Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series (42 page)

Maxwell drove away another grip of panic. His audio sensors still operated, so he listened. The sky shrieked with dozens of simultaneous explosions. Fiery rods ripped through the air, wrenched apart on their way down. Deep, hard thuds punctuated the atmospheric crackling, sending shivers through the ground. Dense chunks of granite rattled with each impact.

His audio sensors detected a quick whistle, like a sharp intake of breath, and—

BOOM!

A heavy hit—nearby—strong enough to blast most of the rocks off his body and pelt him with a few others. The moment he felt the pressure lift from his arms and back, he curled himself into a ball and raised his right arm to keep it free in case more rocks piled onto him. He thrust the tattered scraps of his left forearm over his head, a feeble attempt at protection.

The horrible screeching above cut off. All at once. It was immediately replaced by a growing swell of humming engines. Landing shuttles.

Maxwell lifted his head. One artificial eye had been smashed in, but the other still registered a dim, color-confused, stratified representation of reality. Frozen, uneven bars that kept shifting but gave glimpses of sight. Better than nothing.

Maxwell pushed off a handful of rocks and sat up as jerking images of shuttles leaped by overhead, slanting turbines growling throatily. A few shuttles’ turbines turned vertical as transapien troops flooded out of a cave entrance about a hundred meters away. Machine gun barrels let out quick whines and adjusted aim. Both sides fired at once. The shuttles’ guns did quicker work. Rounds tore through Lonsdaleite armor and punched holes straight through limbs and chests. Diamond-tipped, judging by the shrill tings they emitted against nanomesh. Only diamond could do that kind of damage. Transapien bodies crumpled under the punishment. The blue rings disappeared from most of their eyes. Some crawled back toward safety, dragging frayed, defunct legs. His soldiers were dying.

Maxwell snapped out his forearm barrel and pieced together his distorted bars of vision to aim. His vision became a little clearer every few seconds. Three shuttles hovered overhead, spraying rounds at the cave entrance. Rockets spiraled at them and burst against well-built hulls. The shuttles swerved in the air but recovered with little more than dents and burn marks.

Maxwell focused his gun on the central shuttle’s turbine. He fired a stream of rounds, not stopping as he listened to the clatter cut in and out, some bullets hitting, some missing. He shifted his aim to the point where his shots gave a continual spree of clanking. Finally, the turbine rattled and spat out one of its blades and choked black smoke. The shuttle tilted on that side and spiraled down behind Maxwell. It skidded over the granite with the harsh squawk of peeling metal.

Maxwell slotted his arm barrel and tried to push himself up. His rickety legs failed at first. He had to learn how to walk with flattened, mangled mechanics. When they obeyed enough to hobble, he got going in the general direction of the cave entrance, as fast as he could. His metallic joints ground with each step. Slices of landscape appeared before him, a clearer picture forming the longer he looked the same direction.

Turbines reached a high-pitched hum behind him—shuttles landing. More gunfire rattled from ahead, showering the rocky side of the palace. The Upraadis' combat rifles popped off rockets in reply. Explosive bursts rang against armored hulls, but Maxwell didn’t hear any shuttles go down.

Swift footsteps approached from behind. He wheeled around and snapped out his forearm barrel, but his vision updated too slowly. He caught only the slightest glimpse of a white combat suit before being smacked in the head and thrown to the ground. He sprayed rounds haphazardly, but a well-placed set of shots tore through his gun, disabling his last weapon. A few seconds passed. He heard advancing footsteps again. This time they were casual—triumphant. The white figure paused and knelt over him, black gun pressed against a section of damaged armor on Maxwell’s chest.

“What in Nether are you?” the gruff voice asked, filtered through his suit’s external speakers. More white-suited figures appeared behind him.

Instinct took over—a soldier’s unwillingness to admit defeat. Maxwell wasn’t sure his vocal apparatus still worked. He tried anyway.

“My name is Maxwell.”

First name alone would do. Maxwell wanted this man to know who lay before him. Inside this metallic husk lurked a human being, born of a mother and bearing his own name. That was enough for this stranger from another world to know—that this machine-man had a name and a history and parents and friends. So very much to leave behind.

