Valley of Fires: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series) (7 page)

But where was it? The red army had yet to show itself, and everyone waited with dark anticipation.

“What are we still doing here?” Ravan asked impatiently next to Holt.

“Waiting for the other ships,” Olive replied, staring through a fold-out telescope she’d pulled from her belt. “We leave as one.”

“But we aren’t going with the others,” Ravan replied. “We’re headed
south,
what does it matter if we wait or not?”

“Looks like you’re the only one anxious to get where we’re going, Menagerie.” It was Castor’s voice. He and Masyn were looking to the west with everyone else. They were the only White Helix on board, having been assigned to accompany them to Faust. Neither was happy about it. The way they saw it, a war was about to start and they were left out, given the official (and mundane) task of demonstrating the White Helix weaponry to Tiberius Marseilles. Unofficially, they were more likely there at Dane’s orders to watch over someone else.

Avril sat separate from the others, her back against one of the ship’s tire-wrapped masts, staring at the empty fingers of her left hand. She seemed completely blank, like she was living in a dream. Holt had left a lot behind himself, he knew how it felt.

“Shh.” Olive silenced the others nearby, lowering the telescope. Ravan and Holt looked at her in confusion … until they heard what Olive had. Everyone on deck heard it.

Shuddering, concussive booms that came from the distance.

A second later, and the sounds repeated, echoing off the serene, rolling hills.

Then again. Again. They were growing louder.

“What the hell?” Ravan’s voice was unnerved. “Sounds like…”

“Footfalls,” Holt finished, rescanning the horizon, and this time, amid the haze of the far distance … shapes moved.

Large ones. Lines and lines of them, trudging powerfully forward. They were barely silhouettes at this distance, but Holt had seen enough shapes like that to know what they were, and he felt his blood run cold.

Spider walkers. Fifty feet tall and wider than a city street. Agile, powerful, and carrying enough firepower to decimate anything that challenged them. They got their name from the eight large mechanized legs that held their huge fuselages above the ground. The combination granted them superior mobility, and made them one of the most feared sights on the planet.

Holt had seen red Spiders only once before, two of them, and from what Holt remembered, they were different than the blue and whites. Blockier, slower, but more heavily armed, and judging by the movement on the horizon, there were a lot more than two.

“Mira’s mechanical friend was right,” Olive said soberly. “Looks like about two hundred.”

“But it doesn’t explain that noise,” Holt answered. As he did, the sounds filled the air again, sounds that were now close enough to vibrate the deck under his feet. He remembered what that Captain had said back at the power plant, about the giant shape that moved within the Spiders.

“Look,” Masyn said, pointing to the east. “They’re moving.”

Holt saw with a building dread that she was right. The great, colorful sails of the Landships near the Shipyards plumed outward in bursts of purple and blue as the vessels began to move, gradually picking up speed, headed toward the army growing on the horizon.

“Jesus,” Ravan said. “This is going to be a massacre.”

“Five hundred White Helix are on those ships,” Castor replied proudly. “When they reach the ground—”

“They’ll be crushed like five hundred ants,” Ravan cut him off.

Now there was something else, Holt could see. A blackness that stirred above the walkers in the distance, like shadows growing in the air. Holt had a pretty good guess what it was. So did Ravan.

“If we don’t go now,” she told Olive, “we’re never going to leave.”

“The signal hasn’t been shot yet,” Olive said.

“What’s the signal?” Holt asked.

“A red flare.”

Ravan looked to Castor and Masyn, her eyes moving to the Lancets on their backs. On the end of Masyn’s rested a glowing red spear point. Holt had a guess what she intended, but his eyes were locked on the Landships barreling ahead and the huge image of the
Wind Star
in his optics as its sails launched it forward. She would make it, he told himself. It was the flagship. The safest place.

“You! The blond one!” Ravan yelled at Masyn, taking a step toward her. “Shoot your red crystal thing!” Castor took a protective step in between them, but Masyn stepped past him in annoyance.

“Why?” she asked. “Look how far away those things are. What’s the—”

“Because what’s swarming over there moves faster than any one of these ships.” Ravan looked at Olive as she said the last part. “You know I’m right.”

