The Killing of Worlds (20 page)

So, the messier the better.

The repeater scuttled away as she stretched her muscles. The path the small machine took indicated the direction from which the attack would come. h_rd moved after it, again crawling with an interrupted gait to conceal herself from motion sensors. But she moved faster now, a little carelessly. Alexander wanted the Imperials to respond to her departure with main force to distract them from the movements of the repeaters. The propagation of the compound mind’s control was now entering a critical stage.

Over the last six hours, the gospel of Alexander had spread among the repeaters, each convert adding another to the fold every few minutes. As in any geometric progression, the number of repeaters controlled by Alexander was arcing upward dramatically. Very soon, more than half of the repeater colony would be in motion. Even the Imperials were apt to realize that something was up.

Unless something dramatic occupied their attention.

Suddenly, shooting stars appeared on the horizon before h_rd. Arcs of light reached into the sky. Flashes emanating from just below the horizon showed where land mines were detonating. Concussions and the ripping howls of autocannon followed almost twenty seconds later: The wire was four kilometers away. h_rd stood and began running toward the wire, headed straight for the conflagration. A surge of joy filled her. This was the most dangerous part of the mission, but it was good to finally stretch her legs.

The sky came alive, each luminous missile distinct in the cold, clear air.

The wire had come under attack by Alexander’s ragtag armada, a mob of automated flying machines: weather dirigibles, bird migration monitors, ground effect crop dusters, solar-reflector kites. All of Legis’s air-traffic spotters had disappeared from their stations a few days before, and the small percentage that had survived the perilous trip to the arctic were also in the attacking host. A few dislodged environmental satellites arced across the sky to crash into hullalloy-armored emplacements. Even a handful of walking and flying toys that h_rd had salvaged from aircraft luggage joined in, feinting to draw fire from the wire’s guns and sacrificing themselves to trip booby traps, monofilament snares, and land mines.

The motley flotilla posed little danger to the facility, of course. Very few of the vehicles assaulting the wire were a match for even a single militia soldier. But the Imperial defenses were set to maximum response, alert for any attack on the facility since Rana Harter’s escape with h_rd. The wire’s arsenal was pouring thousands of heavy-metal rounds per minute into kites made of mylar, launching missiles the size of aircars at weather balloons, expending cluster mines on children’s toys.

h_rd ran toward the melee, pulling her Rix blaster from her mission pack. She’d hardly used the weapon since the firefight in the palace, conserving its powerful charges for when she would need them most.

The recon flyer was on the other side of the wire, under Alexander’s control and waiting for the defenses to exhaust themselves against their figmentary attackers. The wire was designed to deliver a short, punishing blow, delaying an enemy until reinforcements arrived. Its supplies of ordnance were limited.

h_rd’s scanner set up a wail. She swept it across the horizon to locate the first of these reinforcements on their way: a pair of ground-effect vehicles racing toward her from the central barracks of the facility.

The commando changed direction, running parallel to the wire now. For this first trap to work, she had to get to the far side of the snowdrift landing zone. h_rd reduced her blaster to a diversionary power setting and dropped to a firing position.

She took aim and fired a long stream of random photons at the GEVs, the blaster sweeping across the EM spectrum to suggest a wide array of weapons. She checked the scanner.

The hovercraft spotted her, and changed course, angling toward her. More vehicle signatures appeared behind them on her scanner. It was working. The Imperials thought that she had come through the embattled wire. Believing that the attacking force had penetrated the terrific fire zones of the perimeter, they would be worried.

h_rd’s sharp eyes now caught a flicker of light from another sector of the facility. Another, smaller contingent of Alexander’s conscript army was attacking the wire from a new direction. Overall, Alexander had committed four separate groups to divide the defenders’ resources. The other three were utterly insignificant, but perhaps the Imperials would outthink themselves and assume that the true attack was a feint.

The CEVs were closing on her now, bearing down from the other side of the landing zone. The scream of their jet turbines drowned out even the battle at the wire. The commando cycled her blaster to a combat setting, in case one made it past the trap.

