The truck skimmed across the grass with barely a whisper from her four multi-phase motors. High hedges ringed the park, so I drove along the edge until I spotted a gap with a simple folding roadblock in the path. Not a military issue barricade, mind. Just something warning guests that vehicles weren’t allowed past that point. I gunned the motors and slammed the roadblock out of the way. If anyone else was crazy enough to be out, I figured they’d earned the right to drive across the grass.
Abandoned cars cluttered the tiered parking area outside, their owners hopefully finding their way to the underground shelters beneath the Tyunta capital city. The only people we saw on the road were dissidents and looters, less worried by the distance blasts than by making sure the governor wasn’t the only one making off with the city’s valuables. I don’t begrudge vultures; I’ve rolled a few Teutonian storefronts in my younger days. When times are tough, you do what you have to. And wartime is always tough.
This was my first time seeing Central from street level, and despite the situation I found myself awed by the scale of its architecture. Grand polycrete and glass skyscrapers towered in their geometric splendor and graceful slopes. Hanging gardens framed murals pock-marked by weapons fire. This planet was old, and we weren’t the first ones here. The bones of curving alien structures dwarfed what I would have expected to see on an industrial planet. Alien remains aren’t terribly rare, but it was unusual to see them in such good shape. After backwater milk runs on outworld settlements, I hadn’t seen a city like this since I left Teutonia.
In the simulator everything looked like a playground: a city at 1/6th scale for you to navigate in metallic skin. The week aboard the Winter had completely thrown off my perception of Tyunta Central. Temples and mosques that had been eye-height in an upright towered several stories above me. Derelict cars easily crushed underfoot I now swerved to avoid, while street-level signs too bothersome to render now told me about cafés, holo theaters, and specials on habs with views of the northern spires (whatever those were). Life on Tyunta: frozen in alabaster resin while the citizens packed into shelters and waited for the war to sort itself out. For most of them, very little would change with the new government. They’d come out, rebuild, and continue where they left off. For others, things were about to get very difficult.
I pulled up to an intersection and rounded the corner, slamming the brakes on the truck so bad I was surprised we didn’t throw someone over the hood. Ahead of us rumbled a column of planetary garrison troops in their own wheeled vehicles. I heard Runty breathe a sigh of relief beside me.
“Friendlies,” he announced.
Several of the garrison troops in the back of the smaller units began to point at us, and two small hovercrafts peeled off in our direction. The hairs on the back of my neck started to stand up. So much for deference. Without taking my eyes off the garrison vehicles, I put my hand on the gear dial and flipped it into reverse. Insubordination was about to save our life.
“Don’t make any hostile moves,” Runty said through the rear window, just in time to miss one of the turret gunners on the hovercraft priming their top-mounted belt-fed gun. I slammed my foot down on the accelerator, shoving us into motion backward just as the front vehicle opened up, stitching a line across the asphalt where we’d been only a second before.
“What the fuck, VanDelle?” demanded Runty, bracing his hand against the frame of the truck. “Now they think we’re hostiles!”
“We are hostiles!” I shouted over the gunfire, swerving us around so fast I’m sure we went up on two wheels for an instant. I kicked the car into forward gear and accelerated through the intersection. “They’re turncoats!”
“How the hell can you know that?”
A hail of gunfire spattered into the sign for the café, showering the truck with glass. I ducked instinctively, despite being in the enclosed cab.
“Besides the fact they’re shooting at us?” I said. “They’re driving away from the fighting.”
The two vehicles swerved around the corner and back into view. Runty stuck his head out the window and looked back, then ran a hand over his head. “Damn, you’re right. Get us out of here,” he said. He ducked back in for a second to grab his carbine from the seat and then leaned out. “Light ’em up!”
The staccato of our three measly carbines began to answer the chunky brap brap of the turncoat’s machine gun. I hoped the short rifles would score a lucky shot on the driver or gunner, but when firing between two moving platforms, you have no control over is a difficult task. And thank God for that, because otherwise the garrison gunner would have cut us down like the unfortunate heaps of scrap metal around us.
I dodged between cars, using the light truck’s maneuverability to fit us through spaces I knew the hovercraft couldn’t follow. They bulldozed their way down the street, slowed by the forest of empty vehicles that they crushed under force of their repulsion field. It was a delaying tactic at best, but it gave me time to think.
I’d learned the general layout of Tyunta Central from the sim, but not well enough to know what lay beyond the next corner. If I’d been in an upright, I could have vaulted up onto one of the buildings for a better look. But then, if I’d been in an upright, I wouldn’t be worried about a pair of skiffs with anti-infantry guns. Guns that might have scratched the paint on Ardennes proceeded to cut a parked air-car nearly in half in a shower of shredded polymer and insulation.
Man, this really was bullshit.
Still, if I couldn’t go over any of the buildings, maybe I could go under one. I risked a glance to the side and saw a low glass-faced gallery with an underground access and swerved toward it. We vaulted over the speed bump and smashed through another striped pole that offered up about as much resistance as a polite suggestion. The dim interior lighting triggered the truck’s lamps, giving me just enough illumination to navigate toward the other end.
“Good thinking,” said Runty. “Now what?” he asked. That should have been my line. Wasn’t he supposed to be in charge?
The hovercraft pulled up. Unable to follow below the overhang designed for civilian cars, the driver peeled back to find another access. I breathed a sigh of relief until I noticed the lamps dimming and checked the battery cells.
