“We’re not going to make it anyway, Master Sergeant,” DJ says, noting my gloom as he walks beside me across the garage to our Skell-Jeep. “Question I have is, which heaven will we go to? Crab heaven or pearly gates?”
Our teams have assembled. We mount our vehicles.
The little side lock opens, Neemie enters and nobody bothers to brush him down because we’re going to immediately shove out anyway.
But then he shouts, “I got satlink! There’s lots of fresh orbital. Our orbital. Don’t know disposition or tactics, but it’s up there! Want to see what I got?”
We share, those of us who can. Some of our angels are still working but for most of us, the skintight charges are too far down, the suits too damaged, some of us now wear Voor helms, and so…
“Push out!” Joe calls. Vee-Def will operate the locks and run to join us when we’ve all exited.
Teal climbs up behind Rafe into a Voor wagon.
That’s the last I see of her.
I’m on my Tonka and true to his word, Joe has assigned me to a multigauge cannon. DJ is on the second cannon. Michelin pilots. We have eight passengers, including Beringer, Brodsky, Mustafa, and Suleiman.
Vee-Def in the garage booth fuses a safety circuit and the main lock gates slide open together—inside and out. Air rushes by with a lion’s roar. We’re blown around for a few seconds, my skintight fabric ripples—our vehicles rev and lurch and roll. The engines all around grow quieter in the thinning air, but the Tonka’s rumble still comes up through our asses.
And then we’re outside, blind—flooded with the barely tactile whisper of a Martian dust storm. Mustafa grabs my arm, I reach over to Michelin, he slows the Tonka for just a moment—and Vee-Def runs out of the obscurity, leaps up onto the vehicle, and squeezes between Mustafa and Beringer.
The Chesty immediately starts laying down barrages right and left. Nobody pauses at the platform to transfer shit; we’re already taking incoming fire, bolts, shells, and then a lancing disruptor beam plows the stone beside us, rises like an electric cobra, and shaves a curved blade from our right rear tire, which immediately digs into the dirt and starts to heave us around.
Michelin ejects the bad tire and it flies off into the swirling murk. Five tires is still enough. Four is enough, though the tail will drag. Three and we’re stalled.
Once again, the dust goes purple all around with ghostly lightning, heavy, dull thumps vibrate us in our seats—something bright green and throwing out curling threads of plasma screams overhead like a ghastly firework, then abruptly descends. It misses us but the Skell-Jeep to our right takes the direct bolt hit and leaps in flaming pieces, bodies and blood soaring into the storm—
We’re keeping to our course, DJ and I are laying down blind cannon bursts—taking opposite arcs right and left—the Martian wind is rising, buffeting like an angry, dusty ghost…
I’m definitely focused. On the Red now and nowhere else, in combat mode, stuck in this all-too-mortal and coldly frightened body, hanging on to the multigauge and my seat, knocked around by rough terrain, wind, concussions. Michelin’s head jerks from side to side in the pilot’s seat. He looks up over his shoulder in disbelief.
Still here!
We’ve managed to push about a kilometer from the Drifter. We can barely make out the Voor wagon ahead of us, can’t see a thing in front, and then—
Air, dust, rock—all lift up behind and cast shadows as it flies over. There are four more bursts just like that in rapid succession. Rocks fall around—meters wide, bouncing and rolling, throwing up great gouts of shattered basalt and sand—and a Millie plummets out of nowhere directly in front of our Tonka, outlined in molten glow, tumbling end over end, cracking open, spilling dozens of weird dolls in jumbles of arms and legs all in the wrong places, all twisting wrong—Antags!
Michelin’s arms wheel as he almost casually steers our Tonka around the wreckage and broken bodies.
Joe takes the comm: “Ants at nine o’clock! Prep sidearms—they’re on foot, fast and close!”
Now we’re going to have our chance to engage the enemy at close quarters. Pity it won’t get reported, pity it won’t get out, what we’ll see.
What we’ve already seen.
BIRDS
What do they look like?” Alice asks.
We’re about fifteen miles from the border. Traffic is backed up; lots of folks heading north for vacation. Cheerful crowding. Canada’s not signatory, but still prosperous, nobody’s retaliating, Gurus don’t want discord. Gurus want political stability while they dole out their technological gifts, so that we can head out to the Red and fight.
“Like birds,” I tell her. “They were pretty thickly suited up. Long in the neck, wide helms, with a long nose—thick bodies, really long, strong arms, a kind of hanging sack below the arms.”
“Like where wing feathers would hang,” Alice says.
“Yeah. Maybe. But the eyes…”
I hear something above the light electric hum of the traffic. All these electric cars and it’s so soft, so quiet, you might think you were out on a meadow with the wind blowing through the grass, that’s what it sounds like on the road to the border, to Blaine.
But I’m hearing something more powerful, louder.
Higher.
Alice hears it next, and the driver notices as well. He turns around, and we can’t understand what he’s saying through the plastic barrier until he switches on an intercom.
“What should I do?” he asks Alice. “We can get off at the next exit, we could go inland, there’s a—”
“Quiet,” she says. She puts her palm to her chin and taps her nose with a manicured finger.
I’m looking up through the side window, straining on my seat belt, and I see them first. Four hover-squares, quadcopters in civvy parlance. Coming low over the countryside, the fields, the freeway, slowly swaying side to side, searching for something.
“Are they looking for us?” the driver asks.
Alice shoots me a querulous look. “Who knows you made it back?” she asks.
“Nobody, I think.”
“The apartment’s clear. Joe made sure of that,” she says, more to herself, then back to me. “Did you walk from the mob center?”
“I walked. Hitchhiked, actually. A lady in—”
“Crap,” Alice says.
“Nobody told me to walk all the way to Seattle,” I say.
“No, that would be silly,” she says in an equally low tone. “The one who picked you up—somebody from the base?”
“She said she was a colonel’s secretary. Older gal.”
Alice looks right at me; she hadn’t heard that part. “Anyone else?”
“A short cab ride.”
“How’d you pay?”
I hold up my finger.
The hover-squares have leveled off about a hundred meters on each side of the freeway and are running north in parallel to the stuck traffic, no doubt scanning everybody through the windows.
I lean back in the seat and close my eyes.
OFF THE RED
Vee-Def shouts through the roar and the dust, “That’s our incoming! From orbit—they’re carpeting the Drifter!”
Which is how we got through the lines. What started out sporadic has now become constant. Maybe it’s for us, to allow our escape, maybe not. But for the moment, while we’re on the run, the Antags are in total disarray.
We’ve gone four klicks. A long chain of explosions ahead of us has halted for the moment and seems to have temporarily put the Antag infantry on pause. Our tires may actually be rolling over some of them in their trenches. I think I see a kind of fountain in a gully, figures scrambling through the morning shadows and the gray and purple-lit dust. More boulders arc out and fall around us from the barrage over the Drifter—bouncing. I can see the Voor wagon off to our right, plunging in and out of drifts of dust and coiling, wind-whipped smoke, and I think I see Antags popping up like arcade cutouts between us, but it’s hard to make out anything real, we’re shivered by one concussion after another. Michelin is driving like a madman, veering right and left, and I barely hear him shouting in his helm, or singing, can’t tell which.