The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (274 page)

“Everyone ready?” he asked.

As the confirmations came in, he checked on the motiles. Their vehicles were now only eleven kilometers away. Eighty clan warriors were riding fast toward them.

“Stig, Olwen, Ayub, fire the zone killers, please.”

The armored cars rocked slightly as the delta-shaped weapons burst up out of their launchers. Sensors briefly captured the three of them tracing a fast arc through the sky above Highway One. Distorted, superheated air churned in their wake.

Kinetic cannons mounted on the Land Rover Cruisers tracked around to the vertical and opened fire. They were answered by a massive barrage of ion rifle fire from the encircling band of clan warriors. Dazzling blue-white pulses sleeted in like a constricting noose of sheet lightning. Hyper-rifle shots and Alic’s particle lances ripped down from the top of the rise.

“Focus on the Starflyer,” Bradley yelled. Fire lines swept inward toward the MANN truck and its shiny capsule. A hundred meters above it, three zone killers detonated. The triple cataracts of emerald twinkle-points descended with slow grace to submerge all the convoy vehicles in a translucent corona. For a second they lay entombed within the glowing shroud like insects in amber.

The ground exploded. Huge gouts of soil and rock streaked up into the sky, obliterating all sight of the convoy. Fireballs from ruptured fuel tanks bloomed within the undulant dirt, to be snuffed out almost immediately. Bradley felt the blast wave strike the armored car, rocking it slightly. Dozens of Charlemagnes bolted, oblivious to the riders clinging to their backs, several toppled over. The cloud of pulverized rock fragments and gritty soil began to dissipate.

A section of Highway One three hundred meters long was completely missing. The ground around it had been reduced to a concave circle of raw smoking soil. Right at the center of the blast maar, the MANN truck sat completely intact; cloying dust motes slithered down its force field as the sunlight returned to glint off its shiny aluminum capsule. Seventeen Cruisers had also survived the zone killers, their force fields glowing like radioactive bubbles around them. Scraps of wreckage from the other vehicles were scattered across the pulverized earth, flames chomping eagerly at their plastic elements. There was no sign of any bodies.

“Dreaming heavens, doesn’t anything touch it?” Stig demanded.

“Go!” Bradley told him.

The armored car lurched forward to race down the remaining strip of road, gathering speed.

Morton had been surprised when the debris plume swirled away. He really hadn’t expected to see the MANN truck intact. His hyper-rifle had fired shot after shot at the stubbornly resistant force field cloaking the silvery capsule before and during the zone killer strike. He’d fired two HVvixen missiles into the melee. Beside him, Alic’s twin particle lances had boomed away, splitting the air with incandescent energy.

“Holy fuck,” Rob spat in amazement. “We never even scratched it.”

“That’s why they call them juggernauts,” the Cat told them with her usual peppy humor.

“The Starflyer gave the Commonwealth force field technology by all accounts,” Alic said. “Looks like it kept the best bits for itself.”

Bradley’s shouted command filled the general communications band. The armored cars began to drive hell-for-leather down the gradual slope. Morton took off beside them, body angled forward, moving with a simple fast loping movement, allowing Far Away’s low gravity to carry him in short arcs above the road between each footfall. His hyper-rifle folded back into its forearm recess while he was on the move. Accelerants began to fizz into his bloodstream, sharpening up his thoughts, binding the interface with his suit even tighter. Nerve strands lost their slackness, contracting to taut conduits that provided instantaneous responses, so tight he could hear them humming. The tactical display in his virtual vision graded up to an even faster refresh rate. Suit sensors showed him the clan warriors reeling their blast-spooked warhorses back under control, and turning back toward the remnants of the convoy. Cruisers opened up with kinetic rapid-fire guns. Long lines of soil in front of the charging horses were ripped up as they ranged in, then the lethal wall of projectiles was chewing through flesh and bone. The front rank of horses died as their legs were triturated beneath them, dropping their bulk into the horizontal fire plane. Their mortal screams seared straight into Morton’s electrified nervous system as they vanished beneath swirling plumes of blood and gore. Inside the scarlet fog, force field skeletons flared amber as riders tumbled to the ground. The second rank rode onward over the steaming gobbets of meat. Morton’s sensors pulled in a swift sequence of images, flicking along the remaining riders to capture faces contorted with rage, hanging on to reins with one hand while they fired off wild shots with ion carbines and lasers. Then they began to fall as the Cruisers continued their fusillade.

