Voyage Across the Stars (45 page)

“I’ve handled hovercraft,” Ned agreed.
Up to and including 170-tonne supertanks, any one of which could turn Quantock into glowing slag in three seconds flat.

“Can we get this show on the road?” Josie Paetz demanded from the other front seat. “Curst if I don’t start walking pretty quick.”

The truck had seats for six people in pairs, but the two rear benches could be folded flat for cargo space. Yazov sat behind his young charge, while Raff sprawled on the rear bench with his rocket launcher pointed straight up like a flagpole. If Raff were human, Ned would guess he was three sheets to the wind, but from what he’d seen at the party, the Racontid stuck to water.

“What I figure to do,” Ned said mildly, “is learn about the equipment before I take us all out in it.”

He tapped a gauge. The needle didn’t move. “This says we’re at sixty-two percent charge,” he said. “How long has it been charging?”

Watford grimaced. “It ought to have a few cells replaced,” he said. “Don’t worry, though, it’ll get you to the ship and bring your friends back. And don’t worry about the ground. We’re at low tide now, so you’ll have a couple hundred meters of beach to run on.”

“All right,” Ned said. He engaged the fans and felt the truck shiver like butter sliced onto a hot grill.

He backed into the central aisle and spun to face the entrance. The vehicle responded nimbly. Ned had forgotten how much handier an air-cushion vehicle was when the driver didn’t have to contend with tonnes of armored inertia. “See you in the morning,” he called over his shoulder to Watford as he accelerated out of the garage.

“Aren’t you going to turn on your headlights, hotshot?” Josie Paetz asked. He reached over to the marked switch on the dashboard.

Ned raised his knee to block the younger man’s hand. “No,” he said, “I’m going to use moonlight. The big one’s just above the horizon, but that’ll do better than advertising us to anybody who wants an easy target.”

Paetz sniffed and settled back in his seat. “Maybe
you’re
easy,” he said, but he didn’t press the matter. His uncle eased slightly.

Ned took the utility vehicle up the ramp over the seawall. The salt breeze felt good and the moonlight was, as he’d expected, adequate without enhancement. Switching his visor to light-amplification mode would rob him of depth perception.

He felt himself relax. This was a nice, easy job to focus him after a social evening in which he felt uncomfortable.

Powerguns threw cyan lightning across the sky southward.

“The ship’s being attacked!” Josie Paetz said. “Let’s get ’em!”

“Wait for bloody support!” Yazov boomed. Several men, mercs to a near certainty, sprang out the doors of the Civic Hall with guns in their hands. The truck dipped down the outer ramp, cutting off the view of Quantock in the driving mirrors; but the
Swift’
s
whole complement would be armed and on its way in a minute or less. The community militia would follow.

Raff said nothing. His rocket launcher’s heavy bolt clanged to chamber a round.

“Hang on!” Ned cried. He turned the truck hard left, up a broad gully instead of due south along the shoreline. When he was sure of the surface he pushed the collective forward, feeding more power to the fans.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Paetz screamed. He pointed. “The shooting’s
there,
by the ship!”

“And that’s where we’re going,” Ned said, “only not by the bloody front door. If you do your job as well as I do mine, sonny, then we’re going to come through this just fine.”

That was a crazy thing to say to the young killer, but the only sane response to combat is to avoid it. If you head toward the guns in a plastic-bodied truck, then your sanity isn’t even in question.

At high speed, the truck bounced on its flexible skirts. Rocks, stream-sorted to the size of a man’s fist, whopped toward the walls of the ravine. The shielded nacelles kept gravel out of the fan blades. The vehicle could move with three fans instead of four, but it would lose speed and agility. Climbing the gully wall would be a bitch even with full power.

Yazov leaned forward. “There’s a lot of wasteland out here,” he said in Ned’s ear. His voice sounded calm.

“It’s okay,” Ned said, shouting as he had to do to be heard while facing front. “I’d been looking at a map. I’m going to take us back from the southeast.”

The ravine kinked through ninety degrees or so for the third time since Ned had turned into it. The change was due to a dike of harder rock that pinched the gully. It made the sides steeper as well. He should have thought of that when he’d decided to climb back to the surface here.

