Stage a fight to get the soldiers out of the fort, sneak in as they’re leaving, round up the horses, and ride out while everyone’s watching the shootout. That was the plan, anyway. But Broben knew that the first thing that gets thrown out when a plan commences is the plan.
He glanced at Plavitz and the navigator shook his head: No sign of the demolition team. Broben wished they had another pair of binoculars. The super-duper ones were with Arshall.
A few nail-biting minutes later the men reached the wall and went prone beside it. Broben had to take it on faith that Arshall was crawling toward the huge equipment door while Sten was headed back to escort the second group; all he could see were three of his crewmen lying prone at the base of an alien fortress.
“Here they come.” Plavitz nodded at the canyon floor. “Maybe half a mile down on this side. You can see two of them because their ballet suits aren’t working. I think there’s three more. You can see them for a second when they come out of the shadows. Those outfits take a blink to go from dark to light.”
“Let’s hope Arshall sees ’em too,” said Broben.
“He’s at the dead spot already,” Francis reported. Sickly pale in the wall’s dim light, the normally coltish tail gunner nodded confidently at the Redoubt. He had lost his eyepatch somewhere on the way here. “I see him moving.”
Broben frowned. “That doctor fix that eye or trade it up?” he asked.
Francis just shrugged.
“Maybe we should get moving,” Plavitz said. “They’re gonna be on top of us in about two minutes.”
“Wait till Sten gets here,” Broben said.
“I’m here now,” Sten said right beside Broben.
Broben jumped. “Holy Jesus effin—don’t do that.”
“Sorry.” Sten deactivated his smartsuit and beckoned. “Let’s go.”
Broben, Francis, Martin, and Plavitz fell in line behind Sten and made their way toward the Redoubt wall. Broben knew he was walking between the lion’s teeth right now, but he couldn’t see it. He could not have felt more exposed if he were playing patty-cake with Santa Claus on a nudist colony parade float. Knowing that the demolition team was catching up behind them gave him an awful itch between the shoulder blades, and he dared not look back.
They were halfway to the wall when a familiar rising whine sounded from the canyon floor somewhere near the Redoubt’s massive equipment door. Arshall had fired on the demo team, much sooner than they’d planned. He probably hadn’t had much choice.
Bright red threads immediately appeared from the Redoubt wall. They swept the canyon, then angled in to converge near where Arshall had aimed. Broben imagined the demo team members desperately running for cover. He almost felt sorry for the bastards.
The watery ghost of Sten moved forward again. Broben quickly followed.
A bass-drum rumble filled the air and the Redoubt’s huge main door slid partway open. A matte-black troop transport rolled out and sped toward the converging targeting lasers betraying the demo team’s position.
Broben froze. How the hell could that heap have got sent out so fast?
“Go,” he told Sten through clenched teeth. “The door’s gonna shut. Go!”
Sten hesitated, then sprinted for the open equipment door. Targeting lasers swung toward him, lit him with red spots, lost him again.
The troop transport slowed.
“They’re gonna see us,” Plavitz hissed from the back of the line.
The main door began to rumble shut. The transport began to turn.
“They’ve got us,” said Plavitz.
Broben was right about to give the order to run for it when a voice shouted from out on the canyon floor. At first he thought it came from the transport. Some warning to disarm. Then he saw the lone man standing a hundred yards behind the turning vehicle. Waving his arms at it and shouting. It was Arshall.
“Did his suit go dead?” Francis wondered.
Arshall jumped up and down and shouted again. Broben felt a sudden leaden certainty. “He turned it off,” he said. “He’s drawing their fire.”
A trio of ruby-colored threads converged on Arshall. He ran weaving toward the troop transport. A patch of ground kicked up just behind him and he stumbled, rolled, and came up running.
The transport halted. It pivoted to face Arshall. Arshall yelled and waved it on.
“Go,” said Broben.
No one moved. They watched the dead-black van speed toward the lone man luring it away from them. The silent play of coherent light from the Redoubt wall. The sudden small explosion from Arshall’s side.
“God damn it, run!” Broben yelled.
They ran. Broben tried to keep straight on the path described to him by Sten. Maybe it didn’t matter now, but it was all he knew to do.
The massive door shut tight with a dull boom. There was no way to know if Sten had made it in.
Broben glanced back at the transport. Arshall was nowhere in sight. The transport bucked over some obstruction and resumed its path toward the demolition team, and Broben saw Arshall drag behind it for a few seconds, then fall boneless to the ground.
Broben made the wall and dove down beside the three crewmen already there. All of them staring out at Arshall looking like a man-shaped hole in the dimlit canyon floor.
“Did Sten get in?” Broben asked.
Nobody knew. They watched the red lines track the barely visible figures of the demo team pinned down near the western cliff wall. The transport pulled up and the sides popped open and troops spilled out. They heard the faint ascending whines of the nerve rifles as the firefight commenced.
“They’ll have to open the door to let it back in,” said Boney.
Broben nodded. “That’s our Hail Mary pass if Sten doesn’t come through.”
The ground around them brightened. Broben looked up, expecting a flare or spotlight, but there was just the flat horizon of dully glowing wall, bright-red spiderwebs cutting the avenue of night sky overhead.
Shorty tapped him on the shoulder and pointed, and he saw a man-sized oval in the wall at ground level fifty feet away. Bright light from inside. An armed silhouette appeared.
Broben drew his pistol. The figure lowered its weapon and beckoned with the other hand.
“Son of a bitch,” said Broben. “He made it.”
The crewmen turned and crawled like sappers toward the oval entrance. Broben hung back and let the others go by him. He glanced at the distant firefight. That demo team didn’t stand a chance.
He took one last look at Arshall on the canyon floor. Then he followed his crew into the Redoubt wall.
TWENTY-NINE
The Typhon was parked head-first on an enormous slab centered on a groove that ran into a recessed bay the size of a warehouse, angular wings folded tight against its long body. Bugs crawled all over it like crabs feasting on a beached whale. A faint rumble sounded from it, a sound more felt than heard, the purr of a hundred-foot cat. But even without the deep vibration Farley would have known that this was not a dead creature being picked over. Perhaps the Typhon was not alive in any way that Farley understood, but though it swarmed with bugs and did not move he also knew it was not dead. Sleeping seemed as good a word as any.
The line of bugs carrying Messerschmitt parts from the crevice behind Farley flowed past the Typhon and out of sight. A sparser line of bugs returned from that direction. Some of these continued back to the crevice opening. Others veered off to join their fellow drones crawling on the Typhon. Whines and faint metallic keening carried across the dilapidated distance. Bright white flashed in tiny spots along the Typhon, and a flickering bluish glow from somewhere deep within the bay gave the space the appearance of some Dantean factory.