"Downstairs!" Byrne shouted at Habel and Jepsen, reloading his battle rifle. "Find a choke point!" The two recruits retreated down a narrow hallway to a stairwell that led to the basement levels and Loki's data center.
Byrne could just see the top of the blue-armored alien's head behind its vehicle's engine. He pinged some rounds off the beast's helmet, and the alien pulled the vehicle away from the door, flinging spikes. Byrne ran zigzag down the hallway. Just as he reached the stairwell, the firing stopped. He whipped around in time to see the tan-haired alien dismount and charge through the smashed-in door.
Byrne fired multiple bursts as the alien rushed toward him down the hallway, hunched over and clawing the polished poly-crete with its paws. Byrne's rounds all hit but they ricocheted off its energy shields.
"Shite!" Byrne cursed. He vaulted the stairwell railing and landed one flight below. As the alien unleashed a salvo of spikes above him, Byrne jumped down a second flight to the basement floor. He took off down a low corridor and the alien crashed down behind him. The Staff Sergeant wouldn't have made it very far if Habel and Jepsen hadn't been waiting at a four- way junction, just in front of Loki's data center.
The two militiamen opened fire around the corners of their branching hallways as Byrne sprinted past. Shot-for-shot, their MA5s weren't as powerful as Byrne's battle rifle. But what their weapons lacked in muzzle velocity they made up for in rate of fire. With both recruits firing full automatic, the alien's energy shields began to falter; cyan plasma vented from its joints as the armor struggled to stay charged. But instead of retreating up the stairwell, the alien marched slowly forward, spewing spikes.
One caught Jepsen in the neck, and he went down in a gurgling spray. Another struck Habel in the hip, shattering the bones. Byrne caught the second recruit as he fell, wrapped an arm across his chest and fired his battle rifle one-handed. The alien drilled two more spikes into Habel's chest—one straight through Byrne's bicep. The Staff Sergeant grunted, dropped his rifle, and staggered back to the data center's door.
"Watch yourself!" Loki announced through Byrne's helmet speaker as the door slid open.
But Byrne was already leaning back toward what he thought would be a solid surface, and couldn't shift his balance. He caught his boot heel on the threshold and toppled backward as the two halves of the door slid shut, trapping the blue-armored alien on the other side.
"Been a little busy," the AI said by way of apology. "The containers are on the strands."
Byrne laid Habel gently on the floor. But he barely had enough time to take in his surroundings—a fluorescent-lit machine room filled with vertical pipes and cables, leading down to the reactor chamber a few floors below—before the alien was roaring and hammering at the door.
"And the warship?"
"Down for the count."
Byrne drew his M6 pistol from a holster in the side of his assault vest. His bicep was torn and burned. He would have to fire off-handed. "No wonder he's so pissed."
Just then, the data-center door slid open—its two halves pushed apart by the blades of the alien's spike rifle. The creature worked its weapon back and forth, widening the gap until there was enough room for it to jam in its paws and pry the door apart. Moving back toward the data center proper—an isolated metal container in a much larger, dim-lit room—Byrne fired through the gap at what he guessed was head height. The alien roared and drew back one of its paws.
The Staff Sergeant enjoyed a rush of triumph, thinking he might finally have taken down its shields. But a moment later, he saw something long and heavy tumble end over end through the gap: a barbed club, longer than his arm. Byrne rolled sideways to let the thing sail past, and it stuck into the data center wall. The Staff Sergeant noticed thin black smoke wafting from the club's spiked head. "Aw, hell," he growled a split second before the grenade detonated, flinging fire and shrapnel.
Fortunately for the Staff Sergeant, the grenade's blast was narrow and directional. But this wasn't so good for Loki. As Byrne rose to a knee, clutching his bleeding bicep, he saw a ragged hole in the data center's wall. Inside, he could see the AI's racked arrays were a burning mess.
Before Byrne could call out to Loki, the blue-armored alien had shouldered through the door. The Staff Sergeant raised his M6 and squeezed off a few rounds. But then the alien had him around the shoulders.
Byrne was a big man. But the alien was a meter taller and outweighed him by half a metric ton. It bent Byrne over and hustled him headfirst into the data center's wall, just beside the hole.
If the Staff Sergeant hadn't been wearing his helmet, his skull would have shattered. Instead, the impact only knocked him unconscious. The next thing Byrne knew, the alien had him by the wrists and was dragging him, belly-up, back into the raging firefight outside the tower.
