Anthony DeCosmo - Schism

However, with Hauser the only Eagle-trained pilot, they had to stop for a few hours of rest before he fell asleep at the sticks. He chose a landing spot alongside the Tennessee River. While Hauser slept, Gordon and Nina replenished the ship's tanks.

As they continued their journey, Knox's knowledge of radar stations combined with the computer maps onboard helped them avoid air defense systems. They stopped to refuel water at the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas/Louisiana border then pushed on through the day into the night to the Rio Grande.

At that point, Eagle One could go no farther. An extensive net of radar installations and surveillance Eagles kept a close watch on the Mexican border. There would be no flying over it.

The Eagle carried a pair of personal hover crafts based on reverse-engineered Mutant bikes resembling a cross between a jet ski and a snowmobile.

While Hauser and Odin the Elkhound remained behind to guard the ship, Nina and Gordon crossed the border at high speed heading south toward Monterrey.

– They rode all night, moving much too fast to be distracted by shadows in old towns, specks of fire on the horizon, or wild beasts.

According to surveys conducted before Gordon "retired" from his post as Director of Intelligence, most of northern Mexico remained a dangerous wasteland prowled by predators as well as human bandits in coastal areas.

The two followed the main roads heading south, using the powerful front headlights of the hover bikes to illuminate the path in fifty yard stretches. On more than one occasion they felt the presence of airborne predators overhead, but even those hunters could not keep pace with the determined riders.

Three hours before dawn, the two found shelter among the remains of an abandoned Mexican army convoy covered in a decade of dust, including an intact armored vehicle. More specifically, a World War II vintage half-track painted in modern camouflage patterns. Nina could not believe Gordon when he told her that such an old vehicle had, in fact, been a part of the Mexican armed forces at the time of the invasion.

Regardless, they spent a few hours catching some sleep within the relative security of the abandoned vehicle. As the first flickers of dawn's approach glowed orange on the horizon, a sound stirred the travelers awake; a low rumble of a sound.

They exited the temporary shelter and scanned the fields of broken buildings, brush, and foothills around the deserted convoy. After a moment, they realized the rumble came from the south; it came from Monterrey.

Nina and Gordon mounted their rides and hurried off in that direction surrounded by the shadows of morning twilight. The whiz and whir of the speeding hovercraft could not block out the growing roar of the noise, but it was not until they climbed the brush-covered hills northeast of the ruins of Monterrey that they could trace the source of the sound.

Nina dropped to her belly and wiggled forward amidst the dusty ground and dried sage at the crest of the mountain. Her black tank top and green BDUs quickly grew covered in powdered dirt. Gordon knelt low beside her with a pair of binoculars in his hand. The sun-while still very new that day-grew hot fast, drying the air.

Towering above the city to the south were the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains. That range trailed off into the distance in a line of dramatic ridges and steeply banked slopes of brown and fading green. The sound that had roused them from their slumber reverberated everywhere, like a million heads of cattle stampeding.

Between their position and those mountains lay several square miles of what had once been Monterrey. The rising sun shed light on the devil's work.

"What the Hell is this?" Nina's brow furled tight but her mouth fell wide open.

She expected to see the singed and melted remains of the city and the Centurian base. Indeed, the smoldering smoke rising from the flattened ruins there did not surprise her, she had witnessed the handiwork of dreadnought belly boppers before.

However, it did surprise them to find that half of those ruins were gone, combed neat and flat into graded dirt. Indeed, the view from the hill resembled a before and after advertisement for a vacuum cleaner: the western side of the city cleansed of debris with only sand-like dirt remaining. The east still a tangled mess of flattened concrete, melted metal, and scorched land with the tallest piles of debris rising no more than six feet.

"Good God," Gordon mumbled in a choppy voice. "It's…it's being erased."

The droning sound came from a swirling cloud hovering and moving southward nearly a mile away from Nina and Gordon's observation point. At the rear of that cloud shot streams of freshly-cleaned dirt, for some reason reminding Nina of the combine harvesters on the farms in her home town in Pennsylvania.

Something worked within that cloud, but it hid inside one of the last remaining shadows at the base of the mountain peaks. Nonetheless, the path the thing followed was easy to see, in its wake it left flat, featureless soil.

"They're cleaning it all up," Knox managed a better handle on his words. "Whatever evidence is down there… we have to hurry."

Nina and Gordon retrieved their hover bikes and swooped down the hill. At the base of that hill stretched a field of debris so flat that the two could see-unhindered-all the way across the remains of town to where that large dust cloud moved at the base of the mountains.

They stopped at a series of stone blocks piled one atop each other to the height of five feet. They stopped because that great cloud on the far side of the old city began to pivot as it reached the end of another line of cleansing. As it turned to head north-to head toward Nina and Gordon-the veil of dust blew off, revealing the machine.

It stretched a half a mile long from side to side and rose some fifty feet into the air. It took Nina's eyes several seconds to understand what she saw. At first, her mind likened the sight to the head of a gigantic push broom, but with squirming bristles. As the dust dissipated, she thought it more a long, hovering wing with thousands of tubes hanging down to the ground, each scrubbing the earth below while a great suction of wind scooped up burnt buildings, melted cars, broken planks, and shattered steel.

It moved slow and methodic tearing away the old, sifting through the mess, and leaving behind a trail of soil cleaned of any evidence the ruins of Monterrey might hold.

"Listen, we have to get in there and find something."

Gordon said, "If I'm right, you're going to need a Centurian body. I'm thinking a head alone would do the trick."

A flash from somewhere between them and the machine caught both their eyes. A stream of liquid light tore between the two people and slammed into the stone pillars. Those pillars evaporated into grains of sand. The explosion knocked both Nina and Gordon from their mounts.

"It's armed!"

Nina corrected, "No. There's something else out there."

She dared a peek from a prone position. Far away the great machine did its work, ripping evidence from the ground a half-mile at a time. But closer…about five hundred yards away…Nina spotted three dark figures, each standing nearly eight feet tall and spread in a picket line with fifty yards between one another.

She raised binoculars for a better view.

The machine's guardians wore dark cloaks, hiding any features. They walked in determined but slow steps, traversing the ground ahead of the cleansing unit. As she watched, one of the two robed arms raised. She saw something that resembled the exhaust end of a jet engine. A golden ball glowed from its end "Get down!"

Another blast of energy streaked toward the infiltrators. It missed high and slammed into the hillside behind them where it knocked great clumps of rock and dirt off a ridge.