Flickers of crimson dotted the night sky in the corner of his eye—Cardie and Brink showing the invaders what for? Gus swung and kicked at anything that moved. Anything that twitched in his direction.
But they were not dumb. A cage of leathery limbs tightened around him from behind, squeezed his lungs. He managed to jam his skinless fingers under one of the knuckles and tear the entire creature free to one side. While it regrouped, he uppercut it with all his might, crashing the thing up and over the pile of debris and down to its death.
Another two lunged on top of him, went to crush his face with their feet balled into clubs. He squirmed to one side, caught a heel to his nose instead. The crunch exploded dully, then sharply, ice-vinegaring his eye sockets. Everything slithered. Writhed. He couldn’t see through the vinegar but he could hear the racket all around him. Displaced debris. Heavy forms finding their balance, picking their place, their opportunity…
…for a final killing strike.
His busted nose smarted and throbbed into his brain. Instinctively he kicked out, but there was nothing there. “Come on, you bastards! What are you waiting for?”
In his liquid vision, dark, swaying figures perched above him, spreading their shoulder spines like carrion birds unholstering gothic wings.
This is it. It took all you sneaky shits to finish me, didn’t it? One guy. A cripple. Just wait till you try taking on Earth, then. They’ll chew you up and spit you out in goddamn—
The deafening crunch of a balloon full of seashells exploding near his ear made him wince. It hurt. Stung. Tasted unlike anything that had ever passed his lips. A blob of some kind of mush filled with hard bits had found its way inside the corner of his mouth. More leaked in as he tongued his lips.
A massive weight landed on his stomach, jerked the air from his lungs. A Finagler? He hammered it off him with his fist.
More crunches, more hurtful stings from every direction left him backscrabbling uphill to escape. They’re torturing me? Death of a thousand pricks? But as his vision began to clear, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The Finaglers, who moments ago had gathered to devour him, were practically trampling each other to get away. Several carcasses were left behind, festooned on the legs of upturned desks and chairs, the middles of their torsos completely exploded.
What in the name of God?
One by one, the deserters popped open, guts and bone fragments and sharp, gilded edges flying everywhere. None of them appeared to know what was happening, as though they were scorpions scurrying apart inside a large microwave oven, unaware of the invisible means of their destruction.
I’m next?
Gus clawed for dear life up the slanted floor, his cybernetic fingers digging in at rapid intervals. More crunches but no more stings. His enemies were too far away. Some of them leaped through the open windows to their deaths, the rest exploded one at a time—pop, pop, pop—all across the wedge of debris until the control tower was a hissing, steaming hotplate filled with nothing but night and leftover shells and gristle.
He didn’t let go of the floor above the slaughter, not before he heard another human voice. L.B.? How much time had passed, he couldn’t tell. Luring the attackers away from her had been the only thing on his mind, but what kind of shape was she in? Had she managed to hide from the sons of bitches? Gus slid down and began to bash and wrench his way through the compacted wreckage. Either he’d find her alive or…no, there was no alternative. Christ, he was sore from hanging by his one arm, but he couldn’t stop hacking, clambering. The voice came from far below, from ground level. “Tower? Are there any survivors?”
A handful of groans emerged from the far side of the room. One or two were able to shout. Gus soldiered on through the alien detritus, oddly convinced he was not in any danger and never had been…at least not from the invisible exterminating force that had ended the Finaglers attack on Altimere.
Whatever it was had been pinpoint in its aim, its lethality.
He reached a damp, limp figure among the wreckage. Rama Core perfume, world-dizzying. He slid the cloak off her, bunched it and rested her head on it. She didn’t move. Had a slight pulse, though, faint as the last few soda bubbles breaching the surface of a tepid drink. She’s still here. He looked up and searched the stars for someone, something to thank. But the force behind their salvation felt closer, beside them even now. He heaved a stuttery sigh of relief. She’s still alive. A cool, searching breeze whispered over them. Gus nestled beside her, so tired he could sleep here forever and call it luxury. But a thought kept nagging at him. If she’s still alive, won’t she still be a coiner?
