Thirty seconds before the shield dropped, Hickory opened the gates of the village and he and Dickory stepped away to let the survivors of the attack flood out in retreat. The couple dozen or so remaining soldiers didn’t stop to wonder how the gate had opened; they got the hell out and broke toward their transports stationed a klick in the distance. The last of these soldiers cleared the gate as we dropped the field. Eser and his remaining guard were midway in this pack, the guard rudely pushing his charge along. He still had his rifle; most left their rifles behind, having seen what happened to those who had used them in the village, and assuming they were now entirely useless. I picked up one, as I followed them out; Jane picked up one of the missile launchers. Kranjic and Beata hopped down from the cargo containers and followed; Kranjic bounding ahead and disappearing in the darkness, Beata keeping time with Jane and I.
The retreating Arrisian soldiers were making two assumptions as they retreated. The first was that bullets had no currency on Roanoke. The second was that the terrain they were retreating across was the same as the terrain they had marched in on. Both of these assumptions were wrong, as the Arrisians discovered when the automatic turret defenses along the retreat path opened fire on them, cutting them down in precise bursts controlled by Jane, who electronically signed off on each target with her BrainPal before they opened fire. Jane didn’t want to shoot Eser by accident. The portable turrets had been placed by the colonists after the Arrisians had been shut in Croatoan; they had pulled them out of holes they had dug and covered. Jane had mercilessly drilled the colonists who placed the turrets so they could move them and placed them in the space of just a few minutes. It worked; only one turret was unusable because it was pointing in the wrong direction.
By this time those few remaining Arrisian soldiers with their rifles began to fire them out of desperation and seemed surprised when they worked. Two of them dropped to the ground and began to fire in our direction, to give their compatriots time to get to the transports. I felt a round whistle past before I heard it; I likewise dropped to the ground. Jane turned the turrets on these two Arrisians and made short work of them.
Shortly only Eser and his guard remained, save for the pilots of the two transports, both of whom had fired up their engines and were preparing to get the hell out of Dodge. Jane steadied the shoulder-mounted missile, warned us to hit the deck (I was still there) and fired her missile at the closest transport. The missile blasted past Eser and his guard, causing both to dive to the ground, and slammed into the transport’s bay, bathing the interior of the shuttle in explosive flame. The second pilot decided he’d had enough and launched; he got fifty meters up before his transport was struck by not one but two missiles, launched by Hickory and Dickory, respectively. The impacts crushed the transport’s engines and sent it careening downward into the woods, tearing trees from the ground with a wrenching, woody sound before crashing with a shattering roar somewhere out of sight.
Eser’s guard kept his charge down and stayed low himself, firing in an attempt to take some of us with him when he went.
Jane looked down at me. “That rifle have ammunition?” she asked.
“I hope so,” I said.
She dropped the shoulder rocket. “Make enough noise to keep him down,” she said. “Don’t actually shoot at him.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She stripped out of her police gear, revealing the skintight, matte black nanomesh underneath. “Getting close,” she said, and moved away. She quickly became next to invisible in the dark. I fired at random intervals and stayed low; the guard wasn’t hitting me, but it was a matter of centimeters.
There was a surprised grunt in the distance, and then a rather louder scree, which stopped soon enough.
“All clear,” Jane said. I popped up and headed toward her. She was standing over the body of the guard, the guard’s former weapon in her hand, trained on Eser, who lay cowering on the ground.
“He’s weaponless,” Jane said, and handed me the translation device she apparently took off him. “Here. You get to talk to him.”
I took the device and bent down. “Hi there,” I said.
“You’re all going to die,” Eser said. “I have a ship above you right now. It has more soldiers in it. They will come down and hunt all of you. And then my ship will blast every bit of this colony to dust.”
“Is that so,” I said.
“Yes,” said Eser.
“I see I have to be the one to break this to you, then,” I said. “Your ship’s not there anymore.”
“You’re lying,” Eser said.
“Not really,” I said. “The thing is, when you took out our satellite with your ship, that meant the satellite couldn’t signal a skip drone we had out there. That drone was programmed to skip only if it didn’t receive a signal. Where it went, there were some skip-capable missiles waiting. Those missiles popped into Roanoke space, found your ship and killed it.”
“Where did the missiles come from?” Eser demanded.
“It’s difficult to say,” I said. “The missiles were of Nouri manufacture. And you know the Nouri. They’ll sell to just about anyone.”
Eser sat there and glowered. “I don’t believe you,” he finally said.
I turned to Jane. “He doesn’t believe me,” I said.
Jane flipped me something. “It’s his communicator,” she said.
I handed it to him. “Call your ship,” I said.
Several minutes and some very angry screees later, Eser flung his communicator into the dirt. “Why haven’t you just killed me?” he asked. “You’ve killed everyone else.”
“You were told that if you left all of your soldiers would live,” I said.