The Assault (15 page)

“Are we okay?” he asked.

Brogan shrugged, and the others nodded.

They stood, and Chisnall walked over to the group of Bzadian soldiers.

“Why?” Yozi asked.

“That’s not important,” Chisnall said. He regarded the other soldier for a moment. Two professional warriors, divided by war and one percent of their DNA. In another universe, they might have been friends. “We will tie you and leave you here, and when we get back to base, we will have a rescue party sent out for you.”

That last part wasn’t true, but it was better to give them hope, Chisnall felt. “Strip off their ID tubes,” he said. Even if they somehow got free, they would get nowhere without their ID tubes.

Yozi was shaking his head. “This makes no sense,” he said.

It wouldn’t, Chisnall thought. As long as Yozi was convinced they were Bzadian, it wouldn’t make sense, and that
was the way Chisnall wanted it. Better that Yozi think them crazy than realize they were humans.

Yozi looked at the body of young Kezalu, lying nearby. He turned back to Chisnall and his blue-black pupils burned. “It would be better for you if you killed us,” Yozi said. “I will come after you.”

Chisnall nodded. “I know.”

Yozi stared at him for a moment, then held up his hands to be tied.

As soon as they were out of sight, Chisnall held up his hand, and Price, who was driving, pulled over. He took off his helmet and reached inside. He felt around until he found the raised bump that was the secret catch and lifted out the liner. Inside were six packs containing uniform markings. He took out five. Hunter wouldn’t need his.

“Replace your insignia with these,” he said. “We just changed unit.”

The simple image on the patches was recognizable in any language.

“Bomb disposal,” Wilton said. “I’m getting a real bad feeling about this.”

“There’s too much going on around here that I don’t know about,” Brogan complained as she fixed the patches on her body armor. “If you had been killed back there, none of the rest of us would have had the slightest idea of what to do next.”

“Stay tuned,” Chisnall said. “You’re about to find out. For now, get the fifty-cal down from the top mount and hide it in the back. Bomb techs don’t drive around with fifty-caliber machine guns on their top deck.”

“One thing I do know is that we’re going to be in a huge pile of alien doo-doo if they get loose,” Brogan said, glancing back toward where they had left Yozi and his troops.

“True that,” Chisnall muttered. Had he done the right thing in leaving them alive?

Almost certainly not.

Perhaps he was not the right person to lead this mission.

YOZI WAITED UNTIL THE LAND ROVER DISAPPEARED INTO the blur of the desert. Only when he was sure they were well out of sight did he twist his arms slightly, just once, pulling one hand through the tie and bringing his arms around in front of him.

His bzuntu, his jagged war knife, had not been taken from him, and he quickly used it to cut through the second tie that fastened his ankles.

“Sloppy,” Alizza commented, noting the ease with which Yozi had got free.

“Did she look sloppy to you?” Yozi asked as he quickly freed Alizza and the others.

“No.” Alizza rubbed some circulation back into his wrists.
His bonds had been tight, to the point of cutting off the blood supply. But Yozi’s had been loose. Far too loose. And she had overlooked the bzuntu blade, despite the shaft being clearly visible in the sheath on his inner arm.

Then there was the odd look she had given him as she had tied him: a slight widening of the eyes, nothing more. Or had he merely imagined that?

“Kezalu?” Zabet asked the question nonchalantly, as if it mattered not at all. But it did matter. He could see it in her eyes.

“Leave the body—we can do nothing for him,” Yozi said. “We will send someone back for him. Right now we have to get back to Uluru and stop whatever Chizna is up to.”

“It’s a long way,” Alizza said.

“We will head for the crashed Dragon,” Yozi said. “There was a lot of wreckage. Azoh may smile on us.”

He set out at a run.

Whoever Lieutenant Chizna said he was, he was someone else entirely. When Yozi had met Chizna, he had assumed him to be competent but harmless. That assumption had not done justice to Chizna at all.

A soldier directing traffic at an intersection was the first to catch sight of them. He glanced at the insignia on Chisnall’s
shoulders as they slowed. “This way,” he said. He pointed with a flat hand. “What took you so long?”

Chisnall did not reply but caught Brogan’s eye as they turned down a road in the direction the soldier had pointed. Immediately ahead of them was the huge four-storied building that was the gateway into the rock. The entrance to Uluru. They were close.

On this side of Uluru, the rock formed massive ridges, like the toes of some gigantic creature. The building was built into a cleft in the rock, a gap between two toes. It was obvious that something serious had happened here, although it was not immediately clear what that was.

The curved front of the building was stone. It looked to be intact. The main way in and out of the building—in and out of Uluru—was by monorail. The track of the monorail, thrust into the air on pillars two stories high, curved in front of them over a parking lot before disappearing into the building through big metal doors. There was no monorail car in sight. On top of the structure, a row of fierce alien gargoyles scowled down at the land around it.

A tall, solid-looking security fence blocked access to the building. Inside the fence was a lot of activity—soldiers running in seemingly random directions. An ambulance was just pulling away through a gate in the fence as they approached. The heavy gate slid quickly shut behind it.

Price gunned the Land Rover forward, past a series of smaller buildings, toward the scene. As they got closer, the reason for the trouble suddenly became clear. The big
metal doors where the monorail track entered the building were damaged. There was a gaping hole where the edges of the metal had been bent backward like paper. The doors were warped open, leaving a man-sized gap between the edges.

The Land Rover slowed and stopped at a low outer fence about two hundred meters from the building, where a group of soldiers were manning a barrier arm.

Chisnall leaned out of the window and asked a soldier, “Where’s your commanding officer?”

The soldier waved and a tall female came running over.

“What have you got for us?” Chisnall asked.

“Unexploded missile inside the building. It’s in the monorail bay, right by the tunnel entrance.” She looked nervous.

