“I’m not,” Ehta told the girl. She wasn’t sure if Roan could see the nasty smile on her face behind the flowglas of her helmet. “Jump in.”
Roan stared at the narrow driver’s seat at the front of the rover. “You can’t expect—”
“You know how to drive. I saw you drive Thom all over Niraya. Get in,” Ehta said, “or explain to all these nice people why they have to die.”
The girl climbed into the seat. She had to duck her head over to one side to avoid the barrel of the cannon, but she could reach the steering wheel and the pedals just fine.
“We’ll send you all the data we can,” the engineer promised. “Let you know where the landers touch down. That’s about all the help we can give you.”
“I’ll take it,” Ehta said. “Roan, get us moving.”
The girl goosed the accelerator and they shot away over the loose soil of the moon, a vast plume of dust jumping up behind them.
The interceptors burst apart, one by one. Big chunks of metal debris spun and bounced before the web, some of it smashing into the FA.2. The jagged remnants of an interceptor gun hit his canopy head-on and a spiderweb of cracks shot across his view. He jettisoned the canopy, sending it hurtling away. He didn’t need it anymore.
“Scouts coming in,” Thom called.
“Keep them back!” Lanoe shouted. The queenship filled the view ahead. The web twitched as he approached, its filaments readjusting as debris punched tiny holes through its thin substance.
One thin arm of wire rose from the web, its end twisting toward him like a serpent rising from its coil, sniffing the air. Searching him out.
He set the FA.2’s controls to run an automatic program. Reached up and unbuckled his safety harness.
Now came the hard part.
He was still a good kilometer out from the web, still moving fast. The fighter’s retros burned hard to slow the pace. He had no desire to die the way Valk had, from sudden deceleration.
“Lanoe, they’ve seen you!” Thom called.
“Then shoot them!”
The deceleration pushed him backward, back into his seat. He grabbed the edge of the fuselage where his canopy used to be and pushed up until he was standing in the cockpit, his head and shoulders outside the fighter. A piece of a blasted interceptor the size of a cow came rolling toward him and he ducked just in time. It would have taken his head off.
Light flashed off to his left. He looked and saw Thom fending off a whole wing of scouts, laying down suppressing fire and maneuvering hard to keep them from catching up with him. Off to his right he saw shadows moving, more scouts or maybe interceptors rushing in to stop him before he reached the web.
He needed to move fast.
With a grace that belied his years, Lanoe flipped himself out of his cockpit and grabbed a jagged piece of metal that used to be one of his airfoils. The whole side of his fuselage was dented in and broken by enemy fire. It hurt to see that damage, when he’d been with the FA.2 for so long.
He knew it was only going to get worse.
He crawled across the fighter’s body, pulling himself along to its undercarriage, wrapping his legs around one of the landing gear. There was so much debris flying past him it was like being in the middle of a dirty snowstorm. He reached for another handhold just as a stray impactor, left over from some long-ago salvo, smashed into the fuselage and he had to yank his hand back in a heartbeat or lose it. The impactor tore open a plastic fairing and shredded the sensitive electronics behind it, and he felt the whole FA.2 lurch to one side, the start of what was going to be a nasty flat spin.
Ahead of him more filaments of the web had lifted away from the main mass, tentacles groping toward him in the dark. There was no more time. He found the panel he wanted, a recessed part of the fuselage about as long as his arm. He got the fingers of his glove under the edge of the panel and tore at it with all his strength. The whole panel came loose, cartwheeling off into the debris cloud. Underneath lay six lumpy spherical objects, each the size of his fist. Bombs, just like the ones he’d used to destroy the geothermal power plant on Aruna.
One by one he tore them loose from their restraining clips, then stuck them to his chest with adhesive patches. He was pretty sure they wouldn’t go off accidentally, that they needed to be armed manually. Pretty sure. He’d never tried anything like this before.
