Task Force (24 page)

“And like Wilton said, you don’t want to let your buddies down?”

“Pretty stupid, huh,” Price said.

“And Monster? He’s pretty stupid too?”

“Monster is a lot smarter than he acts,” Price said. “But he hides it well.”

“I know,” Barnard said. “He can’t hide it from me.”

Price thought of the way that Barnard’s eyes burned into people when she was talking to them, and thought that was probably true. “I think he does it to fool people so they underestimate him,” she said.

“What about all that wacky New Age spiritual stuff?” Barnard asked. “All part of the disguise?”

“Don’t know,” Price said. “That started after Uluru. It changed him a bit, I think. We’ve all changed since Uluru. Well, maybe not Wilton.”

“You like him, don’t you?” Barnard said.

“Wilton?”

“Monster.”

“What do you mean?” Price asked, suddenly off balance.

“Like, fancy, adore, love,” Barnard said, correcting her steering by half a degree. “Soul mates. Two hearts beating as one. You can’t wait for this war to be over so you can settle down with him in some quaint little Monster house and raise cute little Monster kids.”

“I thought you said there was no such thing as love,” Price said.

“Maybe I was just being cynical,” Barnard said. “Does he feel the same way?”

Price trailed a hand in the water beside the boat, liking the feeling of the lake rushing through her fingers. Liking the simplicity of it.

“I … think so,” she said after a while.

“You don’t know?”

“We went out for a while back at camp. After Uluru.”

“And?”

“I broke it off.”

“Why?”

“What’s the point?” Price asked. “One or the other or both of us are not going to survive this war.”

“The point is,” Barnard said, slowing the engine and circling around to zero in on the next position, “that one or the other or both of you are not going to survive this war.”

Price opened her mouth to protest, but then shut it again. After a moment she said, “You’re a very smart person.”

“I know,” Barnard said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Price said.

“I know,” Barnard said.

“I didn’t like you much at first,” Price said. “But you’re kinda cool.”

“Don’t waste it,” Barnard said.

“Waste what?”

“Whatever time you two might have.”

The rotorcraft came in low and fast, landing almost a mile southwest of the dam with a thud that sent spikes of pain up Yozi’s leg. Even before the craft had fully touched down, they were leaping off onto springy coils of grass. A gravel slope rose up out of the farmland above them, the huge earth embankment of the dam. The mighty gates stood between giant concrete pillars. If Yozi had had his way, they would have landed right on the dam itself, but the pilot had refused, worried about the humans’ deadly javelin missiles.

Alizza was in the lead, but Yozi was at his heels, and the other eighteen members of the squad were right behind them.

THE BATTLE FOR THE WIVENHOE DAM BEGAN AT 11:30
hours.

It started in a haze of white as the Angels launched smoke grenade after smoke grenade from the eastern road, then slipped through the trees to get as close as possible to the dam before launching their assault.

The breeze was in their favor—westerly, carrying the smoke across the top of the dam, but light, so the smoke did not disperse too quickly. To the Bzadians up on the ramparts of the giant gantry crane, the smoke must have been unsettling. Things were happening down in the haze below them but they did not know what, or where, to shoot. Occasional single coil-gun shots and bursts of machine-gun fire sounded. Shooting at shadows.

The noise of motorcycle engines reverberated through the haze. Two or three of them at least, but the Bzadians could not know that was just to confuse them, to disguise the sound of the one bike that mattered, the quad bike on which Price and Monster waited.

On the waters of the lake, well out of range of the guns on the gantry, Chisnall also waited, alone in the boat, the engine idling, the bows settled in the water. If ever he had to depend on his team, it was now. If they couldn’t take out the defenses on the gantry crane, he wouldn’t make it within a hundred meters of the dam. He looked at the bomb balanced in the front of the craft and at the detonator clipped to his thigh.

“Do it,” he said, barely more than a murmur.

