Exodus, page 52
“Ghosts incoming,” Mique reported. “Right side again.”
Finn’s suit manager showed him the moat. Its surface was moving. Its entire surface, all the way around the wall, bulging up like a wave and racing forward, an impossibly smooth breaker about to hit the beach. Just before it reached the edge of the moat, its base erupted into spumes of light. Gray spheres came tumbling out of it. And kept on coming.
The false wave collapsed, and still the saberstones swept forward across the blackened ground, churning up the dust. They were rolling, Finn saw, propelling themselves forward. There was no sign of the star-shaped slit on any of them.
Mique fired his gun at the vengeful machine that reared up out of the ground ahead, killing it in a blaze of discordant energies. “Move!”
They all started jogging. Pandiana led two of her team up the slope on their right and set off a barrage of projectiles at the approaching Ghosts.
“Ghosts on the left,” Mique warned.
Both Daves were firing grenades at the mass of saberstones behind. The incandescent explosions didn’t even slow them down. The front line was blown apart, but the massive bulk behind just kept rolling over their remains regardless. Finn couldn’t believe their numbers. They were still swelling out of the moat. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. No, more than that.
Bensath was pounding up the slope on Finn’s left with four of his team. Energy beam strikes turned the dust to glass around them. They had to drop back, launching grenades in high arcs. The Ghosts’ energy beams shot them out of the sky. The light pulse as they detonated was intense, turning the world to black and searing white.
“Rupture fire,” Mique ordered. “Destroy the ground ahead of us.” Even as he spoke another K-screw whirled its way upward barely fifteen meters ahead. Gyvoy took it out with a burst of hyperkinetic projectiles.
Finn switched his own gun to fire in a wide fan, range fifty meters. He stood beside Mique and started blasting away at the innocuous earth. His suit sensors showed him the saberstones had become a terrifying avalanche behind them, surging inexorably onward. They were coming in from the sides as well, huge masses cresting the slopes to tumble down, smothering the grenade explosions laid down by the Daves.
“We’re not going to make it,” Finn realized. They were at least nine hundred meters from the base of the hoodoo.
Mique and Gyvoy were walking forward, firing ahead to devastate the ground and whatever it concealed. It wasn’t fast enough.
“Shut the fuck up,” Gyvoy snarled. “We’ll get there. We have to. You have no idea what’s at stake.”
Finn just laughed at him. It was either that or start crying in futility.
“Elsbeth, ground suppression ahead,” Mique said. “Everything you’ve—” An energized kinetic punctured his helmet, blowing his head apart. Gyvoy and Finn turned together and sent a fusillade of kinetics into a Ghost that had appeared atop the slope ahead.
“Keep going,” Gyvoy yelled.
* * *
—
Ellie had gone up into the command cab as soon as Finn and the others left. For whatever reason, Elsbeth didn’t object—didn’t say anything, actually—so she sat in the chair Gyvoy had been using. She selected the feed from Finn’s suit sensors, allowing her to keep up with exactly where he was and what he was doing.
It was a weird experience. She was still in her own armor suit, so the visor was playing a virtual Finn experience. To her, it was as if she were in an active body remote-controlled by someone else, but just couldn’t feel the motion.
When he walked down the wall into the moat, she noticed the irregular ground between the edge of the moat and the base of the hoodoo provided plenty of cover if the Ghosts converging on the breaches spotted the squad. “That’s good,” she told herself. Then Bensath’s team formed a protective cordon around him. Ellie nodded approvingly.
Mique released a group of scout drones from his silos.
Now the hoodoo had been stripped of its vegetation, revealing the elaborate structures the Celestials had crafted in it. Finn asked if it was a temple. She’d wondered that herself.
They moved forward, following Mique out into the black landscape. She hadn’t expected the approach to be so difficult. The weird lines of light in the ground, the buried traps, Ghost attacks.
