The Night's Dawn Trilogy (159 page)

“Too right. I’ve got enough power in the electron matrices for a five-hour flight before I have to come back up and recharge.
If you want that extending I could land on one of these peaks, they’re fairly isolated.”

“No. You keep airborne, Ashly. Frankly, if they’re not out of there in five hours I don’t think we’ll see them again. And
I’ve already lost one crewman today.”

“You didn’t lose him, Joshua. Silly old fart. Now I’ve got to come back and wander through Aethra’s parkland talking to the
trees. Hell, he’ll love that. Kill himself laughing I expect.”

“Thanks, Ashly.”

The pilot loaded a course into the computer, a patrol circuit along the length of the grey cloud section, staying at eight
thousand metres. Thermals shooting up off the rocky slopes rocked the wings in agitated rhythms as the spaceplane flew overhead.

Jay thought it was a lightning bolt. Blackness suddenly and silently turned to bright scarlet. She sucked in a breath—it must
have been frightfully close. But there was no thunderclap. Not at first.

The redness faded away. She risked opening her eyes. Everything seemed normal, except it was a lot lighter than it had been
before. As if the sun was finally rising behind her back. Then the noise started, a dry roar which built and built. She heard
some of the children start to whimper. The ground began to tremble, the gully wall vibrating her back. And the brightness
behind her kept growing. A sheet of white light sprang across the top of the gully, throwing the floor into deep shadow. It
began to tilt downwards, turning the opposite bank unbearably bright. Jay could just hear the lady beside her shouting what
sounded like a prayer at the top of her voice. She closed her eyes again, little squeaks of fear escaping from her throat.

Lady Macbeth
was passing over Amarisk’s western coast, a hundred kilometres north of Durringham, when Reza detonated the nuke. The sensors
caught its initial flash, a concussion of photons turning the grey clouds momentarily translucent.

“Jesus Christ,” Joshua gasped. He datavised the flight computer for a secure communication channel to the spaceplane. “Ashly,
did you see that?”

“I saw it, Joshua. The spaceplane sensors registered an emp pulse equivalent to about a kiloton blast.”

“Are your electronics OK?”

“Yes. Couple of processor drop-outs, but the back-ups are on line.”

“It’s them. It has to be.”

“Joshua!” Sarha called. “Look at the cloud.”

He accessed the sensor image again. A four hundred metre circle of the cloud looked as if it was on fire below the surface.
As he watched it rose up into a lofty ignescent fleuron. The tip burst open. A ragged beam of rose-gold light shone through.

Lady Mac
’s flight computer datavised a priority signal from one of the communication satellites direct into Joshua’s neural nanonics.

“Joshua?” Kelly called. “This is Reza’s team calling
Lady Mac
. Joshua, are you up there?”

Tactical graphics immediately overlaid the optical sensor image, pinpointing her communications block to within fifteen centimetres.
Close to the blast point, very close. “I’m here, Kelly.”

“Oh, Christ, Joshua! Help us. Now!”

“Spaceplane’s on its way. What’s your situation, have you got the children?”

“Yes, damn it. They’re with us, all of them. But we’re being chased to hell and back by the fucking Knights of the Round Table.
You’ve got to get us out of here.”

Vast strips of rank grey cloud were peeling back from the centre of the blast. Joshua could see down onto the savannah. It
was a poor angle, but a vivid amber fireball was ascending from the centre of a calcinated wasteland.

“Go,” Joshua datavised to Ashly. “Go go go.”

Reza stood on top of the gully, bracing himself against the baked wind driving out from the blast. A mushroom cloud was roiling
upwards from the cemetery of the homestead, alive with gruesome internal energy surges. It had gouged a wide crater, uneven
curving sides spouting runnels of capricious magma.

He brought a series of filter programs on-line, and scanned the savannah. A firestorm was raging for two kilometres around
the crater. Pixels from the section of ground where the marching pikemen had been were amplified. He studied the resulting
matrix of square lenses. There were no remnants, not even pyres; none of them had survived. He tracked back. Knights and horses
had been hurled indiscriminately across the smouldering grass two and a half kilometres away. Encased in that metal armour
human bodies should have first been triturated by the blast wave then fried by the infrared radiation.