She could see them now, their approach raising a cloud of snow. She dropped to the tundra as one of the hovercraft opened fire, the ripping sound of an autocannon reaching her ears as a line of snow and earth before her lifted in a rolling wave.

Then the GEVs reached the landing zone. The permanent tundral snowdrift that filled the trench was usually as dense as concrete, but the heavy vehicles were in for a surprise.

The GEVs hit the doped snow at three hundred klicks, and dropped through the thin crust of frost like charging predators through the leaves and branches of a tiger pit. The nanoed snow-foam probably slowed them a bit, but their armored mass and huge speed packed thousands of times the kinetic energy of a human at terminal velocity. As the hovercraft arced downward, their turbines spewed the treacherous white foam out from their entry holes in geysers. The shock wave of their collision with the trench’s rocky side reached h_rd a few seconds later. The impact threw a fist of earth up into her face, reopening her scarred eyebrow and treating her broken nose to a second round of agony. A gout of flame burst from the trench, a huge cloud of foam-snow rising up like the spray of some vast, breaking wave.

Wiping blood from her eyes, the commando fired her blaster twice through the cloud. She wanted the Imperials to think—for the next few minutes, anyway—that enemy fire rather than mishap had taken out the GEVs.

The commando checked her scanner. The second formation of hovercraft was wheeling to one side now, circumspect after their compatriots’ sudden destruction. The smaller returns of a few Imperial remotes moved into view, and h_rd cycled her blaster down to a sniper’s setting—low power, high accuracy—in case one got too close.

But she figured that she’d bought herself a few needed minutes.

h_rd turned and ran toward the wire again. The firefight there was dying down. That meant either that the Imperials’ ammunition was running low or that the attacking force had been decimated. She hoped it was the former. Her scanner showed the recon flyer still waiting out of harm’s way.

As h_rd neared the wire, an autocannon emplacement acquired her and fired. She dropped and skidded through the snow, cycling her blaster back up. Rolling into firing position, she destroyed the emplacement with a single shot. As she passed another cannon, an arc of tracers came h_rd’s way, but she silenced that gun with equal ease. The wire suffered from a typical flaw: It was designed to keep attackers out, not in. Most of its firepower was oriented outward. The main dangers to h_rd were land mines and monofilament snares— single-molecule tripwires that would slice through her hypercarbon bones like a knife through water.

But this was no time to consider the dangers before her. The remaining Imperial GEVs would regain their confidence soon enough.

The commando plunged forward. Every few steps, she fired her blaster toward the ground a hundred meters in front of her. The full-force plasma rounds rocked the tundra, sending up gouts of flame as if she were following in the footsteps of some huge demon, fiery and invisible. Land mines were detonated by the shock waves, and autocannon imaged the boiling plasma plumes and fired at them instead of h_rd. Bright lines of monofilament in her path glowed for a moment as they were incinerated.

Shrapnel and flying debris cut the Rixwoman’s face and tore at the ablative suit. Her boots were melted by the superheated earth of the plasma craters; even her flexormetal soles burned. One of the autocannon emplacements found her and put a flechette through her thigh before she blasted it.

Her weapon set up a two-pitched keening alarm: It was simultaneously overheating and running out of ammo.

Another flechette struck her, and h_rd stumbled.

She went to ground in a deep crater where her blaster had made a direct hit on a land mine. The red-hot floor of the hole burned her hands, the heat forcing her eyes closed. The sharp smell of her own hair igniting filled her nostrils.

h_rd’s burned fingers fumbled for the positioning device. Had she penetrated far enough through the wire for the recon flyer to reach her? She forced her eyes open and stared at the device. In the hadean light of the crater, she saw that the readout had melted. She kneeled with blistered hands protecting her face, her hypercarbon kneecaps against the molten earth. She felt nothing. Pain overrides had terminated all sensation from her skin.

It occurred to the commando that she had spent the last few hours besieged by freezing cold, and now she was burning to death.

Then she heard a turbine jet approaching, the whine of an Imperial
GEV
, not the recon flyer. She turned and raised her blaster, peering through the miragelike veil of superheated air.

