by Neal Asher
‘I don’t think the Theocracy have anything to celebrate at present, and I think they’ll find this particular firework display rather costly,’ said Cormac.
Gant came to a halt with his APW cradled across his chest and nodded at the sky behind them. ‘You seen that?’
Cormac glanced round but could see nothing else of note, but then the flute grass stood in a tangle two metres tall there, so blocked out most of the starlit sky. He stood up, Mika and Apis also, and they all quickly saw to what Gant referred.
‘I think this was what I missed on Samarkand, wasn’t it?’ said the Golem.
Cormac glanced at him, trying to read something in his expression. Yes, on Samarkand . . . Gant had never got to see this. He’d been ripped apart, underground, less than an hour before Dragon had appeared in the sky – as it had done here.
The latest ‘moon’ of Masada was a small reddish-grey penny in the dark sky, nowhere near as impressive as the descending giant Calypse, or the moon Amok that was following it down – that was until you tried to grasp the fact that this was a living creature.
‘What, now, do you think?’ said Gant.
‘Indeed,’ Cormac replied.
Apis looked at the two of them, his expression showing stubborn anger. ‘You never tell me anything,’ he protested.
Cormac was pleased at such a reaction – it was better than the kind of dead efficiency the lad had heretofore displayed.
He explained, ‘Dragon has probably destroyed every laser array up there, but we think it unlikely it’s now just going to meekly sail away into the sunset. That creature is a very large imponderable . . . so to speak.’
‘Perhaps it’s going to die . . . like it said,’ Apis suggested.
‘Or live,’ Gant added.
‘Or do both,’ said Mika. They all turned to look at her, and she went on, ‘Well, it didn’t seem able to make up its mind as to exactly what it was going to do.’
‘Quite,’ said Cormac, and was about to go on when suddenly Scar snarled, his eyes fixed on the sky. They all turned back to observe Dragon.
‘It’s moving,’ said Gant.
Cormac could not tell for sure, but then he did not have Gant’s eyes. He glanced at Scar. ‘What’s happening, Scar – or do I mean Cadmus? What’s Dragon going to do next?’
‘Dragon is coming,’ announced Scar.
They gazed back up at it and could now see clearly that it was moving. Dropping lower and lower, it grew larger and larger, clouds of vapour boiling around it, then flashes of orange fire, so that soon it looked like the open circular mouth of a furnace. Distantly, at first, there came to them a steady thunderous grumbling that grew in volume. Cormac gazed around, wondering where they could run for safety, but there was nowhere – if this gigantic sphere was coming down on where they stood then they had no chance at all of getting away. Once again, he resumed the view he had taken aboard the landing craft: if Dragon wanted to kill them, then there was little in these circumstances that they could do about it.
Lower now in the heavens it revealed the vast storm of fire behind it – a wake that continued to boil out in a wide V to cover half the sky.
‘It’ll come down about fifty kilometres away,’ said Gant. As a Golem, he possessed the ability to range the creature and work out its angle of descent and its relative velocity.
In the clouds behind and over the surface of the leviathan, forks of lightning flickered, and occasional gunshot discharges hit the ground. The grumbling had become a roar and the ground began to vibrate in sympathy.
‘Suicide?’ Cormac wondered.
‘It’s not coming down completely freefall – must be using AG,’ Gant replied.
At the last it almost seemed to dip, to slam down in the distance, and the fiery cloud of its wake rolled on, blasting up dark clouds and weird vortices of flame.
‘On the ground,’ ordered Cormac.
They flung themselves down with their heads sheltered behind their packs – being the only barrier between themselves and what was coming. The ground shuddered and rocked, and it seemed the whole vast plain dropped a few metres before rising back into position. The roaring increased in volume, then the hurricane was upon them. The flute grass flattened before the blast, and for a short time the air above was filled with long stems and papery fragments, these skirling a hideous dirge as they hurtled past. Then came earth, smoke, and a further rippling of the ground. As this blast-wave passed, it tried to suck them into its wake. After a few minutes, it died and broke into random eddies and the occasional mini-tornado that played strange music with still unbroken stems of grass. In time, they were able to stand up and view the devastation of the flattened plain – and the distant funeral pyre. Scar, tilting his head to the sky, let out a long and mournful howl. Cormac wondered if this was for Dragon . . . or for something Dragon had done.
