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.
He began to register the expressions around him as the damp ash pattered against his jacket. The tears, the silent rage, and the terrible anguish as people took stock of life that had been irretrievably smashed. There were hundreds just along the sections of road that he could see.
It took every shred of self-discipline he possessed to fight the guilt. “We have to,” he told her through gritted teeth. “It’ll come through unless we stop it. We don’t have anything else left to keep it away.”
“Then find something. Use us, we have weapons.”
He glanced at the ion pistol she was carrying openly, and resisted the impulse to give a derisive laugh. “Let’s assess 3F first, shall we?”
The sneekbots were scuttling their way to the top of the encircling mound that had been Market Wall. It took Stig a moment to make sense of the first images they provided. There was nothing he recognized, no features or outlines. First Foot Fall Plaza was a true crater now, and completely black on the inside where it had been scorched by the fuel air bomb. The force field over the gateway had withstood the blast; it was almost buried under fragments of roasted stone, with just a small crescent exposed, looking like milky glass as the rain washed the carbon dust away from it. None of the Institute troops had survived. He couldn’t even see any bodies. Their vehicles had vanished as well, including the MANN truck. He’d expected to see the metallic capsule lying somewhere, battered and overturned, but the sneekbots couldn’t detect any electrical or magnetic activity except for the gateway force field itself. First Foot Fall Plaza was a confirmed dead zone.
“It’s not going to come through into that,” Olwen said. “We’ve got a chance.”
“You’re probably right.” Stig checked the time in his virtual vision. “We’ve got fifty-five minutes left of this cycle,” he told everyone on the general band. “Our job is to make it as difficult as possible for the Starflyer to come through. It isn’t going to risk itself without an escort on this side, so I want Muriden’s and Hanna’s teams to dig in here on Market Wall. If anything comes through the gateway, shoot it with the plasma rifles. The rest of us: we’re splitting into mobile units. We have to prevent the Institute from getting close to 3F Plaza. Keely will update us on the location of any vehicles. If they look like they’re gathering into a convoy we hit them hard.”
It wasn’t a good omen, Wilson Kime calling over the general band that the radar had given them away, then two seconds later having to jump off the Carbon Goose’s loading ramp into pitch-darkness. Morton knew they didn’t have any choice. Options on this trip had vanished when the wormhole back to Boongate had slammed shut behind them. So he’d shouted out the obvious, and flung himself off. Didn’t bother to check if anyone agreed. Supposedly, leading by example was the sign of good leadership, except no one had ever said he was in charge.
The huge plane shot away above him, and he expanded the suit’s force field out to fifty meters. His speed braked sharply from air resistance, and he pushed the perimeter out even farther, shaping it to a teardrop profile. Sensors showed him the cold rock less than two hundred meters below, and approaching fast. They also revealed nine other armor suits dropping around him.
Thank Christ for that.
Morton had thought—sort of—that he could rely on Rob and the Cat to jump, but the others were unknowns. It was kind of reassuring that they were as committed or as reckless as he was.
The base of the force field touched the rock, bowing back up like a sponge to absorb the impact, then folded neatly back around the suit.
“Did you have an encore in mind?” the Cat asked.
“Whatever it is, he’s doing it solo,” Rob said.
“Thanks, guys.”
“Everyone okay?” Alic asked.