“Movement in 3F,” Keely warned.
Stig hurriedly pulled more images from the grid. Eight people in bulky helmeted environment suits were walking out from the CST management building beside the gateway. They went straight through the pressure curtain.
“This is it,” he announced. “It’s got to be; there’s only an hour and a half left in this cycle.” Amazingly he felt almost nothing, no excitement, no dread. Humanity’s most devious enemy was about to arrive on his world, and here he was regarding the moment with cool anticipation. His virtual hand touched the general communications icon. “Status one, everybody. We think it’s coming. Get to your shelter positions, and be ready to move up to engagement point after we hit 3F Plaza.” He stubbed his cigarette out, and settled back in the chair, closing his eyes so he was completely surrounded by his virtual vision. Blue and chrome virtual hands danced across the blimpbot flight command icons as he organized them into their attack formations. He’d been right about the rain, it degraded their performance characteristics, making them even more sluggish than normal. Dangerous in the squally rainstorm. If a gust knocked one off course, it took a longer time than normal to respond and correct itself.
“People are heading back home,” Olwen said. “Rain makes for a bad protest environment.”
Stig pressed himself up against the glass, looking out toward First Foot Fall Plaza, which rose above the surrounding buildings. “That might help us. They’ll be safer indoors.”
“Will they?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s comfortable to believe.” His hand tapped the cold thick slab of glass. “We’d better get out of here.”
Just before they reached the stairs, a lightning flash went off close to shore. Stig saw the blimpbots heading in across the city boundaries. Seen head-on they were big black circles poised above the buildings, seemingly immobile. They were running dark, with their navigation strobes off. It had transformed them; no longer lumbering obsolete throwbacks that drew a smile as their quaint outline slid overhead, they’d obtained a sinister otherworldly appearance as they closed on the overcast human city to deliver their lethal cargo.
“What if it’s Adam coming through?” Olwen asked.
“I have to act on the information we’ve got, however limited. And that truck wasn’t carrying a weapon. It’s the Starflyer.”
“If it is, it’ll blow the wormhole generator as soon as it’s through. We’ll be cut off.”
“I know,” he said, wishing he could answer differently.
“Will Adam be following?”
“I don’t know. Dreaming heavens! He was supposed to be here before now. That blockade-busting operation he put together should have worked.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Carry on with the attack; there’s nothing else we can do. If it’s Adam on Half Way he’ll guess what we’re going to do.”
“Adam doesn’t know what we have here, what our contingencies are.”
“Johansson does. He was going to join the blockade-busting run.”
“Stig, we have to keep the gateway open. They’ll both be trapped on Half Way, along with the equipment we need.”
“We might just have enough equipment for the planet’s revenge. Not that we’ll need it if we can kill the Starflyer today.”
“Long shot,” she exclaimed bitterly. “Very long shot.”
They went out into the street. Stig activated his force field skeleton suit at level one, establishing a minimum field, and zipped up his leather StPetersburg jacket against the rain. Dark rain clouds were blotting out the sun, bringing a premature twilight to Armstrong City.
He hurried along the deserted street, then took a route along several unlit alleys until they came out on Mantana Avenue just above the government district. Here at least the street lighting worked, casting long yellow-hued reflections off the soaking pavement. Lighting in the shabby old buildings behind the maple fur poplars was intermittent, office windows shining with a pearly white sheen as their polyphoto strips remained on, illuminating empty desks and conference rooms. Shops along the ground floor were all shut, their carbon mesh shutters pulled down and bolted, dark and lifeless inside. There was no traffic on the road itself. Civicbots rumbled along the gutters, amber strobes flashing as their rotary brushes cleared the litter and leaves away, keeping the drains free.
Stig picked up the pace as the rain intensified, almost jogging. Branches on the maple fur poplars were drooping low over their heads as the woolly leaves soaked up the water. Thick droplets splattered down. Lightning flickered somewhere close to the docks.
“Here we go,” he said as they reached the turning for Arischal Lane. It led to Bazely Square, which on ordinary days was a busy intersection, with a big grassed-over roundabout in the middle. It had wide pedestrian subways running underneath, which were their designated shelter point during the bomb run.
