The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (247 page)

A large cylinder telescoped up out of a truck near the back of the line.

“That doesn’t look good,” the Cat warned. She fired five shots from her hyper-rifle, each one defeated by the truck’s force field as the cylinder calmly swung around inside the protective dome. “Rob, synchronize,” she yelled.

The cylinder was swinging toward the Cat. She jumped, the suit’s electromuscle powering her ten meters up into the night sky. A vivid white line scored through the air below her kicking feet, striking rock fifty meters away. The massive explosion sent a fountain of lava cascading over a huge area.

“Oh, shit,” Jim groaned. “Here we go. They’ve got real artillery.”

Morton was having trouble keeping current as events were playing out so fast. The weapon on the truck was swinging around, seeking out a new target. Three Starflyer agents stood in the door of the generator building, exchanging fire with Matthew. Someone came through the wormhole, wearing only an environment suit. Rob shot them with his hyper-rifle, sending body parts squelching back against the pressure curtain. Blood froze fast in Half Way’s atmosphere, falling to the ground in a shower of burgundy crystals. The lead truck revved hard, and lurched forward. Rob and the Cat had interfaced their hyper-rifles, and fired at the truck simultaneously. The force field flashed dangerous crimson as the twin energy beams struck it, then vanished through the wormhole.

“Bastard,” the Cat shrieked. “Morty, synchronize. Triple hit.”

The truck’s heavy-duty weapon fired again as Morton’s virtual hands flew over icons. Lava erupted where Jim had been standing. His armor suit curved gracefully through the air. Plasma pulses hit him at the top of the arc, sending him flailing backward through the sluggish jet of glowing molten rock.

Morton’s suit array interfaced with Rob and the Cat, putting his hyper-rifle under the Cat’s control. Two more trucks had slipped through the wormhole; the others were jostling for position, shoving forward.

“Which one?” the Cat demanded.

“Choose fast,” Rob replied. “Not the weapons truck.”

Morton watched targeting graphics zero in on the fifth truck. He would have gone for the one at the front, personally. The three hyper-rifles fired in unison. A scarlet corona burst across the truck’s force field. A particle lance streaked into it, and for an instant the truck was outlined in perfect clarity. It vaporized in an impressive plume of superheated gas and debris that soared above the rocky inlet. The remaining trucks rocked about wildly as the impulse pummeled their force fields. Another dashed through the wormhole.

The weapons truck braked to a halt, its deadly cylinder slewing around to point at the generator building. “Hit the fucker, Cat!” Morton yelled.

Three coincident hyper-rifle shots punctured the force field, and ignited the truck’s power cells. The explosion sent armor suits tumbling across the rock, its ferocity overwhelming all the other firefights.

Morton picked himself up. There was no more Port Evergreen. The only structure remaining was the wormhole generator. Where the huts had been, meager flames guttered in the ruptured foundations. The mounds of wreckage that had been Carbon Goose planes glowed vermilion in patches as they swiftly shed their heat into the freezing air. Rivulets of lava were running downslope to the sea where the Starflyer’s weapon had struck rock.

An ion pistol pulse struck the generator building. Four armor suits immediately fired on the Starflyer agent. Morton hurriedly focused on the building’s entrance. Last thing he remembered was two Starflyer agents in the doorway holding off Matthew. Blue-white light flared inside, a section of the wall shattered, and a broken armor suit flew out through the gash.

“Last one, I think,” Ayub said.

Morton held his breath, and focused his sensors on the wormhole. It was still open. He couldn’t bear the tension. If any Starflyer agent was left on this side, they’d destroy the generator. If there was a demolition charge planted, now was when it would go off.

The Cat moved up to stand beside him. “Eleven minutes left to the end of the cycle. Do we go through?”

“I dunno. Alic?”

“We don’t know what’s there. Matthew, send something through, grab us some data.”

“Already ahead of you, Boss.”

“Okay, everyone else, short-range sweep. We need to secure the area.”

Morton reluctantly agreed with the navy commander, and began to scan the ground where his suit array had located the last Starflyer agent.