The engines of all the bikes roared, and now Price and Monster were moving—Price driving, Monster carrying one of the C4 satchels, the other clipped to the handlebars. One stray bullet and they would be a red smear along the road. The smoke was patchy but thick in parts, and Price kept right to the center of the concrete road, judging her distance from the tracks of the crane to the left and right, visible for just a few meters in front of her.

Now the Angels behind them opened up, their guns pre-sighted on the ramparts of the gantry before the smoke had started. The heavy machine gun jury-rigged onto the front of the other quad bike began a heavy stutter. The Angels’ coil-guns added to the cacophony blazing out at the high platform.

The Bzadians began to respond, firing blindly into the smoke below them. Price corrected her course slightly and gave the quad bike more gas. The front lifted and the bike surged ahead.

A corkscrew rocket came spiraling out of the smoke, impacting on the guardrail in front of them with a roar and a scream of twisted metal. Shrapnel clattered off Price’s visor and armor as she drove through the residue of the explosion.

More explosions now, to the left and the right, heated rushing air blasting around them. The sound of bullets fizzed through the air.

They were at the legs of the crane and Price was braking, hard. Monster rolled off the back with one of the satchels and she accelerated away without ever actually stopping.

The other leg of the gantry loomed, a dark tower, and she skidded the quad bike to a halt. Bullets were ricocheting all around as the Bzadians realized what was happening.

There was no time for anything fancy. She hit the button to start the timer and tossed the satchel down by the leg of the beast. Then she was gunning the bike again, back to the first leg, where Monster was waiting.

He swung himself onto the back and they were racing back to the east side of the dam, to safety.

The rocket that got them was a fluke, the soldier above firing blind. It corkscrewed into the ground about two meters away, blasting Price off the bike and sending it spinning up through the air and out over the edge of the dam. Only a safety
fence saved her as she slid across the roadway, dazed and half-blinded, her ears ringing with a constant high-pitched whistle.

Monster was nowhere to be seen, over the edge of the dam perhaps or a bloodied, shredded body lying somewhere on the roadway.

Seconds slid by, although time meant nothing to her. It was the shape of the Bzadian soldiers appearing through the smoke that finally spurred her into action. Rolling back onto her hands and knees and crawling forward, she found her way blocked by combat boots. Black-suited soldiers were standing over her, their coil-guns aimed at her head. Such was the pain and the confusion in her head that it was only then, when she stopped, certain that this was the end, that she noticed her leg. It was gone. Her right leg below the knee was missing and yet somehow she had crawled on the stump, leaving a bloody trail along the concrete behind her.

Price shut her eyes and, even as she did, the insides of her eyelids flashed brilliant red as a sheet of white lightning lit the scene like a flash photograph. Then came the rush of burning air over the top of her. The C4 on the legs of the crane. Had she been standing, she would have been blasted off her feet by a thump of superheated air, but lying on the roadway she was spared most of the explosion.

The Bzadians disappeared, debris on the wind, some flying out over the edge of the dam.

And above her, the gantry crane danced a crazy dance on broken legs as it swayed back and forth, flapping and flopping
before toppling, in a scream of awful twisted metal, out over the gates of the dam and into the slipway below.

Monster was gone. Amid the pain and the confusion and the shock, that fact finally registered in her brain. And with it came a pain more searing than any ravages of skin, bone, or flesh. Weeping uncontrollably now, she unclipped her utility belt and pulled it tightly around the stump of her leg, a makeshift tourniquet, and probably too little, too late.

A dark shape rose up out of the rubble and strode toward her. For a moment, Price hoped against hope that it was Monster, that somehow he had survived the blast, but even through eyes blurred with tears, she knew that this shape was wrong. It was too tall, the shoulders not broad enough. It drew closer and finally she recognized his uneven teeth. A grotesque leering thing, an ugly creature from an ugly species. His name, Price remembered dimly through the fog in her brain, was Alizza.

Chisnall was moving, skipping across the surface of the water, as fast as the boat would go. Even before the twin explosions that had taken down the gantry and its deadly weaponry, he had been racing full throttle toward the dam. Now he slowed the boat as he moved into the funnel, the twin arms of concrete that stretched out from the dam gates.

