thing—but the spectacle playing itself out before him seemed to hold him enthralled, unable to move. A dark recess of his mind expected some eldritch horror to emerge from the opening pod, covered in slimy tentacles.
What did come out of the gap in the metal, stepping slowly but evenly out of the cloud of smoke into the glare of one of the emergency floodlights, was something a bit more prosaic but no less dangerous: a half-dozen man-shaped figures in heavy, brown-camouflaged armor, arms full of wicked-looking metal objects that were easily recognizable as weaponry. Backlit by floodlights, their shadows looming menacingly toward Jason and Val, the armored figures seemed gigantic: McKay estimated they had to be at least two meters tall.
The lead figure, faceless behind the polarized visor of its full helmet, swung its bullpup-configuration rifle toward them, the bird-cage of the muzzle-brake yawning wide. Jason made a sudden grab for his pistol, sure that he was dead, but the chatter of gunfire behind them distracted both his attention and that of the intruders.
Three of Sigurdsen’s hired security force were dashing across the garden from the mansion’s rear patio, their compact submachineguns spitting fire as they shot from the hip and on the run. The unaimed volley of ceramic bullets shattered statues and ricocheted loudly off the open pod, but didn’t come within five meters of hitting the target. The intruders unhurriedly turned on the approaching guards and returned fire, metallic cases spewing from the actions of their autorifles as they stuttered out a hail of projectiles. Two of the mercs went down immediately, red flowers blossoming on their chests as the invaders’ bullets penetrated the soft body armor there, while the third dove behind a low wall. The invaders seemed to ignore McKay and Valerie, intent on pouring a volume of fire into that barrier to deal with the more immediate threat.
The hysterical paralysis that had gripped him a moment before gone, Jason realized that the time was right to take advantage of the distraction and get the hell out of there. Without a word, he grabbed Valerie O’Keefe’s hand, yanked her to her feet and took off at a dead sprint. The mansion—much as he wanted to get to it, to Shannon and his team—was out of the question: there were already a full dozen of the armored troops between them and the house, and the pods seemed to be landing everywhere. That left two possibilities: the guard shack or the garages. He made up his mind immediately: the guard shack would draw too much attention—they had to reach the garages.
The continuing rattle of automatic weapons fire dogged their heels; and, as they rushed out the closest gate in the garden wall, the dull stutter was punctuated by the rolling roar of an explosion. Jason jerked his head around, risking the possibility of a misstep to sneak a look back at the mansion. Near the area where the pod had crashed, a red crackle of flame had begun to lick across the mansion’s roof, and he could see a dark wisp of smoke wafting into the starlit sky. He resisted the urge to scream a curse at the gods, knowing he would need all the breath he had, but he knew what that hint of flame meant: if the automatic fire-control systems hadn’t already extinguished it, they must have been disabled by the crash of the enemy pod. Shannon and the others were trapped, with fire on one side and the invaders on the other.
His body wanted to turn back, run into the teeth of the fight and die with them. What kept him running away from it was something he hadn’t thought a great deal about in the last few years—his duty.
“Jesus,” he heard Valerie hiss, then felt her stumble and fall into him, taking them both down. He managed to fall into a half-kneeling position and catch her before she hit the ground, but he could see that her eyes were not on him but the growing conflagration back at the governor’s mansion. “What can we do?” she asked him, the agony in her voice mirroring the pain in his soul.
“Nothing,” he snapped, pulling her to her feet. “We’ve got to get out of here now or we’ll wind up dead—or worse.”
Her eyes seemed to widen at the idea there was something worse than death that could happen to them, and she followed him without argument as he led her across the lawn at a right angle to the mansion. The garage was a high-ceilinged, prefab structure with large windows lining its long sides; at this hour, it was deserted and dark but for the emergency floodlights that had snapped on with the onset of the still-wailing alarms. McKay ignored the roll-up doors that took up most of the building’s front wall, heading instead to one of the smaller, side entrances. The lock was a complex, security-coded affair that looked too complicated to pick, so Jason blew it apart with a double-tap from his pistol, then kicked the door in. The interior of the garage was threateningly dark, the glow from the chemical ghostlights shattered into elongated shadows by the hulking metal shapes of various groundcars and cargo trucks.
