The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (246 page)

“There are bombs in five and eight,” Stig said. He pumped his force field up to full strength, and wrapped his arms over his head. “Keely, crash the city net.”

Blimpbot five had hauled two-thirds of its length over the Plaza when the big cylinder dropped out of its front cargo bay, almost unnoticed in the antagonistic environment that the decoy dispensers had created. It tumbled down for a couple of seconds until it was below the lip of Market Wall, then an explosive charge inside detonated. The cylinder disappeared inside a dense vapor burst of ethylene oxide that looked like a bloated smoke cloud. A second, larger explosion was triggered by the bomb’s control array, igniting the cloud.

The fuel-air fireball produced a blast overpressure only slightly less than that of a nuclear weapon.

Stig saw it. He had his eyes closed, and his virtual vision on medium brightness, but the flash still penetrated his eyelids. It corresponded to every sneekbot image vanishing. Several seconds later the sound wave crashed overhead. His arms tightened up as the concrete wall shook.

When he looked up the sky was dark again, though the rain had gone. He could see curious smears high overhead. Small veiled shapes cruised through the night, as if a flock of bats were fleeing the scene. There were no bats on Far Away. When he stood up he could see a seething column of luminous air swelling upward from the direction of First Foot Fall Plaza. He realized he’d lost contact with half of the blimpbots in the second wave. A couple that did respond were recording zero altitude with their helium cells leaking prodigiously.

“Let’s go,” he shouted at Olwen. They ran for an exit. “Keely, I need a sneekbot view of 3F.”

“Doing my best. Dreaming heavens, did that ever work better than we expected.”

Stig reached the stairs up to street level. He came out on the corner of Nottingham Road just as the rain began to sweep back again. His peripheral vision caught something falling above the nearby terrace of houses, something impossibly big, so he turned—“Holy shit!” He flung his arm around Olwen and carried her down to the pavement.

The mangled rear third of a blimpbot sank silently out of the night to smash into the houses, pulverizing the three directly underneath it.
So where’s the rest of it?
Fragmented solar panels, smashed timbers, slates, and long splinters of glass tumbled out of the collapsing rubble to skitter across the road.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure, still had my force field on.”

He looked at the fist-sized chunks of stone and jagged struts from the blimpbot’s geodesic structure that were scattered around them. They’d been lucky nothing larger had landed near them. He could hear screaming, shouts for help rising in the background.

“We can’t stop for them,” he said.

Olwen gave a shaky nod. “Yeah.”

They started off down Nottingham Road. Images were flicking back up into his virtual vision grid as Keely activated the second wave of sneekbots she had stowed around 3F Plaza. No matter which ones he pulled out of the grid, all he saw was the rubble they were crawling over.

Six blimpbots had survived. Their status reports were organizing themselves inside his virtual vision. One was effectively dead in the air, unable to move other than where the wind took it. The remaining five had all sustained a lot of damage, but they were mobile, and one of them was a bomb carrier. “Bingo,” he muttered. “We might be able to do it again.”

They reached a crossroads, and looked along Levana Walk, which gave them a clear view to First Foot Fall Plaza nearly a half kilometer away. As Stig intended, Market Wall had deflected the main blast wave upward, away from the nearby buildings. It hadn’t been enough to save the smaller houses in surrounding streets, which had collapsed; even the larger, sturdier blocks directly outside the Plaza had taken considerable damage. Fires were starting to root, burning fiercely amid the wreckage. Market Wall itself was now a thick stone circle of rubble, only two-thirds of its original imposing height.

Stig drew in his breath at the sight of it. “It held,” he murmured. “Thank the dreaming heavens, it held.” He hadn’t wanted to consider the devastation a fuel air bomb would cause if its blast wave had been allowed to spread out horizontally.

“You can’t let off another one,” Olwen said. She stood in the center of the crossroads, looking down each street in turn.

“Huh?”

“Look. Look properly.”

Stig followed her gaze. There were people everywhere. Dazed, weeping, bloodied, wandering helplessly through piles of wreckage, kneeling beside badly injured friends or family that’d been pulled out of broken buildings. Cars and vans were strewn across the road, none of them with any glass left intact; their alarms were all squawking furiously, lights flashing for attention, even those that had turned turtle. Rain and melted scraps of blimpbot fuselage fabric had combined into a weird sleet that was slowly and methodically smothering the bereaved landscape under an impenetrable black mantle.

