There was a lot of shouting going on all around. Everyone was moving at such a rush. One of the big (really big) mercenaries dashed into the homestead and came out half a minute later carrying Freya.
“Put her in my hovercraft,” Horst said. “I’ll look after her.” The limp girl was laid on the front bench, and he eased a bundle of cloth under her head.
Through all the confusion and bustle Jay saw one of the mercenaries strap a dark globe to the neck of a huge dog. A man (who she thought looked a bit like Rai Molvi) and a lady who had come with the mercenaries were arguing hotly in front of the cabin. It ended when she made a slashing motion with one arm and climbed into the pilot’s seat of the second hovercraft. The other mercenaries were ransacking the ammunition boxes that lay on the ground, slotting magazines into their backpacks. Then the impellers on Jay’s hovercraft began to spin and the decking wobbled as it rose up. She wondered where the mercenaries were going to fit, her hovercraft had seventeen children packed in between the pilot’s seat and the fan at the rear. But when both vehicles swung round and began to pick up speed she realized they were jogging alongside.
“Where are we going?” Shona shouted above the teeth-grating buzz of the fans.
The small hairless pilot didn’t seem to hear.
Aethra watched the Lady Macbeth streak across the ring. Triple fusion exhausts twining into a single braid of near-pure radiation that stretched for over two hundred kilometres behind the fleeing starship.
Murora VII was a thousand kilometres ahead of her. A battered sphere of grey-brown rock not quite a hundred and twenty kilometres in diameter. Along with the other three shepherd moonlets it brought a certain degree of order to the edge of the ring, creating a tidy boundary line. Dust, iceflakes, and pebbles extended out across the gas giant’s ecliptic plane far past the immature habitat’s orbit, although their density slowly dropped away until at a million kilometres it was no different to interplanetary space. But none of the larger particles, the flying mountains and icebergs, were to be found beyond the hundred and eighty thousand kilometre limit where the shepherds orbited.
Lady Macbeth ’s exhaust plume yawed a degree, then straightened out again, honing her trajectory. Three thousand kilometres behind her, five combat wasps, arranged in a precise diamond configuration, were accelerating at twenty gees. It had taken the Maranta a long time to respond to the break-out, its possessed crew wasting seven expensive seconds before launching the combat wasps—though they couldn’t know that. Now the drones could never catch her.
Aethra had never known emotional tension before. Always, it had reflected the feelings of the supervisory station staff. Now though, as it watched the starship curving over the moonlet, it knew—understood—the meaning of trepidation. It willed the starship to succeed.
The station staff were lying on their acceleration couches, that wicked gee force squeezing them relentlessly. Aethra could see the ceiling of the cabin through a dozen sets of pained eyes, feeling the cushioning give below overstressed back muscles.
Three seconds away from the Lagrange point. Lady Macbeth ’s fusion drives reduced to four gees as she skimmed eight kilometres above Murora VII, tracing a slight parabola around its minuscule gravity field. A couple of ion thrusters fired. The pursuing combat wasps cleared the edge of the ring.
Aethra prepared thirty-three storage areas in its neural strata. Ready to receive the memories of the Edenists on board. Although it would be so quick . . .
An event horizon eclipsed the Lady Macbeth .
Her fusion plume lingered briefly like a broken-hearted wraith before melting away. Then there was no physical evidence left of her ever having existed.
Five combat wasps converged on the Lagrange point. Their courses intersected, drive exhausts a dazzling asterisk, and they sped outwards on divergent vectors, electronic brains crashing in program overload confusion.
“I told you Joshua could fly that manoeuvre,” Warlow said.
Aethra tasted smugness in the subsidiary mentality’s thoughts. It wasn’t used to that, but then the last twenty-four hours had contained a lot of unknowns. “Yes, you did.”
“You should have more faith.”
“And you’re the one to teach me?”
“About faith? Yes, I could try. I think we both have the time now.”
The hovercraft battered its way through the tall, heavy savannah grass. It had never been designed with this particular terrain in mind. The grass was too high, too resilient for the skirt to surmount; it all had to be ridden down. That took power, and they were overladen with the children as well.
Kelly datavised the vehicle’s electron-matrix-management processor for a status review. Reserves were down to thirty-five per cent; not nearly enough to make it past the end of the cloud. Impeller monitor programs were flashing amber cautions into her brain as they struggled to maintain skirt inflation. Burnout wasn’t imminent, though it was something she’d have to watch for.
A long mound arose out of nowhere, and she tilted the joystick exactly right to veer round its base. The piloting program Ariadne had datavised to her was operating in primary mode, enabling her to steer with the same consummate skill the mercenary had owned. Her weight—or rather lack of it—made her the ideal choice. Theo piloted the other hovercraft, and the priest was sitting behind her, but apart from them the team ran alongside. Even Shaun Wallace, though the few times she glimpsed him he was as red faced as a marathon runner on the home straight.
The mounted knights were pushing them hard, keeping a steady three kilometres behind, just enough to put them beyond the range of the gaussrifles. One or two would occasionally break rank for a charge. Then Sewell or Jalal would fire a few EE rounds to ward them off. Thankfully the sturdy pikemen were unable to match the boosted mercenaries’ physical endurance (so how come Shaun could?); they had been left nearly seven kilometres behind. So far so good, but the situation couldn’t hold stable for long.
Fenton was racing ahead of the hovercraft, scouting the land, his mass and brawn making easy work of the bristling grass blades. Reza looked through the hound’s eyes, leaving a locomotion program to guide his own body down the trail left by the two hovercraft. He was developing a feel for the land beneath the rhythmic pounding of the hound’s paws, anticipating the folds and abrupt rises which belied the savannah’s facade of interminable mellow ground.
There was a small but certain change in the texture of the grass whipping against Fenton’s blunt muzzle. The dead mat of decaying blades covering the flinty soil becoming thicker, springier. Water, and close by. Fenton slowed to smell the air.
“Kelly,” Reza datavised. “There’s a small stream two hundred metres ahead, steep gully sides. Head for it. Part of the bank has collapsed, you can take the hovercraft down.”
A guidance plot filled her mind, all close-packed brown and blue contour lines, a computer image of how the earth would look stripped of vegetation. Neural nanonics integrated it with the piloting program, and she tweaked the joystick.
“Where does it lead?” she asked. So far all they had done was build distance between them and the homestead cabin, heading due south without any attempt to get back on the river which led to the mountains.
“Nowhere. It’s cover for us, that’s all. The knights are trying to wear us down; and the bastards are succeeding. We can’t keep this pace going for ever, and the hovercraft electron matrices are being drained. Once we’re immobile the pikemen will catch up, and it’ll all be over. They know we can’t fight off that many of them. We have to regain the initiative.”