He watched one silver figure struggle to its knees, then use a broadsword shoved into the ground to clamber to its feet.

Ye Gods, what will kill them?

A horse kicked its legs and rolled over, surging upwards. It trotted obediently over to its fallen rider. Slowly but surely
the entire band was remounting.

Reza jumped back into the gully. Children were being packed back into the hovercraft.

“Joshua’s here,” Kelly yelled over the trumpeting wind. Her tear-stained face framed a radiant smile. “
Lady Mac
’s in orbit. The spaceplane’s on its way. We’re safe, we’re out of here!”

“How long?”

“Ashly says about ten minutes.”

Not enough, Reza thought. The knights will be here by then, they’ll hit the spaceplane with their white fire, if they don’t
just switch off its circuitry with that black magic. “Kelly, you and Theo take off south. The rest of you, with me. We’re
going to arrange a small delay.”

“No, Reza!” Kelly implored. “You can’t, not now. It’s over. Ashly will get here.”

“That was an order, Kelly. We’ll catch up with you when we’ve finished off these mounted pricks.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Hey, Kell, stop fretting,” Sewell said. “You’ve got the wrong attitude for this game. Win some or lose some, who cares, you’ve
just gotta have fun playing.” He laughed and vaulted up to the top of the gully.

Horst made the sign of the cross to Reza. “Bless you, my son. May the Lord watch over you.”

“Get in the bloody hovercraft, Father, take the kids somewhere they can have a life. Theo, blast some grass, get them clear.”

“Yes, boss.” The jungle-rover mercenary fed power into the impellers even as Horst was scrambling on board. With the skirt
bouncing against the gully wall the hovercraft turned in a tight curve and sped back up the scree.

Reza joined his team on the top of the bank. Out on the savannah the knights were mustering into a V-shaped battle phalanx.

“Move out,” Reza said. There was a strange kind of glee running loose in his mind. Now we’ll show you babykillers what happens
when you face a real enemy, one that can fight back. See how you like that.

The six mercenaries started to march over the grass towards the waiting knights.

Sunlight and rain poured down on the hovercraft, surrounding them with a fantastic exhibition of rainbows. The clouds were
breaking up, losing their supernatural cohesion. They were just ordinary rain-clouds again.

The rain sprayed against Kelly’s face as she battled the hovercraft’s inertia against the wind and damp cloying grass. Speed
tossed them about like a dinghy on a storm-swollen sea.

“How big are the children?” Joshua asked.

“Small, they’re mostly under ten.”

“Ashly will probably have to make two trips. He can bring the children up first then come back for you and the mercenaries.”

She tried to laugh, but all that emerged was a gulletrasping cough. “No, Joshua, there’s only going to be one flight. Reza’s
team won’t be coming. Just the children, and me and the priest if the spaceplane can handle our mass.”

“The way you diet to keep your image, you’re into negative mass, Kelly. I’ll tell Ashly.”

She heard the first fusillade of EE projectiles exploding behind her.

Sewell and Jalal stood four metres apart, facing the apex of the charging knights. The reverberant thud of the horses galloping
over the savannah rose above the hot squalls spinning off from the chthonic maelstrom of the blast’s epicentre.

“I make that forty-nine,” Jalal said.

“The lead is mine, you take the right flank.”

“Sure thing.”

The knights lowered their lances, spurring on their horses. Sewell waited until his rangefinder put the lead knight a hundred
and twenty metres away, and fired both heavy-calibre gaussrifles plugged into his elbow sockets. Feed tubes from his backpack
hummed efficiently. He laid down three fragmentation rounds over the knight’s plumed helmet, and followed it up with twenty-five
EE shells into the ground ahead of the left flank.

Jalal was laying down a similar fire pattern across the right flank, his two gaussrifles traversing the line, guided by a
targeting program. Pamiers had shown that the possessed were capable of defending themselves against almost anything short
of a direct hit by an EE round; he was going for the horses. Kill the mounts, chop the legs out from under them, slow them
down. More fragmentation bursts saturated the air. The knights were veiled by smoke, fountains of soil, and riotous static
webs.