“Any idea what type?”

“My sergeant thinks it’s the one they call ‘Tomahawk.’ ” She struggled with the pronunciation.

Chisnall made himself appear shocked. “A Tomahawk! Why hasn’t the area been evacuated?”

“We’re doing that as fast as we can. There were some injuries when the missile hit.”

Chisnall nodded. “Okay. We’ll see what we can do.”

The barrier arm lifted and then closed behind them.

“Dude, I don’t know squat about disarming a Tomahawk,” Wilton said as they accelerated toward the beckoning mouth of Uluru.

“That makes two of us,” Brogan said.

“Three,” Chisnall said.

The security gate slid open as they approached and then closed smoothly behind them. They pulled to a halt at the front entrance of the building and were greeted by a large, square-faced soldier. He looked capable and tough. His uniform markings showed him to be the head of a security detail.

“What the hell was the delay?” he yelled.

“There are unexploded missiles all over the base,” Chisnall said. He stepped down from the vehicle and saluted calmly. “I’m Chizna.”

“The only missile that matters is this one. It’s right by the tunnel entrance,” the security officer said. He examined Chisnall for a moment, then returned the salute. “I’m Conna.”

“Has the building been cleared?” Chisnall asked.

Conna nodded. “The last of the wounded have just been evacuated.”

“Then show us the way,” Chisnall said.

Conna led them in through the single door into the building. As they passed into a large entrance room, Chisnall glanced at the door. It was a massive metal contraption with interlocking bars that slotted into the door frame when it was closed.

The entrance room was a blank-walled space, with no exits on the ground level. Conna led them up a flight of stairs against the left wall to a mezzanine level. The balcony of
the mezzanine was stone and crenellated like the turret of a castle to provide cover for any defenders while giving them a perfect field of fire down onto the first level.

A single point of entry, Chisnall noted automatically. A single flight of stairs up to an easily defended position. This building was impregnable. The aliens had gone to a lot of trouble to protect what was inside Uluru. Now the tables were going to turn.

From the mezzanine level, a long corridor led deep into the building. A few twists and turns took them past a control room to the monorail bay. A flight of stairs led down from an observation level to the monorail platform. Another flight of stairs led up.

The bay was a mess. One and a half tons of Tomahawk was a lot of energy to disperse, regardless of whether it exploded or not. The missile had smashed through the huge metal outer doors and struck a troop transport car that had been stopped at the monorail platform.

The car had been shunted down and forward by the impact, and the mangled wreckage was now jammed up against a second set of metal doors, behind which lay the entrance to the tunnel. The missile had become embedded in the car. A spiral of smoke or steam was rising from the rear, above the fins. All the lights were out in the monorail bay and the illumination came from outside, sneaking through the rent in the outer metal doors.

“Okay, we’ll deal with it from here,” Chisnall said to Conna.

“I’ll be back shortly,” Conna said, looking as though he would rather be anywhere else in the world than in the same space as that unexploded missile.

“You knew this would be here,” Brogan said as soon as Conna was gone.

“Of course,” Chisnall said.

“How did you know there wouldn’t be a real Bzadian bomb squad here already dealing with it?” Price asked.

“Just lucky,” Chisnall said.

“Somehow I don’t think so,” Brogan said.

Chisnall shrugged. “There were unexploded missiles scattered all across the base,” he said. “Enough to tie up all of their bomb squads, and then some. This missile was one of the last to arrive, so the real bomb squads would already have been called out to the others.”

“Won’t a real bomb squad be on their way here soon?” Wilton asked.

“If any of them are left,” Chisnall said. “The other duds were all booby-trapped. We were hoping to put as many of the squads out of business as possible before we arrived.”

“And how could you guarantee that this missile would make it through the air defenses?” Brogan asked.

“There were three of these. They came in last, after the air defenses had been smashed. The first one to reach the target sent out a self-destruct signal to the others.”

“This mission must have been planned for weeks,” Brogan said.

“Months,” Chisnall said as he climbed down the stairs from the observation level to the monorail bay.

The main doors to the monorail car were a crush of corrugated metal. The windows were all smashed, but the narrow, uneven gaps they left were not big enough to climb through. At the rear of the car there was an emergency door that was still relatively intact, and by clambering up the wreckage, Chisnall was able to get to it. The impact had forced the door from its frame and it jutted open. He wrenched at it, but it was jammed solid. He tried again, with no more success.

“Monster, eat this,” he said, which was Bzadian slang for “sort this out.”

Chisnall moved out of the way and Monster took his place, wedging his body against a handrail from the observation level that had been bent like a piece of cooked spaghetti. He hauled on the door with both hands. As he strained, whipcord muscles began to stand out in his neck. Nothing happened. He shifted position slightly and tried again. There was a long, slow grinding sound, followed by a terrified shriek from the metal, and the door slowly began to bend, folding back on itself like a tin can being opened.

Within a few minutes the gap was wide enough for them to enter. Monster beat his chest like a gorilla. Chisnall caught his eye and shook his head. It wasn’t something a Puke would do.

“Anyway, I loosened it for you,” Chisnall said, which earned him a smile.

Monster moved to one side, balancing on the bent railing,
to allow Chisnall access to the car. Chisnall was barely able to squeeze into the narrow gap between the missile body and the crumpled car walls.

The narrow nose of the Tomahawk had entered from the rear of the car, making a fairly neat hole. It was the stubby wings of the missile that had done most of the damage. Rather than slicing through, like the nose, they had snagged and carried the car forward. This left half of the missile—the part in front of the wings—inside the car, while the rest protruded outside. The missile itself was almost undamaged. The front end, which housed the guidance systems, was completely mangled, but the payload, or warhead, section behind that was still in one piece.