Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  She’d have collapsed if the restraints hadn’t held her in place. She didn’t want to imagine the sight of her shoulders where they’d bitten into her; the bruises, she knew, would be spectacular. Almost as much, in fact, as the notion of living to see them.

  Her breath hurt, as though she’d just sprinted through a thousand crunch sit-ups, and she had to force her voice to be heard, even by her microphone’s sensitive pickup.

  “Missiles,” she gasped. “Where are the missiles?”

  “Hostile... ordnance.” Ch’ghan had to pause for some breath of his own, his own voice soft and thick with pain. A part of Nicole noted, automatically, analytically, that the intercom amplified his speech and cleaned it somewhat, to make it better heard and comprehended. “No longer... a factor,” he continued. “One attempted to follow. Stress tore it apart.” His speech was improving with use. The hurt was still there, in full measure; he was simply determined not to let it matter. Nicole wondered what Raqella thought of that and if the boy would try to match him.

  “The other two,” he finished, “burned in the deeper atmosphere.”

  “Where... are we?” Raqella asked. Another surprise for Nicole, as he didn’t bother hiding his own pain. Almost as though bravado was for lesser moments, when nothing but pride and status were at stake.

  “Heading south,” she replied.

  “Outstanding,” Hana grumbled. “Nowhere to set down for over a hemisphere but water and icecap. And in midwinter, too.”

  “The vote of confidence is appreciated,” was Nicole’s retort. “I’d rather not be surprised again,” she said to Hana and Ch’ghan both, “either find a way to hide us from them or for us to pick them up. Somehow!”

  “They cannot disguise their heat signatures as they maneuver in atmosphere, even up here on the fringes,” Ch’ghan said. “I have negative contact to the limit of my scanning range.”

  “We running or fighting?”

  Nicole’s eyes went to the mirror but her friend’s features were hidden by the faceplate of her helmet.

  “You got a preference, Hana?”

  “I don’t like being shot at.”

  She heard what passed among the Hal for a chuckle from Ragella and guessed he was baring his fangs ever so slightly in agreement with Hana’s sentiment.

  “They will expect us to run, Shea-Pilot,” he said. “Unaware that we have teeth.”

  “Are you guys serious?” came Simon’s cry from aft.

  “Operational hazard when you fly with Nicole, fellas.” Hana grinned. “Better get used to it.”

  “This is a shuttle, damn it!” This was Dan’s contribution. “We’re not rated for combat!”

  “Well, actually,” Nicole replied, “we are.” Thinking, Be real, Fahey, how the hell else d’you think we pulled through that high-G turn?

  “Fuel status, please, Daniel.”

  “Forty-one percent on the Scrams, skipper, eighty-three point six on the Roks. Better than eighty-five percent on the maneuvering thrusters. We’re in a substantially ballistic flight mode”—which meant they were gliding—“and, in case no one else has thought of this, probably leaving a fairly intense kinetic signature in our own wake.”

  “We still being jammed, Hana?”

  “Negative signal acquisition on any orbital station, but that’s hardly surprising considering how far off normal flight paths we’ve traveled.”

  “I thought the TDRSS network was supposed to guarantee constant contact regardless of position.” Simon was referring to a brace of communications satellites—initially launched in the 1980s—arranged in a geosynchronous orbit about the Earth, to serve as relay points for transmissions anywhere within the Earth-Moon system.

  “No joy,” Hana said. “Might as well open a hatch and yell for all the response I’m getting. But I don’t think it’s jamming per se, at least not in the classical sense.”

  “Explain.”

  “Makes more sense to feed an invasive program into the satellite’s C3 software, designed to chop us out of the loop on command. We’re transmitting fine; it’s just that all the local receivers aren’t listening. Same applies in reverse, except that their transmitters can’t get a definitive lock on us to establish contact.” Nicole heard a shrug in her voice. “Everything’s sourced and tasked and cycled through solid-state chips; compromise the software, the hardware’s rendered useless.”

