Koyne licked his lips and nodded. He looked disbelievingly at Hudro as Hudro got back in up front. “I guess those people were right. . . . Some of you guys are okay. That took a lot of guts. Thanks.”
“Is we Hyadeans who make drone and bring here. What else I can do?” Hudro replied.
* * *
They were in the form of immense, flattened pyramids, five times as wide across the base as they were tall, glinting a peculiar bronzelike luster between black ribbing and casement structures in the light of the late afternoon sun. Armor-piercing shells skidded harmlessly off their angled faces. Proximity-bursting missiles seemed to have no effect. They advanced in a line several hundred feet above the ground, generating a zone of boiling light and fire beneath that progressed like a wall. Nothing stood up to it. Gerofsky had watched tanks, armored personnel carriers, gun emplacements, consumed like paper balls thrown into a furnace. A wing of the newest supersonic F-19s that went in against them had been picked off like ducks by beams of some kind directed from unseen sources above.
In the positions among the crests of the overlooking slopes, order was starting to break down, with troops getting jumpy, some already falling back, commanders frantically talking into field radios and pleading for orders. Gerofsky could feel himself verging on panic. Yet Nyarl was actually standing, his face expressionless, training his camera, catching everything. The task had become an obsession with him. Suddenly, he looked at Marie, crouched behind the edge of the trench they were occupying ahead of the battery, clutching her useless submachine gun. “Come out and stand up,” he called to her. “I want you in the foreground. A Terran woman facing Chrysean war engines that are destroying her world.” Marie stared at him, as if checking that his sanity hadn’t snapped. He gestured and smiled humorlessly. “I know the psychology of Hyadeans. . . . No, don’t put the gun down. Keep it in your hand. Defiant to the last, eh? They’ll love it.” Gerofsky watched as Marie climbed out from the trench and complied. “The world that invented painting and music, philosophy and dreams,” Nyarl went on as he lined up the camera. “Einstein and Mozart. Both crafters of realities that captivate the imagination but could never be.”
Surely, Gerofsky thought, if Nyarl could get this one shot back to Chryse, it would be enough to stop this. It was obscenity, not war. For the first time in his career, he found himself wondering if there had ever been a difference.
Bolts of plasma began coming down from the sky and exploding among weapons positions, defense lines, supply dumps. There was nothing for the targeting radars to register on, nothing to be done if they could. The troops entrenched along the crests began falling back; then the support units. Soon, everything became a scramble to get away to the rear. Gerofsky halted the ammunition carrier that they had ridden out on, now jammed with troops, just as it was pulling out and bundled Marie and Nyarl aboard. A half mile down the road it became bogged down in a jam tailing back from some kind of obstruction ahead. It would be a death trap when the next attack came in. Gerofsky ordered the other two out. Hauling a radio after him, he stumbled with them across the slopes toward a dirt track rising to follow a ridge. It was bumpy and not all that wide; but it ran straight. Before very much longer there wouldn’t be any other chance.
* * *
The smoke swirled by outside as an opaque fog. From behind Powell, Cade watched the lights of the transport ahead vanish as if they had been switched off. Powell counted off fifteen seconds and then gunned the C22-E’s engines. The plane headed into a black wall hurtling by at increasing speed. Cade felt his hands and back going clammy, wishing he could share the faith in technology of the two seated in front of him. Powell concentrated on the ILS readouts, while Koyne read off the instruments. Cade didn’t want to think about the consequences if something had screwed up invisibly ahead of them. There could be no ground control. Visibility from the tower was zero. Finally, they were at liftoff speed. Powell hauled back the stick, and moments later they emerged into evening. Leveling out low, he banked into a broad right turn that would take them over the hills toward the east, where ominous black clouds towered over the skyline.