Maxwell triggered a sequence to superheat his central power core. The process took a few seconds. His core became too hot for the battery walls to contain—so hot his mechanical insides began to melt. Then—

—as Maxwell studied the face inside the white helmet hovering over him, the vacuous eyes, the exultant half-grin, the word “Tielo” stenciled above the visor—

BOOM.

Abelard hefted the slick, black gun, hesitated. He hadn’t fired it yet, but he knew he needed to.

The air rippled with gunfire. Hot streaks zipped between both sides of the canyon. Upraadi forces held off any shuttles from landing troops near the palace, concentrating heavy fire on any shuttle that got close. But Swan’s guns increased with each landing. More fire returned from the far side, eroding Abelard’s defenses.

A half-dozen offworlders and twenty of his own fighters lined the gravel-bagged balcony of the upper palace. More Swan shuttles arrived every minute, swooping down and depositing stashes of white-suited soldiers across the canyon. The offworlder robot-men picked them off with professional aim. His own fighters sprayed rounds across the way then ducked, sprayed rounds and ducked, and on and on.

Abelard pressed himself against the tightly packed gravel bags, weapon up, safety off. Squeezed the trigger.

BRATATATAT.

He relaxed, the kick not nearly as bad as he’d expected for such a heavy gun. But his shots hit nothing. He aimed again—at a shuttle above the canyon firing on a section of the palace mount below. He fired at the windshield. The bullets made sparks but didn’t penetrate.

Another shuttle thrust toward them from the far embankment, angling upwards. Its spinner cannons blazed. The offworlder soldiers seemed to be behind cover instantly, but the shots hit while several of his men were exposed. One man’s head exploded, body collapsing instantly. Another took a shot through the shoulder and fell gasping like the wind had been punched from his gut. The woman beside Abelard screamed through clenched teeth as she cradled her splintered, bloody forearm. Shots knocked over gravel bags and split the stone tiles of the balcony floor. Everyone pressed themselves into their cover.

“Abby!” Seraphina’s voice broke through the fracas after the shuttle passed by overhead. She poked her head around the carved archway leading into the palace.

Abelard waved her away. “Get back inside!”

Seraphina didn’t go. “I think it’s gone.”

A few of the offworlders snapped up and aimed their combat guns over the gravel-bag wall, fired a few bursts, then sprinted into the palace.

“Wait!” Abelard shouted after them. “Where are you going?”

The heavy whirring sound picking up behind him answered his question. A hulking shuttle rose into view and hovered thirty meters away from the balcony’s edge. Abelard’s men tried to escape but barely got three steps before its guns emitted a deafening clatter. Their bodies were ripped to fleshy ribbons as shots blew chunks out of the balcony floor and dug into the archway. No recognizable human form remained once the shuttle’s guns had ceased; only steaming, messy lumps and limbs. Abelard’s stomach roiled at the sight. His head went light.

But the shuttle was rotating, closing in with its aft. The rear ramp door hissed and creaked open, revealing a packed mass of white combat suits inside. Abelard dashed out from behind cover and shuffled into the palace just as the ramp door came to rest on the gravel bags. Gunshots chased after him.

* * *

Abelard’s fighters inched back through the palace tunnels as Swan troops flowed toward them like water through a pipeline. Trained loyalites in their slavemaster’s armor plowed through the unshielded Upraadis. Aim sharper. Movements tighter.

Abelard hurried on his aching bad leg behind Seraphina. She turned every so often to aim her long-barrel pistol, close her eyes, wince as she fired. Abelard pulled her into a room when a spree of shots peppered the rocks near them. They leaned against a side table and caught their breath.

“Where the hell are the offworlders?” Abelard asked, perusing the mural-carved walls, hanging tapestries, and glossy, fauxwood furniture. Blank projector screens sat between the tapestries for the entertainment of the lord’s guests. An empty and utterly useless room.

Seraphina peeked into the hallway as a few Upraadis sprinted by. Another paused outside the doorway and fired back the direction he came from. A spree of bullets pelted him in reply, holes punching through flesh with ease. His body flopped backwards like a bundle of cords.

“We need to go,” Seraphina said. She pulled Abelard to the door, waited a few seconds. Boots clumped down the hallway. Seraphina leaned out and fired her pistol, making a hard clack against her target—an obvious hit. She eyed Abelard’s gun as shots dug into the stone arch of the doorway. “Now you.”

