Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series (40 page)

Maxwell grabbed the Sagittarian’s collar and dragged him across the covered space toward the canyon ridge. The warrior struggled vainly as his legs scraped across sawtoothed granite and smoldering embers. Falling shards peppered his back, hips, and thighs. A decent enough distraction for the trip to the ridgeline.

“Stop!” the Sagittarian begged once he had glanced ahead. He threw his fist against Maxwell’s arms, a quarter the strength of before. “Wait! Listen to me, you bastard!”

His desperate pleas kept on as Maxwell peered over the edge of the cliff. It dropped off at a satisfactory angle. Not ninety degrees, but close enough. Maxwell heaved and swung the Sagittarian’s body into the air. He plunged in freefall a few seconds before pounding against the rocks and rolling out of sight in a blur. Maxwell kept watching in case the body emerged in his line of sight again. It did not. It had disappeared.

Maxwell, heads up
, Rumaya said through dispatch.

He looked up, toward the plains on the far side of the canyon. A haze shimmered in the distance between the mesas, but he saw nothing else. Then the booming eruptions in the sky cut off—all at once. Residual echoes faded into an eerie silence. Silent enough to hear the wind blow. That high-pitched hum of flowing air. It picked up. Shifted. Solidified. Maxwell realized his sensors were not detecting wind. None at all. That sound was not wind . . .

Windshieldless lancer drones expanded in the distance across the plains, flying low. A handful. Then a dozen. Then two dozen. Then too many to count. Maxwell zoomed in his visual field and focused on one. Long fuselage coming to a sharp point. Swivel gun underneath. Slender double-wings forming a sideways V-shape from the front, single-barreled guns lodged between them. Some strange symbol plastered against the sides of the body. A white bird with an extended, arcing neck and black beak. No bird native to any planet Maxwell had visited. Definitely Sagittarian.

Phase two of the assault had begun.

All Section One teams to the surface, now!
Maxwell dispatched across all channels.
They’re coming.

Upraad orbit . . .

Captain Tielo clutched the bar at the cockpit-end of the landing shuttle, looking across the spartan interior fuselage. Damn near fifty brothers and sisters sat, waiting. Four rows, side by side, everyone facing each other. Knee to knee. Gun in one hand, helmet in the other. The gleaming armor of Swan made everyone the same size, same shape. Same haircuts for everyone, male and female—shaved clean on the sides and a shallow strip of hair running from the back of the neck to the tip of the forehead, rounding off like a beak. The Swan emblem repeated itself down the line of shoulder pieces, one after the other.

Tielo felt a wide grin split his cheeks. He popped another piece of gum in his mouth. The last had gone stale.

“Brothers and sisters!” he shouted over the hum of the engines and airflow vents. “The time has come to prove ourselves.”

“Loyalite
,” some called him when they thought he wasn’t listening. Tielo didn’t mind the name. His brothers and sisters used it as an insult, lips curled in disgust as it rolled off their tongues, but it was no insult. Not if they knew better. Tielo embraced his role as an honorable one. A necessary one. Lord Velasco had only a few thousand like him—lowborns who had sworn lifelong loyalty. Tielo’d found long ago that the highborns wanted loyalty and respect more than anything else. More than hard labor. More even than the lion’s share of the produce. When a common man such as himself gave them what they wanted, the nobility gave him what
he
wanted, what he craved.

Dignity. Authority. Sway.

That’s all it meant to be a highborn, really. To be dignified and authoritative—that’s all that gave them power. None of that DNA hocus-pocus. That was just to make the nobles easier on the eyes. To solidify their status. Make the lowborns feel their lowliness every time they looked in the mirror. All Tielo had to do was show loyalty and respect, and then he became like one of them. All that power his fellow lowborns wanted was within their grasp—all they had to do was reach out and take it. But they didn’t, and he did.

“Don’t be afraid!” he called out to an audience of wide eyes and leaning faces. “To obey our lord is virtuous. To kill for our lord is pure. To
die
for our lord is glorious. Yes, brothers and sisters, we have only one path to glory, and it awaits us on the planet below. Do your duty today, and you will earn your title as Sons of Swan.”

