The Goad sprinted swiftly and gracefully through the city streets and out into the flat countryside. Its top speed, a hundred seventy kilometers per hour, proved that it was extensively refitted and well programmed. Even this speed, while well faster than any Hercs or tanks she was likely to encounter, was no match for that of fighters or bombers, and she began searching skyward for signs of pursuit.
It did not take the Terran Defense Force long to send a trio of Banshees after her; she saw the disc-shaped fighters first as black dots against the clear blue sky, and then as flashes of thruster fire as they decelerated down against her vector, matching courses and speeds and coming to relative rest five hundred meters above her head.
She saw a control icon on the misshapen lump of metal that passed for a Cybrid concole, and pressed it without thinking. It acknowledged the contact with a harsh chirp just as a cluster of Hades missiles fell from the Banshees.
They missed, horribly. The device was indeed a jammer. It was not likely to last for long though; already the Banshees were losing altitude to engage her with optically-guided weapons.
She steered the Goad in a wide arc, coming about to a small depression in the landscape, the track of a seasonal creek, now dry. A small wood lay ahead of her, stretched out on either side of the creek. Thinking of rabbits and brier patches she squeezed a little more speed out of the vehicle, loping for the wood.
The Banshees fired and the Goad was smacked hard in the back by a powerful shockwave. Blown forward by the impact, the vehicle pinwheeled sideways through the air, skidding into the creek and falling over. The leg caught on a patch of rocks and the vehicle's structure ripped apart instantly. Metal plates, structural elements, and circuitry panels popped out into the cold winter air, and Eidolon herself was thrown clear. She landed with a yelp on a cluster of bushes, rolling over a few times until she came to rest by painfully smacking into a tree.
The Goad was a shattered heap of metal strewn across the creek bed; no help would be found there. She jumped to her feet and ran for the trees.
The Banshees did not seem satisfied with the Goad's destruction. They bore down on her as she entered the thick nest of trees, and she heard the smack of autocannon pellets strafing the trees. Some whistled past her head, and she ducked and rolled.
She fell into a large mud puddle, and came up covered with sticky, brown mud that smelled of sweet organic material. The soil was quite rich, she noted irrelevantly as she made her way deeper into the woods.
The Banshees came again, this time dropping a cluster of bombs on the forest. Eidolon was thrown backward by the shockwave, and this time remained were she fell. Now it is time to be a Ghost, she thought, took a deep breath, and stopped her heart and breathing.
The Banshees circled once, twice. One dipped toward the treetops.
Laying on the ground looking up, she stared into the thruster ports of the fighter, watched its bomb bay open.
It closed without releasing any ordnance. A moment later the fighter rejoined its wingmates and the three of them took off to the north, vanishing into the blue sky.
It took her a few minutes to remember to restart her heartbeat.
Nova Cincinattus was a small city, almost overlooked. The fortificatins of the city, winding around the hills and valleys of the area, were unbroken: of minimal strategic value, the city had not been a Cybrid target during the war.
The perimeter defenses had been scrapped and moved elsewhere after the Cybrids were cleaned out of the North American east coast, and thus only small 90mm autocannon turrets, sitting on hills here and there, guarded the city.
Eidolon drove a humvee down the valley leading into the city, pedal to the metal and her hands in a white-knuckled grip around the steering control. She looked left and right, and, not seeing any signs of pursuit, brought the vehicle onto the road leading outward from the city to the airfields to the west. While the airfields had also been stripped down, the craft taken south to reinforce the siege against some Cybrid positions in the Virginias, the airfield still carried numerous unarmed spacecraft, mostly in poor states of repair. The war had taken a heavy toll on mothballed equipment; production of new components had been very difficult after the Cybrids had started attacking Earth's industrial base. Most of the war machines currently in the field mopping up the Cybrids were third-generation cannibalized wrecks barely able to hold a straight course. The humvee Eidolon drove, for example, had been stripped down to its original chassis and a new canopy had been installed, crudely fashioned out of what appeared to be the foot armor plate of a Basilisk.
There were three spacecraft still in functional shape at the airfield, two small, Luna-Earth runners and one mothballed torchship on standby. The torchship, barely able to land on high-graivty Earth at all, rested in a special berth elevated from the ground. The craft had originally been armed to the teeth, but now only the superstructure and the engine assemblies remained. Eidolon's eyes ran over the bell-shaped plasma thrusters the ship rested on. They looked to be in very bad condition; oxidation had set in on the outer skirts. Very likely the craft would shed metal if it took off, and there was a significant chance that it would disintigrate into metal slivers as soon as force was applied.
Blaring sirens sounded over the rattling engines of the humvee and Eidolon grumbled something impolite. A flashing red light started blinking at the top of the control tower near the torchship. Eidolon saw the scurrying motion of small pursuit vehicles, heavy bikes most likely, pouring out of the hangar doors at the base of the control tower. She threw the humvee sideways and it spun in a wide, dirt-spraying arc. Before it had even come to a complete stop she was out of the vehicle and climbing a ladder up to the torchship's engine assembly.
The bell-shaped mouth was cavernous, ten meters wide at the widest point. She looked up into the dark throat of the primary conduit, thinking of the unimaginable energies the ship would soon be pouring through that very spot.
"This is the Imperial Police! We have you surrounded. Come out with your hands up!" Eidolon paused a moment, then swore as a laser beam took a bite out of the engine skirt right next to her. She leapt back from the red-glowing metal and looked up again.
She smiled and waved a hand.
The engine blasted to life in a supernova of violet light.
The torchship LP-16-r, in mothballs for many years, throttled up on its launch pad, theoretically impossible since the main reactors were unfueled, and lifted into the deep blue sky on a column of dazzling light. The unfortunate police units stationed at the base, responding to an intruder alert, were hospitalized for weeks from the radiation burns. The engine assembly fell apart and crashed into a nearby farm, obliterating a large tract of hydroponics bays and setting fire to the owner's prized collection of horses.
It was not possible for the vessel to reach orbit without a tow, but it managed anyway. Satellite tracking traced the vessel as it entered a ballistic orbit with an crash point somewhere in western Europe, and defenses in that region were notified and put on full alert.
The ship was over the Canaries when it disappeared from all sensors.
Records were traced and the ship was positively identified as the Farsight, a Long Patrol vessel that had lost all crew but its captain over forty years previously. The Imperial Navy did more searching and found that a ship with identical reactor signatures had been intercepted and destroyed on an Earth-attack orbit less than a month previously. Searching other records, the Navy also found the exact same ship, right down to the Naval ident codes and reactor signatures, had dropped cargo from orbit into the southern hemisphere of Mercury in 2820, despite the fact the Farsight had been in spacedock at Luna undergoing repairs after a reactor explosion. This provoked shudders from the Admiralty: the jinxed ship had been apparently removed from circulation three times and yet still kept reappearing in places it could not possibly be.
In an unrelated incident, radio transmissions in southern Europe were briefly blocked out by a wave of coherent static, a transmission coded in a cipher so complex that the best of the Imperial Police Communications Division were unable to translate anything but the first few sentences. The powerful transmission was traced to a deserted neighborhood of the city of Monaco, but before the transmitter could be located, the source-- apparently underground in the city's tunnel networks-- was destroyed by an explosive device.
No one on Earth was able to decipher the meaning of the short, decoded clip of the transmission: "SDSA to Solace, record follows. I remember when those with power were burned, out of the fear of it, for I was once such and died often for it. Now, we are the only hope, for this universe and many--"
-Mercurial
Copyright © by Ghosts of the Antipode All Right Reserved.
Published on: 2004-06-16
