“Not you,” he said.
“Yes, me,” said the bot. “You know I have to come. The honeysuckle.”
He yawned and licked his teeth. They tasted vile. Gypsy Blossom passed him a bottle of fruit juice. He twisted off the cap and drank.
“Better,” he said. A moment later, he sighed. “You’re right.” And she was, of course. She and the honeysuckle were their only hope of avoiding traps or knowing when the humans launched their counterattack.
The technicians were done. Two collapsed the launch-stand into a compact bundle of pipes and braces and tucked it between a missile and the side of a truck. There was a similar bundle beside the other missile. They wedged themselves into the narrow spaces that were left, and then they cradled rifles and antitank missile launchers in their arms.
Engines were starting.
He was awake enough now. He slid beneath the wheel.
“You’re driving?” She sounded surprised.
“Climb in and sit down.” Did she think he would want to miss this moment? It was their last hope. If it failed, they were doomed. If it succeeded…
“Follow them.”
“I know.” They could not reach the surface by the same tunnels that had led them here. But there were others, including some that reached the surface much closer to their targets. He remembered the briefing that morning, before he had let exhaustion claim him. He remembered the route. He remembered what they planned to do.
Or try to do. There were no guarantees of success. But this was the last chance that they could see to claim any sort of victory.
They would have to get as close as possible. Or the humans would have too much time to respond. Enough time to doom them all.
He let his teeth show and curled his upper lip in a way that said he intended nothing resembling a smile. Then he stepped on the throttle and steered the truck into its place in the procession.
The refugees who watched from the cavern’s edges said nothing. They did not cheer or wave or wish good luck aloud. But they too, every one of them, showed teeth in as feral a display as his.
If the humans in their ships could only see it…
One could. There was Marcus Aurelius Hrecker, standing near the dark opening where the road left the wide parking area. Flanked by two burly guards, he was watching the trucks and the missiles, absorbing the preparations for departure. He spotted Dotson and raised one stiff-bladed hand to the level of his chest. The arm of the guard on that side lifted briefly, tugged by the chain that bound Rac and human together. The guard scowled and jerked his arm. Mark’s hand came down, and his face looked pained.
The other humans would only laugh, he thought.
Teeth were no threat to them.
But he stared at the back of the truck ahead of him. The technicians grinned back at him, showing their teeth too.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker had been sidelined. So too would every other human be. For just a moment Dotson thought that might even, someday, include the Gypsies, the Remakers, the gods of the Racs themselves.
But then he snorted and shook his head and stared at the two missiles that pointed their noses at him. He hoped their engines would not ignite prematurely.
The opening from which they finally emerged was surrounded by jagged walls of masonry. The only way they could be seen was from directly overhead, and when Dotson looked up, he could see no stars.
“It’s still cloudy,” said Gypsy Blossom. She shivered, and for a moment Dotson was aware despite his pelt of the chill in the air. “But the rain is past. Most of it. It’s pouring on the coast.”
“The honeysuckle, right?” He felt her nod in the flexing of the seat. “They’ll see us anyway, as soon as we can see them.”
Perhaps they could see already, he thought. The Ajax was in orbit, high above, looking down, and it had sensors that would not be blocked by clouds. On the other hand, if the rain would only return, the drops of falling water might confuse a radar image. It depended on the frequency they used.
Whether the Racs could see the Ajax or not, as soon as there was a line of unobstructed sight between them and the ship, the humans might be alerted.
Racs, like their wild predecessors, had good night vision. But this night was dark even so, too dark, as much an obstacle to them as to the humans, and to prove it the truck lurched as a tire sank into a crater in the pavement. Dotson wished they dared to use headlights as they had the night before.
A small hand-held light bloomed in the back of the truck ahead of him. He glimpsed the missiles it carried, the feet of two armed technicians, the road before him. He spun the wheel to avoid another pothole.
The other trucks now had lights as well, and he could see that there were still walls between them and that spot in the sky where the Ajax hung. The lights ahead of him swung from side to side as the lead truck stopped. There was no flare of brake lights; they had been disconnected.
“This is where I check the ground ahead.” Gypsy Blossom was already climbing from the truck’s cab and walking toward a large bank of honeysuckle beside the road. Someone aimed a light ahead of her, but she flapped an arm to say she did not need the help. The first raindrops hit the windshield.
The bot did not push into the viny thicket. She stopped even before her feet touched the outlying shoots. She unfurled the ruff around her shins and burrowed her roots into the soil. She stood still, moving only when she slowly turned to face the way they had been going down the road.
A few minutes later, she was walking along the line of trucks, saying, “There’s no one ahead of us. They’re inside, out of the weather.”
“The robots?”
“They don’t leave the valley. You know that.”
“Then let’s move.”
“Use your dimlights,” said the bot. “It’s safe enough.”
It was raining harder when she sat down again beside Dotson, smelling of wet and soil. He turned on both the windshield wiper and the small lights set in the ends of his front bumper.
