by David Mack
Another wave of stones crashed down on her back, her legs, her head. One banged off her temple. A warm, wet wash of blood sheeted across the right side of her face. Trickles of blood snaked out from beneath her copper-flecked, rust-hued faux hair to trace paths across her forehead.
She came to the edge of the road and looked over it, into the yawning gorge below. There was nowhere left to run to.
The mob surrounded her on three sides. The women cast their stones then left to find more—as another group of women, rocks in hand, stepped forward to take their places.
She put her arm back over her face and curled into as tight a ball as she could. Retreating into the uncomforting cocoon of her own shadow, she whimpered in terror and pain as the rocks continued to fall, without end and without mercy.
Ganag, Lerec, and Shikorn huddled together behind a stack of rusted metal barrels lying on their sides in a narrow gap between two abandoned riverfront warehouses. Just past the end of the gap was West River Road.
On the other side of the road was the Ulom River.
Rolling down the road was a Venekan Army unit comprising several armored vehicles and more than a hundred heavily armed troops. “Just a few more minutes,” Ganag whispered to his friends. “As soon as they pass us, we’ll get in the river and swim the rest of the way back to the skiff.”
Shikorn nodded. Lerec stared in mute terror at the Venekan troops marching past. Ganag reached back and playfully mussed the young boy’s dark-bronze hair. “Breathe,” Ganag teased him. “Hold your breath after we’re in the water.”
Lerec smiled weakly but said nothing. The boys remained quiet and hidden, waiting patiently for the soldiers to pass.
Then the army column ground to a halt.
Shikorn leaned over to Ganag. “What’s happ—” The first cracks of gunfire silenced Shikorn and sent the Venekan soldiers in the road scrambling off the tops of their armored vehicles and behind them for cover. Explosions filled the road with fire, smoke, and shrapnel. Furious, buzzing automatic gunfire came as much from the X’Mari Resistance fighters on the warehouse rooftops as from the soldiers in the street.
Ganag turned to his friends and pointed away from the road, back the way they’d come. “Back and right, to the gravel yard,” he said. “It should be empty. We can cut through it to the river.” He herded Lerec and Shikorn away from the fighting.
“You’re sure?” Shikorn said. With a look, Ganag silently admitted that he wasn’t. Shikorn frowned, but nodded and moved on ahead, keeping one hand on the shoulder of Lerec’s coat to prevent the boy from lagging behind.
The three boys ran south toward the gravel yard as the pandemonium of battle echoed behind them.
Hawkins fired off two quick bursts toward the attackers to the front, then pivoted to pick off a soldier who was charging forward on the right flank to lob a grenade, which fell from the man’s hand and detonated, taking down four more Tenebians.
He spun back toward the front and pumped out the last of his four pre-loaded grenades. It bounced off the turret of an armored vehicle that had stopped and turned perpendicular to the road to provide maximum cover for the troops advancing behind it. The grenade’s explosive detonation almost drowned out Stevens’s anguished scream.
Glancing sideways, Hawkins saw that Stevens had been hit in his upper chest, just to the side of his right shoulder. The impact had knocked him backward nearly two meters. His earth-toned serape showed the beginning of a spreading bloodstain. From the other side of the truck, Gomez glanced nervously at Stevens and Hawkins as she continued shooting.
“Stevens!” Hawkins yelled over the metallic peals of ricochets. He tensed to spring to the wounded man’s side.
Stevens grimaced and held up his hand, signaling Hawkins to stop. “I’m all right,” he said, his voice a roar of agony, his eyes tearing. He crawled back toward the probe, his right arm limp at his side. Reaching in with his left hand, he resumed working. The bloodstain spread swiftly across his serape.
Hawkins snapped off another burst toward the right flank, then another forward. His weapon clicked empty. He ejected the magazine and reached down to grab a fresh one, then realized he had just picked up his last clip.
He tuned out the terrible battering clamor of weapons blazing; the fear-colored din of soldiers barking orders over the cries of the wounded and dying; the acrid smell of gunpowder and the choking weight of oily smoke.
