“No way to know who drew the short straw, Melissa.” And shit, they beat the odds: four out of five was the best success ratio Rulaine could validate. But now we’ve got to focus on beating our odds—
Sleeman had not stopped staring into the scope. “But can’t we check—?”
Jeez, she must really like Tygg. Well, no accounting for taste—“Dr. Sleeman, you need to take a deep breath and think. We can’t send radio messages through the Slaasriithi jamming. If we tried, the only thing we might accomplish is giving our enemies a lock on our position. And right now, we have to—”
The comm channel from drive room was suddenly alive with sounds of chaos and shredding metal. “Shit! Karam?”
“Yeah; talk, Tina.”
“Coolant line just blew out. And I mean blew; sprayed shards into the control panel and cut some cables. It’s a friggin’ mess down—”
Karam stole a glance at the engine readouts. One showed steady with the power plant temperature rapidly climbing into the red. The other readout on the dynamic display had gone dark: probably its relay had been in one of the cut cables.
“Karam, what do we do?”
“Tina, you hold tight. I’m going to need you and Phil back there when I try to land this thing.”
“Yeah, well hurry up about it.”
Karam couldn’t help smiling at Melah’s salt-encrusted truculence as he triggered the canopy covers. They retracted quickly, revealing—
Green, black and violet expanses rolling further and further away until they ended at a thin blue line that rimmed the horizon: the straits separating the north and south continents.
“Will we make it?” Lymbery asked.
“Don’t know,” Karam grumbled as he studied the gauges. The power plants and engines were both spiking their temperatures toward the red-line. But even without doing the math, he knew what would happen if he nursed those systems along at lower power levels: they’d remain only moderately compromised—until they disintegrated under the impact of their crash, at least one-hundred kilometers short of the sea. Karam sighed, resolved to take the only action that might save them. And to do so before he could consider it in detail, because then he would probably soil himself. “Everyone: hold on.”
“Why?” chorused Lymbery and Sleeman.
There wasn’t enough time to explain. But apparently Phil Friel knew what was coming: over the engineering circuit, the Irishman shouted for Tina to strap in, for the love of God—
Just as Karam pushed the engine and power plant gains to maximum.
Bucking, shuddering, Puller’s nose rose back up into a faintly skyward arc, the red limit indicators of the ship’s thrusters and power plants rising even more quickly.
Melissa Sleeman’s voice was uncharacteristically small. “Will this save us, or blow us to pieces?”
Karam shrugged. “Damned if I know.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Southern extents of the Third Silver Tower; BD +02 4076 Two (“Disparity”)
The Aboriginal binoculars were quaint, but Pehthrum discovered them to be reasonably effective. Although they lacked the sophisticated analytical electronics of the models he was used to, these purely optical systems had one immense advantage: simplicity. There was no possibility of malfunction or misreading: lenses magnified what your eyes could already see. And these did so quite well: they had revealed the tell-tale signs of a revetment on the far side of the silted streambed.
The clone Pehthrum had chosen as the assistant squad leader—Beta-Three—raised his Pindad caseless assault rifle to his shoulder. Pehthrum pushed it back down. “No. If we rush this position directly, we could take significant casualties. We have to clear almost sixty meters of soft open ground. If they have any modern weapons, they could cripple us.”
“Leader, I understand. But if we lay down suppressive fire with our rifles while the shotgunners charge across—”
“Be still. There is a better way.” Pehthrum motioned to Xi-Two, who passed forward two long cases.
Beta-Three three shrank back. “Will that work—here?”
“Most assuredly, given that we know the biochemistry of our Aboriginal targets.” Pehthrum opened the two containers. After a moment, upt’theel started streaming out, noses questing desperately: they had been in food-deprived hibernation for more than a month now. Pehthrum palmed a piece of bait and waved it in their direction—briefly—before throwing it as far as he could toward the revetment.
The milling brood of weasel-pangolin monsters had just caught the scent—ominously—as the rotting meat described an arc that ended with a sloppy thump only fifteen meters in front of the revetment. As if controlled by one ravenous mind, the upt’theel spun in that direction and swarmed over the ground toward the bait.