“Find the lights,” he told Val, leaving her to feel around on the inner wall left of the door while he went to the front wall to search for the cabinet that would hold the key-cards to the vehicles. He moved slowly along the wall, feeling along the surface of a worktable, yet still managed to slam his shin into a floor jack. “Sonofabitch,” he hissed to himself, rubbing at the leg gingerly.
“Got them!” Val announced, followed immediately by the illumination of the overhead strip lights that ran the length of the ceiling.
Naturally, Jason thought to himself, moving over to the now-visible key cabinet. She finds the lights
The cabinet was locked, but it only took him a moment with a handy prybar to remedy that situation, and he soon found himself staring at rows of labelled hooks, each supporting a computer card for one the handful of vehicles that packed the building. The two limos he rejected immediately: too high profile and not rough enough for off-road use. Likewise, he shook off the scout cycle propped in a corner: too exposed and no room for supplies. He briefly entertained the idea of taking the one Ground-Effects Vehicle present, but decided that the floater was too fragile and high-maintenance if they had to take to the brush.
Which left the two all-terrain utility rovers, one of which was parked close to the main door. They were electric-powered vehicles, with collector panels that could be unfolded on the roof to recharge the batteries in case of emergency. Jason grabbed the appropriate key-card and went to check the car, sliding into the driver’s seat and discovering with a cursory inspection of the instrument panel that the rover was fully-charged.
“Get the door,” he called to Valerie, powering up the rover’s motor, its flywheel humming softly to life. She moved up to the front wall and punched the fist-sized red button beneath the key cabinet, sending the garage door rolling up into the ceiling with a rattle of drive trains. The noise from it made Jason wince: if there were any of the invaders within a couple acres, they’d have to be blind and deaf not to notice.
Val barely had time to jump into the passenger-side seat before McKay tore out of the garage with a squeal of oversized tires on slick plasticrete, the motor whining shrilly in protest. He fought with the control yoke to keep the car from fishtailing as the wheels hit the packed dirt of the drive at maximum acceleration, spitting out a spray of sand and gravel in their wake. McKay didn’t bother sticking to the long, curving path carved out to give visitors a full view of the mansion; he cut straight across the lawn and headed directly for the main road—and directly into the middle of a firefight.
Glowing tracers crosshatched the front lawn, connecting a grounded enemy drop pod with a handful of security guards on the landing pad, sheltered beneath and behind the governor’s flitter. And their landrover was heading at top speed right down the center of it all.
“Hang on!” Jason shouted, pushing the rover’s accelerator to the floor.
The vehicle shot through the gap between the two forces at over a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, the ringing ricochets of slugs off of the rover’s body sending Valerie slouching deeper into her seat, her eyes squeezed shut. One of the invaders launched what Jason thought had to be either a rocket grenade or a shoulder-fired missile at them, but the fiery streak passed just over their hood and rammed into the side of the grounded flitter. The shock of the blast only ten meters to their left shook the rover, scorching its driver’s side and spider-webbing the high-impact transplas of Jason’s window, but McKay ignored the bone-wrenching jolt and kept the accelerator down.
A haze of smoke from the rover’s smoldering paint haloed the car as Jason muscled the control yoke to the left, cutting around the end of the landing pad, trying to put the wreckage of the ducted-fan hovercraft between them and the invaders. Transplas shattered in the rear window with a crack of impacting slugs, and Jason felt the hot knife of a graze score across his right bicep on its way to blasting out the windshield. He bit back an exclamation and kept the steering handle shoved as far to the left as he could. The rover tilted up on its right tires for a gut-wrenching moment, and then it was around the wreckage and back on all four wheels.
McKay heard Valerie gasp in relief as they exploded out onto the paved road and away from the mansion. He felt a similar shudder of relief pass over him.
“That,” he said softly, half to himself, “was too damned close.” That was when he heard an odd sort of scraping noise on the rover’s roof.