Olive stared at Ravan, then looked at Holt. Holt nodded. “Do it,” he told her.

Olive studied him with a mixture of frustration and fear, but then she looked at Masyn and nodded.

Masyn shrugged and yanked the Lancet from her back. There was a loud, percussive ping, and the red spear point shot into the sky. Every ship in the staging area would have seen it.

“I hope you’re right,” Olive said. “Because if you’re not, then—”

“
Look!
” one of Olive’s crew shouted, pointing westward. The air along the horizon exploded in a myriad of buzzing shapes, a hundred of them probably, screaming forward.

It was what Holt expected. Raptor gunships, racing ahead of the ground forces toward the approaching Landships. If those gunships wanted, they could be on the main grouping, the unarmed and defenseless ones, in minutes.

Olive knew the same thing. “Unfurl!” she yelled, running for the helm while everyone else scrambled to their positions.
“Unfurl!”

The red spear point slammed back onto Masyn’s Lancet with another ping. Either it had been taken for the signal flare, or the other Captains had figured out the same thing. The crews of every Landship around them were scrambling to unfurl their sails too.

“Checklist?” Olive’s first mate shouted as he started climbing the central mast.

“No time! Full Chinook.
Now!
”

The wind roared above Holt’s head as it was focused and intensified by the artifact, bellowing out the ship’s massive sails. The
Wind Rift
rocked, and Holt held on, trying to—

Explosions flared up in the distance.

With wide eyes, Holt saw the swarm of gunships streak over and rain down yellow plasma onto the ships in the distance. Their Barriers blazed to life, but flames erupted everywhere.

He could hear the sounds of Raptor engines. Could see several dozen of them bank hard right and separate from the others. He knew what it meant.

“They’re coming this way!” someone shouted.

Holt’s eyes searched for and found the
Wind Star,
far away, rocking wildly as a blast erupted near it, but, like the others, it kept moving, dashing toward the Spiders … and, right next to it, the first of the armed Landships exploded in a ball of fire that arced into the sky.

Then the gunships roared over the
Wind Rift,
and the ground all around them was bursting apart too.

*   *   *

DANE BARELY MANAGED TO
leap from the deck of the
Wind Thrust
before it exploded in a massive fireball. Three of his Arc hadn’t been fast enough. The Barriers on the ship had taken their share of punishment from the air assault, but had eventually failed.

The Raptors had made short work of it after that.

Another Landship blew apart, spraying fiery splinters all through the air. He saw some of the Arc there, leaping to safety, but not all.

“Damn it!” he cursed as he hit the ground, dashing forward as more plasma bolts rained down, dodging through them. The Freebooter’s Barriers hadn’t been enough, and it was tempting to blame what was happening on her, but it was plain to see where the real blame lay.

On him.

He’d pushed for this frontal assault. He’d heard Mira’s claims about air support, and he’d ignored them. He should have thought strategically. Gideon had always preached strength, but he had also drilled in the idea that strength could never be relied on alone.

Dane had been a fool, and people, friends of his, were dying because of it.

He had to salvage this, he told himself. He wasn’t going to lose the first battle of the war. “Spread out!” he yelled, and his Arc and the others around him obeyed instantly. Right now they were clumped up, easy targets. More explosions flared. “
Agility!
” Dane touched the rings on his index and middle fingers together, calling the power, and felt the world slow around him, the comforting sensation of near weightlessness as everything colored in a hue of yellow.

He and the rest of the Helix dashed forward. More leapt from their ships and followed, weaving in and out of the plasma fire.

Ahead, Dane finally saw the enemy with clarity. The Spider walkers, painted a brilliant shade of crimson, their giant legs moving them forward in lines that stretched from one edge of the horizon to another. The sight was sobering. How could anyone expect to survive against
that
? But he didn’t have to survive, did he? He just had to last long enough to let the others escape … to let
her
escape.

From behind, he heard dozens of loud percussive pings. Above his head, streaks of color, red, blue, and green, arced forward through the air. It was the Landships. They were firing back.

