Newby laughed, or cried. He wasn't sure which. But his lungs were juddering as his throat convulsed. His whole body was numb as shock blanked out the pain. He could see very little, just simple silhouettes. He blinked a few times as he scrabbled around feebly in the mud and broken branches. It took effort to lever himself up onto his knees. The laserblast had left huge gray mists floating across his vision. He whimpered as the numbness quickly gave way to a terrible cold gnawing deep into his flesh. Then he was shaking uncontrollably. The jeeps had gone. Several fires were burning amid the shattered trees. Smoke braids coiled around the trunks as they drifted up toward the canopy.
A dark mote streaked past his head from the direction of the road, so fast he thought it was some phantom, part of the damage the laser had wreaked on his eyes. But there was a tiny rigid contrail in the air, marking its passage.
Newby turned to see where it had gone. The contrail was curving at incredible speed, weaving fluidly around the intervening trees as it chased through 180 degrees. His brain sent a flood of nerve impulses out to his lungs and vocal cords, preparing them for a scream. They weren't fast enough.
Lawrence didn't allow them to stop until the jeeps had climbed up onto the plateau itself, and they were free of the jungle. During the last section of the climb the Great Loop Highway had gradually eroded to little more than a path through the trees. The tarmac had crumbled away from a combination of heat, water and roots. This far from Memu Bay, the budget for highway maintenance robots no longer allowed for resurfacing. The best they could do was keep the original route clear. Vehicles that traveled out here had the kind of gearing and suspension to cope with a mud track.
The jeeps had certainly managed. They'd come through the attempted ambush with several dents from chunks of flying wood, and the paintwork was scarred and scorched. But the engines and wheels were intact.
Dennis braked to a sharp halt as soon as Lawrence told him he could, tires kicking up a cloud of sandy dust.
Lawrence turned around. The sniper's bullet had caught Edmond at the base of his neck, slicing clean through the Skin carapace. There was nothing the Skin's medical program could do for him. The bullet had spun inside him, hacking through muscle, blood vessels, nerves and even shattering two of his cervical vertebrae before punching out through the back of his shoulder. There was just too much damage.
Hal's arms were flung around his friend, as they had been for the last hour. Even with half of his facial muscles impaired, his anguished expression was terrible to see.
"Dead," Hal wailed. He sucked down some air and blew it out. "Dead. Dead." Another labored inhalation. "Sarge. He. Is. Dead."
"I know, Hal. I'm sorry."
Blood had foamed out through the hole in the Skin's carapace. It'd soaked into the front of Hal's white shirt, where it was clotting into a thick paste.
Amersy, Lewis, Karl and Odel walked over from their jeep.
"Shit," Lewis muttered on the general communication link. "Now what?"
"I didn't know this was going to happen," Odel said.
"Yes, you fucking did," Karl snapped. "The sarge warned us. And we saw those bastards lurking in the woods."
"He's dead!" Odel snapped.
"So are they." Karl's voice had a satisfied edge. "Smart missiles. You know they make sense."
"Dear heaven, this shouldn't have happened." Odel turned away from the jeep, standing with his hands on his hips.
"We have to bury him," Lawrence said.
"Sarge?" Dennis asked.
"Bury him. As far as Bryant and Zhang are concerned, he's another Jones. We can't take him back with us. We can't tell them what happened."
Hal was still embracing his friend. Dennis had to prize his arms away using a hefty fraction of his Skin's strength. Hal's cries were wretched as they carried Edmond away from the jeep. His hands flailed helplessly against the seat and door, rocking the whole vehicle.
By unspoken consent they walked several hundred meters away from the track. Amersy and Odel began to scrape at the sandy soil, digging quickly. They laid the body, still in its Skin, in the bottom of the grave and filled it in.
"Anybody got any words?" Lawrence asked.
"Good-bye, mate," Karl said. "I haven't finished with KillBoy's friends yet. I'll score up a few more for you before this is over. Promise."
Amersy sighed. "Those of us who knew you thank you for the time you shared with us. You lived a good life, and that will not be forgotten. We wish you bon voyage on your last journey. May God embrace your soul."
"Amen," Dennis mumbled.
"Amen," Lawrence repeated.
"So now what?" Lewis asked as they walked back to the jeeps.
"We should be able to reach Arnoon in another five hours," Lawrence said.
"You mean keep going?" Odel asked.
"I will," Lawrence said.
"But he's dead, Sergeant. They know we're here."
"Not anymore they don't," Karl said. "They're dead too. We've earned that money, man. It belongs to us."
"If you want to go back, you can," Lawrence said. "Nobody's going to stop you, or hold it against you. I said right from the start, this is your own choice. It was Edmond's, too."
"God damn that KillBoy," Odel said. "I hope he burns in hell."
"Okay, let's get started," Lawrence said. "Dennis, I want you to look after Hal. Get him cleaned up; I think we brought some fresh shirts for him. I'll drive. Odel, you're with us; I want you integrated with the smart missile rack."