He began to register the expressions around him as the damp ash pattered against his jacket. The tears, the silent rage, and the terrible anguish as people took stock of life that had been irretrievably smashed. There were hundreds just along the sections of road that he could see.

It took every shred of self-discipline he possessed to fight the guilt. “We have to,” he told her through gritted teeth. “It’ll come through unless we stop it. We don’t have anything else left to keep it away.”

“Then find something. Use us, we have weapons.”

He glanced at the ion pistol she was carrying openly, and resisted the impulse to give a derisive laugh. “Let’s assess 3F first, shall we?”

The sneekbots were scuttling their way to the top of the encircling mound that had been Market Wall. It took Stig a moment to make sense of the first images they provided. There was nothing he recognized, no features or outlines. First Foot Fall Plaza was a true crater now, and completely black on the inside where it had been scorched by the fuel air bomb. The force field over the gateway had withstood the blast; it was almost buried under fragments of roasted stone, with just a small crescent exposed, looking like milky glass as the rain washed the carbon dust away from it. None of the Institute troops had survived. He couldn’t even see any bodies. Their vehicles had vanished as well, including the MANN truck. He’d expected to see the metallic capsule lying somewhere, battered and overturned, but the sneekbots couldn’t detect any electrical or magnetic activity except for the gateway force field itself. First Foot Fall Plaza was a confirmed dead zone.

“It’s not going to come through into that,” Olwen said. “We’ve got a chance.”

“You’re probably right.” Stig checked the time in his virtual vision. “We’ve got fifty-five minutes left of this cycle,” he told everyone on the general band. “Our job is to make it as difficult as possible for the Starflyer to come through. It isn’t going to risk itself without an escort on this side, so I want Muriden’s and Hanna’s teams to dig in here on Market Wall. If anything comes through the gateway, shoot it with the plasma rifles. The rest of us: we’re splitting into mobile units. We have to prevent the Institute from getting close to 3F Plaza. Keely will update us on the location of any vehicles. If they look like they’re gathering into a convoy we hit them hard.”

It wasn’t a good omen, Wilson Kime calling over the general band that the radar had given them away, then two seconds later having to jump off the Carbon Goose’s loading ramp into pitch-darkness. Morton knew they didn’t have any choice. Options on this trip had vanished when the wormhole back to Boongate had slammed shut behind them. So he’d shouted out the obvious, and flung himself off. Didn’t bother to check if anyone agreed. Supposedly, leading by example was the sign of good leadership, except no one had ever said he was in charge.

The huge plane shot away above him, and he expanded the suit’s force field out to fifty meters. His speed braked sharply from air resistance, and he pushed the perimeter out even farther, shaping it to a teardrop profile. Sensors showed him the cold rock less than two hundred meters below, and approaching fast. They also revealed nine other armor suits dropping around him.

Thank Christ for that.

Morton had thought—sort of—that he could rely on Rob and the Cat to jump, but the others were unknowns. It was kind of reassuring that they were as committed or as reckless as he was.

The base of the force field touched the rock, bowing back up like a sponge to absorb the impact, then folded neatly back around the suit.

“Did you have an encore in mind?” the Cat asked.

“Whatever it is, he’s doing it solo,” Rob said.

“Thanks, guys.”

“Everyone okay?” Alic asked.

He got a chorus of acknowledgments. They were all down intact. The armor that the four Guardians wore was almost as good as the navy-issue marque.

“Four kilometers that way,” Morton said as they gathered together. “And thirty-two minutes left until the wormhole closes. How do you want to handle this?” The original hasty plan back in the Carbon Goose while they were suiting up was to creep up on Port Evergreen and sniper any exposed Starflyer agent, then hopefully disable the vehicles it was using before they went through the wormhole.

“Go in stealthed,” Alic said. “Take out those vehicles before they know what’s happening. It has to be in one of them.”

“No way, darling,” the Cat said. “We’re working with a badass timescale here. They know we’re here, we know they know, so we go in hot and burn the bastards down.”

“Do it,” Morton said. Once again he just set off, using the suit electromuscle to sprint hard over the land.

