Omega Point (24 page)

  Lehmann leapt, twisting and balling himself up as he came. He slammed into a comms station, taking the impact on his back, keeping it from Chures and Valdaire. The Stelsco swerved as he hit. Otto wrestled it back under control and shut the doors. Gunfire rattled off the vehicle's armour. Otto heard the low whump of EMP discharge and felt a residual surge in his systems, but the vehicle's faraday armour took care of most of it.

  He pulled away from the train, the Stelsco bouncing madly as it left the embankment. Lehmann and the others, unsecured, slammed backward and forward, Lehmann doing his best to protect Chures and Valdaire as he slid across the cabin floor.

  The vehicle skidded to one side as something big hit.

  "Kaplinski," growled Otto.

  Kaplinski straddled the vehicle's nose, his face shredded, two insane eyes staring from his ruined face, his grin a death's-head rictus of bloodied teeth in shiny black bone, his lips stripped from his skull. The fingers of one hand were firmly wrapped around one of the Stelsco's forward sensor pods. The other formed into a fist. Roaring in pain and rage, the cyborg pounded at the Stelsco's armoured windscreen.

  On the fourth hit, cracks appeared.

  A pair of airbikes roared overhead. Twin lines of bullet impacts perforated the earth and passed over Kaplinski, knocking bits of flesh from him. He did not flinch, but continued to methodically smash his way into the Stelsco.

  Otto brought the turret forward, right to the front of the roof. He brought it to its lowest elevation. Its eye cams were so close to Kaplinski the cyborg filled the view on Otto's iHUD.

  "Goodbye, Kaplinski," he said.

  The guns opened up. At such close range, they would have pulverised a mountain. Kaplinski danced upon the Stelsco's rounded front, one arm up in front of his face. He came off the bonnet and bounced onto the ground. Otto was not sure if he jumped or fell.

  In the rearview cameras, Otto saw Kaplinski stagger to his feet. A bright lance of energy, emanating from the train, hit him square in the back, and he fell. Otto lost sight of him.

  The Stelsco hurtled across abandoned fields. The Cossacks had got into the air, and their airbikes raced overhead; it would not be long before others from the border patrols joined them, the only military units allowed in the DMZ. Lehmann and Valdaire wrestled Chures into a chair. Valdaire stumbled onto Lehmann, and he pushed her into another seat and strapped her in. Otto jinked as missiles streaked from airbike farings, the Stelsco's defensive arsenal taking some out, others sending plumes of dirt and fire into the sky as they impacted the ground.

  The treeline; he had to get into the forest. He swung the car hard onto an overgrown dirt track, the armoured vehicle's wide wheels overhanging both sides. A missile got through its countermeasures, destroying the middle left wheel. The car jettisoned the damaged unit, the Stelsco bucking as it went under the back wheels and was tossed high into the air. Water fountained as the car plunged down and up, surging through a small river, the small bridge that had once crossed it long gone.

  In seconds, they were in the trees, racing along a forestry road. Otto engaged the machine's camouflage lamellae, and the scales that comprised it rippled and changed, depicting the road under it and forest around it. The Cossacks' shots grew less accurate.

  "I'm going for the lake!" he bellowed. "Hang on!"

  He turned off the road into an area recently felled. The Stelsco bounced madly as he forced it over tree stumps and gouges. A trio of auto-foresters blurred past, backs stacked high with logs. The car bumped over a series of concrete foundation blocks, remains of an old suburb, and then was into an area where the rotting remnants of houses still stood. The Stelsco burst through house after house, dragging rotting memories out into overgrown streets as it went. They crossed a road pockmarked with shell holes, past the rusting wrecks of ancient groundcars, and went down a narrow lane lined by the wild back gardens of two streets. Crumbling fencing exploded under the Stelsco's fat tyres. Otto swerved to avoid an overturned truck, Weeds growing thickly between long-forgotten possessions turned to mush on the road. More forest. A horrible grinding came from the front right wheel unit, a major malfunction, but salvageable. Otto told the machine to withdraw the unit and repair it.

  With two wheels out of action, their speed reduced as the car's near-I struggled to keep it stable.

  They went up and over the remains of the P-419 highway into the southern industrial zones. Concrete giants loomed, the remains of ancient refineries.

  "We're getting close," he said.

