Invader (59 page)

FTL and stockpiles, hell.

It was dodge and turn in the dark through a confusing maze of small service roads, over hills, through meadows and down and across bridgeless streams in wooded areas — trees grew quite successfully wherever there was water and, increasingly so as they entered the wide south range, only where there was water.

They weren't in the lead: two other cars were in front, and Tabini rode with Naidiri in a car two back from them in the six-vehicle column, security clearly taking care to have them protected in the middle, but not together in the middle. The road ripped along a wooded streamside and out across open grassland for a space and back again into trees. They parked twice, each time in such wooded areas, at places where other roads diverged, and waited for what event wasn't clear, for maybe five minutes. Everyone sat in total silence, listening into the dark, the motors cut off, nothing but the night sounds of the range and the mild whisper of a breeze moving through the branches overhead. Tano relayed Banichi's messages to someone on his pocket-corn — Banichi didn't talk, neither did Jago: voices that might be too well-known, Bren thought, especially to the neighbors. Tano said something about section eleven and some incursion and taking the number twenty-one. "Easy," the driver said, and motors were starting ahead and behind them. The lead driver backed a little and nosed off onto the divergence, leading the way onto a rougher, less-traveled road. Brush scraped the undercarriage and escaped out the rear, branches already broken by the first and second vehicle scraped along their sides.

Change of plans, Bren thought and, sandwiched between Jago and Tano in the backseat, cradled his elbow to protect his arm from the weight and irritation of the vest.

But taking it off didn't tempt him in the least.

"Are we still going toward the site?" he asked once, as quietly as he could, after Banichi and the driver had exchanged a couple of casual words.

Then a branch hit their windshield and scraped over their heads, so atevi had to duck and the human in the middle suffered a rain of pungent and bruised leaves.

Three violent bounces over roots, a sharp turn, and they made an uphill climb over a ridge in which the view from the backseat was black sky and then the lumpish, weathered granite that told him for the first time they were on the cross-range ridge. He checked his watch, risking knocking into Jago and Tano.

"Hour before dawn," he said with a nervous flutter of his stomach. "They'll be underway, the lander will —" A fierce bounce, then a break out of the woods: the faintly lit detail of branches gave way to total black interspersed with trees, as the driver made furious efforts with the wheel to keep them up to the speed they'd carried.

Going as fast as they possibly could, he thought.

"We're not far from the junction east, then access to the —"

He heard a thump. Jago and Tano folded over him, shoving him down as a shock of air blossomed all around them in a sound, a pressure, a force that heaved up the road, shoved them and the whole car over, spilled them in a heavy tangle of limbs and stickery brush and lastly pelting earth and stone and wood.

He couldn't get his breath for a moment. He braced himself as somebody leaned on him trying to move, then — then the car exploded in a ball of flame, somebody grabbed his vest by the bottom edge and dragged him downhill, shots were going off. He'd lost the helmet, he'd every awareness his most essential job right now was to keep his head down and keep out of the way — he knew Jago and Tano were alive, they'd fallen tangled with him, they'd hauled him back. In a flurry of small-arms fire, he heard car engines whining — in what sounded like fast reverse, cars from behind them getting out the only direction they could; but his ears were ringing from the explosion, and in the glare of fire he couldn't make out anything but the burning vehicle they'd been in, black in the center of the fireball, uphill in front of them. Trees were catching, going up like matches. The whole area was lit in fire.

Then he heard someone shouting, and Banichi — thank God, Banichi — shouting back they couldn't maneuver where they were, don't try to come after them, they'd hold here.

"Stay down!" Banichi yelled, then, and a strong atevi hand shoved him flat as fire spattered chips off the rocks and thumped into the other side of the burning car.

"My computer!" he protested.

"Your head, nadi." Jago kept up the pressure on his back. These was another thump from up the hill, then an explosion that hit beyond them and rained rock and dirt.

Tano said, while his ears were recovering from the shock, "Firetube. I can go up after it."

