Undercurrents (33 page)

We had come so far to get to this point, but if the shuttle lifted off with the cavorite aboard, we would have failed completely.

Kit had told me that the shuttle, fully fueled and loaded, needed all twelve thousand feet of runway to get airborne, and then spaceborne, in the atmosphere and gravity of Tressel.

If we could get one of the thirty-ton Thunderers out onto the runway, then, as long as it remained there, the shuttle and the cavorite would remain here on Tressel, too.

I peered out a side peephole. Thunderer Two had apparently reached the same conclusion I had. The tank adjusted course, then leapt—who am I kidding, crawled—at all of five miles per hour toward the long runway.

The distance to the runway was only about four hundred yards. But between our two tanks and the runway the two skimmers buzzed like frenzied hornets. Their drivers hovered them, and juked them left and right, while their gunners hosed out an ineffectual curtain of needler rounds at us. They could literally run circles around us, but they couldn’t get under our skins. We, on the other hand, could penetrate each skimmer’s skin with our machine guns like it was foil. To say nothing of our cannons.

We rolled forward toward the runway.

In the distance, the pitch of the shuttles engines rose until it overmatched the thunder.

Eighty-nine

Polian peered through his rain-drenched goggles at the two drab-painted vehicles that lumbered toward the skimmer in which he rode. He vaguely recalled seeing something similar to them on a history chip. They
were
crawler tanks, and not tractors. They had already breached his meticulously designed and executed perimeter.

Tressen riflemen by the dozen dashed by the skimmer, away from the relentless, bellowing behemoths. As the tanks lurched and rumbled, they spit yellow flame from machine guns that protruded, seemingly in all directions at once, from gimbaled mountings set in their sides.

A retreating Tressen ran straight at Polian, looked up with wide eyes and dodged only a blink before he was run down. As the man dashed past, he threw away his rifle, and it clattered off the skimmer’s flank.

Polian reached out and grabbed the man’s arm. “Stop! Pull yourself to—”

Bam-bam-bam-bam.

The man stiffened, and his head snapped back as a burst from a tank machine gun struck him in the back. He fell away as the skimmer’s driver sideslipped the craft to dodge the burst.

Polian felt heat in his right thigh, looked down, and saw that a bullet had torn his trouser and grazed his leg.

A neat row of holes stitched the skimmer’s armor, which was effective against the needler rounds a criminal might fire at it back home, but useless against a gunpowder weapon’s heavy bullet.

Another man ran toward him, zigzagging through the rain. This one was an armored Yavi private. He, too, carried no weapon. The private’s face shield was raised, and he panted, wide-eyed, as he threw a leg over the side and rolled into the skimmer’s rear compartment.

Polian turned back to the man, who lay gasping on the floor. “Get up, man! And fight back! You’re wearing armor!”

The man shook his head. “No. Mazzen. They killed Mazzen right through his armor!” The man pointed his index finger against the back of his own neck, like a pistol.

Polian balled his fists, then stared at the oncoming tank. In his mind, he saw Mazzen, good, solid, promising Mazzen. Kneeling while these ghouls executed him with a pistol shot to the back of the head. He muttered, “Bastards!”

Another machine-gun burst, from the tank directly in front of Polian’s skimmer, ripped through the skimmer’s flank on the driver’s side.

The driver screamed, then collapsed forward onto the wheel.

Polian twisted in his seat. One of the crew was gone. Out over the side? Deserted? In this chaos, who knew? The others slumped grotesquely, dead or unconscious.

He slumped himself, dazed, while the unguided skimmer spun slowly in a perpetual left turn, as aimless as his thoughts.

He had failed as a commander. He had failed dead young men of promise like Sandr and Mazzen. He had failed his father, who had admonished him to beware the undercurrents. The only failure that remained to him lay in the future, to betray Gill, the man who had been a better father to him in weeks than his biological father had been in a lifetime.

Polian straightened himself, then dragged the unconscious driver into the rear compartment and slipped behind the skimmer’s wheel himself. He peered out through the skimmer’s spiderweb-cracked windscreen at the tank clanking toward him. Now a figure knelt atop the tank, alongside the slitted, topside forward box. Polian realized that the box housed the driver. The exposed figure was a woman, in Iridian uniform, and she leaned down to shout directions to the blindered box as she pointed ahead with her free hand.

