Resolution (82 page)

Return fire spat upwards, knocked three carls from their ropes. The remaining ninety-seven warriors and five non-combatant specialists slid down. Some of the bigger carls fired heavy magzookas from the hip. Thirty seconds later, they touched ground. Ropes fell away, and the flyers turned towards home.

Down in the pit, the battle began.

There
was
something. Tom held his breath. Listened.

Then a black-armoured ciliate the size of Tom’s thumb rustled past, on its random hunt for grubs buried in the clay. Nothing untoward. Tom closed his eyes, and his dream came flooding back.

The objective was clear. Three great stubby pillars stood in the caverns: cones with the tops sheared off level. On each one perched an orbital shuttle with a bulging hold and strong, angled wings.

The carls, laying down heavy magzooka-fire, spread in coordinated teams across the cavern’s polished floor. Many of the grey-uniformed men and women that fell back before them were unarmed. Others returned fire, untrained in countering surprise attacks but still dangerous: their response was unpredictable.

Kraiv, leading his team, slowed down as two big hostile civilians with grapplers in hand - engineering kit as deadly as any purpose-built weapon - stepped from behind a processor block. Kraiv drew back his lips and gave his berserker roar.

‘Blood and Death!’

Morphospear still slung across his back, he leaped for the two men with his big hands coming up, reaching for their throats. They died.

Off to Kraiv’s right, Volksurd’s team was fighting. Volksurd’s morphospear moaned through the air, bit into an Absorbed man’s neck, and there was a liquid crunch. The head dropped and rolled, its eyes already growing opaque.

‘By Axe and by Blood, we take what is ours!’

Deep in berserker rage, the carls howled, and threw themselves into the half-determined, half-panicked mass of fifty or more soldiers and engineers who faced them. The carls’ weapons swung and twisted, sang and altered shape from one deadly form to another, while their massive owners roared with blood-lust, white spittle-foam caking their lips as they took the battle to the Enemy.

In minutes, it was over.

Designated carls used magzooka-fire to collapse the entrances, while their comrades moved among the dying, dispensing
coups de grâce
with quick thrusts. The strongest climbers pulled on gekkomere gauntlets and began to ascend the pillars, Volksurd and Kraiv among them.

Seventy-nine carls survived.

The three shuttles, resting on their massive plinths, were theirs. Now, the carls had only to wait.

As Tom lay still, sweltering beneath his chameleoflage sheet, he heard a tiny sound. Perhaps it was just another small ciliate, but he could not take the—

A small round hole appeared in the membrane, and a human hand reached through. Then a turban-wrapped head followed, as the man hauled himself up, onto the hard ground. On hands and knees, he pulled small silver gadgets from inside his tattered robe, and set them down.

Then he sat back on his heels and giggled, while the silver objects clawed and crawled their way across the hard clay. The man watched, slack-mouthed, and a thin line of saliva drooled from his lip.

The gadgets were toys. Tom watched from beneath his chameleoflage, wondering who the man was, and who had looked after him before the realm below fell to the Anomaly.

‘Bright.’ The man mumbled incoherent words, then: ‘Bilgon like.’

All around the nearby ground, Ankestion Raglok and his clone-brothers were as still as stones, none of them presenting an outline that might suggest a human presence. Like Tom, they waited.

For half an hour, the man - Bilgon, presumably - watched his glittering, crawling toys. Then his attention seemed to drift, and he stared unfocused into nothingness. More time passed.

It was not Bilgon’s lack of intelligence that rendered Tom and the clone-warriors invisible to him. More intelligent observers would have been
less
likely to notice the hidden warriors: people see what they expect to see.

If Bilgon had not gone by nightfall, Tom and the clones would melt away in the darkness, then proceed to an alternative shaft ten klicks away. But that was not going to happen ... Already, Bilgon was gathering up his toys, muttering as he tucked them back inside his robe.

Then he paused. Tom could not see if Bilgon was staring in his direction.

I
am invisible.

For a long moment, Bilgon did not move.

I
am clay. I am natural ground.

Then Bilgon was crawling back to the shaft. At the edge, he hunkered, murmuring. He hummed a small tune, then stopped.

He’s missed one ...

In that moment there was a flash of silver, then the wandering toy’s pincer took hold of Tom’s chameleoflage sheet and tugged it. Just a few centimetres, but enough. Tom stared into Bilgon’s widened eyes.

Bilgon’s mouth dropped open.

Then he stiffened. A dark shape launched itself through the air, hands wrapped around his chin and the crown of his skull, and twisted. The backwards hip-throw was overkill.

A clone-warrior looked down at Bilgon’s corpse, then went down on one knee and plucked something from the body’s neck. It was a thin black needle, retrieved from between cervical vertebrae, which the warrior pushed back into place above his own eye: just part of his graphite eyebrow.

Two more warriors took the corpse away, while Tom and the others resumed their earlier positions, hoping no more innocents would blunder into their way.

Nightfall was not enough. Darkness on the surface was good cover; but they would need nightshirt in the realm below, and that was not in synch. They had to wait until two hours before dawn.

Then they moved.

Five metres from the shaft’s edge, working by the moons’ silver-white light, the clone-warriors screwed simple titanium bolts into cracks in a rocky outcrop, and wove a web formed of rope among the bolts. Tom and Ankestion Raglok tugged at the web and nodded their approval.

They strapped on safety harnesses. Each man checked his neighbour’s harness. Then they attached fourteen separate ropes to the support web, let the ropes slide down inside the shaft, and checked the ropes hung freely. Almost ready. Ankestion Raglok took small vials from his belt pouches, and clipped them onto the supporting web.

There was a tiny squeak of sound as Ankestion twisted each vial’s calibrated cap to a precise angle, allowing a precisely calibrated chemical reaction to begin.

Now the team moved quickly, laying rough fabric covered with clay over the web. When they stepped back, they saw only a clump of ground from which fourteen ropes mysteriously extruded like black serpents upon the moonlit ground. In one hour, hydrofluoric acid would spill through the vials, split the casings and attack the hidden rope-web, disintegrating it in seconds.

At that point, the fourteen attached ropes would snake down the shaft and drop from sight. On the surface, no obvious sign of interlopers would remain. Down below, it would be
‘rather a good idea,’
as General Ygran had put it, if Tom and the clone-warriors were no longer dangling from the ropes when the hour had elapsed.