Five sneekbots were running fast over the scorched ground in front of the generator building. They didn’t slow when they reached the pressure curtain. Morton accessed their sensor feeds as he continued his own search through various pieces of wreckage. There was a moment of fuzzy darkness, then they emerged into a universe that was strangely black. The ground was covered in soggy ash. Infrared showed something large directly ahead. A flash of light—

“They’re waiting for us,” Jim said.

“Christ, we need the armored cars for this.” Morton touched the Carbon Goose icon. “Wilson, get down here fast.”

“On my way. What’s happening?”

“We’ve secured the wormhole, but the bastard slipped through. They’re sitting on the other side, and shooting anything that sticks its head through. The armor cars should give us an edge.”

“That’s a bad timescale,” Wilson said.

“Morton,” Adam called, “even if we get the armored cars through, which will be pushing it, we’ll be in some kind of fight to clear the area. We don’t know how long that’ll take, and it’s what the Volvos are carrying that is really important here. They have to be safeguarded, and they’re simply not going to get through in the ten minutes we’ve got left.”

“If you don’t go through, you’ll be giving it a fifteen-hour head start. How long will it take to reach its ship?”

“Two to three days, depending on how badly the clan warriors damage Highway One.”

“Then you can’t afford fifteen hours.”

“I know.”

Morton’s suit sensors showed him an immobile warm patch in a slight hollow. When he inspected it, he found half an armor suit and a large rapidly cooling shale of blood crystals.

“Sending another sneekbot through,” Matthew announced.

The Carbon Goose was a pink point just above the invisible horizon, still two minutes out. Morton cursed the feeble speed of the great plane. He knew they weren’t going to get down in time. The timer in his virtual vision was counting off the seconds. There were only eight and a half minutes left now. He pulled the latest sneekbot image out of his grid. It lasted less than a second.

“What the hell is that black stuff?” Rob asked. “It’s everywhere on the other side.”

“It looks like ash to me,” Matthew said. “Something bad happened there, very bad.”

Morton finished his sweep. He watched the Carbon Goose swoop low over the water. Its nose tipped up, and the tail touched the surface. Huge fantails of foam shot out on either side and it slowly sank back level, lowering more and more of its belly into the water. He was surprised how short the landing run was.

“Morton,” Adam called, “we’re not going to send the armored cars through.”

“Damnit.” He looked at the wormhole again. The impulse to sprint straight at it was a strong one.
I wonder if that’s how I felt killing Tara. Action is always the solution, it links events, carries you forward.

“There might be another way,” Adam said.

Morton switched his communications link off. “It better be good,” he muttered into the muffled silence of his helmet.

While the Carbon Goose sailed sedately toward the shelf of rock that formed Port Evergreen’s shore, Morton went and stood in front of the dull gray semicircle. The timer continued to count off seconds. It was like watching his life drain away. He was aware of three other armor suits coming up to stand beside him. They waited in silence.

We should have knocked out the generator ourselves, made the sacrifice. That would have stranded the Starflyer here. We could have killed it then. If it was in one of the trucks.

There were just so many unknowns and variables. Morton hated that.

His timer was seventeen seconds off. The wormhole closed before he expected, the slight glimmer behind the pressure curtain shrinking away unexpectedly early.

“Okay,” he told Adam. “Let’s hear it.”

It took the Institute thirty-two minutes to shoot down five of the remaining blimpbots after the fuel air bomb went off. Land Rover Cruisers tore through the streets of Armstrong City in twos and threes, never quite constituting a decent target by themselves. The teams would rendezvous in an open location where they could mass their firepower and slam it into the massive aging craft coasting above the rooftops.

It was easy enough for Keely to track them. She’d successfully crashed the city’s net, forcing the Institute to use encrypted radio. Transmission points were easy to track. Physically following them was more difficult. The streets were packed with people and vehicles, trying to get the injured to hospitals, forming rescue parties to pick through collapsed buildings. Lack of communications was a huge inhibitor. The emergency services had fallback radio, but they didn’t know where the worst areas were. It wasn’t just the district around 3F; the blimpbots that had been knocked out of the sky had caused tremendous damage where they crashed. Three of them had started street blazes.