He turned to go, then halted. Lightning flashed again. One of the blimpbots was sliding over the government district at the far end of Mantana Avenue, its black bulk materializing silently out of the gray rain as it headed toward them. Olwen followed his gaze. “Dreaming heavens, that’s low,” she gasped. The keel was barely ten meters above the roofs of the various government office buildings. Given the size of the blimpbot, such a separation distance was insignificant. Water poured from its flanks to drench the red pan tiles and solar paneling.
Stig watched it tack around slightly, and begin to fly along the broad thoroughfare. On its final approach, the main ducted fans fore and aft spun up to full thrust. It moved fast, a lot faster than he’d anticipated. The tips of the lofty old maple fur poplars scraped along the blimpbot’s fuselage. Cargo doors swung open all the way along its belly.
“Move,” Stig yelled. His overlay graphics told him it wasn’t carrying a bomb, but it was going to draw the Institute’s attention in a big way. He’d been a fool to stop and gawp like a tourist. Adam would be cursing him.
They sprinted down Arischal Lane as the blimpbot slid gracefully along the avenue behind them. It was audible now, the ducted fans whirring urgently, their pitch shifting as they swiveled constantly to maintain the craft’s course against the wind and rain lashing against it. The engine sound was twinned with a coarse ripping noise as the soaking trees along the avenue grated their way along the fuselage.
It eclipsed the entrance to Arischal Lane, a disturbing dark presence dominating the sky. In Stig’s virtual vision, it was one of nine that made up the first attack wave. They were closing on 3F Plaza in a loose circle, set to arrive within a four-minute window. Three of them already had cherry-red damage warning symbols blinking bright; they’d all struck something on their flight over the city: chimney stacks, rotundas, trees, masts slicing through the fuselage fabric to buckle and snap the geodesic stress structure. The holes made little noticeable difference to their aerodynamics or speed as they droned onward relentlessly.
The communications array at the aerodrome reported a burst of calls from the government district and the Governor’s House. It replied with a standard reply of we are forwarding your message for action. More advanced software began to probe the aerodrome’s network, searching out current flight files. The routines that the Guardians had installed were deflecting them, and attempting to Trojan their own disruptor virals into the Institute systems.
Stig reached the end of Arischal Lane, where there was a subway entrance on the corner of the road. He took the stone steps three at a time, before leaping down to the bottom. Olwen followed with a more nimble jump. They both sped forward through the lighted concrete passage to the central junction in the middle of the roundabout. It was set out like a small concrete crater, with polyphoto strips high on the walls. Rain poured down from the dismal sky to gurgle away slowly through drain grilles partially blocked by litter and dirt.
Images from the sneekbots showed Stig the Institute troops in 3F Plaza had finally been alerted to the massive airborne invaders heading toward them. F
our Land Rover Cruisers drove into a protective arrangement around the MANN truck and its valuable load, their medium-caliber mounted weaponry ready, small sensor stalks swishing back and forth. The remaining Cruisers were fanning out across 3F Plaza, guns pivoting up to the thick rain clouds, tracking around in search of a target. Troops in flexarmor suits were bounding up the steps on the inside of Market Wall, their long hurdling movements agile in the low gravity. Sneekbots reported an ether thick with encrypted traffic. Scarlet targeting lasers stabbed out, foreshortened in the rain.
“They’re strengthening the force field over the gateway,” Keely reported.
“Good. I want it intact. Adam might still get through.” Stig sat down with his back to a wall, pants in the water trickling along the floor. Olwen knelt down beside him, and gripped his hand. He was glad of the contact. Everything they were dealing with was so remote, his virtual vision display reducing it to the level of some training exercise. “It’s about to begin,” he told everyone over the general band.
