Great North Road (124 page)

There!
Right on the limit of resolution, a glimmer of pink, a higher temperature.

“Are any of you near me?” he whispered with his mouth closed.

“Just passing outside the vehicles now,” Raddon replied.

“It’s here. I’m about to fire.” He squeezed the trigger with his gloved finger. His whole vision detonated into searing orange flashes. There was the oddest sound amid the roar of the carbine, a loud piercing whine. Ricochet. A couple of rounds had been deflected off a solid surface.

Ravi stood up, and squinted into the swirl of snow. He’d hit something.

It lunged at him. Scarlet sunlight flaring out of the dreary aquamarine murk, the shape of a man. Lethal blades slashing fast. Ravi sidestepped smartly—product of one-too-many bar fights that had gotten him into so much trouble back in those glorious days of R&R in Vegas. He countered, using the barrel of the carbine as a club, which went thudding into the monster’s side. As soon as it hit, he fired again, sending three rounds slamming into the malleable stone hide. They had no effect. And the monster parried in turn, twirling its own arm like a dueling rapier as the bullet impacts thumped at it. The blades cut deep into the barrel, and the carbine misfired, the explosion wrenching it out of Ravi’s grip, snapping fingers as if his bones were formed of ice. The monster’s arm recoiled, too, as Ravi went stumbling backward, howling at the pain.

There was no strategy now, no careful considered blow and counterblow. Ravi regained his balance and ran. The monster was death. Immortal. Unreal.

“Where are you? What happened?”

Elston’s demands were disconnected, a vague mosquito buzz in his ears, irrelevant to his fight for survival. Ravi plunged forward, sending the snow and fog eddying away, stumbling on treacherous crumbling snow, scrabbling upright, running again, falling. Onward and onward he went, building distance from the monster, from the convoy, from help. The carbine was gone, destroyed by those diabolical blades; he drew his Weston pistol from its shoulder holster, using his left hand. The safety he had to push off with the heel of his right thumb. The rest of his right hand was useless, throbbing with hot pain.

Blue light flickered faintly through the heavy snowfall. The aurora borealis had returned, and the mist seemed to be thinning, though not the snowfall. Ravi could feel the land rising below his boots as he pushed them through the fluffy snow; he was on the riverbank, climbing up toward the trees. Ethereal blue light shivered again. The jungle shone in front of him, sturdy black trunks encased in their enchanting crystalline shrouds, bound together by an impenetrable lace-like vine webbing that sagged beneath a million icicles. Somehow the aurora had swooped down to infest the knotted branches beneath the canopy, shining out through the speckled air and projecting long shadows across the silky ground of the slope. The phosphorescence intensified and withered without rhythm, as if specters were gadding through the trees. And finally there was sound, the dull
crump
of bulky snow streams falling onto the ground.

That was real. Ravi paused in his madcap flight as the aurora dimmed once more. Something ahead of him had moved. Something had shifted mounds of snow. His adrenaline-accelerated paranoia visualized a thousand of the creatures shrugging their way up out of ancient graves to swarm upon him. Instinctively he knew the forest was danger. An unseen force allied to the monster had erupted from it to strike poor Mark Chitty. Now it was turning its unseen eye upon him.

Locked in a crouch, panicked, not knowing where the greater danger lay, ahead or behind, he activated his infrared function again. His Weston waved about, covering as much of the area as he could.

Heightened senses warned him. He caught a flicker of motion from the corner of his eye and jumped out of the crouch, diving down the slope. As he landed on his belly the end of a bullwhip branch came slamming down out of the iridescent ether. It struck him square on the back, hammering him deep into the snow.

The blow was everything Ravi imagined a traffic smash would be. Incapacitating. Pain peaking toward overload. Disorienting, stretching time out to make that single moment resonate on and on. Sheer disbelief was his only other companion amid the torment. The tree! The tree had hit him. It was alive, just as Mark warned them.

Ravi moved his head a fraction, seeing the branch lift elegantly, twitching as light as a cat’s tail flick as it began to gather itself back into a tidy horizontal coil.

He’d heard his armor vest creak and crack as the branch hit him. That had saved him. But the armor was fractured now. He’d never survive another strike. And the trees were legion.

