Mad World Bandby Danielle L. Parker |
Chapter 8, part 1 appears in this issue. |
| Chapter 8, part 2 of 2 |
But they passed that particular danger as well, and, tense with nerves, were soon at the huge outdoor cooler where Terhune had supposedly hidden their transportation. It was the work of a few seconds for Dorn, placing his hand on the lock, to open the door with a manipulation of telekinetic force.
“Clever,” Martin said after a moment, helping Dorn move the boxes of frozen carrots and peas aside. “It looks almost like an ordinary pallet from the top. He even painted it to look like wood. He’s a fox alright.” He studied their transportation with a critical eye. “I hope this thing comes with some serious automated shielding. One blast from these Union energy rifles and we’ll be melted slag otherwise.”
Dorn, ruthlessly shoving aside an armload of vegetables, only grunted in response. The control arm for the sled was folded flat, and lying tucked into the sides of the thin platform were the two promised splat guns. He picked up the nearest rifle and checked it with the ease of long familiarity.
“Fully charged and set on maximum,” he said after a moment, handing his companion his own weapon and stuffing the two spare charges into his belt before turning his attention to the sled again. “We’ll have to hang on tight,” he muttered as he snapped up the control arm and rails of their flying platform. “Just sidebars on this one.” He shook his head disapprovingly; there were a few built-in grips in the metal surface, but using those required a hand he might need for the rifle.
Martin Berger got on top and took the control arm. The sled, which was almost completely silent, rose quivering from its mound of frozen food. Dorn, getting up to kneel behind his fellow Soltrian, put one hand on the nearest grip and braced himself in the corner against the back and side rails. It was definitely awkward with a rifle in his free arm. He slung the strap over his chest; at least if the sled swerved violently, that should keep the gun from flying over the side. What those platforms lacked in flat-out forward speed they usually made up for in agility, and Dorn had endured some sickeningly corkscrew maneuvers on more than one.
The platform wheeled toward the door. Martin muttered, “I don’t think they’re going to need these vegetables.” He leveled the rifle on his knee, and the door burst into dust in the vibrating burst he fired. The shot rattled the teeth in their gums and the bones in their skin, but there was no one close enough, apparently, to notice, even if they had recognized that eerie vibration as a weapon. MWB-11’s own standard weaponry was very different from Soltri’s, a factor that Dorn hoped would work in their favor.
Dorn hung on with a whitened grip, for his outwardly bookish companion was already showing a surprising nerve in his manipulations of the sled. As Martin drove the platform at its top speed toward the domed buildings that housed the base’s critical generators, Dorn’s telepathic senses felt the first jolt of alarm. They had just been spotted, and he saw beneath them an upturned face, the mouth gaping wide open in shock. There was nothing that could be done. With a pang of regret, he aimed the splat gun.
But it appeared their airborne incursion had already registered on some kind of automated tracking system. A terrible siren suddenly rose wailing into the night, so loud and shocking that Martin’s grip, holding the sled’s super-sensitive control, twitched involuntarily and slewed them a meter or so sideways in the air. Dorn felt the scream of his own sense of danger, but there was no helping it. Whether they died for this or not, the equipment had to be destroyed, and with no more than a gritted curse, his fellow Soltrian righted his course with an iron hand and drove on.
Dorn, kneeling behind him, saw a telltale shimmer flicker in the darkness; it marked a bio-construct soldier reforming one of its arms into weapon mode. The sled passed over that figure, and Dorn, instantly firing, saw that he had just managed to save their own lives: those soldiers had personal shields against the fearsome energy weapons used on this world, but it seemed the protection was not particularly effective against their own alien splat guns.
But Dorn was now all too aware that they had just been spotted. Most of the bio-construct soldiers were linked in networked communication within their squad, and the shining silver eyes that had just dissolved in the burst of his fire had already registered their presence. Every soldier on the base would now have that same image.
