87

It was just after sunrise and fifty thousand voynix were attacking from all directions. Ada paused to look back at the Pit where the shredded corpse of the Setebos spawn still lay.

Daeman touched her arm. “Don’t feel bad. We had to kill it sooner or later.”

She shook her head. “I don’t feel the least bit sorry,” she said. To Greogi and Hannah she shouted, “Get the sky-raft up!”

Too late. More than half the survivors had panicked at the scuttling roar of the voynix attack—the creatures were still invisible in the forest but the two-mile radius must have been cut in half by now. They’d be at Ardis in less than a minute.

“No! No!” shouted Ada as thirty people, in their panic, tried to fit aboard the slowly lifting sky-raft. Hannah was at the controls, trying to keep it at a steady three-foot hover, but more people were trying to clamber aboard.

“Take it up!” shouted Daeman. “Hannah! Take it up now!”

Too late. The heavy machine let out a mechanical whine, dipped to its right, and crashed to the ground, sending people flying.

Ada and Daeman ran to the fallen machine. Hannah looked up with a stricken face. “It won’t start again. Something’s broken.”

“Never mind,” Ada said, her voice calm. “It would never have made even one trip to the island.” She squeezed Hannah’s shoulder and raised her voice—“Everyone to the walls! Now!! Bring every weapon in the compound. Our best chance is to break their first charge.”

She turned and ran to the west wall and a minute later the others began to do the same, choosing empty spots in the now-circular palisade. Everyone followed Ada’s example of carrying at least two flechette rifles and a crossbow along with a heavy canvas bag of magazines and bolts.

Ada settled herself into a firing niche and discovered that Daeman was still beside her. “Good,” he said.

She nodded, although she had no idea what he was really saying to her.

Working very carefully, in no rush, Ada slapped in a fresh magazine, clicked off the safety, and aimed the rifle at the treeline no more than two hundred yards away.

The rushing, hissing, clacking noise made by the approaching voynix grew deafening and Ada found she had to resist the urge to drop her rifle and cover her ears. Her heart was pounding and she was feeling slightly nauseated, almost the way she’d felt earlier in her pregnancy, but she did not feel afraid. Not yet.

“All those years of the turin drama,” she said, not realizing that she was speaking aloud.

“What?” said Daeman, leaning closer to hear.

She shook her head. “I was just thinking about the turin drama. According to Harman, Odysseus said that he and Savi started that—distributing the turin cloths ten years ago, I mean. Maybe the idea was to teach us how to die with courage.”

“I’d rather they’d given us something to teach us how to win a fight against fifty thousand fucking voynix,” said Daeman. He clicked back the activation bolt on his rifle.

Ada laughed.

The little noise was drowned out by the roar as the voynix broke free of the forest—some leaping from tree branches even as others scuttled beneath the leapers—a gray wall of carapaces and claws rushing at them at fifty or sixty miles an hour. There were so many of them this time that Ada had trouble making out individual voynix bodies in the rising and falling mass. She looked over her shoulder and saw the same nightmare coming at them from all sides as the tens of thousands of voynix narrowed the radius at full speed.

No one yelled Fire! but suddenly everyone was shooting. Ada grinned in the grip of a sort of ferocious terror as the flechette rifle emptied its first magazine in a series of hard stutters against her shoulder. She let the ammunition clip drop free and slapped a fresh one in.

The flechettes struck by the thousands, crystal facets gleaming in the rising sun, but the hits seemed to make no difference. Voynix must be dropping, but there so many thousands still leaping, scuttling, jumping, running, scrambling, that Ada couldn’t even see the wounded and dead ones fall. The gray-silver wall of death had covered half the distance from the woods in a few seconds and the things would be over the low palisade walls in another few seconds.

Daeman may have been the first to go over the wall—Ada couldn’t swear to it, since it seemed to be an almost simultaneous decision. Grabbing up one weapon and screaming, he jumped from the parapet, vaulted over the tops of the logs, landed, rolled, and began rushing toward the voynix.

Ada laughed and wept. Suddenly it was the most important thing in the world to her that she join in that charge—the most important thing in the world to die attacking this mindless, vicious, stupid, programmed-for-murder enemy, and not wait here behind wood walls to be killed cowering.

Absurdly taking care because she was, after all, five months pregnant, Ada jumped, rolled, got to her feet, and rushed after Daeman, firing as she ran. She heard a familiar voice screaming to her left and she turned just long enough to see Hannah and Edide running not far behind, stopping to shoot, then running again.

She could see the humps on the gray-carapaced voynix bodies now. They were covering twenty or twenty-five feet at a leap, their killing claws extended. Ada ran and fired. She no longer knew that she was screaming or what words she might be screaming. Briefly, very briefly, she summoned an image of Harman and tried to send a message his direction—I’m sorry, my darling, sorry about the baby—but then she paid attention only to running and firing and the gray forms were almost on them, rising above them like a silver-gray tidal wave….

The explosions threw Ada ten feet back and burned off her eyebrows.

Men and women were lying all around her, thrown backward with her, too stunned to speak or rise. Some were trying to put out flames on their clothing. Some were unconscious.

The Ardis compound was encircled by a wall of flame that rose fifty, eighty, a hundred feet into the air.

A second wave of voynix appeared, running and leaping through the flames. More explosions erupted along this line of running gray-silver figures. Ada blinked as she watched carapaces and claws, legs and humps flying in every direction.

Then Daeman was pulling her to her feet. He was panting, his face blistered from flash burns. “Ada… we have to get… back… to…”

Ada pulled her arm free and stared up at the sky. There were five flying machines in the air above the Ardis clearing and none of them were sonies—four smaller, bat-winged devices were dropping canisters toward the tree line while a much larger winged machine was descending toward the center of their palisaded compound—the palisade walls mostly tumbled inward now from the multiple explosions.

Suddenly cables dropped from the bat-winged shapes and black, humanoid but not human shapes whizzed down the lines, hitting the ground faster than a human could and running to establish a perimeter. When some of these tall, black forms ran past Ada, she saw that they were not humans—nor even humans in combat armor of some sort—but taller creatures, strangely jointed, covered with barbs, thorns, and a chitinous ebony armor.

More voynix came through the flames.

The black figures between her and the voynix had gone to one knee and raised weapons that looked too heavy for human beings to lift. The guns suddenly exploded into action—chuga-chink-ghuga-chuga-ghink—sounding like some chain-driven cutting machine while pulses of pure blue energy raked the oncoming ranks of voynix. Wherever a blue pulse struck, the voynix exploded.

Daeman was pulling her back toward the compound.

“What?” she shouted over the din. “What?”

He shook his head. Either he couldn’t hear her or didn’t know the answer himself.