Beta-Three started to rise. Pehthrum cuffed him with the back of his gauntleted hand. Not enough to inflict a concussion: just a love tap that partially severed the top of his ear. “You wait for my order. And for our pets to do their work.”
The upt’theel certainly seemed eager to do just that. They flowed over the lumpy, partially marshy ground like a clattering, squealing carpet. When the first few reached the bait, they struggled, rolled in furious arabesques of mortal competition—until one put up a sharp nose and detected the scent of more sustenance. Its head swiveled, others following, toward the revetment. With a renewed cacophony of clacks and shrieks, the majority of the horde swept toward it.
* * *
Unsymaajh looked at Riordan, who was keenly aware of the many, massive eyes watching him from behind the fronds, straining to either run or protect—
Caine waved his hand, spoke one of the commands the humans had used in directing the water-striders: “Go.”
The gigantic creatures trampled out of the brush with a chorus of ululating hoots, like enraged fog horns testing their vocal range. In three strides they were into the wave front of the startled upt’theel, which, true to their nature, launched themselves at the striders’ lower legs.
However, for every one that managed that feat in time, half a dozen were smashed into screaming, writhing pulp.
Caine saw one of the loathsome octopedal monsters begin burrowing into a water-strider’s lower leg—just as another strider grazed its own wide leg across that of its afflicted herd-mate. The upt’theel’s rear half was kicked away like a writhing rag, the front half screeching starved outrage at the immense animals towering over it.
Caine swallowed, discovered his throat was as dry as sun-baked leather. “Thnessfiirm.”
“Yes, Caine Riordan?”
“Has the AMP relocated?”
“Yes, and it has self-stealthed again.”
“Arm the launch pods.”
“It would be best to prepare to designate the targets. And you will need to keep the targets in the designator’s line of sight until—”
“I understand. We have a similar guidance system: we call it fire-and-forget.” Riordan raised the wandlike designator. “I’m just waiting for our real enemies to show themselves.”
Qwara had been silent beside him the whole time. “They are rising up, now. Look—wait: is that—are they—?”
“Those are Optigene clones, Ms. Betul.”
The same kind that were sent to kill me just last year.
* * *
Pehthrum did not understand what he was seeing, at first. The tall stands of ferns and frond-trees on the downstream side of the Aboriginal revetment had vomited out large, impossible quadrupeds. Some as high as ten meters, sounding like a collection of war-trumpets and bone krexyes horns, they charged the flank of the upt’theel swarm, stomping as they came. The small creatures, ferocity undiminished, were no match for the close-furred colossi: bright spatters and sudden smears marked the carnivores’ demise beneath the massive feet of the counter-attackers.
Beta-Three stared at him. “Respected Intendant, what do we—?”
“Rifles of triad one and two; suppress the revetment. Rifles of triad three; enga
ge the—the creatures. Shotgunners: charge to thirty meters range and engage the creatures with single slug rounds. Full automatic. Now!”
Pehthrum’s clones rose up from the tall, spiky thickets in which they had been hiding, started firing at the revetment. But that withering fusillade did not generate the multi-directional spray of wood that the Intendant had been expecting. So: an earthen redoubt behind it. Clever.
The two riflemen firing at the tall creatures were passable marksmen, but only passable: most of their hits did more to enrage the long-legged behemoths than incapacitate them. Concentrating most of their fire on the largest specimen, they did inflict some wounds that looked mortal, but in the sense that they would kill in minutes or hours, not before the infuriated animal completed its charge.
And still the riflemen of triads one and two were dutifully and futilely peppering away at the revetment. By the Progenitors’ scrofulous testicles, have these accursed clones no greater sense than this? “All rifles on the creatures; shotguns hold your ground and fire, point blank!”
