Adam did some quick mental arithmetic. “That is going to be tight.” He reckoned the Starflyer would reach the Institute sometime after midday.
“Very,” she said. “But that’s not the real problem.”
“What is?”
“Our observation team is badly behind schedule. As soon as we heard the Starflyer was through the gateway we tried to tell them to start. They were camped in the Nalosyle Vales, and there was a bad weather front around there. We didn’t get through until early this morning, bastard short wave is good for crap all. If they have nothing but good luck, it’ll take them three days to get up to Aphrodite’s Seat.”
“What does the observation team do?” Wilson asked.
“We have to know the topology of the weather patterns,” Samantha said. “We need to plot the morning stormfronts exactly as they come around Mount Herculaneum, then we need to see what effect our manipulators are having so we can direct the damn thing properly. It’s going to be tricky enough for the control group without working half blind.”
“Satellite imagery?” Anna said.
“No satellites here,” Wilson said. “I remember talking to the Institute director a while back. Got a personal update on infrastructure.” He grinned distantly.
Samantha gave him a very interested look. “Right. Which is why we need someone on Aphrodite’s Seat. From there you can see right to the eastern end of the Dessault range. It’s also a perfect com relay point; no more crapping short wave.”
“But they’re not going to get there in time,” Adam said. That arithmetic wasn’t difficult at all.
“Trust me, we’re kicking their asses as much as we can over the radio. Not that we can say much without drawing too much attention. If anyone can do it, they will.”
“Isn’t there any other way up there?” Wilson asked. “What about flying? There must be some aircraft on Far Away.”
“Aphrodite’s Seat is above the atmosphere. In any case, nobody goes flying planes around the Grand Triad, not with the winds that hit them from the ocean.”
“I thought tourists flew over it,” Oscar said.
“Sure do,” Samantha said. “Rich morons try and catch the winds so they can glide over it. The lucky ones make it to the far side. Not onto the peak.”
“The right parabola could get you there,” Wilson said thoughtfully.
“And you know how to do that?” Samantha asked scornfully.
Wilson leaned forward with a menacing smile that shut down her attitude. Adam could see what an unfair contest it was: a young Samantha who cheerfully bossed around a team of freedom fighters and the Admiral, an exfighter pilot who had captained the Second Chance, then went on to command the navy.
“I’m the only human being ever to have flown on Mars,” he told her equitably. “I aerobraked a spaceplane from a two-hundred-kilometer orbit and landed on a designated site the size of a tennis court. How about you?”
“Shit! You’re dicking with me, pal.”
“Wilson.” Oscar was tugging at his arm. “Come on, man, that was over three hundred years ago. And that plane had rocket engines to help you steer, these gliders don’t.”
“That kind of flying is not something you forget or erase,” Wilson said. “Besides, the tour companies here must have skill memory implants.”
“Well, yeah,” an astounded Samantha said. “But, come on! Landing on the summit of Mount Herculaneum? Are you serious?”
“Yes, are you?” Adam asked. As soon as Wilson suggested it, Adam had begun sketching out consequences and opportunities. Even if there was only the slightest chance of success they had to make the effort. It wasn’t going well on Highway One, and the superstorm wouldn’t happen unless the control group was fully functional. After everything they’d gone through, the sacrifices they’d endured to get the Martian data here, he couldn’t bear the idea of it not having its chance.
“You’ll need a lot of electrical gear,” Samantha said. “We need high resolution panoramic vision and clear relay channels. I haven’t got anything like that here.”
Wilson tapped her ancient array. “The electronics we’re carrying are a lot better than anything of yours I’ve seen so far, no offense.”
“First things first,” Adam said. “Can we reach the gliders which the tourists use in time to get up there before the Starflyer arrives at the Institute?”
