Wizard (36 page)

“That was great bomb placement,” Gaby shouted, suddenly appearing to his right, mounted on Hautbois. The Titanide had Robin cradled in her arms. “It’s hard to think the buzz bombs are working with the wraiths.”

“I wouldn’t count on them being on our side, though,” Chris said.

“Neither would I. You got any ideas on what to do next?” She pointed to the sky, where Chris saw two flights of three buzz bombs wheeling around for another pass.

“I’d say keep running,” Valiha said before Chris could get anything out. “It looks to me like they’re not used to dropping bombs. They had two chances while we were helpless and they missed both times.”

Hornpipe and the Wizard had matched the pace of the other two Titanides and now galloped along beside them.

“Okay. But they could change tactics. If it looks like they’re coming in low, hit the dirt. And if we’re going to run, don’t do it in a straight line. And spread out a little. More targets might confuse them.”

The Titanides put the orders into effect. Valiha began a zigzag progression toward the cable, totally different from her usual effortless glide. Chris had to hold tight to stay on her back. When the buzz bombs were positioned for another run, she redoubled her efforts, sending up great sprays of sand as she leaned into her turns, hooves churning.

“They’re keeping high,” Chris told her.

“Good. I’ll keep—”

“Turn toward them!” he shouted. Valiha obeyed instantly, and Chris ducked as three bombs sailed
over his head, seeming close enough to touch. Yet they hit fifty meters away. Chris saw that he had been right. The momentum of a bomb that fell short could still spray them with the liquid fire. His ears rang, but the main force of the devices was expended in incendiary effects rather than concussion.

“That’s napalm,” Cirocco shouted as for a moment Hornpipe and Valiha drew close in their erratic paths. “Don’t let it get on you. It sticks and burns.”

Chris wanted no part of it, sticky or not. He was about to say so when Valiha shrieked and stumbled.

He was thrown forward against her back, hitting his chin and snapping his teeth together. He sat up, spit blood, and looked over her shoulder. Glassy tentacles had wrapped around her left foreleg. They seemed too ephemeral to exert the force that was tearing her flesh and pulling her down into the sand. Yet they were doing it. Her knees were already buried.

His hand had no feeling in it as he aimed the gun and squeezed a stream of water over the wraith. It released Valiha, backed off half a meter, and began to shake. Chris thought it was dying.

“The water’s not hurting it!” Valiha shouted. She was using her club to flail at the thing. Two tentacles broke off and slithered independently before slipping into the sand. “It’s shaking it off.”

Chris could see it. Injured, the creature nevertheless began to close on Valiha again. It was a nest of glass snakes. Somewhere near the center, not held to a defined spot, was a large pink crystal that might have been an eye. It more nearly resembled one of the invertebrate chimeras of the sea than any land creature, yet it had the supple strength of a whip.

Valiha reared on her hind legs while Chris held on only by winding his fingers in her hair. She didn’t seem to notice. She came down on the creature with her front hooves, reared and did it again, then jumped over the twitching remnant and hit it so hard with her hind legs that pieces were still rising when she leaped forward again.

Chris looked up, and the sky was filled with buzz bombs.

Actually there were no more than twenty or thirty of them, but one was too many. Their pulsing
exhaust rattle shook the world.

The next thing he knew, Valiha was kneeling in front of him, shaking his shoulders. His ears were ringing. He noticed that Valiha’s hair was singed on one side and that her left arm and the left side of her face were bleeding. Her yellow skin was nearly invisible behind a coat of sand which adhered to the sweat.

“You’re not bleeding too badly,” she said, causing him to look down and see tears in his clothing and redness beneath. A patch on his pants was smoldering, and he quickly slapped it out. “Can you understand me? Can you hear me?”

He nodded, though he was very shaky. She lifted him again, and he fumbled with his feet, trying to straddle her back. When he was in place, she took off again.

