Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess (34 page)

“They’re not fireworks, are they?” Meriel said softly.

John shook his head. “Wait here. I’ll pull the wagon around,” he said and took off at a run.

Meriel could not run and watched the lights in the sky with the girls. Flares followed the explosions, but just before reaching the ground, the flares slowed and seemed to land gently.
Just like a marine
, she thought.

John pulled up in the wagon, and Meriel and the girls got in.

“They’re here, aren’t they?” Meriel asked, and John nodded.

“Who’s here?” Sandy asked.

“The bad guys.”

Elizabeth sat in the backseat of Lieutenant Abrams’s small armored personnel carrier, or APC, and watched the fireworks through the rooster tail of dust thrown up behind them. Cookie rode in front looking comfortably at home with a hand on the barrel of the EMP cannon mounted above the backseat. The fireworks seemed to end, and Elizabeth turned to look at the road in front them. Another set of explosions, closer to their position, rocked the jeep.

“Sonic boom. Those aren’t fireworks,” Cookie shouted to Abrams. “Looks like drone capsules.” Drone capsules could stand higher g forces and went in before the paratroopers landed.

Abrams nodded. “Looks like they’re heading for the Johnston Valley.”

“They’ll roll right over John’s farm on the way,” Elizabeth said. “We need to stop them.”

“You’re civilians here,” Abrams said.

“You think they’re gonna let us go just ’cause we didn’t fight?” Cookie said. “We can help.”

Abrams’s link buzzed. “They’ve turned off the evaporators. Dust storm’s on the way.”

A squadron of flying drones streaked past and peppered them with small slugs. One of them hit Abrams in the leg, and their jeep skidded off the road. Three of the drones stayed back while the others flew past, heading to the valley. Elizabeth took Abrams’s sidearm and knocked down one of the drones. She nicked the second, which spun and shot the third.

“Like he said, we can help,” Elizabeth said.

“The nearest marine base is up ahead, Base 4A,” Abrams said and groaned. “It protects this side of the valley. Follow this road.”

Cookie put a tourniquet and compress on Abrams’s leg and gave him a shot of painkiller. Elizabeth took the wheel, and they sped off down the road.

Drones, flying and crawling, headed toward the valley to their right. She came upon them too suddenly for the drones to target the APC or get out of the way, so she ran right into them and over them, leaving a trail of debris behind her. Cookie took the turret with the EMP cannon, and his finger never left the trigger.

“How much juice has this got?” Cookie yelled from the turret.

“It’s run off the generator,” Abrams yelled back. “As much as you need until the engine quits. Then one last discharge.”

The trio could see the front gate and fence of Base 4A less than a quarter mile ahead. Most of the drones had bypassed it. The jeep’s radio squawked, and Abrams turned up the volume.

“Avoid Base 4A,” the message said, and Elizabeth stopped the jeep. They looked up and saw the trails of missiles heading to the base in front of them.

“Crap! Where to now?” Cookie said, but Abrams was snoring, dopey from the drugs. Cookie shook him. “Where to, boss?”

“Turn right and straight on till dawn,” Abrams said with a wave of his hand and a laugh. He groaned, his head bobbing like a doll’s from the effects of the painkiller.

Elizabeth spun the wheel and gunned the APC. Less than a half mile away, the missiles hit Base 4A, lifting it—dirt and all—forty feet into the air where it exploded into flame.

“Johnston Valley is to the right,” Cookie said as dirt and smoking debris fell around them.

Abrams nodded. “Follow the drones.”

Within a few hundred yards, the APC caught up to the drones heading into the valley, and Cookie turned the EMP turret to clear their path on the ground and in the air.

Elizabeth sped through the obstacle course of mechanical debris, but then the road dropped into the valley exposing a drone mech crawler twice as large as their vehicle. Unable to avoid it, the APC hit a leg of the crawler and flipped, throwing Abrams, Elizabeth, and Cookie from the vehicle.

Sensing some small disturbance, the crawler fired a variety of ordnance in all directions. Then, with one leg disabled, it hobbled over and inspected the APC with a camera stalk. It detected a reflection in the APC’s mirror and opened fire again, leaving a smoking crater where the vehicle had lain.