Abelard hefted his gun and set the firing mechanism to the upper barrel. He held it out the doorway and blasted a mini-rocket. The explosion shook the rocks all around them, toppled faux wood chairs. Seraphina stumbled into Abelard as the ceiling buckled and dropped dust on their heads.

They coughed and rushed out of the room while they had the chance. The tunnel had partially collapsed about twenty meters down. A white-armored arm stuck out of the debris, gloved fingers twitching.

Further down, the halls fluttered with dozens of fighters falling back, deeper into the palace. Abelard and Seraphina headed toward the throne room. The offworlder captains would be there. They would know what to do. He’d already put his life and rebellion in their hands. If they failed, Abelard would have nothing. Only the option of retreat, living to die another day. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but with how quickly Swan’s forces stormed through their halls . . .

Men and women in exoskeletons rushed past them holding jagged steel sheets, guns slung behind their backs. They used the mighty strength of the exosuits to ram their makeshift shields into cracks in the wall. More fighters came down the tunnel. Some already had lumps of gray caustic gel clumped on their skin, covering wounds. A wiry woman bled from a gash in her lip. Others limped along after the main cluster of comrades, still clutching their weapons. The group had probably repulsed some whitesuits in another tunnel and were ordered here as backup. Or maybe the whitesuits had pushed them all the way back to the main corridors, and now they had nowhere else to go. The more cuts and bruises and gel-smeared wounds Abelard saw, the more convinced he became it was the latter.

“Hold fast, brothers and sisters!” Abelard called over the noise of shuffling feet and hard breathing and quick commands. Eyes darted to him hopefully. “Stand your ground. Your guns are as good as theirs in this tunnel.”

He gave them nothing new, nothing to take hold of. His words reported one thing, but his feet reported another. Young men watched in confusion as Abelard and Seraphina rushed away from the front and toward the throne room. The young men stayed behind and clutched their weapons, but their leaders’ retreat confirmed what they felt—Upraad’s defenses were crumling.

Rumaya watched the last deflector dish explode in her subvision, and with it her last shred of hope of repulsing the Sagittarian invasion.

Of course, one dish could not have stopped a full-scale bombardment. It could not stop the dozens of shuttles picking off her surface-level troops or the thousands of Sagittarian footsoldiers now swarming into the tunnels. The destroyed dish was symbolic—a triggering point for the shift to plan B: escape.

For that, she needed the firepower to cover their planes’ takeoff from the palace landing platform, hence why her 109 transapien troops now drew back from their respective fronts, contracting into the main corridors and rushing toward their new designated stations. The Upraadi natives would keep fighting tunnel to tunnel while Rumaya’s teams pushed Sagittarian shuttles back from the platform. The invaders would be too distracted in the tunnels to notice her troops coalescing—or so she hoped.

Rumaya dispatched orders to concentrate firepower on shuttles approaching the platform and to leave the others alone. The first shuttle needed time for takeoff.

A familiar, burly man barreled into the throne room, heaving breaths. Sweat formed a dark column down the middle of his polyfiber shirt and matted his uneven hair. Others rushed in after him, haggard and unsure, eyes shifting between comrades in disappointment. Fewer than they started with. Their leader cast a map rendering from his wrist cuff to the floor and studied it.

“Gable,” Rumaya called to him.

He cut off the map and lumbered over, face a constant scowl.

“Send an order down your chain of command. I need your troops to keep—”

“We have no chain of command,” he growled.

Any lingering mystery of how this militia could disintegrate so quickly disappeared.

“Fine.” Rumaya tried again. “Pass a message to all your troops to keep a presence on the surface. As much as possible. We need to keep the invaders spread thin so my teams can pick them off.” She watched him close to detect any suspicion. Her emotionless voice found its uses in times like this.

Gable nodded and started to turn, then paused. “What happened to your counterpart? The . . . man.”

Maxwell
. Rumaya stayed silent. The question forced her to face reality. Maxwell’s vital signal and comms had shut off abruptly after the second bombardment. Even in nanomesh armor, the odds of surviving a nearby orbital strike were impossibly slim. The man she had trained with, gone through transformation with . . . He was gone. Never more than a fellow soldier, Maxwell’s loss still merited the sluggish sadness that dogged her. She didn’t
feel
it, but she sensed it.