“Thanks for coming,” Moorefield said. “We just got immediate tasking, and I need your help.”
Even better than a moonlight walk. “What is happening?” she asked, nodding to Cook and Parker.
“You know the interface craft and pilots that arrived yesterday?”
She nodded. “I met one of the pilots and one of the ground team. They asked about riding whinnies.”
Moorefield nodded. “They’re here to blow up the transmitter the J’Stull are building. There are two ground guys who are here to designate the targets so the aviators can drop bombs on them.”
“Designate them? Like put a big orange piece of material with a bullseye on the targets? One that reads, ‘Drop here?’” She smiled.
“Not really,” Moorefield said, and she could see he was determined to keep the conversation absolutely serious. Too important for even a small joke. That’s a bad sign. She dropped the smile.
Moorefield nodded, acknowledging the change in her bearing. “There are two men who have lasers. Their job is to point the lasers at the targets. The bombs the aviators are going to drop will see the reflected laser energy and guided down to them, eliminating the targets.”
Cook’s and Parker’s presence made sense. They led the squad with the best whinnie riders, and, along with her, were the best riders in the camp. Except for Moorefield, himself, who probably couldn’t go because he’d been up all day and was currently on duty.
“We need to get them to the target?”
Moorefield nodded. “The two ground guys have both ridden in the past, but they’ve never ridden whinnies, and they need to be able to if we’re going to get them where they need to be in time. I don’t want to send you on this, but you’re the most experienced person I have for teaching people how to ride whinnies, and I need Cook and his men to provide protection for them and get them to the target. If you’re willing, I need you to keep them in their saddles while Cook’s squad gets them to the target.”
“Very well. When do we leave?”
“As soon as possible,” Cook said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and most of it—especially once we get near the target—is pretty forbidding terrain. It’s going to be a hard ride getting there, and may be an even harder ride on the way out if we attract the attention of the J’Stull.”
Aliza nodded. There was no way in hell she’d turn down a chance to make herself useful. Or to turn down Bo, at all, if the truth were known. “I shall gather my gear. Tell them to meet me at the paddock.”
* * *
She already had the whinnies saddled when the two privates arrived with Private Ivan Petrov from Cook’s squad. Both of the newcomers had big packs on their backs.
She nodded to the packs as they carefully set them aside. “Are those the designators?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the bigger one—Dorkhouse—said.
“They look heavy. Want me to saddle another whinnie to pack them along?”
“No, ma’am,” the other—Renaldi, she thought—replied. “Bad enough to have to carry it along. It’d be worse if the damn lizard sat on it and broke it or something.”
“The whinnies are quite smart,” Aliza said. “They’d do a good job with them. Probably better than you’d do if you fell off your whinnie and landed on the box.”
“All the same, ma’am,” Dork said, “I’d rather keep mine close to me.”
“Me, too,” Renaldi added.
“As you wish. Now, I’m going to give you a crash course in riding whinnies—”
“Can we do it without the crash?” Dork asked.
He sounds like he means it. She smiled. The man seemed good natured, if a little slow. His partner, while more mentally agile, sounded like an annoying New Yorker she’d had the displeasure of knowing once. “Of course,” she replied when Renaldi rolled his eyes. “This will be the quick, no-crash version. Whinnies are easier to ride than horses, because they’re smarter…”
* * *
Aliza stood from fastening the saddle’s belly-straps as Moorefield approached Cook’s squad to see them off. “Good luck,” he said to Cook. He turned to Aliza. “Be careful.”
She nodded. “I will. I’ll get them there and back, safe and sound.” She smiled. “With Sergeant Cook’s help, of course.”
Cook nodded. “Ready to go, ma’am?”
Aliza looked to her two charges. Dork was on Scout, Moorefield’s mount, as it was the biggest one they had, while Renaldi was on Trigger, a smaller male that had a more golden color. Dork gave her a thumbs up, while Renaldi nodded. He was less comfortable on whinnie-back and probably didn’t want to let go of the reins. “We are ready,” Aliza said.