When Mique called for ground suppression, Elsbeth fired eighteen hypersonic missiles from the Hell Welcomes magazine. “Isn’t that overkill?” she asked. By the time she’d finished the question, they’d all obliterated strips of ground inside the wall. She studied the tactical display, trying to find a pattern.
“The impact points were all random except for the one taking out the Ghosts,” Elsbeth said when she asked. “It’s a strategic distraction. This way the defense CI doesn’t know we were targeting a specific location.”
“Ah.” Which was obvious now that Ellie thought about it. Maybe Gyvoy was right? Not that she’d ever forgive him; it’d been too humiliating.
“Our millandys outside the wall are coming under a lot of fire,” Elsbeth said, “so the CI is concentrating on the deep burn assault. They always do that; it’s like they take it personally.”
“Do they?”
“They’re not self-aware sentient, but self-defense prioritization is something they share with biological life. It’s just another factor we use to divert them from the actual incursion.”
“So they’re not that bright, then?”
“Depends on the metric. If you consider—”
A tortured scream came over the squad channel. Ellie saw scarlet alarm symbols flash up on Edusal’s suit telemetry; identical symbols materialized on several other suits positioned close to hers.
The feed from Finn’s suit became a confused blur, he was twisting about so much. Then Ellie saw Edusal fall; she had no feet. Blood was gushing out of the severed limbs, turning to plumes of red vapor.
“Asteria fucking wept,” Elsbeth yelped. “It can’t be!”
“Be what?” Ellie demanded.
“Saberstones!” Mique was bellowing. “That wasn’t a moat for water, it was a bed of saberstones.”
“Oh, fuck, no, no, no,” Elsbeth moaned. “Not the whole moat, there’d be…millions.”
“What the hell are saberstones?” Ellie demanded.
“We’ve only seen them once before. They’re like pebbles that bite—and bite through just about anything. Certainly the armor the squad’s wearing.”
“Well…the squad’s out of the moat now.”
“They move, too. That other time? Nobody survived.”
“Use the hypersonics. Kill them.” Even as she said it, the feed from Finn’s suit was showing her a deluge of saberstones rising out of the moat, distorting its placid surface of air crystals in a massive swirl of scintillations.
“They’re too close,” Elsbeth said.
The leading edge of saberstones started rolling across the ground, forming a mobile ridge that was growing higher as it advanced. Ellie couldn’t believe how many there must have been, piled up under the air crystals. Elsbeth was right: millions! Now every single one of them was on the move, pursuing Finn.
When the squad tried to escape, traps rose out of the ground ahead.
“We’re not going to make it,” Finn said, his tone ominously calm.
He’s right, she realized. “Can we pick them up?” she asked.
“I can’t,” Elsbeth said. “Even if we could get through one of the breaches, there’s a million saberstones between us and the squad. Not even Hell Welcomes can drive over them. They’d chew the tracks apart before we get twenty meters, then start on the chassis. It’s suicide.”
“What about a bridge?” Ellie asked desperately. “Some way over them? A route straight to the hoodoo?” She ordered the tactical display to provide an overview of the whole area.
“If there was, Mique would’ve used it,” Elsbeth said. “There’s nothing.”
Ellie stared at the map, searching for something—anything.
Mique’s suit telemetry flared scarlet, then went black before vanishing. Finn’s feed showed the headless armor suit collapsing onto the ground.
“Keep going,” Gyvoy ordered.
It was all useless, Ellie knew. Even with Mique guiding them through the traps they wouldn’t have made it; there wasn’t enough time. Now that he was gone, there really was no chance.
She watched half of the squad purging the ground ahead, their weapons ripping up huge spumes of dust and soil. They were clearing a way, but far too slowly, and from what she could see on the tactical map, the mass of saberstones was closing in from both sides. Groups of Ghosts were also hurrying toward them. The squad needed a much wider swath of destruction—
She checked the map again, her mind whirling through the calculations: distance, height…
“Elsbeth!”
“What?”
“Are there any hypersonics with boosted-proton warheads?”
