“That’s no crater,” Lanoe said. “It’s a strip mine.”
Chapter Fourteen
A line of red pearls appeared in the corner of Lanoe’s vision. He pulled up his sensor board and saw heat sources warming up all around the crater’s rim—especially on the side nearest to the two fighters. “They’ve seen us,” he said. “Those towers around the rim. Do they look like antivehicle batteries to you?”
“They don’t look like anything I’ve seen before,” Zhang replied. “I’m still going to say yes.”
“No point in being sneaky, then. Break left,” he said, and pulled his FA.2 into a wide bank to the right. He didn’t need to look over to see Zhang headed in the opposite direction—they’d done this a thousand times before. She knew the drill.
He kept low, skirting just outside the crater rim, ready to drop behind it when things got too hectic. Inside the crater the towers with their crowns of slowly waving arms grew hotter and hotter. One of them craned its top around as if it were looking right at him, and a plume of dazzling red fire spurted from its arms. Plasma, he thought; the thing was shooting plasma at him. The stream moved fast but Lanoe was far enough away that he had time to duck behind the rocky wall of the crater before it struck.
Above him rock exploded in a shower of incandescent lava as the plasma hit the crater wall. A few drops of molten rock spattered down onto his vector field and were deflected harmlessly, but the temperature readings on his sensor board were ridiculous. For a millisecond there the rock had burned hotter than the surface of a good-size star.
Getting plasma that hot that fast required an enormous amount of power. He wondered if there was a way to make use of that datum. In the meantime—
Using his airfoils, he swung upside down into a tight barrel roll that let him just peek over the crater rim. The tower’s arms hung flaccid now, spent, but he didn’t want to give them a second chance at shooting him—if that plasma hit him it would overwhelm his vector field and roast him alive. He lined up a shot with his PBW cannon and poured fire into the tower, just below its crown, where it was held up by a framework of skeletal girders.
Accelerated protons tore through the steel supports. The tower crumpled over on its side and went down, falling with glacial slowness in the low gravity of the moon.
All that before he completed his barrel roll, taking him back down below the rim of the crater. “Those towers go down easy,” he told Zhang, “but there are a lot of them—I counted at least a hundred. And I’m guessing they won’t let us just walk away now. The second we pop our heads over the side of the crater they’ll start shooting again. We’re going to have to take out this facility before we can get away.”
“I have my doubts about the veracity of that statement,” Zhang said.
Lanoe smiled to himself. When she talked fancy like that, it was meant as a gentle jibe. If she’d really disagreed with his assessment she would have said so with a lot more cursing. Good old Zhang, he found himself thinking.
“You have a brilliant plan here, boss?” she asked him.
“Maybe. Those towers can’t be generating that much heat on their own—they’re too skinny. There has to be a central power plant here. If I can slag that, all the towers will go silent. I’ve got a full rack of bombs. You’ve got the better sensor package.”
“You always did know how to give a lady a compliment,” she replied.
He laughed. “On our approach, did you get a decent map of this place? See anything that looked like a fusion plant, or maybe some big geothermal loops?”
“Let me run an object recognition algorithm on my imagery,” she told him. “But tell me something—if it’s inside the crater, how do you plan on getting to it without getting fried yourself?”
“I guess I’m going to need someone to draw their fire for me,” he told her. “Zhang—this is going to be dangerous.”
“I didn’t join the Navy for the retirement package,” she told him.
He nodded to himself.
Good old Zhang. He tried not to think about the fact that good old Zhang was wearing the body of a twenty-five-year-old, a body she was supposed to give back to its owner. That kind of thing might stop him from sending her in on such a risky mission.
The two of them circled the outside of the crater, staying well below the rim, picking up speed. When they did this stupid thing they needed to be moving fast. Zhang linked her controls to Lanoe’s, basically letting him fly for her. As they bobbed up and down, barely clearing the boulders and jagged hills that littered the ground around the crater, she had plenty of chances to regret that decision, but she needed her hands free.
Her computer had good video of the inside of the crater, taken during their approach. It had broken that feed down into still images and studied them until it had identified every structure inside the crater, every building or piece of enemy machinery. It used a pretty good algorithm, but the computer wasn’t smart enough to understand what it was looking at—that was up to her.
Her infrared displays flickered through hundreds of magnified images, blown up details of the structures her sensors had mapped inside the crater facility. She studied them not with her eyes but with her bare hands. She’d become so adept at it that it felt like she was touching the holographic pictures, feeling the rough textures of the enemy machinery, swiping through dozens of them a second.
None of it looked like anything she’d seen before. There were bulbous shapes like clusters of mushrooms, long filamentary nets like spiderwebs. When the crowned pylon shapes of the towers came up she flicked them away in annoyance. There had to be something there, something that could generate all the power a facility like this needed. She found a couple of weird structures like weathered stones, or maybe like pieces of coral—irregularly shaped and riddled with holes, but no, a power plant should be giving off incredible amounts of waste heat, and the spongy structures were ice cold.