Moorefield stepped up to Scout. “Take care of them, boy,” he said, slapping the whinnie’s shoulder. The whinnie purred.
“Keep a light on for us,” Cook said, then turned to the formation. “At the canter, forward harch!”
Moorefield watched Aliza’s back as the squad rode off across the plateau. It was never easy to stay back when you sent men out to do something dangerous, and this time, it was even harder. “Vaya con Dios, Honey,” he muttered quietly.
* * *
“Not sure you really want to do that,” a voice said as Bowden gave a tug on the last missile. He turned to find Byrd smiling at him.
“Strangest preflight I’ve ever done,” Bowden said. “I don’t know how it was with you, but before I ever got to touch a new model of aircraft, there were a bunch of ground school classes, emergency procedures trainers, and simulators out the ass.”
“I got some ground school, but all that whiz-bang computer shit was long after my time.”
“Yeah, I guess it would have been.” Bowden smiled and slapped the interface craft. “I barely know anything about the craft. If we have an emergency, the pilot will have to handle it, because I don’t know shit. The oddest thing, though—from my point of view, anyway—is that we never got to touch live ordnance until we knew it inside and out. I barely know what to look for from these weapons, and none of them have the orange ‘Remove Before Flight’ tags.”
“Yeah,” Byrd commiserated, “I don’t even really want to look at the weapons, because then I see how everything is cobbled together, and I start thinking, ‘There’s no way this shit’s going to work.’ Weapon safety isn’t a big thing with the SpinDogs, which is why I said I’m not sure you really want to tug on the weapons. Fiezel had one of the latches on a Sidewinder fail when he did that, and it came off in his hands.”
“Holy shit! What did he do?”
“The other latch on it held, or it would have dropped to the dirt, as there’s no way he could have stopped the 400-pound missile. While I don’t think it would have gone off, I wouldn’t say the same about one of the Skippers if they hit nose-first.”
Bowden shuddered. He’d shaken all four of his, along with the two Sidewinders, and he realized the drop to the ground was longer than the arming wires. If one had fallen, it would have been armed when it hit, and the 1,000-pound bomb probably would have gone off. Oh hell!
Byrd took a couple of steps closer. “Hey…you going to be okay with, umm, going along?” he asked quietly.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Bowden said. Mostly. “I’m just the airborne spare.”
“I’ll make sure I take out the control station,” Byrd said with a smile. “That way you don’t have to worry about it. Even if the Zoomie misses his target, the transmitter will be out of commission until they build a new control station. If they even have the parts to do so, which they might not. It’ll take them time to rebuild it, and by then we can have more people trained to fly the mission.” He chuckled. “Maybe we can even test out the weapons a few times, too.”
“Yeah, that would be nice.” Bowden smiled. “I guess, since you’re here, you’re ready to go?”
Byrd nodded. “Fiezel is almost done, too.” He looked at his watch. “And right on time. We’re supposed to be wheels-up in twenty minutes in order to be there when we told the peo
ple riding the giant Komodo dragon things.”
* * *
The column was riding down a dry riverbed which had cut a crevice through the foothills when it narrowed suddenly. Aliza Turan rode forward to get a look at why Sergeant Cook and Corporal Parker had reined in their whinnies. “What’s up?” she asked as she pushed her mount alongside theirs in the narrow fissure.
Cook nodded to the landscape in front of them. The crevice divided into three separate, smaller paths. “The map we have only shows the terrain near the target, and we’re not close enough yet to be on the map. We’re not sure which of those crevices is the right way forward, and we’re trying to decide which one to follow.”
“Can’t we send scouts up each of them?” Aliza asked.
“No time, ma’am,” Cook said. “We’re already behind timeline. If we get there after the planes go by, all of this is for naught.” They’d surprised a group of J’Stull soldiers, who had made a small camp in a place where the crevice widened significantly. Cook, Parker, and several of his men had charged the camp, riding through and killing the enemy soldiers, but they’d lost Corporal Johnson to a lucky shot by one of the enemy.
