Extremis (20 page)

* * *

Diane slid down and into a fire-ready position just as the private—who had taken her watch in the basement—finished pounding up the stairs. He immediately went for his bulky valise.

Ved had snapped off his safety and gone to the window on the opposite side of the door from the staircase. “Jesu of Old, they must have had this house under observation.”

“Looks like it.” Falco put his eye to the sights of his own weapon, and Diane imagined she could hear an unspoken addition:
“Yes, the unauthorized bombers operating out of this location must have been sloppy enough to leave a trail. And that’s going to get all of us killed now.”

Van Felsen was scanning the room, checking everyone’s positions and readiness. He threw a glance at the back door—

—where the hulking Marine corporal she’d sent to check that route of egress had evidently decided to get his rather immense rifle first: he had just stuck his head out the door, leading with the weapon’s muzzle.

“Corporal!” shouted Van Felsen. “No—don’t show weapons. Not unless we have to, damn it!”

The large Marine, flustered, looked out the back door again as if checking whether anyone had seen him or heard her…then froze for one instant and hastily shut the door.

Van Felsen’s voice—and face—was like a slab of bone-dry slate. “Report, Corporal. What did you see out there?”

* * *

Lentsul had just maneuvered one defense blister into position behind the target house when the rear door opened and the barrel of a
griarfeksh
military rifle protruded. He quickly dropped the altitude of the blister so that its sensor cluster just topped the roofpeak of an adjoining house. He reached out with (urgency) toward—“Heshfet!”

But she had obviously been monitoring the real-time
selnarm
output that converted the vehicle’s streaming sensor data into the equivalent of a telepathic command channel. “I see it, Lentsul. Send blister 3 to cover the rear exit, also. Now”—and she widened her
selnarm
projection to include her entire Enforcer-Group—“the
griarfeksh
are armed but not yet prepared. Quickly, rush the building before they can organize themselves!” And, exemplary
Destoshaz
that she was, Heshfet broke into a swift charge toward the target house.

Lentsul—both fearful and aroused by her gallantry—pulsed a warning (desist!) and pleaded with her to “Stop—wait for the air cover! Wait for all the blisters to be in position! Heshfet, you must wait just another—”

But Heshfet’s
selnarm
had walled out his reluctance and suffused with (
berserkergang
), she closed on the house.

* * *

Joe Adams—usually the most animated of Van Felsen’s command staff—was evidently a very cool customer in a crisis. “They’re coming,” he announced calmly from his position farther up the stairs that were just a step behind Diane. He was using the mid-floor landing as a higher vantage point to see out the same window where Diane waited. “Commander, they are charging with weapons at the ready.”

“Shit,” hissed Van Felsen, who looked not so much angry as bitterly disappointed. “Corporal, clear us a path of retreat out the back. The rest of you hold them off and disengage in descending order of rank, as possible. You do not wait for anyone else—you run like hell. Stay split up. Make all speed for fallback point delta. If it’s compromised, you go into the bush and head for the nearest Resistance cell. Got it?”

Nods and murmurs of assent.

“Good. How close are they?”

Falco sounded tense. “They’ll be coming through the door in a five-count. No sign of stopping or any attempt to communicate.”

Van Felsen shook her head in what looked like both despair and disgust. “Open fire,” she said.

* * *

The change in situation was so abrupt that Lentsul hardly knew what to do first. The back door opened, and a stream of murderous fire poured out—and hit the primary rearwatch blister dead-on. Already impressed by the marksmanship, he was utterly stunned when the unit’s
protoselnarm
link stuttered and died: that heavy human rifle had been firing some form of hypervelocity armor-penetrating round. He commanded the next blister to rise up and return fire with all munitions, then sent another to the rear as Heshfet had instructed.

But in the same instant, the front windows of the house exploded outward in a glistening wave of shattered glass as multiple muzzle flashes licked angrily out over the sidewalk.

Lentsul felt Heshfet’s
soka
—her life force—wink out in the very first moment of that fusillade. All her vitality and energy and raw, primal power was erased instantly, and in its place there was an emptiness so profound and yawning that it felt as if the provocative
Destoshaz
had never existed, had been a figment of Lentsul’s fevered sexual imagination.