  “I have a signature,” Ch’ghan, “very hot, a hundred kilometers behind us and pushing hard to close.”

  “Shea-Pilot,” Raqella, “could our own Command software have been corrupted?”

  “Now there’s a cheery thought.”

  “If this were Amy Cobri’s doing, Hana, she’d be more likely to rig the controls so we’d fly ourselves into the ground. There’d be no need for the interceptors.”

  “The flight is still young, Ace.”

  “It’s not her style.”

  “Blitzing software? That’s precisely the little bitch’s style; it’s how she tried to get to you before, only she killed that Secret Service agent instead.”

  “Seventy kilometers, still closing,” noted Ch’ghan. “I have a second trace flying wing position on the first. I have no contact with the third. I have establishing emissions from a fire control radar but negative lock at this time; the range is still too great.” But not, his tone made clear, for much longer.

  “Prime the guns to my stick,” Nicole said. “Ch’ghan, you handle any missile attack. I plan to fire at ten.”

  “Ten?” squawked Simon. “Ten kilometers?”

  “Depleted uranium shells, Simon, ground-attack tank killers. At the speed they’re flying, they’ll barely have time to realize the danger before they’re hit.”

  “If they don’t zap us first.”

  “I’m open to suggestions, Hana.”

  “You always say that.”

  “It’s always true.”

  “I wonder who they are?”

  “If we’re lucky, we’ll probably never know.” Unbidden memories flick-flashed across her mind’s eye: a young man spinning silently in zero, eyes wide with surprise, one hand clutching behind him for the arrow Nicole had shot through his heart; and a Hal, small and lean, lunging for her with fangs and claws, driven mad by an assassination indoctrination program intended for Nicole, staggering in midair, the sleek symmetry of her body broken by the impact of the bullet from Nicole’s gun. The boy had been a stranger; Matai, the Hal, genetically engineered to be Nicole’s psychic twin.

  Her hand began trembling and she moved it clear of the yoke, so as not to disturb the plane’s flight. Strange, she thought, how some memories stay with you, the bad more easily than the good, acid etched in crystal for perfect clarity.

  They still haunted her, those deaths, she suspected they always would.

  She heard Hana mutter under her breath. She couldn’t make out what was said, but it seemed to strike a subconscious chord, because it brought her back to full alertness.

  “What?” she demanded. “Hana, what did you just say?”

  “God, I hate these open circuits. I was just talking to myself, Nicole.”

  “Talk to me, now. What?”

  “It’s those guys behind us. They’re making a helluva lot of electronic noise for folks so far back.”

  “Maybe they want us to know they’re there.”

  “Precisely. But why? They may be the active threat but they aren’t coming that fast, we’ve got plenty of time to respond, they have to know that.”

  “They want us so intent on them, we’ll forget all about Number Three!”

  “The thought had struck my mind.”

  “Find him for me, Hana. Ch’ghan, you too! Flash me when pursuit closes to within twenty-five kay; until then, the third bogie has absolute priority.” She opened the circuit to the entire crew. “Everybody make sure you’re strapped snug and secure, things may get lively.”

  “What was that before, skipper?”

  “But a prologue, Simon
, to our play. Number Three’s got to be coming from above and behind,” she said, thinking aloud, “we’d better swing to meet him.”

  She nudged one of the pickle-switches on her yoke, firing the appropriate attitude thrusters, and the horizon rose up to fill the canopy as the nose dropped; while the plane pitched literally head over heels, she rolled it on its long axis so that when she fired a braking counterburst, the Swiftstar came to rest flying backward, in a moderate nose-up attitude.

  “Eyes peeled, campers,” Nicole called, “be nice if we could see the bad guys first.”

  That honor went to Raqella, as he pointed and cut loose with a hoarse cry of excitement—tinged, though he’d deny it vehemently, with the stress of fear. Nicole tried her best, but Hal eyes were better.

  “Two missiles,” Ch’ghan reported.

  “Jam ’em, Hana!”