The blimpbot sailing along Mantana Avenue was the first to arrive at 3F Plaza. It was also the most easily seen as it began to lift higher just before it reached Market Wall. Institute troops who had it in their target sensors opened fire immediately. Ion pulses and kinetic bullets ripped straight through the fuselage fabric, punctured the forward clump of helium cells and streaked out through the upper fuselage. Occasionally, one would strike a carbon-titanium strut in the stress structure, and inflict a modicum of damage. But the geodesic was designed to retain overall integrity under major impact conditions, the load paths simply shifted around fractionally. Overall, it was like shooting a dense patch of air.
The huge blunt curve of the nose glided up over the Enfield entrance. Dispensers fixed into its cargo bays began to fire volley after volley of chaff, flares, and small electronic warfare drones. For a glorious minute, the gloom was completely banished as dazzling white and red stars swarmed over 3F Plaza, trailing thin lines of smoke. Secondary detonations flashed, and silver chaff scintillated across the sky, before sleeting down. Quieter, gray-blue drones zipped about like hummingbirds, impossible to see, sending out powerful disruptive EM pulses.
Troops on the wall were firing nonstop into the blimpbot as more and more of it slid out across 3F Plaza. Then the Cruisers on the ground opened up. Someone among the Institute officers had obviously taken charge. The heavier caliber kinetic and maser weapons were directed first at the ducted fans protruding from the fuselage, then the guns worked down the keel where the cargo bays were situated. Creases began to appear in the fuselage as the geodesic structure finally succumbed to the violence. Tears started to multiply, exposing the clustered helium cells strung along the interior, translucent white spheres like wax bubbles.
The second blimpbot arrived at 3F just as the flares from the first began to splutter out. Several troops shifted their aim, beginning to understand their targeting priorities. Land Rover Cruisers were firing into the cargo holds even as the dispensers began blasting out their ordnance.
Blimpbots three and four arrived simultaneously. By then, number one was sinking rapidly, the rear third of the fuselage twisting savagely as it fell toward the Enfield entrance. Only inertia kept it moving forward as the badly tattered fuselage fabric ripped into fluttering streamers in imitation of black flame. The nose dipped, angling down on one of the Plaza’s big ornamental fountains. Troops on Market Wall who were still underneath the tail end jumped and sprinted out of the way as its descent accelerated sharply. It crashed over the entrance in elegant slow motion amid a cacophony of snapping and splintering sounds from the geodesic struts as they burst apart. Cruisers and trucks raced away across the Plaza as if they’d just been released from a starting grid while the fuselage kept on collapsing, folding in on itself as though some terrible invisible force was intent on squashing the broken craft completely flat. Above it, white and red flares mingled with the rain, to cloak the slippery fuselage fabric in shimmering patterns.
By then blimpbots two and four were also mortally wounded. They started their uncontrollable descent into the Plaza. Two was swinging around as its tail disintegrated, popping the helium cells like party balloons, an abrupt loss of buoyancy that pulled the rear half down with alarming speed. Its nose punched into the middle of three, which bent the entire stress structure.
Despite the size and surprise of the attack, the Institute troops and equipment hadn’t actually taken any losses. Their vehicles were still careering around the Plaza dodging debris as it fell from the sky, and powering away from impact sites. Individual troops were more vulnerable, having to run and jump without any guidance other than looking up—this while maintaining their aggressive firing. So far none of the blimpbots had got near the gateway. A protective ring of Cruisers had drawn up around it, with more skidding into place. The trucks were taking cover in the bigger warehouses and archways along the base of Market Wall.
The firepower from the ground was intense, matching the deluge of flares in lambency. To anyone standing in the middle of the Plaza, the rain clouds were almost obliterated from view behind swirls of light and clots of darkness. Into this balletic graveyard of goliath craft, blimpbot number five arrived at high speed, rushing over Market Wall. Seven, eight, and nine were already drawing fire from the top of Market Wall as they sped inward.
“There are bombs in five and eight,” Stig said. He pumped his force field up to full strength, and wrapped his arms over his head. “Keely, crash the city net.”
