External sensors showed Morton water spraying out from either side of the track. A rigid trail of squashed muddy plants lay behind him. “Goddamn!”
The bubble’s chromometic skin was doing a wonderful job defusing the moldy green color of the crop around the entire exterior. Any eye or visual sensor looking down would just see a hazy patch just the same color as the rest of the field; but that crushed track and little wake of water was a dead giveaway.
“We need to get on the farm roads,” he told the others. “This wet ground is painting us as big fat targets.” Pre-invasion map images flipped up in his virtual vision, and he steered the bubble to the right, his body tilting over as if he were riding a bike. The bubble changed direction, heading for the top corner of the field.
“Incoming,” Doc Roberts warned. “Four flyers.”
Morton saw the symbols creep into his virtual vision. They’d come into the valley at the western end, following the old highway route around Blackwater Crag.
Aerobots curved around to meet them head-on. Maser beams slashed between the two opposing formations, etching themselves in lines of steam through the downpour. Force fields flared brightly as they deflected the energy strikes. The aerobots fired salvos of missiles, their fiery contrails spluttering in the rain. Powerful ion bolts ripped through the air like slow-motion lightning, casting stark shadows for kilometers across the ground below.
Morton reached the rough farm track bordering the field. It was awash with muddy water that was spilling over the banks of the dike, but only a few centimeters thick. He throttled up the bubble’s track. A limp fantail of water squirted up behind him as his speed reached an easy eighty kph.
Tactical decision: that the aliens in their flyers would be a little preoccupied to spot a ripple in the mud right now.
The aerobots were always going to lose. They were outnumbered from the start. The flyers were heavier and slower, but their beam weapons had a much higher power level. Maneuverability and superior tactical ability gave the first two kills to the aerobots and their host of submunitions, but eventually brute force won out.
After seven minutes of furious combat the remaining two flyers thundered over the area where the wormhole had opened. One of the stubby cylinders was trailing a thin brown vapor trail from a gash on its side, but its straining engines managed to keep it airborne. They began to spiral out, sensors sweeping the ground.
Ten kilometers away, and already three hundred meters above the valley floor in the rugged folds of the foothills, Morton watched the aliens circling around and around. His bubble was stationary, resting at the bottom of a narrow gully cut out of the soil by an earlier spring storm. Mud and stones were pressed against the base, their mottled shading replicated all around him. A web of thermal shunt fibers completed the disguise, giving the bubble’s chromometic skin the same temperature as the land it rested on.
“Bugger,” Rob Tanne said. “Eight more of the bastards.”
The new flyers raced up the Highmarsh Valley to join the first two in the search for any surviving human trespasser. Their flight paths brought them closer and closer to the foothills.
“Don’t they have anything else to do?” Parker complained.
“Guess not,” Morton said.
Cat’s Claws waited as the flyers swooped low overhead, their bubbles inert, operating on low power mode, hidden among the abundant secluded folds and hollows provided by the rugged landscape. Morton could hear the bass thrumming of the engines through the bubble’s gel. They must be very loud out in the open.
One passed about fifty meters away. His bubble’s passive sensors scanned the layout. There wasn’t much to add to the database already in his array. The Primes didn’t seem to vary their machines.
After thirty minutes, six of the flyers peeled off and left, leaving the remaining two patrolling the Highmarsh. “Let’s go, boys,” Cat said as the flyers loitered at the far end of the valley.
Morton was slightly surprised she was still with them, not to mention sticking to the deployment plan. He’d half expected her to take off on her own as soon as they were down. Under his guidance, the bubble’s plyplastic skin rippled, squeezing itself up out of the gully with a fast lurch. The caterpillar track held it steady on the soaking sulphur-yellow boltgrass that covered the slope. There was only a kilometer or so of desolate ground to cover before the unruly cloud base. They’d be a lot safer inside the thick, cool vapor.
The strategic assault display was empty now. Elan’s deployment was complete. The wormholes above the planet had all closed, shutting down the temporary communications feeds. Morton switched to a local display, checking the position of the other bubbles against his own. Unsurprisingly, Cat was already above cloud level, waiting for the rest of them. He fed power to the tread, and began his ascent.
The navy had been concerned that the snow that lay on the Dau’sing peaks all year round would leave tracks that the Primes could follow. For that reason the path preloaded into the bubble’s navigation array skirted the very high ground, taking Morton on a long winding route through tough passes and clinging to contour lines along alarmingly steep slopes. They need not have worried. The gray clouds were several degrees warmer and a lot muckier than the usual weather fronts besieging the mountains at the onset of the southern continent’s winter. The snowline had undergone a long retreat upward, exposing vast tracts of slatey shingle that hadn’t seen daylight for millennia.
Morton drove through the dark, murky fog for a couple of hours. He had to move slowly; visibility was down to thirty meters at best, and that was using the passive sensors on full resolution. All he saw was kilometer after kilometer of the same slippery, muddy shingle crunching below the translucent track. No other features emerged out of the fog. The angle of the slope changed, but that was it for variety.
They were traveling in a very loose convoy, with Cat out in front. At least he assumed she was still in front; he hadn’t spotted her beacon for over an hour and a half. She’d gone off at a speed he wasn’t going to try to match. Behind him, Doc Roberts was keeping a sensible kilometer separation distance. His beacon moved in and out of acquisition depending on the shape of the terrain.
Morton rounded a sharp vertical ridge of rock, and the Cat’s beacon was shining three hundred meters ahead.
“Where’ve you been, boys?”
“Taking care,” Morton said. “We’re not proving anything to each other here.”
“Touchy!”
He accelerated down the shallow incline to her bubble. She had stopped at the low point of a shallow saddle between a couple of peaks on the edge of the Regents range, about fifteen kilometers from where the navy detector station had been built. It was walled in on both sides by cliffs of sheer rock rising to vanish into the turbid clouds that occluded the peaks. The ground between them was a stratum of crumbling stones, scattered with fresh unsteady piles that had fallen from on high when the mountains were shaken by the nuclear blast.
Morton drove his bubble on a slow circuit of the area, matching up what they’d reviewed on the satellite imagery from CST’s original survey. It was a good location to adopt as a base camp. The cliffs were riddled with slim zigzag fissures and deeper crevices. He identified at least three where they could store the bubbles and equipment.
“This should do,” he announced as the Doc’s bubble came slithering down the incline.
“Well, as long as you think so, Morty darling,” Cat said.
Once everyone had arrived, they got out of the bubbles and started unpacking their equipment. Morton and Rob took a fast walk over to the edge of the saddle. Past the cliffs, the ground curved down sharply, though visibility was still only a few tens of meters. The clouds were moving faster here, scurrying along the southern edge of the Regents. Without them, Morton and the Doc would have had a clear view straight down to the Trine’ba two kilometers below. Randtown itself was away to the west.