A whip of steel smacked across the back of the FA.2, tearing at its thruster cones. One of them cracked apart and bits of it showered down across Lanoe’s helmet and shoulders, making him duck.
Another filament snared the nose of the FA.2.
A third got its landing gear just a split second later.
The fighter had been decelerating and it was moving nowhere near as fast as Valk had when he’d been caught by the web. Yet when the filaments caught the FA.2 and dropped its velocity to zero in a fraction of a second, there was still a lot of momentum that had to go somewhere.
Lanoe was torn free of the fighter’s undercarriage. He bounced hard off its side, then went spinning off into the dark, like any other piece of debris. Blood rushed to his head and his vision dimmed. He could hear himself breathing a hundred times a minute. Feel his heart bursting in his chest.
“Lanoe!” Thom cried.
The rover bumped and bounced over the rough terrain. Ehta held on tight to the cannon and forced herself not to lock her knees, riding with the suspension rather than against it. Roan kept her head down as she drove, as if she expected a lander to come crashing down on her at any second.
They headed down a long slope at the outer edge of the crater, the rover constantly threatening to come up off its rear wheels and send them somersaulting down to the plain below. Ehta focused on the heads-up display in her helmet that showed the orbiters lining up in the sky above. She thought maybe she saw one, an especially bright star streaking over the horizon.
They had a pretty good idea of where the landers would come down. The landing zone was a stretch of relatively flat ground a hundred kilometers across, right outside the crater. That left a huge amount of ground to cover but—
“There!” Roan shouted, pointing up at the sky.
“I see it,” Ehta replied.
A thin streamer of fire coming straight down from above. Even the thin atmosphere of Aruna was still thick enough to heat the lander up as it fell, and it was glowing a dull red as it touched down in a crown-shaped spray of dust, maybe ten kilometers from their position. Roan poured on the juice, sending them careening over a low rille, so they briefly went airborne, then crashed back down with a thump that made Ehta’s shins ache.
“Easy!” she called, but the girl ignored her. She drove straight for the landing site, then pulled up short three hundred meters away, turning into her deceleration to keep the rover from rolling. They rocked to a stop, side-on to the impact site.
Ehta peered through the slowly settling dust. She thought maybe she could see it, a dark, angular shape in the murk. Climbing to its feet, its legs straightening.
She’d forgotten how big the damned things were.
Six meters high. All legs and pointed claws and nothing else. No head, no face, no eyes. Nothing even remotely human about it. It didn’t even look like an insect, or a cephalopod. It was alien, just alien. Something human eyes were never meant to see.
A wave of dust blew over them, fizzing quietly as it scoured her helmet. The dark shape was moving, she was sure of it. Walking toward them on its many legs.
Then, as the dust cleared a little more, she saw she was wrong. It wasn’t walking toward them.
It was running at full speed.
Its wickedly pointed claws stabbed at the ground, shoving its mass forward until it was bounding at them, one or two legs always in the air, reaching as if it could extend those legs across the intervening space and impale them where they stood.
“Shoot it,” Roan said, breathless. Then louder. “Shoot it!”
“I can shoot while you drive,” Ehta called back. She broug
ht the cannon around on its pintle mount and tried to aim. No virtual Aldis sights here, not so much as an iron tab at the end of the barrel to help her get a bead on the thing. She squeezed her trigger and the particle beam spat from the gun, scoring a deep black line through the soil between them and the lander. She brought her aim up a little, just as Roan threw the rover into gear and got them moving again, lurching forward in an arc that took them around the lander. Ehta fired again and again, trying to get a feel for the cannon, trying to hit something.
Her beam finally cut across the lander’s front legs, digging in deep through its cladding and into the bundles of wires inside. A leg came loose, severed near its root, and the lander tumbled forward, rolling with its momentum, knocked off its feet.
Ehta whooped in joy, but not for very long.
A thing with that many legs could spare a few. It was up again in an instant, running toward them just as fast as before.
And just off to Ehta’s left three more of them were coming down, burning through the atmosphere and striking the ground hard enough to leave craters.