“Call them back,” Morton screamed into the general channel. “Get them out of there!” He deployed two plasma carbines and started bombarding one of the Cruisers with pulses. They broke apart into energy flares that whipped impotently across the translucent boundary.

Mortars fired by the McSobels began to land amid the Cruisers, disrupting their fire as force fields hardened temporarily against the electron squalls. Loiter missiles sailed overhead, waiting for the moment when the kinetic fire resumed to slam down hard.

The Barsoomians opened fire. Streaks of violet light hammered into the Cruisers, almost invisible against the sapphire sky. Morton’s tactical software couldn’t classify the weapons at all. The force fields began to glow a perilous rose-gold.

Short-range defense X-ray lasers on the armored cars opened up. Stig and the other drivers coordinated their attack, concentrating on one Cruiser. Morton’s aim shifted with accelerant lubricated precision to join the barrage.

They were halfway down the slope now, ranged at four hundred seventeen meters from the MANN truck. Thick clouds of diesel gushed up out of its vertical exhaust pipes behind the cab, and it started to rumble forward.

“Don’t go,” the Cat yelled at it. “That’ll make me cross.”

The Cruiser they’d been concentrating their firepower on exploded. Morton watched in dismay as the Guardians continued to ride into the kinetic guns. “They’re being slaughtered,” he shouted accusingly.

“We are where we’re meant to be,” Scott replied levelly.

“Fuck that.” He had two HVvixen missiles left. Both of them burst out of his shoulder tubes. Two seconds later they stabbed down on a Cruiser, taking it out in a clean pillar of white flame.

“Bad move,” Rob said. “I think we’ll need them later.”

Morton ignored him. The surviving Cruisers were still shooting. “Cat, Rob: synchronize.” He stopped running, and crouched down as his hyper-rifle slid smoothly up from his forearm. The MANN truck started to draw away. Beside him the Cat and Rob had come to a halt. Charlemagnes charged past in pursuit of the armored cars. Masers from Institute vehicles had locked on to them. The shield webbing protecting the warhorses blazed with energy that was discharged through their elaborately woven saddle tassels; the big beasts raced onward trailing whirlwinds of sparks. Morton pulled targeting data out of the tactical display at accelerant speed, bundled some of it in a neat file that he shunted to the Paris team. “That one.”

Three hyper-rifles fired at once, joined a moment later by the boom of the particle lances. The Cruiser’s force field burned dark crimson. They fired again. The Barsoomians joined them. This time they punctured the force field. “Switching,” Morton told them. He picked a second target while the fireball was still expanding.

The Cruisers were on the move, bucking and juddering over the rough ground as they closed protectively around the MANN truck. Accelerants allowed Morton a seemingly leisured review of the fickle data coming in from the Guardian scouts up ahead. The vehicles carrying the soldier motiles were only three kilometers away now. Already a running firefight had broken out between the aliens and the lead riders of the mounted platoons sent to intercept them. It looked like the soldier motiles were equipped with a very powerful version of a plasma rifle. They were also shooting mini-missiles with enhanced-energy warheads. Once again, the horses were taking the brunt of the attack.

Morton’s wired scrutiny snapped his attention back to one of his own sensor feeds. One of the Cruisers around the MANN truck was firing missiles. A squadron of intense purple sparks went slicing through the air to detonate against the front of Bradley’s armored car with a ferocity that slammed the heavy vehicle back several meters. The blast wave nearly knocked Morton to the ground. He swayed back as the inside of his helmet reverberated with the roar of the explosion.

“This is a strategic balls-up of the first order,” Rob declared. “They haven’t got a fucking clue what to do.”

“Is there anything we’ve got that can split that bastard’s force field?” Morton asked.

“I don’t think so,” Matthew said. “If the zone killers couldn’t do it, nothing we’re carrying can.”

“Bradley,” Alic called, “what’s your plan now?”

“We’re going to ram the truck. That’s the only way left to stop it reaching the
Marie Celeste.
We must pray the planet is having its revenge.”

“Crazy,” Rob wailed. “This isn’t a battle, it’s a joke.”

Morton swiped his attention across various images. The MANN truck had almost made it to where the road began again. Two kilometers ahead of it, the motile soldiers were brushing off the wild attacks by the mounted Guardians. They’d link up soon enough.