The others of Heshfet’s group were not so lucky, for they did not expire so quickly. The half that did not get to cover first were savaged by multiple hits from a variety of human weapons—all of which fired faster and harder than anything that the Children of Illudor had yet encountered. Limbs trailing, clusters and tentacles shattered or even severed, they fell into writhing, blood-spurting heaps, expiring in an agony that buffeted Lentsul with a
selnarm
wave almost as powerful and piteous as that which had accompanied the burning deaths he had felt during the convoy ambush.

Lentsul experienced a
befthel
—a “three-eyed blink” that was often a sign of impending shock—before he could respond. And then, with (hate, vengeance, bloodlust) suddenly rising up through him and into the nearby
selnarm
links, he gave rapid orders to the blisters. One covered the rear door; a second boosted high on its fans for a bird’s-eye look down upon the rear of the house. A third went to the front to provide support for the remaining
Destoshaz
Enforcers; a fourth hung back behind it, lurking low, waiting to pop up, and the last remained back near the vehicle to provide a base of fire.

Then he reached out his
selnarm
to the remaining group members, but an instant too late. They were—

* * *

“—charging again, Commander.”

“Hit them—hard,” said Van Felsen, who, turning, obviously intended to check the back door.

Diane could hardly keep track of events after that: they came so swiftly, that there was no reliable sequence.

All the firepower at the front of the house lashed out again. She popped up to look at the Baldy attackers and was stunned by their utter silence, composure, sinuous dodges, and eerie coordination. There were no delays, no waiting, no double-checking. Their fast leapfrog advance was seamless—but hopeless. The interlocking fields of fire tore the rest of them to pieces.

But a blister—airborne and right behind them—was firing with far greater accuracy. And lethality: the private at the door was literally cut in half by a sheet of small-caliber autofire that roared out of the blister in excess of eight hundred rounds per minute. At the same time, the same drone sent a small rocket blasting into the wall to the right of the door. Falco cartwheeled back into the middle of the room, missing both his left arm and the left side of his head.

Bastards
, thought Diane, who brought the launcher up to her shoulder and dropped the crosshairs on the advancing blister. The vertical and lateral bars flashed and were then lined in green: she pulled the oversized trigger.

With a dull cough, the clearing charge put the rocket a few meters beyond the muzzle of the launcher. Diane ducked—just as the roar of the rocket kicked in and sent a back-blast through the window she’d been using but a moment before. A split second later, there was a confused smash, blast, howl of violated metal, and an even larger explosion.

Above and behind, Joe Adams’s shout was a celebration. “That’s one down, Corporal! Now hit ’em with—”

Then the rotary weapon sound came again, a little more distant—and she looked up in time to see calm, genial Joe Adams blasted into bloody tatters by yet another blister-mounted rotary machine gun.

Fucking
bastards
, she amended, selecting another AP round from the five-rocket magazine sleeve at the rear of the weapon. She shouldered the tube, readied herself to rise into a firing position—

—just as she saw the Marine corporal at the rear of the building go down. Van Felsen, arriving there a moment later, picked up his immense rifle, knelt, and dumped the clip skyward out the back door: there was a shuddering roar over the rooftops. Van Felsen dropped the spent weapon, turned, and shouted, “We’re leaving! Everyone on m—”

And then Van Felsen exploded. She literally came apart in a spray of bone and blood and organs that spattered across the room—along with a few pieces of shrapnel that made a zipping sound as they went through Diane’s left lung and shoulder. Ved was less lucky; at least a dozen fragments cut through his torso, and—eyes wide and a broad blood smear on the wall behind him—he slid down to the floor and slumped over.

Well, shit,
thought Diane through her tears—and she came up to a crouch, firing at the first weapon blister she saw, not even bothering to wait for a targeting lock. She ducked down—and the same sounds of catastrophic destruction filled the street in front of the house.