  Bullets rattled off the car roof as the airbikes locked onto them once more. Five of them wove back and forth above them, strafing. Warning lights blinked red in Otto's iHUD and on consoles round the compartment as subsidiary systems died, some sacrificed by the Stelsco to keep its priority gear running.

  "Let me take them out!" shouted Lehmann.

  "No more collateral damage!" replied Otto.

  He wove through dry sump pools, their beds stained bright with toxic chemical deposits. The vast Bratsk aluminium refinery opened up in front of him like a belated apology, rust and weeds and yesterday's poisons.

  "Nearly there!"

  Tumbledown warehouses clustered round the refinery dock. The hulks of rusting barges slumped at their berths, cargoes forever undelivered. Otto hit the dockside at high speed. The engines whined as wheels spun wildly, free of the ground's friction. They bounced hard as they hit the cracked mud at the bottom.

  "The river!" shouted Lehmann, and pointed through the cracked windscreen. Ahead, glinting silver, a series of loops surrounded by deep mud, cutting across the bottom of the empty Bratskoye reservoir. Once held back by one of the world's largest hydroelectric dams, it had been blown by what the Russian government had blandly termed "rogue nationalist elements" after the Secret War and the subsequent Sinosiberian purchase. The ensuing flood had taken out the other four dams on the Angara river, leaving wrecked infrastructure and flattened towns to the Chinese.

  Now the noxious mud, thick with mercury from the town's aluminium and chemical processing past, was open to the skies, and the unbounded river formed the true border between the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China, slap in the middle of the 75-kilometre-wide demilitarised zone.

  A clunk sounded from the Stelsco as it redeployed its repaired wheel unit, and it became easier to control. The ghostly remains of the city whipped past far on their left, and receded as they travelled across the mudflats. Otto made good use of the shipwrecks dotting the plain, and for a few precious moments the airbikes lost them. Otto accelerated. One of the airbikes picked up his dust plume, and suddenly all five swooped in, hammering away with missiles and guns.

  The Stelsco lurched as it hit the sticky mud round the river, skidded, then spun through 180 degrees as it hit the water. Its fat wheels and flotation units kept it on top of the water, the wheels stopped spinning and water jets took over. Otto disengaged the left jet and slewed the vehicle across the water as he grappled to bring the Stelsco back under control. Bullets followed their plume of spray, then abruptly stopped.

  "They're retreating," said Lehmann. Eye cam screens showed the airbikes splitting in the air and falling back, as if they'd seen an invisible wall.

  "Welcome to China," said Otto.

  The Stelsco's wheels re-engaged as they hit the other bank. It struggled to haul them up out of the river. Otto eased back as they found their way back onto the dry.

  "Everyone OK?" he asked. He looked back. Lehmann was as impassive as he always was when he was in mission mode. Valdaire was shaken up, and was anxiously checking over Chures.

  Otto set the car to autodrive and went back. The VIA man was sprawled in his seat, deathly pale and barely conscious.

  "Chures," he said. "Chures! Where's the damn medical pack in this vehicle?" Otto asked Lehmann.

  Lehmann shook his head.
It won't do any good
, he thought out to Otto.
Kaplinski has shattered all his ribs, he's got massive internal bleeding. He might have a chance if we got him into a proper hospital, but out here…
His MT cut out as his thoughts trailed away.

  "Hang in there, Chures," said Otto. "We'll get you help."

  Chures smiled weakly. His breathing was weak and pink bubbles frothed at the corner of his lips.

  Valdaire looked at Otto. "We could always neurally pattern him. I'm sure we could effect a quick download through his uplinks. It'll hurt, but it's better than the alternative."

  Chures pushed weakly at her arm. "No…" His words came in brief pants, as his increasingly laboured breath would allow. "Don't… make… me… into… one of… them."

  "Let him alone," said Otto. He remembered another time, and another person saying those words. This time he'd listen.

  "It's the only way," said Valdaire, "I've got to do it, I can do it," and she began to throw open storage bins in the Stelsco. "I can get an emergency neural pattern, I can. If only…"

  Otto grabbed her arm. "He said no."

  Chures gasped and he passed out. His skin was white, his lips ashen.

  An alarm trilled. "Veev! I'm under assault, help me, Veev!"

  Valdaire's mouth dropped open. "I forgot to shut Chloe off!" She pawed at buttons until the trilling of her life companion ceased.

