The light show continued on up above as they endured the equal parts frenzied and slow line into the westbound train. About half the people were occupied with personal comms, while much of the other half was shouting to be heard over all the shouting. Ragged-looking trainyard employees lined up to take some of the pressure off the automated systems. There were no demands for ID, and Saketa wasn’t even sure they counted the cash they were handed. People were simply herded into the cars, and Saketa’s group wound up in the second-to-last one.
She stopped even bothering to hide the sword. Her mind was on the tower, and the waves, and nothing else.
The train took off, and was blessedly faster than the one before. The great plains continued, although spread-out lights hinted at mountain ranges in the distance. Other lights were bundled together, and moving as a group. Saketa took them to be more civilians fleeing population centres.
The explosions up above got bigger, or at least seemed bigger. It was more likely they were simply getting closer, as the platform network was whittled down and the planetary fleet tried to fill the gaps.
This new ride had been going for close to an hour when debris became visible, coming down across the night sky as burning streaks. It was coming down all over, spread out across the entire sky in a chaotic display.
“Wow,” Ayna said, her voice tight and her face up against a window. “This would be pretty if people weren’t… you know… dying.”
It was shortly after this that Saketa saw the first ground cannon shot. It would be sheer vanity to assume she’d witnessed the first one on the entire planet, but there it was, streaking up from behind the mountains and vanishing into the far, far distance.
More followed, fired from the other side of the train, from behind and up ahead. In this region, at least, the platforms had failed and the Sixth was truly closing in. Into the trap that had been set for them.
Debris kept on raining down, like awful shooting stars, and Saketa turned at the sound of a passenger yelping, and saw a great explosion groundside to the south. It was a huge, huge burst of burning plasma. An entire cannon battery’s worth.
“I didn’t see a shot from above,” Losan said.
“No,” Fredrak said. “That was sabotage.”
Only minutes later there was a similarly huge blast beyond the mountains. And only seconds later the Sixth started firing back. Colossal blasts and great missiles streaked down, too fast for the eye to notice as anything other than afterimages. It was a source of fresh terror for the train passengers, and coincided with a general swell across the entire planet. And still it would all get worse before it got better. The Exile would have still more energy to draw on. But it was starting. With almost an hour left to go to Unnu, Saketa felt the start of his grand move.
“It is beginning.”
She had hissed it under her breath, but her companions still took notice. She didn’t look at them. She looked ahead, through a window, in the direction of the energies being drawn to the Tower of Kanato.
“I feel it. Like water flowing around my feet.”
“How… how long?” Vanaka asked, and clearly dreaded the answer.
“As soon as the Sixth arranges itself fully,” she told her.
“It won’t be long,” Fredrak said, and finally she actually saw some worry in the man. “Not if what we’re seeing is indicative of the overall invasion. It could be under an hour.”
“Well, w-we’ll make it, right?” Vanaka asked. “We have… we have about that long to-”
The soft hum of electrical systems died down. The car interior fell into near-darkness, lit only by emergency chemical lights. The train continued on through the power of momentum, but already Saketa felt it slow down. A quick look at the countryside confirmed that this ill fortune wasn’t targeted. Virtually all the lights were out.
“Sabotage,” Fredrak said with quiet intensity. “The Authority. Orbital fire. One of those things.”
The train slowed down to a crawl, and word seemed to travel down along the cars from the front. The conductor didn’t expect to move any time soon.
Saketa gathered her strength, sucked in a breath, and swung her fist into the window. The frame proved to be weaker than the hardened plastic, and the pane popped out in one piece. She vaulted out while the train was still moving slightly, and landed on dry, rocky ground.
“I am not stopping,” she said firmly, and started jogging.
Behind her, the others clambered out and followed. She put no thought to keeping pace, but also resisted the urge to Shift ahead, step by step. It would drain her precious strength right before the fight. Once she had view of the tower, once the Exile started, whichever came first… then she would move.
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It was a bleak and tense run, far too slow across the flat, dark plain. A fight where the only weapon was energy management and the enemy was time. The surface-air exchange continued, and the explosions lighting up the sky got ever closer. The planetary fleet seemed to be putting up its final defence, and the streaks of debris continued unabated. It was all an unnerving reminder of human smallness.
A missile or a crashed ship went up in a gigantic fireball somewhere up ahead, creating a modest mushroom cloud. In the briefly lit-up background Saketa saw something, some structure, close by. The flames dulled and were sucked into smoke before she could fully make it out, and just then she sensed danger.
“I think it’s heading at us!” Ayna shouted.
