The door they’d entered by slid shut behind them, muffling the sound of Samandra’s guns. They whirled; Crake raced to the door. ‘The code!’ he urged. Crund tapped in the code on the keypad. Nothing happened. ‘They’ve trapped us in here!’
The atmosphere in the room thickened, shadows swarmed and the temperature dropped. Frey slowly turned his head, looking over his shoulder. From behind the Azryx device, a lean figure stepped into view, half-lit by the bruised glow from the cylinder.
‘Hello, Trinica,’ he said.
Forty-Three
Silo’s eyes flickered open.
He was face down on the ground. Cold, wet stone pushed into his cheek. His head rang like a struck bell, his neck was agonisingly stiff, and his limbs and torso blazed with pain.
He wasn’t sure where he was or what had happened to him. Automatically, he tried to rise. The pain made him grunt, but he pushed through it, and forced himself up onto his knees. The effort set off a pounding in his skull, which faded as quickly as it came.
Blinking, he looked about. He knelt amidst a broken landscape of stone and dust and flame. Hot winds blew smoke around him. People staggered here and there, like the wandering souls of the damned; vague blurred shadows, shouting things he couldn’t understand.
The frigate.
The memory of the enormous aircraft plunging towards him brought him another step closer to making sense of things. He was at the edge of a wide, shallow trench which had been scored through the city. Some way distant, a mountain of twisted metal smoked and flamed. In its wake, no building was left standing. The far side of the square had been entirely destroyed, but the near side, where Silo had been thrown, was still partially intact.
It had passed them by, then. But not by much. And it had taken a heavy toll.
He got to his feet, dazed. None of it seemed real. Bodies lay everywhere, red and black and twisted. Lipless jaws yawned, showing charred teeth. The air reeked of cooking flesh and prothane.
Malvery stumbled past him, moaning. The doctor didn’t even seem to see him. Instead he fell to his knees a few metres away, where a limp figure was lying beside the remains of a wall.
It took a few seconds for his stunned brain to slot her into place. Ashua.
Concern and alarm drove him to movement. He made his way over to Malvery on leaden legs. The distance exhausted him; he was forced to his knees again. There was no strength in his body. It had been knocked out of him along with his wits.
Malvery had Ashua in his arms, supporting her shoulders and head in the crook of his elbow while he felt for a pulse at her throat. Blood stained her short ginger hair and ran down her tattooed face; her skin was pallid and dirty.
‘Come on, come on, come on,’ Malvery was muttering frantically, broken glasses still hanging askew on his bulbous nose. He patted her face. ‘Don’t play games now. You ain’t dead. You ain’t!’
He looked around as if for help, and found Silo there. ‘I can’t see where she got hit,’ he said hoarsely, and he brushed back her hair to try to find a wound. There was something close to panic in his voice. He was as shell-shocked as Silo was. ‘I can’t find the wound!’
Silo just stared at her. She wasn’t moving. Malvery craned his neck and searched among the wandering ghosts that surrounded them, as if there was anyone more qualified than he to give aid.
‘Doc. .’ Silo croaked. His throat felt like it had been scorched.
‘I think she might’ve cracked her skull,’ Malvery muttered. ‘I think there might be a crack there.’
He put on big hand on her head, feeling clumsily around. At his touch, Ashua bucked and fell out of his grip. Malvery gasped and tried to gather her up, but she kicked out and fought him off, and ended up scrambling away on her arse, with one hand held to the side of her head.
‘Ow!’ she said pointedly, scowling at him. ‘That bloody hurts!’
‘You’re alive!’ Malvery cried out in delight.
‘Course I’m alive,’ Ashua said. She was slurring her words, and sounded drunk. ‘Reckon I’d rather not be, though.’ She stared about dreamily. ‘Crawler hit us?’
Malvery laughed, and went over to her and gave her an awkward hug. She winced as he squeezed her, but she didn’t protest. She laid her head on his shoulder, and let herself be held.
Silo got to his feet again, and this time found that he had more strength in his legs. The sense of dislocation was lessening moment by moment; he was returning to himself. There was something he was meant to do here, he just couldn’t remember what.
Above him, through the drifting black haze, he saw a great swirling vortex and explosions in the sky. They sounded distant and hollow, as if they were no part of the world he occupied here on the ground. But the longer he looked, the more the picture came together.
The Awakeners had been mostly scattered or destroyed now, but the core of the convoy remained. A dozen battered frigates hung static around the flagship, hemmed in by the Samarlans. But the Samarlans weren’t attacking them any more; instead, they were defending them from the Manes on their flank, whose terrible dreadnoughts were still arriving. The Awakener convoy struggled and fought, but they were bereft of leadership or tactics. They could do little but harass the craft that surrounded them.
Why are the Sammies helpin’ the Awakeners? Silo thought; but the answer came to him almost as soon as he’d posed the question. The Awakeners had the Azryx device. The Sammies must have known the Awakeners would guard the device at the heart of their fleet, and didn’t want to risk it being destroyed. They wanted the city guns neutralised until they could get their landing parties down to secure them; it was worth taking a few casualties for that.
The guns, he thought, and suddenly he remembered it all. He lurched away across the blasted square, stepping over rubble and bits of bodies.
The guns were their only hope now. With the Awakeners all but out of the game, it was between the Manes and the Sammies as to who would control the skies. Once the victor had beaten their opponents, they’d descend on the city in force. The Samarlans with their troops, or the Manes with their howling hordes. Slavery or conversion. Not much of a choice.
What were the Manes doing here? He didn’t know; nor did he know who’d summoned them. But if they hadn’t, the Sammies would have swarmed all over the city by now. The Manes’ intervention might just have bought the Coalition the time they needed.
‘Fall back!’ someone was shouting in the distance. ‘Fall back to the palace!’
Silo frowned, not sure if he’d heard the order right. A bloodied young soldier went stumbling past him, his uniform ragged and a wounded hand held to his chest. Silo grabbed him by his shoulder.
‘Where you goin’?’ he asked.
The soldier stared at him, bewilderment in his eyes. ‘The palace,’ he said, as if it was obvious.
‘You’re goin’ back?’ Silo asked in amazement. ‘You still got your gun, ain’t you?’
The soldier surveyed the scene of destruction around him. ‘Going back to the palace,’ he muttered blankly.
‘They’re dug in, you mad bloody Murthian!’ said another soldier. ‘Let him go.’
Silo let the young soldier wander off. The man who’d addressed him was in his late twenties, with a short moustache and a thick head of black hair mussed by the battle. Other than that, he looked relatively unharmed. ‘You seen the commander? Any sergeants?’
‘No,’ said Silo. ‘Where’s the gun?’
‘It’s over there,’ the soldier replied, pointing across the obliterated square. Through the flames, it was just possible to make out the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun tilted upward. ‘They’ve dug in, didn’t you hear? They retreated back up that road and shut the damn gates.’