She looked up, and Polian recognized her rain-slicked face from the hospital wanted-poster sketches. Celline. The mythic heart of the rebellion that had now spoiled so much.

Ruberd Polian’s hands gripped the wheel so tightly that it quivered. Then the heat in him receded and a cold rage replaced it. He drew a breath, held it.

Pointing the skimmer’s nose at the tank’s oncoming prow, he rammed the throttles to their forward stops. Acceleration slammed him back against the driver’s seat as the skimmer roared head-on toward the tank and the woman at over sixty miles per hour.

Ninety

As Thunderer One rolled on, I peeked out a side peephole. Thunderer Two was fifty yards closer to the airstrip than we were, hare to our tortoise in the glacial dash to block the shuttle.

The shuttle’s engines, which had crescendoed moments earlier, settled back and purred like a three-hundred-foot-long cat. I had upped ship the old-fashioned way often enough that I knew the pilot had just run his engines up, against the brakes, to test them. Given a shuttle’s checklist—and the Rand followed their checklists as surely as cats purred—that meant we had three minutes before the big ship rolled out for real.

The Yavi had either given up on wasting needler rounds on our armor, or had run out of them. Celline had clambered up onto Thunderer Two’s turtle back and was leading the charge with one arm thrust forward like an animated war memorial.

Maybe you have to be nuts to be a hero. Maybe when people think you’re a hero it drives you nuts. I’m too sane to join the club, so I’ll never know.

Suddenly, Thunderer Two’s bow machine gun, which had been quiet, flashed, firing straight ahead. Celline dropped into a crouch like the tank had become a Trueborn surfboard.

I switched peepholes to see what Celline saw.

A skimmer dead ahead of Thunderer Two streaked straight toward the tank’s prow. It hit a bad air patch inbound, wobbled, and one of the limp Yavis in armor in the rear compartment, who seemed to be reclining in back, bounced up and was catapulted out of the skimmer like a stuffed doll.

Behind Thunderer Two, Celline’s troops scattered and ran.

The skimmer driver hunched over the wheel, his face obscured by the cracks that veined the windscreen. I don’t know whether he was a member of the hero’s club. I do know he was nuts. A skimmer’s listed best military speed is sixty-one miles per hour, but if this one wasn’t making seventy when it hit Thunderer Two, dogs don’t bark.

Four tons traveling at seventy meets thirty tons traveling at five. Kit the college girl was fond of saying that physics were a bitch. So you do the math.

Skimmers are really pretty flimsy, like most things that fly. But their fuel is highly flammable, and the pressurized nitrogen vessels that power the needlers are such bombs in their own right that they’re located inboard, protected by the vehicle frame, and armor plated.

Therefore, when the skimmer hit the tank, pointed prow against pointed prow, the skimmer just seemed to disappear into itself, the way an empty beer can did back at the bar when I stomped it.

Then the compressed lump that remained of the skimmer exploded in a ball of yellow flame that engulfed the front half of Thunderer Two and reached up into the rain higher than a three-story Tressen row house. I saw Celline fly through the air like the stuffed-doll Yavi had; then I lost track of her. The explosion’s heat puffed through my peephole hot enough that I blinked. Then my eye teared.

Seconds later, Thunderer Two sat within a semicircle of flaming metal bits that sizzled as rain washed them. The tank looked exactly as it had before the collision. Except that it was stationary, and silent.

That meant that my tank was the last chance to block the shuttle from taking off and changing the balance of power in the known universe. I dunno. It’s a living.

I shifted in my seat, looked ahead, and dropped my jaw.

The other skimmer sat, hunkered down on its deflated skirt, presenting its left flank to us broadside. It was thirty feet in front of our prow. The half-dozen Yavi in its open cab blazed away with the skimmer’s sidemount needlers, with short-barreled carbines, and one, in the right-hand front seat, with a needler pistol. As the range between the tank and the skimmer closed, the Yavi fired away like it was their last stand.

Which, fifteen seconds later, it was.

Our left track bit the skimmer’s flank first, and we tilted up on the left for a moment; then the skimmer collapsed. I counted five screams. The tank continued on across the pancaked skimmer, rocking front to back and side to side as it crushed one element of the machine after another. Metal groaned and snapped.