Samantha sucked in a long breath. “It’ll be tight, pal. You’ll need to get the hyperglider tethered down in Stakeout Canyon tomorrow night to catch the morning storm. The travel companies hangar them at Stonewave, that’s on the wet desert west of the Aldrin Plains. You’ll have to burn some gas to get there in time, tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”
Adam pulled the map out of his virtual vision grid, tracing the northern edge of the Dessault range to the west until he found the town. She was right, it was a long way, much farther than Wolfstail. “Can it be done?” he asked.
“Yeah, maybe. There’s a track wedged in between the foothills and the top of the grasslands. You use that and you don’t have to drive through the crapping Anguilla grass. It’ll take you around Herculaneum and out on the north side of Mount Zeus. Stonewave is a straight line north from there.”
Adam turned his attention back to the trucks. “We’ll unhitch the trailers from the cabs. We’ll make much better time without them.”
“You’ll need to, pal. Believe me when I say you do not want to be caught anywhere near Herculaneum tomorrow morning after the storm comes in from the ocean. If you’re going to live, never mind fly, you have to get into the lee of Zeus before sunrise.”
“Thanks.”
She gazed at Wilson. “You really going to do this?”
“We’re really going to do this,” Oscar said.
“Huh?” Wilson gave him a startled look.
“You heard,” Anna said. “We all know how to fly; that’s one up on most of the tourists crazy enough to try this. And with three of us, there’ll be a better chance that someone will survive to smash down on the top of the mountain.”
“You mean glide gently to a soft halt,” Oscar said.
“I know what I mean.”
Wilson put his arm around her. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” She stroked his cheek tenderly. “You still owe me a honeymoon.”
“This trip isn’t good enough?”
She kissed him, her eyes shining. “Not yet.”
“Dreaming heavens,” Samantha said. “I don’t doubt you could do this, but … the sabotage. I can’t risk it.”
“Yes, you can,” Wilson said. “Assume the worst, if the saboteur is the only one of us who makes it to the top and doesn’t relay the observation data you need, how will that make it worse than it is right now?”
Samantha gave him a desperate look; her gaze slipped over to Adam. It was obvious she didn’t want the decision. “All right,” she said grudgingly. “I guess there’s not much to lose.”
Wilson gave her a curt nod, still in command. “We’ll need your exact observation requirements, and the communications specs so we can modify our equipment. Do Rosamund and the rest know the route to Stonewave?”
“Pretty much. The tourist companies use the route along the side of the foothills to chase after their hypergliders, so it’s pretty well marked out.”
Adam caught up with Oscar as the trailers were being unhitched from the Volvo cabs. Almost all of the crates had been unloaded. The truck to Zuggenhim Ridge had already left. Samantha was going to take a jeep and follow it, once she and another Guardian called Valentine had finished briefing Wilson and Jamas on the technical details of the observation. They were going to spend the trip to Stonewave modifying their arrays to duplicate the performance of the equipment that the original observation team carried.
“I’m glad you volunteered,” Adam said.
“I wasn’t about to let Wilson go and—” His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why?”
“Because I’m only going to allow
you to fly.”
“What!” Oscar hunched down instinctively, checking to see if anyone was looking. “What are you talking about?” he asked in a low voice.
“You think Wilson and Anna are suddenly in the clear because they offered to do this?”
“Well …” Oscar rubbed a hand hard across his forehead. “Oh, Christ.”
“Assume one of them is the traitor, and they make it to the top. The whole planet’s revenge project is dependent on that observation.” Adam slapped his hands together vigorously. “They’ve fucked us. Bang, it’s over. Starflyer makes it back to the Marie Celeste and leaves.”
“When are you going to tell them?”
“After we’ve got to Stonewave and prepared the hypergliders. That’s the other thing, this trip will keep all of us away from these manipulator stations Samantha is building; I don’t want any sudden freak accidents to happen to them, either. Once we’ve found a working hyperglider and set it up ready to fly, I’ll tell them they’re grounded. My Guardian team will back me up.”
“Adam, please, I’m not that good a pilot. Hell, the only time I’ve actually flown in the last ten years is on the Carbon Goose.”
“The insert memories will help. You’ll make it, Oscar, you always do.”