“Hang on!” he repeated. He banked up the outside of the curve and gunned the fans. His three passengers threw their combined weight to the right without being told. Raff’s snarls might have been Racontid curses. Paetz and Yazov were certainly cursing.

Centrifugal force lifted the vehicle over the lip of rock. They’d been millimeters from turning turtle and landing upside down in the ravine, but only horseshoes and hand grenades . . .

The terrain was corrugated. Tubes of lava a meter or two in diameter had hardened alongside one another in past ages. An overburden of ash had fallen across the denser lava, had been compacted and then swept away by centuries of pounding rain. The present surface was almost impossible to walk over, difficult to traverse even in an air-cushion vehicle, and provided no cover whatever for a man-sized target.

The truck rubbed and pitched. The corrugations were deep enough to spill air from the plenum chamber, so Ned couldn’t proceed as fast or as smoothly as he had up the streambed. From what he remembered of the chart, they had about a klick to travel.

“Where are we headed, Slade?”
Yazov said. He was using his helmet radio to avoid windrush. The high metallic content of the planet’s volcanic rocks absorbed radio signals over very moderate distances, but it wasn’t so bad it affected four men sitting within arm’s reach of one another.

“There’s another ravine,”
Ned explained. The vehicle bucked high. Ned twisted the bar on the dash which controlled the attitude of the fan nacelles. By angling them vertical, he managed to cushion the truck’s impact.

“
We’ll take it back toward the coast, but south of the ship,”
he said, wheezing because the shock of landing had jolted him against the yoke. “
They won’t expect us from that way.”

Powergun bolts streaked the sky and lit the dark mass of the crater which bowered the
Swift.
More shots reflected from the ground and glowed in the gas vaporized from gouges of rock.

Josie Paetz stood. He presented his submachine gun with both hands instead of clinging to the windshield with one or the other. His body swayed, perfectly in balance despite the truck’s violent motion. His eyes scanned the horizon from that slightly higher vantage.

Ned took a hand away from the collective to key his helmet. “
Best we not call attention to ourselves too soon, Paetz,”
he said.

“Fuck off,” Paetz shouted.

There was a series of bright red explosions from the battle scene. Raff stroked his rocket launcher and laughed like gears clashing.

A shadow on the ground, streaking lesser shadows. Sooner than he’d—

“Hang
—” Ned cried.

They were airborne, dipping into the gully that Ned had thought was just another corrugation until it was
real
close. He spun the yoke and leaned. The truck didn’t have an aircar’s power-to-weight ratio so it dropped instead of flying, marginally under control.

Paetz fell to his knees and grabbed the windshield. The clear plastic cracked across with the strength of his grip, but he didn’t go out. His weapon still pointed forward in the other hand, ready to engage any Spider that showed itself.

It took ten meters before Ned thought he could get the truck stable, twice that before he did. Even then the ravine twisted unexpectedly and he tore off a chunk of front molding. Only the skirts’ resilience kept them from worse trouble. Yazov cursed him for a cack-handed fool.

Paetz shot—three bolts so dazzling that Ned’s visor blacked out to save his night vision. The object in the gully ahead of them was just an object to Ned, a boulder in the way. Paetz, his faceshield set to thermal imaging, recognized it as a Spider while Ned was trying to maneuver safely around.

The creature lunged upward, screaming like a glacier about to calve icebergs. It had been crouching to aim its own powergun toward the kilometer-distant cone which protected the
Swift.
As the truck howled past the Spider, Yazov shot it with his 2-cm weapon and Raff fired his rocket launcher point-blank.

The rocket motor was of the all-burned-on-launch variety so there was no danger to the shooter from backblast, but the supersonic
crack!
behind Ned’s left ear was deafening despite his helmet’s protection. The Spider blew apart in a white flash. The warhead’s explosion had been lost in the motor roar.

The ravine twisted. Three Spiders hunched like squat bollards across the truck’s path. Instinct told Ned to brake by aiming the fan output forward. Training—
when in doubt, gas it
—slammed his throttle to the stop.

It seemed as if the whole world was shooting, but the only gunmen were the three mercs with Ned. Paetz and Yazov hit the right-hand Spider simultaneously, head-shots from the submachine gun while Yazov cratered the creature’s chest with a bolt from his heavier weapon.

