Connected Infection

35. Gobi - Chapter 21.1

21

15:03 (UTC+8)

Raven peered through Mendoza's field glasses at the pair of Hos fleeing before them. The Jeep bounced him around as it crossed the uneven terrain, and Raven wasn't sure the first time, but when something zipped across his line of sight again - the only sign of its presence a brief occlusion of the view through the glasses - he began to grow suspicious.

'Can we stop a second?' he shouted.

'But we are nearly on them!' Mendoza called back.

'There's something out there,' he muttered to Popescu, who was squinting around, shielding her eyes from the sun.

'I think you're right,' she said, pointing to their left. 'Those tanks have just stopped dead. I think they rolled right off their tracks. You'd better stop, Mendoza,' she said.

Raven saw the fly glinting in the sun just moments after the coronel told the driver to hit the brakes. It shot at them, veering across into their path, close to the ground. It disappeared out of sight beneath them, and instantly there was an explosion and a jolt. The Spanish soldier lost control and the Jeep lurched and tilted. Raven dropped the field glasses as he lunged for the side to stop himself being thrown out - but the Jeep kept tilting so he twisted around, grabbed Popescu around the waist and kicked with his legs to throw them both over the rear as the vehicle rolled.

They hit the sun-scorched ground hard. Raven grimaced and sat upright as the dust cleared. The Jeep had come to a halt upside down, and Mendoza and the Mongolian flag-man were dragging the driver out from beneath it.

Raven helped Popescu up.

'What hit us?' Mendoza asked, holding his arm.

'It was tiny, like a very small homing missile,' Raven said. 'I saw it coming at us.' He peered at the exposed underside of the Jeep, where the explosion had shattered the front axle. 'I think it was some kind of fly. I think I heard its buzz.'

'That must be what's stopping the tanks they aren't nuking,' Popescu said. 'None of them have been able to reach the buildings yet.'

'Get down!' yelled Mendoza, diving to the floor.

Raven hit the ground, yanking out his Walther as a trio of Hos appeared behind a low rock outcrop.

Bullets ricocheted from the upturned Jeep and kicked dirt up around them. The Spanish driver slumped down dead as Raven and Popescu returned fire, scrambling round the vehicle to use it as cover - but the Hos ducked into a ditch where they peered sporadically over the top, and snapped off shots that clanged and sparked from the chassis before the agents.

Then, with a sudden scream of engines, a jet tore overhead and a forest of dust plumes erupted through the Hos' position.

'Yeah!' Popescu shouted, punching the air. When the dust cleared all the Hos were down.

Raven stood, watching the Chinese jet as it banked for another pass. As it did so, he saw something glinting in the sky, on an intercept course from the direction of the GASP buildings.

There was a small flash, and one of the jet's wings seemed to detach itself from the fuselage. The pilot ejected as the plane went into a spin and tumbled from the sky.

'Fuck,' Popescu said.

The pilot's parachute opened, moments before the fireball of his craft's union with the desert blossomed into the air.

'It was another one of the homing things,' Raven told her as the sound reached them. 'You're right; they're protecting the facility.'

'We aren't going to catch those two Hos on foot,' Popescu said. 'They're running like madmen. The heat and the strain have probably already killed the hosts, but they just don't know it yet.'

Mendoza turned to the Mongolian soldier with the flags. 'Get us some backup,' he said, and the man nodded and loped towards a rocky knoll behind them. 'What now?' he asked, turning to the agents.

Another of the all-too familiar mushroom-shaped clouds boiled slowly up into the sky a few miles away, a larger and deadlier relative of that from the fallen jet. Popescu watched it for a moment, then turned to Raven. 'Let's take a look at those dead Hos,' she said.

Raven nodded. Keeping low, he sprinted around the side of the Jeep and across the cracked earth to the ditch where their attackers had died. He slid down next to the bodies of three Mongolian civilians in casual clothes, and Popescu and Mendoza joined him a second later.

'Aha,' Popescu said. 'That's what I'm looking for.' She took an oddly-shaped, clumsy-looking gun from the hands of one of the dead men. 'I think this might be one of the antimatter guns.'

'It is,' Raven confirmed. 'I saw one fired at that first tank.'

'That's a lot of firepower,' Mendoza said. 'How many shots are in it?'

They peered at the weapon. It consisted of a short tubular barrel, with a trigger on the underside and a dorsal chamber that Raven assumed contained the ammo; but there was only a single round object within it.

'One here and one in the chamber makes two,' Popescu said, exchanging a glance with Raven.

'What are you thinking?' he asked her.

'I think you and Mendoza should keep your heads down for the next couple of seconds,' she said.

Raven grinned.

'Wait!' Mendoza said. 'The flag-man!'

They all looked back to see the soldier standing on the knoll behind them, making symbols in the air with his brightly coloured flags, calling in back-up. If they fired the antimatter weapon he would receive a many-times lethal dose of gamma rays out in the open.

'I'll get him down,' Mendoza said.

'Hurry. We don't know what the range on this thing is,' Popescu told him, as he lurched up the side of the ditch and ran towards the knoll.

'Take aim,' Raven told her. 'I'll call when they're clear.'

Popescu nodded and crawled out of the ditch. She stood above him, held out the weapon and squinted along the barrel.

'Don't stick around to see if you hit,' Raven advised her.

'No shit.'

He turned to watch Mendoza, who had reached the knoll. The coronel climbed up the slope, ran to the Mongolian and tackled him. The two rolled out of sight.

'Fire!' Raven said. Popescu squeezed the trigger and something fizzed out of the weapon's barrel. She dove straight into the ditch, rolling as she hit the blood-soaked floor among the bodies.

There was an enormous crack and a flash, and the ground shook. As the pattering sound of raining dirt and gravel began, Raven climbed out of the ditch and looked towards the fiery mushroom cloud. There was no sign of the Hos they had been pursuing.

'I didn't aim right at them,' Popescu said, joining him. 'I don't care if antimatter annihilation doesn't produce fissiles - there's no way I'm walking into that crater or under that cloud.'

'Eh. Near enough,' he said.

But Popescu went on. 'I'm not a nuclear physicist; I have no idea what kind of secondary products have formed in there. And I'd rather not have it explained to me by medical physicists when I'm bleeding out of my eyeballs.'

Raven shrugged. 'I think we'll all be spending enough time in radiation therapy anyway.'

'I thought I told you to stop trying to cheer me up.'

'Come on. Let's go see what they were carrying.'

Raven set off at a lope towards the cloud that billowed up like the angry snort of a fitful volcano. He hummed happily to himself as he ran, leaving Popescu to hurry after him.