A hovercraft was headed for her, approaching slowly so that the wire’s friend-or-foe sensors wouldn’t confuse it with an enemy. The
GEV
moved in a search pattern; they couldn’t detect her amid the chaos.

She aimed the blaster and pressed its firing stud.

Nothing happened. The weapon’s heat sink panel glowed white, unable to disperse enough energy to recycle the blaster in the boiling crater.

The hovercraft wandered closer to her. Close enough.

The commando pushed two blistered fingers into her blaster’s suicide triggers and pulled them simultaneously. Then she heaved the blaster over the side of the crater, and it spun through the air toward the
GEV
.

h_rd dropped flat as answering fire erupted from the hovercraft. The hot lance of a flechette passing through her stomach grimly complemented the scalding rock of the crater floor.

Seconds later, the GEV’s chattering autocannon was silenced by the explosion of the blaster. A sheet of plasma passed over the crater, sucking the air upward from around h_rd with a whoosh, momentarily snuffing the small fires in the hole. When she could hear again, the turbine of the
GEV
was howling like a wounded animal, dopplering as the machine retreated.

She struggled to her knees again. The ablative suit was mostly gone now; what remained of it was burned onto her skin in patches. Her tactile sense was so suppressed by pain overrides that it was hard to keep her balance. The flexormetal that protected her soles had lost all elasticity, rigidified and cracked by the heat.

h_rd peered across the tundra at the retreating
GEV
. It bounced backward, bobbing on its air cushion like some toy on a string. The armor glowed white hot; she wondered if the crew inside were even alive—or was the thing simply on autopilot, reeling blindly from the blaster’s shock wave?

Her vision was blurred, her eyes dry and slitted in the heat. But h_rd could see two more ground-effect vehicles in the distance approaching cautiously. She searched the melted plastic of her mission pack. There were hissing and useless smoke grenades, a ruined remote drone, and a silent dart gun whose Rixian curves were bent into an ugly mess.

Nothing that could scratch an armored vehicle.

The commando drew her monofilament knife and stumbled to her feet.

The GEVs were circling a few kilometers away, afraid to close with her. The explosions from the wire behind h_rd had settled.

Suddenly, the commando felt the tingle of static electricity.

Then a rush of air filled the crater, sparking the glowing rocks into open flame like a strong wind against embers. It was the recon flyer descending. h_rd realized that her hearing must be woefully damaged; the noisy craft had sneaked up on her.

One of the GEVs opened fire, and the recon flyer responded. Its small cannon whined in a pitiful sound, but the Imperial craft pulled back, wary after the Rix blaster’s terrific self-destruct.

The recon flyer bounced on its air cushion just above h_rd, whipping the air in the crater into a frenzy. The commando reached up and grabbed one of the landing struts, and the flyer soared up and out of the crater. In ten seconds they were a hundred meters aloft and climbing.

Dangling from the craft with locked muscles, she looked down at the wreckage of the wire. A swath of destruction cut through it: her neat row of blaster scars extending from the inside outward, and a hodgepodge of land mine craters, crashed aircraft, and friendly fire damage marking Alexander’s attack from without. The two paths of ruin met halfway, leaving the wire utterly ruptured. Only a few, bright lances of antiaircraft tracers survived to dog the flyer as it rose, too far away and firing in short bursts to conserve their waning ammunition.

h_rd realized that she would pass out soon, and didn’t trust the muscles in her burned hands to stay locked, so she climbed laboriously over the side of the flyer and collapsed into the gunner’s webbing.

“Take me to Rana Harter,” she commanded her god.

And lost consciousness.

Alexander was ready.

Across the planet Legis XV, a sudden pall of electronic failures struck. The telephonic system dropped a quarter-billion conversations, aircars tossed their drivers into manual, and inside market-trader headsups the cool icons of commerce were replaced with polychromatic sheet lightning. Every remote surgeon, engineer, and handeye gamer was paralyzed as secondary sight and hearing stuttered, then flew into a rage. Airscreens, false views, and overlays were replaced with a riot of color, a turbulent river of passing data in its rawest form.