Her parents had been pursued halfway across the galaxy and now lived as fugitives because of their phenomenal astral travel abilities. And by her own admission, L.B. had those same abilities, maybe even more potent. Had he…could he have just witnessed her forbidden coining unleashed in its full, frightening glory? Astral travelers weren’t supposed to be able to affect physical changes, but if the military had wanted her parents so badly…
Her tiny fingers eased closed around the edge of his palm. They were cold as icicles.
“L.B.? Lyssa?”
“Mmm.”
He forced himself up, gently lifting her onto his artificial shoulder. She moaned behind gritted teeth. “I need you to stay with me. No more coining. No more escaping. Whatever you did, whatever you do, stay in this body. Keep it alive for me, okay? I’ll get you down somehow.”
Her wound leaked inside his torn shirt, the blood streaking warmly down the join in his skin. “Are…are they all gone?” She groaned.
“I think so. I hope so.” Gus squeezed past the smart-chart trolley, then checked his footing over the multistory drop. Torch lights fingered the darkness below. “You’ll have to tell me about it someday.”
“You reckon?”
“I insist.”
She shuddered, coughed blood that peppered the tinny, hollow cases. “Say, will it qualify me…you know, for soldier’s benefits?”
“If we ever told them.”
“Hmm, good…point. Gus?”
“Yep?”
She fell lifeless over his shoulder, and he could no longer find a pulse. The strength drained from even the indefatigable metal parts of him. He’d rather not make it through this if she wasn’t going to. Though the voice in his head maintained, You have survived, you will adapt, he gazed down at the lonely torch beams in the endless dark and wanted, more than anything, to fall with her into the alien waters of Altimere.
Altimere, where no one swam alone.
Chapter Twelve
So much for turning the tide.
The moment Brink had expelled his final sigh of commitment to the mission—civvy life dispelled in one last bittersweet flick of the switch in his brain—it hit him with a crushing matter-of-factness. There was that mechanism at work, sharp and calibrated after all this time. A sloughing of self-preservation. He realized the impossible odds arrayed against him and it didn’t matter. It never had. Not to him. On this far side of the warp jump, Fifth Condor was supposed to rendezvous with squadrons from several other command hubs for a raid on the Sheiker’s advance base on the third Forjorean moon. Thankfully not the moon on which they’d found Pyro Canyon—even that one was too inhospitable for the likes of Sheikers.
But Christ, it wasn’t just the Sheikers attacking—their enigmatic sponsors, the Finaglers, had joined them in full force. A horseshoe-shaped vessel had landed, encircling the Sheiker base on the moon’s desert surface, outsizing it by a factor of about twenty. An industrial behemoth transplanted over a dozen light-years. The last friendly transmissions from Altimere had indicated a sneak invasion force, almost surgical, definitely alien, but nothing on this scale. With the neutrino shield up to prevent any more kamikaze ships reaching Altimere, there had been nothing Fifth Condor could do to help.
Both he a
nd Jane had agreed: make the warp jump, hit them hard and as quickly as possible, perhaps make them think twice about overreaching into ISPA space for a while. The propaganda angle was shot to shit now anyway. All that mattered was military might—the hot and cold truth of it. Cameras were no good out here. Only firepower.
And they were impossibly outmatched.
“Weapons hot.” He wriggled himself into his utmost taut and upright position, clasped his fingers one at a time around the joystick. “Stay in tight formation. Cut main thrusters—we’re using psammeticum acceleration for a gravity slingshot around the fourth moon.”
Not a single response. They’d all placed their lives in his hands and would obey whatever improvisation he came up with, half-assed or not.
The sudden exhilaration of responsibility flushed adrenaline right through him. Responsibility—as alien to him as the giant metal Finagler bagel clamped on the surface of the third moon…until now.
At least Jane would call him out on anything too boneheaded. Might be invaluable before long if he let the adrenaline get the best of him.
