It meant that their cars were still bunched together, supplying the Organization starships with the biggest target. Oscar Kearn, uncertain which one contained Mzu, decided to start there and eliminate the other cars one at a time until her soul was claimed by the beyond. With that, they would have won. Bringing her back, one way or another, was all that mattered. Now the spaceplanes had been destroyed, she would have to die. Fortunately, as an ex-military man himself, he had prepared his fallback options. So far Mzu had proved amazingly elusive, or just plain lucky. He was determined to put an end to that.
The ironberg foundry yard pickup had been planned in some detail with Baranovich, its location and timing quite critical. Although Oscar Kearn hadn’t actually mentioned how critical to the newly allied Cossack, nor why. But he was satisfied that if things went bad for the Organization on the ground, Mzu would never survive.
Firstly, the frigates would be overhead, able to initiate a ground strike. And if she somehow escaped that . . .
While the Organization starships were docked with the Spirit of Freedom they had gained command access to the tugs delivering Tonala’s ironbergs for splashdown. A small alteration had been made to the trajectory of one tug.
Far above Nyvan’s ocean, to the west of Tonala, an ironberg was already slipping through the ionosphere. This time, no recovery fleet would be needed. No ships would be employed to tow it on a week-long voyage to the foundry yard.
It was taking the direct route.
* * *
The first X-ray laser blast struck the police car which was lying down the embankment, hood embedded in the ditch. It vaporized in a violent shock wave, sending droplets of molten metal, roasted earth, and superheated steam churning into the air. All the snow within a two-hundred-metre radius was ripped from the ground before the heat turned it back into water. The other car abandoned on the road was somersaulted over and over, smashing its windows and sending wheels spinning through the air.
* * *
The first explosion made Alkad wince. She glanced out of the rear window, seeing an orange corona slowly shrinking back down into the road.
“What the hell did that?” Voi asked.
“Not us,” Gelai said. “Not one of the possessed, not even a dozen. We don’t have that much power.”
A second explosion sounded, rattling the car badly.
“It’s me,” Alkad said. “They want me.”
Another explosion lit up the sky. This time the pressure wave pushed at their car, sending it skidding sideways before the control processor could compensate.
“They’re getting closer,” Eriba cried. “Mother Mary, help us.”
“There’s not much She can do for us now,” Alkad said. “It’s up to the agencies.”
* * *
The four voidhawks were in a standard five-hundred-kilometre equatorial parking orbit above Nyvan when Hoya received Samuel’s frantic call. Their position allowed them to shadow the Organization frigates which were strung out along a high-inclination orbit. At the time, only the Urschel and the Pinzola were above the ironberg foundry yard’s horizon. Raimo was trailing them by two thousand kilometres.
Although it was four thousand kilometres from the Urschel and Pinzola, Hoya’s sensors could just detect the brilliant purple discharge in the clouds below the Organization frigates as they fired on a fourth car. The voidhawk began to accelerate at seven gees, followed by its three cousins. All four went to full combat alert status. A salvo of fifteen combat wasps slid out of Hoya’s lower hull cradles, each one charging away in a different direction at thirty gees, leaving the voidhawk at the centre of an expanding and dimming nimbus of exhaust plasma. After five seconds, the drones curved around to align themselves on the Organization frigates.
Urschel and Pinzola had no choice but to defend themselves. Their reaction time was hardly optimum, but twenty-five combat wasps flew out of each frigate to counter the attackers, antimatter propulsion quickly pushing them up to forty gees. The frigates broke off their attack on the cars, realigning their X-ray lasers ready for the inevitable swarm of submunitions.
Raimo launched its own salvo of combat wasps in support of its confederates, opening up a new angle of attack against the voidhawks. Two of them responded with defensive salvos.
Over a hundred combat wasps launched in less than twenty seconds. The glare from their drives shimmered off the nighttime clouds below, a radiance far exceeding any natural moonlight.
Despite the continuing electronic warfare emission from the SD platforms, none of the orbiting network sensors could miss such a deadly spectacle. Threat analysis programs controlling each network initiated what they estimated was an appropriate level of response.
* * *
Officially, Tonala’s ironberg foundry yard sprawled for over eighteen kilometres along the coast, extending back inland between eight and ten kilometres according to the lie of the land. That, anyway, was the area which the government had originally set aside for the project in 2407, with an optimism which matched the one prevalent during Floreso’s arrival into Nyvan orbit three years earlier. Apart from the asteroid’s biosphere cavern, the foundry became Tonala’s largest ever civil engineering development.
It started off in a promising enough fashion. First came a small coastal port to berth the tugs which recovered the ironbergs from their mid-ocean splashdown. With that construction under way, the engineers started excavating a huge seawater canal running parallel to the coastline. A hundred and twenty metres wide and thirty deep, it was designed to accommodate the ironbergs, allowing them to be towed into the Disassembly Sheds which were to be the centrepiece of the yard. The main canal branched twenty times, sprouting kilometre-long channels which would each end at a shed.