The Institute troops didn’t care about any of the human problems. Their Cruisers drove through crowds and forced ambulances off the street; anyone who got in the way was shot at. When they did succeed in attacking a blimpbot it would fall to the ground, causing more deaths and damage.

Stig and the available clan warriors chased around after the Cruisers on bikes where they could. It was difficult, they couldn’t go plowing through crowds. They’d managed to wreck six Cruisers in total, at a cost of nine Guardians. He didn’t like the ratio.

“Convoy forming along Mantana Avenue,” Keely warned.

Stig checked his timer. There were eighteen minutes left before the wormhole closed. Above him stars were shining through the thinning rain clouds. “Okay, all mobile units, we’ll regroup at the 3F end of Levana Walk. Muriden, Hanna, slow them up as best you can. We’ll reinforce you immediately.” He braked the bike he’d commandeered, a Triumph Urban-retro45, and swung it in a sharp turn to head back down Crown Lane. Olwen, who was riding shotgun, slipped her ion pistols back into their holsters. “Did they get the bomb carrier?”

“Yeah.” He was busy concentrating on the road, which was littered with debris. Every other vehicle driving that evening was moving fast and swerving to avoid the bigger lumps and branches. It was adding a considerable percentage to the casualties.

Sensor coverage from the sneekbots was sporadic. Keely had left secure routes through the city’s network that the Guardians could access, but there had been a lot of physical damage, especially around 3F. Stig was supplied with intermittent images of the vehicles thrusting their way along Mantana Avenue. There were some kind of bulldozers near the front, and a couple of beefy tow trucks.

“Isn’t that another of those life-support capsules?” Olwen asked.

Stig risked shifting his focus from the road to his virtual vision grid, and saw an identical MANN rig to the first. “What do they do, clone those bastards?” A minibus full of injured heading the other way blasted its horn at him, and he throttled back, swaying in close to the pavement. The driver shook his fist as he passed.

“Damnit, we’re not going to be in time.” He watched the first Cruisers reach the bottom of the steep rubble slope that had been Market Wall. Their suspension had lowered, lifting the main body a couple of meters above the ground. They didn’t even seem to slow down as they tipped up and began climbing the pile.

Hanna’s team opened fire as soon as they reached the crown. Gatling cannon and masers replied. Headlights and targeting lasers lashed across the broken inner surface.

The bulldozers were going up in formation, flattening a crude road, shunting aside tons of debris with a speed Stig could hardly believe. Their brilliant headlights cut through the late twilight, illuminating thick clouds of dust they were churning up. More Range Rover Cruisers were speeding up over the broken stone and into the dark heart of the blast zone. They began firing at random out of the cloying dust, strafing the blackened slopes.

“Disengage,” Stig ordered as the tenth Cruiser topped the mound. “Fall back, dreaming heavens, you can’t hold that many.” They were even losing sneekbots as the Institute’s randomized firepower swept around the ruined Plaza.

The bulldozers had carved a roughly level path up to the top of the slope; now they were pushing down the other side. Dense streamers of dust congested the air around them, blurring the light beams. Five more Cruisers raced up after them, jumping the apex to come bouncing down the newly formed ramp. There were over twenty of the Institute vehicles inside the Plaza now, all of them shooting wildly. None of the Guardians were firing back; they were scrabbling desperately for cover. The MANN truck arrived at the bottom of the incline, and began to grind its way up, eight headlights stabbing up into the occluded night.

“We should have stayed,” Stig said. “Made our stand there around 3F.”

“We’d have been slaughtered,” Olwen said. “This is complete desperation on their part; they’ll do anything to clear a path for the Starflyer.”

He turned onto Nottingham Road and braked again. It was chaos ahead, with cars and vans wedged together, headlights shining on the partially collapsed buildings. People were working on the ruins, picking stones and bricks off one at a time. A city fire crew was deployed halfway along, their bots crawling up a four-story house that had somehow twisted itself around through twenty degrees.

“Run,” he said simply.

The Institute Cruisers stopped firing. There were only five functioning sneekbots left in 3F Plaza. They showed the MANN truck gunning its way down the inner slope in juddering bursts. Five Cruisers were shining their headlights on the gateway’s pressure curtain. A group of figures in flexarmor were clearing it, flinging away chunks of debris.