At first, the fighting had gone neither very well nor very badly. The combat bots and the fighters with shoulder-mounted ion rocket launchers had landed a decent number of hits on the mechs. Having talked to Pompey, Thidian saw what the general meant about needing to understand the enemy’s tendencies. He saw how the mechs tended to stay together but could be split up under the right circumstances.
The mechs had soon regrouped, though. One by one, they had eliminated the combat bots. They had also killed all of the resistance fighters in the immediate area. And still the cloud of poisonous energy that the black mech was releasing continued to spread. After it had covered two city blocks, the mechs moved on to another section of the northwest quadrant.
There, the gray mech’s transport disc had begun to spin in circles. The mech let its scythe extend from its body as it spun. The transport picked up speed until sickly green and yellow waves of energy shot out across every sidewalk, street, and building. The energy rippled up and down the framework of the nearby structures, causing sparks to fly from every surface.
Thidian squinted at the tiny hologram in his palm. He knew pairs of Vonnegan fighters were hidden in the streets but saw no sign of them. All was still in the street except for the last remnants of energy rippling across a building.
The four mechs began traveling down another block of the northwest quadrant. There, they began extinguishing any other life they came across.
“How is it going out there?” a woman with pitch black hair asked, her view of the hologram blocked by an elderly Vonnegan man.
“Well enough,” Thidian replied.
“Have they destroyed any of the mechs?”
“Not yet.”
“But the resistance fighters are doing their job?”
Thidian squinted at the hologram. He watched as a pair of Vonnegans in battle armor appeared from the doorway of a skyscraper at the same time as another pair of Vonnegans appeared from a broken window one hundred stories above them. Both fired rocket propelled plasma grenades. The reddish brown mech turned its ion sword sideways so the blunt side of the weapon acted as a shield. The plasma grenade dispersed plasma around the mech with only tiny amounts touching the enemy. The white mech fired an ion arrow at the other plasma grenade, hitting it before it could reach the mechs. Instead of hitting its target, the premature detonation caused plasma to fall back toward the surface and splash across fifty feet of sidewalk where it sizzled and burned. The next ion arrow pierced the soldier who had fired the surface grenade. The gray mech moved toward the hundredth floor of the building and sent a bolt of energy into it. No more plasma grenades were fired.
“Yes,” Thidian mumbled. “They’re doing their job.”
He did not tell her the mechs were slowly making their way toward the section of city directly above where they were hiding.
48
Margaret did everything she could to stay out of the public eye. She kept her head down, with a scarf over her hair. She wore nondescript clothes. As she passed through the streets of CamaLon, no one took note of her.
The few times she raised her eyes it was to observe the changes to the place she had once called home. The transformation went deeper than her husband’s assassination, her son’s departure, and her best friend’s suicide. It was the atmosphere around her. A sense of dread and anxiety pervaded each street corner.
Her city seemed to be filled with people who wanted only to take care of themselves, who didn’t care about their neighbor. Only a week earlier the same places had been filled with people calling for Julian to lead the Round Table. When her husband lay dead in an alley, the people went back to their lives as if he had never returned from the Cartha sector as a hero, as if they had never cheered his name. No one spoke of Hector either. They didn’t even mention the warrior with four arms and four legs who had brought Arc-Mi-Die’s head. They wanted merely to continue to exist, and for the Hannibal threat to magically disappear. They cared about themselves and nothing else.
She heard whispers from those who passed on the street. Almost all of them were making plans for where they would go if the Hannibal made it out of the Mardigan sector to Edsall Dark. No one spoke of remaining there to defend the Round Table. The hushed tones were only concerned with getting as far away from the threat as possible.
Following Julian’s last inter-sector deployment, she had returned to the planet and thought of Edsall Dark as a place where everyone looked out for one another. Back when she had walked the fields outside the capital wall with Portia, she had the sense that she would spend the rest of her life there. Now, she knew there was no way she could remain. Not because the Hannibal were approaching, but because there was nothing left for her. The people she had loved were gone. With it, so was the place she thought she knew.
As she approached the entrance to the Great Hall, a sensor detected her and the giant wooden doors automatically began their gradual separation so she could enter the place where hundreds of representatives made decisions for the rest of the galaxy. The din of the courtyard faded and was replaced with the sound of formal proceedings. She turned a corner and took the lift up to the observatory. All was silent except for the hum of the tube raising her high above the Round Table. With a ding, the lift stopped, the clear door slid aside, and she stepped off to join the few other visitors on the observation deck.
Below her, the hundreds of representatives sat around the impossibly wide circular table. From where she stood, the table looked like one solid piece. That was impossible, though, because it would have had to have been cut from a tree as large as a Solar Carrier. She had heard a story that the table’s maker had created the design so that no matter how large the table became, there would always be one wedge for each of the representatives who sat around it. It might have been true or it might be an old wives’ tale.
The representatives were in the middle of a session. With so many people gathered around one table, and without an organized voice, a dozen different discussions took place at once. Everything that was said was transmitted through the speakers of the observation deck. There were so many simultaneous voices, however, that most of the discussion was unintelligible. While she watched, a family there to see the proceedings shrugged and left.