Saketa looked up. An Authority fighter ship was coming down. It spewed flames and smoke and debris, but a sole thruster was still operational. The ship was corkscrewing at an angle, going in large circles that dipped lower with each pass. And yes, it was heading at least in their general direction.
She stopped, and looked within for calm. Her eyes followed the doomed ship and estimated its course. It went into another circle, and another, and she really thought it would hit something. But there was nothing in the shrouded plain for it to hit, and now, in a final pass that seemed to scrape the scarce plantlife, it was coming at them from the south-west.
Saketa found the perfect calm only for a moment, amidst the ocean of corrupted energies, but that was all she needed. She reached into the universe and thrust her palm out. The wave burst out from her will and hit the ship head-on.
At the speed it was going, the ship was utterly shattered as it met a force that could not be moved, like an egg thrown at a wall. There was a great boom of metal and munitions both, and the pieces of the wreck then dropped straight down.
Saketa started running again. The others followed.
Booms sounded across the plains, proof of just how close the violence had gotten in general. Some of it was explosions and some of it was crashes. The sky was streaked like never before; a glowing artwork of destruction. And she arrived at the structure she’d seen. It was an overpass for the train tracks. Down below was a multi-lane road, and she actually saw a few moving lights in both directions.
“We need a vehicle,” Saketa said. “We need a vehicle now.”
The power that the Exile was churning about profoundly disrupted everything. Saketa felt she could probably manage the short Shift down onto the road, but it still seemed safer to just swing herself over the railing and climb down a beam.
“Losan!” she said on her way down. “Bring out your big gun!”
There was a solitary light up ahead, coming fast but with quite some distance to cross. Saketa ran into its lane and Losan joined her in seconds. The warrior, conditioned though he was, was showing the effects of the extended run. She hadn’t paid any attention to how her companions were handling it. She couldn’t afford to wait for them. No one could afford it. But he clearly had fight left in him, and she was glad to see he didn’t need this venture explained to him. Or that he needed urging to unload his gun as the car bore down on them.
Saketa stood directly in its path and waved her arms as if signalling an emergency. It was entirely possible that the driver was panicking too much or not paying enough attention to stop, and she was at the ready to leap out of the way. But the car did come to a sudden stop, with a rather loud engine whine.
It was a somewhat boxy personal transport on four wheels, and it looked like it would house all five of them. The driver opened a side-window, then froze in place as Losan raised the gun.
Saketa hurried over, giving the man no time to think or react.
“We need the car!” she announced and banged on the windshield. People reacted to fear differently. This man reacted by freezing, so Saketa fastened her eyes on the front passenger seat and risked a Shift. The ultra-short trip worked out, and she landed in the seat.
The man yelped in confusion, and she reached over and undid his seatbelt. Losan hurried over as well, and the man got the message and opened the vehicle. He hurried out and backed away from the scene as the others came on over. Fredrak was more winded than Losan, and Ayna, with her short legs, even more so. Vanaka looked fine.
“We’ll feel bad about this later, okay?!” Ayna asked between heavy breaths as they bundled into the car.
“I’ll drive,” Losan stated plainly, and no one argued. The other three got into the back seat, and after a few seconds of going over the controls the man activated a digital map.
“We can go in a near-straight line to the city,” he announced, then punched in a route and hit the accelerator.
The car took off. Losan drove off the road and to the west. The car’s suspension served them well up a slope, and after that it was more bare plain. He activated night-mode on the windshield, and between that and the map their path looked clear.
Saketa shrugged out of the coat. The time for stealth was over, and she needed as free an access to the universe as possible. The tip of Nara’s sword pressed into the floor and the pommel rested against her forehead.
Vanaka sat with the travelling case, and now opened it. Out came Losan’s sword, which she handed over to him. The ansoti placed it within easy reach. Vanaka arranged her own folded stick comfortably on her belt, then took the pistol as Losan handed it to her. The girl’s reflection in the shiny dashboard let Saketa watch her without turning her head, and Vanaka’s reluctance to handle the deadly weapon was plain to see. But she did load it with familiarity that Losan had presumably imparted, then put it in a pocket.
“Since you have a sword, can I have one of those sticks?” Fredrak asked.
“Sure,” Losan replied absently without looking at the man. “Take them both.”
Vanaka handed them over and Fredrak clipped them to his belt. Ayna gave her little self-defence pistol a look, then simply slumped into the seat, looking transfixed by everything that was happening.
Losan kept on accelerating, gaining speed as he gained familiarity with the way the car controlled. The projected arrival time lowered from fifty-nine minutes to fifty-two, then again to forty-six.