As his men started to follow these orders and the first of the charging quadrupeds stumbled under the more intense fire, Pehthrum, hanging back, took the Jufeng dustmix rifle off safety, snapped over the trigger selector so that it would fire the underslung launch tube, and selected a conventional high explosive grenade from the rotary cassette just in front of the trigger guard. He shouldered the weapon, braced it by wrapping its sling around his arm, raised the barrel slightly in the direction of the revetment—and noticed a small, color-changing dot on his sleeve, which vanished in the same instant he saw it. No! A laser designator? Dung and submission! “Get down!” he tried to scream over the clones’ chattering rifles and shotguns. “Concentrate your fire on—!”
* * *
Caine nodded to Thnessfiirm. “Fire the first five MAPHs.”
Thnessfiirm bobbed her compliance and tapped a thick control rod with several of her rings.
From a clearing thirty meters behind the revetment, angry sibilant hisses up-dopplered and materialized in the form of miniature anti-personnel heat-seekers, each only fifteen millimeters in diameter. They sped through the dwindling melee between the water-striders and weasel-monsters, bypassed the shotgun and rifle wielding clones that had closed with the one charging strider, and disappeared, fire-tailed, into the bodies of the rearmost enemy troops. The one who had held the long weapon was hit first. His torso exploded from inside, clumps of flesh and bone puffing outward as the lower half of his body swayed, and then toppled. Before it hit the river’s silty shore, three of the riflemen who had remained behind to provide a base of fire were also hit, two with similar results. The third shrieked as his left arm was blown off at the shoulder.
Riordan saw this and, peripherally, the slow fall of the much-mauled water-strider. He moved the laser designator from one clone to the next, starting with the rearmost and moving forward. “Launch the next three,” he ordered Thnessfiirm.
But the fairly neat arrangement of targets was rapidly becoming chaotic. Some of the water-striders were hooting and stomping at the attackers in what seemed to be threat displays. Several of the clones swerved away from the huge creatures, two of whom, finding themselves only twenty meters from the revetment, charged it. Caine quickly cancelled the primary designations for the next flight of MAPHs, painted these two new, rapidly approaching threats, ducked, saw Qwara crouching, watching, aghast at the speed with which the carnage had taken place. He stabbed an arm out to grab her: “Get dow—!”
A jackhammer stutter. The top of Qwara Betul’s head smeared away under a shower of shotgun slugs—just as three of the MAPHs raced over her falling corpse. An eye blink later, three small, sharp explosions beat a nearby, percussive tattoo. Caine leaned down to look out the observation slit they’d built into the revetment: there wasn’t much left of the two charging clones, and it was difficult to determine where their remains ended and those of the pulped upt’theel began. But the rifleman’s weapon was apparently intact…
Rifle rounds peppered the top of the revetment, the treetops: one of the convector subtaxae tumbled from a frond tree, emitting a sound that was part chirp, part bleat.
Unsymaajh appeared, swinging downward from behind the canopy of the cone-tree that stood at the juncture of the revetment and the fronds that had hidden the water-striders. The big convector’s long arm stretched down to scoop up his fallen taxon-mate—
A flurry of fire from back near the river: Unsymaajh seemed to writhe upward in mid glide and then collapsed, blood trails marking his descent like nearly invisible dotted lines.
Caine rolled to the other side of the vision slit, ducked back and then out to get a quick look: the four surviving clones had doubled back and discovered their dead commander. One had found the Jufeng, was lowering it: that weapon was probably what had killed Unsymaajh. Of the other two, the one who was armed with a shotgun had put it aside, was inspecting which of the fallen riflemens’ weapons was still serviceable. Caine called to Thnessfiirm, who had retreated into the far corner of the revetment and was shivering as if she had been dropped in ice water. When the traumatized cerdor failed to respond, Riordan scrambled over, gently helped her raise the control rod into their shared field of vision. “Thnessfiirm, I need you to launch two MAPHs. I need you to do it now.”
Thnessfiirm’s head bobbed and weaved erratically and she was emitting a wheezing buzz, but her rings clacked against the rod with shuddering purpose.
