Polaris (32 page)

“Let's do it,” she said. “I want to kill them quickly.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said the sergeant, already leading his men up the rock face of the bluff.

She and Banach looked at each other. “Having fun?” she said.

He nodded. “Nice to see these guys earning their pay for a change.”

They scrambled up the bluff behind the marines. As she neared the top, she saw what was left of her submarine out at sea, a few floating scraps still being bombed by the relentless drones. Just in front of it was the wounded
Polaris,
badly damaged but untouched by the swarm. She felt a pang thinking about her lost boat. But it was balanced by the relief she felt at escaping with her life, and the thrill of the hunt.

“Almost all the windows are out!” said Banach after a few minutes of shooting from atop the rise. The men inside had stopped showing their faces; they were hunkered down, panicked, no doubt, perhaps contemplating surrender. Banach had a small pistol out, but the commandos around them had the bigger guns, automatic rifles and a grenade launcher that Carlson had been only vaguely aware was onboard. She admired the efficiency of the marines as they worked, the sergeant barely said a thing as they took their positions, covered one another, and shot accurately at the windows. There was something medieval about it, she thought, besieging a tower on an island. And as in any siege, time was on their side. Soon, several windows of the tower had been completely shot out.

The marines stopped shooting momentarily, and the sergeant addressed the man with the grenade launcher. She couldn't hear his words, so deafened was she by the firing that had gone on all around her, but she knew what he was saying. The same thing she might say to a brash OOD who had a torpedo in the tube, the outer doors opened, and the bearing of the enemy.
Take your time,
he must be saying.
Make it count.

The soldier got down on one knee, squinted through the sight, exhaled, and fired. The grenade launcher made a satisfying
BLOOP.
The grenade flew directly toward the tower but hit low, bouncing off the side and exploding as it fell toward the ground. The sergeant leaned in and calmly spoke to the soldier again, who nodded and adjusted his stance. His second shot flew directly through one of the windows they had blown open with their bullets.

And then it passed directly through a shattered window on the other side. It exploded harmlessly in the air.

There was a moment of silence, and then they all burst out laughing.

“What a horrible shot!” said Carlson, laughing with the rest.

The sergeant put his hand on the shoulder of the soldier with the grenade launcher, moved him slightly to his left, so that his next shot wouldn't pass all the way through.

Before he could shoot, there was a sudden change that Carlson became aware of on a subconscious level. The drones that had been hovering all around them, watching their fun but not participating, suddenly jerked in their flight paths, as if jolted by a sudden and important set of new instructions. A large contingent of them formed into a V and flew directly toward the
Polaris
. The drones that had been directly over their heads dipped ominously, their buzzing engines deepening by an octave as they changed course.

Almost immediately, the bombs began falling.

The first one landed in the middle of the commandos, shattering their bodies, sending three of them rolling down the hill. The man with the grenade launcher was cut almost in half, leaving his weapon behind as he rolled into the sea. The gray rock of the bluff was suddenly red with the blood of her men.

Carlson was shocked to realize she wasn't hit, even as the bombs continued to fall. She followed the dead bodies of the marines, rolling down the bluff, thinking that the drones might take her for one of the dead.

Banach followed her down. They were in that slight crevice in the rock now, between the bluff and the rest of the island, but the drones weren't fooled at all. An explosion went off right in front of them. She was turned away, but Banach lost an eye in the explosion; his face was covered in blood.

Banach pulled himself upright, still alive, and dragged himself on top of her. At first she wasn't sure what he was doing and started to get angry with him, could barely breathe from the suffocating weight of his body on top of hers. Then she realized that he was trying to protect her.