Twenty yards away, Elizabeth whistled. The crawler’s camera stalk turned toward the unfamiliar sound, and she fired the last charge from the EMP cannon. The crawler collapsed in a heap.

Abrams signaled them to head to a bunker at the top of the hill. Cookie threw Abrams over his shoulder like a toy and carried him up the grade. Elizabeth followed, dragging the EMP cannon.

Another crawler detected them, extrapolated their destination, and directed its firepower and that of the nearby drones onto the bunker. The entire hilltop erupted in flames, and the crawler and drones returned to their primary mission.

***

John drove the wagon toward town to find the police station and the militia staging area, but he stopped at the edge of town.

“Why are we stopping?” Meriel asked.

“The lights are off,” John said. “The lights are never off.”

“What about the militia?”

“We’re all the militia.” His link buzzed. “They turned off the evaporators. Let’s find some shelter before the dust storm hits.”

“Where can we go?”

“Home. To hide. If Khanag is coming for us, our marines know where we live.”

“Khanag may know as well.”

“We’re not defenseless,” John said.

Explosions lit up the night sky to the west, and laser beams cut through the smoke and sparkled.

“That’s Johnston Valley,” John said. “The sparkle is from snow blown in the air to scatter the lasers.”

Meriel remembered that was Elizabeth’s destination.

Heading to the farm. Are you OK?

Small robots like spiders crossed the road ahead of them, heading for the valley. John ran over a few, but that did not stop the others. “Bugs. Drones.”

Floodlights illuminated the farm compound when John, Meriel, and the girls arrived, but that was normal for early evening when everyone was celebrating at the fair. On the horizon, they could see the approaching dust cloud covering the low stars and rising galaxy.

“Get your pellet guns, girls, and your dust gear,” John said as they entered the farm kitchen, which was large enough to feed the entire work crew during harvest. The girls scattered to get their guns, and John led Meriel to the locked weapons closet. From it, he removed stunners for each of them, a shoulder-mounted rifle with a sniper scope, and a large canvas bag.

“Nothing bigger?”

“Anything bigger and we’ll blast each other,” John said.

“I’m not up to a fight, John.”

“Don’t worry, M. The marines will be here.”

I hope that’s soon
, she thought, looking at the rifle. “Slug shooter?”

“Pneumatic. No tracer rounds, no muzzle flash, no laser trail.”

The girls came back with their pellet rifles. “By the kitchen windows, girls,” John said. “Look for drones and bugs flying or crawling. Anything bigger than a sheep, it’s a mech, and you gotta hide. Got it?” The girls nodded and went to the kitchen door. As the girls’ rifles popped, John headed for the front porch for a view of the main road, but Meriel shook her head.

“Paratroopers, John. They don’t need a road,” she said and led him back to the kitchen to view the compound. “We won’t be able to see much in a dust storm. Do you have proximity alarms? Something to tell us when they arrive?”

John smiled, reached into the canvas bag, and produced a small metal box with switches. He pulled out two pairs of tiny goggles and gave one to Meriel. Her eyes narrowed.
What are these gonna do?
she wondered.

“What do you have up your sleeve, John?” she said loudly over the rattle of the windows from the wind.

“OK, girls. Put your gear on. Into the shelter now,” John yelled. “And take the stunners.”

“I got ten, I’m sure,” Becky said, taking the toroidal device from her belt and giving it to Meriel as she passed her.

Sandy frowned. “Then I musta got fifteen.”

“But yours were small,” Becky said and stepped into the kitchen closet.

“No they weren’t!”

Just as the girls closed the closet door, the dust cloud engulfed the farm with winds much stronger than the day in the schoolhouse. The wind blew the flying droids away, but the crawling droids simply dropped their center of gravity.

John pressed the red button on the box, and a holo of the farm compound popped up. Red dots moved toward the center of the screen and approached one of a series of concentric red circles. He tapped the side of Meriel’s goggles and then his own.

