“Fuck that.” He had two HVvixen missiles left. Both of them burst out of his shoulder tubes. Two seconds later they stabbed down on a Cruiser, taking it out in a clean pillar of white flame.
“Bad move,” Rob said. “I think we’ll need them later.”
Morton ignored him. The surviving Cruisers were still shooting. “Cat, Rob: synchronize.” He stopped running, and crouched down as his hyper-rifle slid smoothly up from his forearm. The MANN truck started to draw away. Beside him the Cat and Rob had come to a halt. Charlemagnes charged past in pursuit of the armored cars. Masers from Institute vehicles had locked on to them. The shield webbing protecting the warhorses blazed with energy that was discharged through their elaborately woven saddle tassels; the big beasts raced onward trailing whirlwinds of sparks. Morton pulled targeting data out of the tactical display at accelerant speed, bundled some of it in a neat file that he shunted to the Paris team. “That one.”
Three hyper-rifles fired at once, joined a moment later by the boom of the particle lances. The Cruiser’s force field burned dark crimson. They fired again. The Barsoomians joined them. This time they punctured the force field. “Switching,” Morton told them. He picked a second target while the fireball was still expanding.
The Cruisers were on the move, bucking and juddering over the rough ground as they closed protectively around the MANN truck. Accelerants allowed Morton a seemingly leisured review of the fickle data coming in from the Guardian scouts up ahead. The vehicles carrying the soldier motiles were only three kilometers away now. Already a running firefight had broken out between the aliens and the lead riders of the mounted platoons sent to intercept them. It looked like the soldier motiles were equipped with a very powerful version of a plasma rifle. They were also shooting mini-missiles with enhanced-energy warheads. Once again, the horses were taking the brunt of the attack.
Morton’s wired scrutiny snapped his attention back to one of his own sensor feeds. One of the Cruisers around the MANN truck was firing missiles. A squadron of intense purple sparks went slicing through the air to detonate against the front of Bradley’s armored car with a ferocity that slammed the heavy vehicle back several meters. The blast wave nearly knocked Morton to the ground. He swayed back as the inside of his helmet reverberated with the roar of the explosion.
“This is a strategic balls-up of the first order,” Rob declared. “They haven’t got a fucking clue what to do.”
“Is there anything we’ve got that can split that bastard’s force field?” Morton asked.
“I don’t think so,” Matthew said. “If the zone killers couldn’t do it, nothing we’re carrying can.”
“Bradley,” Alic called, “what’s your plan now?”
“We’re going to ram the truck. That’s the only way left to stop it reaching the Marie Celeste. We must pray the planet is having its revenge.”
“Crazy,” Rob wailed. “This isn’t a battle, it’s a joke.”
Morton swiped his attention across various images. The MANN truck had almost made it to where the road began again. Two kilometers ahead of it, the motile soldiers were brushing off the wild attacks by the mounted Guardians. They’d link up soon enough.
Another flight of missiles from a Cruiser pounded into the armored cars.
“If it’s running for its ship it has to get out of the truck to transfer,” Morton said. “That’s when it’s vulnerable. We just have to keep up.”
“Morty, clever boy,” the Cat said approvingly.
“Are you with me?”
“Wouldn’t miss it, darling.”
“Let’s show these morons how to fight a real war,” Rob said.
“Okay,” Alic said. “We’ll take it to them.”
Morton’s smile was feral as he started running.
***
Amid the gray desolation of solidified lava that comprised the summit of Mount Herculaneum the hyperglider had become difficult to see. Dust churned up by the crash had settled on its white fuselage, sticking to the streaks of ice to tone down the shiny plyplastic like adaptive camouflage. Its sharp aerodynamic planform had disappeared the instant it struck the rock spur, crumpling and warping until it resembled the worn vacuum-boiled ripples of lava on which it had come to rest. In the dark cavity underneath what was the badly smashed-up cockpit a couple of small red LEDs glowed in the shadows, slowly dimming as the ruined power cells decayed.
The thin regolith around the wreckage had been disturbed when Wilson hauled himself out of the inverted pilot’s seat. A trail of meandering sulci led away to the rim of Aphrodite’s Seat, illustrating how he’d pulled his inert legs along behind him as he crawled the remaining two hundred thirty meters. Every now and then the trail widened with broad scuff marks where he’d squirmed around. The exposed lava was covered by flaking splotches of dried blood and little droplets of epoxy foam used to patch the splits in his pressure suit that had torn open again.
Wilson never looked back now. He’d found a smooth cleft right on the precipice that accepted his body like a comfy old sofa. His feet didn’t quite dangle over the eight-kilometer drop, but they were only a few centimeters from it. The pressure suit’s silver-blue fabric was dull beneath a grimy coat of regolith dust it’d picked up as he dragged himself along. Thick pleats of epoxy foam crisscrossed his shattered legs. Two of the blobby lines were still oozing blood; little droplets inflating out from the edges to bubble away in the vacuum. He no longer worried about such things. Painkillers insured his remaining time would be comfortable. The last of the Wild Foxes had successfully completed the mission.
To his right, the arrays and their supplementary electronic modules were arranged neatly on the rock with the broad sensor strips sitting on squat tripods, their matte-black multi-absorbent faces pointing east. The view was perfect, showing him the entire Dessault range all the way across to the tiny spire of Mount StOmer in the east. Far, far below him, the glacier ring was a bright diamante strip braided by thin wisps of cirrus. Farther down, the thick storm clouds continued to sluice around the tremendous volcano. After hours watching keenly, he was sure the power of the winds from the ocean were weakening now. It didn’t matter; the storm had provided the Guardians with more than enough raw material to manufacture their planet’s revenge.
While he lay there in the quiet peace of the vacuum he’d observed the clouds spreading east. From this altitude it was like seeing a white-water torrent pouring down a dry riverbed. The green valleys were slowly occluded by the cumulus, leaving just the rugged gray and white pinnacles sticking above the surface.
In the background Samantha and the others chittered away, their voices like some kind of insect trapped in his helmet. He didn’t say very much to them now, just the occasional comment to confirm some aspect of the observation. At first there was little to see. The storm for all its size and speed was perfectly natural. He lay there watching its progress as the sun warmed his chest and the lava slowly sucked heat out of his spine. Eventually he noticed how the winds were gradually speeding up; the strange way clouds were confined to the mountains. Ordinarily most of the storm would flow away out across the vast expanse of the Aldrin Plains, while on the other side of the Dessault range it spewed around Mount Idle to disperse over the southern pampas lands. Today it was blocked and channeled. As the morning went on he started to recognize the Guardians’ choreography. Between the mountain peaks, manipulator stations churned up gigantic whorls in the fast-flowing cloud, sucking stationary highs into the Dessault range, denying the storm any release. As a consequence, the cloud swarm rose in height as it thronged along valleys, layer after layer building into a solid thunderhead, kilometers deep. With every exit denied it had nowhere to go but east. A smile ghosted Wilson’s face as he watched the front roar along Trevathan Gulf, fed by fresh gales that the manipulator stations injected through every major valley.