“What have you decided?”
Cook ran the back of his sleeve across his forehead to wipe away the sweat. “Nothing yet, ma’am. The one going to the right heads up toward some higher terrain and is probably impassable, which leaves us two. Parker thinks that we’d be better off going to the left as it’s less likely to get closed off, and I think the center one is more likely to keep us away from the indigs.”
Aliza sighed and looked at her watch. Cook was right; they didn’t have time for this…yet they had even less time to make the wrong choice and have to backtrack. Without warning, Athena, her whinnie, stood up on its back two legs, and Aliza had to grab the saddle to keep from being thrown. The whinnie trumpeted loudly, then it dropped back onto all fours.
Within a couple of seconds, another whinnie replied from somewhere ahead, and all three whinnies backed away from the split. The three Terrans looked at each other, then refocused on the center passage and the fast thudding of an approaching whinnie. Everyone drew their weapons as an enormous specimen rounded the last corner, side-winding swiftly toward them. The creature didn’t have a saddle or any other equipment to show it had been around humans before.
Athena turned her head and pushed the muzzle of Aliza’s pistol away from the approaching lizard. “Cook, Parker, put your weapons away. My whinnie’s saying this one is friendly.”
The soldiers reluctantly holstered their rifles as the strange whinnie approached and came to rub noses with Athena. It then turned and moved to stand at the entrance to the crevice on the right.
“Huh. It seems to think we should take the pass to the right,” Aliza said.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” Cook replied. “I know we’ve seen some pretty strong indications that the whinnies are smart, but I don’t know if we can trust them to make this choice. I mean, how do we know your whinnie really knows what we’re trying to do and where we’re trying to go? And how would it send that information to this, eh, wild one?”
“I don’t know,” Aliza said, “but I say we trust them.”
“I’m with the Sarge on this one,” Parker said. “I’ve done a lot of scouting in these hills, and that gulch looks like it’s going into some pretty significant terrain.”
Athena blew out her breath in a snorting noise and walked forward into the crevice on the right. The large male whinnie stepped ahead of her, jogged forward, and Aliza’s whinnie picked up her pace to match. “It seems,” she called over her shoulder, “that the decision has been made!”
She risked a glance behind her, and she saw the two men shrug and start after her. She turned back in time to lean into the turn as Athena negotiated a rocky outcropping, and she hunched forward to pat the whinnie’s shoulder. “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
* * * * *
Chapter 8
“Rocket assist in five,” Lotho Ferenc said once the tow vehicle had moved off the runway, leaving his aircraft—the mission’s lead platform—with its nose aimed down the long, groomed strip.
Although usually reserved for old-fashioned ramjets that had to be accelerated to generate the airflow necessary to ignite the engine, the RATO—rocket-assisted take off—modules had been mounted on each of the three combat craft. Conventional take off—vertical or otherwise—consumed a great deal of their dual-phase engines’ fuel, and Bowden’s flight was going to need every drop in its tanks since they would have to loiter near the target until they got the go-ahead from the laser designation team. Although built for operations in atmosphere, the SpinDog craft were not optimized for it, and they consumed fuel rapidly, even during the most normative missions—and this one was going to be anything but.
Five seconds later, the dual rockets on the back of Ferenc’s craft fired, and it leaped forward. Halfway down the runway, both of its dual-phase engines rose to a low burn, trailing additional plumes. Ferenc rotated with about a quarter of the runway remaining, and the craft soared up and away as the rockets died out. Ferenc turned downwind and jettisoned the spent rockets, which deployed parachutes and descended to be picked up and used again.
As the second craft bearing Fiezel and Burg Hrensku leaped forward, though, Bowden could immediately see something was wrong. Only one rocket plume emerged from underneath the tail of the craft.