They had already dropped more than half their original charge. The small groundskeeper buggy had never been designed to carry a bed full of grown adults, nor to be run at full tilt for minutes at a time. We’d never make it to the Chevalier outpost at this breakneck pace. But giving the turncoats an easy shot would kill us just as dead.
I thought about tossing the truck into reverse again, but there was too great a risk that one of the hovercrafts was still back there waiting for just such a trick. I kept us rolling through and back out into daylight, holding a hand against the glare of the twin morning suns reflecting off the glass face of a high-rise.
Valor pointed to our left. “There they are!” she said. I spun the wheel in the opposite direction, waiting for her to answer those heavy slugs spitting our way.
“Why aren’t you shooting back?” I asked.
“Because we’re out! Only had what was in the locker,” she shouted.
Blitz handed his pistol back through the window. “Here,” he said. As if the little sidearm would do any more than the carbine had against the garrison scout vehicle.
I glanced to my right, hoping for another escape, or an alley where they couldn’t follow. Or, worst-case, somewhere to dismount and hold up and hope they didn’t have grenades to flush us out. That wasn’t a hope I wanted to test.
I didn’t see an escape, but I did see a swift shadow move across the reflection in the skyscraper down the block. With the clatter of small arms fire drawing closer behind us, I made a risky play and swerved us around, slamming over a walkway and through a fountain plaza to a parallel side street past a trio of very surprised looters coming out of a tech shop with their arms full.
The maneuver threw off the gunner’s aim, but I could see him pivoting to reacquire us while his driver swung the craft wide. His line of fire cut across the three looters, painting the whitewashed wall with a sudden splash of crimson and concrete chips. I don’t know if he even saw them, and they didn’t even have time to register a threat before they were little more than gore on the facade. My heart felt as though it might stop in my chest. I fixed my vision ahead.
“Father Joseph, Vandal, what are you doing?” asked Runty. He’d managed to hook one foot over the steering column and anchor the other under the dash to keep from getting tossed out the window by the maneuver, thanks to that preternatural sense of balance jockeys all seemed to develop. He looked up the street at the path of destruction. “This street takes us back to the crash.”
“I know,” I said, trying to both avoid the press of clutter on the road and keep my eyes on the left side. This road hadn’t been built to accommodate the traffic of the main street and began to narrow. I caught another flash, a glint of sun off metal between buildings, and slammed the pedal all the way into the floor. The truck barked at me that I had pushed the batteries to critical amp draw, risking an over-temp in the motor controllers. “C’mon baby, just hold on.”
The rebel gunner got his aim back on track and slugs began to impact around us, and even on the back edge of the cab, forcing my head down. I wound along the road, swerving to avoid fire while I headed for the next intersection. Despite my best efforts, the rebel gunner finally scored a hit on something vital, and the truck bucked wildly under my hands. Someone in the back shouted as we swerved, but our momentum carried us through the intersection, just in time to almost be crushed by the phantom I’d been following.
A recon upright stepped over us, bottom of its foot no more than a meter above the roof of the cabin and thumping down within a car length ahead of us. The corner of our truck clipped its rear leg actuator and spun us out on the road. The rear wheel smoked where the gunner had lanced our motor. The upright tracked us, guns angled down as we spilled out of the wrecked truck and took cover.
I almost thought he would fire on us, but then the incoming fire from the turncoats struck it. The jockey ducked and twisted, traversing his turret toward the attack from the hovercraft and slamming his armor panels in the full-forward position. The two rotary cannons on its high-mounted arms began to spin.
“Ears!” I shouted and clamped my hands over my own.
I’d never been underneath an upright when it fired its weapons. It sounded like a pair of jackhammers pulverizing each eardrum directly. I felt the pressure in my gut and against my eyes. Steel casings began to pour out and dent the roofs of surrounding cars like heavy hail.
One of the rebel hovercrafts exploded. The other was heavier and had armored front-facing panels. The driver braced against the incoming fire and returned it with arcing rockets. The recon’s forward point-defense array cut them down before the payloads could detonate, but the propellant explosion felt like someone punching me directly in the chest and knocked me to the street.
The jockey moved his recon out from over us, sidestepping over parked cars and advancing on the vehicles while opening up with a chin-mounted fusion pump. The stubby nozzle spilled out a beam of white-hot plasma from his reactor. The air crisped, wavering with mirage, and the intense backwash of the heat reached us even behind the recon upright. The tops of several cars along the path of the pump curled and burst into flame, and the garrison vehicle armor gave way under the onslaught. Within a few fractions of a second, the second hovercraft exploded.
I stood up from behind a parked car I’d used for cover and watched the recon’s sensor ball traverse the area for new threats. Finding none, the jockey picked his way back to us. I held up empty hands to show I was unarmed and not hostile. Now things had slowed down, I could read his livery, and IDed him as one of the War Dogs, a smaller cavalry company also tasked with defense of Tyunta Central. The pilot clicked on his external speaker on.
“Chevalier, right? Came down with that grounded Peregrine? I followed the gunfire.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Ran into turncoats on our way to link up with our formation. Rest of the column is ten or twelve blocks north, heading west toward the palace complex.”
A brief pause. Then: “My formation’s got their 20. Get some of these wheels rolling and I’ll make sure you link up with your people.”
Most of the ground vehicles still had motor locks disengaged, so Athena and I were able to bypass the security and get one rolling in just a few minutes using good, old-fashioned Teutonian delinquency. We rumbled alongside the War Dog recon for another three kilometers before reaching the Chevalier forward outpost.
My hands shook the entire time.