He switched his weapon to semi-automatic and picked his targets, popping off three shots forward, two more to the right, then turning forward again. The soldiers on the front and right flanks seemed to be holding back, unwilling to charge blindly as their fallen comrades had done. Instead, they stayed behind cover, each of them looking to make a lucky shot.
We’re lucky they want the probe, Hawkins realized. If not for that, those tanks would’ve just run us over.
An armor-piercing round blasted through the overturned truck and shot through Hawkins’s right leg, knocking him on his back. Three soldiers on the front flank saw him fall, and charged forward. Hawkins lifted his head just enough to aim his rifle over his knee and fired three more rounds, dropping all three men in quick succession.
He heard the turbine shriek of a jumpjet, which appeared from behind an enormous gravel mountain like a dark mechanical raptor. It had a perfect angle from which to sweep him, Gomez, and Stevens with cannon fire without hitting the probe.
He dropped his rifle and grabbed the rocket launcher. In a single motion he raised it to his shoulder and fired.
The projectile soared away with a sibilant whoosh, trailing a streak of white exhaust as it raced in less than a second to its target. It struck the jumpjet almost dead-center in its fuselage. The aircraft spat fire from beneath every hull plate. It wobbled and spun for a moment, then pitched toward the ground and tumbled chaotically, finally making impact on the slope of another mound of gravel on Hawkins’s rear flank.
The blast felt like an earthquake. The gravel mound was transformed into a storm of speeding rock, suspended in a pyroclastic cloud that billowed over the rear third of the industrial yard. Dust and dirt blanketed the away team.
Hawkins’s ears were still ringing from the explosion as he loaded another rocket into the launcher.
Stevens slumped against the probe and declared as loudly as he could, “It’s armed.” Gomez looked back at him.
“Good work, Fabian,” she said. “Set it for thirty-five seconds, then signal the—” The bullet exploded through her chest half a heartbeat before Hawkins heard the crack of the sniper rifle that had fired it. Two more shots ripped through Gomez’s torso as she fell toward Stevens. With his good hand, he plucked her rifle from her hand and tossed it to Hawkins, who caught it, braced it against his shoulder, and aimed it at the sniper on top of the gravel mound behind them on Gomez’s side.
He fired as he saw the muzzle flash of the sniper’s weapon.
The sniper jerked back and tumbled down the far side of the gravel mountain—just as his bullet slammed into Hawkins’s lower left arm, just in front of the elbow. Flesh and muscle were shredded, the bone shattered. The shell exited Hawkins’s forearm and lodged deep in his bicep. He collapsed onto his back, with one arm and one leg paralyzed.
“Stevens,” he said through a mouth sticky with dust. “Set the timer. Send the signal.” Stevens reached into the probe and keyed in a short string of commands.
Hawkins craned his neck back and gauged his upside-down perspective of the armored vehicle parked broadside not forty meters away. He fought to steady his one-handed aim with the rocket launcher.
A pleasant-sounding chirp from the probe confirmed Stevens’s orders. Just need thirty more seconds of delay, Hawkins told himself. He fired the rocket.
The AAV flew apart in a devastating eruption of metal and fire. Its explosion effectively pushed the Venekans’ front line back at least fifty meters, equaling the damage done to their right flank by the crash of the jet. “Stevens…” The engineer limped over
to him, his face stippled with Gomez’s blood and shrapnel wounds from bullets that had penetrated the truck.
“Get Gomez’s submachine gun,” Hawkins said. “Hold the left flank.”
Stevens gripped Hawkins’s shoulder, then half-limped, half-hopped to Gomez and took the submachine gun that was still slung over her shoulder. He staggered over to Gomez’s position and squeezed off a short burst toward distant voices in the dense gray-brown cloud. Hawkins reached down and loaded one more rocket into the launcher, just in case.
The weight of the barrage had driven Abramowitz toward the edge of the precipice until she was perched on its lip, one foot dangling over the abyss. She shivered uncontrollably; she wasn’t sure whether it was because of the cold or her injuries.
Then the rocks stopped falling. Abramowitz hoped that she had passed out and been beamed up to the da Vinci. She opened her tear-filled eyes. She was still on the mountain road.
