Ashua shouted from the bridge. ‘They’re climbing up the wall! Get out of there!’
He pulled a box of matches from his pocket. No time to finesse this, then. If the flame-slime didn’t work as expected, they’d still be too close to the explosion when it went up. But if he left it any longer, the hybrids would be on him.
He struck the match and touched it to the fuse. Fire bloomed at the tip, but it didn’t fizz as a fuse should. The flame-slime was burning, but the heat hadn’t reached the black-powder core of the fuse.
‘Silo!’ Ashua screamed. He looked over his shoulder and saw the forelegs of a hybrid reaching over the top of the panels at the edge of the platform. Ashua began blasting at it from the bridge, but her pistol didn’t slow it in the least.
Silo jumped to his feet, snatching up his shotgun from where it lay next to the bag of dynamite. As the hybrid’s head came over the top of the panels, he unloaded point blank into its face. Glass sprayed him as its eye-clusters exploded, and it flew backwards and off into the trench.
Now he could see into the trench, he saw that Grudge had followed his advice. The wall of the trench was cratered with autocannon blasts. Around each crater were two or three of the hybrids, frantically repairing as best they could. Between them and the creatures already in the trench, the numbers at the end of the bridge had thinned.
Bess was shunting a tangled pile of hybrids along the bridge, driving them forward with her inexorable strength. She was almost at the far side now. The others were firing every which way, shooting at anything that moved.
All this he saw in an instant. And in that instant, a hybrid leaped up off the wall of the trench and landed on the bridge, cutting him off from the others.
Time decelerated. He chambered a new round as if in slow motion, glancing at the dynamite as he did so. The flame-slime hadn’t burned through yet. How many seconds had passed? How many more to go?
The hybrid on the bridge shook out its forelegs. They split into a dozen smaller arms with tips that burned and sawed and cut. Bess might have been impervious to them, but he wasn’t. His crew saw the danger, but they were too far up the bridge, almosbridge, t at the other side now, following in Bess’s chaotic wake.
He fired. The blast did little more than stun it. He stepped forward, cranked the lever of the shotgun, and fired again. One of its back limbs came off and went spinning away. Step, crank, fire. It staggered back against the edge of the bridge, limbs flailing spasmodically.
Step. Crank. Fire.
His last shot blew it off the side of the bridge, sending it tumbling to the floor of the trench. Already more were clambering onto the platform. Some moved towards him, but one of them went straight for the dynamite. He backed away onto the bridge. His way was clear now, but he was afraid of what that hybrid might do. If the dynamite didn’t go off, they were all dead.
The hybrid tilted its head this way and that, its multiple eye-lenses whirring, studying the satchel. As if dynamite were something it had never seen before, and it didn’t know what to make of it.
The dynamite fizzed and the fuse sparked into life. The hybrid jerked back in surprise. Silo turned tail and ran.
Behind him, the hybrid picked up the lit stick of dynamite, raised it to its face, and tipped its head quizzically.
The explosion lifted him up and threw him forward, pushing the breath from his lungs. He flew through the air and crashed down onto the bridge, skidding and sliding with uncontrollable momentum, until he fetched up in a heap at the feet of his crewmen.
His head was filled with wool. His senses were deadened, his sinuses throbbed, and there was a high, piercing whistle that seemed to emanate from inside his skull. He felt strong arms on him, and Malvery pulled him blinking to his feet. The doctor was saying something – he could tell by the movement of his great white moustache – but he couldn’t understand what. He wobbled, childlike in his confusion.
Then he was being pulled along. He stumbled to keep up. Guns were firing all around him, and huge arachnid shapes rushed past in a stampede. He watched, uncomprehending, as the horde of creatures flooded on to the bridge he’d just vacated. The things seemed to have no interest in attacking him or his companions. Instead they were rushing towards the shattered platform at the other end. There was an ascending whistle coming from that direction, as of pressure building and building.
Another explosion, bigger than the first, blasting pieces of flesh and chitin everywhere. The force of it shoved him back against Malvery. The doctor tripped, and they both went to the floor. Mangled and charred metal panels flipped through the air above them.
He was helped up a second time by other hands. By now his senses had reasserted themselves, and he could see the damage they’d wreaked. The platform was entirely gone, and half the bridge with it. All that was left was a large blackened gash at the base of the engine. Electricity sparked and sizzled within, and there was a distressing metallic whine coming whine c from somewhere in the guts of the machine. Those hybrids that hadn’t been destroyed in the explosions swarmed over to it, blindly obsessed with its repair. As Silo had hoped, the invaders had been entirely forgotten.
‘Yeah!’ cried Pinn, fist pumping the air. ‘Let’s hear it for Professor Pinn’s Incredible Flame-Slime! Artis Pinn, inventor!’
The sarcastic comment Malvery was preparing was cut off by a third explosion. This one came from off to the side, where the enormous flank of one of the hourglass structures sloped into the chamber. The blast shattered a section of the containing vessel. Coloured gas began to seep through the cracks, and electricity crawled across its surface.
‘Er,’ said Pinn.
Suddenly, a fork of lightning lashed out across the chamber, blasting the shattered section apart as it went. Where it hit, an explosion threw a bloom of flame into the air.
Silo and Malvery stood next to one another, momentarily still, mesmerised by the sight of what they’d done. Samandra stuck her head in between the two of them and laid her hands on their shoulders.
‘Boys,’ she said. ‘I’m thinkin’ we might want to be elsewhere. What say?’
‘The lady’s got a point,’ Malvery said.
Samandra patted them both on the shoulders, then turned and ran like her heels were on fire.
Forty-Five
‘Frey! Pay attention!’
Frey did his best to focus on what Crake was telling him.
‘You press here, got it?’ said Crake, showing him the thumb-stud on the device in his hand, as if it wasn’t obvious.
‘Got it,’ he said. But he didn’t get it. He couldn’t wrap his head round the reality. Even when he’d been at his lowest ebb, he’d always secretly believed he could evade this confrontation. No matter the odds, in his heart he’d never thought it would come to this.
But full dark was almost upon them, and the Iron Jackal was coming.
Crake carried on wittering about his machines, using terms like ‘interference fields’ and ‘resonance pathways’ and so on. They stood in the chamber where they’d found those creepy tanks occupied by dead Azryx.
Tombs, Frey thought. Appropriate.
Frey and Ugrik were both wearing cumbersome backpacks, each comprising a bulky battery and one of Crake’s machines, belted clumsily together. Ugrik had jammed the relic in there too, because he refused to leave it behind after all this trouble. In their hands they each held a thick, stumpy cylinder of metal tipped with a pinecone arrangement of small rods. Cables ran from the cylinders to the machines in their packs. Crake, with Silo’s help, had jerry-rigged them together using the gear in his sanctum and a few extra parts. He called them ‘harmonic arc generators’.