Liz thumped the dashboard. “Eight hundred and goddamn seventy-sixth place on the list,” she groaned. “The only thing left of us by then will be a few lumps of charcoal.”
The array flashed up a general call icon. “I’ve got a wormhole open inside the Turquino Valley,” Mellanie’s voice said. “It’s not a large one, I’m afraid, so it will take a long time to get everyone through. If we’re lucky we can pull it off before the Primes discover what’s happening. Simon?”
“Heaven bless you, Mellanie,” Simon said. “All right, people, you heard; convoy to proceed to the Turquino.”
“We left Mellanie behind us,” Mark said flatly. They’d barely reached Blackwater Crag when a huge, powerful explosion had flattened almost a third of the town. It appeared to be centered on the Ables Motors garage where they’d left Mellanie. When it happened he’d told himself that she would have found a way out, not that he had a clue how she’d do it. Now, rather than relief, he was getting more than a little apprehensive about Mellanie Rescorai and her abilities.
“She said she was getting help,” Liz said.
“Who the hell gives help on this scale?”
“It’s either someone like Sheldon, or possibly the SI itself. I can’t think of any other way she could pull this off.”
“God Almighty, why her?”
“Dunno, baby,” Liz said. “God has a sense of humor after all? But I’m glad she’s on our side.”
“Goddamn.” He clenched the steering wheel, staring sulkily through the cracked, grubby windshield. A long line of pickup trucks, four-by-fours, and buses were turning off the Highmarsh road just before the main junction, taking an even smaller track that threaded along the line of tall dark jade lüpoplars that marked the edge of the Calsor homestead.
“Carys?” Liz asked.
“On the road to nowhere. I hope your little girlfriend knows what she’s doing.”
“Me, too.”
The Turquino Valley was narrow even by the standards of the Highmarsh’s northern ramparts. A near-symmetrical V-shape that began two hundred meters above the floor of the Highmarsh. Its walls had boltgrass scrabbling a little way up the lower slopes, but after fifty meters or so the vegetation and stony soil gave way to naked rock. Rivulets oozed down from the jagged heights, feeding into a fast-flowing stream that foamed along the bottom to spill out into the Highmarsh.
By the time the track reached the Turquino’s mouth, it was little more than a line of beaten down boltgrass. Only the most foolhardy sheep and goats strayed into this valley.
Yuri Conant was leading the convoy in his four-by-four. The road was already at a steep angle when it reached the ice-cold stream gushing out of the Turquino. Through the windshield he could see the mountains rising imposingly above him, guarding the entrance. Yuri’s vehicle was going to have trouble getting any farther. The buses certainly weren’t going to get past the stream. He went over the water and braked to a halt.
When he got out, he knew he’d never forget the sight of the convoy jostling its way up the slope. Broad sunbeams were prising their way through the battered clouds above to play over the filthy battered vehicles. Pickups were packed full. All the buses had their doors open to draw some air inside now the air conditioners had failed; people were standing down the aisles. The sound of frightened children and injured adults arrived long before the vehicles reached him. Most prominent of all was Carys’s beautiful metallic gray sports car, whose fat wheels had lowered themselves beneath the chassis on telescoping suspension struts, bounding along over the trough terrain with the ease of any four-by-four.
It drove through the stream without any difficulty and pulled up beside him. The side window came down.
“Any sign of the wormhole?” Carys asked. Barry and Sandy were squashed into the passenger seat beside her, with Panda lying along the back.
“Not from here, no.”
“Okay, I’ll keep going as far as I can.”
He waved languidly as she drove off down the valley, keeping parallel to the stream. Several four-by-fours followed her; then the first bus arrived and he joined in helping with the wounded.
By the time Mark drew up at the improvised parking lot, the scene had become a replay of the bus station. A lot of people were clambering over the boltgrass slope to get into the valley, hauling kids along. Dozens more were milling around the four buses that were carrying the injured, manhandling stretchers out of the doors.
“Found it,” Carys exclaimed jubilantly from the array. “We’re five hundred meters in from the start of the valley. Mellanie’s here waiting, and she wasn’t kidding, I’ve never seen a wormhole this small before.”
“Get them through!” Mark blurted. He felt Liz’s hand in his, gripping tight.
“Out of the car,” Carys said. “Five meters. Mellanie’s saying hello. Yeah, right, hi. Okay, Barry, go on, dear. That’s it. Hold my hand, Sandy. Mark, we’re safe—”
He let out a sob. Beside him, Liz was smiling despite her moist eyes. They looked at each other for a long moment. “Guess we’d better go and lend a hand,” she said.
Simon was gathering his little band of devotees along the side of the gushing stream. He held up a hand as Mark, Liz, and David went past. “Those of us with weapons should dig in here at the valley entrance and provide some cover for our friends and families. It will be some time before everyone is through, and the aliens will probably come after us.”
Mark gave Liz a despairing look. “I think he’s talking about us again,” he said under his breath.
“Yeah. Well at least we have some heavy-duty weapons, now.” Liz held up one of the big cylinders she’d taken from the Prime.
“We don’t know what they are, or how they work.”
She gave him a wolfish grin. “Lucky we’ve got the best technical man in Randtown with us then, huh, baby?”
It was silent in the tactical display for several minutes after the Desperado shot back into hyperdrive and withdrew from the battle above Anshun. Wilson moved his hands across icons, pulling down sensor displays. Anshun had few sensors left in working order, but the aerobots provided intermittent sweeps of space directly above the tempestuous ionosphere. Forty-eight wormholes held their position in an ephemeral necklace two thousand kilometers above the equator. As he watched, several types of Prime ships began to fly out of them, accelerating through the hellishly radioactive cloud of cosmic dust and debris that churned around the planet.
“They’re still there,” Elaine Doi said in an appalled murmur. “We didn’t close one of them. Not one!”
“You have to get through to the generators,” Dimitri Leopoldovich said. “Simply hitting them with crude energy assaults from this side is completely ineffectual, they are manifestations of ordered energy themselves.”
“Thank you, academician,” Rafael said. “We just watched four of our ships die trying to defend us, so unless you have something constructive to add, shut the fuck up.”
“Fifty-two alien ships either destroyed or disabled,” Anna said. “Our missiles outperform theirs every time. But they do have weight of numbers. That’s their advantage every time.”
“What are we going to do?” the President asked.
Wilson was disgusted with how whiny she sounded.
“Our aerobots managed to strike every landing site on Anshun while the starships were engaged above the planet,” Rafael said. “We wiped out ninety percent of them. They’ll have to start the occupation again.”
“Which I have no doubt they have the resources for,” the President said. “Weight of numbers, again.”
“Probably, but in the meantime we can complete the evacuation.”
“We now have eight extra wormholes open inside city force fields,” Nigel Sheldon said. “Another three hours should see Anshun evacuated.”