  “Working on it. They’re locked on our configuration, internal guidance, we’ll have to burn them!”

  Which is precisely what Ch’ghan did, with the laser that was part of their weapons package. Two split-second bolts of light that ignited the onrushing warheads with eye-searing brilliance. He tried to acquire the launching platform as a target, but the hostile was streaking too fast down the gravity well; there was simply no time to lock and fire their own missiles.

  Nicole thumbed up the safety switch on her yoke, freeing the trigger, a squib of data on her HUD confirming that she had control. Around her was a cacophony of sound and activity, everyone seemed to be talking at once, a storm of voices—some human, most electronic—feeding her an unending torrent of data, all of it essential. She wasn’t listening, in any active sense of the word, she’d gone far beyond that; she let the information flow directly into her subconscious, which allowed her to make decisions on an extra-rational basis without stopping to actually think about them. In effect, to act from “instinct.”

  All this happened in less time than it takes to tell—a matter of seconds, really—from the moment Raqella sighted the hostile to Nicole’s pulling her trigger. A one-second burst, a hundred shells from the Gatling gunpod mounted flush with the fuselage.

  Think of it as strewing a handful of gravel in the path of a speeding car. The faster the car’s going, the more damage the impact causes. When the target’s traveling at better than seventeen thousand miles per hour, even a single hit can be devastating.

  At first, though, it looked like they hadn’t been that lucky. The hostile ripped past them, too far away for Nicole to get a decent look at its design—she hoped the hull cameras had more success—and with no indication of any debris.

  Nicole didn’t have any opportunity to worry about that, she’d already shifted her focus to the other two spacecraft, which had accelerated over the past few seconds and were coming into fighting range.

  “Boundary layer, Nicole,” Simon told her, doing his level best to keep the strain from his voice. “We’re starting to get some friction heating on the hull. We should restore our proper flight attitude.”

  She smiled at his deadpan delivery of that last line. He knew as well as she that she wasn’t about to do that with a pair of hostiles on their tail.

  “Make a note, Hana,” she said, hoping this would sound funny, “we need a way of shooting backward. Ch’ghan,” she continued, in a more serious vein, “can you tag the bastards?”

  “Negative target acquisition,” he growled in frustration. “They are as hard to catch as mercury, even with a ranging laser.”

  “I want that design,” Hana breathed and Nicole nodded. So much for their fond belief that Swiftstar was state of the art.

  Then, suddenly, “I have tone,” Hana cried, “they’re locked on us!”

  Nicole’s hands moved of their own accord, to the bank of throttles on the console between her and Raqella. It was like being bodychecked in pro hockey, as her body was hammered back into her chair, while the main engines went to full thrust. The cabin shook violently and a couple of displays hiccoughed from the systems overload as they tried to keep track of what was happening.

  “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” she heard bawled in her headset, Dan’s voice. There were red flashes all over her panel—she assumed his own dedicated console probably looked much worse—as she once more pushed the Swiftstar beyond its operating tolerances.

  At the same time, as their speed dropped markedly—and their altitude as well, the sudden, savage deceleration dumping them like a stone into the atmosphere—she swung them through another roll, worse than any roller coaster. Somebody retched but drowning in their own vomit was the least of their worries.

  It was Simon, she could tell from the hoarseness of his voice as he called her.

  “We’re inverted!” Upside-down, with the magnificence of the world filling the whole of the canopy, the clear Lexan already taking on a roseate fringe from the rush of air molecules over the hull. The entire fuselage was intended to handle a modicum of reentry heating, but the bulk of the insulation was along the belly. There was no way they could survive the way they were, an opinion emphasized in no uncertain terms by Nicole’s flight telltales.

  She ignored them.

  She had eyes only for the targeting grid on her HUD as the two hostiles, caught unawares by her sudden maneuver, popped past, unable and unwilling to break off their own descent into the atmosphere. They’d lost their chance to fire, she wasn’t about to do the same.

