“We are here,” Lady Wíela said under her breath. There was far, far too much blood dripping from her robes.
How was Cale going to explain dead royalty in the after-action report? Or court martial, as he envisioned it, now that things were going south.
“Is that the tree?” Cale asked.
Lady Wíela didn’t lecture them about the Tree’s provenance, or tell them about any Mystical Powers it held. She just nodded, exhaustion plain on her face.
She tried to reach for it, straining to hold one hand up into the air, but she could barely reach the bucket.
“Up the ladder,” Cale said, and slipped under her shoulder.
Together they limped around toward the backside with the rest of the squad, then clambered up the ladder there onto the catwalk around the machine.
They were all winding down, low on water, low on ammo, trying to keep adrenaline pumping long enough for them to achieve some kind of nominal security.
Now was not that time or place, not yet.
“Find good firing positions. Let’s make sure we have three-sixty awareness,” Cale ordered as he pulled Lady Wíela up after him.
“I need to get to the Tree,” she whispered. “Before I die.”
“We’ll get you there,” Cale promised. But first they needed to get the tree out and to a secure location.
Then he could fulfill a promise to a dying elven princess.
“Let’s get it secured!” Cale shouted. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
Barden got Dooley to the forwardmost position, right next to the glassed-in cab, while Orley got into the cab and started to look over the controls. Lomicka and Ysbarra went right-rear, and Diaz and Antoine took left-rear, right over the ladder up.
Cale pulled the ladder up behind him and locked it in place. But he already had another problem: Lady Wíela had closed her eyes and folded up on the catwalk. She looked like she was sleeping.
Shit.
He headed up the stairs to the cab. “What’s the word, Orley?”
The young Marine glanced up at him, face a mask of confusion. “No idea how the fuck to make this thing go, Staff Sergeant.”
“Well, let’s see if we can figure it out together.” Cale started pulling out binders tucked into plastic slots. Data sheets for hazardous materials, safety bullshit, more safety bullshit. Idiot manual with pictures in a binder!
Cale opened it.
“Okay, got it!” Orley hit the Initiate Power On Cycle button before Cale could point it out from the diagram in the second binder.
Somewhere deep in the thing, a giant diesel engine turned over and rumbled to life. Must have been a big enough block to drive a train, the way it sounded.
As it spun up, screens came to life all over the inside of the cab. Three of them were arrayed around the seat where Orley sat, several more mounted to the overhead, at least two for Orley to see, and four more for a seat up behind Orley’s.
“Uh. . . .” Cale flipped pages. “Look for the transmission default state initiator. . . .”
“Never mind, Staff Sergeant. It’s got a dummy screen.” Orley pointed at one of the three screens in front of him lit up with big buttons that offered just a few options.
He skipped the testing and diagnostic startup and went straight for the operational go. Warnings flickered down the side of the screen about the low fuel state.
“Let’s hope we can at least get it out of the cavern, Staff Sergeant.” Orley tapped at a screen that had filled with computerized dials, one of which was their fuel gauge. Not much there. The computer estimated less than an hour of running time.
“Get this thing into gear and get us turned in the direction of the entrance.” All the new carved-out tunnels that Wíela disapproved of had been carved out so that the Caterpillar could carry the divine tree-thing in here, where it could be protected by mercenaries.
“Aye, Staff Sergeant.”
Cale popped back out of the cab to take Dooley’s position and send the doc back to look Lady Wíela over, just as a round snapped by his head and pinged off the metal roof of the cab.
“Contact left!” Cale scrambled back over the upper surface of the huge machine and lay flat, peering out.
Cale saw a merc, all in black, hunkered near the cavern’s entrance. The man fired a few more times, and as he did so two more mercenaries ran out of the tunnel, hugging the near wall, trying to get around the right side of the machine.
Barden fired once, dropping one of them, while Dooley sprayed the other one with rounds. Both down, neither moved.
“Good shooting, Doc!” Cale shouted. “But make ’em count. One shot, one kill. Let’s conserve ammo.” He had no idea how long they had to make it last. They had to be down well under a thousand rounds for the lot of them, maybe as few as five hundred. Most of their grenades were gone.
Whatever Dooley might have said in reply was drowned out by a sudden rev of the huge machine’s engine.
It lurched forward and started to turn over to the left. The big leafy branches of the tree in the bucket shook. Lady Wíela leapt past Cale and Dooley in a jump from off the catwalk, moving quickly and unsteadily along the huge, hydraulic arm to the point where it bent into the bucket. She left bloody handprints as she clambered along.
“Lady Wíela!” He’d get her to the tree when they were safely out of here.
His shout was utterly lost in a clatter of fire that came from all around the cavern and the engine noise. Sparks flew from the metal around the wood elf’s bare feet, as bullets stitched along the metal arm.
Cale felt his breath catch as Lady Wíela flinched, blood sprayed the air from two shots, and she wobbled.
If she fell now, she’d fall to the ground.
But then she grabbed a branch, pulled herself up into the shaking foliage, and disappeared.
Barden slid along the upper level of the giant machine as it jerked around.
“Orley, you asshole, don’t knock us all off,” she hissed.
Dooley slid over into her more than once as the thing turned, even heeling over a little. It did one complete circle of the cavern, and the tree’s branches slapped the ceiling several times as Orley struggled to straighten the thing out. Shots pinged off the steel here and there, even some arrows skipped off the vehicle’s skin and threatened to skewer the unlucky or incautious.
