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I thought this would be a clandestine engagement.
He just put it on the big stage.
“Pup One to Howler One. Handshake: 2345209. We have Anteater. I repeat, we have Anteater. Sliders in pursuit. Are bearing south at 53.48, 113.41, requesting LongMalice support. I repeat…”
The track spits us out into a salt flat. The knights push the bikes for all they’re worth. Alexandar’s wolfpelt streams behind. They start weaving in and out of one another to confuse enemy targeting. Seems unnecessary. Didn’t we destroy the other bikes? I start weaving with them, just a moment before Ignacius banks in front of me, then swerves back without the top half of his muscular body. His gravBike drifts sideways, losing speed.
Snipers.
I glance back. The cave is barely a dot. We must be five kilometers away, an impossible shot, even for lurchers…Something whips past and a huge crater opens up just left of my bike’s nose. I send my bike into frantic contortions, and soon it seems we’re out of range, but Alexandar has not let up. He hunches grim-faced over his handlebars, looking left and right and repeating his message to his master.
Ah, of course.
A swarm of hooded Gorgons on gravBikes flow down the nearly vertical face of a sandstone butte to our left. Another swarm pours out of a mountain valley to the right, racing to cut us off before we can get free of the mountains. All over the mountain range, the acolytes of the Fear Knight emerge from subterranean bunkers like hornets from a kicked nest.
RADTATATATATATAT
The ground in front of us ruptures with railgun fire, not to kill us, but to drive us west back into the mountains. We call the bluff and drive through it. Debris rips into my burn at two hundred kilometers an hour. A rock almost takes my head off. Then we’re through, pushing for the open desert, the pursuing bikes still kilometers off. Three hundred kilometers an hour. The world is a blur, but the Mind’s Eye makes everything feel languorous as I bob and weave around boulders and debris.
A vertical silver slash comes down from the sky.
WAAAAAAAAAOOOO
A beam of white light obliterates the horizon, leaving a gash of light across my vision. The sand of the desert pulses deep red as it’s turned to glass in a twenty-kilometer swath. “Idle banter!” Alexandar crows. “We’ve got your dog, Grimmus. We’ve got your dog!” I can’t help thinking of Cassius and Darrow riding over the Martian highlands of the Institute crowing nearly the same thing.
We careen over the molten desert. The heat radiates upward. My bare feet begin to blister. I pull them up to rest on the chassis. Through the warped air, another squadron of Gorgons appears. “Split ’em. Cato, follow me.”
Hadrian banks left with Drusilla. I follow Alexandar right. The Gorgons divide to follow us, not knowing which has the Fear Knight. More orbital strikes come down to hem us in, but Alexandar is a god on a bike. He leads a whole squadron of Gorgons into a particle beam. They disappear like mist as we bank into a canyon, then spit out the other side. I stick on his tail as we head to the open desert.
I glance back.
Two kilometers behind, an army pursues. We’ll never make it.
“Pup One to H
owler One. Do you read me?”
No answer but static. Soon Society air support will come. They’ll be scrambling ripWings. Aerial infantry will block our path.
We continue our course. With no way to down us without killing the Fear Knight, it becomes an endurance race. The gravBikes holding steady behind us in the open desert, suggesting a trap up ahead. The giant sun begins to set and stain the horizon the color of hot metal. The stims have faded. The agony of the burn returns, and I see Alexandar slumping in his saddle. Drusilla has linked up with us again, though there is no sign of Hadrian. Only three bikes remain. Debris from the Battle of Heliopolis begins to litter the sand with shriveled remains of war machines.
Soon we can see the storm wall of Heliopolis as a thin metal line in the far distance. But setting down between us and it is a line of mechanized Grimmus troopers. They’ll have electrical cannons to fry our bikes’ electronics. RipWings buzz overhead suddenly. The Society trap closes. “We have to run it,” Alexandar says. I see no way through. The pursuing Gorgons creep closer. “Pup One to Howler One,” Alexandar calls, panic finally making its way into his voice. “Our path is blocked. Pup One to Howler—”
A voice unlike any other comes over the com.
“Howler One to Pup One. Continue course. LongMalice deployed at danger close. Midnight inbound.”
“Stick tight to me!” Alexandar says. “Cato, Drusilla! Stick tight!”
Thooom. Thooom. Thooom.
Huge explosions break the face of the desert. They blossom into acrid clouds of smoke and sand in the center of the Grimmus troopers. Darrow’s artillery guns send another salvo arching from the city through the air in the thin gap between the storm wall and the dome shield of Heliopolis. They decimate everything in their path. Huge holes are blown in the pursuing squadrons of gravBikes as artillery shells scream over our heads.
It is all absurd sound and fury. Individual patterns in the metal and noise show the intelligent hands at work—move and countermove, measure and countermeasure—and how together they make insanity.
All this for the thin man attached to the back of Drusilla’s bike. Neither alliance fighting for love or hate, only the utility that one life will provide them. And when I think of that distant look in Atlas’s eyes as I choked him out, that look that reminded me of Cassius when he went to face the Raa, I understand what they both knew—how foolish all this rage is.
Before I plunge into the smoke of the artillery bombardment, the last thing I see is a ripWing squadron streaking out from under Heliopolis’s shield with guns ablaze.