Caine rolled back to the vision slit, aimed the designator, painted the clone with the Jufeng—and ducked back as an improbably loud roar of weapons-fire accompanied a hailstorm of high velocity rounds that clawed and ripped at the edges of the slit. Now that they’ve spotted me, they are likely to—
Only then did Riordan realize that the gunfire hadn’t merely come from the enemy rifles; that thundering crescendo had been caused by the simultaneously-launching Slaasriithi MAPHs.
But not just the two Caine had called for: Thnessfiirm had fired all of them.
A flock of the bright-tailed missiles sped over the bodies of clones and upt’theel and water-striders and streaked to a ruinous convergence upon the wielder of the Jufeng. He disappeared in a set of overlapping explosions that left no trace of him, and very little of his weapon.
But with the miniature anti personnel heatseekers gone, the rest of Riordan’s strategy was in ruins. Fatal ruins. Caine turned to Thnessfiirm, about to ask why the cerdor had launched all of them: had she misheard? Had it been a command error? Had she been panicked? But the answer was obvious at first glance: Thnessfiirm was still quaking, still sitting folded into the back corner of the revetment, her own wastes pooling out from beneath her.
Unsymaajh dead, Qwara dead, Thnessfiirm in shock: Riordan crawled to the other end of the revetment, risked a peek around that leaf-shrouded corner.
The three surviving clones were advancing at a trot, weapons at the ready. The water-striders, not under immediate attack, hooted their challenges, stood their ground, but wavered, uncertain what they should do as the soldiers gave them a wide berth.
One chance. And it almost certainly means my death to try: to roll out, grab the Pindad just a few yards away and get back behind the revetment. It’s not much of a plan, but short of running and leaving Thnessfiirm to die and our rear undefended, it’s the only plan I’ve got. Caine gathered his legs under him, felt his overtaxed heart hammering in his chest, heard his own wheezing breath—
And heard a startled cry from the corpse-strewn field. Hoping that anything which surprised the clones would give him a moment of safe observation, he popped his head back around the corner of the revetment.
One of the clones was down, the other two staring wildly about—just as, faint as the echo of a distant dog’s bark, they all heard a rifle report. And having carried that model of rifle, Caine knew exactly what it was, and exactly what it meant.
The distant CoBro eight millimeter liquimix battlerifle—the new standard of Earth
’s Commonwealth forces—fired again: another of the clones went down, two puffs of dark mist jetting from his chest. The dying echo of the blended reports confirmed the direction and the range of the fire: it had come from well beyond the far side of the river. And it meant friendlies were on their way. The last clone dropped to a knee, scanned quickly for cover—
Caine sprinted out around the corner of the revetment, grabbed the blood-slick Pindad on the move, rolled into a prone position, his heart hammering so hard he knew he would never be accurate enough to hit his enemy—
Who, hearing the noise, had spun around, his own Pindad coming up—the same moment that three rapid maroon vapor jets erupted from his torso. He fell over and did not move.
Caine resolved to take three seconds to rest and think and listen.
And the first sound he heard made him cancel the last two seconds: more Pindads firing, back near Fallback Point One. Damn it. The attack here, which he’d guessed might be a feint or merely an opportunity attack, had obviously been the signal for another, possibly larger force to hit his main line.
So: how best to help? What will hit our enemies the hardest? Caine’s eyes strayed out over the bloody silted river bed: probably a handful of firearms, but it would take time to find them, time to get the ammo, and all the while, he’d be getting shorter and shorter of breath.
Which reminded him: time to pop another pill. He did.
The alternative? See if Thnessfiirm could move now. If she could, and was able to operate the AMP, that would bring a far more powerful weapon to bear far more rapidly.
Caine snagged the Pindad’s bandoliers from the dead clone’s torso, jogged around the corner of the revetment—
—and almost ran headlong into Thnessfiirm. The Slaasriithi’s very pale neck and tendrils looked like they were now covered with sagging, old skin. “Thnessfiirm, are you—?”
“I am able to function. I believe.” Her sensor cluster wobbled uncertainly in the direction of the distant gunfire. “They are attacking where you expected.”
Raising Caine - eARC Page 48
