mansion area himself, no doubt at great personal risk.
“Lieutenant McKay might be with her,” Shannon deduced suddenly. “She went for a walk earlier, and he wasn’t in his room. They might have been forced away from the mansion.”
Gunny Lambert shrugged his massive shoulders. “We can take a swing around the place in the cars, but we’d better hurry. There should be room for y’all in the APC, if a few of my kids ride in the scout car.”
“Can I stay in here with the naked lady officer, Sarge?” The APC’s driver, a tow-headed young corporal with a pronounced southern drawl, twisted around in his seat, smiling broadly.
“Shaddup, Bobby,” the Gunny snarled good-naturedly, “or I’ll make you get out and push.” He turned back to the troops still crouched in a perimeter around the APC. “Frenchie, Tinker, Clarke, get in the scout car. The rest of you into the tin can, double-time!”
Three of the Marines sprinted over to the still-watchful scout vehicle while the others waited for Shannon to get her people into the APC before piling in behind them. One of the troopers elbowed the hatch control and the heavy plastrons swung shut with an ear-ringing clash of metal, leaving them in total darkness until the interior lights flickered on.
“So,” Bobby, the driver, twisted around to ask, “where’re we goin’ in this heap, anyways?”
“Once around the park, James,” Lambert drawled. “After that…” He looked to Shannon. “Ma’am?”
“Lieutenant,” Captain Trang called from the rear of the vehicle. “After the Arm of Allah riots, the Governor had the foresight to have a special shelter built. It might be wise to take refuge there for the time being.”
“Is that true, Your Honor?” Stark asked the big man.
“Why, of course.” Sigurdsen shot Trang an annoyed glance—whether because he resented the man for thinking of the idea first or because he hoped he had kept the shelter a secret, she wasn’t certain—before turning back to her. “We need to head up the old dirt road northwest, into the mountains.”
“You heard His Honor, Bobby.” Gunny Lambert thumped the driver on the shoulder. “Get us out of here.”
The APC jerked abruptly into motion, and Shannon bit back a curse as her wounded shoulder bounced against the bare metal of the bulkhead.
“Why don’t you put this on, ma’am,” Sergeant Lambert shouted above the whine of the APC’s turbines, pulling a spare armored vest from a rack above her and handing it down. She nodded gratefully, carefully slipping into the heavy, padded garment. It rubbed uncomfortably against the imbedded splinters, but it was better than the alternative, which was the bare metal of the APC’s hull. The Sergeant fished around for a set of headphones, slipped one pair on himself and handed Stark another.
“You see anything, Peplowski?” Lambert used his headset to ask the Marine who was standing in the APC’s bubble turret as the vehicle, trailed by the scout car, curved around to the back of the mansion.
“Just dead bodies,” the petite female reported. “A few live Gomers over by the back of the garden.” She traversed the turret toward the garden wall and cut loose with a short burst of 25mm. “Sorry, my mistake,” she corrected. “Make that dead Gomers.”
“All right,” Lambert decided. “Wherever they are, they aren’t around here. Bobby, steer this crate for the mountains.”
“Roger that, Sarge.”
Shannon felt the vehicle turn sharply and angle out across the grassy fields behind the mansion. Looking at the headset Lambert had given her, trying to untangle its cord so she could talk to him, she saw a monocular reticle that could be flipped down in front of her left eye. Stark slipped the set on, lowering the eyepiece. Suddenly, she found her left eye filled with the view from the bubble turret’s gunsight, still pointed back at the mansion. It was an infrared sight, lit with a hazy green, but she could see that the building was totally consumed by flames now, a column of smoke rising above it far into the night sky.
“Maybe there is a God,” she muttered to herself, not realizing that the headset’s mike was voice activated.
“What?” she heard Sergeant Lambert ask, turning toward her with confusion in his eyes.
“Oh,” she said with a shrug, a bit surprised at being overheard. “I just meant, that eyesore has burned down twice now.”
Lambert’s broad face cracked in a wide smile and she heard his full-throated laugh over her earphones.
“You’re not bad, ma’am,” he told her. “For an officer.”
“Contact!” Bobby called from the driver’s seat. “Radar says we got company at three hundred meters, coming in from the road to the city. And it’s big, boys and girls.”
Peplowski traversed the turret with a whine of servomotors and Shannon’s left-eye view turned to their left, to the road they were about to cross. She tried to bring the image into clearer focus, and finally caught sight of the… thing.
“What the hell?” she could hear Peplowski exclaim, echoing her own thoughts.
What the hell, indeed. The machine was… Jesus, it was hard to even know how to describe it. The image it initially brought to her mind was that of an industrial exoskeleton, but much, much larger—fifteen meters tall, she estimated. It walked with a curious, bounding gait on a pair of articulated, digitigrade legs—bent backwards, like an ostrich. Slung between the legs was an armored cabin, bristling with missile pods and machine guns, with a heavier cannon hanging beneath it like some kind of absurdly exaggerated penis. Twin turbines rode on the thing’s shoulders and a pair of radar dishes turned slowly atop the main cabin, searching, obviously, for them.
The thing’s main gun swung around and flared as it fired a slow-cycling three-round burst. Metal fragments pinged off the side of their vehicle and dirt kicked up around the APC as the exploding rounds hit only meters from them, the clap of the explosion reverberating through the personnel carrier like a drumbeat.
“Jimenez,” Lambert radioed to the driver of the scout car, “I don’t know what that thing is, but take it out now!”
“That’s a big roger,” came the laconic reply.
The APC’s turret powered around to view the wicked lines of the other vehicle just as the scout car’s boxy missile launcher flared with a blast of exhaust and a heatseeker flashed out at Mach 5, reaching the Invader machine before Peplowski could turn to look at it. By the time the Hopper—Shannon had already tagged it with that name in her mind—came back into her field of view, it was staggering backwards with the top half of its cabin missing, an incandescent cloud surrounded the rended and twisted metal. Only a heartbeat after it came into her sight, the fire reached the thing’s missile pods. An explosion she could feel from over a kilometer away shook the APC as the Hopper was blown into scrap metal in a fireball that lit up the night and nearly burned out the turret camera’s infrared filters.
“Evasive course!” Lambert snapped. “Bobby, Jimenez, give us some smoke. I don’t know if these boys have air support or space weapons, and I don’t want to find out.”
There was a crackle of chemical combustion as clouds of electrostatically charged smoke enveloped both Marine vehicles, obscuring even the IR viewers. Shannon flipped up the ocular and looked back over to Sergeant Lambert.
“Well, Gunny,” she said with only a trace of the weariness and isolation she felt, “I guess this is the enemy we’ve been expecting.”
“Sure looks that way, ma’am,” he agreed, pulling a small can of chewing tobacco out of a vest pocket. He tapped the can to shake loose the contents before opening it, a thoughtful expression on his sculpted face. “I’d like to know how they got by the
She agreed that was a good question. The
“Governor Sigurdsen,” she yelled over the whine of the engines. “Is there a radio at your shelter that can reach orbit?”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” the big man told her. “Do you think we’ll be able to call for help?”
“Maybe. If,” she said softly, half to herself and half to Lambert, “there’s any help left to call.”
The mountains that ran like a dividing line between most of Aphrodite’s temperate southern hemisphere and the Wastes of the north were as young and harsh as the rest of the world. Created during an extended volcanic period, they were all sharp edges and steep drops, only lightly weathered by the last million years of water and wind. All of which made the ride up the barely-existent dirt trail pretty bumpy.