“Lock in your accelerators to match the third moon’s rotation,” Jane reminded everyone. “Remember, we need to leave the fourth moon when the enemy base is on the flip side of the third, so we can sneak in and flank it undetected. Once we’re in the atmosphere, it’s low-level all the way, just like we showed you. Brink, you take the west flank.”
“Understood. And let’s drop everything we’ve got—” two sub-nuclear missiles apiece, “—on our first run if we can. Reap the entire moon if we have to. These bastards have technology we’ve never seen, so we don’t want to get into a drawn-out fight if we can help it. Hit and run. Make them a memory.”
Several dozen birds flashed their wing lights in acknowledgment behind him. Rookies all, boys and girls about to become men and women. Maybe only a few seconds of manhood, womanhood, but more of either than most people got to experience in a lifetime. No use dwelling on that now. The Sheikers and Finaglers wouldn’t.
The smooth trailing hum of the accelerator and the purple psammeticum light flickering in reflection off the fuselage panels increased steadily during the slingshot orbit, the former in pitch, the latter in rapidity, until they were a whistle and a constant beam. Soothing. Gentle. No hint of the hundreds-of-thousands-of-miles-an-hour propulsion behind them. Psammeticum accelerators were over a century old in design but had never been bettered in sub-warp propulsion, at least not in terms of reliability. Their revolutions-on-anti-matter tech, or RAM, could reach virtually any speed if one accelerated for long enough through space.
Fifth Condor needed several minutes, nothing more.
Brink tinted his visor to quell the glare of the sun as he left the dark side of the fourth moon at a blistering clip. The distance between moons was a little shy of six hundred thousand miles but he traversed it in forty-six minutes. Forty-six grim, pragmatic minutes of checking in with each individual pilot, reassuring them all, one at a time. After a brief reversal of the RAM accelerator, he entered the dull green-gray atmosphere of the third moon through terrific turbulence. Sparks scarred the windshield for a full minute.
“Alpha group, break west and follow me. Betas east with Cardie. See you at the bonfire.”
“Bagels on me.” Just like the Jane of old, always had to have the last punch line. Usually a corker.
The low flight over razor crevasses and copper plates the size of Montana made him wish he could tell the kids in the park all about it. Up close, the terrain was like nothing he’d ever seen, deadly, cold, monumental, as though the moon were part of a gargantuan, derelict space machine cut loose and left to rust. The copper region ended and a mountain range with dead-flat summits stretched beneath him for the remainder of the journey.
His computer beeped, projected a holographic topographical map onto the windscreen. He rolled his shoulders to limber up a little. Swallowed hard. Sat bolt upright in preparation. Here we go.
It appeared between the cleft of two green-gray mountains—a cylindrical monstrosity as unearthly and clinical as it was perfectly crafted. Towers were erected on the nearest summits. They were made up of several spinning tiers, each emitting a different spectrum of light. Before Brink could bark a warning to his group, each of the towers within view collapsed into a single spinning tier, hovered a little in the air, then shot away down the mountainside, toward the command ship.
“All right, we’ve been made. Nothing fancy now—quick in, quick out. Good luck, Fifth!”
“For Altimere!” one of the rookies yelled.
It surprised Brink how much that sentiment fired him up, got his old juices flowing. He’d been cool and reserved, maybe too much of both—it was unnatural, maybe a mild state of shock he hadn’t shaken—but now his stomach knotted, challenging him to either untie it or pull it so tight that it tautened every fiber of his being into a rigid instrument of warfare. The latter.
Static crackled from his fingertip as he held it over the button for Missile 1 Release. Just a few more seconds. Over the next rise and he’d be bird’s eye over the western arm of the Finagler bagel.
Pulse rings laddered up from holes in the ship’s roof, growing in radius and lightening in color, from orange to yellow to white. Brink banked out of the way, barely avoiding one. Wow. It caught the next two ships behind him, though, clipping their wings off with laserlike intensity.
“Shit. Dive down, Alphas. Dive for the roof and dodge the blast ports. Those rings will destroy anything in the air. Stay as low as you can, then skim the ground inside the curve of this thing. They won’t dare risk destroying it with their own crossfire. Shoot your missiles into the center of the curve.”