The goggles cast a heads-up display of the same dots, grid, and symbols shown on the panel but only those within her field of view. Real objects in the compound were contrast-enhanced so that the edges glowed slightly in the display. The halo made the objects appear as in a virtual-reality game, but this was real time. The sensor array was outside the kitchen, so it appeared she could see through the walls. When she turned her head, the view changed to match her field of vision. It also matched the information on the holo. She turned around to look toward the front of the house and the road, and she saw no dots. Instead, the dots were converging on the farm compound from the rear and resolving into figures as they approached. Without this tool, the dust storm would blind them. This was marine equipment, maybe better.
Not defenseless, huh.

Meriel could feel the electricity in the air caused by the dust storm. Lightning flashed, and her goggles fogged momentarily to protect her eyes, and each time the lightning flashed, one of the red lights blinked and died.

She raised the toroidal device to John’s view. “I saw the girls playing with this,” she asked. “What is it?”

“Dunno. It’s from Annie’s kit. She set up the defenses here. Took the bag with her on her last mission.”

“To kill the Blackout-Box?”

John nodded.

“What does this do?”

“Really, M, I don’t know, and I don’t care right now. Pay attention.”

Meriel put the toroidal device down on the counter again but stared at it.

John pressed a button, and bright flashes beamed from the tops of the buildings. The flashes lured attackers to fire their weapons, which allowed John’s defense grid to confirm their locations and weaponry. When an attacker shot at a flash, an exploding concussion device, such as the one John had used at Wolf Station, exploded nearby to disabled him. Some of the dots on the panel remained motionless while others reached the red line. Meriel’s hair fluffed for a second after he activated the second switch to detonate focused EMP devices. These weapons would make all electronic weapons and drones useless, but soldiers would still be alive and dangerous.

“Annie built these for the second attack by BioLuna,” John said over the howling wind.

Some small explosions went off, and one of the red dots blinked, dimmed, and disappeared. Every few seconds, yellow beams shot from the tops of the buildings, and other red dots blinked out.

“Three-hundred-nanometer laser,” John said. “The yellow are tracers from different locations to warn us. They won’t see the source, but neither can we.”

A squad of drones crawled up and circled the farmhouse where John, Meriel, and the girls hid. Most of the defenses were down now. Across the kitchen, a link they had not noticed buzzed and blinked, and Meriel went to check it.

From: S. K.

Please pick up.

Meriel put the link on the hands-free setting.

“Ah, there you are, Ms. Hope,” Khanag’s voice came from the link. “You’ve given me great distress. It is my hope that I can provide you with the same discomfort.”

“What do you want?” Meriel asked.

“Your mates from the
Princess
have remained elusive, so I have had to improvise,” he said. A slight delay in response implied that Khanag’s message originated from space, not close by. “Mr. Smith,” Khanag said. “Your farm is surrounded, and our ordnance is set to destroy you. A well-fought defense, but in the end, it is inadequate to the task—like all the works of unbelievers. Your daughters cannot survive, Smith.”

The link projected a picture of John’s girls entering the closet. Then there were two views of them in the kitchen. Then four, and then eight—one from each drone.

“You bastard!” John exclaimed.

“Yes, yes, that is what they say of all audacious visionaries,” Khanag said. “Your weapons are useless, Smith. We have many more corsairs than you have defenses.” They watched as one of the drones spun in the compound and set fire to the barn with laser blasts.

“OK, where do you want me?” Meriel asked while looking out the window for a place to hide outside away from the girls, but the storm and lightning still raged. She turned and spoke into the link. “I’ll trade myself for the girls, of course.”

Khanag laughed. “Oh, no, Ms. Hope, there is no chance that any of you will escape. I wish you to see them die first, slowly. Like all of those close to you when they arrive.”

“You’re just a cold-hearted thug,” she said. John shook his head and signaled her to keep Khanag talking while he reprogrammed the control box.

“Hardly, Ms. Hope,” Khanag said. “My corsairs and I value all life. Our prophet tells us that ending a single life is like killing all of humanity. Everyone should be given the opportunity to accept the prophet’s teachings and submit to his mercy. You were given the opportunity aboard the
Princess
ten years ago, and you declined.”