The northern horizon was an uncompromising clash of turquoise and red, both colours textured as fine as silk, pressing smoothly against each other. Both unyielding. Beautiful, from a distance. Directly in front of the spaceplane, filth and fire was belching from a widening fissure in the rain-clouds.
Ashly altered the camber of the wings, and sent the spaceplane on a steep dive through the dank clouds. Water slicked the pearl-white fuselage, misting the optical sensor images. Then he was through, levelling out.
It was a small confined world of darkness and squalor into which he had come. At the centre, clouds reflected the diseased irradiation of the crater, tarnishing the land with the flickers of dying atoms. Wildfire scoured the malaised savannah around its base, eating its way outwards. Twisters roamed the scorched earth, scattering soot and ash all around to form a greasy crust of embers over the flattened grass.
But further out the rain was falling, cleansing the land. Spears of sunlight wrested their way past the shredding clouds, returning cool natural colours to the fractal wilderness of greys.
Sensors locked on to Kelly’s communication block. Ashly banked the spaceplane in a swift high-gee turn, riding the signal to its source. Ahead and below, two tiny hovercraft bounced and jerked their way across the uneven countryside.
Reza counted twenty-one knights escaping from the small holocaust Sewell and Jalal unleashed. That was good, he had expected it to be more. He and Pat Halahan were next. His sensors showed him the spaceplane sinking fast out of the sky a couple of kilometres behind him.
“Five minutes, that’s all they need.”
“They’ve got it,” Pat said urbanely.
Reza fired his forearm gaussrifle. Targeting-program-controlled muscles shifted the barrel round as his sensors went into a track-while-scan mode. All his conscious thoughts had to do was designate.
He picked off three knights with EE rounds, and brought a further two horses down before the gaussrifle malfunctioned. Some of his processor blocks were glitched as well. Sensor resolution was falling off. He dumped the gaussrifle and switched to a ten-millimetre automatic pistol. Chemical bullets which produced a scythe of kinetic death, and nothing the possessed could do to stop it. Two more knights were down when he ran out of spare magazines. White fire hit his shoulder, blowing his left arm off. A two-metre jet of blood squirted out until his neural nanonics closed artery valves.
Pat was still sluicing bullets at a pair of knights off to Reza’s left. Stimulant and suppressor programs were working hard to eliminate shock. Reza saw a mounted knight thundering towards him, whirling a mace around. A momentum prediction program went into primary mode. The horse was three metres away when Reza took one step back. His remaining hand came up inside the slashing arc of the mace. He grabbed, pulled, twisted. His carbon-fibre skeleton twanged at the severe loading as the inertia of the spiked iron club yanked him off his feet. Glossy armour shrieked a metallic protest as the knight was catapulted backwards out of the saddle, then clanged like a bell as he landed.
They climbed to their feet together. Reza raised the mace and started to walk forwards, a locomotion auto-balance program compensating for his lost arm.
The knight saw him coming and pointed his broadsword like a rifle. White flame raced down the blade.
“Cheat,” Reza said. He detonated the fragmentation grenades clipped to his belt. Both of them vanished inside a dense swarm of furious black silicon micro-blades.
A hurricane squall of rain stung Kelly’s face as the spaceplane swooped fifteen metres overhead. Its compressor nozzle efflux nearly overturned the hovercraft. She engaged the fan deflector and killed the impellers. They skidded to a rumbustious halt.
The spaceplane slipped round sideways in the air then landed hard, undercarriage struts pistoning upwards. Rain pattered loosely on its extended wings, dribbling off the flaps.
Kelly turned around in her seat. The children were huddled together on the hard silicon deck, clothes soaked, hair straggly. Terrified, crying, peeing in their shorts and pants. Wide eyes stared at her, brimming with incomprehension. There were no clever words left to accompany the scene for the recording. She simply wanted to put her arms round every one of them, pour out every scrap of comfort she owned. And that was far less than they deserved.
Three kilometres behind the hovercraft, EE explosions strobed chaotically, while antagonistic streamers of white fire curled and thrashed above the blood-soaked grass.
We did it, she thought, the knights can’t reach us now. The children are going to live. Nothing else mattered, not the hardships, not the pain, not the sickening fear.
“Come on,” she said to them, and the smile came so easily. “We’re leaving now.”
“Thank you, lady,” Jay said.
Kelly glanced up as a figure hiked out of the rain. “I thought you’d left,” she said.
Shaun Wallace grinned. His sodden LDC one-piece was shrunk round his body, mud and grass clung to his boots, but the humour in his eyes couldn’t be vanquished. “Without saying goodbye? Ah now, Miss Kelly, I wouldn’t be wanting you to think the worst of me. Not you.” He lifted the first child, a seven-year-old girl, over the gunwale. “Come along then, you rabble. You’re all going on a long, beautiful trip to a place far away.”
The spaceplane’s outer airlock hatch slid open, and the aluminium stairs telescoped out.
“Get a move on, Kelly, please,” Ashly datavised.
She joined Shaun at the side of the hovercraft and began lifting the exhausted, bedraggled children out.
Horst stood at the bottom of the stairs, harrying his small charges along. A word here, a smile, pat on the head. They scooted up into the cabin where Ashly cursed under his breath as he tried to work out how on earth to fit them all in.
Kelly had the last boy in her arms, a four-year-old who was virtually asleep, when Theo started up his hovercraft. “Oh no, Theo,” she datavised. “Not you as well.”
“They need me,” he replied. “I can’t leave them. I’m a part of them.”
Great bands of sunlight were raking the savannah. The fighting was over. Kelly could see three or four knights on horseback milling about. None of them showed any interest in the spaceplane now. “But they’re dead, Theo.”
“You don’t know that, not for sure. In any case, haven’t you heard, there’s no such thing, not any more.” He stuck his arm up and waved.
“Hell.” She tipped her head back, letting the sweet rain wash her face.
“Come along now, Miss Kelly.” Shaun leant over and gave her cheek a platonic kiss. “Time you was leaving.”
“I don’t suppose it would do any good asking you to come?”
“Would I ask you to stay?”
She put a foot on the bottom rung, the drowsy child heavy in her arms. “Goodbye, Shaun. I wish it could have been different.”
“Aye, Miss Kelly. Me too.”
Kelly sat in the cabin with one eight-year-old boy on her lap and her arms round a pair of girls. The children squirmed round, fidgeting, excited and nervous, asking her about the waiting starship. Lalonde was already half-forgotten, yesterday’s nightmare.
If only, she wished.
The compressor whine permeated the overcrowded cabin as Ashly fed power into the fans. Then they were airborne, the deck tilting up, a press of acceleration. Kelly closed her eyes and accessed the spaceplane’s sensor suite. A lone figure was trudging over the savannah, a well-built man with tousled ginger hair, wearing a thick red and blue check cotton shirt, collar up against the rain as he headed for home.
A minute later a stentorian sonic boom broke across the vast grass plain. Fenton raised his great head at the sound, but there was nothing in the sky apart from rain and clouds. He lowered his gaze again, and resumed his earthbound search for his lost masterlove.