The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (179 page)

“We’ve got a decent supply of medical equipment stashed back at our base camp. There should be something that can help.”

“A painkiller would do to start with,” David said. “We’ve even run out of those. The hospital was shut away behind the first force field they generated. We’ve had to make do with whatever we can find in the farmhouses ever since. It never amounted to much, and it seemed selfish to keep what little we had from poor old Napo, even at the end.” He indicated one of the corpses.

“No problem,” Rob said. He took a small applicator pad from his pack.

David gave an audible sigh as it was pressed to his neck. “Damn, I never thought I’d enjoy feeling numb. That’s very kind of you, my friend.”

“My pleasure. Now just lie still and let my e-butler’s medical routine work out what to do with you.”

“How much bandwidth can your communications wormhole handle?” David asked. “We have the memories of our friends; can you at least get them to safety?”

“You’ve got a secure store in here?” Morton asked.

“Their security is our honor,” Simon said. “Every time one of us ventures outside, we transfer our last memories to an ordinary handheld array. Those who remain are sworn to get them to safety back in the Commonwealth. We trust each other, you see. Friendship in these terrible times has forged a bond strong enough to give us the strength to face bodyloss with confidence and conviction.”

Morton wasn’t sure there was anyone in Cat’s Claws he’d trust with his memories. “It would be a slow transfer,” he said carefully. “The wormhole isn’t open for very long. Just a few seconds.”

“I understand,” Simon said. “We have survived thus far, a few more months should pose no problem, especially with your weapons to help protect us.”

Morton lifted his helmet off. After the filtered air he’d been breathing, the smell in the cave seemed exceptionally strong. Something he couldn’t place: raw meat but with a sugary tang. It was strange. “What is that?”

“The smell?” Mandy said. “Whatever they’ve been polluting the Trine’ba with. It’s been getting worse for weeks now.”

“Any idea what it is? We saw the refinery they’ve built.”

“I took a few samples earlier on,” David said. “It’s like an algae of some kind. They’re bioforming the Trine’ba.”

“I believe it to be the first step in converting this planet to one that is host to their own biological heritage alone,” Simon said. “They certainly show no interest or respect for any existing organisms. It is an imperialism which seems to extend down to a cellular level.”

Rob took out a couple of vials from his medical kit, and slotted them into the applicator patch. “I’m going to put the leg into a healskin sheath after this,” he told David, and put the patch on the man’s discolored thigh. “I can’t set the bones properly, but the sheath and the biovirals should help stabilize you until we can get you back to a Commonwealth hospital.”

David coughed. Tiny flecks of blood settled on his lips. “Hope Lydia’s keeping up on my medical insurance payments.”

“You will survive, David, I promise you that,” Simon said calmly. “I will carry you to the wormhole on my own back if necessary.” He broke off at the sound of someone splashing their way along the entrance fissure.

The Cat waded up out of the water, and removed her helmet. Her purple-tipped hair was sweaty, rising in a multitude of tiny spikes. She grinned broadly, and her wide blue-gray eyes took in the cave with one easy glance. “Nice,” she observed. “Hello, boys, did you miss me?”

“Like stale vomit,” Rob said. He turned back to stripping the dressings off David’s leg.

The Cat strode into the middle of the cave. “Well, my dears, that was an impressive first six hours, wasn’t it. Two of us dead. We didn’t save two refugees. We set off some nukes that did no damage whatsoever. And most of our sensor disks are gone. Talk about making an impact.”

“And you were a big help,” Morton said.

“You heard what I said. You chose to ignore it.”

Even though it was a perfect fit, Morton relished taking off his armor suit. He rubbed at every part of himself he could reach, easing itchy skin and stiff muscles. The semiorganic fiber one-piece he wore underneath repelled the cave’s cold moisture, keeping him reasonably dry. There was nothing he could do to stop the smell.

After living on scavenged packets for weeks, the Randtown survivors welcomed the food Cat’s Claws had brought.

“Manufactured corporate pap full of sugar, badly modified genes, and toxic additives,” Georgia said as she stuffed a fishcake straight from its heating envelope into her mouth. “God, it tastes good.”

