Then they straightened out again and Hank put his foot to the floor. Maybe through it, they picked up speed so fast. Then an awesome noise cracked across the clifftops from somewhere far to the west. The noise rolled across the tops of the Damisi Mountains and rattled, echoing, against the canyon walls.
“What the hell was that?” Abe Lendan gasped.
Whatever it was, it came again. And again.
“It’s the Bolo,” Kafari whispered. “It’s s-shooting at something.”
Lots of somethings, from the sound crashing across an entire mountain range. She tried to peer through the side window, caught the edge of a blinding flash high above the western cliffs. Julie Alvison, ash-pale beneath the livid bruise spreading across her face, let out a breathy scream and pointed into the sky. “What’s that?” she gasped, hand violently atremble.
Kafari craned her neck, trying to see. A massive fireball was streaking down across the morning sky, trailing a long glowing tail of smoke and flame. It vanished behind the eastern slopes of the Damisi Mountains range. Nobody offered any guesses. Probably because they were all hanging onto the car seats and each other as Hank whipped through turns in the road. They went airborne on small rises, scraped the bottom of the chassis in the occasional dips in the road.
It was part of a ship, maybe, Kafari theorized in jolted, jagged flashes between thuds and skids. A big one. Bigger than the freighter? How long would it take a ship to fall from orbit? Would a ship fall from orbit? Or just drift around as big chunks? Maybe it was one of the Deng ships trying to land?
Nearly three minutes after it vanished behind the mountains, a massive plume of smoke and debris rose above the clifftops. Then chunks of rock started falling. Hank paid more attention to the plummeting debris than his job and skidded them straight off the road. He fought the wheel and plowed his way back onto the asphalt. The car behind them slewed into the ditch, trying to avoid hitting them. The second car spun around, then tipped over, skidding sickeningly on its side.
Then a massive chunk of sandstone — nearly as big as their car — smashed into the ground half a meter from their right fender. Flying shards caught the side of the car like shrapnel. The front passenger window broke like an eggshell. Debris peppered the whole right side of the car. More falling rock cracked the windshield. The glass spiderwebbed. The roof rang like a bell, dented in a dozen places.
Somebody was screaming. Words took shape between sobs of hysterical terror, which Kafari finally realized were coming from Julie, the president’s energy advisor. “What was that thing?” she was asking, over and over, between hiccoughs and shrill, panicked-animal noises. She was clawing at her seat belt, trying to reach the floor, but the belt had locked tight. She gave up and simply huddled as low as her harness would let her, trembling violently. Kafari was shaking pretty violently, herself…
The president’s bodyguard had pressed one hand to his ear, obviously listening to a broadcast over his ear-piece. “I think,” he said tersely, “that was part of a Deng ship, that thing we saw come down, not one of ours.” Ori Charmak’s face abruptly faded to the color of dirty snow. “But we’re getting hammered. Hard. General Hightower says we’ve lost Ziva Station, Juree Moonbase, all the asteroid mines.”
Shock crashed across Kafari like a tidal wave, drowning out his voice. The whole space station? The entire moon base? Just gone? She was still trying to take it in when a black shape came arrowing down from the sky. Kafari screamed. A huge ship was dropping toward Klameth Canyon, moving fast.
“Get off the road!” Ori shouted. “That’s a Deng troop transport!”
Hank skidded the car through a farmyard and rocked to a halt under the spreading limbs of a massive oak tree.
“Out!” Ori snarled, bodily hauling President Lendan out of the car. As Kafari scrambled out, a group of farm hands began running toward the house, abandoning tractors and cultivators in the fields. Then something else big roared down the canyon, at treetop height. Dazzling beams of coherent light strafed the fields, cutting down anything moving: tractors, herds of panic-stricken livestock, people…
“Down!”
Ori slam-dunked Abe Lendan into the ground and shielded the president’s body with his own. Kafari ate dirt. More airborne fighter-craft shot past, toward the immense bulk of the Deng troop ship. The alien behemoth was settling to ground less than five hundred meters away. Oh, God, Kafari wept in sheer terror, oh, God… She dug her fingers into the dirt.
Things were emerging from that ship. Immense, multijointed things. Bristling with guns. Looking like demons from the darkest reaches of hell. Yavacs, her brain gibbered. Those are Yavacs! Lots of them. And infantry. A black tide was pouring out of the troop ship, full of hairy, dog-sized creatures. Spindly, stiltlike legs sent them scurrying far too fast.
Then a groundcar from a farmhouse a hundred meters from the Deng ship skidded onto the road. Somebody was making a run for it. Every gun on every Yavac in the canyon turned in a blinding blur of speed, shooting at the car. It disappeared in a blinding flash and roar. The echoes were still cracking off the canyon walls when the door of the farmhouse closest to them crashed open. A woman’s voice shouted across the yard.
“Inside! Quick!”
Kafari hesitated only long enough to scream at her trembling muscles, then she was on her feet and running. The others were right behind her. She gasped for breath as she shot across the porch and staggered toward the open door. Kafari literally fell through the doorway. The president was right behind her. Ori threw Julie Alvison across the porch to reach the marginal safety of the farmhouse.
“Get down!” the woman yelled, even as she slammed the door shut and threw herself to the floor. Kafari skidded across polished wooden floorboards. The buttons on her shirt and shorts dug scratches into the gleaming wood. She fetched up behind a hand-carved rocker with a quilted cushion in cheerful reds and yellows. Then white-hot hell erupted beyond the windows. Glass blew out, shattering in the overpressure of a massive explosion. Kafari’s ears felt like they were bleeding.
When she could see again, the president’s car was gone. So was the tree it had been parked under. And so was most of the front wall. A ship of alien manufacture shot past, firing at something farther down the road. Kafari couldn’t even breathe, she was so terrified. When the alien fighter moved away, the woman who had offered them shelter scrambled up, covered with dust and splinters and blood, but on her feet and moving.
“Up, quick! We got to reach the cellar!”
The ground trembled under strange, disjointed concussions. One glimpse through the broken wall showed Kafari a sight from deepest nightmare. Yavacs, walking down the canyon. On huge, missahpen metallic legs. Insects the size of houses. Hunting her.
“Move your ass, girl!” the farmwife snarled.
Kafari broke and ran.
They plunged down a long hallway toward a spacious kitchen, filled incongruously with the smell of fresh-baked bread. It smelled like home, like her grandmother’s apron, like everything in the world she’d come home to defend. A boy of about twelve, eyes wide and scared in a dark and frightened face, had pulled up part of the kitchen floor. Steps led down into a cellar. Anything that resembled a hole she could crawl down and pull in after her looked good to Kafari. A whole pile of guns lay beside the open trapdoor. She felt better, just seeing them. With guns in their hands, they could at least go down fighting.