“We’ll lose so many . . . .” Necalli said.
“We’ll lose everyone if we don’t,” Pepper replied.
There was a shocked silence as everyone surrounding the pipiltin reset. They’d been planning a long dug-in defense on their home territory. Now they were invading the enemy.
But the alternative was to stay here and die. They realized Pepper was right.
Pepper clapped his hands again. “Let’s get moving.”
He would hold back, helping the stragglers, fighting the rearguard action. He had the most protection, speed, accuracy, and strength.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The fire line went up in one giant whumph that Timas felt from a hundred yards away. The blaze leaped high into the air, hiding the Swarm from them. Everyone got to work, pulling the barriers aside and lining up in the streets. The elevators had been working overtime, and people packed every inch of the houses of the upper layer.
Over the last hours of fighting people had been evacuating by the docks as fast as possible. Thousands more had moved up to the upper layer. They packed the streets outside the atrium, waiting for the signal. Below the roof Timas stood on he could have walked on people’s heads all the way to the elevators were it not for the forest of billhooks people carried.
Katerina grabbed Timas by the hand. “Good luck.”
“You too.”
They walked down the stairs together to the street level, and then looked toward the fire. Soon the alarm would sound, and at the moment they would open up full fire.
Then they would rush the Swarm, not even trying to stop it, but just get to safety. It had to be waiting. It had to know that Yatapek was losing altitude.
Timas felt his stomach flip-flop.
He was going to run straight to his death, and he trembled slightly.
He’d faced death on the surface. But this was less academic, and more real. The Swarm waited over there, out in the open.
The fire danced high, mesmerizing him as he stood in the jostling crowd.
“Have you seen Pepper?” he asked.
Katerina shook her head just as the klaxons sounded. The crowd surged forward. On the road in front of them several grenades exploded, blowing the fire out.
They moved out in the thousands, and on the other side of the fire line the Swarm milled, waiting. But it was confused, riddled with the counter-infection, parts of it jostling, wheeling about, and trying to cordon off the biting recipients of Heutzin’s blood.
Someone at the front started a loud scream, a war cry, and it rippled down the ranks, until it reached Timas, and he found himself caught up in it. He was a part of the group, running in rhythm, a primal rage directed out as they ran toward their enemy.
The mass of humanity struck the Swarm. Billhooks out, shields raised by anyone on the edges, they scythed their way through, momentum and edged weaponry carrying the tide on.
Timas spotted the vacant face of one of the Swarm shoving through, but a billhook hit its neck, blood spurted, and it dropped down where it was trampled.
People fell, to the sides, yanked away. The front lines folded as Swarm threw themselves at people’s knees. But those following stampeded right over them.
The herd of humanity continued, forcing the Swarm out from in front of it, until it hit the tortured mess between the two cities.
This was where people toward the back came in, carrying large planks over their heads to reinforce the rickety bridges the Swarm had already laid between the two cities. These were passed forward, as well as rope. Yatapek stormed into the space between the cities.
Swarm threw themselves at the sides of this river of humanity, and billhooks lashed out in response. Blood flowed, bitten, slashed, shot, from all sides. And for every human that fell, another showed up from behind. Timas could see all this from farther in the back.
Anyone bitten rushed into the midst of the Swarm, trying to cause as much chaos and death as they could, trying to die fighting.
Swarm waited on the other side as Yatapek took bridges and approached Aegae.
“Ahead!”
“Take a deep breath if you don’t have an air mask,” someone yelled. “Then make a run for it. Those of you that have air masks, take a breath, then pass it back.”
Timas reached the planks, slowly now, moving over the wreckage around the worst of the gap. Some moved too quickly and fell off the planking. They fell between the cities, screaming on their way down, bouncing off parts, impaling on others, or just falling down toward the clouds.
Timas slowed even more. He climbed up a large spar that stuck up into the air at a gentle angle. Katerina followed him as he walked up it, bent forward. Now he looked out over the thousands of faces determinedly thundering their way through the wreckage toward Aegae.
“Do you see Pepper anywhere?”
Katerina scanned the masses. “There. In the far back.”
Pepper fought at the tail of the invasion, trying to slow the Swarm down from their attempt to dissolve it. The suited figure leaped into the air and twisted, a constant flash of muzzle fire from his gun as he sped from spot to spot.
From a distance, it was like watching a hummingbird. Pepper moved so fast one couldn’t see the individual movements.
But then Timas saw it happen: the Swarm moved like a pincer to cut off the stream of humanity between Pepper and Timas. Pepper and the people he stood with made a large ring that faced outward. They were being forced away from the bridge between the cities.
Timas couldn’t stand and watch. “Please, don’t follow me,” he told Katerina as he ran past here. “I have an idea.”
The airlock where Itotia said Pepper stored his escape bubble was out along the nearby rim, and Pepper was being forced away from that one as well. Pepper tried to break free, but the Swarm piled bodies deep to stop him. It clearly regarded Pepper as the most important target.
There was another airlock, even farther down. Timas started shouting for an air mask, loudly and while fighting the people storming past him.
