"Aircars—prep for launch."
"Beta Air ready for launch." Redhawk's armored fingers flew over the console, and all the lights glowed green. Snow Leopard sat beside him, still checking out the squad.
Snow Leopard began his pre-launch sermon, "Psycho, if it moves…"
Psycho seemed edgy, "It's dead. I know—tacstars, all the way!"
"Thinker, we'll be depending on you!" Snow Leopard's voice had a very hard edge on it, with more urgency than I remembered hearing before.
"I'll be there, Snow Leopard," I said. I was oddly calm. Determined. Doomed.
"Warhound, there won't be time to double-check anything. If it moves…"
Warhound snapped back, "Kill it. I've got it, Snow Leopard. Don't worry."
"Priestess…"
"I'll be as close as I can get, Snow Leopard. Don't worry."
Command interrupted, "Launch aircars!"
The lights flickered and an alarm shrieked once again. It felt as if the gravity god were smashing me right through my armor. A great roar as the aircar jets erupted to full power, the console aglow, my entire body trembling from the vibrations. The aircar fell wildly into the dark, bouncing and shaking in unstable air. It appeared pitch black outside, but soon weak flickers of light were visible—sparks, lost in the awful night. Black clouds, flashing past us. A tremble of lightning. A glow, somewhere ahead and below. A soundless explosion, lighting up a sudden jagged black horizon, the lightning of the Gods. A dark volcano erupted, glittering streaks of golden lava bursting up into the night in heart-stopping slow motion.
"Look at that!"
"It's beautiful!"
"Thinker, I'm listening to the stars." Priestess, a dreamy whisper. Priestess. Fragile Priestess. My hope. My strength.
"I'm with you, Priestess. I'm with you." The car shook wildly, the engine shrieking, seemingly out of control.
"To the death…to the death…to the death…" Someone prayed quietly. And suddenly the Drop Song came on.
"The past is dead and gone,
The scent of flowers in a tomb,
A half-remembered tune
From a half-remembered time
Open your eyes, cast off old dreams!
A New World awaits you—
A New World to love you—
Drop, drop, drop!
The past is dead and gone!"
I tuned it out. I wanted to listen to the stars.
"Heads up, gang!" Redhawk warned us, snapping me out of my reverie. "Here comes the antimat!" We fell through that evil night like a great cenite bat. The aircar's tacsit screen glowed hot with Legion aircar markers. The grav pulled at my restraints as the car buffeted wildly. Thick clouds edged with burning embers flashed past the plex. I caught a quick glimpse of another aircar, a sinister black bird, cutting through the soup, then gone. Up ahead, two glittering phospho white tracks relentlessly traced their way almost straight down towards the shrouded surface.
A blinding blue incandescent flash suddenly lit up everything, freezing it all into my retina, a fraction of time caught forever—a world afire below, dull red volcanoes belching fire and ash, ochre rivers of lava burning their way in great loops through that hellish underworld. A titanic blast of glittering orange lava shot skywards as the initial flash faded, a spectacular eruption, millions of dazzling streaks rising, growing, forming a massive fireball rising high into the atmosphere, blasting a shock wave of smoky debris ahead of it. My eyes were still dazzled by the flash—I couldn't see the target.
"It's headed for the vac!" Warhound shouted.
Then the shock hit us, flipping our car like a toy as the crack of doom resonated with my armor and rattled my teeth. Upside down, we hurtled to our death—until Redhawk regained control and righted us.
"That was the first anti!" Snow Leopard shouted. "Take a look!"
"I never woulda guessed it!" Psycho quipped, "Thanks for enlightening us!"
Everyone ignored him—we had a pretty scary view all right. The spectacular geyser of lava blasted its way completely out of the at with cosmic force, filling the sky, erupting from a giant irregular lava lake set at the foot of a bleeding volcanic mountain chain. There—that was the target! I could see nothing of the starport but as I watched, a heavy lava rain showered the lake, falling from the antimat blast.
Much of the surface of the lava lake had disintegrated or was still heading skyward, but there was plenty left. Nobody had ever before used antimat on an Omni starport hidden deep under the surface of a moving lake of lava. Command believed two strikes would shatter the upper portion of the Omni installation and probably kill a great many O's. We certainly didn't want the entire starport destroyed. It was an incalculably valuable prize of war, if we could win it. We had no idea of the size or structure of the installation—the lava was good camfax. We knew so little about the O's it was well worth the risks—that's what they had told us. The mission was to record and exploit everything we found, and recover what we could. If the antimat strike prompted the O's to retreat, we'd seize and hold. If they survived and rallied, we'd retreat rapidly. And all this to be done with lava presumably pouring into the base! Life ain't easy, as Snow Leopard often said.
I prayed that Atom's simulations were accurate and that Command's decision to send us in after only two strikes was the right one.
"Look out!" An irresistible fist of gas hit us and a hailstorm of lava and pumice and ash peppered the car, screeching and pinging off the armored skin. We flipped again, my stomach swirling unhappily as I prayed to Deadman. In an instant, we were back on track, more or less right side up.
"I'm approaching the zero," Redhawk reported. "There's antimat number two—stand by!"
"Oh, no!" somebody objected.
The second of those awful phospho tracks was about to hit target—right on the Omni starport. I saw it coming down, the finger of God. Another elemental, eye-searing flash lit up the world, an antimat sun, an artificial comet impacting to shake the planet with cosmic force. The lava lake blew open with a mighty crack, punching a gigantic gassy plume of smoking, burning debris into the upper atmosphere while ejecting a stunning display of white-hot lava contrails ripping out in all directions—how could anything survive? The O's must be history! I gritted my teeth. The car rattled and lurched wildly, and my head snapped back and forth in my helmet.
"What's that?" Snow Leopard asked, pointing straight ahead.
Smoky clouds ahead of us were filled with incandescent little green tracers, meandering around lazily—as if looking for something. Atom was wrong. Command was wrong. The Omni base had survived two antimat hits and they were still fighting! This was madness! We couldn't fight the O's! Nobody could fight the O's!
"They're shooting at us!" Redhawk sounded shocked—as if it were not allowed. He snapped the car in a turn that must have been greater than 90 degrees, but I couldn't tell exactly because I lost consciousness when the gravs on my body exceeded the weight of a neutron star—or at least it felt that way to me.
When I came to, we were dropping like a meteor, and those green bastards were following us down like a swarm of bees. Then my heart leaped to my throat and the adrenalin cocktail shocked me awake as it all came into focus. The armored plex was riddled, streaks of blood shot past on the inside of the plex as I watched in amazement, trying to understand it. Redhawk's blood! He screamed in agony, his armor smoking as the planet's poisonous air roared into the cabin. A section of the armored wall had peeled open and loose junk whipped past me. The readouts on the cockpit all glowed red, an electronic crackling indicated the aircar's instrumentation was fried, and Sweety was calmly relaying it all.