“I agree,” she said as she watched them go.
From what she was able to gather from the discussion, the representatives were trying to decide what to do with her son. He had threatened a representative and told everyone else what would be done rather than asking for a vote. He had also destroyed a Round Table vessel, but the representatives in the Great Hall showed more concern with their own slights than with that offense. It took her a while to differentiate between the different discussions. As always, it sounded as though the room was split on what to do.
Half of the Round Table wanted to bring charges against Talbot.
“He threatened a member of the Round Table! We cannot let that pass.”
The other half thought he was their only chance for victory.
“But what if Talbot’s plan is successful? We’re going to punish someone for saving the galaxy?”
Margaret listened for a little longer. Then, understanding that nothing would be decided, no matter how long she sat there, she got up and left.
49
Philo lay on the ground, motionless and quiet, a black stream of smoke rising up toward the sky from where Dindraine had shot him in the back of the helmet. The former Fianna hadn’t tried to drag himself out of the bunker to get away from his attacker. He hadn’t called for help. He had merely fallen face first into the ground with a thud and gone still.
For a while, Dindraine had stood over him, shocked that the epitome of Vonnegan cruelty was actually dead. All her life she had been taught to fear the Fianna. They had killed her family after dragging them away in the night. Rumor had it that each year they had killed hundreds of people who had dared speak out against Mowbray. Decades earlier, an uprising had broken out around the royal palace and the ni
ne Fianna had killed thousands of armed Vonnegans without suffering a single casualty of their own. Those were the things she thought of when she saw the purple demon mask.
Now, though, one of them was dead in front of her, and it hadn’t been difficult at all. She marveled at how little effort it had taken to raise her blaster to the back of Philo’s head and pull the trigger. A single shot, that’s all it took to defeat the symbol of terror.
In the distance, she could hear the sounds of the mechs’ hover discs growing louder. Every once in a while she heard resistance fighters in other parts of the metropolis launching their own weapons. She wasn’t familiar enough with the weaponry to be sure, but she thought she heard some ion rockets and some plasma grenades. The echoing boom of massive explosions also rang out and she imagined huge chunks of skyscrapers being torn apart as the fighting raged in the northwest quadrant.
She thought about dragging Philo out of the bunker and leaving him in the street. Everyone else nearby would see the dead body and realize the Fianna weren’t gods after all, they were just highly trained killers without consciences. That was all.
But she also understood that the dead man next to her had been the best fighter among them. The way he had beaten the Purple Beret in one-on-one combat had impressed even her. It was likely that even if people despised the Fianna, they might still turn on her if they found out she had killed Philo. She had noticed the way many of them had looked at Philo while he trained them, as if he were their best hope for victory. The idea made her laugh with scorn. One man wasn’t going to be the difference between them living or dying. If people really felt that way, maybe it was for the best that they not see the dead Fianna and keep believing in miracles.
In the distance, a tremendous boom reverberated through the streets. The ground shook as though an earthquake were taking place only blocks away. She lifted her head out of the bunker just a little. Most of her view was obstructed by other skyscrapers, but in the air she saw a giant cloud of dust and debris mingling with the toxic black cloud that one of the mechs was emitting. She couldn’t be sure, but she guessed that the first of Pompey and Thidian’s traps had just been triggered and a building had come down on top of one of the mechs.
50
It was true that Thidian had helped identify a series of skyscrapers that could be used as traps, the hope being that their foundation could be detonated and the structures would fall on top of one or more of the mechs. It was also true that one of the high-rises in the northwest quadrant had been leveled only moments earlier. The problem, though, was that it hadn’t been one of the buildings where crews had set explosives.
Pompey watched a series of holographic displays from the observation deck at the opposite side of the city. The four mechs had neutralized all of the threats within a two-block radius before moving further across the urban terrain. After leaving a trail of dead soldiers, destroyed combat bots, and burning missile batteries across ten city blocks, they had arrived at Mudrock Point, the intersection noted for its giant statue of Mudrock the Merciless. Most statues of former Vonnegan rulers had been toppled after Mowbray’s death, but the one of Mudrock had remained because of the few good deeds he had performed during his reign.
Upon entering Mudrock Point, the reddish brown mech had hovered next to the giant statue. For a moment, the statue and the mech, both roughly the same size, stared at one another. Then the mech brought its ion sword across its body at a diagonal angle and sliced the figure in half. The statue hit the ground with a thud, cracking the pavement where it landed.
Before the mech could join the other three units, a Vonnegan jumped out from a false door in the statue’s base. The soldier had the face of a fighter, eyes wide open and ready to strike. Seeing the mech only feet away, he lost his resolve and his hands twitched. Only for a moment, though. Then the soldier’s thumb pressed a button on the control panel attached to his torso and the entire arsenal of thermal grenades the soldier carried ignited.
A flash of light like an atomic explosion appeared in Mudrock Point, incinerating everything within a fifty foot radius. The base of the statue was gone. The soldier that had decided it was better to die fighting than to retreat was also gone, with absolutely no trace of him left behind.
