Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series (39 page)

The musty air hung in silence. Abelard waited in their gaze, waited for some reaction. Anything. Any show of solidarity.

Finally, a low voice uttered: “Hail to the Liberator!”

“Hail!” the crowd shouted. “Hail, Liberator!”

Gable grabbed Abelard by the arm. “Abelard, please. We have to go.”

Abelard hopped down from the rock and nodded at Gable to lead the way.

Seraphina hooked arms with her half-sibling and kissed him on the cheek. “Their hearts are with you, Abby. As is mine.”

Once again, Abelard stepped through the crowd in Gable’s path as hands stretched out to touch him. This time, he held out his own to graze their fingers as he passed. He wasn’t their lord. No. Abelard was their Liberator.

But as they cried “Liberator, Liberator,” a fear swelled in him—the fear that he had only liberated them for a time. For a brief, sweet time.

The aerial defense dishes waited, aimed at the rust-red sky. The air had quieted, all but a light breeze that ebbed and flowed. Thin, tan clouds swirled in from the east like a dust storm.

Guarin waited, wedged in a cleft between boulders. Jagged pebbles fell from above, pricking his arm and forehead. He brushed them away. Shoulder still sore, but usable. His breaths came short inside the plastic mask as it worked—slowly—to filter out toxins and let in breathable air.

The clouds cleared, opening up the crimson, evening sky. Guarin squinted up at it. He couldn’t see any twinkles of light or dull shadows through the hazy atmosphere, but they were there. He felt it in his marrow. Lord Velasco wouldn’t let his death go unpunished. That’s what these Upraadis and their Carinian friends had prepared for. That’s why they hid underground.

Guarin closed his eyes and took in as deep a breath as his mask would allow. His mind trickled back to Guerlain. To the way her devious cat eyes watched him. How sharp they could be when indignant, how sultry when scheming. His cradlemate had been a minx in bed and a hawk in battle. And now, as the persistent mental image reminded him, she was only a memory.

That dull, sluggish ache spread through his veins with every heartbeat. Guarin let himself drift into bitter memory as the breeze brushed his skin . . .

He jolted back to consciousness at a horrible sound.

It had begun. The sky roared and cracked like thunder. The aerial defense dishes thrummed loud and deep. Laser cannons whined, swiveling from one side of the steel bowl to another, blasting invisible lasers through wispy clouds, high into the atmosphere.

Starbursts ignited in the air, blindingly bright, sending off delayed, burning growls. A central point of light stretched into a line of trailing fire then split into pieces, dwindling after a few seconds. It happened all over the sky, all at once. Guarin stared straight up, watching it all, pulse surging ten times faster.

As soon as the growling, cracking thunder dissipated, another round of explosions ignited. Defense dishes droned and whined. Their cannons concentrated beams at the tips of the tungsten rods screaming down from orbit, just long enough to make them wobble. Melt a millimeter off, then the powerful thrust of air would knock the light rods sideways. The atmosphere did the rest. Guarin’s years at academy ensured he never forgot how orbital bombardments work. Or how bombardment defense worked.

Or, fortunately, how to break those defenses.

Smaller flares sprinkled around the falling fireballs and crumbling shafts. Titanium bolts, Guarin guessed. Even a meter of titanium, travelling fast enough, could radically reshape Canyon City. They popped like gunshots, blending together into a constant, crackling racket. Flashes and flames strobed the sky almost from horizon to horizon. And still the defense dishes hummed and beamed on, untouched and unperturbed, not letting a single projectile through.

Then Guarin heard a sound he hadn’t anticipated.

Thump.

An impact exploded into a spray of pebbles about fifty meters out. More metal remnants beat down on the ground all around it, then to Guarin’s right and left and behind him. A rain of charred titanium and tungsten, slamming into the rock, splitting solid granite, sending tremors through the ground. Guarin needed to go.
Now
.

He drew his shoulders together to dislodge himself from his hiding place and thrust into the open, going straight into a hard sprint. A shard landed maybe ten meters ahead, showering him in tiny, jagged rocks, nicking his skin in a dozen places. Another hit cracked the ground behind him, almost knocking him off his feet. The defense dish was thirty meters away. He pushed his legs harder.