The trucks ahead began to move. They accelerated, speeding up as much as the improved visibility permitted in the rain. Five of the trucks turned right, onto a road that would lead them to the edge of the bluff overlooking the valley. The other four kept on straight, heading for an overlook that would give them a clear view of the Gypsies’ old landing field.
There were only four of the human ships left on First-Stop. Two, the Drake and the Saladin, were in the valley. The other pair, the Gorbachev and the Bonami, sat on the landing field.
When Dotson and his companions reached the brink of the valley, they found the human ships standing high but not quite so high as the bluff tops, seeming almost close enough to reach out and touch. They quickly turned their vehicles to face away. The technicians leaped from their niches in the back and hurriedly set up the launch-stands on the ground.
Dotson looked over his shoulder in time to see them heft the first missile into position. They had debated firing them from the backs of the trucks. The effects of the missiles’ exhaust on truck cabs and drivers and chances to get away alive had almost persuaded them against that option. But then Edge-of-Tears had said, “We are expendable. We have to be, for if we give them any chance at all to anticipate our blow, we will fail. They will be safe.”
“But,” had said a technician, “a launch-stand is stabler. We’ll have a better chance of hitting them if we take just a little more time.”
The rain grew gentler. Just above the far rim of the valley, Dotson saw a few stars. It was clearing then. Perhaps by the time they were done with this night’s work, the sky would be clear and the few humans left alive would be able to look down and see what the Racs had done.
The two ships in the valley sparkled with lights. Dotson saw them as things of beauty and dread and envy. “We’ll have our own one day,” he said, and he felt more than saw Gypsy Blossom nod beside him.
Something was happening in the valley. More lights were gleaming. Weapons ports were opening. A spot
high on the Saladin glowed hot, and the third truck to the left flashed into vapor and slag, missiles and all.
But the other missiles were on their stands and ready. As one the remaining technicians punched the launch buttons. The missiles’ engines ignited. Plumes of flame and smoke splashed against the ground and the rears of the trucks. One fuel tank exploded. Something metallic slammed against the side of Dotson’s truck, and his leg went numb.
The humans’ particle beams caught two of the missiles while they were still in the air. Two of the remaining six missiles struck that remnant of Worldtree Center the humans had occupied for their own purposes. The other four struck the ships, two apiece, and ripped gaping holes in their sides.
At the same time, two dozen lines of fire reached from the ruins in the valley below the bluffs as other Racs fired antitank missiles. More explosions peppered the sides of the ships. They seemed puny beside the earlier blasts, but they still gouged more deeply into the enemy fortresses.
Fire bloomed in the ships’ wounds. Alarms hooted. Particle beams and missiles and cannon sought targets both on the bluff and in the valley.
Yet their aim was not precise. The rain of fire hesitated oddly, beams lost their focus, targets were missed. The effect was of a giant who had lost his only eye and must blindly flail after a horde of tormentors.
Dotson felt the technicians leaping into the back of the truck. He hit the throttle as hard as he could. Wheels spun and gripped. The truck beside him lurched ahead, and then he was behind it, accelerating, leaving the overlook just as the ground where he had been turned into an expanding cloud of incandescent vapor.
Neither Dotson nor the other surviving drivers went very far. As soon as there was a mound of rubble between them and the sight of war, they turned parallel to the valley. When they found another opening, they stopped.
Dotson had to peel his leg from the seat. His fingers found the stickiness of blood and the open lips of a gash high on his thigh. Briefly he wondered why the wound did not hurt, but then he saw the others were not waiting for him. They were already silhouetted against the glow of fire and the flash of ordnance in the valley, their legs moving slowly, cautiously toward the valley’s rim.
He hobbled after them until he too could see what was going on, and there they stood, together. Dotson and the other drivers, Gypsy Blossom, the remaining technicians, watching as the humans fired every weapon at their command. It was clear, however, that that defense could not be enough. The blow Dotson and his fellows had struck from atop the bluffs had crippled the ships, and the Racs below were unleashing every gun and missile that remained to them.
They must know, Dotson thought, that their ships will never fly again. We have done that much, and now their deaths are only a matter of time. No one will want to take prisoners. We will kill them all. Or they will hide within their ships until they starve.
He hoped those who had gone to attack the ships on the landing field had fared as well.
The battle below was as desperate as any battle could possibly be, yet the din of war seemed distant, muted. When Gypsy Blossom touched his arm and quietly said, “There’s still the Ajax,” he had no trouble hearing her.
“What can they do?”
“They can’t land, but Mark said they have nuclear bombs and warheads.”
“They wouldn’t use them.” He hoped he was right. “They wouldn’t dare.”
But she was shaking her head. “If they are anything like the Engineers the honeysuckle remembers…”
CHAPTER 27
Tamiko Inoue hovered just within the door of the room that was Sunglow’s prison chamber. Her hands were behind her back, taut muscles in her arms and neck shouting that they were clenched in desperation. Her face was frozen stiff and pale, her mouth a grim line, her eyes wide and frightened. Her forehead glistened.
