesthetic. His eyes were wide open but voyeuristic somehow, sunken back, his vision gliding over dangerous things from a place of safe remove. Powerful yet numb. Ineffectual. He was apart from reality. From duty. From L.B.—

  Black rain bombarded the sea, throwing up spume and vicious waves, the vertical smoky trails wafting northward like smudged exclamation marks above the splashes. More rain hit the landing strips and the nearest ring bridges. They exploded in black and crimson.

  He looked up as the dome halves closed, then he grabbed hold of L.B. The sky was swarming with sleek, V-shaped gliders. Far too many for the heavy-duty cannons to pinpoint.

  A devastating crash hurled them both off their feet, filled the room with the smell of cordite. It snapped him to. But before he realized where he was, they’d become separated during a heady downward slide along the polished floor. He spun. She scrabbled madly at toppling furniture, grabbed the corner of a static console, righted herself. The blast appeared to have buckled the entire tower thirty degrees to its wharf side.

  Kamikaze ships! Sent through space at high speed, timed to enter Altimere airspace just as the neutrino shield deactivated. We opened the door for them.

  Dozens of consoles, chairs and personnel thudded against the reinforced window, but it held. To slow his own slide, Gus clawed his cybernetic fingers at the floor, creating sparks until he found an open seam. Jesus, he’d burned off his fingertips and it hurt like hell—maybe the FIBER docs should have skipped the nerve-realignment part, left that part of him robotic, pain-free—but he was now fully lucid, caught up with the shocking events.

  The Finaglers themselves were attacking. Hundreds of them in formation. They were airborne, zeroing in on the hub tower in their mimetic, dark gray gliders, ready to strike. One or two gliderless creatures had fallen to the ground already and lay smashed on the landing strips, their curlable, comblike array of limbs on either side of the central torso now spastic, fluttering like the wings of featherless eagles. They had no heads comparable to a human head. Instead, their eyes and audio receptors lay somewhere in the sinuous shoulder spine bridging all the digit-endowed limbs, six or seven on either side. The central torso was a drooping trunk of extremely tough material, and armor-plated as well.

  Elaborate designs had been carved into these cylindrical “breastplates,” a reminder that the Finaglers, while monstrous to humans, were a highly advanced alien race. They could contort their bodies to stand more upright, on a par with humans, during negotiations. Usually hidden under drapes, yes, to preserve their secrecy, but hardly inferior. Indeed, they’d far surpassed humans, it seemed, in terms of aerial assault technology. No ISPA squadron could have managed such a precise high-velocity strike within such a narrow window—the neutrino shield had only been open a matter of moments.

  But they’d come in person…to wipe out Altimere.

  “L.B., you hanging in there?”

  “Like a limpet. You?”

  “By my fingertips.”

  “Good. Hope you don’t get an itchy ass. Gus, get out of the open. They’re swarming this way, and you’re right in the firing line. Quick, slide over to the corner. At least hide behind something.”

  “Okay, I’ll try,” he lied. Some of the tower personnel were passing out sidearms. They’d be the first line of defense. But if they failed, he’d have an iron fist cocked and ready to resume negotiations on behalf of Ambassador Shin Gunto, Dad, Barani and all the boys and girls in the Vike. And for L.B. Most of all for L.B., the one person in his life who hadn’t left him.

  The first gliders swooped past the window and opened fire from all across their wing-rims. Blizzards of crimson bullets ripped through the reinforced glass as though it was cellophane, annihilating Tower Control in blinding horizontal waves from back to front. First the executive offices at the rear, then the console arrays.

  L.B. let go of her station and slid down beside Gus. Smart girl. He caught her and swung her to safety behind an upended trolley full of metal smart-chart cases. Then he let go himself, just before the latest wave of firepower chopped up the area where he’d dug in. A wedge of broken furniture and glass, smashed flooring chunks and piled miscellaneous console supplies offered the only protection now, a kind of cluttered guttering between the survivors and a deadly drop.

  Everything went quiet. Perhaps the barrage had exhausted the enemy’s ammunition, or maybe they wanted prisoners. Tower personnel shot back, picking off a handful of Finaglers, but there were far too many swarming about. What are they waiting for?

  “Gus…Gus.”

  “Here.”

  “Ah, what’s happened? Have they…gone?” She sounded winded, dazed.

  “No, they’re circling outside. Don’t know what they’re up to. How are you holding up?”

  “Yeah. No.”

  “L.B.?”

  “Don’t come over here.”

  He stopped breathing. The plug on his heart pulled loose. “What’s—”

  “Gus, just stay there.”

  He didn’t say anything. He daren’t. Falling masonry clattered on the wharf side far below.

 
; “I’ve got a hole right through me. Big enough to get my hand inside. I’m gonna just lie here a while, okay?” She let out a tremulous cry of agony, trying her best to mute it. “Whatever happens, I don’t want you seeing this.”

  “Forget that. I’m coming over.”

  “No. They’ll see you. And it won’t do any good. I’m dead already. Gus, do you hear me—I’m bled out…bled out…dead already.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  No sooner had he stirred when the window space filled with a thousand whumping noises, and a full attack force landed amid the gutter debris. The flexing, lurching forms began to prod through the wreckage, scouring for survivors…or the dead.

  Either way, this was an extermination. One they’d tried on him before.

  You have survived. You have adapted.

  His mind blanked and he saw livid red. He reached up for the shoulder spine of the nearest monstrosity and, with all the force in his mechanical half, wrenched it off its perch. The Finagler didn’t utter a sound as it slammed into the hard floor, its gilded torso snapping in two. Maybe it couldn’t utter sounds.

  But it could call for help. Extra-sensorially?

  Before he’d finished thumping the life out of it, seemingly every bastard who’d made the descent now dashed at him through the darkness. They clambered and bashed and scurried across the tilted tower with alarming ferocity, slicing up survivors as they went. Clearly this was more than avenging a fallen comrade.

  They want me. Gus Trillion. They’re frightened of my propaganda.

  An insensible feeling of invincibility lifted him to his feet.

  Hell, I’ve got the bastards frightened. Without even firing a shot.

  He smirked, readied his fist and got as far away from L.B. as he could as quickly as he could. Not very.

  “All right, you sons of bitches, let’s finish this.”