“Bad rocket!” Jukhal Samkamka yelled on the radio next to him. “You’ve got a bad rocket, Burg.” No second rocket meant extremely uneven thrust, and that meant disaster. The only remaining question was: how bad?
There wasn’t enough time to correct with thrust from the vehicle’s own dual-phase scramjets, and frankly, this wasn’t the sort of failure the SpinDog pilots had ever had to worry about and for which there simply hadn’t been enough time to train.
Fiezel and Hrensku were on a runaway craft, and it was unstoppable until the rocket burned out. There was no sense hitting the brakes until it did—it would only have blown out the tires and stripped the brakes as the craft skidded along.
The rocket burned out just over halfway down the runway. Instantly, the craft’s spoilers popped up and smoke poured from underneath; Hrensku had jumped on the brakes, trying to keep the craft on the runway. But Bowden could tell it wasn’t going to stop in time. He’d once seen an F/A-18 go off a runway, and it had looked just like this. The two vehicles that served as fire engines—stationed at the 3/4-point on the runway—churned up a cloud of dust as they chased after the runaway craft.
The bird was still going about 50 miles an hour as it left the prepared surface of the runway. It traveled about 30 meters, and then the left main mount either went into a hole or hit a soft patch of dirt; Bowden couldn’t tell which. The left main mount stopped, even though the craft kept going. The mount was torn off in a spray of shredded parts, and the left wing dropped to the surface. The sudden increase in off-center drag spun the craft about 90 degrees before it stopped.
Bowden sighed. “And that is why we have a spare.” The full significance hit him a moment later: his was no longer the spare third craft. It, and he, were now a “go” asset. It was like he was waking from a nightmare, only to realize he hadn’t been dreaming at all.
“Wait…uh…maybe they’ll want to come and fly this craft instead,” Bowden said as his lunch threatened to come back up.
“After they just wrecked, they are going to want to try it again?” Samkamka chuckled. “Even if they are uninjured—which is unlikely—I find it improbable they will be eager to take our place.”
“Uh…yeah,” Bowden said lamely.
“There is a problem, though,” Samkamka added.
“What’s that?” Bowden asked, feeling like a drowning victim who’s suddenly been thrown a life ring.
Samkamka motioned down the runway. “They are still in the way. If we experience the same malfunction, it is likely we will run into them. Our normal procedu
re would be to not attempt a takeoff until their aircraft is towed clear.” He shrugged. “As they are missing a wheel, that will take some time.”
Bowden looked down the runway. It would be hours before they got the aircraft moved, and—even if they launched then—it would be dark when they got to the target. Who knew if the ground force would still be there, or if they would be able to see the cables anymore. To say nothing of the fact that the first craft would have to come back, refuel, and get new rockets. Which might also fail.
No. If we’re going to go, we need to go now. As much as Bowden wanted to cancel the flight, he knew he couldn’t. The weapons were untested, and some probably wouldn’t work. They had an airborne spare for a reason—if something went wrong with Ferenc and Byrd’s craft, then all of this had been for nothing, and the J’Stull would be able to call Kulsis before a second strike could be mounted.
He had to go. All the Lost Soldiers, both on the ground converging on the target and those in space, were counting on them to get the mission done. As scared as he was, and as little as he wanted to go, he knew there was only one thing he could say.
“We have to attempt it, even with the other plane sitting in our abort lane. It’s now or never.”
Samkamka nodded. “Yes, it is.” He started moving switches. “Ten seconds.”
Bowden pressed himself back into his seat. “Hey, Samkamka?”
“Yes?”
“If we get a rocket failure, swerve right to miss them, okay?”
“I will try.”
That didn’t give Bowden the confidence he was looking for, but he had no time to comment or object. Samkamka pressed the red button in front of him, and the rockets lit off underneath them. With only the launching of the other two craft to go by, Bowden was pretty sure both rockets had ignited as he was smashed into his seat, and he saw stars as his head slammed against the back of his helmet.
Waveoff (Murphy's Lawless Book 6) Page 6