  "Too late now," said Otto, and nodded at the windscreen. Against the grey sky bright points of light glowed, blowtorch flames in the air. They grew larger. Each burned from a jetpack attached to a heavily armoured human figure. "Dragon Fire soldiers," he said.

  "The Chinese are coming," said Lehmann.

 

Early the next day, Richards' regiment marched to the south gate.

  The streets were packed with soldiers. For much of the way Richards could see little but the helmets and spears of the men around him, until the tops of the walls came into sight. Guards walked their circuit. Many watched the horizon for Lord Penumbra's armies, but more than a few had their weapons turned inwards, a spur to patriotic zeal.

  The south gate was bigger than the north, five railway lines running through tunnels either side of it. Off to the west of it was a giant goods yard, and here Richards' regiment trooped in and lined up, waiting to be loaded onto waiting trains. Small locomotives doubled up at the front of each, baroque smokestacks wisping smoke to join the sulphurous fug over the yard. Twenty or so trucks were behind each engine, low-sided and open to the elements, many already crammed with soldiers. There were divisions of foundrymen armed with sledgehammers and wearing thick leather aprons, units of the city guard in enclosing armour, hordes of animals, crews of bobbleheaded sailors, weird blobs and cute robots. Officers, animal, man and otherwise, boarded the few passenger coaches attached to each train. Richards' unit's turn came and they were directed up onto the freight wagons, helping hands grasping and pulling them up, for there were no ladders.

  The yard was deafening. Engines coughed and whistled. Trucks clattered and banged. Everybody was shouting. The ground was restless under the tread of the army. Men came down the trains' sides, passing up rations and canteens of water, hallooing as they went. Railway workers followed, slamming up the trucks' sides and locking them with rattling pins. They did not meet the eyes of those who stood within.

  With a lusty hoot the first train pulled away in a cloud of steam and smoke. A cheer went up from the men and beasts aboard and they struck up a song. This one contained the vanguard of the army, a forward corps of city lancemen and scouts who stood in their trucks with their thogs, soothing them as they mooed and stamped their six hoofs.

  "Look at those poor things," said Tarquin as the thog cars rumbled by. "Eyes rolling all over the place. Someone really should do something about that."

  Another train pulled out, long trucks racked with light artillery, its attendant guards and units of the larger animals riding behind. Then the foundrymen. Time passed, and Richards' mind drifted.

  His train's departure took him by surprise. His legs ached from standing still for so long, and he started when the engine took up the slack and dragged his train forward inch by squealing inch. A paw took the crook of his elbow, preventing him from falling.

  "Steady there, friend!"

  Richards looked up into the face of a hare. "Thanks," he said. "I didn't expect that."

  "I know what you mean!" said the hare. "Exciting, isn't it? Oh, how I have long longed to march to war! Imagine! A hare like me smashing Penumbra's evil forces! I am lame and cannot run." He patted a crooked leg. "My brothers and sisters are swift as the wind, and have joined with the scouts. I thought a life of adventure beyond me. But here I am, here I am! The opportunity for glory at last, here I am!"

  Several of the other soldiers had faint smiles, half-daring to imagine victory. A forlorn hope; any division with minimal armour and lame hares as part of its set-up probably did not rate highly in strategic planning, thought Richards.

  "Yeah," said Richards. "Great."

  "Friend! You seem to be uninspired. Think! Here you stand, taking the fight to our enemies, allies at your side. Oh, I shall write a poem about this! Yea, a paean to glory." With this he scribbled down some notes in a book he produced from a pocket.

  "Sorry," said Richards. "I've a lot on my mind."

  "Indeed?" said the hare genially, glancing up from his book. "Pray tell me your troubles. We have a long journey. A burden shared is a burden halved. And it may make a good poem." The train went into the tunnel, a dark world lit by skirling sparks. Richards exited the tunnel with ears ringing and stinging eyes. The hare was not put off. "Is it some young lady? Some darling you have left behind?" He waggled his eyebrows. "Maybe a leveret or two back home in the hedgerow? We all have worries, my friend. But fear not, we are to be victorious! Mr Spink told us. It is assured by the stars themselves. And what has a brave warrior like you to fear? I see from your lion-cloak you already have some skill at arms. Tell me how you vanquished such a ferocious beast. I shall pen you a rhyme to memorialise your deed."