by Greg Curtis
“No time!” The sound of panicking feet behind them pulled him away from the screens. “I’ve got two more of them and they’re already tunnelling. Let’s get the crap out of here.” Even as he was yelling the warning, Mark was easing himself into the rear compartment driver’s seat, and pushing the engine into reverse, hard. Daryl and Ryal, quickly found themselves heading for what had once been the front window, only their seatbelts holding them back until the newly enhanced stasis fields cut in. Then they felt the tracks underneath bite firmly as the bug took off like scorched cat.
“But we haven’t even laid the explosives.” Silence was his only response, and Daryl realised he would get no answer. Mark believed they were in imminent danger and he was concentrating on fleeing as fast as he knew how. And as he reminded himself, the man knew what he was talking about. Daryl might know nothing about who he was or how he came to be in the Force, but he knew that Mark was an absolute expert when it came to armaments and defence. He’d designed half the new systems they carried on board the bug. If he said they had to go, so be it. Stuff the traps, it was time to run.
“Dropping mines, and I’ve now got three, - no make that four, all tunnelling furiously.” Ryal, at least through his new Force translator was starting to make a lot more sense, but right then Daryl wished he wouldn’t. Four bolos on their tail at once! It was a nightmare.
“Shit! Floor it Mark, and drop all the damn mines.” They were only a last ditch effort to slow the bolo’s down, but if there really were four of them coming then they’d need every ounce of speed they could get. As if in response though, the bug picked up more speed, and shortly they were doing two hundred and twenty klicks down the laser bored tunnel. Like a bullet in a gun barrel. But was it enough? They still had nearly seven klicks to go. A fraction under two minutes to safety.
“All mines away.” Damn Ryal could be calm. It was one of the things that irritated Daryl about him. After the panic that was. During one he didn’t really care. Especially when he could barely hear anything over the scream of the turbines. Except of course for his own blood pumping through his veins.
“I’m getting sensor sweeps. Which was about the very last thing Daryl wanted to hear right then. Sensors meant that at least one of the bolos was already through, all the way into the tunnel somewhere behind them, and scanning for the invaders who’d spoiled its rest. And they were still over a minute from the end.
“Hit the packs and get the Sparrow into position.” He screamed it at the others, though why he added the last he didn’t know. They would no doubt already have done just that right at the start. Lucon and the other officers on board were getting very good at being prepared. But on cue the rocket packs fired and he watched with awe as a tail of fire two hundred metres long, streamed out behind them. Even while he was being flung brutally once more into the straps as the bug rocketed along.
Damn those Force engineers could do good work. He could give them anything, any idea, even an archaic human design like a Jet Assistance Take Off unit, then watch them throw in their own unique understanding of the mechanics of the system, modify the bug accordingly and know it would work. JATO units hadn’t been used in at least three hundred years, and back then had been highly dangerous technology used to get heavily laden bombers off the ground. The noise was unbelievable, and the bug was shaking like a kango hammer in a blender, but he knew it would hold together. Everything they designed worked.
Even after twenty seconds he could still feel it accelerating. How fast were they going he briefly wondered. Three hundred? Four? He didn’t know and quite frankly didn’t care. As long as they were putting a safe distance between themselves and their pursuers. But were they? The bolos were fast.
“Laser fire. One unit.” Ryal didn’t actually need to tell him, Daryl could see the orange splashes on the shields behind them. Not that strong yet, but considering everything, far too strong, and far too soon. Especially when they were actually rocketing away from them. Then came the news from the front he’d been both waiting desperately to hear and dreading.
“Cutting the boost.” It meant they were slowing, but it also meant they were close to the end. They couldn’t turn outside at top speed even, let alone under rocket assistance, and a two hundred klick roll even in the bug would likely kill them all, enhanced stasis fields or no. Assuming the bolos didn’t first.
“Incoming.” Even as he was watching the last of their own tail of fire disappearing he saw the streak of something nasty chasing them. Some sort of missile, and he knew that the bolo was catching them. Make that bolos. Glancing across at Ryal’s screens he could see multiple echoes as the bolos sent their radar signatures ahead to locate them. The explosion was glorious, as it had been before, but oddly enough he couldn’t hear it, or feel it. The din in the bug was simply too loud, and it was shaking too badly for anything else to register. He could actually only hear the others through their translator links.
“More incoming.” He wished Ryal would stop telling him. He could see it as clearly as him. But of course Mark up the front probably couldn’t take his eyes off the front view as he tried desperately to get them to safety. Even as the blast of pure white was fading somewhere behind them, he could see more streaks of fire heading their way. At least half a dozen of them, coming as a unit. At least three bolos had to be in the tunnel now. And all within missile range, whatever that was, a klick, two? He couldn’t begin to guess with this new generation of bolos.
This time Daryl felt the explosions. They all did as the bug was literally lifted off its tracks, and hurled further along the tunnel by the blast. But at least the shields held, while behind them he could see part of the tunnel collapsing. It had never been designed for that sort of fire power. Maybe that would slow them down as well.