"No!" Banichi said. "Too damn much light out —"

Another shell hit beyond them, starting a minor landslide. Jago hauled him into a hollow of rocks and Tano joined them, as Banichi fired a rapid series of shots toward the height.

He had his own gun. He pulled it out of his pocket, aware when he rested his weight on the other elbow that he'd strained the shoulder enough to make his eyes water. He wasn't sure what the target was, he wasn't even sure where the attack was coming from, but the blowing smoke was headed down the road and the fire had skipped to brush in that area.

Tano and Jago stretched out in the scant cover they had and began laying down fire at the uphill as well. He tried to find a way to do the same, but he had a rock in his way and tried to get a vantage above it, but Tano jerked him down, none too gently.

"I've extra clips," he said, trying to be useful at something.

Another shell hit. Banichi and another man he thought was the ranger took shelter with them as a tree came down in a welter of branches, right on the front of the car, and caught fire, making a screen of light between them and anything they could possibly aim at.

"Steady firing," Banichi said. "All we can do. We're a roadblock. They're trying to go behind. Keep their heads down. Bren, watch our backs. Hear?"

"Yes," he said, and edged around to do that. Go behind what, he wasn't sure, but he suspected Banichi meant Tabini's group was going behind the hill: they'd backed the cars out of the area, headed in reverse back around the curve of the ridge, the way the car in front of them seemed to have gotten away down the road. He didn't know if there was a plan, if some of them were going to go up and others were going to get Tabini out of there, or if Tabini and his security were going to try the hill; but Banichi and Jago and Tano and the ranger-driver were all firing as if they could see what they were shooting at — and as if they had more ammunition than he thought they had. He had a branch gouging his arm as he'd faced about to the downhill: he took a hitch on one hand to shift to a more long-term position — and saw a movement in the firelit dark downhill.

"Man!" was all that came out of his mouth — he fired, and a blow knocked him back into the rock, his head hit stone, and guns fired on either side of him.

"Bren-ji!" Jago's voice.

"Vest," he managed to say, bruised in the ribs, winded, realizing there'd just been justification for the body armor. He had his gun still in hand; he braced it on his knee, his arm and leg both shaking. "I'm watching! It's all right!"

Guns were going off next to his ears, Banichi and the ranger were still shooting. Tano and Jago turned their attention back toward the hill and he sat there and shook — which tightened the muscles in his ribs, which didn't help him get his breath. Heat was rolling down the slope on gusts of wind, bringing stinging smoke.

At least they weren't landing more of the heavy shells. Their attackers might not have any more. The fire they were sending upslope might be keeping the enemy's heads down.

But they couldn't have that much ammunition left to keep up their own fire, and the attackers on the ridge had sent at least one man below them — surely not just one. His eyes weren't as good as atevi eyes in the dark: he didn't know how they were against the fire-glare, but the pitch of the slope made deep shadows interspersed with firelit branches of trees and rocks, and out beyond, grass, just — grass forever, past this stony hump of a ridge that ran a diagonal across the south range, the one exception in a flat that went on clear to the ocean bluffs —

And that antiquated space capsule was already on its way, committed beyond return: a fast push of a button on his watch and a steadying of his wrist said it wasn't the eternity he'd thought, but it wasn't that much time left, either, and they weren't where they were supposed to be, even if Tabini's people got them clear; they weren't going to make it out of here in any good order; and the question was whether they were
going
to make it out, or whether, if Tabini was being his stubborn self up there, they were going to have a government left in another hour to care at all whether there was a paidhi to translate for humans. He felt sick at his stomach, partly the heat, partly the shock of the hit he'd taken, and partly the knowledge this wasn't going to work — —

"Clip, nadi," Jago said with complete calm, and he dug in his pockets with the other hand, gun still braced generally downslope, and reached around to hand her two of the three. "I've got one more, no, two, counting what's in my gun." His voice wasn't entirely reliable. He tried to keep watching where he was supposed to watch.

"Go easy, go easy," Banichi said, and the shots kept coming — Banichi's, Jago's — keeping his ears ringing. "We can't have that damn firetube back in action."

