The tredeyans and Charlie ducked. He couldn’t see a pulse cannon on top of the shuttle, but only had a view of the front end of the craft.
It was only a matter of time before the slavers would be either forced to assault them, or decide it wasn’t worth it and leave.
Charlie hoped for the latter, but things never worked as he wanted. The alien in green body armor sprinted out of the side of the shuttle, dove behind rocks and focused a thin red beam on their position.
“You were right, Charlie—” Vingo said.
A hollow pop split the air. Charlie glanced up. A projectile fizzed into the dark sky and arced down toward them. Vingo and the other two prisoners pressed themselves against the sand. A loud explosion boomed in front of their cover. Fire and sand shot in the air.
Through the decreasing flames, five slavers split in different directions and projectiles peppered the rocks and ground around them.
Charlie grabbed the tredeyan prisoner who crouched by his side, clutching the captured rifle, and shook him. “Get up and fire the damned thing.”
Dark figures moved from rock to rock on either flank while rifle fire kept Charlie and the three tredeyans pinned down. He knew they would be quickly overrun and killed if the tredeyans didn’t start to fight back.
Taking a deep breath, Charlie leaned around the rock and hoped they had enough ammunition, and luck.
Chapter 19
AN EXPLOSION ERUPTED a few meters behind Denver’s position, the sound reverberating off his helmet as though he had been struck by Thor’s hammer.
The force pushed him back into the seat of the catamaran, bringing with it the realization that the craft had struck the ground of the valley and embedded the front of its twin hull into the black, volcanic sand, upending the rear so that the vehicle was lying at a steep angle.
Only his left arm, trapped between the door and open window of the catamaran, stopped him from falling over the smashed windshield and crashing to the ground. Denver’s arm freed. The suit’s servos whined as he hauled himself upright, placing his feet against the dash panel and then clambering up the netted section until he could fling one leg over the rear of the vehicle.
He shook his head, trying to clear his blurred vision.
Another explosion, only marginally less powerful, lit up his surroundings as a cloud of sand and dirt launched into the air and rained back down. In that brief scintilla of light, he managed to see from the corner of his eye what at first glance resembled a croatoan harvester, the outline of which remained visible on the inside of his eyelids even as the flame-yellow nova of the explosion dissipated into the inky black night sky.
A deep rumble, made louder by the vibrations travelling up through the dead priest’s transport, shook Denver from his perched position. The harvester-like machine lurched forward and stopped some fifty meters away from him.
Twin headlights, shining out sharp slices of pale blue light, cut through the darkness and showed him that they had crashed into a valley. High walls on either side of the hundred or so meter expanse rose up to the sky, showing him just how far they had fallen.
As the croatoan vehicle continued to scan the landscape with its antennae-searchlight beams, Denver scanned the vista for any sign of Layla. He knew she was still alive; her breathing came over the intercom in short shallow undulations.
He suspected, given the regularity of her breathing, that she was unconscious somewhere. That ignited a flicker of hope, even as the croatoan’s searchlights arced around to his location.
Flinging his legs over the side of the catamaran, he braced himself for the fall as he hit the ground and rolled with the momentum. The suit dampened the impact, enabling him to get to his feet and dash behind a section of a destroyed scion ship lying between a sheer rock formation and the catamaran.
The matte-black angular fighter had clearly been shot down some time recently, given the heat still coming from its single engine and the smoke that rose from an ugly wound in the side of the fuselage.
Looking at the size of the hole and the splintered metal surface around it, he guessed the fighter had fallen victim to the croatoans’ massive plasma-gun platform—the thing parked just half a football field away from him.
Although it shared a few similarities with the machines the croatoans had brought to Earth, it looked to him to be an upgraded or more powerful version. The cannon barrel extended out from a circular base at the top of the roof.
A pair of the small driver croatoans were sitting behind an armored glass panel at the front, the low interior blue light giving them a ghostly hue in the pitch blackness of their surroundings.
Coming from overhead, a deep subsonic growl grabbed his attention.
One of the huge scion ships was descending from the clouds.
Half a dozen of the smaller, triangular-shaped fighters launched from bays within the larger craft’s four pyramidal sides and headed off to the east, disappearing behind the valley’s tall walls to Denver’s left. Their low altitude meant that light from their engines showed him the deep ridges of where the catamaran had gone over the edge and gouged into the side of the valley wall before coming to a jolting rest.
To his right, shrouded in darkness, the croatoan gun platform roared into action. The barrel started to move, following the sweeping path of its searchlights—right into Denver’s path.
Through his blurred night vision, he spotted a trio of hunters drop down from the side of the hulking, square machine. They carried heavy, wide-bore automatic weapons, a bandolier of ammo hanging over their right shoulders. Over the din of the machine, Denver made out an increasingly high-pitched whine—hover engines.
He spun round, facing south, looking down the valley. From a darker patch that just looked like a large hole in the wall, at least two hundred meters away, four hover-bikes shot out into the war zone of the valley.
Before Denver had a chance to run for extra cover within the barren, rocky valley, one of the hunters opened a volley of auto fire in his direction. A series of wide-caliber shells pounded into the carcass of the downed scion fighter. Sparks and debris lit up the air around him, and he was running, strafing to his left, going northwards down the valley as stones and dust kicked up behind him.
His pulse pounded as he leapt over boulders, desperate to stay one step ahead of the croatoan hunter’s fire. And then there was the plasma cannon… and, hovering above him like the Sword of Damocles, the scion prism, which seemed unusually quiet… until the sky cracked and it seemed like the universe itself was splitting apart to reveal the swirling blue mists of creation beyond the tear. From that awe-inspiring wound, a directed bolt of lightning the width of the valley and the thickness of an insect’s wings struck down, slicing the croatoan’s heavy weapon’s platform in two as though it were made of nothing more than cardboard.
Denver, his attention on the scion prism and the blue mist that surrounded and obscured its base, struck his boot on a low boulder and crashed onto his chest.
He didn’t have time to tense in the suit and the impact rattled him within his shell.
Swearing with the pain of the jolt, he spun over on to his back to take a deep breath when he saw the shadow go over him, created by the croatoans’ hover-bikes. Like the birds he used to watch fly over the clearing back home, the bikes rolled and dived, but unlike the birds of Denver’s memory, they did not make it safely into the woods.
Denver just laid there in among the black sand of the valley’s floor, staring up into the cracked sky, mesmerized by the crackling blue energy, the likes of which he’d never seen before and had no words to describe.