The time to be skeptical or bitter had passed. They’d already been conscripted. They’d already been trained with a gun and outfitted with armor and stuffed inside a carrier ship. They already sat inside the belly of a landing shuttle, awaiting their order to descend. Soon they would leap into battle, where they might be shredded to bits. Or they might shred his lordship’s enemies to bits. Either way, the time for outrage had gone.

A bright orange light blinked overhead, and the ship let out a string of klaxon blasts. Sudden gravity pulled everyone toward the ceiling as the shuttle ejected from the carrier ship. A gasp spread around the cramped lines of soldiers, who remained snared in their restraints.

“This is it, brothers and sisters! It’s time to win our glory!” Tielo unsnapped his helmet from a clip on his suit belt. “Helmets!”

Armor clacked against armor as everyone followed their captain’s lead, lifting helmets and stuffing their heads inside. Once snugly inside his own, Tielo found the forward strike group’s objectives in green on his faceplate.

—Destroy or Disable Anti-Bombardment Dish 1

—Destroy or Disable Anti-Bombardment Dish 3

—Destroy or Disable Anti-Bombardment Dish 5

—Secure Western Embankment in Sectors 2 and 3

—Dig In and Hold Ground

Tielo grinned. Fancy words for “Blow shit up and slaughter the enemy.”

He looked past the transparent green commands on his faceplate at his four rows of subordinates. Faces hidden now. Each armored body identical to the next.

Just a few shots fired in their direction, and they’d all be loyalites.

Now!

Maxwell thrust upward, exposing his shoulders and head from the trench drilled into the rock and snapped the reticle of his combat rifle at the first lancer drone he saw. Forty other transapiens along the line did the same, and a fraction of a second later, they fired as one. Forty-one mini-rockets blasted smoke trails at the oncoming mass of flyers and exploded together. The lancers jerked away but not in time. Too many explosions at once.

Fireballs of pressure and shrapnel minced the forward lancers. Wings pinwheeled downward as tattered metal frames sunk to ugly crashes. Ammunition caches blew up and sent engine parts skipping over granite.

More lancers tore through the panorama of thin, gray smoke. Twenty, then forty, seventy. They angled down on the transapien teams, swooping like hawks, and opened fire. Maxwell and the others ducked behind cover as copper-alloy bullets peppered the ground around them.

Autodrones,
Maxwell dispatched to the teams stationed at the riverbed. Then he spoke through comm to the Upraadi captains behind him. “Fire! Fire!”

A hundred and twenty meters behind the first trench, several hundred Upraadi fighters popped up from another trench, planted glassy, black Carinian assault rifles against the embankment, and fired. Steel rounds zipped through the air. The lancers dashed up, down, left, right—sensors reacting in milliseconds to incoming visuals. Still, some rounds struck, tearing off chunks of wing or sinking into the body.

Maxwell loaded another mini-rocket into the top chamber of his double-barreled combat rifle. His fellow transapiens launched explosive rounds as fast as they could reload—straight up, letting the mini-rockets’ guidance system finish the work of exploding in the right places. More fiery blasts littered the air overhead, darkening the sky in a veil of smoke. Maxwell fired off a rocket, not even watching it burst as he reloaded. Two and a half seconds, his visual display told him. Too slow. His compatriots were reloading in under two seconds.

Meanwhile, in the top left corner of his visual field, a digital mini-map of the city center showed his autodrones pitching themselves up from the riverbed in clusters of eight. He hoped the timing would be right.

The lancers careened over the second trench with another quick swoop, sending down a rain of gunfire. A few dozen Upraadi troopers took shots to the head and collapsed into the trench. Their fire persisted as individuals dropped off. The lancers barraged the defense dishes as they passed. Rounds pelted the outer shielding and punched holes in the smooth inner bowl. Minimal damage. Maxwell had to accept some harm to one row of dishes to execute his plan.

Sure enough, the lancers sped over the ridgeline toward the palace as his autodrones reached a hundred meters below surface level—the perfect firing distance. Their railgun revolvers spun with blurring speed as tiny slugs spit from the barrels, a hundred a minute, emitting a sound like humming bird wings. Their fire ripped into the unsuspecting lancers and blasted gaping holes into lightweight metal. The Sagittarian flyers shifted immediately to counter the wave of Carinian drones whipping up at them from below, but their thrusters and guns moved too slow. Dozens splintered in seconds. Machine carcasses tumbled down through the air. Then the autodrones curved over the ridgeline and engaged the oncoming lancers, weaving through screaming flyers with lightning speed. Guns blazed faster than thrusters could dodge or sensors could register.