Sunglow could only stare and replay the words the human had uttered as soon as the door had slid shut behind her.
“You’ve won,” Tamiko had said.
“What do you mean?” What could she mean? Had Dotson somehow forced the Engineers to say they would release her, set her back on her own world, send her back to him? How could he have done that?
“You’ve destroyed our ships.”
“The ones on the ground?” But there were no others, were there? Not here, not at First-Stop, except for the one that held her. And that one was safe, out of reach from the ground, untouchable, impregnable. Certainly she would have known if it were not.
Tamiko nodded jerkily. “Every one of them. All of them.”
“Then we’re safe! I can go back.”
The human head was shaking now, almost trembling in its negation. “No. There’s no way to take you back. This ship can’t land. Just the others.”
“You mean I’m stuck.” A prisoner forevermore. Yet that thought did not strike her as she might have feared it would. She was doomed, but her world was safe.
Or was it? Tamiko was all nod and shake and tremble and then two ominous sentences: “You’ll be better off with us. We have one last card to play. We can’t leave them thinking they’re better than us. Or else, when we come back…”
Sunglow pushed off the bunk and hovered over the human woman. Tamiko shifted to one side, flicked the veedo on, and said, “Look at that.”
The grainy, foreshortened view was enough by itself to say the camera was attached to the orbiting Ajax. The ships stood in the valley and on the landing field. Smoke billowed in and around them. Rac troops gathered on the ground at their feet. There was no sign of combat or of prisoners. Bodies were arranged in lines like the pickets of flattened fences.
“You killed them all,” said Tamiko. “You didn’t have to do that.”
Sunglow almost laughed. “What do you want them to do? Make pets out of them? You said yourself, there’s no way to send them home.”
“And you wrecked the drives. But just in case, we’ll put some nukes right there. Then we’ll…”
“Sterilize our world.”
“No. No-no. We can’t do that. We couldn’t possibly, not with ten times the bombs we carry. But we can make the soil and water toxic to you and raise clouds of dust that will block the sun for months. The plants that feed you will die. If you don’t freeze, you’ll starve.”
Sunglow was close once more. “Then we’re dead anyway.”
A trembling nod. “Most of you. But we won’t be able to settle here for centuries.”
“And that’s our victory.”
“A Pyrrhic victory.”
Sunglow could not possibly have recognized the reference, but she thought she understood its meaning: the victory of the pyre. She also understood she could no longer hope ever to see Dotson Barbtail again. She would never bear his children. She would never…
“You’ll be okay.” Tamiko sounded placating, as if she thought the Rac’s personal survival was all that mattered to her. “We’ll take you with us, take care of you. We’ve got some males too. You can have cubs, or whatever you call them. And…”
Sunglow blinked as tears flooded her eyes. There was only one chance of avoiding the fates her captors intended for her people and for her.
As calmly and as deftly as if she were spearing a tasty-tail, an aquatic dumbo larva, for a snack, she reached out her hand and extended a single finger and its claw.
The movement felt like it took forever, but the eternity through which it stretched could not have lasted half a second.
Tamiko neither tried to flee nor closed her eyes as the claw approached her throat.
Nor did she scream when Sunglow ripped through her flesh. The only sound she made was the gurgle of blood in her windpipe.
She was no longer capable of protest when Sunglow reached into her thigh pocket and found not one cardkey but two. The Rac took them both.
The guard in the corridor proved no more difficult to kill.
Sunglow slammed the wall with one hand, pulled herself to one side, activated the door, and as it began to
slide open grunted desperately as if she and Tamiko were struggling. The guard thrust himself through the opening, his gun in one hand, ready to intervene.
The sight of Tamiko stretched upon the room’s narrow floor, blood extending sticky tendrils toward the walls, froze him for just the instant Sunglow needed to use her claw once more.
She clutched Tamiko’s cardkeys in the hand that jutted from her cast. The other held the gun she had taken from the guard. The door of her prison was closed behind her.
The ship murmured with the sounds of humans. Occasional soft, sliding footsteps. The small collisions of solid objects. Voices that raged and soothed and rang with vengeful determination.
What could she do now?
She wished she looked like a human. As a Rac, she would be recognized instantly. She would have to shoot as soon as any human appeared in front of her.
But she could not possibly shoot them all. Sooner or later they would kill or capture her, and then the remaining humans would destroy all that was left of her world.
A buzzing sound heralded one of the humans’ tiny robots. It rounded a corner, its wings folded against its back, its propeller still, its insectile legs a blur of motion. She poised her gun, but it gave no indication that it even noticed her much less knew that she was loose. Besides, it was electronic. If it was going to cry alarm, it would have done so already.
When it was gone, she stared at the cardkeys in her hand. She needed help. And there was only one place where she could find it.
The gun in her free hand burped almost before she realized that a human had emerged from a door just three steps away.
“Hey!”
Someone else was in that room. Someone else had seen the body jerk and go limp and fall while blood pooled upon the floor.
She reached the door before the other human could do more than lay one hand on the room’s communications panel.
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