When she finally found it, the power plant was the most normal thing she’d discovered so far. A nest of thick tubes that plunged down into the central pit. They gave off so much heat they nearly scorched her fingers.
“Got it,” she said. “It’s geothermal. Right in the middle of the crater—you’re going to have a devil of a time getting in there.” She sent a copy of the image to Lanoe, then pulled her gloves back on and grabbed her control stick. “I’m breaking our link now. You ready?”
“I’m ready,” he called back. “Start your run anytime, and I’ll duck in once you’ve got their attention.”
Zhang nodded to herself. No time like the present, right? Even if it meant there was no future.
She pulled back hard on her stick, angling it just a touch to the left, at the same time firing her maneuvering thrusters so that she shot upward, over the crater rim, in a long, twisting corkscrew, giving the towers something to shoot at while making herself as tricky a moving target as possible.
The towers responded instantly, just as she’d expected they would. Crowns of segmented arms twined together and bright tongues of fire licked upward at her, plasma streaming past her canopy as she twisted away from it. Through her vector field, through her canopy and the flowglas of her helmet, still she felt the intense heat on her face, felt it make the fine hair on her nose curl up. She threw her stick over to the right and shot out of her corkscrew, then dove toward the crater at a shallow angle, less than a kilometer over the tops of the towers. More and more of them turned to point their arms at her, and suddenly a dozen plumes of superhot plasma came arcing up toward her at once, converging on her location.
She wanted desperately to crane her head around and look for Lanoe, make sure he was safely inside the crater and well into his bombing run. There was just no time, though. The plasma raced toward her and in a fraction of a second it would reach her. That much heat would vaporize her fighter even on a near miss.
So before it arrived she pulled the oldest trick in the book. She knocked her stick hard over to the right and made a ninety
-degree turn, her BR.9 shuddering with the strain but obeying her command. Then she pushed herself into a flat spin, stalling on her airfoils in the thick atmosphere of the moon. Her fighter twisted on its long axis until the crater and the planet in the sky switched positions over and over again, until she had to look away from her canopy so she didn’t get dizzy.
Above her the plasma streams converged and billowed in a fiery cloud that threw long shadows across the enemy facility. She had a moment to look down, and saw Lanoe moving over the face of the crater. Like a bat out of hell he shot across the strip mine, mere meters off the ground. She saw something else start to move down there, something with long legs and not much else—
But there was no time to worry about him. More streamers of plasma arced toward her, and she had to twist away again, just ahead of disaster.
Lanoe dodged around a big structure like a cluster of domes wrapped in a cobweb, then jinked back to the straight line of his bombing run with one smooth motion. Up ahead lay a great twisting plain of pipes and tubes. The ground fell away beneath him and he dropped hard over the clifflike wall of one of the inner terraces. Not far now—he could see the big pit up ahead, the hole the enemy had dug into Aruna’s side. Mining drones like spiders with hands scuttled in and out of the pit, dragging chunks of rock bigger than they were, headed for what might have been a conveyor system.
None of it made sense. He’d ground-strafed his share of bases and spaceports in his time, bombed bunkers and factories and yes, even mining facilities and none of them had looked like this. The weird machinery all around him ran on principles he couldn’t fathom.
Not that it mattered in the slightest. On the far side of the pit lay the thick looping pipes of the power plant, so hot they glowed with a visible sheen. All he had to do was get over there, drop his bombs, and streak away before anyone managed to kill him. Easy.
Hang in there, Zhang, he thought. Not long now.
He scowled and tried to shove those thoughts out of his head. Zhang knew what she was doing—how many times had they run an assault like this together? How many scrapes had they pulled each other through? She had her job to do, he had his, and if he started worrying about her safety it would just distract him.
At these kind of speeds, that would get you killed fast. He had to concentrate, had to pull this off flawlessly. Whatever the enemy was mining here, he couldn’t let them have it. Destroying this place might weaken the enemy—at the very least it would annoy the fleet’s commanders, which was more than worth the cost.
Something hunched and twitchy moved in his peripheral vision, far enough away he could barely make it out. He called up a magnified view and moved it to one side of his canopy so it didn’t block his line of sight. A forest of tall pipes lay just ahead of him, each pipe ending in a fluted mouth that pointed at the dark blue sky. A communications array? A pump for exhaust heat? It didn’t matter—he didn’t want to fly over those yawning mouths. He zigged around them, then zagged back, and only when he was fully clear did he spare a glance at the magnified view.