It won't work,
she thought. The drones saw the concentration of bodies, alive and dead, as an attractive target and wouldn't stop until they were obliterated. He might absorb the first blast, maybe the second, but the drones were relentless, and her death was inevitable. Banach was so close, the whole length of his body atop her, that she could feel his weakening, dying pulse through her uniform. Each explosion forced him down harder on top of her, as if he were a lover trying to tighten his embrace. A bomb exploded directly on top of them, and his heartbeat stopped. His blood poured over her face, and her arms were pinned by the rock walls, her hands unable to clear her eyes. His dead body absorbed another blast, and then another.
How gallant of him,
she thought. But she would have preferred to die atop the bluff in the first blast, she realized, looking out at the sea.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY

Moody watched from the deck of the
Polaris
as the three rubber boats zipped by her on the way to Eris Island; two from the Typhon boat, and one from the escape trunk of
Polaris
. The
Polaris
boat contained just Pete and McCallister, and no guns. The Typhon boats in contrast were crammed with men, all of them carrying weapons. She could take no satisfaction in the imminent, brutal deaths of those two traitors, because it would mean that Typhon would soon take Eris Island. And the cure.

The drones continued to bomb the Typhon ship. It was sinking rapidly even as the boats escaped it. They zipped by Dr. Haggerty, who was pathetically waving his arms at all parties, seemingly shocked that no one wanted to save him. She didn't understand it. She felt a creeping, familiar aggravation, much like she had when Hamlin had arrived with his secret orders. Once again, so many people seemed to know exactly what was going on, while she did not. Haggerty went under for good at about the same time the Typhon submarine did.

She reminded herself that she was still in command of an Alliance submarine. She'd been watching the waterline carefully, and while only the nose of the sub still stuck out of the water, it no longer appeared to be sinking. She had to summon help somehow, even with radio disabled. Maybe she could launch the emergency beacon, draw in help from the Alliance. She had two billion dollars' worth of technology under her command, nuclear missiles, torpedoes, the most advanced submarine in the world. Surely she could thwart three rubber boats.

The boats landed on the island, and she lost track of what was happening until the action began to center on the distant control tower. She heard the sharp staccato cracks of rifle shots. That sound stopped and was replaced by something lower, more powerful.

Suddenly there was a change in the air. The random swooping of the drones over Eris turned into a direct flight.

Toward her.

She'd observed enough drone attacks to recognize what was about to happen. Somehow the radius had changed, she realized, putting the
Polaris
in the killing zone. Without thinking, she executed a perfect swan dive off the side of the
Polaris,
into the ocean. The cool water braced her, gave her clarity of mind she hadn't had in days. As she came up to the surface, she was already swimming fast, athletically, toward the rocky shore of Eris. The bombs exploded behind her, finishing off what was left of her submarine.

She found her rhythm quickly, swimming strongly toward shore, breaking through the waves. It was five miles to the beach. A long swim in open, choppy ocean, but she was strong, the all-time record holder on the Alliance obstacle course. The swim took her back to her training, when everything seemed so clear and her talents so valued. Every second stroke, she took a breath, and she could see bombs dropping in front of her now, too, exploding all over Eris Island. She herself must be inside the killing zone, she realized, but a lone swimmer was, at least for the moment, a lower priority target. As she powered through the waves, she felt indestructible.

*   *   *

Pete looked cautiously out the window as Carlson's crew was swarmed by drones.

At first, the drones assessed the immediate threat, bombing Carlson and her men. They threw themselves to the ground, but there was nowhere to hide on the rocky bluff. Bombs fell all around them. They were close enough that Pete could see them screaming, but he couldn't hear them over the constant roar of the exploding bombs. Some of the Typhon crew rolled into the crevice, driven either by gravity or by an instinct to seek some kind of shelter.

Simultaneously, a formation of drones headed toward
Polaris
. Pete saw Finn wince as the first bombs struck his ship. They poured their bombs onto the boat, then formed a beeline back to the island to reload. The
Polaris
held up bravely as bombs poured onto her, but eventually the top of the hull cracked, and smoke poured out as more bombs poured in. The drones were in a frenzy.

And then, suddenly,
Polaris
was gone, replaced on the ocean surface by a black slick of oil and a layer of bubbles as the ship's air banks cracked and exploded.