Clutching the launcher, she low-crawled toward the back door and glanced around; only she was left. And there was obviously another flying trashcan covering the mostly closed back door—the one that had hit Van Felsen. Diane felt her lips pull back even as she pulled back the loading lever to advance yet another 38 mm AP rocket into the weapon’s launch chamber.
Well, trash can, you’re going down.
She squirmed over and crouched behind the door, ready to push it open, sweep the skies, and take a fast shot—

—when the door before her disintegrated under a typhoon of small, high-velocity bullets. Through the tattered remains of the door, she had a split-second glimpse of a defense blister floating there, just a meter beyond the doorframe. Evidently, it had been waiting for her thermal signature to draw close enough to fire blind through the door itself.

Diane Narejko discovered that she was still, inexplicably, completely lucid, despite the fact that her back was so wet with her own blood that she was lightly sticking to the wall where the inward blast had impaled and pinned her. And as the blister advanced through the doorway, and its rotary machine gun roared again, she experienced a fleeting feeling—rather like a great sadness—as she realized that the red spray now obscuring her vision was her own blood flying up from the bullets tearing through her chest.

And then, after another split second of the dusky red spray, came a deep, permanent blackness.

* * *

Lentsul, still quivering with rage and grief and horror, watched the pieces of what had been a human drop to the floor.

The
selnarm
link poked at him. (Urgent. Missiles inbound. Confirm?) came from the combat air patrol which, having been automatically updated on the terrible casualties the Group had suffered, now had precision munitions locked on target. Lentsul considered calling off the strike, sending the weapons to circle back around to fall harmlessly in the bay, but he reasoned—thinly—that there might still be some hostile
griarfeksh
in the house. And there was no reason to take chances that would cost more lives from the ranks of his brothers and sisters. Best let the weapons strike.

But he knew his real reason: he wanted to obliterate the house and the remains of those that had killed Heshfet. Heshfet who had always had contempt for him; who had stretched like a goddess when she emerged from the misting-chamber; who had been impetuous, temperamental, capricious, emotional, and the object of his every waking and sleeping fantasy. These
griarfeksh
would pay—and keep paying—for discarnating her: even if they had already gone to a blank, soulless death in the true oblivion of
xenzhet-narmat’ai
. He would make sure that they were all spinning down that hole of utter nothing, make sure in the most final manner possible: he would wipe the house from the face of the earth.

So it was that when Lentsul sent (confirm) he did not stop to think—nor would he have cared—that he was sterilizing the site of any possible intelligence or forensics value.

And he did not know that, just as surely, he was cremating the remains of what had been the only, and last, nascent hope for peace between Arduans and humans.

* * *

Sandro had seen smoke arise with great suddenness over the roofs of his neighborhood as he pulled on to the closest cross-street that would allow him to park near his house. Then more smoke, and he heard the double-crack of distant sonic booms from all points of the compass: Baldy combat flyers going supersonic, and from every side of him. From every part of the horizon.

As he nosed into the intersection with the street that went past his front door, he saw the source of the smoke from three blocks away: his house was aflame. Burning wreckage—some Baldy machinery, some nearby parked vehicles, even parts of the façade of his house—filled the street. He thought he saw bodies as well, and floating objects that looked like upright, round-ended canisters: Baldy weapon blisters in remote mode. Farther beyond that, through the smoke and occasional movement, he saw what looked like the nose of a Baldy personnel carrier—which rolled backward, even as he watched. The blisters stopped their vaguely cyclic movement and fell back directly on the armored vehicle, accompanying it out of sight around the distant corner.

That was when Sandro caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye. High above the rooftops, a dot—riding a growing column of smoke—was hurtling downward at a sharp angle. Then he noticed five others, each closing from different, and widely separated, points of the compass.

Sandro took his foot off the brake, accelerated smoothly through the intersection, turned back in the direction he had come from, and took a quick look in his rearview mirror.

As he watched, the first missile came down. He saw the roof of his house—and several nearby—fly upward, riding a geyser of smoke and intermittent flame. Then the other five missiles came in, just as the sound of the explosions started rolling over him in one long wave: the concussions rattled the glass of his vehicle’s rear window, and shook the roadway enough that he could feel it shift under him as he drove.