“No!” Maggie shouted in frustration, but her AI took that as a rejection of permission to abort, and in half a second they slammed to the ground, and her aircar began sending pulsed bursts of antigravity through the substrata.
Maggie looked out the windows, shouted, “Gallen, the airfield was clear! The Tekkar must have their transports out searching for us!”
But Gallen was already clearing the hold, with Orick, Ceravanne, and the Bock all following. Maggie silently willed her mantle to radio the message from mantle to mantle, and she looked around.
“Message received,” Gallen said through his mantle. “But we can’t stop now. Do what you can, then get out of here!”
Maggie wondered what to do. She couldn’t leave Gallen stranded here in Moree, but certainly the Tekkar airships, with a capability for mach 10 speeds, would be here in seconds. Even if they were out a hundred kilometers away, they could be here in thirty seconds.
Maggie bit her lip, studied her surroundings. For the moment, her ship was partly hidden under the rock cliff face to her south. To the north and east, the mushroom clouds from the exploding starships were growing redder and redder as their caps of smoke and flame rose higher into the thunderheads. Static discharges caused by the explosion were suddenly setting off a series of lightning blasts that spanned the sky. The door to the shuttle hummed shut, and almost unconsciously Maggie realized that a huge hole had had opened in the cliff face to her south. From inside the aircar, with the exterior sounds shielded, she heard and felt nothing as tons of rock slid down the face of the cliff, leaving a gaping hole.
Gallen, Ceravanne, and the others were running over the ground, and now that the hole was opened, the transport’s AI began emitting a cloud of Black Fog, a harmless aerial dye that blocked nearly all light.
At this moment, Maggie was supposed to move the hovercar, begin circling on a path around the Harvester’s subterranean throne room, collapsing the tunnels leading to the room so that the harvester and the Inhuman would be sealed off from aid, and from any avenues of escape.
Maggie swung the hovercar forward in a long arc, covered a kilometer in a matter of seconds, and watched as her aircar’s antigravity collapsed the tunnels ahead, leaving furrowed ruins.
Tunnels fell in and chambers opened in a regular pattern. Maggie had made nearly half the circle when an alarm sounded. Her AI flashed an image of two approaching aircraft, smart missiles blurring toward her.
Maggie had no missiles left to fire back, and it was too late to escape.
Orick was running up the hill behind Ceravanne and the Bock, with Gallen in the lead. A gritty rain hammered his snout, and red pillars of fire blazed across the countryside. All around them the ground had collapsed in pockets as tunnels and chambers caved in. In those places, Orick could see slabs of broken stone protruding from the ground. In many places across these fields, there were fires coming up out of the horrific rents, and dust rising from the earth. Armageddon. It looked like some vision of Armageddon.
Orick had seen that much of the damage was already done before their transport even landed-apparently the explosive power of the starships had been more than the architects of this city could have planned for.
Orick was running full tilt when suddenly the ground at his feet began to give way, and he lunged forward just as a tunnel collapsed beneath. In front of him a hundred yards there was a sound of splitting rock, and almost all of the face of the cliff just before the group began sliding down, as if it had been a sand castle dashed apart by a child’s foot.
The sounds of the splitting rock, the roaring infernos of the distant mushroom clouds, the blasts of lightening, the cries of people, the shaking of the earth-all rose together in an incredible tumult, and for one breathless moment Orick stopped to watch in the distance as one of the starships-a gigantic globe nearly half a mile across-lifted from the ground without any visible means of propulsion, heading upward for the safety of the stars.
Gallen stopped for a moment, and Orick could feel the ground weaving and bucking beneath his feet. The movement bothered the humans and the Bock more than it did Orick, and they stood balancing precariously.
Where the rock wall had collapsed, they could see at least six levels of rooms that had been in that part of the Tekkar’s city. At the highest level was a tall chamber, with forty-foot ceilings. The Harvester’s throne room. But to reach it they would have to climb the wall of broken rubble that lay before them, scaling the stones.
“That way!” Gallen shouted, pointing out a path over the rocks.
The whole world smelled of fire and smoke and broken stone.
Orick was vaguely aware of Tekkar running through those apartments, of wounded people crying out, but suddenly a wall of Black Fog swept over them as Maggie released their camouflage. And then they were swallowed by utter darkness.
Ceravanne pulled the glow globe from her pocket, and even its brilliant white light would not let them see more than five yards ahead. The aircar made a deep thrumming, grinding noise as it swung around to the southeast.
Gallen called to the others, telling them to form a group as they climbed. He was merely waiting for the ground to stop shaking, for rocks to quit sliding from the cliff wall above, and Orick hoped that as Maggie moved the aircar, it would become safer for them to begin running again.
And suddenly Orick heard the whine of rockets accelerating toward them, off toward the aircar. The rockets slammed into the car with a pinging noise, and a huge explosion lifted them all from their feet.
Orick looked toward the aircar for any sign of a flash or burning. But in the inky darkness, Orick could see nothing but a brief lightening of the darkness, and then bits of metal and rock and ash began to rain down upon them.
“Maggie!” Orick cried, and Gallen stood watching the empty space, a look of utter desolation on his face. “Maggie!” Orick called again, and he began to run toward the car.
“Stop!” Gallen shouted at Orick’s back, and when Orick turned to look at his face, Gallen turned away. “She’s gone,” he said. “She’s gone, and there’s nothing we can do.”
For one brief moment, it looked as if Gallen would crumple under his own weight. It looked as if some invisible support had been kicked out from beneath him, and he dropped partway to one knee. But then he lifted himself and began scrambling up the rocks. Orick heard Gallen sniff, saw him wipe at his eyes with his sleeve. Then Gallen pulled his dronon pulp gun, and his robes suddenly used their chameleon abilities to turn jet-black, to match the darkness.
Somehow, Orick found that he was unprepared for this. He’d imagined that if anyone would die in this battle, it would have been frail Ceravanne or the Bock or that maybe even Gallen would take on more than he could handle-but not Maggie.
“Gallen?” Orick cried at his back.
“She’s gone,” Gallen shouted, and he leapt forward to a boulder, then another, running up over the broken field of rubble without thought of stones still tumbling and crashing from the face of the cliff. Ceravanne ran behind him, calling for him to slow down, holding the light aloft, but she soon lost him in the dark.
And so she stopped and waited for the Bock and Orick to catch up. With his mantle, Gallen could see in the full darkness better than any man, and within seconds there was no sound of him.
Orick stopped beside Ceravanne, and the Bock made his way slowly over the rocks. Ceravanne nodded up toward where Gallen had run, and she muttered, “He’s in a foul mood. Can you track him for us?”
Orick grumbled, “Not with those damned robes on. They mask his scent. I can’t smell him.”
Ceravanne sighed in disgust. “Then we’ll track him by the corpses he leaves behind.”
They began scrambling up over the fallen rocks from the cliff, and it seemed to take minutes upon minutes to get anywhere. As they passed beneath the cliff, they could still hear boulders and scree falling through the darkness around them, but they did not see the dropping stones. By now, between the thunderheads, the Black Fog, and the deep shadows of the Tekkar’s city, the air around them was darker than any night.