Lanoe bounced off a chunk of debris hard enough that he saw stars. He couldn’t catch his breath. A filament of the web slashed toward him but it snagged on the broken skeleton of a scout, and they both went spinning away.
Behind him as he tumbled he caught stroboscopic images of the FA.2, as more and more thin arms of the web grabbed it and wrapped it up like they were spinning a cocoon. The entire fuselage had collapsed inward and the nose had crumpled upward. The next time he spun around he saw the fighter break in half. Its reactor collapsed, blinding him with a sudden flash of light.
Lanoe
His helmet responded by turning opaque, protecting him from the harsh light. He tried to flick his eyes at the virtual controls to depolarize the flowglas but he could barely feel his face, much less move any of it. As he spun his blood was all shoved into his head and his feet and he felt like an overripe tomato, like he might burst.
Inside the opaque helmet he could only see afterimages, flickering green and blue. He couldn’t hear anything but the thudding of his own heart.
As quickly as the helmet had polarized it cleared again. He squinted to see what was left of the fighter but there was nothing but more debris, more chunks of metal spinning between the thin columns of the filaments.
are you
His back struck something—he never saw what—and he went flying off in a new direction, his arms flailing in front of him. He fought for control, fought to get his right hand over to his left wrist even as centrifugal force kept forcing it back.
There…there…just another centimeter, and the tip of his index finger just brushed the gray surface of the display patch on his wrist. A flashing red screen popped up, filled with warnings—hundreds of collision alerts, oxygen and nitrogen gauges dropping as he hyperventilated, biometric readings telling him what he already knew, that he was perilously close to losing consciousness.
He was so busy looking at the alerts he almost missed the filament that came speeding toward him, its thin end moving so fast it could cut him in two.
receiving
He threw up his arms, knowing it would do no good at all, knowing he was dead, that his incredibly risky gamble had not so incredibly failed, that he had thrown away everything on—
A particle beam stabbed out of the dark, a perfectly straight line studded with gems of pure light. The filament came apart in sections that moved slowly away from each other, inert and harmless, each of them missing Lanoe’s suit by full meters.
He saw more beams slanting down through the debris, carving away at a nest of serpents that twisted and bent beneath him. Filaments he hadn’t even seen, filaments that had been reaching for him, filaments that recoiled now, away from the deadly beams.
Lanoe?
With a start he realized that Thom was trying to contact him. The kid’s voice was incredibly faint and distant. Whether that was because of the congested blood in Lanoe’s eardrums or that his suit’s comms unit had taken damage, he didn’t know.
“I’m alive!” he shouted. “Thom, I’m alive.”
He reached for his wrist again. Fought with physics until he could tap at the display. He switched on his suit’s emergency positioning jets. Fired one after another until he’d canceled out the worst of his spin. Almost instantly the blood flowed out of his head. He felt like he might pass out for a second, and even when that sensation was gone a horrible ball of nausea cramped his stomach, but he was alive.
And right where he wanted to be.
“Go, go, go!” Ehta shouted as a lander came chasing after her. She yanked her feet out of the nylon straps and jumped up on the roll bar so she could swivel the cannon around a hundred and eighty degrees, then poured particle fire into the pursuing drone. It gained ground steadily, even as she chopped limb after limb from its mass.
“Go!” she cried again, not even bothering to line up shots, just spraying fire across the chasing lander’s front. “Faster!” she shouted.
Without warning Roan stamped on the brakes. Ehta’s feet went up in the air and she had to grab hold of the cannon to avoid being thrown clear of the rover. Behind her the lander took a swipe at her with one long, jointed leg but she cut it off before she’d even got her footing back. The thing fell back and she kept cutting away until it toppled over—only then turning to look and see why Roan had stopped so suddenly.
Dead ahead of them stood two landers, one to either side. Closing in.
“Reverse!” Ehta shouted.
