Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

asteroid, out of contact with the
surface, to be pierced by relentless flickering beams of crimson
light. When he looked back he saw that still another wave of troops
was coming out of the trench. They were twitching like dolls as the
darting light threaded through them. Soon the next wave were
struggling to advance through a space that was clogged with
corpses.
    Space was sewn with cherry-red beams, a great flat sheet of them
that flickered, vanished, came again. When he looked up he could see
more of the beams, layer on layer, absolutely straight, that climbed
up like a geometrical demonstration. The light crowded space until it
seemed there wasn’t room for it all, that the beams must start to cut
and destroy each other.
    And still people fell, all around him. He had never imagined such
things were possible. It was as if he had been transported into some
new and unwelcome reality, where the old physical laws didn’t apply
-
    Somebody punched him in the back.
    With agonising slowness, he fell to the dirt. Something landed on
top of him. It wasn’t heavy, but he could feel how massive it was;
its inertia knocked the wind out of him. For an instant he was
pressed face down, staring at the fine-grained asteroid soil and the
reflection of his own hollow-eyed face. But still the cherry-red
light dazzled him; even when he closed his eyes he could see it.
    He twisted and thrashed, pushing the mass off his back. It was a
trooper, he saw. She was struggling, convulsing. A crater had been
torn in her chest. Blood was gushing out, immediately freezing into
glittering crystals, as if she was just pouring herself out into
space. Her eyes locked on Luca’s; they were blue like Teel’s, but
this was not Teel. Luca, panicking and revolted, thrashed until he
had pushed her away.
    But without the trooper on his back he was uncovered. Some
instinct made him try to dig himself into the dirt. Perhaps he could
hide there. But deeper than a hand’s breadth or so the dirt was
compact, hardened by aeons, resistant to his scrabbling fingers.
    A shadow moved across the light. Luca flinched and looked up. It
was a ship, a vast graceful ship silhouetted against the light of
battle.
    The Xeelee nightfighter was a sycamore seed wrought in black a
hundred metres across. The wings swept back from the central pod,
flattening and thinning until at their trailing edges they were so
fine Luca could see starbreaker fire through them. The Xeelee was
swooping low over the asteroid’s surface - impossibly low, impossibly
graceful, utterly inhuman. Threads of starbreaker light connected it
to the ground, pulses of death dealt at the speed of light. Luca
couldn’t tell if their source was the ship or the ground. Where the
ship’s shadow passed explosions erupted from the asteroid’s surface,
and bodies and bits of equipment were hurled up to go flying into
space on neat straight-line trajectories.
    Beneath the gaze of that dark bird, Luca felt utterly exposed.
    There was a fresh crater not metres away, a scrap of shelter. He
closed his eyes. ’One, two, three.’ He pushed himself to hands and
knees and tried a kind of low-gravity crawl, pulling at the surface
with his hands and digging his toes into the dust, squirming over the
ground like an insect.
    He reached the crater and threw himself into it. But again the low
gravity had fooled him, and he took an age to complete his fall.
    The massive wing of the nightfighter passed over him. It was only
metres above him; if he had jumped up he could have touched it. He
felt a tugging, like a tide, passing along his body, and light flared
all around him. He clamped his hands over his head and closed his
eyes.
    The cherry-red light faded, and that odd sensation of tugging
passed. He risked looking up. The Xeelee had moved beyond him. It was
tracking over the asteroid’s close horizon, setting like a great dark
sun, and it dragged a webbing of red light beneath it as it
passed.
    There was a brief lull. The light of more distant engagements
bathed the ground in a paler, more diffuse glow.
    Something moved on the ground. It was a trooper, crawling out of a
hole a little deeper than Luca’s. He, she, moved hunched over,
looking only half human. One leg was dragging. Luca saw now that the
trooper had lost a foot, cleanly scythed, and that the lower leg of
the skinsuit was tied off by a crude tourniquet. More troopers came
clambering out of holes and trenches, or even out of the cover of the
bodies of their