In reply, the black loci of Calmissiles descended in silence, consuming air and X-ray lasers with equal serenity, until they punched through the Deliverance ships, eviscerating the wreckage.
Even though Loi had been at most of the Knockdown meetings and knew the plan by heart, watching the numbers wind up was unnerving. The cruisers were expending munitions at a phenomenal rate, and he was keenly aware of the reserves. They’d pushed manufacturing stations to the maximum in order to be ready for today, but even so it was going to be tight.
The Knockdown tactical display splashed the cruisers above Utah, closing to their optimal attack points. Deliverance ships around Salt Lake City responded to their approach by firing at the gathering above. Missiles began to streak down in retaliation, slicing incandescent lines through the crud-clotted air.
Three command icons splashed green.
‘Go,’ Johnston said.
Loi started moving towards portal five. It took time to get up to a run, even with all the artificial muscle the suit was packing; that much inertia couldn’t be overcome easily. When he and Eldlund had been practising in the suits, they’d found the best way to stop when you were sprinting was just to drop to the ground, then dig your knees and elbows in to bulldoze through dirt until you halted.
He’d reached a reasonable jogging speed when he passed through portal five’s blue rim. His balance shifted, which the suit’s network corrected. There was an intruder synth turtle just behind his heels, squatting on the side of Mount Kessler’s steep slope in the heart of the Oquirrh range. Eldlund emerged from portal three, twenty metres to the west, with Lim following him out.
The gale pummelling the mountains was so thick with a hail of soil and stone flakes that Loi’s visual sensors couldn’t see them at all. The stones pinged off his armour, making it sound as if he was being shot with old-fashioned bullets. He kept moving forwards, sustaining his momentum despite the unstable ground. The tactical splash exposed the Olyix ships ranged across the nearby mountains. They’d emerged a kilometre from a transport ship – while two and a half kilometres beyond that, along a precarious ridge, a Deliverance ship had pulverized the top of Farnsworth Peak, creating a flattish plateau on which it had sat for the last two and a half years while it assaulted Salt Lake City’s shield.
The transports were starting to take off while the Deliverance ships were shooting upwards at the swarm of missiles hurtling down. This time it was the Calmissiles that arrived first. Their exhaust plumes were bright enough to shine through the murky atmosphere, turning the slope into a stark monochrome wasteland. Loi could even glimpse the hulking shapes of the other two armour suits lumbering along.
Five Calmissiles punctured the Deliverance ship at Farnsworth Peak, cutting clean through and boring vertically down into the mountain until their spacial entanglement casings were switched off seconds later. By then the incandescent exhausts had already devastated the interior of the Deliverance ship. It burst apart in a cascade of molten slivers and jagged structural segments.
The glare faded, replaced by intense flashes from somewhere overhead as a fusillade of nuclear warheads detonated. Loi could just make out the shadow shape of the transport ship lifting off – a truncated-cone profile with its nose angling up as it started to accelerate. More explosions bloomed, their shockwaves crashing down in massive pressure surges. The transport ship was more than three hundred metres high when the full force of the blastwave struck. It was flung down, twisting sharply as if trying to regain its correct flight vector. Then it smashed hard into the ground. Splits multiplied along the fuselage, but it remained intact.
Loi designated the fusion chamber exhaust ports at the rear, and the suit fired a tactical missile. The warhead was only a two-decaton nuke, and it exploded twenty metres away from the ship. Still, it was powerful enough to lift half of the transport off the ground as it shunted the whole mass along. The nose crunched into a rock clump, and the fissures in the fuselage ripped wide open. The aft quarter crumpled badly, blackening as the nuke’s small mushroom cloud was immediately torn apart by the wind.
Loi crouched down. Even so, he wound up sprawling on his back as the blastwave flipped him over. Three high-velocity drones streaked forwards from Eldlund’s dispensers, hitting the transport ship’s mangled fuselage and sticking fast.
‘Entanglement suppression active,’ Eldlund exclaimed. ‘The Salvation onemind doesn’t know what’s happening to the ship.’
Loi had righted himself and was ploughing forwards as fast as he could go. The flashes from nukes overhead were coming less frequently. All part of the Knockdown strategy, allowing the remaining ships to escape to orbit.
The transport was in bad shape. Its sombre-red fuselage had so many cracks and gashes it was clearly never going to fly again. Internal tanks had been torn open. Fluids were gurgling out to splurge over structural spurs and the curving decking before splattering on the baked ground. Some of the liquid bleeding from the ship’s vitals was cryogenic, bubbling away from exposure to the hot winds, producing vigorous clouds of white vapour that veiled the deeper mysteries of the interior.
Loi switched his suit sensor array to active, and it probed clean through the clouds, exposing the layout ahead. The ship was one he was painstakingly familiar with, identical to the original design of the Avenging Heretic. Directly under the fuselage skin was a thick seam of systems to manipulate exotic matter, allowing the ship to fly through a wormhole. Gravitonic drive units and fusion generators occupied the aft quarter, now mostly mangled slag thanks to the tactical nuke he’d fired. The bulk of the ship comprised cylindrical compartments linked by overlapping circular corridors that resembled wide pipes.
He reached the ship and gripped