Four Land Rover Cruisers were parked across Highway One. Ion shots raked the sky above them, punching into buildings where Institute troopers were shooting at the approaching line of Guardians’ vehicles. The kinetic rapid-fire gun mounted on the bonnet of the Cruiser blocking the nearside lane began firing at the cab of the big eighteen-wheel Loko truck that was bearing down on it at a hundred kilometers an hour. An answering hyper-rifle shot from the truck’s cab struck the Cruiser head-on, slicing clean through its force field. It exploded violently, lifting its broken-backed chassis off the ground to somersault in midair.
“Going airborne,” the Cat’s voice called out blithely on the general band. Her armored shape jumped from the Loko’s cab, surrounded by a sparkling amber force field. She hit the worn enzyme-bonded concrete and bounced, slamming into the wall of an animal feed store amid a shimmering crimson aurora. The wall shattered and the roof sagged alarmingly.
The flaming corpse of the Cruiser landed on its roof, collapsing under the impact. A second later the Loko truck struck it head-on, shunting it back into the rest of the blockade.
Two hundred meters behind, sitting at the wheel of the armored car, Stig winced at the impact. The Loko truck rampaged onward. Two more crumpled Cruisers lurched into the air as it struck them, their force fields flaring dangerous scarlet. Scraps of wreckage tumbled fast across Highway One beneath a huge fireball flooding up into the empty sapphire sky. Tiger Pansy squealed in Stig’s ear. It was like a fingernail scrape plugged into a rock band’s amp stack. “Holy shit,” she sighed in exhilaration. “You’re not going to …?”
He kept the accelerator floored as the blazing chassis of the truck performed a slow jackknife across the two southbound lanes. The buildings on the side of the road were getting perilously close, blocking the narrow slit of side window with a high-speed smear of fanciful colored paint. In front, the Loko’s chassis was slowly coming to a halt, leaving a very small gap that continued to shrink. Stig’s arms gripped the steering wheel like bands of steel. He refused to brake. Flames were fanning out across the enzyme-bonded concrete as the tank on the fourth Cruiser burst open, spilling out a wave of fuel that was already alight.
“Dreaming heavens,” Bradley gasped from the front passenger bench; his hands clawed at the cushioning. A lavish sheet of flame roared upward, covering both lanes.
They flashed through the gap, their slipstream pulling some of the flame with them. In the air above, fire and smoke swirled in micro-cyclone patterns.
“Fucking-A,” Tiger Pansy agreed loudly.
The road ahead was clear. Stig steered them back into the outside lane. The Mazda jeeps and the other armored cars following him drove through the gap, keeping their set fifty-meter separation distance. Then came the last three Loko trucks.
“Cat?” Stig called. “Cat, are you okay?”
Bradley was pressed against the slit window, staring back along the road. “Can’t see anybody. Still a lot of flame.”
“Cat?” Morton asked; for once he sounded concerned.
“Boys. You care. How sweet.”
Cheers rang out from all the vehicles.
In the rearview camera image Stig saw the Cat’s armored shape walk out of the ruined feed store. A Mazda jeep braked hard, tires leaving black rubber streaks on the enzyme-bonded concrete. The front door opened, and the Cat climbed in as if she were hitching a lift.
“Any bad guys survive?” Alic asked.
“I’m monitoring local net traffic,” Keely said. “The residents haven’t seen any yet. Mind you, they’re still keeping their heads down.”
“Tell them not to approach any survivors,” Bradley said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Now that was fun,” the Cat said. “How long till the next one?”
“Half an hour,” Olwen muttered in a piqued tone.
Like all of them, Olwen had been keen to join battle when they finally caught up with the Starflyer. It was an event Stig and Bradley had soon realized was never going to happen if they kept getting delayed by the Institute patrols. Bradley had made the decision to adopt the head-on collision tactic. Only the state-of-the-art armor suits worn by the Paris team and Cat’s Claws could perform that duty, which left the rest of the Guardians more than a little envious.