Byrne's helmet was gone, as were both his weapons. The alien had torn off his assault vest with a single, vicious swipe of its paw; there were bloody clawmarks down the center of his olive-drab shirt and his chest stung and throbbed. He tried to get his feet under him and break free of the alien's grip. But the creature simply turned at the waist, and smashed a giant fist into Byrne's face, breaking his nose and cheekbone. As the Staff Sergeant's head rolled between his shoulders, the alien hauled him over the sandbag berm in plain view of the recruits on the tower.
"Cease fire! Cease fire!" Stisen yelled. "You'll hit the Staff Sergeant!"
Byrne tried to shout: "No!"—tell Stisen to drop the tanhaired alien and him both—but his jaw was dislocated, and his order came out like angry cough.
The alien picked Byrne up and drove him roughly to his knees. It pulled its spike rifle from its belt and drew the crescent blades across his shoulder. The blades were bent and chipped from being wedged into the data center door, and the Staff Sergeant roared—a throaty blast of air past his flapping jaw—as they grated across his clavicle. The alien barked something that would have been incomprehensible if it hadn't pulled the blades from Byrne's shoulder and placed them against his neck: Surrender, or he dies!
Don't any of you do it! Byrne cursed. But before his recruits could lay down their weapons and disappoint, a sudden chorus of approaching engines echoed off the tower.
In his current state, Byrne had difficulty comprehending the sheer numbers of his rescuers: the ten gargantuan combines backed by phalanxes of gondolas that came rolling over the eastern ridge, the squadrons of dusters that darkened the western sky. But the sight of the approaching JOTUN army stunned the blue-armored alien, and it pulled its weapon from Byrne's neck. When it did, all the recruits on the tower opened fire.
The massive brute fell backward, gouting dark red blood, leaving Byrne to topple forward.
By the time the Staff Sergeant rolled over on his back, the militiamen had shot one of the other armored aliens from his vehicle and the third was boosting back to the complex gate, retreating toward Utgard and its warship.
It didn't get very far. Two JOTUN dusters dove from a circling wedge and slammed into the alien's vehicle with all the accuracy of guided missiles. The vehicle exploded in an orange fireball tinged with purple smoke, leaving a deep crater. Its jagged wheels came loose, and they rolled forward a good distance down the road before wobbling apart and veering off into the wheat.
"Nice and easy!" Stisen grimaced as he, Burdick, and two other recruits grabbed Byrne by his arms and legs and carried him to an approaching gondola. The machine lowered its spill- ramp, releasing a load of JOTUN all-in-ones.
"Where are they going?" Burdick asked as the spidery JOTUNs skittered toward the tower.
"Who cares," Stisen grunted as they hefted Byrne up the ramp. "We're getting the hell back into town."
The recruits propped Byrne up at the back of the gondola. Squinting his eyes against the pain that filled him head to toe, Byrne saw the all-in-ones scramble up the tower and began work in the maser antennae. Before Byrne could even begin to wonder why, the mass driver's gimble angled up from the western wheat, only to come to a clanging stop against the raised header of a JOTUN combine.
The two gargantuan machines wrestled for the better part of a minute—the JOTUN rising up on its huge tires like a rutting stag—until the gimble relaxed with a defeated, pneumatic hiss, lowering the combine to the ground. But the JOTUN kept its header pressed down against the gimble and left its engine running, just in case it again needed to put the mass driver in its place.
By then all the recruits were aboard the gondola. It raised its spill-ramp, maxed power to its electric engine, and headed for the Utgard highway. After that, all Byrne could see was sky.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Dadab hunched behind a bright blue barrel, plasma pistol clutched in his hardened fist. He could feel the metal projectiles from the aliens' weapons plink through the barrel's plastic walls and bury themselves in the yellow foam inside. Of the sixteen Unggoy that had managed to retreat back to Dadab's side of the middlemost junction—the side opposite the control-room— only four remained: himself, Bapap, and two others named Fup and Humnum.
The barrels were arranged in a half-circle two deep, facing away from the junction. Dadab had urged Flim to construct a similar barricade near the control room, but he hadn't checked the other Unggoy's work. By the time the Deacon's group had muscled their own barrels from storage platforms protruding from the walkway, the aliens' booby-trapped containers were already rising into the orbital.
