Luc followed Zelia through the greenhouse and outside in time to see several more fliers erupting upwards. One disappeared in a blaze of heat and light before it had ascended more than a few hundred metres. He glanced back up at the belly of the vast ship overhead, seeing a stream of tiny dots descending towards them. Mechants.
Zelia grabbed hold of his arm. ‘What you just did to that mechant – can you do it again?’
The dots had by now resolved into multi-armed silhouettes, approaching rapidly. A burst of incandescent light indicated the destruction of yet another flier.
As he watched, the mechants broke formation, spinning off in different directions. Several hit the dirt close by the mansion house, sending up clods of soil. Others span out of control, their limbs flailing spasmodically.
‘Come on,’ said Zelia, tugging him by the arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Luc stumbled after her and inside her own flier, which had barely enough room for the both of them. Luc’s insides lurched as he saw the ground dropping away from them with terrifying speed.
The flier veered wildly, and Luc gasped as he was slammed against the curved upper hull. Several seconds of free-fall followed, then another sudden wrenching burst of acceleration. The ground rushed towards them at gut-wrenching speed before suddenly spinning away once more.
‘Sorry,’ Zelia muttered. ‘Had to take evasive action. We were being targeted.’
‘Can we get away from them?’
‘Possibly,’ she replied. ‘Not that there’s that many places left to run to.’
‘Your friends,’ Luc gasped, ‘did the rest of them get away? Can they help us?’
‘I don’t know, Luc,’ she said, sounding hopeless. ‘It’s not looking good now. There’s fighting around the Red Palace now, but I don’t think we’re winning.’
‘What about the Hall of Gates? Is there any way we could get through it and escape?’
She shook her head. ‘The last I heard, the Hall of Gates was in lockdown, and guarded by a heavy contingent of Sandoz on either side.’ She turned and glanced at him. ‘You do understand, don’t you, just how bad things are? Cheng has all the cards on his side. What about Sachs? Would the Coalition be willing to help us?’
‘Sachs is gone,’ he told her. ‘He was on board the
‘But . . . you said he was still alive?’
‘You asked me if he was dead, and I said not in the way you meant.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘People in the Coalition maintain multiple iterations of themselves, Zelia – they jump in and out of bodies like we do fliers. Even if the particular instantiation of Sachs I met is gone, I have no doubt there’s another one somewhere back on Darwin right now reporting on everything that happened here.’
‘Shit.’ Zelia slammed the console before her. ‘Then that’s it, isn’t it? The Coalition’s invading forces are on their way, and Cheng’s got all the firepower on his side.’
‘No, that’s not it,’ said Luc, with a determination that surprised even himself. ‘We have to try, because if we don’t, all that’s left is to see who kills us first – Cheng, or the Coalition.’
TWENTY-TWO
The landscape below them curved in on itself as the flier carrying Luc and Zelia boosted upwards and into low orbit, the sky darkening and becoming filled with stars. They saw brief flashes of light, like lightning, from somewhere over the horizon.
‘I’m guessing the fighting turned nuclear,’ Zelia said quietly from beside him when he turned to look at her. She studied the console. ‘No direct hits on any major targets yet, but only because there are still enough functioning countermeasures to take out the missiles before they reach their targets.’
‘How many dead?’
‘Hard to say,’ said Zelia, pressed up close beside him in the tiny cramped cockpit. ‘A hundred, maybe more. The majority of the dead were on our side, I’m afraid to say.’
‘You’re planning something, aren’t you?’ she asked quietly.
He regarded her. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Centuries of observational politics,’ she replied. ‘That, and the fact of what you did to that mechant in my