“Hang on.” It was lucky Mark warned them, since from the rear unit they couldn’t see the daylight, or the path ahead veering. Both Daryl and Ryal were thrown sideways in their seats as the bug slewed madly from side to side, and for the longest time he thought they were going to roll, no matter how stable the redesigned vehicle was. But somehow they made it, and Daryl had just time to see daylight behind them, as something intense and white, blasted into the tunnel they’d just left. The Sparrow’s laser.
They’d done something to the beam he realised, even as he was hanging on for dear life to the seatbelts while the bug was rolling like an out of control ice dancer and still desperately trying to slow down. The beam was tighter than before, surely no more than half a metre wide, and the whiteness from it was even more brilliant than usual. Somehow he guessed, they’d managed to fine tune it again, and with it, hopefully made it even more destructive. All in the last two hours. But would it be enough?
Even as he was wondering he and Ryal saw the first of the bolos leaving the tunnel mouth in a screaming fiery heap. It made no attempt to turn or steer, and he guessed it was finally dead, just moving too fast to stop rolling. He watched momentum carry it smoothly on down the sloping hill face and then over the cliff at the end, and down a hundred metre fall to where it detonated in a glorious explosion of light and thunder. A second and a third followed close on its heels, each also a bonfire on wheels, which again followed the first down the cliff to an explosive end.
The fourth when it came out was in slightly better condition, and while it didn’t seem to be able to turn away from its suicidal course, it managed to fire a few laser blasts at the Sparrow before joining its friends in hell. Fortunately none of them seemed to get through the ship’s newly reinforced shields.
Then a fifth appeared in the tunnel mouth and promptly exploded there, bringing down tonnes of rock and dust on its roof.
“Five bolos!” It was Ryal who said it but he spoke for them all. Five bolos. It was a miracle they’d survived. And it was a nightmare that so many had attacked at once. That had never happened before. Not here nor on any of the other digs, and it smacked of planning. Of learning. As if they’d realised that individually they could be p
icked off, but together they were much stronger. But machines surely couldn’t do that. Could they?
But even as he was wondering, Daryl realised that the Sparrow was still firing, its white hot beam passing directly through the fifth bolo which was now a pile of molten metal on the tunnel’s lip, and back down the tunnel. But why was it still firing? Surely they’d got them all. As if to answer him, a series of explosions came from somewhere deep within the tunnel, at least according to the ground penetrating radar scope, and he realised more bolos were dying in the tunnel. Another couple at least.
He checked on the remote viewer scope and realised, there were still more bolos coming. Their nuclear signatures were clear even through solid rock. Very clear. It took him a few seconds to realise how powerful those signatures were, and then to try and calculate how many more that meant were coming. Then he whistled, quietly. There were a lot more coming. More than he’d ever imagined possible. More than had ever been seen in any of the other expeditions either.
It made no sense when there was nothing left of them inside the tunnel for the bolos to attack. But for some reason, even after they had left the tunnel, the bolos’ were still giving chase. It smacked of unbridled, unreasoning hatred, which surely couldn’t be true of a machine, and it also scared him as he realised that if they were truly insane and desperate enough they could pursue them across the entire planet, and sooner or later catch them. But it also gave him an idea.
He hit the com button. “Lucon, How much longer can you keep firing for?” He doubted it would be very long given the enormous drain the new laser modifications surely made on the ship’s old banks. But a few minutes was all they needed for the moment.
“Two minutes forty or so.” Good enough, it had to be.
He hit the button that connected him with the Targ. “Captain, are you able to do some rock cutting for us?” If the Sparrow’s laser banks were limited, the Targ’s were anything but. It had to have a hundred thousand times the firepower. And given how the bolos were acting he knew a way to use it.
“Yes.”
“We need a trench, a nice long vertical drop, starting immediately at the tunnel mouth and running all the way down a hundred or so metres, and all the way back to the bottom of the subterranean cliff in front of the Sparrow. And we need it yesterday.” He wondered if the translator carried the panic in his voice back to the captain, because he was sure it was there for everyone else to hear.
Fortunately, even as the last of the words were leaving his mouth he watched a beam of rainbow coloured light streak out of the sky and start drilling into the ground immediately in front of the tunnel mouth, and he started breathing again. The ground simply exploded into a spewing volcano of dirt and fire, and the only way he could see how well the Targ was doing was through the instruments. But what they showed was more than enough to make him very happy. Within seconds the Targ had drilled down to at least a hundred metres and was starting to cut it along the ground back towards the cliff. Daryl suspected the captain had guessed his plan even before he’d finished speaking. He wasn’t slow by any stretch of the imagination.
Within a single minute they had a trench a hundred metres deep and two hundred long, heading all the way back to the cliff face. Soon they could see bolos, shining stars of fire even through the dust clouds, one after the other exiting the tunnel at well over two hundred klicks, and then beginning their long fall to oblivion against the rock floor. Like flaming lemmings.