Of course the Deacon had no idea the containers were rigged—that the hapless Unggoy who entered the junctions' umbilicals would be blown to pieces. In the first moments of the aliens' attack, almost half of the orbital's sixty Unggoy were killed or wounded. The Deacon ordered all the survivors to fall back, and it was a wise decision. The two remaining containers held something even worse than explosives: well-armed alien soldiers, eager for a vengeful fight.
The walkway shook as another pair of the large containers passed quickly through the orbital and continued upwards along the cables. Dadab hadn't bothered to keep track of how many of the boxes had ascended, but he guessed it was close to a hundred. And unless he had misunderstood Lighter Than Some, the Deacon knew exactly what they held: the planet's population—the Jiralhanae's prey.
As the containers' rumble faded, the aliens' fire intensified. Dadab was no warrior, but he correctly assumed this meant they were about to charge.
"Get ready!" He yelled to Bapap.
The other Unggoy looked forlornly at his plasma pistol's battery meter, a holographic swirl above the weapon's grip. "Not have many shots."
"Then make sure they're good!" Dadab tightened his grip on his own pistol and prepared to spring up behind the barrels. But as he tried to rise, he found that he was stuck to the floor.
Unbeknownst to Dadab, the aliens' bullets had ruptured the barrel at his back, and some of the sticky foam had leaked out and adhered to the bottom of his tank, gluing him to the walkway. At first he cursed his bad luck. But then he witnessed Bapap's fate and realized just how fortunate he had been.
Green energy building between his pistol's charging poles, Bapap stood up into a wall of flying metal. The stout Unggoy's neck and shoulders exploded in bright blue blood, and he crumpled to the walkway. Bapap's trigger finger spasmed as he fell, unleashing a pair of wild shots that splashed against the orbital's hull. Dadab watched as the bubbling holes quickly filled with the same reactive foam that had just saved his life.
Then Dadab felt vibrations in the walkway: the tramp of the aliens' heavy boots as they approached the barrel barricade from the third junction. He knew he needed to move or die. But he wasn't willing to leave Bapap. He was his Deacon. He would stand by him until the end.
Dadab took a deep breath, filling his mask with methane—enough for a handful of shallow breaths. Then he pulled his supply lines from his glued-down tank, slipped out of its harness and crawled to Bapap's shivering form.
"You will be all right," the Deacon said.
"Will I take Journey?" Bapap mumbled, blood oozing from his mask's circular vents.
"Of course." Dadab took his comrade's spiny fist in his own. "All true believers walk The Path."
Suddenly, Humnum and Fup rose up, brandishing their pink, explosive shards. Neither Unggoy had been part of Dadab's study group. They were large, quiet, and had deep scars in their chitinous skin—evidence of a rough-and-tumble habitat upbringing. Likely the two Unggoy had seen their share of fights and had decided to end their lives on their feet with cutlasses raised. That or they were preparing to flee. But they didn't get a chance either way.
Dadab heard the aliens' weapons clatter and both Unggoy fell—Humnum with a tattered chest and Fup with half his head. The rounds that shattered Fup's skull had also penetrated his tank. Shimmering trails of methane followed him to the floor …directly onto Humnum's upraised cutlass. Dadab had a moment to curl into a ball before the shard exploded, igniting the methane trails. Then Fup's tank blew to pieces, spewing metal fragments into Dadab and the first alien to turn the corner of the barrel barricade.
Dadab heard guttural screaming as the alien reacted to its wounds. The Deacon was in agony as well—from the flying metal as well as his aching lungs; he'd spent almost all his mask's methane speaking to Bapap. Despite the pain and building panic, he managed to stay still. And when the other aliens thrust their weapons around the barrels, scanning for survivors, Dadab and Bapap appeared as corpses, one curled beside the other.
Drawing the shallowest breath he could, the Deacon listened to the aliens try and calm their wounded comrade. Exhaling, he considered his bleak choices: die of asphyxiation or go down shooting. He still had his plasma pistol. But he wouldn't be able to move without drawing the aliens' fire. And frankly, he didn't see much point. Those around him were dead or dying, and he assumed Flim's outpost would soon suffer a similar fate now that the aliens could press in from both sides. The Deacon closed his eyes and prepared to join Bapap on The Path, when a volley of molten spikes whizzed past the barrels, dropping two more aliens where they stood.