He spun the boat around to bleed off speed, then let it coast up to the massive metal bulkhead gates. Tall flat sheets of solid metal, impossibly thick, the tops of them rising out of the
water. It was hard to imagine an explosive even denting such behemoths.

He chose the center gate and pulled the boat up alongside it, rolling the heavy fuel cell over the side, ignoring the pain from his broken rib. The fuel cell sank so rapidly that the flying rope almost caught his foot, and he just had time to flip the buoy out into the water before the rope snatched it from his grasp.

He gunned the engine, arcing around in a spray of white water and heading for the wide-open water of the lake.

He hoped the others were all right, but there was no time to even think about that. They had done their job; now it was time for him to do his.

From the top of the dam, Yozi watched the boat surging away. A flash of a face and he knew it was Chizna at the tiller. There had to be a reason for that, and staring down the face of the dam gates he saw it. Two plastic bottles full of air, bobbing against the gates.

An explosive.

Yozi raised himself up and yelled directions to the remains of his squad; the others had been decimated by the explosions that had taken down the gantry.

Those who could raced to the edge of the dam and began to lay down fire at the retreating boat.

Yozi stripped off his weapon and his heavy armor, climbed
up onto the railing, and jumped off, feetfirst, into the rippling waters below.

Alizza had no weapon. It had been snatched from his arms by the claws of the explosion. His armor was shattered; his visor was gone. He took off the remains of his helmet as he advanced on Price and threw it to the ground.

She pushed herself upward, knowing that even in the best of shape she was no match for this creature, and right now she could offer little more than a token resistance.

Alizza reached down for her. She kicked at him with her one leg, momentarily breaking his grip, suddenly sure what he was doing. So simple. So efficient. So brutal. He was going to hurl her off the side of the dam.

She kicked and fought, but her muscles were loose and he was too strong. He lifted her up but abruptly let her go again and staggered backward into a swirl of smoke.

“Leave her alone,” a voice said, and Monster was there.

Chisnall spun the boat around as he heard the splash and saw a Bzadian emerge, coughing and spluttering, in the water at the base of the dam. Something looked familiar about the face of the soldier.

Yozi!

He gunned the boat, racing back to the dam, desperate to stop Yozi before he could disable the bomb.

Bullets kicked up the water before him, making miniature waterspouts. More clanged off the cowling of the motor. Chisnall was forced to swing away again, racing out of range as the water behind him erupted with gunfire.

In the water, Yozi began to swim toward the buoy.

Alizza stood up, grinning his terrible gap-toothed smile, actually pleased, Price thought, to see Monster again.

That was when she noticed the blood pouring from cuts in Monster’s shoulders and arms, and the way he held his right hand. The explosion had not left him unscathed.

Alizza advanced toward him, still grinning. “The last time we met,” he said, “you had the advantage of surprise.”

Monster did not smile back. “The last time we met, I held no anger for you,” he said.

“This time you are angry?” Alizza looked from Monster to Price, then back again. “Ah, so this is your paired female.”

Monster flared his nostrils but said nothing. He did not deny it.

Price scrabbled for the sidearm that should have been in her leg holster, but it was gone. So was the holster, torn away by the blast or the slide along the roadway. So was most of the leg.

“The last time we met,” Monster said, “it was within my power to kill you, and I chose not to.”

“The last time we met”—Alizza grinned—“I did not have a knife.”

He reached to his belt and withdrew a bzuntu, a jagged war knife, which he raised and tossed from hand to hand expertly.

“Everything will be as it should be,” Monster said.

“On that we both agree,” Alizza said.

Again Chisnall tried to maneuver back to the dam, this time weaving the boat from side to side, trying to throw the Bzadian gunners off their aim. There was no way. Bullets stitched a line of holes across the gunnels and he spun the boat around, heading back out of range.

Yozi reached the makeshift buoy. He clutched at the nearest of the bottles bobbing on the surface of the water. He put his head under the water briefly.