A girlish scream of rage echoed off the cliff walls. Abramowitz heard a few running footsteps coming toward her, then she felt a brutal kick between her shoulder blades that knocked her over the edge.
Her right hand flailed out, every instinct telling her to survive, to hang on until the last possible second.
She looked up and saw Lica standing over her, like a dark and terrible child-deity. Her young violet eyes, scarred by war and its endless horrors, were filled with rage.
“I asked them to rescue you,” Lica said, her voice quaking with fury. “They let you in because of me! It’s my fault we have a spy!” Abramowitz said nothing. She clung by four fingertips to the sandy lip of stone.
“I have to cleanse myself,” Lica said. She lifted her foot.
“No!” Abramowitz screamed. Lica stomped on Abramowitz’s fingers. A pain like searing fire spiked through her hand. Sobbing with agony and desperation, she held on. The girl lifted her foot again. “Lica, don’t!” The girl’s foot smashed down on Abramowitz’s slender fingertips and pulverized them.
The world washed past Abramowitz, like a child’s watercolor painting left in the rain, as she fell through the mist toward the barren canyon floor several hundred feet below.
Commander Zila swallowed mouthful after mouthful of curses as he observed the battle from the air and snapped orders to Lancer Vecha, the weak-kneed and mind-bogglingly incompetent field officer leading the attack on the ground.
“I know you just lost an AAV!” Zila shouted. “Send Eight-Two Olik around the right flank and have One-Three Masara lay down smokers to cover Eight-Two’s charge.”
“Commander,” Vecha said, his voice swallowed by static, “with all due respect, their position is too strong for a direct—”
“There’s only three of them, you idiot! And one’s dead! Charge! Do it now, before I come down there and rip off your renods!” Zila punched the channel closed and looked across the compartment at Goff. “Now we’re gonna see some results!”
A flash of light brighter than the morning sun enveloped the gravel yard. The blast tossed the jumpjet into a flat spin. As the aircraft’s electrics went dead, Zila felt its sickening spiral toward the ground begin.
“Move out! Double quick time!” Maleska barked marching cadences at his squad as they sprinted away from the X’Mari ambush toward the firefight in the gravel yards three tiliks up the road. He’d heard two resounding explosions even from this distance.
The X’Maris must have an entire regiment holding the gravel yard, he speculated. The combat zone loomed into view beyond the row of dock warehouses along the road. What if it’s another ambush? Should we wait for more orders?
A synthetic bleating from the radioman’s pack signaled a transmission from Sync-Com. “Hold up!” Maleska ordered. His squad halted and immediately crouched low and assumed perimeter-watch formation. The radioman kneeled in front of Maleska, who grabbed the digital receiver, turned toward the river to reduce the noise from the combat zone, and pressed the transmit key.
“Sync-Com, Five-Nine Jazim. Go ahead.”
“Five-Nine Jazim, reinforcements are needed at map grid Xondi Six-One,” the Sync-Com coordinator squawked. “What’s your column’s status? Over.”
“Sync-Com, Five-Nine Jazim. We lost our AAVs and more than half our company in an ambush on West River Road. Remainder of company is humping into the zone on foot. Over.”
“What’s your grid reference?”
“We’re near the end of West River Road, roughly three tiliks from Xondi Six-One, and moving into—”
A nova-bright flash of light from the gravel yard coincided with a sizzle-hiss of static over the line. Half a second later came the cataclysmic thunder-crack of a massive explosion.
“Down!” Maleska vaulted over the railing that ran along the road and dived over the river’s edge into the water.
He hoped that his men would be quick enough to follow him.
The water was so cold that it prickled his skin, like needles jabbing him with electric shocks. He gasped in pain, losing half the breath he’d gulped before hitting the water.
Looking up, he saw the blurry, morning-sky silhouettes of bodies diving into the river above him. Then he realized debris was falling in with them—and that none of them were swimming down to escape the blast or up to get air. They simply bobbed on the surface like flotsam and jetsam.
Within seconds, the rumbling stopped. A film of dust and filth settled like a skin over the surface of the river.