"You think they'll try again?" Lewis asked.
"Only if they're really stupid," Amersy told him.
* * *
Denise managed to keep the Scarret's speed at around the 140-kph mark as she powered through the highway villages. Her body weight swayed fluidly from side to side in perfect concert with the alignment power coupling, slicing the bike round the lumbering trucks and decrepit old vans. The combination of the Scarret's laser radar, Prime and d-written neurons proved a formidable guidance mechanism, allowing her to push the bike right out to its limit. Ramshackle buildings flashed past, reduced to a peripheral slipstream of drab colors. Her attention was focused only on the road ahead, the obstacles that snapped up. Bicycles were a pain. People were dangerous, especially the kids, who ran out into the tarmac. She lost count of how many times she hurtled past one with only a few centimeters' separation distance, leaving the child screaming in terror.
The traffic began to thin out as she closed on the border. As the gaps between vehicles stretched, she increased the power flow to the axle motors. Hunched down behind the sculpted ellipsoid of the windshield she could feel the wind blast past on either side. Tarmac was a slick blur below the fat, soft tires. Once again, human emotion had engaged. The aggressive thrill of speed pursued over the edge of safety. A predator's satisfaction at closing on its prey. And coiled deeper in the psyche, the painful hunger for a revenge that was pure vengeance.
She thundered out of a low valley to see the countryside open up ahead. The Mitchell range slid up across the horizon, standing aloof above the jungle. One by one she named each of the peaks spiking up into the pale turquoise sky. It had been months since she'd seen them, the companions of her youth. The sight of them invoked a subtle reassurance. Despite the circumstances, she was coming home. The loneliness would soon be over.
Inevitably, once the Scarret entered the jungle, she had to slow again. The tarmac was cracked, pulped gray fruit was splattered across it, water pooled in the potholes and steamed off the flatter sections. Even this bike, with all its active stabilization and compensators, had to be careful over such a treacherous surface.
Her private wish was that she'd catch up with the jeeps before the ambush, maybe even charging past to help Newby, Nolan and the other cell members. Not anymore.
When the Great Loop Highway finally narrowed enough so that the trees merged above and cut off the sunlight, she switched the headlight on. It was a strange, spooky section of road. Rather than illuminate, al
l the blue-white beam seemed to do was deepen the twilight murk around her. The undergrowth that fenced the tarmac was peppered with mold and slime; the leaves, deprived of light, had grown long and distorted, bleached of their healthy color. Tixmites were the only form of life here, flourishing on the decay carpet that was the jungle's floor.
The bike hummed down the center of the disintegrating highway, its superb engineering still giving her a smooth ride over the erratic surface. She switched off the laser radar in case the Skins detected it. Every enhanced sense she possessed was straining to detect them.
In the end, it wasn't difficult. Gases from the explosives lingered a long time in the still, thick air that smothered the road. Denise smelled them a minute before she reached the ambush site. She came around a slight curve and saw thick columns of sunlight pouring down through the canopy where several trees were missing. Parking legs slid out of the Scar-ret and she got off. Explosions had torn huge rents through the jungle. Shattered stumps were still smoldering. There was a shallow crater in the road itself, with the ruins of a huge tree on either side. It didn't take much to work out what had happened. The fallen tree to stop the jeeps, putting them in the killing zone. Except the Skins had blasted it aside with their own weaponry.
She knew from her Prime's snooping through Z-B's AS that the platoons had brought heavy-caliber weapons to Thallspring. But it was the first time they'd ever used them. Newton must have withdrawn them from storage without anybody knowing—just as she had with the land mines.
The notion was extremely worrying. Unless it was some huge coincidence, it must be Newton who had the rogue Prime. Which meant that he must know of the dragon. How? Had somebody told him? The same person who had also given him a Prime?
And now he was taking his platoon up to the plateau on a freelance mission. There could really only be one reason.
Denise scouted around the immediate vicinity of the ambush, trying to find out what had happened to the cell members. She had a vague hope that they might be able to help fill in some details. Then she saw a toppled tree that was splashed in scarlet fluid. Tixmites were swarming over it. They were also falling off as fast as they arrived; hundreds were lying underneath, dead. She walked closer to investigate. Her foot slipped on a lump of something with the consistency of tough jelly. She looked down and winced.
The cell members wouldn't be able to tell her anything after all.
She hurried back to the bike. Her ring pearl used the domestic relay satellite to place a call to Arnoon. The call routing was guarded by Prime and heavily encrypted. Even so, there was a tiny risk of interception, but she had to take it "Denise!" Jacintha exclaimed. "Why the encryption? Have you heard something about Josep? We're all so worried."
"We've got a bigger problem than that, I'm afraid."
