She turned and ran to the west wall and a minute later the others began to do the same, choosing empty spots in the now-circular palisade. Everyone followed Ada’s example of carrying at least two flechette rifles and a crossbow along with a heavy canvas bag of magazines and bolts.
Ada settled herself into a firing niche and discovered that Daeman was still beside her. “Good,” he said.
She nodded, although she had no idea what he was really saying to her.
Working very carefully, in no rush, Ada slapped in a fresh magazine, clicked off the safety, and aimed the rifle at the treeline no more than two hundred yards away.
The rushing, hissing, clacking noise made by the approaching voynix grew deafening and Ada found she had to resist the urge to drop her rifle and cover her ears. Her heart was pounding and she was feeling slightly nauseated, almost the way she’d felt earlier in her pregnancy, but she did not feel afraid. Not yet.
“All those years of the turin drama,” she said, not realizing that she was speaking aloud.
“What?” said Daeman, leaning closer to hear.
She shook her head. “I was just thinking about the turin drama. According to Harman, Odysseus said that he and Savi started that—distributing the turin cloths ten years ago, I mean. Maybe the idea was to teach us how to die with courage.”
“I’d rather they’d given us something to teach us how to win a fight against fifty thousand fucking voynix,” said Daeman. He clicked back the activation bolt on his rifle.
Ada laughed.
The little noise was drowned out by the roar as the voynix broke free of the forest—some leaping from tree branches even as others scuttled beneath the leapers—a gray wall of carapaces and claws rushing at them at fifty or sixty miles an hour. There were so many of them this time that Ada had trouble making out individual voynix bodies in the rising and falling mass. She looked over her shoulder and saw the same nightmare coming at them from all sides as the tens of thousands of voynix narrowed the radius at full speed.
No one yelled Fire! but suddenly everyone was shooting. Ada grinned in the grip of a sort of ferocious terror as the flechette rifle emptied its first magazine in a series of hard stutters against her shoulder. She let the ammunition clip drop free and slapped a fresh one in.
The flechettes struck by the thousands, crystal facets gleaming in the rising sun, but the hits seemed to make no difference. Voynix must be dropping, but there so many thousands still leaping, scuttling, jumping, running, scrambling, that Ada couldn’t even see the wounded and dead ones fall. The gray-silver wall of death had covered half the distance from the woods in a few seconds and the things would be over the low palisade walls in another few seconds.
Daeman may have been the first to go over the wall—Ada couldn’t swear to it, since it seemed to be an almost simultaneous decision. Grabbing up one weapon and screaming, he jumped from the parapet, vaulted over the tops of the logs, landed, rolled, and began rushing toward the voynix.
Ada laughed and wept. Suddenly it was the most important thing in the world to her that she join in that charge—the most important thing in the world to die attacking this mindless, vicious, stupid, programmed-for-murder enemy, and not wait here behind wood walls to be killed cowering.
Absurdly taking care because she was, after all, five months pregnant, Ada jumped, rolled, got to her feet, and rushed after Daeman, firing as she ran. She heard a familiar voice screaming to her left and she turned just long enough to see Hannah and Edide running not far behind, stopping to shoot, then running again.
She could see the humps on the gray-carapaced voynix bodies now. They were covering twenty or twenty-five feet at a leap, their killing claws extended. Ada ran and fired. She no longer knew that she was screaming or what words she might be screaming. Briefly, very briefly, she summoned an image of Harman and tried to send a message his direction—I’m sorry, my darling, sorry about the baby—but then she paid attention only to running and firing and the gray forms were almost on them, rising above them like a silver-gray tidal wave….
The explosions threw Ada ten feet back and burned off her eyebrows.
Men and women were lying all around her, thrown backward with her, too stunned to speak or rise. Some were trying to put out flames on their clothing. Some were unconscious.
The Ardis compound was encircled by a wall of flame that rose fifty, eighty, a hundred feet into the air.
A second wave of voynix appeared, running and leaping through the flames. More explosions erupted along this line of running gray-silver figures. Ada blinked as she watched carapaces and claws, legs and humps flying in every direction.
Then Daeman was pulling her to her feet. He was panting, his face blistered from flash burns. “Ada… we have to get… back… to…”
Ada pulled her arm free and stared up at the sky. There were five flying machines in the air above the Ardis clearing and none of them were sonies—four smaller, bat-winged devices were dropping canisters toward the tree line while a much larger winged machine was descending toward the center of their palisaded compound—the palisade walls mostly tumbled inward now from the multiple explosions.
Suddenly cables dropped from the bat-winged shapes and black, humanoid but not human shapes whizzed down the lines, hitting the ground faster than a human could and running to establish a perimeter. When some of these tall, black forms ran past Ada, she saw that they were not humans—nor even humans in combat armor of some sort—but taller creatures, strangely jointed, covered with barbs, thorns, and a chitinous ebony armor.
More voynix came through the flames.
The black figures between her and the voynix had gone to one knee and raised weapons that looked too heavy for human beings to lift. The guns suddenly exploded into action—chuga-chink-ghuga-chuga-ghink—sounding like some chain-driven cutting machine while pulses of pure blue energy raked the oncoming ranks of voynix. Wherever a blue pulse struck, the voynix exploded.
Daeman was pulling her back toward the compound.
“What?” she shouted over the din. “What?”
He shook his head. Either he couldn’t hear her or didn’t know the answer himself.
Another round of explosions knocked all the retreating humans down again. This time the mushrooms of flame rose two or three hundred feet into the cold morning air. All of the trees to the west and east of Ardis were burning.
Voynix leaped through the flames. The chitinous black soldiers shot them down by the score, then by the hundreds.
Then one of the black things was looming over her. It reached out a long, barbed arm and extended a hand that seemed more black claws than hand. “Ada Uhr?” it said in a calm, deep voice. “I am Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. Your husband needs you. My squad and I will accompany you back to the compound.”
The large ship had landed next to the Pit. This flying machine was too large for the palisade and had knocked down most of the rest of the wooden wall on its landing. It stood on high, multiply jointed metal legs and some sort of bay doors had opened in its belly.
Harman was on a litter on the ground with several different creatures huddled around it. Ada ignored the creatures and ran to Harman.
Her beloved’s head was on a pillow and his body had been covered by a blanket, but Ada had to thrust her palm in her mouth to keep from screaming. His face was ravaged, cheeks hollow, gums all but empty of teeth. His eyes were bleeding. His lips had cracked until they looked as if something had chewed them to bits. His bare forearms were visible above the blanket and Ada could see the pooled blood under the skin—red skin that was sloughing off as if he had received the world’s worst sunburn.
Daeman, Hannah, Greogi, and others were huddled near her. She took Harman’s hand, felt the slightest pressure in return to her soft squeezing. The dying man on the litter tried to focus his cataract-covered eyes on her, tried to speak. He could only cough blood.