Someone finally shoved one in his arms.
Timas moved to the edge of the crowd and began climbing down through the wreckage. His machine gun hung crooked, and he almost lost it a couple times.
There were no Swarm in the nooks and crannies, and when he finally got down to the outside lip, one of the seams that ran around the outside of Yatapek, he pulled the air mask on.
He had no safety lines, and the seam jutted out only a foot. He’d felt safer when he walked over the wreckage between the cities.
Timas leaned against the city wall and carefully made his way along to the airlock. His exposed skin tingled, exposed to the wicked air without protection. As they had dropped closer to the clouds, the sulfuric acid in the air had increased.
Now it burned a bit.
He got to the outside of the airlock with only one turbulent, lurching moment where the city shook and almost bounced him right off.
Once safely in, Timas hunted around until he found the large package. Pepper’s escape bubble.
He opened the inside door to Yatapek carefully, thumbing the gun’s safety off.
The Swarm all had moved through the fields toward the elevators.
Timas held the package up and fired his gun into the air. He saw Pepper, in mid-leap, in a ring of much fewer surviving fighters, spot him. Timas held the package up, and then pointed at the next airlock.
Pepper nodded.
Timas cycled back outside, but this time he snagged a run-line and snapped into a track on the lip’s surface. This time he ran.
To one side: a long fall to the clouds which now lay just a thousand feet below the city. Yatapek’s hull would kiss them soon.
The airmask started to run out of air by the time he got into the next airlock. He swapped it out for another. As he did so, a heavy vibration hit and the entire city tilted up even higher. Timas pressed his face to the airlock’s porthole in time to see the Aeolian city rip free, debris falling clear a
s the two massive structures separated.
The door opened, Timas swung around, his gun up, ready to shoot, and stopped himself as Pepper leaned in. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Helping you.”
“You got clear with everyone else. At least ten thousand people got into Aegae, but you’re still down here trying to get yourself killed.” Pepper pulled a clip out of his gun, slapped a new one in, and looked behind him.
Swarm gathered several hundred feet away, getting numbers together, moving against each other in odd, swirling patterns with their hands held up.
Pepper held the gun up with just one hand and fired in careful, single-shot bursts. Five heads exploded. The Swarm retreated another hundred feet.
“I have your escape bubble,” Timas said. “It’s a multiple-person one. If we strip you out of armor and get in, we can get out of here.”
“You assumed I needed help, Timas. I was trying to save those people back there. I wasn’t trapped. Don’t think that I can’t handle myself. What you’re asking me to do now is render myself defenseless. I won’t be doing that.”
“Then what are we going to do?” Timas looked back out at the door. He couldn’t try and get back to the other city now.
“Give me that.” Pepper snatched the escape bubble away from him and tucked it under an arm. “And come on.”
Shots kicked up dirt. Timas jumped back into the airlock. “They’re shooting! Why now? They haven’t done that before.”
Pepper shot back, and ducked into the lock himself. “The Swarm aboard Yatapek realizes it won’t be growing itself or taking the city, so now it just wants to kill as many of us off as possible. There are maybe a couple thousand left, thanks to the counter-infection.”
Timas saw the world outside the airlock turn a thick brown. They’d fallen into the clouds. His ears hurt as the air pressure increased. “What do we do?”
“We’re going for the docks. Do me a favor, be careful with that gun and don’t shoot me in the back.”
Of course, Timas thought. The alien airship was down there. Pepper lived among that level of technology; he would be able to fly it.
They burst clear of the airlock, and Pepper sprinted ahead, shooting at the Swarm off into the distance. The ones with guns. He dropped them with deadly accuracy, and the ones nearby, he kicked back to clear the path.
Timas fired his machine gun in small bursts as he saw figures jump at him. They fell back, but he could see them crawling along, still alive. You really had to hit them exactly in the head.
One of them got close, really close, biting the hem of his ragged trousers. A strip of cloth tore off in its mouth as Timas kicked it in the head and kept running up the street. Up, it seemed, because Yatapek hadn’t quite recovered. It still tilted, losing more air, and thus buoyancy, from the rent where the other city hit. Looking over at it, Timas could see more brown Chilo air pushing in like a malevolent brown fog. The thick clouds dispersed throughout the entire upper layer, making the whole dome hazy. And it grew worse with each passing minute.
Everything cast shadows in the gloomy, deep brown twilight now that the entire city was wrapped in the clouds. Sulfuric acid rivulets dripped from the great gaping wound in the shell.
They burst into the empty streets. Timas could feel his mouth getting dry, and he gasped. Pepper slowed to a fast walk, occasionally shooting stray Swarm in the head as they stumbled out from between alleyways. The air had grown almost too thin. Survivors who hadn’t made the escape to Aegae choked as they tried to hold the Swarm back from the atrium. Fortunately most of the Swarm choked as well, vulnerable to the same problem.