Soldiers were revving up the engines of the few machines that would be of use on the surface, and checking weapons that seemed in pristine condition. Thorn had slept, despite the cacophony that seemed only to grow since the destruction of the arrays. Then, upon waking to discover Stanton and Jarvellis gone with soldiers to unload Lyric II, he made his way to Lellan’s control room where, after the guards finally let him through, he found further frenetic activity.
‘You have to understand that we are just as unprepared for this as they are,’ said Lellan, during a brief pause when people weren’t approaching her for orders, explanations, even comfort, as the military machine she had built reconfigured itself for these strange circumstances. ‘There’s a few units of the Theocracy military on the surface, but mostly it’s the proctors, and they only possess limited armament.’
‘The arrays,’ said Thorn. ‘What else would they have needed?’
‘Exactly,’ said Lellan, nodding. ‘On the surface they only have hand weapons, aerofans, a few military carriers and armoured cars, and limited antipersonnel weapons. For more than a century they’ve had no need for heavy armour, missile launchers, or anything with more punch than a hand grenade. Why bother with anything else when in a minute you can summon a satellite laser strike accurate and powerful enough to take out anything bigger than an aerofan?’
Fethan, who had only then arrived, interjected, ‘About four of the arrays were accurate enough to target and take out single individuals, but the Theocracy never bothered – it meant using a huge amount of power, and when was there ever a single individual offering a sufficient threat to ’em?’
Thorn glanced at him, noticed the girl Eldene walking a pace behind him, the pulse-rifle hung from a strap over her shoulder, obviously an unfamiliar weight to her. To Lellan he said, ‘Surely that makes it all a lot easier for you?’ He had already guessed the answers Lellan might give him, but wanted confirmation.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we never bothered building any armoured vehicles or any launchers that could not be carried by a man, for the same reasons – the arrays could just take them out. All our forces are kitted essentially for guerrilla warfare, and that kit is limited in quantity – we never expected to be in a position to take all our forces to the surface at once.’
‘Bastards woulda used the arrays at leisure,’ said Fethan.
‘Can you take the surface with what you have?’ Thorn asked.
‘Yes, only to lose it again,’ Lellan replied. Thorn studied her queryingly. ‘Charity,’ she went on, ‘is just a great big training camp for the military. It’s spun over to one gee, so the fifty thousand active troops there are training in gravity higher than we have down here. So there’s them, and they can come down in landers at any time. With the big ships of the fleet down, they can unload launchers and tanks, and in the end, if all else fails, they can bombard us from orbit with atomics.’
‘Seems no-win,’ admitted Thorn.
‘In the end it’s down to Polity intervention, and we’ve always known that. The guy at the bottom of a well with a bag of rocks is always gonna lose to the guy at the top,’ said Fethan.
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br /> ‘It’s a balancing act,’ said Lellan. ‘We want to capture the surface for long enough to get the ballot over eighty per cent, and then to ask for help from the Polity. We need to create enough disorder so that the Polity can justifiably intervene, but not so much that the Theocracy are forced to go nuclear.’
‘Never clear-cut, is it?’ said Thorn.
‘No,’ said Lellan, moving away with the latest group dressed in camouflage fatigues who had demanded her attention. ‘Always dirty, and infected.’
Thorn now turned to Fethan and Eldene. ‘And probably deeper and dirtier than even she knows,’ he muttered, stepping past them to Polas, who had been listening in to their conversation whilst keeping half an eye on his consoles and screens. It seemed that most of the tasks required from him at present he was managing to automate.
‘I want to see that recording again,’ Thorn said, resting a hand on the back of Polas’s chair.