Little impacts pelted the uneven ground. Then one of the burning hot fragments sliced through the flesh of his forearm. Searing pain burst up to his elbow and down to his fingers, sizzling at the point of impact. He bit his tongue and wrapped his other hand around the newfound orifice in his arm and kept going. Pulses of hot pain flashed around the bleeding wound.

Just before he reached the safety of the space under the dish, Guarin knelt beside a still-glowing ember. He locked his teeth together, sucked in a few shallow breaths, then uncovered the bloody hole in his forearm and pressed it against the smoldering lump of metal. Scorching pain shot through his arm and to every corner of his body. It was as if every nerve ending had been inflamed. The wound cauterized, he turned his arm to seal the exit hole. It burned like hell, worse the second time—more exposed raw flesh. When he sprang up and rolled under the cover of the dish, his head swam in haze. He thought he might pass out, but he shook his head and forced himself up.

His forearm had been charred black at the wound and cooked red around it. He squeezed that hand into a painful fist. His muscles and tendons resisted, but he fought through the throbbing stiffness.

More metallic rain came down outside the safety of the dish. Guarin examined the thick stalk and its steel legs stabbing into the rock. At the top of one leg, where it met the stalk, he saw the contours of a hardware panel door. He planted a boot on the flat top of the leg and started up it.

How well would the defense array work with one dish out of commission?

The defense’s command center—the palace’s old throne room—quivered in collective impatience and anxiety. Maxwell saw it in the Upraadis as they huddled together and whispered. Eyes wide and dialated. Hands twitching. Feet shifting. Even super-powered by mechanical exoskeletons and holding polished foreign weapons, they had little confidence. They did not know what they were doing. Kids trying to make it in a world of adults. Sheep among wolves.

A cluster of thuds trembled through the dense rock from above. Dust fell into the curiously colored pool around the edge of the chamber.

The transapien commanders stood on the dais where Radovan’s crumbled throne remained in a pile. They stood perfectly still, thinking, processing information as it streamed into their heads. Abelard and Seraphina waited at the edge of the steps leading up to the dais, no less nervous than the others. One of Abelard’s underlings, who they called Gable, paced restlessly with a deep grimace lining his cheeks and forehead.

“Would you stop that?” Abelard hissed. “Everyone is watching.”

It likely did make things worse, based on Maxwell’s assessment of the room, but he suspected the sporadic pounding overhead had more effect. The Upraadis all paced on the inside. But it did seem as if the impacts had gotten harder and more frequent.

Maxwell
, Rumaya dispatched.
A problem.

What is it?

Rumaya’s blue eyes sliced up at him.
Dish Four is offline. The cannon is not firing.

Was it hit by debris?

No serious hits,
she replied.
The cannon pushed away all the big pieces. We’re registering a malfunction in the master processing node.

An image appeared in his mental subvision of a Skyshield aerial defense dish, labelled with lines running from various parts. One blinked red: Master Processor. The line ended at a point on the stalk, under the protection of the dish. It made no sense. There was no plausible way a piece of debris could have reached that area.

Want me to send someone up to look at it?
Rumaya asked.

Negative,
Maxwell replied.
I’ll go myself.

I have a team directly under the dish.

Keep them on standby. Someone might be trying to sabotage us. If so, I want to know who. Everyone is clear on their duties. I’m the most expendable at this point.

You’re our chief commander,
Rumaya dispatched, tilting her head for emphasis.
We can’t lose you.

If I’m killed, you’re in charge. But I won’t be killed.
Maxwell looked at Abelard on his way down the steps. “I’m going to the surface to deal with something. The plan hasn’t changed.”

Abelard stepped in Maxwell’s path with commendable eagerness. “I’ll go with you.”

Maxwell placed a hand on the hooknosed Upraadi’s shoulder and thrust him aside. He tried to be gentle, but Abelard was weak, and Maxwell’s arm held the power of ten men. “Your fighters need you with them, Abelard. Stay.”

* * *

Maxwell treaded across the Upraadi surface with immunity. Debris impacted all around him, some pieces the size of coins, others like baseballs. A few the length of his leg smashed into the rocky ground and sprayed umbrellas of pebbles twenty or thirty meters around them. Boulders split, cracks branching out like lightning across their rugged surfaces.