They were only a hundred meters from the first of the cable strands. Just before they arrived, Chris heard a subtle alteration in the sound of Valiha’s hooves. Instead of the muffled thumps of deep sand, it was turning into a satisfying clop-clop as they emerged onto hard rock. Soon they were close enough to touch the massive strand. Valiha wheeled around, and they looked out over an empty expanse of desert. Nowhere could they see Cirocco and Hornpipe, Gaby, Hautbois, or Robin. Though they could hear the distant thunder of pulsejets, the sky was clear of buzz bombs.

“Over there,” Valiha said. “To the east.”

There was a commotion on the sand. Many wraiths created a shifting cloud over something lying motionless.

“It’s Hautbois,” Valiha said quietly.

“No. It can’t be.”

“But it is. And over there, to the right of the remains. I fear that is our companion Robin.”

The small figure had come into view from around the curve of the cable strand. She was three or four hundred meters from the two of them. Chris saw her stop short of the carnage. She crouched. She put her hands to her mouth, then straightened, and Chris was sure he knew what she was about to do.

“Robin! Robin, don’t!” he shouted. He saw her stop and look around.

“It’s too late,” Valiha called out. “She no longer lives. Come to us.” She turned to Chris. “I’m going to get her.”

He held her wrist tightly.

“No. Wait for her here.” It felt like a damnably unheroic thing to say, but he couldn’t help it. He kept seeing the tentacles of the wraith pulling Valiha down into the sand. He looked at her legs and gasped.

“That thing …”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Valiha said. “The cuts are not deep. Most of them.”

It looked awful. Her left leg was covered in drying blood, and at least one of the gashes had torn loose a flap of her skin. He looked away, helplessly, back to where Robin was running toward them. She was unsteady, her legs and arms flying without much control. Chris ran out a short way to meet her and hurried back, supporting her under one arm. She collapsed on the rock, gasping, unable to speak but clutching the hard surface to her like an old friend. Chris turned her over and took her hand. It was the one without a little finger.

“We were here,” she finally managed to say. “Here under the … cable. Then Gaby saw the buzz bomb, and … and it was coming in low. The first one. And she shot it down! And something came out of it in a parachute … and she ran off after it. The water didn’t kill them! They came up right in front of us, and … and—”

“I know,” Chris soothed. “We saw it, too.”

“… and then Hautbois ran off looking for Gaby and … didn’t take me. I couldn’t move! But I did move, and I got up and went … after her. She was out there, and then you called me … and Gaby’s out there somewhere. We’ve got to find her, we—”

“Cirocco and Hornpipe are missing, too,” Chris said. “But they might be under the cable. You must have come in farther to the west than we did. Cirocco might be in the other direction. We … Valiha,
how long was I out?”

The Titanide frowned. “We were under the cable, too,” she said. “We made it to safety, then saw Gaby running alone, and we went to help her, and that is when we were nearly hit. I was out myself for a short time, I think.”

“I don’t remember any of that.”

“It has been possibly four or five decirevs … possibly thirty minutes, since the bombing began.”

“So Cirocco has had plenty of time to make it to the cable. We should search the outer cable strands first.” He did not add that he felt sure anyone still out there on the sands was dead.

They all felt a sense of urgency, yet found it difficult to move from their hard-won refuge. They managed to use up some time in the examination and treatment of wounds. Robin was the least injured, and Chris had nothing wrong that a few bandages would not cure. Valiha’s treatment took more time. When the torn leg was bound up, she did not seem eager to put much weight on it.

“What do you think?” Chris asked them. “Any of them could be just on the other side of this strand, looking out over the sand, trying to locate us.”

“We could split up,” Robin suggested. “They’d be around the edge. We could search in both directions.”

Chris chewed his lip. “I don’t know. Every movie I ever saw, splitting up happened just before the big disaster.”

“You’re basing your tactics on movies?”

“What else do I have? Do you know more about it?”

“I guess not,” Robin admitted. “We have drills for different sorts of invasions, but I don’t know how much of that would apply here.”

“Don’t split up,” Valiha said firmly. “Division is vulnerability.”

But they did not have time to make the decision. Robin, looking out at the desert, saw Gaby appear over the top of a dune. She was bounding in the long, easy low-gravity lope which no longer looked odd to
Chris. He knew it well enough by now to be able to tell she was tired. She was bent slightly, as if favoring a stitch in her side.