Most shocking of all, however, was that the blood-colored mech’s transport was also heavily damaged, as were the mech’s feet and much of its armor. It sizzled as the metal melted under the extreme heat of the lava that the thermal grenades sprayed.
The white mech provided cover fire, shooting ion arrows at incredible speed. Darts of light shot out toward every doorway and alley, erupting into explosions wherever they struck the Vonnegan cityscape. The matte gray mech began lashing its scythe back and forth in long strokes that sent out waves of energy, destroying entire floors of the buildings they hit. For the first time since arriving on Greater Mazuma, the black mech stopped emitting the lethal gas from its scale and moved into position next to the damaged mech.
While the white and gray mechs continued destroying everything at Mudrock Point, the black mech lifted the rust colored mech back toward the Juggernaut. On their way, hundreds of projectiles passed them, descending from the Hannibal ship toward the surface.
“This isn’t going to be good,” Pompey muttered as he watched the scene unfold.
He looked down at another hologram to see where the rest of his fighters in Mudrock Point were located. Three two-man squads had been in the area. One set had been in the doorway of the skyscraper on the far side of the street. Another pair had been located halfway up that same building, one hundred stories in the air. The third set had been underground in a bunker covered with what looked like pavement but which was just a thin reproduction they could move aside before attacking.
All of them were dead.
And still the white and gray mechs continued decimating the city block.
A moment later, the Hannibal projectiles reached the surface. None of them caused damage on impact. Instead, they erupted into circles of energy—portals—that were just large enough for the mechs to pass through. As Pompey watched on his holographic monitor, the projectiles dispersed throughout the rest of the northwest quadrant. The white mech passed through one and disappeared. It was followed by the gray mech, which passed through another glowing circle and vanished.
Pompey’s eyes darted to the displays in front of him. He found the white mech three city blocks away from where it had been. The gray mech was four blocks in the opposite direction. Both fired a couple of times from their new locations, then disappeared back into the portals again. When they appeared next, both were in different locations once more.
“This isn’t good at all,” Pompey said.
The white mech appeared ten blocks down from Mudrock Point. An ion tank was waiting for it. The tank’s crew hadn’t been expecting to see the enemy so suddenly, though. The last report they had received said the mechs were all the way back at the statue of Mudrock. Now they were there.
The tank’s crew, like the soldier who had been hiding in the base of Mudrock’s statue, made a split second decision. They fired all twelve of their ion missiles in less than two seconds. The tank’s entire battery rocketed toward the white mech.
Pompey clenched his jaw and sucked air in between his teeth.
The white mech, on the opposite side of the street, moved back, into the portal it had arrived from. In the next instant, the portal disappeared. Instead of destroying one of the mechs, all twelve of the ion tank’s missiles struck a skyscraper across the street.
The damage was staggering. The building was designed to be resilient against Greater Mazuma’s storms and even small explosions. They were not designed, however, for the type of destruction that a Vonnegan ion tank could unleash. The high-rise’s metal frame whined. A series of internal explosions wracked the structure as the power room became compromised. Flames shot out of the open spaces where windows had been.
Even in that moment of shock, Pompey was grateful fo
r the planning that had ensured no citizens would be anywhere near the fighting. If the building had been occupied, he couldn’t guess how many lives would have been wiped out in the blasts.
The ion tank began to power up its engine. Before it could go anywhere, the gray mech, having appeared from a portal behind it, cut off its top, leaving the shell of the tank exposed so the mech could look at the tank’s crew and the crew could do nothing but stare back. Then the mech sent a bolt of energy down and destroyed them.
Across the street, the building continued to groan as its foundation began to fail. The mech scanned the building, then moved backward, returning to the energy of the portal and disappearing.
Seconds later, the building began to lean forward. Once it started there was no hope. It picked up momentum and crashed into the skyscraper directly across from it, damaging most of that structure as well. The rest of the building slammed into the ground with enough force to equal the tremors of the last major earthquake to hit the region.
Fighters all across Greater Mazuma began sending in communications, asking what had happened. Pompey sent a rare announcement to everyone so as to discourage further radio traffic. He noticed that Philo had not been one of the people to use the comms devices, and he guessed it was because the deadly serious soldier knew not to break from protocol. And so he thought nothing of it when he didn’t hear from his lead fighter.
51
“We’re approaching ID-1D-0067,” the pilot said through the open doorway of the Llyushin cruiser.
Talbot, in the passenger area of the ship, heard the announcement and made his way to the cockpit.
The crew had initially called him “sir” even though he wasn’t an official member of the Round Table forces anymore, let alone a superior officer. He was viewed as the leader of the mission, though, so it was more a title of respect than anything based on rank. After he told them not to refer to him that way, they had taken to calling him by his last name, the way everyone aboard most vessels referred to one another. But in his case, that made the crew cringe. He looked just like a younger Julian Reiser, a man almost all of them had looked up to. Calling him by his last name left many of them, Talbot included, feeling empty. They had settled on occasionally calling him by his first name, but more often they simply made statements and hoped he realized they were talking to him.
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