Autodrones slid into an upward curve and zoomed back toward the canyon. The Sagittarian machines split, some continuing on toward the dishes on the far bank, some chasing the autodrones into the canyon. The dogfight evolved into a convoluted mess. Lancer swivel guns made no space safe for Maxwell’s drones—except above. As half the autodrones weaved around the canyon, the other half whisked higher and higher, trying to keep the upper ground and swoop down on helpless lancers. But the lancers let only a handful of their own go down from these upward attacks before rising to keep level with the autodrones. The dogfight bifurcated. Crippled or tattered machines fell from the sky, spewing scraps across the hard terrain.

Maxwell maximized his digital map as one lancer descended, twirling smoke, angling for one of his dishes. Falling fast. He shoved another rocket in his rifle chamber and swiveled around to aim at the kamikaze drone. Fired. Watched as the rocket streamed fifty meters, a hundred. But the lancer fell faster. The rocket burst twenty meters above the dish, but the lancer had already smashed into it, creating an awful, wrenching explosion. Fire and steel melded into one barreling mass. Metal fragments blasted across the landscape. Shards sliced into bodies inside the second trench line. A dozen fighters crumpled onto each other.

It took a moment to register the loss. The dish had been shattered completely. Suddenly, they were down to five. Maybe not even that.

Is Dish Four back online yet?
Maxwell dispatched privately to Rumaya.

It took a few seconds for her to respond.
Not yet. The Sagittarian ripped it up good. It isn’t communicating with the other dishes.

So Dish Four wouldn’t be collaborating with the others. It might cover the wrong section of the sky. Or the exact same section as another dish. Or it might fire at random targets. Or it might not fire at all.

That left four reliable dishes. Not enough to ensure coverage of the safe zone.

Maxwell snapped open all channels on comm, dispatching to all transapien teams at the same time.
Back underground! Everyone get back undergound on the double!

Transapiens surged out of the trench, cracking mini-rockets up at the handful of low-flying lancers still afloat. The Sagittarian drones flitted around in zigzagging curves to target the vulnerable bodies fleeing for cover. The Upraadi fighters had less ground to cover between their trench and safety, but it caught the lancers’ sensor eyes. A pair of them dove down and swept horizontally across the hundreds of men and women running for cover, sputtering gunfire from all three guns. Rounds showered the rock, tore bodies into ragged, gory chunks. Killing with soulless indifference. Going down the line. Leaving behind a heap of fleshy shreds, sometimes survivors looking in shock at missing limbs.

It took too long for one of the Carinians to shoot them down. A rocket blast exploded between them, blowing them both apart in the air.

Maxwell hadn’t even gotten halfway to the carved stone archway leading underground when the sky lit up again. Not the reddish natural light of the atmosphere or the orange radiance of the local sun but a garish, foreign spray of flares, followed by a wave of thunderous explosions. It took less than ten seconds for one of the rods to slam into the ground—somewhere not too far off. Maybe two hundred meters. A tremor ran under Maxwell’s feet, almost strong enough to knock him over.

Another blurry streak tore through the atmosphere faster than sound could follow, plowed into the palace mount, sent rubble twisting through the air, severed boulders the size of houses, triggered a rockslide down the cliff. Balconies and platforms carved into the precipice were consumed in its wake. Greenhouses beside the river were crushed. The rocky shoreline grew halfway into the river from piling rocks.

Then Maxwell’s sensors went haywire. A horrendous sound erupted behind him.

The ground buckled and cracked, and a shockwave launched him into the air. Higher than he thought possible. Further away. Surrounded by slabs of jagged rock bigger than his body. Tumbling and spinning through the air and reaching vainly for something to grab onto. Until his interior alarm blared from falling, falling, falling. Ground expanding fast in the few glimpses he caught of it. Coming so close, so fast. And then—

Orion Arm, just inside the Sol system’s asteroid belt . . .