I don’t know whether the Yavi had powered down to block us, thinking that four tons squatting would be harder to bulldoze than four hovering tons. Or they had a mechanical. Or they were just nuts. There’s always a lot of nuts-ness going around during a firefight. An unfortunate truth about combat is that your enemy rarely tells you why he did what he did. Especially if he’s dead.

I grabbed a peek and saw the shuttle still stationary, but time had to be short.

We continued to lurch forward toward the runway, but something had hung up on our underside. It howled like a cat from hell as we dragged it, which was merely annoying. But it also slowed us down too much.

Maneuvering a Thunderer was a team sport. Two gearmen behind me had charge of one track each. I signaled the gearmen to reverse the left track, then the right, then repeat. The pattern would twist the tank the way you might twist your foot to scrape something unpleasant off your shoe sole.

On the second twist, whatever was caught on our sole exploded so violently that it lifted the tank, dropped it, and knocked us all senseless.

“Jazen?”

Kit peered down at me, blue eyes wide.

I lay on my back on my tank’s floor. Behind Kit, light and rain entered the tank’s interior through the open rear left sponson hatch.

I blinked. “What happened?”

“Whatever you were dragging blew. Skimmer nitrogen bottle, I think.”

I looked around. “Crew?”

“Okay, I think. Bells rung. Like you. Most of my platoon, too.”

It suddenly occurred to me that we were inside my tank, but we were talking.

I sat up. “We’re stalled!” There was no time to restart. Besides, I only had one eyebrow left. But I still heard the shuttle’s engines purring steadily in the distance. I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds.

I pulled myself up by the six-pounder’s mount. “We’ll never get this thing onto the runway in time.”

“You’re right.”

I squinted down the cannon’s coaxial telescopic sight. The shuttle still sat, but as I spoke its engine pitch changed.

Kit said, “Crap. He’s running them up.” She turned and stared down at the six-pounder’s square breechblock. “This thing work?”

I widened my eyes. “We can’t blow up a neutral shuttle! We already talked about this.”

“That was then. This is now. Besides, we won’t blow it up.”

I pointed my index finger from the breechblock along the six-pounder’s barrel to the point where it poked out through the sponson as I raised my eyebrows. “You do see that this is a
cannon
?”

“We just put one armor-piercing round through one of the landing-gear struts and collapse it. No explosion. The worst case would be maybe a fuel-cell rupture.”

I stood back and crossed my arms. “Seriously?”

She bent and peered through the cannon’s ’scope at the distant shuttle. “It’s only, what? Twenty-two hundred fifty yards?”

I had forgotten that I was in the presence of Annie Oakley.

Kit turned back to me, hands on hips, and stared. “It takes two to operate the gun, Parker. Move your ass!”

I had seen that look before. I had also forgotten that I was in the presence of a woman bent on saving the universe.

In the distance, the shuttle engines climbed the scale.

I turned to the ammunition rack, slid out an armor-piercing round, and loaded it while she cranked the traversing wheel.

Kit panted as she bore down on the wheel. “Jeez, Parker. Didn’t you grease this thing?”

“That shouldn’t make—” I wrinkled my forehead, peeked out past the cannon slit, then recoiled.

Glaring back at me through the slit was the face of a thin, gray-moustached old man. His face was smoke smudged, and the left sleeve of his Tressen battle-dress uniform had been torn away. But the leaves of a Yavi lieutenant general were pinned above his right sleeve. He straddled the six-pounder’s barrel as though he were bareback-riding an anaconda.

I glanced at Kit. She had given up on the wheel, and bent, hands on knees, while she peeked out through the gap between the cannon’s barrel and the sponson. “Parker! We can’t aim this thing with that fucker on there! Shoot him.”

If we couldn’t aim the cannon with his weight aboard, we certainly couldn’t wiggle it around and shake him off. Running outside and wrestling with him would take too long.

I drew my machine pistol and sighted down the barrel through the slit at the old man. Behind him, I could still see the shuttle. Its engines were now so near max that they shook the ground, and the space plane’s vertical stabilizers vibrated.

I looked into his eyes, and in that instant I knew. I knew that he was the sixth man in the skimmer we had crushed, and the only survivor. I knew that with those leaves, he was also Gill, the general in charge here on whom we had eavesdropped. He knew the shuttle’s importance, knew that the six-pounder was our last chance to stop it. And he was risking his life the only way he had left to stop us.