They had to be careful, as the team was getting a little sluggish. Barden and the rest of the Marines were tired. Bone tired. The last time she, or any of them, had slept was high up in Runt’s mountain hideaway. That was, what, twenty-four hours or more prior?
They were all wounded, too. Even Doc was bleeding from a wound to her hip.
The machine heaved around again, moving at little more than a walking pace. Orley got it more or less aimed at the entrance to the tunnel. Mercs and elves swung into view, and Barden backed herself off the edge of the top as much as she could. She fired, aiming for a merc and missing him with the first few shots. Then her M27 locked back on a dry magazine, and she cursed.
“Keep up the fire, doc!” Barden shouted. “I’m reloading.”
Dooley picked her shots now instead of wasting her magazine, so that was something. Barden pushed back farther from the edge and rolled to her side. The magazine pouches on her chest were empty, but for one. She opened it, snatched out the last magazine and swapped it into her M27.
Twenty-eight bullets. No more.
She’d have to make them count.
“God damnit!” That was Cale.
Just as Barden closed the bolt, she heard a high, single piercing note that shifted into a fluttering melody.
Barden rolled over to look at the bucket loader just as Lady Wíela popped up out of the foliage, near where the leaves stopped and the heftier lower limbs converged on the bole of the tree.
Cale was low against the railing, looking like he was going to try to jump the hydraulic arm to go after her.
Lady Wíela raised her blood-slicked arms. Last Barden had seen her, she’d looked ready for a dust-off, and a date with a doc of her choice.
But now she glowed.
Literally. The very air bent around her, and the light that peeled off her seared the air so radiantly it made everything else around seem like it had been in deepest darkness all this time.
The crystals in their sconces faded, and Lady Wíela’s voice boomed out as if she had a throat mic and the cavern was wired like an arena for sound.
“I am she! The one rightful ruler of all the wood elves!” Her words echoed all throughout the dark.
Even Barden felt herself instinctively snap to attention at the authority lying just under the words. She had to actively ignore Lady Wíela’s voice in order to concentrate on the situation around the machine.
“I am Wíela te-Corunna and I command your loyalty! Bow down to me or I will strike great vengeance upon you with furious anger; and you shall know that I am the Queen, when I shall lay my vengeance upon you!”
Dooley scooted back beside Barden, both of them looking on toward Wíela. “Was that Samuel L. Jackson’s line from Pulp Fiction? Where’d she get that from?”
“Don’t know.” Barden was too busy sighting on the elves stepping out from behind the rock that were bowing, scraping, and groveling before the bucket loader. They raised interleaved fingers over their heads. “Watch out for the mercs!”
The mercs, though stunned, did not grovel. They were immune to the light. One aimed his M-4 at Lady Wíela.
Barden twitched her rifle his way, but before she could squeeze a burst off, a great beam of light lanced out from Lady Wíela’s hand at the man. He sort of evaporated in a swirl of flesh and fabric.
“Holy shit,” Dooley said, eyes wide.
The merc fire started up again, but it was more sporadic as they were trying to remain in solid cover to avoid Lady Wíela’s lethal return fire. And then, after a few confused moments, that fire became panicked as wood elves turned on the mercs firing at Lady Wíela.
The human screams echoed around them all as the mercs faced the knives, arrows, and even sharp teeth of suddenly madly enraged, almost-possessed wood elves.
Orley drove the machine into the tunnel past groveling elves that darted out of the way.
Several mercenaries threw down their weapons and cowered beside the elves when they saw Lady Wíela vaporize anything, elf and human, who resisted her. Mists of blood that had once been bodies rushing the machine hung in the air as they passed.
“Give me what you’ve got left.” Barden had run dry and held her hand out for the rest of Dooley’s ammunition, which amounted to one partial magazine. “Go check on everyone else—we might be winding down here. I don’t want anyone bleeding out this close to being done.”
“Got it.” Dooley nodded and crawled off toward the rear of the machine.
Barden stared forward at the tree. They’d known Lady Wíela had a claim to power, but Barden hadn’t been ready for the light show. It was clear that she meant something around here. And if a true heir could wield that kind of power with the tree, it was no wonder the enemy had tried to tuck it away deep under a fortress.
The end of the tunnel yawned in front of them, a pale gray light dawning outside. Barden scanned forward of the machine, but nothing moved, and no one opposed them.
As they cleared the end of the tunnel, she saw why. Three Ospreys hovered fifty meters over a cleared space in front of the fortress, blazoned with block letters that said ROYAL MARINES on the side. Each of the Ospreys had their tail ramps lowered and British Marines were fast-roping down to the ground. Men and women in distinctive British camouflage had already rounded up prisoners.
They didn’t stop. The great big ’dozer kept moving on as if it didn’t see the Royal Marines stepping out of its way.
“Orley!”
Barden slid down to the platform beside the cab. She yanked open the door.
“Orley, you can stop. Orley?”
Orley sat upright in the driver’s seat, fingers clutching the control stick. His chest was a mass of scarlet, the Kevlar vest and strike plate hit by multiple rounds before it gave up. But he hadn’t. He had steered them through the tunnel with the last of his strength, and brought them safely outside.
“Orley . . .” she whispered, and the name caught in the back of her throat.
Barden pressed two fingers to his neck to be sure, but there was no pulse. His eyes stared lifelessly ahead, and the weight of his body kept the control stick pushed forward, arm locked in place.
She pried his fingers away from the stick, and the machine shuddered to a halt fifty meters short of where the Ospreys hovered.