Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

Kirin snorted dismissively.

Reynold tapped the com button on the collar of his fatigues. “Spiro,” he addressed the commander of the four-unit of Separatist ground troops positioned in the surrounding area. “ECS are on to us but don’t have our location. If they get it they’ll be down on us like a falling tree. Be prepared to hold out for as long as possible—for the Cause I expect no less of you.”

“They get our location and it’ll be a sat-strike,” Plate observed. “We’ll be incinerated before we get a chance to blink.”

“Shut up, Plate.”

“I think I may—” began Kirin, and Reynold spun towards her. “Yes, I’ve got it.” She looked up victoriously and dramatically stabbed a finger down on one key. “Your remote is now armed.”

Reynold raised his hand and opened it, studying with tight cold fear in his guts the blinking red light in the corner of the touch console. Stepping a little way from his comrades to the edge of the trees, he once again gazed down upon the city. His mouth was dry. He knew precisely what this would set in motion: terrifying unhuman intelligences would focus here the moment he sent the signal.

“Just a grain at a time, my old Separatist recruiter told me,” he said. “We’ll win this like the sea wins as it laps against a sandstone cliff.”

“Very poetic,” said Kirin, now standing at his shoulder.

“This is gonna hurt them,” said Plate.

Reynold tapped his com button. “Goggles everyone.” He pulled his own flash goggles down over his eyes. “Kirin, get back to your worms.” He glanced round and watched her return to her station and plug the memstore cable into her laptop. The worms and viruses the thing contained were certainly the best available, but they wouldn’t have stood a chance of penetrating Polity firewalls before he initiated the device. After that they would penetrate local systems to knock out satellite scanning for, according to Kirin, ten minutes—time for them to fly the gravcar far from here, undetected.

“Five, four, three, two . . . one.” Reynold thumbed the touch console on the remote.

Somewhere in the heart of the city a giant flashbulb came on for a second, then went out. Reynold pushed up his goggles to watch a skyscraper going over and a disk of devastation spreading from a growing and rising fireball. Now, shortly after the EM flash of the blast, Kirin would be sending her software toys. The fireball continued to rise, a sprouting mushroom, but despite the surface devastation many buildings remained disappointingly intact. Still, they would be irradiated and tens of thousands of Polity citizens now just ash. The sound reached them now, and it seemed the world was tearing apart.

“Okay, the car!” Reynold instructed. “Kirin?”

She nodded, already closing up her laptop and grabbing up as much of her gear as she could carry. The broadcast framework would have to stay though, as would some of the larger armaments Spiro had positioned in the surrounding area. Reynold stooped by a grey cylinder at the base of a tree, punched twenty minutes into the timer and set it running. The thermite bomb would incinerate this entire area and leave little evidence for the forensic AIs of ECS to gather. “Let’s go!”

Spiro and his men, now armed with nothing but a few hand weapons, had already pulled the tarpaulin from the car and were piling into the back row of seats. Plate took the controls and Kirin and Reynold climbed in behind him. Plate took it up hard through the foliage, shrivelled seed husks and swordlike leaves falling onto them, turned it and hit the boosters. Glancing back Reynold could only see the top of the nuclear cloud, and he nodded to himself with grim satisfaction.

“This will be remembered for years to come,” he stated.

“Yup, certainly will,” replied Spiro, scratching at a spot on his cheek.

No one else seemed to have anything to say, but Reynold knew why they were so subdued. This was the come-down, only later would they realise just what a victory this had been for the Separatist cause. He tried to convince himself of that . . .

In five minutes they were beyond the forest and over rectangular fields of mega-wheat, hill slopes stitched with neat vineyards of protein gourds, irrigation canals and plascrete roads for the agricultural machinery used here. The ground transport—a balloon-tyred tractor towing a train of grain wagons—awaited where arranged.

“Irrigation canal,” Reynold instructed.

Plate decelerated fast and settled the car towards a canal running parallel to the road on which the transport awaited, bringing it to a hover just above the water then slewing it sideways until it nudged the bank. Spiro and the soldiers were out first, then Kirin.

“You can plus-grav it?” Reynold asked.

Plate nodded, pulled out a chip revealed behind a torn-out panel, then inserted a chipcard into reader slot. “Ten seconds.” He and Reynold disembarked, then bracing themselves against the bank, pushed the car so it drifted out over the water. After a moment smoke drifted up from the vehicle’s console. Abruptly it was as if the car had been transformed into a block of lead. It dropped hard, creating a huge splash, then was gone in an instant. Plate and Reynold clambered up the bank after the others onto the road. Ahead, awaiting about the tractor stood four of the locals, or ‘yokels’ as Plate called them—four Rhine’s World Separatists.

“Stay alert,” Reynold warned.

As he approached the four he studied them intently. They all wore the kind of disposable overalls farmers clad themselves in on primitve worlds like this and all seemed ill-at-ease. For a moment Reynold focused on one of their number: a very fat man with a baby face and shaven head. With all the cosmetic and medical options available it was not often you saw people so obese unless they chose to look that way. Perhaps this Separatist distrusted what Polity technology had to offer, which wasn’t that unusual. The one who stepped forwards, however, obviously did trust that technology, being big, handsome, and obviously having provided himself with emerald green eyes.

“Jepson?” Reynold asked.

“I am,” said the man, holding out his hand.

Reynold gripped it briefly. “We need to get under cover quickly—sat eyes will be functioning again soon.”

“The first trailer is empty.” Jepson stabbed a finger back behind the tractor.

Reynold nodded towards Spiro and he and his men headed back towards the trailer. “You too,” he said to Kirin and, as she departed, glanced at Plate. “You’re with me in the tractor cab.”

“There’s only room for four up there,” Jepson protested.

“Then two of your men best ride in the trailer.” Reynold nodded towards the fat man. “Make him one of them—that should give us plenty of room.”

The fat man dipped his head as if ashamed and trailed after Kirin, then at a nod from Jepson one of the others went too.

“Come on fat boy!” Spiro called as the fat man hauled himself up inside the trailer.

“I sometimes wonder what the recruiters are thinking,” said Jepson as he mounted the ladder up the side of the big tractor.

“Meaning?” Reynold inquired as he followed.

“Me and Dowel,” Jepson flipped a thumb towards the other local climbing up after Reynold, “have been working together for a year now, and we’re good.” He entered the cab. “Mark seems pretty able too, but I’m damned If I know what use we can find for Brockle.”

“Brockle would be fat boy,” said Plate, following Dowel into the cab.

“You guessed it.” Jepson took the driver’s seat.

Along one wall were three fold-down seats, the rest of the cab being crammed with tractor controls and a pile of disconnected hydraulic cylinders, universal joints and PTO shafts. Reynold studied these for a second, noted blood on one short heavy cylinder and a sticky pool of the same nearby. That was from the original driver of this machine . . . maybe. He reached down and drew his pulse-gun, turned and stuck it up under Dowel’s chin. Plate meanwhile stepped up behind Jepson and looped a garrot about his neck.