“— ernor!” Shroud shouted. “What’s going on?”
“A lot of dying,” Teddy grated out. He could still smell the prairie and the ripeness of the buffalo. The power emanating from the body of Bloat was like a stream in a drought, a bare trickle. “Let me listen, would you?”
I am so tired… I don’t know how much I’ve got left…
Something shrieked overhead, tearing the fog. There was a brilliant explosion behind them: tracers of white and acetylene blue. The sound followed a second later, a concussive wave that staggered the Outcast’s body. In Teddy’s head, voices screamed in terror and pain. More banshee wails followed: the Wall shook from the multiple impacts, the thunder of the shells was deafening, and a grotesque yellow glare illuminated the fog, fading to a persistent orange.
Governor!
I just want to leave want to leave go HOME…
Another shell; this one Teddy saw clearly in a rift in the fog, and he lifted his staff. Energy leapt from the crystal to the sky; the shell canted sharply right and plunged into the gray nothingness beyond the Wall. Waves crashed into the base of the stones a few seconds later. “Damn you!” Teddy shouted, and his rage was echoed in the mindvoices of the Rox. “Damn you all! Can’t you leave us alone?”
He had very little left. Already the Outcast was beginning to fade. He was going back to Bloat, and then he’d be able to do nothing. Nothing at all. The shells would come and destroy the Rox. Already the Wall was fading from his sight.
“Damn you!” he said again, and he spoke in the voice of Bloat. Joker guards looked at him in mingled sympathy and fright. Outside the transparent bulwarks of the castle, the fog was tinged with the hues of hell. "Stop it! You’re killing us!” Bloat wailed.
As if in response, a series of long, distant, rumbling bass reverberations trembled the Rox from far out beyond the Wall.
Modular Man ghosted just above the waves with Mistral/Molly at his side. He knew he was going to be taking on an entire naval task force and he wished Mistral could both fly faster and make a less conspicuous target.
His radar caught another salvo in flight. Nine shells, he counted, a full broadside from the New Jersey, instead of the ranging shots fired earlier. They’d found the range.
That didn’t necessarily mean that every shot would hit, but on the other hand the Rox wasn’t exactly an agile, hard-to-miss target, either.
Each shell weighed over a ton. Nothing in the Rox’s architecture could withstand them.
He calculated speeds, ranges, flight times. The huge rounds were taking almost a minute to fly from the gun barrel to the target, which meant the New Jersey was near the limits of its range, twenty miles or so out. That was a long distance to fly, but it also meant fewer salvos.
“How do we beat a battleship?” Mistral said.
“We don’t.”
She gave him a look from goggle-covered eyes. “So what are we doing here?”
“Why aren’t the shells failing into Jersey City?”
“I dunno. You tell me.”
“Somebody’s spotting them. Someone’s watching them fall and reporting back to the New Jersey.”
“But they can’t see anything through the fog.”
“Right. So the spotting is being done by radar. I know the services have radar sets that are good enough to spot individual shells falling. And apparently the radar spoofers placed around the Rox aren’t working well enough. There’s someone sitting at the radar sets communicating to the battleship by radio.”
“Okay.”
“What we do is wreck the New Jersey’s radio antennae. They’ll have at least a couple microwave antennae for satellite linkage and a whole battery of antennae for radio communication. We don’t know which they’re using, so we’ll have to destroy them all.”
“With my winds? Piece of cake.”
“I hope so.”
The fog parted, twisted into streamers by Mistral’s winds, and the ocean opened before them. Lights winked on the horizon, and seconds later came the boom of distant thunder.
Another salvo wailed overhead.
Outcast wavered, his image distorting as if someone were trying to pull a paper cutout apart. He blipped out like the dot on a television monitor when the power is cut.
There was the sound of anvils being struck together. The airburst rained acid down upon the trees in the swampland. Wyungare sought shelter as the droplets hissed and burned their way through the verdant foliage around him.
And then something new, something that dwarfed everything that had gone before, picked Wyungare up like a child grasping an unresisting doll.
It sounded like the sharp crack of thunder rushing on the tail of the lightning striking the plateau of Uluru.
It felt like the ravenous grasp of Wurrawilberoo, the desert whirlwind devil.
Slammed out of his concentration, Wyungare abruptly felt like one of the Keen Keengs, the flying men descended from giants. Except that he was not a giant himself and the stone blocks splintering and clashing around him were as big as he. He was falling.
The cell had come apart, the floor was no more, and his body caromed off hard surfaces. Wyungare heard yells, curses, a scream. Instinctively he twisted in the air and ducked to avoid a piece of castle that would have smashed his skull like a maira, a paddy-melon. Wyungare allowed his eyes to see what he could of his surroundings more slowly, and so his body could react.
Actually he could see very little. For a sudden and brief moment, a high-explosive flare lit his plunge. Then he fell not quite so far into the crashing, splintering darkness as he had expected. Perhaps, his own inner voice guessed, as little as one level. Regardless, the fall felt like the plunge from the top of Uluru.
His lungs filled with airborne chaff from the straw that had lined the floor of the cells. He gagged.
Stone, he thought. My landing place will be on granite and my body will break in a thousand ways.
But that did not happen.
His face suddenly whipped through spray and he plunged headfirst into cold water. It was salty ocean water; he knew that as he struggled back to the surface, spitting and blowing like a wounded seal.
Concussive waves battered his ears. Artillery? he wondered. Or carpet bombing. An arc-light operation, he speculated. Debris splashed into the water around him. He could not see anything. This was a case of having to trust to luck. Blind luck.
Then the area lit up with a baleful crimson glow. Some sort of chemical fire cripped down a stone escarpment about a hundred meters away. It looked almost like lava leaking out of a volcanic crater.
Wyungare squinted. He could see the woman prisoner — Mistral — struggling to stay afloat. She was holding on to the fur of the black cat with one hand. The large feline, in turn, was paddling for the shore.
“Wait!” Wyungare called. The chemical fire flickered and went out. The Aborigine started swimming for the place he’d seen Mistral and the cat.
The light flared up again. No woman. No cat. But Wyungare did find a rock he could use to haul himself out of the cold water. On shore, he scanned the heap of jumbled stone wreckage until he found a deeper shadow than the rest, the opening to a passageway.
Wherever it led was fine, so long as that direction was up.
The Turtle took the long way home.
The Rox was between him and his junkyard, hidden beneath a roiling carpet of fog. Tom gave it a wide berth. He veered well to the east, then turned due south over Brooklyn, staying on the fringes of the fog, figuring he’d cross at the Narrows, zip across Staten Island, and come into Bayonne from the south.