After the first seven Disassembly Sheds were completed, an audit by the Tonalan Treasury revealed the nation didn’t require the metal production capacity already built. Funds for the remaining Disassembly Sheds were suspended until the economy expanded to warrant them. That was in 2458. Since then, the thirteen unused branch canals gradually choked up with weeds and silt until they eventually became nothing more than large, perfectly rectangular saltwater marshes. In 2580, Harrisburg University’s biology department successfully had them declared part of the national nature park reserve.
Those Disassembly Sheds which did get built were massive cuboid structures, two hundred metres a side, and very basic. An immense skeletal framework was thrown up, bridging the end of the branch canal, then cloaked in flat composite panels. A vertical petal door above the canal allowed the ironberg egress. Inside, powerful fission blades on the end of gantry arms performed a preprogrammed dissection, slicing the ironberg into thousand-tonne segments like some gigantic metal fruit.
A second network of smaller canals connected the Disassembly Sheds with the actual foundry buildings, allowing the bulky, awkwardly shaped segments of spongesteel to be floated directly to the smelter intakes. The desolate land between the Disassembly Sheds, foundry buildings, and canals was crisscrossed by a maze of roads, some no more than dirt tracks, while others were broad decaying roadways built to carry heavy plant during the heady early days of construction. None of them had modern guidance tracking cables; foundry crews didn’t care, they knew the layout and drove manually. It meant that any visitors venturing deep into the yard invariably took wrong turnings. Not that they could ever get lost, the gargantuan Disassembly Sheds were visible for tens of kilometres, rising up out of the featureless alluvial plain like the blocks some local god had forgotten to sculpt mountains out of during Nyvan’s creation. They made perfect navigational reference aides. Under normal conditions.
* * *
The road was over eighty years old; coastal winters had washed soil away from under it and frozen the surface, flexing it up and down until it snapped. There wasn’t a single flat stretch anywhere, a fact disguised by fancifully windsculpted drifts of snow. Alkad’s car lumbered along at barely more than walking pace as the suspension rocked the
body from side to side.
They’d driven into the yard at a dangerously high speed along the roadway. A fifth car had been wiped out behind them, then the blasts of energy from space seemed to stop. Alkad datavised the car’s control processor to turn off at the first junction. According to the map she had loaded into her neural nanonics memory cell, the Disassembly Sheds were strung out across the yard’s northern quadrant.
But as she was rapidly discovering: the map is not the territory.
“I can’t see a bloody thing,” Voi said. “I don’t even know if we’re on a road anymore.”
Eriba peered forwards, his nose almost touching the windshield. “The Sheds have to be out there somewhere. They’re huge.”
“The guidance processor says we’re heading north,” Alkad said. “Keep looking.” She glanced out of the back window to see the car following her bouncing about heavily, its headlight beams slashing about through the snow. “Can you sense Baranovich?” she asked Gelai.
“Faintly, yes.” Her hand waved ahead and slightly to the left. “He’s out there; and he’s got a lot of friends with him.”
“How many?”
“About twenty, maybe more. It’s difficult at this distance, and they’re moving about.”
Voi sucked her breath in fiercely. “Too many.”
“Is Lodi with them?”
“Possibly.”
A massive chunk of machinery lay along the side of the road, some metallic fossil from the age of greater ambitions. Once they’d passed it, a strong red-gold radiance flooded over the car. A faint roar made the windows tremble.
“One of the smelters,” Ngong said.
“Which means the Disassembly Sheds are on this side.” Voi pointed confidently.
The road became smoother, and the car picked up speed. Its tyres began to squelch through slush that had melted in the radiance of the smelter. They could see the silhouette of the furnace building now, a long black rectangle with hangarlike doors fully open to show eight streams of radiant molten metal pouring out of the hulking smelter into narrow channels which wound away deeper into the building. Thick jets of steam were shooting out of vents in the roof. Snowflakes reverted to sour rain as they fell through them.
Alkad yelled in fright, and datavised an emergency stop order to the car’s control processor. They juddered to a halt two metres short of the canal. A segment of ironberg was sliding along sedately just in front of them, a tarnished silver banana shape with its skin pocked by millions of tiny black craters.
The sky above turned a brilliant silver, stamping a black and white image of the canal and the ironberg segment on the back of Alkad’s retina. “Holy Mother Mary,” she breathed.
The awesome light faded.
“My processor block’s crashed,” Eriba said. He was twisting his head around, trying to find the source of the light. “What was that?”
“They’re shooting at the cars again,” Voi said.
Alkad datavised the car’s control processor, not surprised when she couldn’t get a response. It confirmed the cause: emp. “I wish it was only that,” she told them, marvelling sadly at their innocence. Even now they didn’t grasp the enormity of what was involved, the length to which others would go. She reached under the dashboard and twisted the release for the manual steering column. Thankfully, it swung up in front of a startled Eriba. “Drive,” she instructed. “There’ll be a bridge or something in a minute. But just drive.”
* * *
“Oh, bloody hell,” Sarha grumbled. “Here we go again.”