“Falling back into door-to-door fighting is good,” Pepper said. He didn’t sound affected by it at all. “Touch seems to be the way they communicate fastest, so the open fields were dangerous. Here we break them down into individual units with basic instructions.” He fired again as another one stumbled down a set of stairs.
It dropped back minus a head, blood geysering out from its throat. Timas jerked his eyes back down the street, but it felt like the image had seared itself onto the back of his head.
“Keep moving,” Pepper said.
They hurried through the streets, retreating with the surviving hundreds that converged on the elevators and emergency stairwells.
Timas looked around, astounded as the survivors lined up quietly. No pushing, no noise. They all rode the city down to its bitter end, fighting the Swarm for every last inch. And they didn’t see the need to panic, they just maintained their determination. It took ten overly long minutes to wait in line, trusting people near the back to keep the Swarm at bay.
The Swarm had gotten within a couple hundred feet when they stepped into the elevator and headed down.
Far overhead the city groaned. The layers were exerting heavier loads on the parts of the shell that were undamaged. As they slowly descended through the atrium Timas saw fires burning among buildings, gardens, and avenues. They passed opposite the other side where a tiny figure of a single person with a billhook held off seven Swarm advancing on him. The man climbed up onto the balcony after one of them bit him. He plummeted down the atrium’s shaft, hitting some of the spars on his way down.
Pepper watched the body fall, but made no comment.
The air got better. Here it was trapped behind street bulkheads, in between layers, and in the atrium. Timas stopped wheezing.
When the elevator got to the docks Pepper ducked out first, checked the area, then waved Timas on. Before he stepped out of the elevator, the brown murky light washed out into a general dimness. Timas looked up through the elevator’s transparent top, up the long shaft all the way to the top of the city. He could see the undersides of the clouds. They’d passed through.
He ran out after Pepper.
Down here, it was like the exodus in all the other layers hadn’t happened. Grim-looking Jaguar scouts manned the same defenses Timas had passed on the upper layer to get to the atrium.
Pepper and Timas used call and response passwords to pass through. Several men had large jugs of pulque and big smiles. They were dead men, finding liquid courage.
Timas couldn’t blame them.
Others sat with their guns cradled, business as usual, waiting for some threat to attack them.
“We didn’t have time to assemble,” they told Pepper. “We were to be the second wave, but the cities separated, so we retreated down here so we could at least die with dignity.”
Several of them had come down, layer by layer. “We found some children in the houses in the mid-layers,” they reported. “Their parents couldn’t get them up to the upper layer or down here to the airships that were leaving.”
They took Pepper and Timas to the alien airship, where the hatch had been shut. “Do you know how to fly it?”
Some of these people had drawn straws to fly out on the last airship that had risked docking with the city. And those that had found escape bubbles stocked in the docks had already since bubbled out.
A little less than half the city had escaped, they all guessed, comparing notes. Although what the thousands who crossed into Aegae would find, no one knew for sure.
The mid-layer children had missed both chances. They stood huddled together in a small group, grim, tired faces regarding Pepper with a faint flicker of hope.
“I can’t fly it,” Pepper said. “I have no idea. But it is designed to survive the surface, and inside it will have anti-crash mechanisms. There’s a good chance they’ll survive the impact. The city has enough air in its buildings and inner structures that even as it drops down, with remaining buoyancy, heated air, and the thicker atmosphere, terminal velocity will be fairly low. Leave them in there.”
But there was no more room for Timas once the children were herded into the alien machine.
Timas turned to Pepper, who looked at the mechanical hand in front of him. The hand that Pepper didn’t have.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Pepp
er made a fist. “Timas, I’m not going to risk being infected. If I bubble off and get picked up by them, I’m an easy capture. There are things I know that the Swarm could use.”
“You’re Pepper, damn it!” Timas looked slightly panicked, certainly trapped.
“I can’t risk it.” Pepper grabbed him by the elbow and forced him to march along.
The damn kid had complicated it all. All he had to do was to follow what he’d been told and invade the other city with everyone else. It had been a bold gesture, trying to save Pepper’s life. But sadly, one with consequences. Whether fair or not.
Pepper led him into the prep rooms for the groundsuits and pushed Timas toward the nearest, a bulky yellow one. “Let’s suit you up.”
Timas didn’t get it for a long second.
“Move,” Pepper snapped. They didn’t have much time. Timas jumped into motion. Pepper helped him get into the insectlike contraption. “You have almost the same chance as the kids in that craft back there, in your suit. The heat, the pressure, they won’t kill you. The impact, that won’t kill you as long as you find a solid place to hide with some cushioning. What might kill you is the structural collapse.”
Timas stared as Pepper snapped the torso together. “Collapse?”
“When the damn city hits the ground and starts breaking up. I recommend not going to the upper layer, as parts of the city’s wall will break off and fall onto it. Get a couple layers beneath that, but as close to the atrium as possible—it’s stronger.”
“You’re leaving me here to die.”
“We’re both at extremely high risk for dying; don’t assume the bubble will work. We could get picked up by the Swarm.”
“You’re leaving me here to die,” Timas repeated.
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