Streaks of white fire ripped out of the carnage. Sewell and Jalal leaped aside. Four knights sped towards them out of the
furore. Sewell spun round as he hit the ground, white fire was gnawing into his left leg. His targeting program locked on
to the first knight; one of his gaussrifles was responding sluggishly, the other fired ten EE rounds. The knight and his horse
vanished inside a tangled screen of rampaging electrons. Gore spat outwards.

Sewell’s optical sensors were tracking more knights riding out from the first assault point. Several bodies were scattered
on the crushed grass behind them. His neural nanonics automatically fired a salvo of fragmentation rounds at the renewed charge.

He tried to get up, but there was no response from his leg. One of the gaussrifles had packed up completely. Some of his sensor
inputs were wavering. Horses were charging at him from three directions. His functional gaussrifle blasted at one. Another
knight aimed a lance at his head, and fire squirted out of its tip.

Sewell rolled desperately. He flung a grenade as the fire caught him on the shoulder, punching him round. The grenade went
off beneath the horse, lifting it clear of the ground. It crashed down, the knight tumbling through the air before landing
with a bonebreaker smash.

The horse’s outline imploded into an amalgam of purple flesh and pumping organs. Eight or nine sayce had been moulded together,
like living dough, into a rough sculpture of the terrestrial animal. Heads stuck out of its sides and haunches, encased in
thick vein-laced membranes, jaws working silently beneath the naked protoplasm.

Neither of Sewell’s gaussrifles were working. He swivelled them down, and used them as crutches to lever himself upright.
His medical program was flashing red caution warnings into his mind. He cancelled it completely, and drew a TIP carbine from
its holster. The fallen knight was rising to his feet, crumpled armour straightening out. Sewell flicked the TIP carbine to
continuous fire with his thumb, and pulled the trigger. It was like using a battering ram. The energy pulses kept smacking
into the armour with jackhammer blows, knocking him down and kicking him across the ground. A violet corona seethed around
the silver metal. Sewell pulled a grenade from his belt and lobbed it at the limp figure.

A lance caught him in the middle of his back, splitting his ribs apart then puncturing his lungs and an oxygenated-blood-reserve
bladder before sliding out of his chest. The blow flung him three metres across the grass. He landed awkwardly, the lance
jarring round violently and causing more internal damage.

The knight who had speared him reigned his horse round and dismounted. He drew his broadsword and walked towards the crippled
mercenary.

Sewell managed to achieve a precarious balance on his knees. His right hand closed on the lance, boosted fingers exerting
their full power, crushing the wood. It snapped off, leaving a splintered twenty-centimetre stump sticking out of his chest.
A huge quantity of blood coursed down into the grass.

“Not good enough, my friend,” the knight said. He ran his broadsword through Sewell’s short neck.

Sewell reached out with his left arm and grabbed the knight’s shoulder, pulling him even closer. There was a sharp grunt of
surprise from the knight. Little crackles of energy skated over the surface of his armour. The broadsword penetrated up to
the hilt, but Sewell opened his mouth slit wide.

The knight got out one frantic “No!” before Sewell’s silicon carbide teeth clamped round his neck, slicing cleanly through
the chain-mail.

The northern horizon was an uncompromising clash of turquoise and red, both colours textured as fine as silk, pressing smoothly
against each other. Both unyielding. Beautiful, from a distance. Directly in front of the spaceplane, filth and fire was belching
from a widening fissure in the rain-clouds.

Ashly altered the camber of the wings, and sent the spaceplane on a steep dive through the dank clouds. Water slicked the
pearl-white fuselage, misting the optical sensor images. Then he was through, levelling out.

It was a small confined world of darkness and squalor into which he had come. At the centre, clouds reflected the diseased
irradiation of the crater, tarnishing the land with the flickers of dying atoms. Wildfire scoured the malaised savannah around
its base, eating its way outwards. Twisters roamed the scorched earth, scattering soot and ash all around to form a greasy
crust of embers over the flattened grass.

But further out the rain was falling, cleansing the land. Spears of sunlight wrested their way past the shredding clouds,
returning cool natural colours to the fractal wilderness of greys.

Sensors locked on to Kelly’s communication block. Ashly banked the spaceplane in a swift high-gee turn, riding the signal
to its source. Ahead and below, two tiny hovercraft bounced and jerked their way across the uneven countryside.