“Yeah, five, but they’re purely for last-resort self-defense. We can’t use them anywhere near the squad.”
“I don’t want them near the squad. Target the two hoodoos just outside the wall on the northeast. If you strike just above the base, they’ll topple into the compound. There will be causeways of rubble, so we can drive straight in across them.”
“Oh, shit, that’s crazy.”
Suit telemetry from one of Bensath’s team reported three hits from energized kinetics. Critical medical alerts bloomed.
“They’re dead anyway. Do it!”
“Aw, fuuuuck. Warn them.”
“Finn, Gyvoy, stay where you are. Do not move. Understand? Hold your position.” As she said it, she could see the advancing wall of saberstones was piling itself higher than Finn’s armor suit.
“What?” Finn’s confused voice blurted.
“We’re going to make a bridge. Hang on, we’re coming.”
“Launching,” Elsbeth said.
Hell Welcomes rocked as the missiles streaked away.
“Hold,” Ellie pleaded.
Barely two seconds later the boosted-proton bombs detonated simultaneously. Elsbeth had fired a pair at each of the two hoodoos Ellie had indicated.
Ellie sucked down air as the Hell Welcomes sensors showed the plasmaspheres expanding, orders of magnitude brighter than the sun in the airless sky above. Barely a second later, the vapor blast hit the tank. The entire vehicle pivoted up on its front, lifting almost vertically. Ellie grabbed the seat frame—oh, this is going to hurt. It crashed back down, attempting to slam her entire spine into her skull. Her armor suit’s internal padding contorted, its grip as hard as steel.
Ellie yelled wordlessly as if that would expel the pain. Some amber symbols appeared in the visor. She had no idea what they meant, they were so blurred.
The tank lurched forward, its tracks growling as it accelerated. Ellie’s padding relaxed its grip, and she blinked the display into focus.
“Head back to the Natt,” Elsbeth told the Eat This and Hard Yes. “I got this.”
Sensors on either side of Hell Welcomes showed Ellie the two hoodoos behind and on either side. Cataracts of ebony grit poured down the sides from all the trees that had crumbled in the explosions. The glare of the plasmaspheres was dissipating, revealing massive gashes around the bottom that glowed like lava. They began to disintegrate, flinging out slabs of rock that bounced and careered across the ground, fragmenting further as they went.
Abruptly, the entire base of the hoodoo on the right burst apart in a blizzard of huge splinters, as if another warhead had gone off right inside the pillar.
“Oh, sweet Asteria,” Elsbeth moaned in mortified delight. “It’s going!”
Ellie could barely believe it, but the hoodoo now had a definite tilt—just a few degrees, but visible, its apex leaning toward the compound. The angle started to increase, and accelerate.
That was when the base of the second one erupted in a blast of detritus. Ellie’s amazement switched to panic as she saw the big chunks of rock arcing out. Some of them were going to come crashing down very close…
“Er, how good is our armor?” she asked.
She never got an answer. A rock smashed down on the Hell Welcomes, slamming them sideways with a deafening crunch. Elsbeth fought the motion, oversteering to slalom them back on course.
“You are fucking kidding me!” Finn shouted.
“Told you we’re coming,” Ellie retorted with manic glee. “Now duck!”
Ellie had the view of both hoodoos on either side of Hell Welcomes falling with miraculous grace, made even weirder by their silence. Their fall started to speed up. For a moment it seemed as though Hell Welcomes was trying to race them to their doom. The lower portions of both hoodoos were disintegrating into massive billowing clouds of dust and splinters as they smashed into the ground. Then the destruction was racing ahead of the tank. Both rock pillars hit the compound’s perimeter wall, demolishing it. The expanding dust storm was clotting the entire area. Ellie had to switch to the tank’s radar to catch the last sequence of the hoodoos smashing apart as they crashed down. She watched the enhanced tactical display without breathing as they fell on either side of the squad. Vast quantities of rubble surged out, burying entire sections of the saberstones’ deluge.