Polas glanced up from his instrumentation and eyed him dubiously. ‘They say you’re ECS,’ he said. ‘Were you sent here to help us, or just make fruitless inquiries?’
‘I wasn’t sent. I ended up here by accident,’ Thorn replied.
Polas raised an eyebrow as he opened a box underneath the console and from it removed a computer disc, which he shoved into a slot in the console. Again, on one of the screens before him, the recent events that had occurred above played out.
‘Stop it there,’ said Thorn, and Polas froze on the image of wreckage hurtling away from the dispersing explosion. ‘Can you move backwards slowly with this set-up?’
‘We’re not entirely primitive here,’ said Polas.
Flickering, the image jerked back in frames: wreckage reversed back into a brightening explosion as the laser array re-formed.
‘There,’ said Thorn. ‘That came out of Dragon.’
Polas squinted at the screen, and adjusted the image back, and they saw for certain an object spat from Dragon just before the creature’s strike on the laser array. He now moved the image back and forth until the object was at its most visible. ‘We should be able to close in on that and clean it up a bit,’ he said. He opened his box of discs and sorted through them. Finally selecting one, he held down two buttons while removing the recording and replacing with the new disc he selected. The image remained in place and a grid flicked up to cover it. Using a ball control, he adjusted the grid to centre the object in one of the grid’s squares. Pressing down the control, he called up a target cursor in the corner of the screen, and then zeroed it on that square.
‘Here we go,’ he said, pressing down the control again to select.
The image broke apart, then the one from the selected co-ordinates began to re-form in small squares across the entire screen. After a moment, a blurred and vaguely rectangular shape became evident. With the computer chuntering away, and each of the squares breaking and re-forming into smaller pixels, the image became steadily clearer.
Before it had completely re-formed Polas said, ‘Military lander.’
‘Theocracy?’ Thorn asked.
Polas nodded.
Thorn studied the image as it continued to clear. ‘Now what was Dragon doing with that?’
Polas shrugged and, as the computer finished its work, he used the ball control to pull up a menu and save the same image.
‘Any idea where it came down?’ Thorn asked.
‘I might be able to find out,’ said Polas, gazing down at his open box of discs, ‘if it crossed any of our viewing stations. It’ll take some time, though.’
‘Please do so – this might be important. I’m sure Lellan would be as interested to know who was in that craft as am I.’
Even though it was quite likely Dragon could have snatched a Theocracy craft on the way here, perhaps to seek information, perhaps just for the hell of it, it seemed odd to Thorn that it had then released it in one piece – especially after seeing what Dragon did to the laser arrays.
At last, in a moment of calm, Carl paused while staring at the forward screen display, and tried to absorb the fact that a circumstance more unlikely than the most extreme he had trained for had now come about. This ground tank – like the other nineteen possessed by the Underground, part of an apocalyptic scheme thought up by Lellan’s predecessor – had been retained only for use in the tunnels in the event of an underground attack. No one had even considered the possibility that it might be used on the surface, except perhaps that same predecessor. Carl remembered him as a strange little man who, after raising Lellan to the position she now occupied, had shuffled off to hang himself in Pillar-town Two. His scheme back then had apparently been a mass breakout to kidnap the Hierarch during one of his periodic visits, and he had only scrapped it because the said dignitary had ceased to visit the surface.
The tanks to either side of Carl – three in all, since the others had long since gone to other break-out caverns – were already belching steam from their exhausts as hydrogen turbines wound up to speed. On the surface these would cease to function in the oxygen-bereft atmosphere, but by then they would no longer need the huge torque output of the engines, and could go back onto battery drive.
Glancing back, Carl saw that the rest of his crew was ready: Beckle on the heavy pulse-cannon only recently installed; Targon on the medkit, replacement duty, and just about everything else; and Uris on logistics and navigation. After listening to the communication that came direct to his comlink, he announced to them, ‘Lellan says time to give them their wake-up call.’
‘I was hoping to put them to bed,’ said Beckle, fiddling with the adjustments inside his targeting visor.
