14 January 2838
Eidolon was running again. The guards were closing in and her cloak of invisibility would be sure to run out long before she reached the streets of the city, and safety. And even if she eluded the guards, how would she get past the five meters of electrified wall that surrounded the Imperial Knights' base?
A shout behind her: she had been spotted. She sensed danger and leapt aside, and an electromagnetic pulse ripped through the space she had just occupied, striking the wall in a shower of sparks. She ducked behind a parked Paladin tank next to the entrance, considering her next move.
She did not get the time to consider. The Paladin was occupied; the turret slowly spun to face her and she found herself staring into a pair of particle beam weapons. She lurched backward just as they fired, and she felt the blistering heat on her face. She would have sunburns-- or deeper radiation burns-- if she survived this.
Fortunately the Paladin's tracking systems were set up to calculate vectors of large, fast-moving war vehicles, and not tiny, slow-moving people. Eidolon ducked around the vehicle's massive tread, and ran off. She could hear the vehicle's engines powering up, but she entered the field of weaponry on the west side of the base. Massive cannon and ammunitions containers littered the ground, and the tank would not be able to get through.
The shouting died down as she rounded the main barracks, then came back threefold when she passed the white-painted, red-striped trapezoidal building. Another contingent of guards was approaching from the other side, and she was pinned against the outer barrier.
She looked up as the whine of metal on metal screeched through the air.
A turret, mounting a pair of fusion turrets, was turning to face her.
She jumped backward as it fired, and the shots ripped into the ground next to her. The shockwave knocked her off her feet, and she fell on her belly on the hard tarmac. She rolled, looked up to see the weapon about to fire again, and braced herself for annihilation.
Her death came to life as a pair of slowly growing fusion explosions, approached her as they accelerated under the impulse of the weapon's magnetic impellers. Eidolon closed her eyes as the light grew blinding, and heat warmed her body as the hot plasma drew near. She surrendered to her imminent death--
And with a hard jerk, she found herself yanked out of the weapon's sights, and the fusion globes struck the tarmac where she had been. She opened her eyes and noted that she was hanging from a grappling claw attached to a screaming Banshee fighter. Before she could register precisely what had happened, she was pulled upward, over the barrier. Her dangling feet missed the electrified metal by centimeters, and she reached up, holding the chain of the grapple in a death grip.
She began to pull herself up toward the black-painted flier, feeling the hot wind of the fighter's exhaust stinging her already-burned face. As the fighter juked left suddenly, she cried out as she found herself swung in a wide arc. She got to see more of the city that she really wanted to, and she felt quite nauseous.
The nausea was forgotten as she spotted a pair of red-striped Knights' Banshees trailing. Blobs of green plasma lanced past her, shooting sparks off the hull of the flier. Eidolon shrieked as the Banshee did a tail flip, cracking the grappling cable like a whip. The shock nearly knocked Eidolon unconscious... but then she would not have had the pleasure of watching the Banshee skate between a pair of tall buildings, less than ten centimeters from the western one, at some two hundred kilometers per hour. Eidolon's foot tapped the other building, and she was flicked into the Banshee's hull like a bothersome insect.
"Well since I'm here anyway..." she muttered, her words lost to the wind. She grabbed the Banshee's upper hatch control bar and raised it upward, and the hatch slid open. She dropped inside just as the vehicle's mad pilot dropped the Banshee into another series of stomach-churning maneuvers, and Eidolon was bounced around inside the airlock like a pea in a poorly-fitted pod.
"Argh!" she cried, and popped the inner airlock, accessing the cockpit. She leapt for the empty co-pilot's chair, grabbing the seat restraints and wrapping them around herself.
Gasping, she leaned back in the chair and turned to look at the pilot.
"Hello, my friend," Maria said without looking up, her fingers dancing on the control console. "You needed a lift."
"You broke the cycle! But how--"
"Later," Maria said. "You need to be here..." she added, tapping a particular spot on the console. "See you in a few months. Bye." She poked the console with a smug grin on her face.
Eidolon grabbed the arms of the chair as it vomited out the belly of the Banshee and fell toward the city far below. As the thrusters in the ejection chair kicked in, she stared up into the sky as the black Banshee receded, easily out-distancing its pursuers.