Every few seconds, a piece hit him on the chest or shoulders, making him recoil. But each hit left scarcely more than a burn mark on his armored body. In this case, freedom from vulnerable flesh was an asset.

He approached Dish Four and scanned his surroundings. No one in sight. Just a motionless dish encircled by burgundy rocks, a rise of wind-worn boulders behind it, another cluster to his left. About ten meters out, he noticed an open panel in the stalk. Much of the hardware had been ripped out. As he suspected—someone had sabotaged them.

Maxwell reached the edge of the covered area under the dish when the sound of quick footsteps made him turn. He glimpsed a figure in tattered, foreign body armor before being smacked across the head with a sheet of steel. His brain jostled inside its mechanical cranium, and his feet stumbled sideways, keeping him upright. He raised a hand to shield his head from another strike, but the blow came at his side instead, knocking him the other way. This time, he planned ahead. Maxwell grabbed the steel sheet—the Master Processor panel door, he realized—and swung it away. The attacker went with it, flying under the cover of the twelve-meter dish. One of its dense stabilizer legs halted him.

Maxwell tossed away the panel door as the young but well-built man coughed inside his breather mask and pushed himself to his feet. One of his forearms had been severely burnt. His earlobe-length blond hair had been scorched black in a few places. By the looks of him and the style of body armor, Maxwell deduced him to be Sagittarian. A nobleman.

They stared at each other. Maxwell considered what to do. The fight would not be difficult, but did he want to kill this Sagittarian?

“Who are you?” Maxwell called out, loud enough to penetrate the fracas.

“Is it for your gravestone, Metal Man?” the Sagittarian shouted back. “You want the name of the one who ended you?”

“I believe your own gravestone is a more immediate concern,” Maxwell replied, staying outside cover, allowing himself to be struck by more bits of debris. “Were you the one who killed Radovan?”

The Sagittarian’s face turned sour. “No. That would be an Eagle bastard named Kastor.” He lifted his mask long enough to spit. “Probably thinks he killed me. But it’s not so easy to kill a Swan—as you’re about to find out.”

He charged Maxwell, darting outside cover to kick a glowing hunk of metal. It launched straight at Maxwell’s chest, but he batted it away. The Sagittarian leaped off a rock and slammed his elbow into Maxwell’s head. With a roll, Maxwell escaped and straightened with metallic fists up. He could have used the guns in his forearms, but the rules of fairness prevented him from doing so. The Sagittarian launched a punch at Maxwell’s side. He deflected it, then another and another. When Maxwell swung back, the Sagittarian darted backwards.

Without pause, the blond warrior leaped off the steel stabilizer leg, trying for another elbow attack. Maxwell saw it coming, grabbed the Sagittarian out of the air, and used his own momentum to smash him into the ground, shoulder first. Something cracked.

The warrior yelped and tumbled away. That arm went limp, only twitching at the fingers. It took surprisingly little time to recover before he charged again, shoulder lowered, driving straight into Maxwell.

The Sagittarian picked up the transapien and hauled him several meters before bodyslamming him into a boulder. That same edge of the elbow beat against Maxwell’s head again and again, blurring his vision and restricting his concentration. Had to focus.

His hands felt for the Sagittarian’s ribs then punched repeatedly. Harder each time until Maxwell felt bones crack like glass against his knuckles.

The Sagittarian gritted his teeth and groaned in desperation. He got off one last elbow shot at Maxwell’s face, doing no damage to the metal but rattling the transapien’s brain painfully. Anger fueled Maxwell’s punches, made them harder, stronger. Another solid hit, then another. Finally, the Sagittarian cried out and lowered his arms to shield his sides. Maxwell used the opportunity to headbutt him squarely in the nose, crushing the plastic mask and making blood burst from his nostrils.

The blond menace moaned and rolled away. Despite the hit, his crumpled mask had not been punctured. Once Maxwell’s vision straightened from the headshots, he stood up and looked down on the pacified warrior. The Sagittarian had taken a surprising amount of damage and now inched away pitifully. Blood filled his mask, hindering his breathing.

As far as Maxwell could tell, this one had acted alone. Probably a survivor of the commoner uprising. If there was not a bombardment going on, Maxwell would question the Sagittarian, find out who he was and what he knew. But alas, no time. And no one to spare for guard duty.