Blimpbot five had hauled two-thirds of its length over the Plaza when the big cylinder dropped out of its front cargo bay, almost unnoticed in the antagonistic environment that the decoy dispensers had created. It tumbled down for a couple of seconds until it was below the lip of Market Wall, then an explosive charge inside detonated. The cylinder disappeared inside a dense vapor burst of ethylene oxide that looked like a bloated smoke cloud. A second, larger explosion was triggered by the bomb’s control array, igniting the cloud.
The fuel-air fireball produced a blast overpressure only slightly less than that of a nuclear weapon.
Stig saw it. He had his eyes closed, and his virtual vision on medium brightness, but the flash still penetrated his eyelids. It corresponded to every sneekbot image vanishing. Several seconds later the sound wave crashed overhead. His arms tightened up as the concrete wall shook.
When he looked up the sky was dark again, though the rain had gone. He could see curious smears high overhead. Small veiled shapes cruised through the night, as if a flock of bats were fleeing the scene. There were no bats on Far Away. When he stood up he could see a seething column of luminous air swelling upward from the direction of First Foot Fall Plaza. He realized he’d lost contact with half of the blimpbots in the second wave. A couple that did respond were recording zero altitude with their helium cells leaking prodigiously.
“Let’s go,” he shouted at Olwen. They ran for an exit. “Keely, I need a sneekbot view of 3F.”
“Doing my best. Dreaming heavens, did that ever work better than we expected.”
Stig reached the stairs up to street level. He came out on the corner of Nottingham Road just as the rain began to sweep back again. His peripheral vision caught something falling above the nearby terrace of houses, something impossibly big, so he turned—“Holy shit!” He flung his arm around Olwen and carried her down to the pavement.
The mangled rear third of a blimpbot sank silently out of the night to smash into the houses, pulverizing the three directly underneath it. So where’s the rest of it? Fragmented solar panels, smashed timbers, slates, and long splinters of glass tumbled out of the collapsing rubble to skitter across the road.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Sure, still had my force field on.”
He looked at the fist-sized chunks of stone and jagged struts from the blimpbot’s geodesic structure that were scattered around them. They’d been lucky nothing larger had landed near them. He could hear screaming, shouts for
help rising in the background.
“We can’t stop for them,” he said.
Olwen gave a shaky nod. “Yeah.”
They started off down Nottingham Road. Images were flicking back up into his virtual vision grid as Keely activated the second wave of sneekbots she had stowed around 3F Plaza. No matter which ones he pulled out of the grid, all he saw was the rubble they were crawling over.
Six blimpbots had survived. Their status reports were organizing themselves inside his virtual vision. One was effectively dead in the air, unable to move other than where the wind took it. The remaining five had all sustained a lot of damage, but they were mobile, and one of them was a bomb carrier. “Bingo,” he muttered. “We might be able to do it again.”
They reached a crossroads, and looked along Levana Walk, which gave them a clear view to First Foot Fall Plaza nearly a half kilometer away. As Stig intended, Market Wall had deflected the main blast wave upward, away from the nearby buildings. It hadn’t been enough to save the smaller houses in surrounding streets, which had collapsed; even the larger, sturdier blocks directly outside the Plaza had taken considerable damage. Fires were starting to root, burning fiercely amid the wreckage. Market Wall itself was now a thick stone circle of rubble, only two-thirds of its original imposing height.
Stig drew in his breath at the sight of it. “It held,” he murmured. “Thank the dreaming heavens, it held.” He hadn’t wanted to consider the devastation a fuel air bomb would cause if its blast wave had been allowed to spread out horizontally.
“You can’t let off another one,” Olwen said. She stood in the center of the crossroads, looking down each street in turn.
“Huh?”
“Look. Look properly.”
Stig followed her gaze. There were people everywhere. Dazed, weeping, bloodied, wandering helplessly through piles of wreckage, kneeling beside badly injured friends or family that’d been pulled out of broken buildings. Cars and vans were strewn across the road, none of them with any glass left intact; their alarms were all squawking furiously, lights flashing for attention, even those that had turned turtle. Rain and melted scraps of blimpbot fuselage fabric had combined into a weird sleet that was slowly and methodically smothering the bereaved landscape under an impenetrable black mantle.
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