A single gantry pillar had been left standing just behind the prow. The MANN truck was parked at its base.
“The son of a bitch made it,” Alic said bitterly.
“We’d have been royally screwed anyway,” the Cat said. “I somehow don’t think these boys would let us pass.”
Soldier motiles had formed a broad line across Highway One and the surrounding ground half a kilometer from the rear of the Marie Celeste.
“Oh, shit,” Morton muttered; there must have been a thousand aliens waiting.
“Ready,” Stig said.
“Hit it.” Morton launched his three electronic warfare drones; the Cat launched her remaining pair. Stig and Olwen had changed the focus on the X-ray lasers; now they fired them in broad fans at the waiting aliens.
For a couple of seconds the soldier motiles were bombarded by false signals and insidiously corrosive software; X rays seared into their electromagnetic sensors. They adapted and filtered and flushed the digital viruses, but there was still a moment while they were purblind.
It didn’t matter. When their sensors regained full functionality and scanned the land in front of them nothing had changed; the armored cars were still racing along Highway One, three armor suits riding on the outside of one that was puffing out hot black smoke. The two vehicles suddenly braked hard, tires squealing as the gearboxes were slammed into reverse. Then they were turning, skidding around as if the concrete had iced over. They started to flee back down the road.
As one, the soldier motiles started running after them. The armored car that was leaking smoke suddenly juddered. It began to slow, sparks flying out from underneath along with thickening belches of smoke. Something inside it was clanging like a broken bell. The soldier motiles opened fire.
“FUUUUUUCK,” Morton yelled, and powerdived off the armored car. The sky around him erupted in a relentless blaze of malignant ion bolts. He hit the edge of the concrete and rolled perfectly, timing it so he recovered his footing in a half turn. Suit electromuscles propelled him into an immediate sprint, his body leaning forward at forty-five degrees. The force field reshaped itself, mushrooming out around his head and shoulders to act as a spoiler, providing downpressure from the air that rushed over him. He swung his hands in a near-Neanderthal gait, knuckles not quite touching the ground, but close.
Sensors caught Stig bursting out through the armored car’s front emergency hatch as its force field’s glow escalated to a scarlet climax. The Guardian sped away, moving with fluid ease in the low gravity. Behind him the soldier motiles concentrated their fire. The crippled armored car exploded.
Up ahead, Olwen’s armored car braked.
“Keep going,” Morton yelled frantically. “Get the fuck out of here.” Micromissiles streaked overhead, pummeling the slow-moving vehicle. “We can outrun them.”
“But—”
“Go!”
The armored car accelerated hard again, building distance.
“Outrun them.” the Cat laughed raucously. “You going to run away from the launch, too, Morty darling?”
He gritted his teeth inside his helmet. Ever since he’d seen the ship he’d been trying to work out how much it massed. A lot of it was fuel; he remembered that from the quick review he’d given the files. Despite that, a quarter of a million tons was a conservative estimate. Even with force field wings generating some degree of lift, igniting the kind of fusion engines that could produce that much thrust would be worse than letting off a strategic nuke.
He saw the dark tide of soldier motiles flow over the burning wreckage of the armored car. They were fast, but they didn’t have electromuscle support. They’d never be able to keep that speed going. Would they?
The Cat was keeping up with him, leaning over at an even greater angle. Alic was off to one side.
“There won’t be a launch,” he grunted.
“Oh, Morty, you’re priceless. These Guardian fuckups have blown every chance they had. This won’t be any different.”
“It has to be. Bradley has to win. The Starflyer can’t go free.”
“Then we should have brought some tactical nukes or a Moscow-class warship. Don’t you get it? This thing is smarter than us.”
“You. Not me.”
“Morton’s right,” Alic said. “It hasn’t launched yet. Bradley just has to keep it on the ground.”
“Men! Why accomplish when you can dream?”
“Fuck you.”
It took them three minutes to cover a kilometer. They didn’t use the road, it was too open. The ground alongside was rugged, with the grass and eucalyptus shrub offering a small degree of cover. They kept going for another fifteen minutes, until Morton’s laser ranger finally showed him they were widening the gap on the soldier motiles behind. “We need to get away from the road,” he said. “The other motiles are still up ahead. I don’t want to be caught between them.”
“Good idea,” Alic said.
Morton changed direction slightly, angling away from Highway One.
“How far do you figure they’ll chase us for?”
“More to the point, how much power have you got left?”
“My suit is down to eleven percent. The force field is a real drain.”
“Look, boys, we don’t have to—”
The sun went out.
Even with accelerant driving his thoughts, it took a second for Morton to register the monstrous anomaly. The light was draining out of the veldt, rushing away from him like an extinction event. “Huh?” He twisted to face the west and tilted his head up, aligning the main visual sensors on the Dessault Mountains. His knees nearly faltered with shock. “Not possible,” he gasped.
***
The Charybdis began to creak in protest as Ozzie shunted the acceleration up to fifteen gees. They were chasing a shallow parabola back up from the second lattice sphere. Behind them, nuclear explosions had pumped the plasma into a solid incandescent white sky. Sensors showed them the outer lattice sphere as back prison bars across the hazy stars.
An armada of Prime ships was curving around to follow them through the turbulent plasma, firing volley after volley of missiles. More explosions bloomed, and an indigo stain began to seep through the plasma as the energy levels built toward saturation. Masers and X-ray lasers left visible cerise lines through the diaphanous ions as they stabbed at the frigate.
Ozzie was feeding small random variations into the acceleration, evading the missiles’ target tracking function. A red mist was encroaching the edges of his virtual vision. He tried to keep his attention on various colored lines that represented important criteria like velocity and closing distance. External cameras showed him a very large dark strut of the outer lattice looming in front of the frigate’s blunt nose. It was a hundred eighty kilometers wide, and stretched out to a junction with five other struts four hundred kilometers ahead.