  The act was simplicity itself. With Nicole at their Six, the hostiles’ radar-deflecting configuration didn’t matter; they were pumping so much residual heat from their own engines, not to mention what was being generated by the friction of their own reentry, they’d become perfect targets for a heat-seeker.

  But the hostiles surprised her. As she fired, the two space-planes split formation, one going into a spinning corkscrew loop that made her gasp—with awe and admiration, both for the pilot nuts enough to try such a maneuver and the vehicle capable of surviving it—while the other increased the velocity of its own descent. Some might argue that it was trying to outrun the missiles, or gambling that they’d burn up before reaching him, but Nicole knew better. One plane was providing too juicy a heat signature for the missiles to ignore, sacrificing itself so its wingman could escape.

  It succeeded.

  Nicole didn’t bother trying to follow the other one down; as the first plane exploded, she rolled the Swiftstar right side up, adding a couple of microbursts from the nose thrusters to restore them to proper attitude. That took longer than she liked; the plane was wallowing, the controls unresponsive. She had no idea where they were at this point, somewhere along the way they’d slipped past the Terminator into the Earth’s nighttime shadow, denying her any ground points she could use for reference. The inertial plot would tell her eventually, once it unscrambled itself, but she wasn’t sure they had the luxury of waiting. If she committed to reentry, there wouldn’t be fuel for another orbital insertion; and, she had a suspicion, not much more for cruising about in the atmosphere. Going for the Black would likewise demand all their remaining fuel; if the third bogie—or any others that might have been missed along the way—chose to reenter the fight, they’d be sitting ducks.

  “Dan,” she called, “fuel stats.”

  “High or low?”

  “High.”

  “It’s dicey, Nicole. We blew off a lot of delta-V and sky, I don’t know if we can get them back.”

  The data flashed on her display and she considered it a long moment. The plane was shuddering as it encountered denser air, but that was no more than they’d experienced on earlier reentries.

  “Plot me an insertion window, Raqella,” she said. “Let’s get back where we belong.”

  They were ten seconds into the burn, clawing through the transition from hundreds of thousands of feet to miles, Nicole’s eyes flicking—nervously, she had to confess—from the fuel bars to the course display, where the Swiftstar appeared to be disconcertingly close to the lower edge of their flight path, when Raqella pointed
again. Down and to the left.

  It was the third hostile, the one that had jumped them from on high. Ch’ghan managed to swing a camera around and bring up a close-in view on the main screen. Nicole wished he hadn’t.

  It was obvious from the first that the hostile was doomed. Some of the shells had hit home after all. It was in Shadow, its flight crew opting for reentry rather than orbit and realizing too late they’d made a fatal mistake. From the heat signature of the engines, Nicole knew they were trying to echo the Swiftstar’s ascent. But they were going too fast. Their passage through the deep atmosphere had enveloped the spaceplane in an articulated teardrop of fire. A window was open on the main display, presenting an infrared view of the vehicle. Across one wing and the fuselage—just aft of the flight deck—was a scattering of hot spots, dull red pinpoints against the darker—cooler—upper surfaces of the hall. Impact points. As Nicole and the others watched, those hot spots grew brighter—red shifting up the scale to white—until at last they became visible to the naked eye on the main display. The shells had cracked the hostile’s shielding, and now friction was burning holes right through its skin.

  A piece tore off the wing, tumbling away behind as it blazed to brilliant incandescence. The hole on the hull became a tear, reaching back towards the fuel tanks. And then, as all had known it would, the entire wing folded in on itself. In the blink of an eye, the vehicle twisted broadside to its line of flight, tumbling through every dimension for the few terrible seconds it took the tanks to rupture and that awful heat to consume the remaining fuel.

  It was an ending a Viking would be proud of.

  “For what it’s worth,” Harm said softly, “I have TDRSS acquisition. Both Sutherland Mission Control and Edwards are back on-line, voice and telemetry.”

  “Nicole,” Dan’s voice, “permission to give Simon a hand? I’d like to unseal his helmet. He’s a mess.”