Nyarl kept busy throughout, capturing anything that caught his interest. Since there was no quality connection back to the plane, he was storing the clips offline for delivery later. Some of the troops they passed reacted sourly to seeing a Hyadean, once or twice with open hostility, and Gerofsky had to defend Nyarl’s presence repeatedly. He himself was having to work at accepting Marie—until so recently one of the enemy in the form of CounterAction. He studied her as she sat perched on one of the carrier’s box sides, cradling her weapon, clearly awed by the extreme to which those efforts had finally contributed, yet also deeply apprehensive. She saw him from the corner of her eye and turned her head.
“It feels strange, us being on the same side.” Gerofsky looked around. “A bit overwhelmed? Not what you expected?”
“We wanted to awaken the people,” Marie answered. “Not all-out war. Somehow it all went out of control. Do you understand it?”
“I’m not sure anyone understands it. These things take on lives of their own.”
The whoosh came of an outgoing missile launching distantly, followed by another. Marie gazed after them as they cleared the skyline. “And now we’re trying to do the same thing again, only this time on Chryse.”
“Is it possible to make it work there, when it didn’t seem to here, do you think?” Gerofsky asked.
“Nyarl thinks so. He says minds work differently on Chryse.”
Gerofsky stared across at him on the far side, panning the camera at a field radar being set up. “Let’s hope he’s right. It might be the only chance we’ve got.”
* * *
As a precaution, Powell had moved the C22-E out to a corner of the field, away from the airport buildings and the crush of aircraft loading or maneuvering into a takeoff line to evacuate the field. That was probably what saved it when the attack came in.
Cade was in the cabin, keeping an open radio channel to Hudro and Davis in the tower; Powell was standing outside, taking in the general scene. Suddenly a shriek of warning sirens went up, and within moments, all over the airfield amid shouted orders and calls to stations, figures were jumping into slit trenches, running for cover, manning antiaircraft weapons. Short-range ground-to-air missiles were already flaming away all around like birds lifting in response to a spreading alarm call. Cade grabbed the helmet he had been given and tumbled out of the plane to join Powell in the ditch by the perimeter taxiway. The thudding of gunfire, felt as continuous jolting to the ears rather than heard, was already coming from the north. Then the harsher barking of fast-firing, smaller-caliber weapons joined in, getting nearer.
They came in low over the hilltops with a roar rising to a scream, a loose formation of maybe ten or twelve. Cade didn’t know the type—they were just glimpses of bodies and wings outlined against the sky. One disintegrated as it cleared the ridge and fell on the slopes below in a cascade of flame. The lead group blanketed the ground defenses with rockets and fragmentation cluster. The rest went down into strafing runs to pour cannon fire and scatter low-yield bomblets across the field. One aircraft failed to lift with the others, hitting the ground and exploding somewhere beyond the far end of the field. Cade pushed himself up slowly from the ground, dazed by the suddenness and the violence of it. Slowly, he registered planes sagging and broken amid the smoke; figures picking themselves up, staggering among the wreckage, pulling others out; the cacophony impressing itself from all sides as his numbed ears recovered, of exploding ammunition, screams for help, voices shouting. Beside him, Powell straightened up, looking about. A transport on the main runway, one of its wings torn at the root and draped back over the fuselage, erupted into a fireball. Smoke billowed outward over the ground in a churning curtain, and then several figures ran out covered in blazing fuel. Somebody from a rescue tender doused them with foam while others grabbed them and tried to roll them on the ground. Another was trying to unfold a tarp. Cade could only stare, numbed by the horror of it. Then the sharp crack of something detonating overhead made him look up. It was like a Fourth of July star burst, except that the objects being ejected from the center were not incendiary submunitions but self-powered devices like birds that seemed to be dispersing. Another exploded above the far end of the field. Then another, off to one side. Still bewildered, Cade turned his head toward Powell. “What the hell are those?”