He dipped into the eye of the alien ship. Flattish copper and rocks littered the few miles of no man’s land. The Sheikers’ base, a decent-sized mobile fort surrounded by eight or nine armored freight transporters, appeared pathetic in light of its company. Brink zeroed a spot slightly to west of center on the giant crescent Finagler ship and fired twice.
Before his missiles hit, the eastern arm of the vessel exploded—thump, thu-thump, thump—in a staggering sequence that sent metal panels and shrapnel the size of skycabs hundreds of feet into the air. Cardie’s birds fell like swatted fireflies in the hurtling debris, but he clocked her ship far above, already out of harm’s way. The explosions continued in sections, back and back along the bagel, until it met his own and those of his Alpha group.
He climbed quickly vertical, just kept going to the stars. “Get the hell out of there, Condors. The bonfire’s at full blaze. Rendezvous on the dark of third. Great job!”
Three jubilant Hip-hip, hoorays crackled loudly over the comm channel. He looked in his rearview display and flipped the bird to the toasted bagel as he tore out through the atmosphere, rather pleased with himself. Oh yes, and with the mission as well.
It might only be a minor victory in the grand scheme, in the course of the war, but he’d just conquered fifteen years of nowhereness and nothingness. And that, right now, was worth more than a galaxy of—
“All pilots, head for the eleventh moon immediately. We ain’t seen nothing yet.” Jane flicked to their private comm channel. “Scott, it’s happening. Exactly what we were afraid would happen, it’s happening. Right now.”
His chest squeezed inward and stitched tight. His heart began to drum. “They’ve found the pyro? They’re landing?”
“Affirm that. And much worse—they’re heading straight for the canyon, straight to you-know-where!”
“Not if we get there first.”
“Swear you won’t let anything happen. Swear to me they won’t find it, no matter what.”
Grinding the joystick under his bearlike grip, he somehow knew this was not a mission he would return from. And that was okay. Long, long ago, he’d committed to this moment and this sacrifice and the words he n
ow had to repeat. “I swear. Whatever happens, they’ll never find our secret.”
“I swear it too.” A forever pause. “So this is it, then.”
“Aye, this is it. Pyro fucking Canyon.”
* * *
The place that had haunted him for so long, and had also been the source of his hopes and dreams for fifteen years, belched reddish fumes over thousands of livid acres. It was hellish, yes, but also hypnotic to look at. A heat haze over a mile high wavered everything—the geyser jets, the canyon walls veined with luminous red pyrofluvium, even the pinkish sky above.
So many reckless flights had passed through it during the heyday of Fifth Condor, in the name of piloting bravado, to fly the lowest, the fastest, the longest before a pilot’s fear got the best of him and forced him to pull up to safety. So many blind runs—if only they’d known what existed inside it, hidden under a low shelf one could only see from ground level. If only he and Jane had known—their lives might have turned out differently. Maybe killed at Perihelion with the others. Maybe on a subsequent mission. No one was indestructible. In a career like this, it was only a matter of time…
Is our time up?
Watching Jane spearhead Beta group away to the east of Pyro Canyon stirred something inside him, a cross between pins and needles and a warm fizz in his core. It began to ache, to course in rivulets to his fingertips and his shins. It lifted him weightless for a moment, turned him inside out with longing. What if we did make it through this? Jane hadn’t changed that much, and neither had he. Not really. Neither of them had ever married. No kids, of course—Pyro Canyon had forbidden that. But they were still drawn to each other like colliding particles. Unpredictable. Volatile. Inevitable.
Yeah, we could make a go of it together somewhere…on our own.
“Squadron Leader, my scans are picking up a reading at two o’clock. It’s difficult to tell through the distortion—the fumes are—”
“Best guess, Endicott.” Brink blinked himself back to the mission at hand, guiding Alpha group wide of the canyon smoke that billowed westward and curled into high-rise commas.
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