We should have knocked out the generator ourselves, made the sacrifice. That would have stranded the Starflyer here. We could have killed it then. If it was in one of the trucks.
There were just so many unknowns and variables. Morton hated that.
His timer was seventeen seconds off. The wormhole closed before he expected, the slight glimmer behind the pressure curtain shrinking away unexpectedly early.
“Okay,” he told Adam. “Let’s hear it.”
It took the Institute thirty-two minutes to shoot down five of the remaining blimpbots after the fuel air bomb went off. Land Rover Cruisers tore through the streets of Armstrong City in twos and threes, never quite constituting a decent target by themselves. The teams would rendezvous in an open location where they could mass their firepower and slam it into the massive aging craft coasting above the rooftops.
It was easy enough for Keely to track them. She’d successfully crashed the city’s net, forcing the Institute to use encrypted radio. Transmission points were easy to track. Physically following them was more difficult. The streets were packed with people and vehicles, trying to get the injured to hospitals, forming rescue parties to pick through collapsed buildings. Lack of communications was a huge inhibitor. The emergency services had fallback radio, but they didn’t know where the worst areas were. It wasn’t just the district around 3F; the blimpbots that had been knocked out of the sky had caused tremendous damage where they crashed. Three of them had started street blazes.
The Institute troops didn’t care about any of the human problems. Their Cruisers drove through crowds and forced ambulances off the street; anyone who got in the way was shot at. When they did succeed in attacking a blimpbot it would fall to the ground, causing more deaths and damage.
Stig and the available clan warriors chased around after the Cruisers on bikes where they could. It was difficult, they couldn’t go plowing through crowds. They’d managed to wreck six Cruisers in total, at a cost of nine Guardians. He didn’t like the ratio.
“Convoy forming along Mantana Avenue,” Keely warned.
Stig checked his timer. There were eighteen minutes left before the wormhole closed. Above him stars were shining through the thinning rain clouds. “Okay, all mobile units, we’ll regroup at the 3F end of Levana Walk. Muriden, Hanna, slow them up as best you can. We’ll reinforce you immediately.” He braked the bike he’d commandeered, a Triumph Urban-retro45, and swung it in a sharp turn to head back down Crown Lane. Olwen, who was riding shotgun, slipped her ion pistols back into their holsters. “Did they get the bomb carrier?”
“Yeah.” He was busy concentrating on the road, which was littered with debris. Every other vehicle driving that evening was moving fast and swerving to avoid the bigger lumps and branches. It was adding a considerable percentage to the casualties.
Sensor coverage from the sneekbots was sporadic. Keely had left secure routes through the city’s network that the Guardians could access, but there had been a lot of physical damage, especially around 3F. Stig was supplied with intermittent images of the vehicles thrusting their way along Mantana Avenue. There were some kind of bulldozers near the front, and a couple of beefy tow trucks.
“Isn’t that another of those life-support capsules?” Olwen asked.
Stig risked shifting his focus from the road to his virtual vision grid, and saw an identical MANN rig to the first. “What do they do, clone those bastards?” A minibus full of injured heading the other way blasted its horn at him, and he throttled back, swaying in close to the pavement. The driver shook his fist as he passed.
“Damnit, we’re not going to be in time.” He watched the first Cruisers reach the bottom of the steep rubble slope that had been Market Wall. Their suspension had lowered, lifting the main body a couple of meters above the ground. They didn’t even seem to slow down as they tipped up and began climbing the pile.
Hanna’s team opened fire as soon as they reached the crown. Gatling cannon and masers replied. Headlights and targeting lasers lashed across the broken inner surface.
The bulldozers were going up in formation, flattening a crude road, shunting aside tons of debris with a speed Stig could hardly believe. Their brilliant headlights cut through the late twilight, illuminating thick clouds of dust they were churning up. More Range Rover Cruisers were speeding up over the broken stone and into the dark heart of the blast zone. They began firing at random out of the cloying dust, strafing the blackened slopes.
“Disengage,” Stig ordered as the tenth Cruiser topped the mound. “Fall back, dreaming heavens, you can’t hold that many.” They were even losing sneekbots as the Institute’s randomized firepower swept around the ruined Plaza.
The bulldozers had carved a roughly level path up to the top of the slope; now they were pushing down the other side. Dense streamers of dust congested the air around them, blurring the light beams. Five more Cruisers raced up after them, jumping the apex to come bouncing down the newly formed ramp. There were over twenty of the Institute vehicles inside the Plaza now, all of them shooting wildly. None of the Guardians were firing back; they were scrabbling desperately for cover. The MANN truck arrived at the bottom of the incline, and began to grind its way up, eight headlights stabbing up into the occluded night.
“We should have stayed,” Stig said. “Made our stand there around 3F.”
“We’d have been slaughtered,” Olwen said. “This is complete desperation on their part; they’ll do anything to clear a path for the Starflyer.”
He turned onto Nottingham Road and braked again. It was chaos ahead, with cars and vans wedged together, headlights shining on the partially collapsed buildings. People were working on the ruins, picking stones and bricks off one at a time. A city fire crew was deployed halfway along, their bots crawling up a four-story house that had somehow twisted itself around through twenty degrees.
“Run,” he said simply.
The Institute Cruisers stopped firing. There were only five functioning sneekbots left in 3F Plaza. They showed the MANN truck gunning its way down the inner slope in juddering bursts. Five Cruisers were shining their headlights on the gateway’s pressure curtain. A group of figures in flexarmor were clearing it, flinging away chunks of debris.
Stig’s timer said there were thirteen minutes left until the end of the cycle. For another fuel air bomb he would have signed away his soul.
One of the Institute people walked through the gateway. There were flashes of light on the other side, diffused by the pressure curtain.
Some kind of truck came crashing out through the pressure curtain in a burst of noise and light. Its force field was radiating a bright perilous red. Air brakes shrieked and hissed, tires skidded across the slippery ash. The mounted weapon on every Cruiser tracked the truck’s erratic journey until it came to a halt fifty meters from the gateway. Its engine was racing, snorting like a maddened animal as the red hue faded away. Frost began to form on its bodywork.
Two more identical trucks came racing through. Then brilliant scarlet light stabbed through the pressure curtain, illuminating half of the Plaza.
“That’s us,” Stig said. “It’s got to be. Adam’s on the other side. The Starflyer isn’t having it all its own way.”
More trucks were scurrying through, so close together they could have been a train. The Cruisers were forming a broad semicircle around the gateway, every weapon pointed at it. Stig counted eight trucks in total behind them. One was crawling forward, leveling up beside the MANN truck. “Keely, we need a better angle on that truck,” he said.