Another flight of missiles from a Cruiser pounded into the armored cars.

“If it’s running for its ship it has to get out of the truck to transfer,” Morton said. “That’s when it’s vulnerable. We just have to keep up.”

“Morty, clever boy,” the Cat said approvingly.

“Are you with me?”

“Wouldn’t miss it, darling.”

“Let’s show these morons how to fight a real war,” Rob said.

“Okay,” Alic said. “We’ll take it to them.”

Morton’s smile was feral as he started running.

Amid the gray desolation of solidified lava that comprised the summit of Mount Herculaneum the hyperglider had become difficult to see. Dust churned up by the crash had settled on its white fuselage, sticking to the streaks of ice to tone down the shiny plyplastic like adaptive camouflage. Its sharp aerodynamic planform had disappeared the instant it struck the rock spur, crumpling and warping until it resembled the worn vacuum-boiled ripples of lava on which it had come to rest. In the dark cavity underneath what was the badly smashed-up cockpit a couple of small red LEDs glowed in the shadows, slowly dimming as the ruined power cells decayed.

The thin regolith around the wreckage had been disturbed when Wilson hauled himself out of the inverted pilot’s seat. A trail of meandering sulci led away to the rim of Aphrodite’s Seat, illustrating how he’d pulled his inert legs along behind him as he crawled the remaining two hundred thirty meters. Every now and then the trail widened with broad scuff marks where he’d squirmed around. The exposed lava was covered by flaking splotches of dried blood and little droplets of epoxy foam used to patch the splits in his pressure suit that had torn open again.

Wilson never looked back now. He’d found a smooth cleft right on the precipice that accepted his body like a comfy old sofa. His feet didn’t quite dangle over the eight-kilometer drop, but they were only a few centimeters from it. The pressure suit’s silver-blue fabric was dull beneath a grimy coat of regolith dust it’d picked up as he dragged himself along. Thick pleats of epoxy foam crisscrossed his shattered legs. Two of the blobby lines were still oozing blood; little droplets inflating out from the edges to bubble away in the vacuum. He no longer worried about such things. Painkillers insured his remaining time would be comfortable. The last of the Wild Foxes had successfully completed the mission.

To his right, the arrays and their supplementary electronic modules were arranged neatly on the rock with the broad sensor strips sitting on squat tripods, their matte-black multi-absorbent faces pointing east. The view was perfect, showing him the entire Dessault range all the way across to the tiny spire of Mount StOmer in the east. Far, far below him, the glacier ring was a bright diamante strip braided by thin wisps of cirrus. Farther down, the thick storm clouds continued to sluice around the tremendous volcano. After hours watching keenly, he was sure the power of the winds from the ocean were weakening now. It didn’t matter; the storm had provided the Guardians with more than enough raw material to manufacture their planet’s revenge.

While he lay there in the quiet peace of the vacuum he’d observed the clouds spreading east. From this altitude it was like seeing a white-water torrent pouring down a dry riverbed. The green valleys were slowly occluded by the cumulus, leaving just the rugged gray and white pinnacles sticking above the surface.

In the background Samantha and the others chittered away, their voices like some kind of insect trapped in his helmet. He didn’t say very much to them now, just the occasional comment to confirm some aspect of the observation. At first there was little to see. The storm for all its size and speed was perfectly natural. He lay there watching its progress as the sun warmed his chest and the lava slowly sucked heat out of his spine. Eventually he noticed how the winds were gradually speeding up; the strange way clouds were confined to the mountains. Ordinarily most of the storm would flow away out across the vast expanse of the Aldrin Plains, while on the other side of the Dessault range it spewed around Mount Idle to disperse over the southern pampas lands. Today it was blocked and channeled. As the morning went on he started to recognize the Guardians’ choreography. Between the mountain peaks, manipulator stations churned up gigantic whorls in the fast-flowing cloud, sucking stationary highs into the Dessault range, denying the storm any release. As a consequence, the cloud swarm rose in height as it thronged along valleys, layer after layer building into a solid thunderhead, kilometers deep. With every exit denied it had nowhere to go but east. A smile ghosted Wilson’s face as he watched the front roar along Trevathan Gulf, fed by fresh gales that the manipulator stations injected through every major valley.