Keep going
. Just as he’d done all those years ago above New Florida. The odds were impossible, then as now. That didn’t matter. You did your best, you didn’t give in. Always, you gave your all, just as the military did throughout history.

Ravi Hendrik heaved himself up out of the imprint his body had made. His yowl of anguish and determination was loud enough to wrench the fog and snow apart by itself. They’d have heard that back in Abellia.

He couldn’t even stand erect. His back was too badly damaged. The bodymesh showed a dozen small puncture wounds where the fractured armor had jabbed into him. He hobbled off down the slope again, a fearful Neanderthal retreating. His head was craned back so he could watch for—

Another bullwhip branch came lashing out of the jungle. Ravi vaulted as best as his crippled body could manage, and the branch tip sent up an angry plume of snow centimeters behind his ankles. He slithered on, rolling and bouncing down and down until he banged into something solid enough to stop him. Glanced up to see what the obstruction was.

The monster looked down at him, haloed in a sapphire glow from the aurora borealis. He’d bumped into its legs. A desperate twist wasn’t quick enough. Those five dreadful blades came stabbing down. Ravi screamed in agony as one slid straight through his right upper arm, grazing the bone, pinning him to the crusty snow.

His left arm came up and around as if fired by an electric shock. It put his pistol muzzle five centimeters from the monster’s inflexible face. He tugged the trigger. For once the bullet seemed to have some effect, punching the head back. He shot again. Again! A bright orange spark erupted from the thing’s brow as the bullet
piiing
ed away into the night, and it swayed back. Ravi fired once more.

The blade withdrew, allowing the monster greater movement so it could avoid the relentless point-blank shots. Madness and fury shunted Ravi up to his feet. Following it. Shooting, always shooting. The dark head wove from side to side, trying to elude the impacts.

Then, as Ravi knew would eventually happen, the trigger clicked uselessly. The Weston’s chamber was empty. He and the monster paused for a second, staring at each other. Ravi could have sworn the thing was as startled as him by the crushing fall of silence. He did the only thing he could now, and threw the Weston at it before turning to run for his life. As he did the five blades came whistling toward him in a furious arc. Two razor tips caught his shoulder, ripping through his parka, slicing the flesh outside the rim of the armor. Ravi barely registered the new pulse of pain. So much of his body hurt now.

He ran on. His grid was still dead. All links down. Fire burned into his spine. He ignored it. Blood drizzled down his arm from the blade wounds. He kept one foot swinging in front of the other, nothing else mattered, kicking the loose top-snow aside. Running he didn’t know where, just not up the slope to the trees.

It was behind him. Close. He could hear the snow being thrust apart as those inhuman feet pounded after him.

A deeper darkness grew ahead of him, and the mist churned around his legs, sliding forward as if propelled by some natural urge. The snow was unrelenting, though sudden gusts began to buffet it up around him. Ravi
knew
then.

Another ten paces brought him to it. He was sliding precariously on naked ice as he came to the precipice. Fog glided over the edge, sweeping down into the black canyon to accompany the flurries of snow spinning giddily in the ragged updrafts.

He risked a glance over his shoulder. The monster was four meters behind, its arms coming up for the last, fatal embrace.

“Fuck you,” Ravi shouted with the full defiance that only a Wild Valkyries flier could possibly muster. He turned, stiffened, and jumped—

The search party found some splatters of blood. In itself a miracle given how fast and thick the snow was falling.

Elston had dispatched two squads: Botin, Atyeo, and Leora in one; Omar, Raddon, and Jay in the second. He allowed them to go outside the ring of vehicles, but not out of link range, pitiful though it was.

Back in the vehicles, Dean, Miya, and Ken tried desperately to clear the rip that had killed their net.

Links were bodymesh-to-bodymesh only, so everyone got to see through Botin’s eyes as he shone a torch on the blood spots at the bottom of the riverbank. Flakes of snow landed softly on them, slowly obscuring the last evidence of Ravi Hendrik’s existence.

Botin’s team was 123 meters from the vehicles, putting their link strength down to 10 percent.

“Can you see anything?” Elston asked.

“No, sir,” the lieutenant replied. “There’s a lot of marks in the snow here, and three spent nine-millimeter casings. This is where we heard the last shots from. There was obviously some kind of struggle.”

“Lieutenant!” Leora called.