Carl reached out and clicked over the switches that started the turbines and immediately they began to cycle their way up to speed – the tank vibrating and groaning like some waking monster. Ahead, the first tank turned towards their exit tunnel, its treads flaking up stone from the floor.
‘We’re still in tunnel seven?’ he asked.
‘Confirmed, tunnel seven,’ said Uris. ‘Gets us into the centre of the coming shit storm.’
Gripping the control column, Carl engaged the turbine and eased the tank forwards, as he had earlier done during the infrequent practice sessions with this machine. It still seemed almost insane to him that they were heading for the surface. With the laser arrays functioning, there had always been small windows of opportunity they could use for a surface attack, outside of which their losses immediately soared above ninety per cent. Never, though, had there been a window large enough to drive a tank through, so to speak – it seemed almost unnatural.
‘What’s our target?’ Beckle asked.
‘Nothing from Lellan yet on that,’ Carl replied.
‘It’ll be either the Agatha or Cyprian compounds,’ said Uris. ‘They’re the nearest ones with a military presence.’
‘Both have autogun towers, and both have over three thousand troops in situ,’ said Beckle, probably wondering if the pulse-cannon was enough.
‘Confirmed on Agatha compound,’ said Uris. ‘Full plan feeding across.’ He studied his readouts in silence for a moment before continuing with, ‘Four towers and, at last count, three thousand five hundred troops. We hit this tower at 0.33 from mark time.’
Carl glanced at the map screen before him, as the coordinates came up. He then concentrated on where he was going – T-2, 3, and 4 ahead of him now motoring up into the darkness of tunnel seven.
Uris went on, ‘After we’ve taken down the tower, we’re to hit anything that comes out by air until things get too hot, then head towards Cyprian to rendezvous with Group Two at second co-ordinates, and head north. Holman is even now mining the area underneath second co-ordinates, where it’s projected the Theocracy ground troops from both bases will meet.’
‘How many should that net us?’ Carl asked.
‘Estimated thirty per cent casualty rate,’ Uris replied.
‘That could mean two thousand dead people,’ said Targon, who often acted as their conscience as well.
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Glancing across at him, Uris said, ‘More than that when we turn back and hit them again while they’re still reeling. With any luck there won’t be enough of them left to scrape up with a spade.’
The tanks ahead, now going onto the straight upslope, were closing in their two wide treads, which had until then been necessarily apart for steering purposes. Carl operated the control to set his tank doing likewise, turned on the tank’s side-lights, and watched as the lead tank hit the earthen wall at which the tunnel terminated. Now with its treads closed to form a continuous belt, that tank opened its tread dips and began to plough its way through. Once up on the surface, the treads opened out again for steering and fast manoeuvring, but Carl had to wonder if, even with their light foamed-metal construction, they would be able to proceed on that surface without sinking.
‘What about the infantry? When do they go in?’ asked Beckle.
‘That old tunnelling machine with the compacter and plascrete spraying arms’ll be following us directly, so the tunnel should be ready about an hour after we hit the towers. Infantry’ll be coming up then, to take the bases,’ explained Uris.
‘Then where for us?’ inquired Beckle.
Uris did not reply – he just looked at Carl, who glanced round at him briefly before replying to the question they all wanted an answer to.
‘You know how it is – it depends on exactly what they’ve got on the surface,’ he said. ‘We get proctors or army running around with smart hand-launchers, then we’re back to foot-slogging. These bastard lumps of metal make easy targets.’ He slapped the control console before him, and did not add that Lellan would tell them to abandon only once losses in the tank section grew higher than the gains – and with only twenty tanks to lose, those were odds Carl did not care to study too closely.
Loman did not know whether to feel relief, anger or sadness. Yes, Behemoth had destroyed every one of the laser arrays, killing thousands of good men and breaking the Theocracy’s steel grip on the population below, but Faith, Hope and Charity were still intact, and the creature had crashed itself into the surface of the planet. And, now it was gone, there was only the unnecessary chanting of the Septarchy Friars filling the upper channels, when those same channels could be so useful to him.