The Great Loop Highway was now just a rather feeble joke. The transponder posts were missing. The maintenance robots hadn't cleared the vegetation for years. The highway was nothing more than two uneven tire ruts in the ground, gouged out by the few trucks and pickups that still drove across the plateau. And they weren't even following the original path anymore. As puddles and holes grew bigger, the drivers had swerved around to avoid them. These curves would create new holes, and the next swerve would be wider.
Lawrence was constantly turning the wheel to follow the meandering track as it snaked around unseen obstacles. There were no puddles today; it hadn't rained on this part of the plateau for some time. His jeep was throwing up a smog of powdery dust as it bounced along the ruts. The stuff got everywhere. Hal had to wear one of the paper masks from the medical kit. Skin gills had to flush the gritty particles out of their filter membranes.
Lawrence was constantly referring to his inertial guidance display to confirm they were still heading roughly in the right direction. There was no other way of knowing. The map file of the plateau was the same as they'd had last time, without a single update. It still showed the Great Loop Highway running straight and true between the hinterland settlements.
When they approached Rhapsody Province he even thought the map was glitching. There was no sign of the bauxite-mining operation. It took him a while to realize that the conical hillocks ahead of them were actually the old slag heaps, a little bit taller now and covered in baby crown reeds and stringy weeds. The vegetation had a distinct lemon tinge, as if the plants were jaundiced.
"I wonder if they've shut the mine down altogether," he said.
"Can't see much happening here," Dennis said. "Maybe they've moved on."
"At least that explains why the road's in such a crappy state these days."
They drove on past the base of the first few slag piles, then turned in among them. Somewhere up ahead was Dixon. Lawrence didn't really want to go there, but that was where the road led. For all their ruggedness, the jeeps wouldn't be able to cross the raw terrain of the plateau.
"Somebody behind us, Sarge," Lewis announced. "Moving fast."
Lawrence expanded Lewis's telemetry grid and called up his visual sensor. Sure enough, a small plume of dust was racing across the plateau. It was too far away for the sensors to gain a clear picture of what it was. But it was certainly traveling a lot faster than the jeeps had managed along the same stretch of road.
"Keep tracking them," Lawrence said. "No active sensors. But I want to know when you can make them out properly."
"No problem, Sarge."
Dixon was still there. Most of it. The first thing Lawrence saw was that all but one of the huge maintenance sheds were gone. Its doors were open, showing a single excavator processor standing inside. Concrete oblongs marked where the other sheds had stood, gradually succumbing to the slow incursion of windswept soil. One of them was now a parking lot for a couple of articulated trucks. A further two were covered with small piles of aluminum ingots; there weren't enough to fill even one of the trucks.
The houses remained, though the majority had sheets of bleached plywood fixed over their windows. The grainy dust lay thick on every ridge. Lawrence noticed that all the air-conditioning cabinets had been removed, leaving empty metal brackets on the walls.
He looked over to the hexagonal building outside town that housed the fusion plant. The web of red power cables that used to radiate away from it had been taken down; now there was just a solitary line of pylons carrying a lone cable across the countryside. When he switched to infrared, the walls and roof glowed a light coral pink in comparison to the dull vermilion of the surrounding land.
"They have power," he said.
"Anybody home?" Dennis asked. He was too edgy to make it entirely jovial.
"There has to be somebody," Odel said. "They're still working here. The lights in the shed are on."
"They must have seen us coming," Karl said. "They'll be hiding out there somewhere."
"How did they know it was us?" Amersy said. "We didn't announce we were visiting."
Lawrence's jeep had reached the first houses. He nudged it forward along the main street, sensors sweeping for any sign of movement. "I don't care where they are as long as they're not in our way. Keep going."
"Sergeant!" Odel called. "Airborne. Incoming."
Odel's telemetry grid expanded across Lawrence's vision. Tracking data scrolled down. Three kilometers west, five hundred meters' altitude, holding level at four hundred kilometers per hour. One meter long. No known match found in the armory file.
"What the fuck is that?" he murmured. His own AS had acquired it: there was hardly any infrared signature, and no electromagnetic emission at all.
"It's a goddamn recon drone," Lewis said. "They're hunting us."
Who? Lawrence wondered. Somehow it didn't seem like the kind of thing that KillBoy would use. It must be Arnoon Province. They had the money and the technology to guard their territory. Despite the alarm at such a thing being deployed against them, he felt happy. I was right about them.
"More like a smart cruise," Dennis was saying.
"Amersy, double time," Lawre
nce said. "Let's get out of here. Odel, use a smart, shoot it down."
"Yes, sir!"
Lawrence accelerated: the main street was the best piece of road since before the ambush; the jeep made a hundred kilometers an hour along it without any trouble. He saw Amersy keeping up with him. A single pulse of bright-orange flame squirted out from the smart missile rack Odel was carrying. His sensors tracked the little missile as it flashed into the sky, arcing around to line up on the unidentified drone or whatever the hell it was.
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