Another of the big Loko trucks they’d liberated from the depot growled past Stig’s armored car. Jim Nwan was driving; his gauntlet waved as he maneuvered the truck into point position.
The beezees Stig had taken to keep alert during the second full day of driving made it hard for him to slacken his grip on the steering wheel. They narrowed the brain’s focus onto one task and kept the neurons zinging with the precision of a processor; people had kept doing the same thing for up to a week when they were dosed up. You didn’t need sleep, but it became difficult for the mind to nudge its way out of the thought-loop that bestowed so much attention.
“Anybody else between us and the Anculan?” he asked.
“No reported sightings,” Keely said. “I’m still not getting anything close to the bridge. The road net ends a hundred sixty kilometers this side of it. Even the redundant systems have failed after that. Nobody’s picking up any radio coming from the south, either. I’m still getting check signals from Rock Dee on the short wave but that’s all.”
“Okay.”
At their current speed, and assuming no further clashes with the Institute, they’d reach the Anculan bridge in another two and a half hours. Best guess put the Starflyer there an hour ago. They didn’t know exactly; communications had fallen off dramatically when the Starflyer convoy passed that magic sixty-kilometer marker. What the Institute had done to kill the road’s net was subject to a lot of debate among the Guardians.
Stig was desperate for some news. Anculan was where the clans were making their biggest effort to intercept the Starflyer on Highway One. If that didn’t slow it down, then the whole pursuit would be for nothing, and they’d have to depend on the planet’s revenge and the Final Raid. Not that he would ever criticize Bradley Johansson, but for plans that had been a hundred years in the making, their time frame was starting to look pretty shitty. Besides, the bombing run on 3F Plaza made this personal; he wanted to take down the Starflyer himself. The beezees was loose enough to second-track that thought.
Bradley bent over and gave his short-wave array a hard look. “That sounds like Samantha.”
Stig’s eyes never left the road. He’d isolated his inserts from any external communication to help his concentration. Up in front Jim Nwan’s truck was belching out a lot of exhaust fumes. The hard blue of the sky splashed strong waves along its elaborate chrome finish. He tried to lock down any repetitive pattern in the reflections. “What does she say?”
>
“They’re at the last manipulator station. I guess that means Adam got through with their equipment.”
“Good man, Adam, no traitor is going to derail him.”
“Hang on …” A grin flicked over his lips. “She keeps saying she’s ready to surf the next wave.” He switched the short-wave array to transmit. “Message acknowledged. Have a good day at the beach.” His reply was automatically repeated ten times.
Olwen dropped her arms onto the back of Bradley’s seat, her head resting in her hands, and grinning in satisfaction. “Tomorrow! Dreaming heavens, can you believe this. It’s going to happen tomorrow!”
“Not if I catch it first,” Stig grunted.
Olwen and Bradley shared a glance.
“So, Bradley, how do you feel about this?” Tiger Pansy asked. She was oblivious to the way Olwen’s mouth wrinkled with disapproval. “You’ve waited a long time for it to happen.”
“I’m not sure I feel anything,” Bradley said. “I just keep focused on the events happening around us. I know I set them all in motion but I don’t think I’d ever tried to visualize them for myself before. It’s quite something, like looking out on an avalanche as it thunders down a mountain and knowing you threw the first pebble.”
“It’s an avalanche that’ll bury that bastard Starflyer,” Olwen said. “We’ll see to it.”
“Thank you, my dear. It is your clans that have gifted me a great deal of strength over the decades. You have no idea what it is like to be surrounded by contempt and hatred and yet still have somebody believe in you.”
“Commonwealth’s going to owe us, huh?”
“They always have, they just never knew it. So do you know yet, dear Olwen, what you’re going to do afterward?”
“No. Never even thought about it. It’s still kind of hard to accept this is happening. I always expected it would be the next generation who helped the planet have its revenge, or the one after. Never mine.”
“Ah well, the day after tomorrow we will all have to sit down and think about what is to become of us. The clans will have to transform themselves. Into what, who knows.”
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 219