She gradually closed the distance. When still half a kilometer from them, she waved one hand and shouted, but no one could hear what she said.

And she could not hear them when all three began to shout frantically, trying to warn her of what she could not see because it was approaching her from behind.

Valiha was the first to start running. Chris followed quickly, but the Titanide quickly outdistanced him. She was still 300 meters from Gaby when the buzz bomb tilted its nose up and released its deadly cargo. Chris watched it tumble slowly through the air, his feet pounding the sand, oblivious to what might be under it. It came down just in front of her, and she threw up her hands as a wall of flame appeared in her path.

She came out of it running fast. She almost seemed to fly.

She was on fire.

He saw her hands slapping at the flames, heard her scream. She no longer knew where she was going. Valiha tried to grab her but missed. Chris did not pause. He smelled burning hair and flesh as he hit her with his shoulder and knocked her sprawling; then Valiha was holding her down as she thrashed and cried out, and Chris used both hands to throw sand on her. They rolled her, held her down, ignoring the pain as their own hands were burned.

“We’ll suffocate her!” Chris protested when Valiha pressed Gaby down with her entire body.

“We must smother the fire,” the Titanide said.

When she stopped struggling, Valiha scooped her up and grabbed Chris, almost pulling his arm from its socket. He swung onto her back, and she flew toward the cable, holding Gaby, unconscious or dead, in her arms. They caught up with Robin, who had already turned back, just short of the cable strand where they had watched most of the drama. Chris caught her hand and pulled her up behind him. Valiha did not slacken her pace until they were on hard rock again.

She was about to set Gaby down when she looked back and saw yet another buzz bomb on its approach. Incredibly, it was aiming at the cable at high speed, on a course that would deposit its bombs just where Valiha stood. As it nosed up to release them, its engine bellowing at full thrust as it reached for the power to climb fast enough to survive, Valiha headed deeper into the darkening maze of monolithic cable strands.

There were explosions behind them. It was impossible to know if one signaled the death of the buzz bomb. Valiha did not slow down. She raced deeper into the strand forest and paused only when the darkness had deepened to gloom.

“They’re still coming,” Chris said. He had never felt so hopeless. Behind them, silhouetted against a thin wedge of sky visible between strands, were the convex slivers of shadow that marked buzz bombs seen head-on. He counted five, knew there were more. One banked right, then left, threading its way through the strands with suicidal speed. There was an explosion far behind them, then one nearer, and the creature roared overhead. In the darkness its blue exhaust flame was once more visible.

There was a monstrous explosion ahead of them, and the cable interior suddenly flared orange. The shadows of the strands danced in time to the unseen flames; then, for a brief instant, Chris saw the broken body of the buzz bomb dropping. Valiha ran on.

A second creature came up behind them, and they heard the crash as a third hit a cable strand to their left. Burning napalm dripped down the strand to splash a hundred meters away from them, like wax from a candle. More bombs exploded ahead of them.

The concussion began to shake large stones and other massive debris from the narrowing spaces between the unwinding strands far above. A boulder as big as Valiha crashed in a shower of sparks twenty meters ahead of them. Valiha went around it as they heard another buzz bomb impact, followed rapidly by two more, punctuated with the lesser sounds of released bombs.

Valiha did not stop until she saw the stone building that marked the entrance to the regional brain of Tethys. She halted, unwilling to enter. Only the driving force of the buzz bombs had brought her this far,
into a place traditionally avoided by her kind.

“We’ve got to go in,” Chris urged her. “This place is falling apart. One of those things is going to get us if a falling rock doesn’t kill us first.”

“Yes, but—”

“Valiha, do as I say. This is Long-Odds Major talking to you. Do you think I’d make you do something that wasn’t a sure bet?”

Valiha hesitated one second more, then trotted under the arched doorway and across a stone floor until she reached the beginning of the five-kilometer stairs.

She started down.

The chemical fires had long guttered to their death when Cirocco, on foot, rounded the curve of the great cable with Hornpipe following behind. The Titanide used a three-legged gait, his right hind leg held up by a sling tied around his middle. The lower joint of the leg was splinted.