“Bradley,” Morton called. “He’s one of yours. Keeps asking for you.”
Bradley went down the ramp along one of the tire tracks, thinking the soil and shingle would be firmer there; even so his feet slipped several times on loose patches. Stig followed him a couple of paces behind, their biggest medical kit bag hanging off his shoulder.
Cat’s Claws were standing some way off the bottom of the ramp in the middle of the bushes. One of the Charlemagnes had fallen nearby, its bulk skidding for several meters through the undergrowth before it finally stopped. Just behind it, lying in the muddy wake of crushed vegetation, its rider had come to rest in a gouge that was slowly filling with water. His scarf was the emerald and copper check of the McFoster clan, though the proud colors were now hard to distinguish below all the blood that the cloth had soaked up. A very old-fashioned force field skeleton worn over his dark fatigues had burned through in several places. By far the worst of his wounds was a rent along the side of his torso, which was coated in bloody mud.
Bradley narrowed his eyes at the sight of the man’s thick ruddy skin with its subsurface lacework of broken veins. “Harvey? Harvey, is that you?”
“Dreaming heavens, it is you,” Harvey’s ruined voice croaked feebly. “They said you were here. I didn’t believe it, not really. I’m sorry. I knew in my heart you wouldn’t leave us to face that monster alone.”
Bradley dropped to his knees in the blood puddles beside the old warrior. “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to fight anymore.”
“One last battle, Bradley. That’s all. I grew so tired of training the youngsters, sending them out while I waited behind. I always needed one last battle for myself. And thank the dreaming heavens it was a glorious fight. Our ancestors are proud of us this day.”
“I’m proud of you, Harvey, I always have been. Now lie back, Stig’s got a medical kit, he’ll get you stable.”
“Bradley.” Harvey’s hand came up and gripped the front of Bradley’s shirt.
“Yes?”
“Bradley…you should see the other fella.” Breath rasped out of his mouth in the best laughter he could produce.
Bradley closed his hand over Harvey’s. “Don’t talk.”
Stig almost fell to the ground, staring aghast at his old combat instructor. “You’ll be all right, Harvey. I’ve got a medical kit that’s come direct from the Commonwealth. There’s healskin in it, and biogenics, the whole works.”
“Save it, lad,” Harvey whispered. “You’ll need it for real after the planet’s revenge.”
Stig bowed his head, tears running freely down his cheeks.
“Harvey?” Bradley asked. “How long ago did this happen? Can you remember?”
“I’ve got it for you,” Harvey said. “I watched when the monster’s truck went up the slope and noted the time. I knew you’d need it. The others, all kids, they never listen to me when I tell them what’s important.” He glanced at the ancient black chrome digital watch on his wrist. “Eighty-seven minutes, Bradley. That’s all it’s got on you now. I told you we put up a good fight.”
“You did. And we will finish the job now, I promise that.”
Harvey’s eyes closed. He let out a wheezing breath.
“Give him something for the pain,” Bradley told Stig. “Then get him into one of our jeeps.” He gently detached Harvey’s hand from his shirt, and looked at the scarlet mud stain it had left there as though trying to remember how it got there.
“Sir,” Stig said with an edgy voice. “We can’t move him. These injuries…”
“Harvey is going to the dreaming heavens, and nothing you carry in your bag will prevent that,” Bradley said. “We cannot wait here for that to happen, and I will not allow him to be left alone to die. Even if he only lasts a few minutes he will be with us, his comrades, as we chase our nemesis to its doom. Would you deny him that?”
Harvey laughed again, a weak burbling sound. His eyes were still closed. “You tell him, Bradley. Kids today, may the dreaming heavens preserve us from them.”
Stig nodded humbly, and opened the medical kit.
Bradley climbed to his feet. “Eighty-seven minutes,” he told Cat’s Claws. “We can catch it.”
Adam had considered the name wet desert to be a near perfect oxymoron, right up until the moment they started driving across it. Every day the storm that came in from the Hondu Ocean at dawn brought clouds that dumped between four and five centimeters of rain on the region before they finally blew out in the late morning. The wet desert was a wide shelf of land dropping steadily over hundreds of kilometers from the Aldrin Plains down to the shore of the ocean, a flat expanse that was made up from sand and shingle. Essentially it was the biggest beach in the known galaxy, although the last tide had gone out about a quarter of a million years ago. Geologists on early survey expeditions determined it used to be covered by the Hondu Ocean, which would have put the Grand Triad right on the coastline. It must have been quite something to see the lava from such enormous volcanoes pouring into the ocean.