“Our way of life has truly ended,” Simon said. He accepted a vegetarian lasagne from Cat, inclining his head in gratitude.

“It’s not from a Big15 factory farm,” she told him. “I wouldn’t fill my body with that shit.”

Morton watched Rob open his mouth. Their eyes met, and Rob turned away.

“We have to decide what to do,” Morton said. “I think our first priority is to get you clear.”

“What about David?” Simon asked. Dunbavand had been wrapped in Morton’s lightweight sleeping bag, protecting the healskin from the cave’s rancid humidity. He was sleeping fitfully as the drugs and biovirals did what they could to assuage the damage.

“We can load him in one of our bubbles and remote drive it out of here,” Morton said. “You’ll be safer up in the Dau’sings.”

“Yes, the aliens seem to be centered around Randtown and the valleys immediately around Blackwater Crag,” Simon said. “We should be safe in the highlands.”

“What about our mission?” Rob asked. “We’re supposed to be making life intolerable for the aliens.”

“We will,” Morton said. “We’ve got six months.”

“I hate to disagree,” Simon said. “But you saw the new force field generators they were building. Once those are operational there is very little even you will be able to do to harm their primary installations, I suspect. This is the third expansion and protective upgrade they have made since they arrived. Each time the force fields are larger and stronger.”

“We tried to get inside at first,” Georgia said. “Five of us were caught going through the sewers. They didn’t stand a chance. The aliens must have been expecting us to try and infiltrate their station. They’re not stupid. And poor old Napo led a dive team that was going to use an underwater route through the old aquarium. Nothing works. They’ve got every route covered.”

“There are no routes, not anymore,” Mandy said. She was chewing listlessly at a bacon sandwich. “They’re already outside the old town boundaries. All the utility tunnels and storm drains are inside the force field now.”

“You boys aren’t thinking,” The Cat said. Her voice cut clean across the cave, ripe with mockery. Morton gave her an intolerant glance. She was doing her yoga, one foot tucked in behind her neck.

“You have a solution?” Morton asked.

“It’s obvious.”

“Want to share that?”

“Nuke them. That’s all we can do.”

“We can’t nuke them. We can’t get to them.”

She closed her eyes, put her hands into Dawn Sunlight position, and breathed in deeply.

“There has to be a way in,” Rob said. “What about caves?”

“No,” Simon said. “We performed a full seismic survey before we started building Randtown. I didn’t want us to suddenly come up against subsidence problems after we were established. That would have been too costly.”

“Do you have anything that could dig underneath the force field?” Georgia asked.

“Alamo avenger,” Rob muttered with a small private smile.

“No,” Morton said. “We didn’t come equipped to mount a frontal assault. We’re supposed to harass and disrupt, to make them waste time and money looking over their shoulder the whole time.”

“A nice theory,” Simon said. “But they’re a very centralized species. The activity out in the valleys is susceptible to the kind of campaign you’re talking about, but I doubt it would ultimately have much effect on them. To hurt them, you must strike at the structures inside the force field.”

“It’ll have to be an underwater approach,” Rob said reluctantly. “Even if a dump-web doesn’t work underwater, there must be some route in. An arch in a reef, an inlet pipe. Something!”

“Oh, this is painful,” the Cat said. She slipped her foot out from behind her head. “I thought you were executive management class, Morty. What happened to that ‘don’t download glitches, upload fixes,’ corporate speak you’re so fond of?”

“Just tell us what your idea is, please,” he said wearily.

“The aliens keep expanding the area they’re developing around the refinery station, right? So what we do is put a nuke outside the existing force field, and inside the border where the new one is going to be. When they switch on the new force field, the nuke is now inside their defenses, and it goes off. Any questions?”

Morton wanted to kick himself it was so obvious. He put the lapse of clear thought down to the shock of losing Parker and the Doc. “Simon, do the aliens turn off the old internal force fields once the new ones are up and running?”

“Yes. They have so far.”

“Oh, gosh, boys, are we really going to use my little old idea?” The Cat batted her eyes.

“Yeah,” Rob said. “I don’t suppose you fancy staying with the nuke and detonating it once we’re sure everything is peachy in there?”