Hell Welcomes began to judder then jump as the impact quakes shook the ground beneath them. Her suit padding tightened up again.
Elsbeth steered the tank in a sharp turn. “Hold on,” she barked. Hell Welcomes reached the debris field of the fallen hoodoo to their left. The tracks screeched and skidded as they fought for traction on the mound of still-slithering scree. “Ellie, I’m assigning you control of the firing systems. Shoot anything that moves, then when it stops moving, shoot it again.”
“Okay,” she said without any confidence whatsoever. Targeting data and virtual triggers swept up into her visor display, overlaying the tactical map. She could see the squad’s icons, moving slowly. “Get up on the debris,” Ellie told them. “We’re going to be level with you in a couple of minutes.”
Elsbeth grunted cynically as she juggled the tank forward. The incline was growing steeper, and they were dislodging a lot of rock chips as they went. But Hell Welcomes kept climbing, its rear fishtailing from side to side.
Visually, it was like night outside, the dust cloud was so dense. Even the radar was having trouble cutting through the thick mush of particles.
“Did they hit the compound hoodoo, do you think?” Ellie asked nervously.
“They weren’t long enough; you chose well. But I’m expecting the rubble spill will have reached it. Hopefully that’ll allow us to get to the foot of it intact.”
“Can the saberstones travel over this stuff?”
“Fucked if I know.”
Hell Welcomes reached the top of the mound, and Elsbeth turned again so they were heading straight along the causeway of debris toward the hoodoo in the middle of the compound. All Ellie could think of was the giant rock pillar slowly shaking from the quakes generated by the annihilation of the other two—movements that would surely build until it started to topple. She couldn’t see a thing, and the radar image dissolved to fuzz after a couple of hundred meters. Anything could be happening out there.
The tactical display showed her the squad clambering up the unstable slope two hundred meters ahead. Twelve in total. Crap, is that all that’s left? But Finn was one of them. She focused on that.
“I’m not stopping,” Elsbeth said. “Jump on.”
* * *
—
Finn couldn’t see a thing in the churning dust; he was totally dependent on radar and the suit’s inertial guidance. The stones underfoot were treacherous, and making his way up them was more like an inept drunken crawl rather than a walk. The ups on his boots were of no use at all. They needed a stable, solid surface they could attach to. His tactical display was the only way he knew the Hell Welcomes was really approaching.
Stones slipped under his feet, sending him slithering down again.
“Finn, you have to stay with us,” Gyvoy demanded.
“No shit!”
“Daves, help him.”
“I can manage.” One of the biggest lies he’d ever told. The slope was utterly treacherous. Big stones, small stones, rivulets of grit, and none of them were stable. He couldn’t get any traction. And still the dust rained down, coating his armor and degrading its sensors more effectively than any electronic warfare deep burn. His skidding feet reached a patch of gravel and lost all grip. He dropped a few meters, slewing round as he scrambled for anything secure to grasp.
A Dave knocked into him and grabbed an arm. That stopped him from moving any farther downslope.
“Huh?” Finn grunted. “How?” They started to slide upward. He just managed to see the Dave’s suit winch cable pulling them. Then they were up beside the second Dave, who was holding the edge of a jagged boulder that was sticking up out of the debris.
“Thanks, man,” Finn said humbly.
“Tank coming,” a Dave said.
“Right.”
The three of them slogged up the remaining few meters. The mound didn’t have a flat top. If anything it was more irregular, but the pieces of rubble were larger, less prone to movement. He wasn’t sure if the dust was thinning out or it was his imagination, but he could actually see the dark patch that was Hell Welcomes grinding its way toward them. It was skating from side to side, the tracks churning up gouts of stone as they clawed at the incline. Even its seventy-ton weight couldn’t hold it steady.
A couple of armor suits were already clambering up its side. Multigun turrets on the rear were firing at something unseen.
“Got the bastards,” Ellie yelled proudly. “Picking up a lot of motion behind us. I think it might be the saberstones.”