Maria is in the Ghost Star system! Eidolon thought wildly as the ground rushed up to meet her. She cannot be here!
She forced herself to relax, so the impact would not tear her tensed muscles to pieces. When she struck the ground, she grunted and flopped free of the chair as the restraints automatically released. She was thrown a few meters down the crisp, green lawn of a large, ornate building. As she looked at it, she found the sign at the top: Nova Columbus Military History Museum.
And she remembered what she had to do.
Eidolon watched the curator as she paraded the group of visitors around the facility, describing all the weapons of mass destruction that littered the shelves. "This here is a captured radiation gun from Venus," she said in a nasal voice that Eidolon found incredibly annoying. "With these babies, the Cybrids would seal off a Venusian arcology and move in with infantry. They'd burn the trapped humans down with the radiation guns. If this didn't work, they would use dissolver nanites--" and at this the woman gestured to another ugly weapon on a nearby shelf, that some children from another tour group were studying excitedly. "And these would cut into the arcologies' bulkheads and let in the Venusian atmosphere."
"Cool," a young man said. Eidolon turned to stare at him.
"I was in one of these arcologies after the Cybrids had done their thing," she said angrily. "I saw the remains, the crumbling pieces of what used to be living, feeling human beings. Not cool."
The man seemed disposed to argument. "Well, you know, the 'brids like, knew what they were doing and stuff. You gotta admit, letting the air, like, do your work for you's gotta be cool."
"Too bad you didn't live in Drachensatem a few years back," Eidolon said viciously, but under her breath so the man did not hear. The curator regarded her with interest.
"You were on Venus?"
"I was all over the place." She did not mention the Ghost Star system, of course.
"Well, perhaps you can appreciate our new exhibit then." The curator led the tour group to a set of blast doors on one side of the museum's main chamber. "We managed to find a Cybrid vehicle, just sitting there on Venus, fully intact and powered but without a pilotform." The doors hissed open to reveal a dark chamber. The lights popped on, and reflected off the silver hull of a polished Goad. Radiation guns much like the one in the display case-- but a hundred times bigger-- hung from the vehicle's hardpoints. Eidolon's eyes widened.
"We think this vehicle is from the mysterious Exemplar Guard, a subset of the Exemplar elite sect. The Cybrids would program pilotforms with the Exemplar protocols for certain difficult missions such as--"
Eidolon tuned out the monologue as she studied the vehicle. She had encountered the vehicle before; of that she was certain. She looked closely at the Goad's belly, and sure enough there was a large, circular depression in the metal. This vehicle had tried to infiltrate Eidolon's hideout on Venus, and she and ShatteredStar had chased it away. The impact crater was from a Swarm missile from Star's Predator. The Goad had been on a hair trigger and had fled before he could get another volley into it.
She and Star had had other things to do, and so had not pursued. Eidolon smiled fondly at the memory, then forced herself to set it aside.
"Hey, ma'am, you have to get away from that." The curator gestured to the perimeter of red tape on the floor surrounding the vehicle, that Eidolon had crossed. "It still has power. We have not extracted the reactor core yet." Eidolon nodded, but did not move. "Ma'am, please step away from the vehicle."
A hatch popped open on the bottom of the vehicle's main hull. The curator gasped, then spoke into her wrist communicator. "Security!"
Eidolon jumped into the open hatch and closed it behind her. She heard the thud of fists on the metal, and a moment later, the crackle of emp bursts.
"Goad, drive," she said quietly, and the vehicle surged to life. Its foot lashed out and swept the entire tour group aside with considerable force. There would be broken bones to fix, Eidolon thought ruefully as the vehicle found its stride and headed for the blast doors.
Through the external speakers she heard screaming, and she looked out the narrow slot window. People were running everywhere, which was to be expected considering most of them knew the power a rampaging Cybrid warform would have, having suffered greatly during the Occupation. The Goad walked through the main chamber, and on its way to the exit it stomped on the table with the radiation guns and the dissolvers, and smashed both into oblivion.
As the Goad left, a young man picked himself off the floor and turned to the others in the tour group. "Whoa," he said in an amazed tone. "That was, like, so cool!"
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