“Lucon, I want you to back off another half klick at least behind that trench and lower your laser’s intensity a little. You’re now the bait, not the slayer. And I need you to keep firing as long as possible, drawing them out.” On cue he saw the colour of the beam lesson a little, even as more fiery blobs left the tunnel and headed for their grave far below. They were still doing well over two hundred klicks as they exited the tunnel, and that coupled with gravity was turning them into an ever-growing junk pile.
With the laser down to fifty percent, Lucon told him they could keep firing for another twenty five minutes, as the new recharge units almost kept up with the discharge rate, and he wanted them to keep firing. The longer the better. Especially when every minute another half dozen or so bolos were dying a savage death.
In the end though, only another fifteen minutes were needed, as the bolos finally stopped coming. Either they’d gotten a little smarter, or the city had run out of them. Regardless nearly a hundred of the infernal nightmares were now toast at the bottom of the cliff, and best of all the Targ was spotting no more signs of their nuclear engine emissions from above. He just hoped it meant there were no more.
From their new position at the top of the surrounding hills, the three of them in the bug, could just see the gaping hole in the ground that was the bolo graveyard, and coming from it just occasionally, the occasional burst of light as those that still survived, fired randomly into the air or each other. At least they didn’t hit anything.
Filled with a heady cocktail of relief and pleasure as he saw the success of his makeshift plan, he ordered the Sparrow over to them to pick them up. The bug was out of weapons, rockets and even fuel after their insane dash while the Sparrow’s laser banks were nearly drained, and there was still one more thing to do. They had to make sure that none of the bolos had survived their fiery fall to return to duty in the city and do more harm.
No sooner had they taken off then he, Mark and Ryal, joined the others on the Sparrow’s tiny bridge, eagerly waiting for the captain to give the final order. Thirty seconds later, a brilliant beam of rainbow coloured light hit the cliff base, and destroyed anything that had survived. From high above, they watched with growing satisfaction as a series of explosions, each more massive than the last, spewed up out of the great gouge in the ground.
Flames a thousand metres and more in height simply burst forth like new born flowers, while dust and rock scattered everywhere like pollen. Even after the Targ had stopped firing, the explosions continued as fuel tanks ignited in a chain reaction far below.
“Do you think there’s any left?” For the first time Daryl heard some emotion in Mark’s voice, anxiety, and was briefly surprised. He didn’t know the man had it in him. But then he noticed his own voice was trembling, and if he didn’t hold his hands close, he could feel them shaking as the adrenaline slowly worked its way out of his system.
Daryl just shrugged. “Who knows? But if there are they won’t try this mass attack approach again. And even if they do we’ll just use this technique again, except I’ve got an idea to make the bug even better at it.” Which was only the truth. Seeing the way the bolos had fallen to their doom one after the other, he realised that what the bug needed was some sort of antigrav drive installed. Nothing fancy, not even a full drive, just enough to let them accelerate out of a tunnel mouth at two hundred plus, or even under rockets, and not fall to their death.
“Let’s get back to the Targ. We need some repairs, recharging, and I could use a galaxy sized mug of coffee.” Oddly enough, no one seemed to disagree with him, even though Daryl was far from the one in charge, and Lucon quickly had the Sparrow heading back for the safety of space.
Five minutes later they arrived in the Sparrow’s docking bay on the Targ, and the cheers that came from the hundreds of strange throats as they walked down the Sparrow’s gang plank, was music to his ears. And it was literally hundreds. For some reason, every officer on duty in or around the shuttle bay had come to welcome them back. Actually, when he thought about it for a few seconds, he knew why. The enemy had been met in combat and beaten, and they were the warriors returning from the battlefield, victorious.
Daryl, and he wasn’t alone, threw up his hands in celebration, and screamed his head off as loudly as anyone. It was addictive. The more he yelled, the more he wanted to yell some more and he realised there was a lot more adrenaline to get rid of. And a lot more fear to put behind them.
He screamed like a maniac as he damn near skipped down the gangplank. The dig was
far from over, but they’d won a major battle and survived to tell the tale. Every victory deserved celebration.
He and the others then went through the ritual hand shaking and backslapping that was apparently a universal custom, as they celebrated some more. A lot more. And he realised, it was a victory, for everyone. From the engineers and technicians who’d built and rebuilt the vehicles, to the pilots and gunnery officers, and the scientists who’d taken his original crude ideas and turned them into reality, to everybody else who was just happy to be alive.
It was odd, but for the first time in nearly two months Daryl actually felt some level of camaraderie with the crew. Of friendship. Much more than he would have ever thought possible. They might be aliens. Members one and all of the great races, who were still oppressing the Earth, but for the first time he understood they too were just like humans. They were flesh and blood people just like him, with probably very similar hopes and dreams, and they too tried their best to get through the scary parts of life and enjoy the rest. And, though it was difficult to understand, he realised that he was just like them.
In time he met up again with his guard, Halco who, he was pleased to see, was finally back at work as his guard, and shared another hand shake and back slap. The Myran was looking quite chipper actually, as if he could be any judge of what that might look like, and Daryl was well pleased. It had been a good day all round.