“One day, Morty,” the Cat said on a secure link, “we’re going to have to sort out that little ego problem of yours.”

She was level with him, then slowly pulling ahead. Morton settled for staying five meters behind her, and kept pace.

That was how the ten of them appeared on the top of the slope that led down to Port Evergreen: a line of potent electromagnetic and thermal points sliding up over the rocky horizon, unmistakable, making no attempt at concealment. They paused to assess the layout below, activating their weapons, then began the final advance down the incline.

“What is this?” the Cat sneered. “Fucking amateur night? Look at that positioning.”

Seventeen Starflyer agents were spread out in a kilometer-wide picket around the generator building. As soon as they sensed the invaders’ arrival they began to move like ants rushing to protect the nest. A dozen more hurried out of the vehicles waiting in front of the wormhole to reinforce the line. When the two sides were five hundred meters apart, they opened fire.

Plasma bolts and ion pulses slammed into Morton’s force field, ricocheting away without even straining it, their strobing brighter than any flash produced by the planet’s neutron star. The shots cast sharp, long shadows around him, swaying dizzyingly across the rock as they clashed and traversed.

“I’ll start on the right,” Rob said. “You guys keep going.” He dropped to his knee. The Starflyer agents were congregating into a pack directly ahead, with even more appearing from Port Evergreen to concentrate their firepower. Rob’s hyper-rifle rose smoothly out of its forearm sheath. The first shot cut clean through the Starflyer agent’s force field, armor, and body. Tatters of gore created a long splatter pattern on the rock.

The ease and violence of the kill shocked the other Starflyer agents. Their barrage waned for a moment, then shifted focus to target Rob.

“Little help here,” Rob said. The energy hammering against his force field was shaking him back across the rock. “Can’t get a good lock.”

“Never send a boy …” the Cat sighed. Her hyper-rifle deployed, and she took out two Starflyer agents. The rest of the pack immediately split apart with the proficiency of a dance troupe maneuver. They went for cover behind rock formations, or wormed their way along narrow clefts. Two scuttled into a pressurized hut, and resumed firing with a heavy-caliber plasma rifle. One of the Guardians was knocked back, force field alive with ruby flickers.

Alic’s particle lance swung up, and aligned on the hut. He fired. The hut detonated in a burst of silvery splinters and voracious white flame. A mushroom of black smoke boiled up into the dark sky.

“My, that’s a big one,” the Cat said. Her hyper-rifle blew a clump of boulders apart, exposing the Starflyer agent using them for cover. She fired again. “Can you hit the trucks with it?”

“This angle’s close to the generator,” Alic said. “Hang on, I’m going to circle around.”

“Ayub, Matthew, deploy around the generator,” Morton said. “Flush any hostiles out of there. We can’t afford to let them hold it.”

“I’m on it,” Ayub confirmed.

Two powerful plasma shots struck Jim Nwan from a new direction, punching him off his feet. “One of the shits is in a Carbon Goose,” he said and rolled over into a crouch. The rotary launcher on his arm let out a high-pitched
whirr
as the feed tube shook. Enhanced explosive mortars ripped through the Carbon Goose’s fuselage, then detonated. The giant plane disintegrated inside a huge gout of glaring electron-blue light.

“Vehicles on the move,” Matthew warned. The eight trucks were crawling forward, bunching together to combine their force fields. His sensors tracked a pair of human figures running in front of them. They went through the wormhole’s pressure curtain.

Alic’s particle lance struck the rear truck. Its force field held.

“Alic, flatten the rest of the place,” Morton said.

Another particle lance lashed out at the truck, with no effect. “The Starflyer’s in one of those trucks,” Alic said. “It has to be. We don’t have force fields that strong.”

“They’re going to go through,” Morton said. “When they do, everyone left here will try to kill the generator. Take out the huts and everything else they might shelter behind. Jim, you, too. Deny them any cover.”

“All right.”

The first truck was only a couple of meters from the wormhole, its engine revving loudly. Alic started shooting at the remaining huts, blasting them apart. Ayub and Matthew reached the generator building. There was a fast exchange of fire. Matthew released a swarm of sneekbots. Mortars whistled through the air above Port Evergreen. The second Carbon Goose exploded.