'The grass is catching fire," the ranger said, and Bren threw a glance to the ranger's side: fire
had
spread down-slope, not directly below them, but where the burning line of brush had caught down the hill to their left.

It was end of season. The grass was drying. Green-gold in the view from the porch —

All that grass. All that grass, clear to the sea. The capsule coming down in a sea of flame. The heat shield was mostly on the bottom, mostly there — how hot did a grass fire get, when the flames rolled ten meters high and scoured the land black?

Gunfire broke out on the slope above them, a sudden lot of it. He felt a rush of hope and terror, resisting the temptation to turn and look toward what he couldn't hope to see anyway. Gunfire rattled above them, and suddenly a nasal, angry squeal.

That
didn't belong at Taiben — he heard a scream cut short, and that godawful squalling snort that, God, anyone hearing a mecheita attack a man would never, ever forget —

Mecheiti were on the ridge. Riders.

He did turn on his hip, striving to try to see through the spreading fire. Leaves on trees just over their heads were catching, a thin flicker of fire, a rain of burning ash, carried on a gust of firestorm wind. Heat was building. The trees near them could go up the way the first had.

"Trees are catching fire!" he said. "We've got to get to the clear — we're going to get caught —"

But the rattle of gunfire that came to them through the roar of the fire had stopped; atevi voices upslope were shouting at each other.

He didn't know what to think. He crouched on his knees with the gun in his good hand and everyone around him equally confused, for the instant. A sapling burst into flame, all the leaves involved at once. He felt a heart-pounding panic, no better excuse. And faintest of all was a thread of a voice from an active pocket-corn,

"Hold fire, hold fire, blue, below."

"They've got it," Banichi said. "Stay down!"

"Stay down yourself!" Jago said, the only time Bren had ever seen Jago defy an order. Her arm shot past him to grab Banichi's sleeve. "Your leg, dammit, stay here!"

"The hell," Banichi said, and broke his arm free, but he stayed down.

There was just the roar of the fire, now, no rattle of weapons fire. Nothing seemed to move. There was a reek of gunpowder, of burnt plastic, through the stinging woodsmoke, and Tano edged over, finding cover further away from the fire. They crept over sidelong across the slope, below the edge of the road, while a thin conversation over the pocket-corns continued, directing movement, directing roundup of surrendering rebels.

Then he heard Jago say, "The dowager. Yes, aiji-ma — we're fine. All of us. We're holding fire."

He hoped there hadn't been a carnage up there, that people he cared about were still alive, that there was some means of reaching a peace. He heard names like Dereiso, whom Banichi had named to him as a problem in the region. He heard orders to say they should stay still, and he heard the sound of a small plane overhead, which he didn't like, but Tano said it was theirs.

A motor started up, from around the bend of the ridge, and a second one — in a moment more, cars came down the road, Tabini's end of the convoy coming up behind and around their burning vehicle: ahead, nothing but fire — the downed tree that had buried the front end of their own car in its branches was a burning log, and the wind had carried sparks all over the ridge in that direction.

The third car didn't show, but down from the firelit hill came a ghostly soundless darkness: mecheita and rider. Others followed.
Not
under guard. Rangers, Bren thought. He hadn't known there were mecheiti at Taiben. He'd never heard of any. But there they were, fifteen or so riders, coming off the sparsely wooded ridge beyond where the cars were stopped. Riders in metal-studded black, the brief glimpse of one who wasn't — no intimation of threat to the cars or hostility to them: people were out of the cars, Tabini among that body-armored, helmeted group, he hoped.

Banichi stood up, and Tano and Jago did. Bren reached out for a careful grip on a branch, hauled himself up to his feet as he recognized the smallish, plainclothes rider among the others.

Ilisidi.

Cenedi — Ilisidi's bodyguard — and at least fifteen of what she called "her young men," on towering, long-legged shapes with the flash of war-brass about their jaws, short rooting-tusks capped with deadly metal, armed for trouble, the ridden and the unridden — fully ten, eleven more mecheiti shadowing through the brush and rock of the area, catching up with their herd, high-tempered with the fighting and the fire crackling away from already burnt ground.