The drones returned their attention to Eris Island.

They began targeting the pallets of bombs, which exploded with such power that the concussion almost knocked the men down in the control tower. What glass remained in the windows was shattered. Pete covered his face with his hands and felt flying shards of glass cut his knuckles. Alarms went off in the tower as bombs dropped close by; Pete saw one indicator saying that the main tower door was breached, compromised by a series of nearby blasts. But the tower itself stayed safe as the drones focused all their energy on targets outside the ten-foot radius. Pete noticed, fascinated, that the drones were prioritizing the larger pallets of bombs first, then going after the smaller ones. The island was soon blanketed in explosions.

Pete saw a smoke cloud in the distance, on the south side of the island. His heart sank as he realized that the old buildings of the medical detachment were being destroyed. Whatever remained of the group's quest for a cure was being bombed into shreds.

It was over quickly. Soon, the island was overflowing with quick-moving, unarmed drones. Pete could practically read their primitive little minds. They were without bombs, with no chance of rearming, having destroyed all their own munitions. They quickly went into self-destruct mode.

They all picked targets, what few structures were left on the battered island, and flew perfect swan dives into them. Only the ten-foot circle around the tower was safe. Some drones flew into the sea as well, spotting some target of opportunity, a piece of flotsam from one of the sinking submarines.

It took thirty minutes before the bombs stopped falling. It seemed much, much longer as they sat and listened and absorbed the sound from a thousand bombs through the broken windows. Pete remembered reading about artillery barrages in World War II that had gone on for days. He didn't know how men could ever endure that kind of noise for so long without going insane.

His ears rang so badly that it took him a minute to realize it was over. He stood up slowly, and McCallister did the same.

Outside the windows, the island was smoking from a thousand craters, large and small. But no drones flew overhead.

The quiet was breathtaking.

“Everybody OK?” said Pete. He stood all the way up, carefully.

“I'm all right,” said Finn.

“Me, too,” said Stewart, although Pete could hear otherwise in his voice. The old man didn't get up.

“Admiral?” Peter walked to him.

A dark patch of blood spread across his uniform. “I don't think it's anything serious.”

“Are you shot?”

“I don't think so,” he said. “Broken glass. Hurts like the devil, and lots of blood, but I'll be fine.”

Pete looked closely into the admiral's eyes, looking for false bravado. While his body was bloodied, his eyes were steady and calm. Considerably calmer than Pete felt.

“Freeze!” Hana Moody suddenly burst through the door. She rapidly trained a pistol from Pete and the admiral to Finn, and back again. Her eyes stopped briefly on the admiral, confused by a stranger in admiral's shoulder boards. Incredibly, Pete saw in her eyes deference to his rank. Her weapon looked foreign; Pete realized she must have scavenged it from one of the dead Typhon marines.

“Jesus Christ, Moody, how did you—?”

“I rushed to the door of the tower. Stayed pinned against it while you got the drones to do your dirty work.”

Her soaking-wet clothes were torn, her face dirty and bloody. As loud as it was inside the tower, Pete couldn't imagine what it must have been like on ground level during the barrage.

She steadied the gun at Pete, but hesitated to point it at the admiral. “You're all prisoners of war,” she said.

From the other side of the tower, Finn laughed out loud. “Our war is over,” he said. “You can put that thing away.”

“You've betrayed the Alliance,” she said. “And I'm going to see that you pay for it.”

Finn then did the one thing that guaranteed the most viscerally angry reaction. He laughed at her.

With a guttural cry of rage, she fired. Her aim was off, perhaps due to unfamiliarity with the Typhon gun, and she hit Finn in the shoulder. He spun to the ground with a grunt.

She trained the gun on Pete, the only man now standing in the tower. “Have you got anything to say?”

“I'll do whatever you want,” said Pete, trying to exaggerate the panic in his voice. “But we've got to help the admiral!”