Maleska surfaced to a scene as dark as night. Gasping hungrily for air, he coughed as he swallowed a mouthful of filthy water and smoke. He spat it out and wheezed as he stroked awkwardly to the river’s edge and pulled himself out.
He looked around at the flattened building, the landscape of scorched ruins and smoldering ground, the mushroom cloud. The gravel yard, the warehouses along its perimeter, and the ship-loading cranes that had dominated its waterfront were all destroyed, crushed as if by divine retribution.
Lying among the ruins, shrouded in the gray dust of this backward country Maleska had learned both to loathe and to pity, was his squad, reduced to an assortment of gruesome sculptures: an outstretched hand over here; a half-buried corpse lying facedown over there.
He plucked a rifle from the ankle-deep ash that covered the road. Slapped the dust off it and puffed a breath into the barrel. Took out the magazine and inspected it; it was clean. He put it back in. Fired one shot into the river, just to test it, then slung it over his shoulder.
Turning his back to the river, he walked east across the field of destruction. The ground was hot beneath his boots. He wandered without thought past slag heaps that once had been AAVs, past the mangled wing of a jumpjet.
After a time, he reached the far edge of the blast’s major area of effect. Here the buildings still stood, though there wasn’t a window intact anywhere. The city was quiet with death, its secrets whispered on a hot wind that concealed its phantoms in wandering dust clouds.
He paused as he heard muffled sobs. He looked up from his boots, which now were caked in dried mud. Kneeling on the sidewalk, dusty and bloody and broken like himself, was a teenaged X’Mari boy, slumped in the street along the industrial yard’s perimeter. He held in his arms two other boys, both of whom were dead, riddled with bullet wounds.
Maleska looked at their faces, which were masked in dust. One was practically still a child, no more than thirteen, the same age as Maleska’s youngest brother. The other was a teenager, gangly and rugged-looking, cut down just shy of growing into manhood.
The kneeling boy wept bitterly, choking on his tears, seemingly oblivious of Maleska’s presence.
A silhouette staggered out of a wall of sunlit dust farther down the street behind the kneeling boy. As the backlit man drew closer, Maleska saw that it was Commander Zila. The officer was scorched, wounded, maniacal. He carried an assault rifle at his side as he pitched from one side to another, lurching like a drunkard down the street toward Maleska.
Zila stopped and stared with wide-eyed cont
empt at the kneeling, weeping X’Mari boy in the street. He stared at the boy for close to a minute. Maleska stood like a statue, watching Zila. Without a word, Zila lifted his rifle and pointed it at the boy in front of the alley.
Maleska didn’t think about swinging his own rifle into his hands; he simply did it. He didn’t think about aiming at Commander Zila and pulling the trigger once, twice, three times. He simply did it, without thought, without emotion, without regret. The boy went on weeping as the echoes of gunfire faded.
Maleska walked slowly up the street, dropping his rifle next to Zila’s body as he passed by. The sound of the boy’s crying receded behind him as he wandered out of the city, away from the devastation, toward the faint and distant hope that he had seen his last day of war.
Stevens materialized in the da Vinci sickbay. He felt lighter the moment the annular confinement beam released him into the familiar, lighter-than-Teneb gravity of the ship he called home, but he collapsed to the deck all the same.
The transporter beam had grabbed him, Hawkins, and Gomez less than two seconds before the probe self-destructed, and the near-warp aspect of their beam-up had left him more than a little disoriented. Of course, that could also be because I’ve lost a lot of blood, he realized.
Hawkins and Gomez materialized on the deck beside him in roughly the same poses they had been in on the ground. On the other side of Gomez was Abramowitz, who was battered, bloody, and unconscious.
Even before the away team had fully materialized, Dr. Lense, Nurse Wetzel, and Medical Technician Falcão snapped into action, visually assessing each team member’s status.
They surrounded Gomez. Lense called out a string of medical orders that was so fast and thick with jargon that Stevens couldn’t follow it. The only orders he caught for certain were Lense activating the EMH and instructing it to perform emergency surgery on Abramowitz, and Wetzel activating a backup copy of the EMH to perform triage on himself and Hawkins.