Lady Mac’s combat sensor clusters were relaying an all-too-clear image of space above Nyvan into her neural nanonics. Ten seconds ago all had been clear and calm. The various SD platforms were still conducting their pointless electronic war unabated. Ships were moving towards the three abandoned asteroids, two squadrons of frigates from different nations were closing on Jesup; while Tonala’s low-orbit squadron was moving to intercept the Organization ships. This orbital chess game between the nations could have gone on for hours yet, allowing Joshua and the others plenty of time to get back up to the ship, and for all of them to jump the hell away from this deranged planet.
Then the Organization frigates had started shooting. The voidhawks accelerated out of parking orbit. And space was full of combat wasps.
“Velocity confirmed,” Beaulieu barked. “Forty gees, plus. Antimatter propulsion.”
“Christ,” Liol said. “Now what do we do?”
“Nothing,” Sarha snapped. So far, the conflict was ahead of them and at a slightly higher altitude. “Standby for emp.” She datavised a procedural stand-by order into the flight computer. “Damn, I wish Joshua were here, he could fly us out of this in his sleep.”
Liol gave her a hurt look.
Four swarms of combat wasps were in flight, etching dazzling strands of light across the darkened continents and oceans. They began to jettison their submunitions, and everything became far too complicated for the human mind to follow. Symbols erupted across the display Sarha’s neural nanonics provided as she asked the tactical analysis program for simplified interpretations.
Nyvan’s nightside had ceased to become dark, enlivened by hundreds of incandescent exhausts blurring together as they engaged each other. It was the fusion bombs which went off first, then an antimatter charge detonated.
Space ahead of Lady Mac went into blazeout. No sensor was capable of penetrating that stupendous energy release.
Tactically, it wasn’t the best action. The blast destroyed every combat wasp submunitions friend or foe within a hundred kilometres, while its emp disabled an even larger number.
“Damage report?” Sarha asked.
“Some sensor damage,” Beaulieu said. “Backups coming on-line. No fuselage energy penetration.”
“Liol!”
“Uh? Oh. Yeah. Flight systems intact, generators on-line. Attitude stable.”
“The SD platforms are launching,” Beaulieu warned. “They’re really letting loose. Saturation assault!”
“I can get us out of here,” Liol said. “Two minutes to jump altitude.”
“No,” Sarha said. “If we move, they’ll target us. Right now we stay low and inert. We don’t launch, we don’t emit. If anything does lock on, we kill it with the masers and countermeasure its launch origin. Then you shift our inclination three degrees either way, not our altitude. Got that?”
“Got it.” His voice was hot and high.
“Relax, Liol, everyone’s forgotten about us. We just stay intact to pick Joshua up, that’s our mission, that’s all we do. I want you cool for a smooth response when it comes. And it will. Use a stim program if you have to.”
“No. I’m all right now.”
Another antimatter explosion obliterated a vast section of the universe. Broken submunitions came spinning out of the epicentre.
“Lock on,” Beaulieu reported. “Three submunitions. One kinetic, two nukes. I think; catalogue match is sixty per cent. Twenty gees only, real geriatrics.”
“Okay,” Sarha said, proud to find how calm she was. “Kick-ass time.”
* * *
A deluge of light from the second antimatter explosion revealed the Disassembly Sheds to all the cars speeding across the foundry yard. A row of blank two-dimensional squares receding to the horizon.
“Go for it!” Alkad urged.
Eriba thumbed the throttle forwards. The snow was abating now, revealing more of the ground ahead, giving him confidence. Furnaces glowed in the distance, coronas of slumbering dragons smeared by flurries of grey flakes. The battered road took them past long-forsaken fields of carbon concrete where ranks of sun-bleached gantries stood as memorials to machinery and buildings aborted by financial reality. Pipes wide enough to swallow the car angled up out of the stony soil like metallized worms; their ends capped by rusting grilles which issued strange heavy vapours. Lonely wolf-analogues prowled among the destitute technological carcasses, skulking in the shadows whenever the car’s h
eadlights ventured close.
Seeing the other cars falling behind, Eriba aimed for a swing bridge over the next small canal. The car wheels left the floor as it charged over the apex of the two segments. Alkad was flung forwards as it banged down on the other side.
“That’s Shed Six,” Voi said, eagerly looking out of a side window. “One more canal to go.”
“We’re going to make it,” Eriba shouted back. He was completely absorbed by the race, adrenaline rush giving his world a provocative edge.
“That’s good,” Alkad said. Anything else would have sounded churlish.
The snow clouds above the yard were slowly tearing open, showing ragged tracts of evening sky. It was alight with plasma fire; drive exhausts and explosions merging and expanding into a single blanket of iridescence that was alive with choppy internal tides.
Joshua kinked his neck back at a difficult angle to watch it. The car jounced about, determined to deny him an uninterrupted view. Since the first antimatter bomb’s emp had wrecked their car’s electronics Dahybi had been driving them manually. It was a bumpy ride.
Another antimatter explosion turned the remaining clouds transparent. Joshua’s retinal implants prevented any lasting damage to his eyes, but he still had to blink furiously to clear the brilliant purple afterimage away.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 232