Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [85]
Changing focus, he sampled more familiar bandwidth. As expected, all the usual tridee chutes were either dead or suffocating in visual static. Weald was silent. So were Chagos Downs and Waldburg and every other town that boasted its own chute or uplink. Nothing came from above, the dozen or so communications satellites proving as quiet as their land-based transmitters and translators. Destroyed during the initial attack, most probably. It was what he would have done. Blind and isolate your prey first, then butcher at leisure.
He had almost given up hope and had decided to fly his truck as close to the city’s outskirts as he dared in hopes of learning what was happening when something flickered in the lifeboat’s viewing alcove. It was smaller than similar images would have been in his house because the display space was smaller.
What he was picking up, distorted and intermittent, came from a mobile remote, an automated unit that was the property of one of Treetrunk’s two independent media concerns. He identified it by the small rotating logo that hovered above the floor of the lifeboat. There was sound but no commentary. Whoever had been traveling with the unit was quite likely dead, murdered by the invaders. Since communications both local and extraplanetary had been among the invaders’ first targets it was not unreasonable to assume that everyone back at the media concern’s main offices were dead by now as well.
Unconcerned and oblivious to the fate of its human operators, the independently powered robot soldiered on, obediently transmitting tridee images to a base unit that probably no longer existed. No home or commercial receiver could pick up its pictures. For one thing, such interception of a commercial signal would have been illegal. It would take a skilled technician working with specialized equipment to make the grab. Someone like Mallory, for example, working with something like a lifeboat’s all-encompassing emergency instrumentation.
Sitting alone in the boat’s cockpit, he watched in stunned silence as the mobile unit’s pickup roved the city. There was fire everywhere, and smoke that obscured many of the images. Trained to seek out the visible, the unit kept moving. In the absence of directives from an accompanying commentator or its home base, it relied on the fallback instructions programmed into its memory.
Not every building was on fire. Some had been spared or missed. Others had been melted, and gaping, smoking craters marked the prior location of those that had been completely obliterated. A man appeared from off-image left, running at an angle across the pickup’s field of view. Dirty and bleeding, his clothes torn, he carried a baby in his arms while a teenage boy ran along parallel to him. The man kept looking around as if in search of help or a refuge. He might have been an office worker or a technician or a civil servant.
The boy looked back, and as he did so, his head vanished in a rainbow puff of blood, brains, bone, and flame. Ducking to his left, the man tried to bend as low as possible while shielding the child in his arms. One of his legs exploded, and he went down. Unlike the teen, who had perished in silence, a horrified Mallory heard him scream. The mobile remote picked up the shrill sound with detached efficiency.
Dumped from cradling arms, the infant went rolling across the street. It too was screaming. One leg gone, the man began to pull himself across the street toward the child. As Mallory bit down on the back of one index finger hard enough to draw blood, shapes appeared out of the smoke, advancing from the left. There were two of them, tall and straight, clad in protective helmets and bulky body armor. One of them walked up to the crawling man, put the tip of a long, unrecognizable instrument against the side of his head, and activated the device. The man’s head blew apart, blood and fragments of bone splattering against the armored legs. The killer’s companion walked over to the squalling infant and without hesitation repeated the action. Mallory ordered his