Recoil from the rocket launcher lifted the nose of the truck. The Racontid had to have muscles like tow cables to be able to accept the shock. The Spider in the center disintegrated. Fragments of its pelvis and torso blew into its fellows like secondary missiles.

The truck hit the left and center Spiders a fraction of a second apart. The gooey corpse Raff had shot swept away the damaged windshield and knocked Josie Paetz backward. The powergun the creature had been carrying in one of its upper hands clattered on the short hood and off the other side of the vehicle. Yazov fired again, twisting backward in his seat, and lit up the third Spider with his bolt.

The Spiders were retreating, running away when they learned that the
Swift’
s
anchor watch was more of a bite than they could chew. Most of the aliens weren’t going to survive to run far, though.

Ned switched on the headlights. A mass of Spiders stood like startled deer, twenty or more. Sweat and weapons gleamed on their dark gray bodies. They’d heard the shooting ahead of them, but they hadn’t known how to react, and anyway, there wasn’t time.

There wasn’t time for the Spiders now, either.

The creatures were so tall that Ned felt he was driving into a grove with arms flailing above him like windswept branches. Paetz, flung into the well between the front and second bench, fired from a sprawling position. Yazov fired, and Raff emptied his magazine with two thunderous blasts so quick that there was barely time for the breech to cycle between the shots.

Ionized air, matrix and propellant residues, and the unforgettable reek of living creatures whose body cavities had explosively emptied, merged in an atmosphere you could cut with a knife. The truck brushed between two Spiders, one of them dying, and hit a third squarely. A headlight shattered. The heavy body skidded over the vehicle and off.

They were around a twitch in the ravine, so slight that it would appear straight to somebody looking at a map. The three-meter walls cut off view of the carnage behind the truck. There was nothing but rock in the headlight beam. Spiders were shrieking. None of them had fired during the momentary contact.

The volume of distant gunfire suddenly increased tenfold. The
Swift
wasn’t the focus of the shooting. The rest of the mercenaries and the Quantock militia must have run into another party of Spiders.

The rocket launcher clanged as Raff locked home a fresh magazine.
How he stood the recoil
. . . Josie Paetz was upright, reloading also, and the
shuckclack
directly behind Ned meant that Yazov’s 2-cm was ready as well.

“Go on back!” Paetz screamed. “We’ll finish them! Go on!”

Ned spun the yoke with his left hand and unslung his submachine gun in his right. He pointed the weapon over where the windshield had been. “You bet your ass!” he said as the truck tore back into conflict.

The Spiders’ thin bodies were exaggerated by the great length of their limbs. Their heads were nearly spherical and about the volume of a man’s. The eyes were large and slightly bulged, while the mouth was a point-down triangle with teeth on all three flats.

Translucent membranes slipped sideways over the eyes as the glare of the halogen-cycle headlight flashed on them again.

Half a dozen of the Spiders were down. One had lost half its skull to a powergun bolt. Two of its fellows helped the creature stand upright, though it must have been mortally wounded.

Raff put a rocket into the injured Spider. The warhead blew the trio down like pins struck squarely by a bowling ball.

Ned hosed the aliens, keeping his muzzle low. He couldn’t hope for accuracy while he drove, but he knew that being shot at didn’t help
any
marksman’s aim. Besides, he was bound to hit a few of them, trapped in the trough of the ravine.

Paetz fired three-shot bursts, aiming for Spiders’ heads and always hitting with at least one of the bolts despite the truck’s speed and the slewing turn. His uncle aimed single shots at the center of mass of each target in turn. None of the mercs knew where a Spider’s vital organs were—the brain might not even be in the skull—but a 2-cm bolt packed enough energy to cook everything in the torso, and the least Josie’s head-shots were going to do was blind the victim.

The Spider who’d been alert enough to aim as the truck came back was Yazov’s first victim. Another of the creatures managed to swing his submachine gun to bear. The Spider disintegrated in a mix of powergun bolts and a rocket before it could fire.

Ned humped over a corpse, caromed off the legs of a Spider which stood upright but was missing two arms and the left half of its chest, and spun safely out of the killing zone again.