Attention switched to the Weston pistol she was looking at, lying in the snow with its barrel already covered in fresh flakes. She picked it up. “Chamber’s empty. He fired every round.”

“Is there any indication where they are now?” Elston asked.

“Tracks leading south along the river, sir,” Botin said. “Two sets. They were heading for the canyon.”

“Do not pursue,” Elston said. “I am not having you venture outside link range. Fire a flare.”

Botin pointed the stumpy flare gun into the air and fired. There was a glimmer of pink-white magnesium somewhere up amid the heavy falling snow, but it was barely brighter than the electron-blue flickers of the aurora borealis that swam among the trees.

“He’s not going to see that,” Atyeo said.

“He’s not alive to see anything,” Leora muttered. “Let’s not kid ourselves here.”

“Stay on station another five minutes,” Elston ordered. “Fire a flare every minute. If Hendrik doesn’t show up after that, fall back to the vehicles.”

“Yes, sir.”

It took another fifteen minutes before Dean and his team managed to reboot the meshes and processors, bringing the convoy’s net back online. Pings fired out, coded for Ravi’s bodymesh. It never responded.

Elston was startled to see Bastian’s icon slip up into his restored grid. Raddon led Omar and Jay over to the truck’s sledge as soon as the green emblem appeared for all of them to see. Omar got down on all fours and peered past the runners. “Hey, buddy, didn’t expect to see you again.”

“Has it gone?” Bastian North asked. “Please God, it was terrible.”

He told them how he and Ravi had been having trouble with the sledge pumps, how they’d gone over to investigate, how he’d heard some sort of commotion on the sledge. He’d glimpsed the monster emerging out of the veil of fog and snow just as the net crashed, and dived for cover under the sledge. He’d stayed there, hearing gunshots then silence, too frightened to move. Then finally, when the cold was biting hard into his flesh, the convoy net had come back online.

The Legionnaires escorted him back to Tropic-1, where he stripped off his parka and armor, and started to warm up. His face was badly bruised, some grazes leaking blood. “Smacked into the side of the sledge as I went for cover,” he told them. By then Botin and his squad had come back. Everyone knew that Ravi was dead like all the rest before him.

Morale reached its nadir that night. Talk was the same in each vehicle. Every time the convoy stopped, the monster struck. They were only safe when they were moving, and now they couldn’t. With the canyon presenting an insurmountable barrier, they had to wait to see what the MTJs found. So they sat in their vehicles, unable to sleep, barely able to see the headlights on either side, knowing their net was vulnerable to the alien, listening to the servo whine of the remote gun, knowing its targeting sensors couldn’t penetrate the icy murk anyway. Waiting for dawn, waiting for the MTJs to return, waiting for the hated snow to lift, waiting for some intimation of hope.

S
UNDAY,
M
AY 5, 2143

The snow eased off sometime after midnight, allowing sensors to stare farther across the frozen river. There was no sign of Ravi’s body, but then no one was expecting that.

Pale pink dawn brought tendrils of fog creeping out of the jungle again, slithering down to the river and over the frozen waterfall. As everyone was having their meager breakfast allocation the shortwave radio crackled into life. It was Antrinell, his voice drifting in and out amid the hissing static of far-off storms. “There’s a way down. We’re about fifteen klicks west from you. The canyon wall dips down, and there’s a rockfall at the bottom. We can make it down there. Camm and Darwin are already halfway down, marking a route.”

“Stay there,” Vance radioed back. “We’ll come to you.”

They couldn’t raise MTJ-2.

“This radio is not like a link,” Olrg told Vance. “The atmosphere does weird things to shortwave.”

“If we can reach one MTJ we should be able to reach the other,” Vance complained.

Olrg’s face showed how much he disagreed, but he didn’t contradict his colonel outright.

“They were supposed to check in every two hours, as well,” Vance said.

“We had the first scheduled call from MTJ-2 yesterday afternoon, sir, they confirmed everything was okay, then the weather closed in, so we assumed that blocked them.”

Vance wasn’t convinced. If it had been the other way around, and they’d lost contact with Antrinell, he would have simply waited for the MTJ to come lumbering back at the appointed time a day later. But Leif and Karizma, that was different. He told his e-i to open a secure link to Lieutenant Botin.