Cheers erupted as the first of the spear points found their marks. In the distance, colorful explosions blossomed into the sky as they punched through the red Spiders’ armor. He watched those machines crash to the ground in flames, and felt a glimmer of hope.

Still, there were more. Many more.

Behind him, another Landship exploded, tearing itself into the earth.

“Keep moving!” he shouted, running through the yellowish, slow-motion world of the Agility power. He and the others were almost there, and when they reached the Assembly, debts would be paid.

Dane couldn’t see the other ships, the unarmed ones, and he didn’t have time to look. He only hoped that Avril had escaped.

*   *   *

HOLT BARELY MANAGED TO
keep from falling as the
Wind Rift
darted around another Landship at breakneck speed. The fleet was moving, which was good. The problem was, every ship here was headed southwest, while the
Wind Rift
was trying to go due
south.
It meant they had to cross through a massive wave of traffic before they could get clear, and that was proving tough.

The crew scrambled frantically to adjust the sails and rigging as Olive barked orders. Yet again, Holt was impressed by their discipline, their ability to not lose their heads in all the panic. Then again, maybe it had something to do with the knowledge that one slip by any of them probably meant their end.

Explosions rocked the ground. Raptors roared past, their cannons screaming. Holt watched three wheels on the side of a nearby Landship separate from the hull and send the entire ship listing into the ground.

The
Wind Rift
banked hard left, claiming the gap left by the disintegrated ship, desperately trying to get away from the buzzing gunships above.

Very little of the chaos around Holt registered. He just looked north, to where the other Landships moved to intercept the approaching army, and the sky above them was absolutely full of Raptors, firing down a constant hailstorm of yellow bolts. Two more ships incinerated and fell apart, their Barriers unable to hold.

Holt’s eyes found the massive
Wind Star,
Mira’s ship, watching it desperately. Its Barriers were holding, but it was the biggest target out there.

And there was something else now. Something huge. Behind the line of Spiders. Something that filled the horizon with its girth. A single, massive object, the source of those terrifying footfalls. A giant walker. Something no one had ever seen, and if it was real, it towered hundreds of feet above the ground, and it was headed right toward Mira.

Holt gripped the railing, looking down to the ground racing by below. He could jump, run as fast as he could, but he wouldn’t last ten seconds and he’d never reach her in time.

Antimatter crystals shot into the air from the deck behind him. Two Raptors exploded as they banked past, caught by Masyn’s and Castor’s spear points. The Helix fired again and another Raptor crashed in flames.

“Light ’em up or not, boss?” one of Ravan’s men asked, his rifle drawn. The Menagerie looked eager to join in.

“Sure,” Ravan replied, grabbing her own weapon. “Why the hell not?” Gunfire echoed as they shot into the sky.

“Captain!” The first mate shouted down from the crow’s nest at the top of the ship’s central mast. “I don’t see any way out of this, traffic’s just too—”

“Well,
find
a way!” Olive shouted back. She was at the front, where the helmsman spun the ship’s huge wheel, trying to keep from running into the vessels on either side of it. “If we don’t, we’re going to end up—”

Two nearby Landships crashed directly into one another, the front of one’s hull tearing loose as both ships disintegrated.

“Pull starboard!” Olive shouted. “Pull—”

Her voice was lost amid the screaming of Raptor engines. Holt felt the ship shift under him as it turned hard, barely avoiding the spinning, flaming debris.

In spite of it, his attention was still on the
Wind Star
in the distance. It had accelerated past the other ships, only about seven of them now, leading the charge toward the Assembly walkers.

Holt knew what was coming. It was only a matter of time.

From the giant shape in the distance, the machine that towered over the others, a single, bright beam of energy erupted. A massive column of heated death that streaked through the air … and slammed into the
Wind Star.

“No,” Holt moaned.

Holt could see the Barriers along the front of the Landship flare to life and absorb the massive blast, but they couldn’t displace the momentum. The huge vessel rocked violently backward, its front wheels came off the ground and then slammed back down in a cloud of dust. Still, it kept going.