The two fireballs helped him reach the sensible decision to bail out of the carrier, to avoid the unpleasant situation of ending the day scattered in many pieces over the landing strip. He pulled the space as far as the grid allowed. One more step and he’d be outside. Unfortunately, that was the precise moment when he ran out of time. The terrible explosion of the nearby carrier’s right engine ripped its wing altogether. In the next second, it came crashing into Gill’s ship.
The shock threw him up from the floor and smacked his head into the pipes on the ceiling, which started to twist along with the whole carrier, spitting liquids and hot radioactive gases everywhere. Still dizzy from the impact, Gill pulled the space again and grabbed the thick pipe above his head to drag himself out of the doomed ship.
Just when he left the transport, he was surrounded by a wall of fire. His hearts sank, waiting for the explosion of the fusion reactors… Yet by an incredible stroke of luck, they survived, sparing him from a million-degree cloud of hot gas that would have turned him into walking plasma.
Gravity was not nearly as strong as on Antyra I, but the distance to the ground was decreasing sharply. After several long seconds, he found out how to start the backpack jet from the controls on the left wrist of the exoskeleton. In this way, he could accelerate or slow down with a simple hand motion.
The ships were falling into complete silence. He knew they were coming after him like a pack of guvals—it was enough to lean his head back to glimpse their twisted silhouettes a short distance above, entangled in a deadly whirlwind ready to pull him in. Against his instinct, he turned his fist to the ground to accelerate as fast as he could.
The carriers exploded when they hit the runway. Even though he was quite far from them, the hot gases ejected from the blast threw him around like a piece of rag just as he was about to land. Luckily, the frame of the exoskeleton saved his tail from any serious injury.
The crane from where the rebels—or whatever they were—fired at the carrier resembled a fluorescent sea creature due to the swarm of hologuided jelly patches fired by the invading troops. The soldiers detonated them all at once, turning the crane into a cloud of metal shards that pierced the nearby buildings like a salvo of rikanes. The suicidal attack was a very profitable exchange, though, because nobody from the second carrier got out alive.
There was still opposition after the return of the gods! A proof that cowardice was not a disease of the space era, as many were tempted to believe, but a tough shell that could be broken during hard times, like today.
Who were the ones who took arms against Baila’s army? Most likely repulsives like him, determined to go down fighting. And for the first time since the beginning of the madness he didn’t feel alone. A voice whispered in his gills that the temples would fail to occupy the whole city in one day, that they wouldn’t be able to destroy it without a trace. Maybe he’d find allies to hide his tail from the prophet’s fury.
Scenes of utter chaos were unfolding around him as far as he could see. The spaceport—which was built on a higher platform than the rest of the city—had been thoroughly wrecked, except for a small terminal a few thousand feet from him. Dozens of Antyrans in patchy spacesuits were running out of it. On Zhan’s eye, what were they doing in the middle of the battle? He noticed several soldiers handling portable jets. The first such group took off in great haste toward one of the troop carriers, which hovered at five thousand feet above them. Obviously, they were Baila’s agents on Antyra III. If the prophet had no use for their services anymore, it couldn’t bode well for the rest of the city…
Half of the city dome was gone, collapsed over the buildings, and the other half wasn’t looking too good, either. The attackers had torn it with lasers, and it seemed that only its ambition to defy the laws of gravity was keeping it from falling to the ground. The city’s atmosphere had vanished into space—there was nothing to keep it in place—and along with it went the pressurization of the Blue Crevice,61 the rift on top of which the Ropolis dome was raised.
Not a single building remained undamaged on the surface city. Some only lost their windows, but many ended up pulverized by the decompression.
The first rays of light crept between two large, yellow dunes at the horizon, heralding another star-rise. The plateau around the town was scattered with millions of bits of colored debris, contrasting the monotony of the sand. Jets, trees, fragments of buildings, food from the distribution centers, black spots of ore, trains, cranes, and elevators, all ended up sucked in by the vacuum’s insatiable hunger and thrown several miles away from the city.
Gill could see the domes of other cities or mining colonies in the distance, some large and majestic, others less than a thousand feet in diameter; in one place, around twenty domes meandered along another huge crevice opened in the rich crust of the planet. All were under attack from Baila’s spaceships. One by one, they ended up sliced by lasers, spilling their bountiful content over the scorched sand of the plateau.
For a brief moment, the star-rise blinded him, and then he saw an enormous pile of contorted metals lodged deeply into the planet’s crust. He wished he didn’t recognize the thing… It was an artifact fallen from orbit, one of the stellar shields! Gill looked again at the sky as if he could be mistaken, as if the majestic silhouettes of the barriers could still be there, with their edges magically lit by star-rise, to protect the cities from the deadly twilight… But a black void was grinning defiantly into his face from the place where they should have been. Thirty years of colossal building, the proof of the Antyrans’ genius and tenacity, was destroyed in a heartbeat. Gill felt his blood boiling up to his head spikes. So much work, so many resources wasted… for what?
A cloud of debris floated aimlessly near the spot where the shields once stood. Now and then, metallic fragments rained down, striking the dunes with bright flashes of light.
The landing place wasn’t exactly the best place to hide, and not only due to the battle raging around him. He had to find a shelter—ideally, before the star incinerated him with its merciless rays, now that the space shields had fallen. Already the flames of the dawn were burning like a giant oven, and the cooling devices of his spacesuit were showing signs of being overwhelmed. He started to run among the debris scattered on the runway while listening to the nearby war chatter.
“The blue triangle, engage the crevice!” ordered a commanding voice.
“Forcing in at seven! Walk behind for cover,” exclaimed a worried soldier.
“Take care! The others had—”
“… under attack!” the voice from a moment ago yelled in panic. “Fire! Fire! They’re coming from behind! Send… aaaargh!” The transmission ended abruptly, leaving no doubt about what had happened.
“On Zhan’s eye!” the commander cried in anger. “Blue triangle, go to seven!”
After Gill reached the end of the runway, he ran inside the spaceport through the crumbling gateway of a public terminal, now little more than a pile of rubble.
Heavy fighting was still taking place inside the building. Not far from him, in what once was a beautiful glass dome, a soldier was watching the corridors on the second level.
“They fired from above! Take cover!” he yelled through the holophone as he propelled a jelly patch from his launcher.
The pulsing jelly buzzed through the room, guided by the soldier from his portable holophone, on which it faithfully broadcasted the hologram of its surroundings. In the end, it stuck on a ceiling not far from them. The soldier touched a button; a short blast erupted, almost invisible in the absence of an atmosphere, and the entire gallery came crashing down in a hurry, followed by a huge cloud of dust.