The blast from Parker’s last stand against the flyers made things difficult. There was virtually no cover left on the foothills above and behind the town. That left them with the eastern side, where the low ground had been slightly sheltered from the blast wave. Even there, the trees had been completely flattened and incinerated. Large patches of terrestrial GMgrass had smoldered away before the eternal sleet and drizzle extinguished their paltry flames.

A few large houses had been built there, nestled in their own secluded folds in the land. It was one of the areas where the more wealthy had settled, giving them a splendid view out along the Trine’ba. They’d all suffered from the original attack on the Regents, and the environmental aftermath of the invasion; with smashed lopsided roofs and walls lying askew. Once neat gardens were reduced to muddy swamps where plants had briefly run wild before the climate turned against them.

Morton and the Cat picked their way slowly through one such garden. Its owner had been an avid collector of bamboo varieties. There were clumps of the shoots laid out in long curving patterns; from the air it would have looked like a giant tiger orchid flower. Now the leaves were turning brown and soggy. New shoots were rotting in the mud.

“Another two hundred meters should do it,” Morton said. “That’ll take us to the overlook point.” The garden was a shallow depression, partly natural, that a small army of agribots had then worked to extend into the gentle hillside. They were due to place the tactical nuke right on the edge of the garden, where the bamboo gave way to dunes of roses, putting the device in direct line of sight of the giant refinery station along the shore. With the ever-present cloud blocking the starlight, and the sleet choking the air, it was as dark as interstellar space in the garden. Even on full amplification, his visual spectrum sensors had difficulty producing an image. He was heavily dependent on infrared, which gave the tall dying vegetation an ominous looming appearance.

“Okeydokey,” the Cat said. She was using her slightly contemptuous voice, the one full of false enthusiasm.

Morton didn’t care. He’d paired up with her because he didn’t trust her to undertake Rob’s placement. As backup they’d decided a second nuke should be placed on the lakebed. Their sensor disk and comrelays didn’t function underwater. That meant someone working alone. The Cat was a pain in the ass to have alongside, but he could at least keep an eye on her. He wondered what kind of progress Rob was making. They hadn’t done much underwater training.

The swarm of sneekbots scouting the surrounding area reached the house at the center of the garden. It was a long two-story clapboard affair with a three-door garage and a balcony running the length of the wall that faced the Trine’ba. The two nuclear blast waves had left it severely lopsided, with the splintered boards hanging loose at all angles. Solar roofing panels had half-melted in the heat, running like wax to wilt around the structural beams so that the rainwater was constantly tricking down inside, saturating the interior. All the windows were gone, leaving shards of glass to tear at the curtains as they fluttered about, reducing them to a few sodden tatters flapping indolently in the light sleet.

Sneekbot 411 detected an infrared source inside on the ground floor.

“Well, hello there,” the Cat murmured.

“Another survivor?” Morton speculated. The heat source was about the same strength as a human.

“Could be cattle, or a big sheep.”

“You keep telling yourself that.”

The Cat’s hyper-rifle deployed from her forearm, HVvixen missiles slipped into their launch tubes behind her shoulder blades. Ratmines scuttled down her legs, and darted into the thick cover of the bamboo.

Five sneekbots crept forward toward the house. They picked their way up the ramshackle walls and eased their way in over windowsills. The heat source never moved.

A range of neon-green symbols rose up into Morton’s virtual vision. “Electrical activity.”

“Not much. Looks like a handheld array on sleeper mode.”

A sneekbot hurried across an open doorway, its antenna buds tracking across the living room. An alien was standing in the middle of the big room. It wasn’t wearing an armor suit. Water trickled through cracks on the ceiling to splash on its pale skin. A Commonwealth handheld array was lying on a coffee table beside it. An optical cable was plugged into the little unit, snaking up to a compact electronic device that was fused to the bulbous end of one of the alien’s four upper stalks.

“Shit,” Morton gasped. “Where are the others? They always move in fours.” He ordered the sneekbots surrounding the house to extend their search. “What the hell is it doing?”

“One moment, I’ll switch on my suit’s psychic power booster circuit. Oh, dear, it doesn’t seem to be working. How the fuck do I know what it’s doing, you blockhead?”