Roan worked the gear selector, peering back over her shoulder so she could steer and avoid the dead lander back there. She got them turned around, then threw the rover back into forward motion. Ehta hurriedly got her feet back in the straps and swiveled the cannon around to point at the lander coming from their left—it was the closer of the two, the more dangerous.
They were still coming down. Pillars of fire stretched upward into the sky all around them. They were in serious danger of being surrounded—Roan was a hell of a driver but she needed room to maneuver. Ehta looked around to see where the worst danger lay.
She spotted a gentle slope leading down toward the rim of a small crater. “That way,” she said, pointing, before going back to shooting at the lander on the left.
“That takes us farther away from the camp,” Roan said. Meaning, away from any possible help, Ehta knew.
The girl didn’t seem to understand that they were it, the only chance the engineers had. “These things go for the nearest living thing they can find,” she told Roan. “That’s all they’re programmed for. Leading them away from Derrow’s people is a good thing. Trust me!”
“You’re the boss,” Roan said, and turned the wheel hard to the left.
All around Lanoe filaments of the web rose up and lashed toward him. He dove under them, then twisted around to see how far he was from his goal. Not far now—the ragged hole in the web was only a few hundred meters away—but his suit only had a small reserve of propellant left. The jets built into his boots and shoulders weren’t designed for this kind of acrobatic work.
Above him Thom did what he could, dashing in until the tendrils snapped out toward his BR.9, then climbing hard away to stay out of their range. His PBWs cut through the individual filaments just fine, but there were hundreds of them—thousands. The big triangular spikes they’d seen when they first scanned the queenship had been made of countless strands of metal braided together so tight they looked like one solid mass. It seemed the queenship could control every single one of those threads independently.
One slashed across his arm, and he barely accelerated away in time. It cut through an outer layer of his suit but foam hissed across the tear, sealing it automatically.
Next time he wouldn’t be so lucky. Nor were the filaments the only thing he had to worry about. Debris was hurtling all around him, some moving fast enough to tear him apart if it hit him. His suit didn’t have a vector field to protect him.
>
He needed a lucky break, and he needed it now.
When it came, though, it nearly killed him.
A shadow passed across his view and he swiveled around to look up, away from the queenship—and saw the wreckage of a swarmship drifting toward him. The swarmship was just a skeletal frame, having deployed most of its drones except a few that had been slagged and hung like rotten fruit off its spars. It wasn’t moving fast but there were still tons of metal in the thing and if it fell on him it would crush him like a bug. He reached for his wrist controls and found he only had a tiny reserve of propellant left—nowhere near enough to get him out of the way of the giant skeleton.
He looked desperately for a way out but couldn’t find one. There was no way he could get clear.
Of course, if it was going to hit him, it couldn’t help but strike the queenship. Suddenly every filament around him went taut as they stretched upward to snag the swarmship, trying desperately to cancel its momentum before it could crash into the web. Lanoe touched the controls on his wrist and burned hard, straight down toward the web.
The filaments ignored him. Fending off the swarmship occupied every single one of them.
“Thom,” he called. “Thom—I’m going in!”
“Received,” Thom called back. The kid was busy holding off a group of scouts that had moved in to do what the filaments no longer could.
“Do what you can,” Lanoe told him. “Just—get clear of this and stay alive, and try to—”
“I’ll be here when you come back!” Thom shouted. Lanoe could hear all the warning chimes ringing inside Thom’s cockpit. “I’ll wait for you!”
“Don’t wait too long,” Lanoe said.
The last of his propellant escaped from his jets just as he smacked into the web. He’d half-expected it to grab him and pull him apart but it just twisted under him, individual filaments moving to fill gaps in the web every time a piece of debris fell around him.
He’d been very careful about where he came down. Only a few dozen meters away was the hole that Derrow had managed to punch through the web. Its edges looked ragged, bits of sheared wire sticking up in every direction. Some of them twitched but most were just inert.
Forsaken Skies Page 54