Dorn could spare no time for that thought now. The sled was swooping down upon their target, and he fell full-length on the platform beside his companion, aiming the rifle, and kept firing, for Martin it seemed was about to drive them right through the intact wall of the building itself. But fortunately he managed to clear a hole for their entry, and choking in the poisonous dust, grabbed desperately for a handhold as the sled snagged on part of the structure as it burst through. Dorn saw the massive shape of the base generators directly in front of them.
Martin, one hand white-knuckled on the control, was wildly firing with his other, though his shots were almost random. Dorn, lying full-length beside him on the wildly darting platform with his long legs braced against the railings, aimed with much greater care. The huge generator too was shielded, and that much more powerful barrier did not immediately yield to the disruptive force of the rifle. Flickers of lightening ran up the stressed bubble of force, and Dorn, his teeth clenched against the vibration of his weapon, saw Martin momentarily abandon his grip on the control to aid him. The uncontrolled sled slipped in the air, nearly unseating them both, but as his fellow Soltrian’s fire joined his own, the shielding suddenly gave way.
They were far too close to the resulting explosion. The sled, left to its own devices, slewed wildly. Dorn did not quite remember what happened next. The blast that spun their small platform upward like a stick in a tornado deafened and almost blinded him, though he felt Martin’s mental scream even through his fellow Soltrian’s usual psionic barrier. Martin Berger was ripped helplessly free of the sled, and Dorn, dazed, his vision burning red in the glare of that explosion, already conscious of his burned and torn body, grabbed for his fellow Soltrian’s tumbling figure. He snagged something and heaved it over the railing, straddling that limp form while he snatched for the control. The sled was almost overturned and threatening to drop them both into the bomb-blasted inferno below.
There was no time to think about Martin, who might already be dying, and was certainly burned worse than he had been while lying prone and protected on the platform. The generator was not the only thing they had to destroy tonight, even at the cost of his life as well as, it seemed, Martin Berger’s. Dorn, moved by a terrible purpose, pressed the handheld control and rose in the turbulent air.
He was still deaf in both ears, and it was an eerie sensation to move in that soundless world even as his consciousness and burning lungs cleared. The sled rocked, clipped by a flash in the night that Dorn recognized dimly as an energy weapon discharge, but he paid it no heed. The cooler night air whipping by his weeping eyes gave him back more of his vision, pained and fire-split though it yet was, and as he lifted his gaze, he saw that his conviction that the base would be raided tonight was indeed proving true. Over the horizon he could see the streams of fire he could only assume to be the opening of the long feared Sinoasian attack.
But at least that new and more deadly enemy momentarily distracted his own attackers, and though he scarcely remembered the details of it, the transport device in the making was ruin and dust as he once again pressed the sled upwards into the air. Light, the bluish discharge of the defenders and the deadly red rain of the Sinoasians, mingled in the night like the most elaborate of firework celebrations. Dorn could feel a remote appreciation for its spectacular beauty as he turned the sled toward the line of distant hills to the west.
His hand was so burned that he could see its charring, but Dorn did not bother to aid himself. He fixed his gaze on that faint shadow in the distance and pushed the platform to maximum speed. Now they were in a race, and Dorn could not spare time for either his own agonizing injuries or the even more badly injured man he eased gently to the side with his free hand. Those hills were hope, and if they did not reach them in time, neither of them would survive what he knew would soon come.
The battle went on for several hours, though Dorn never turned to look behind him. But he had not yet passed much beyond the rim of that first range of low hills before there was a last blinding flare of light, greater than all the others. The desert was lit to its horizon by that eerie strobe. It was a light he had prayed he would never see.
Dorn instantly steered the sled down and killed its forward speed. As the platform grounded with a jar, he turned and looked behind him. Over the low line of the hills, hiding the first glow of dawn, a terrible column was climbing with great rapidity. As its top expanded to cover the heavens Dorn fell prone and covered the body of his fellow Soltrian with his own. But still, the great rush of heat and air and sound and dust that came in its wake ripped them both up like chaff, and as they tumbled in the whirlwind together, Dorn felt his consciousness at last slip away from him.
Copyright © 2006 by Danielle L. Parker