At first he thought it showed one of the mining drones, except this one didn’t have hands. Then he recognized the cluster of conjoined legs for what they were. It was a killer drone just like the one that landed on Niraya. The mining drones were no larger than big dogs but the lander was the size of a house. As low as he was flying it would be able to reach him from the ground. It would be easy enough to pull back on his stick and gain some altitude, get clear of the drone’s stabbing legs—but if he did that, he would expose himself to fire from the plasma towers. He had to stay low.
And the drone was moving toward him—fast.
He’d seen the video of how those things killed. He’d seen people impaled on their pointy legs. He had no idea if it could pierce his vector field with those claws, and no intention of finding out firsthand.
He pulled up a virtual Aldis sight and laid the crosshairs right on the lander, near its top, where it was thickest. The things were bulletproof, he knew that much, but Valk had been able to carve them up with his PBWs. Lanoe waited for the best firing solution, then pulled the trigger.
The lander lurched to one side as the particle beam sliced through a dozen of its legs. It tried to stay upright, tried to find some ways to balance on the limbs it had left, but even in the moon’s low gravity it couldn’t manage. It fell over slowly, legs still twitching and stabbing at the ground.
Which should have been fine, just fine—except a red pearl appeared in the corner of Lanoe’s vision, telling him his computer had detected a new threat.
He didn’t need a magnified view to see it coming. Up ahead, just off to his left, a hulking edifice squatted on the crater floor. A giant heap of coral or pumice, full of holes. Dark shapes squirmed inside those holes, squeezing themselves out through apertures that should have been too narrow to allow it. One by one landers spat out of the structure, tumbling over each other in their hurry. They took a second to find their best footing, but once they were upright they came scurrying forward in great leaps and bounds. Four of them—five—maybe a dozen.
All converging on his position.
Zhang twisted and turned, always staying one step ahead of the plasma streams. She was high enough above the crater now that the towers could barely track her—as soon as they fired she was banking away, flipping around on her long axis and accelerating into a new spin. She could have kept up those evasive maneuvers practically indefinitely—at least until she ran out of fuel—without being hit.
Of course, the towers didn’t need to get a direct hit to kill her. The heat from all that plasma lingered in the moon’s atmosphere. If Zhang could have seen it, she knew the air around her would be shimmering. She knew for a fact she had started to sweat inside her suit. With all the heat shielding both her suit and her fighter possessed, it had to be five hundred degrees outside her canopy.
The heat played merry hell with her aerodynamics. All the new heat fought with the moon’s cold air and suddenly she was being tossed around by hurricane force winds. Her airfoils had to change shape, growing longer and thinner as they bit into the methane wind, trying to gain traction. Her turning radius suffered and her aerobatics grew sluggish and difficult. All while her fighter’s cooling system struggled to keep her from roasting to death.
Not that it mattered to her, just at that moment—she was far more worried about Lanoe. She had to force herself to keep watching the plasma towers, because what she really wanted to do was look down and see if he was all right.
Well, she told herself, if he was alive he was fine. And if he was dead, she had no reason to keep up this crazy ballet. So she had reason to look for him, occasionally.
Protocol for this kind of assault included radio silence—you did not chatter to each other while both of you were so busy. She couldn’t call him up and ask him if he’d been killed or not. Instead she told her computer to track movement down in the crater and let her know if it stopped.
She was not prepared for the data it gave her—that the entire crater was moving. Crawling with drones.
She twisted around a streamer of plasma so intensely hot it knocked out some of her cameras, then she dove right through a patch of clear air before the towers could fire again.
Below her Lanoe stayed on the course of his bombing run, his trajectory as straight as an arrow. Not long now, no matter how this played out.
Spidery arms lanced at his canopy. Drones leapt toward him, getting impossible hang time in Aruna’s low gravity. Lanoe’s trigger finger was sore from firing his PBWs so often as he tried to chew a way through to the geothermal loops that were his target.
The FA.2 was a lot faster than the drones. As he passed them by some tried to give chase, only to fall away in his rear displays. But others kept appearing before him, looming into his path so he had to hop over them or weave around them. The actual landers, the six-meter-tall killers, were rare but they were his biggest concern. The smaller mining drones were mostly just a
nuisance. They could jump at him but he doubted they could get through his vector field.
Still, he had no desire to find out.
They obscured his forward view. They smacked into his airfoils and made his whole fighter ring as they were tossed away by the speeding fighter. Every impact knocked him a little this way, a little that way—always off course. Maybe that was the whole point of them swarming him.
Then one jumped straight onto his canopy and stuck there, its hands clutching hard at the carbonglas, its legs pulling back for striking blows.
One of those claws came down hard, just half a meter from Lanoe’s face. The point smashed into the carbonglas and dug in with a terrible screeching sound and for a moment Lanoe thought it was all over, that he was dead.
But the canopy held. It was made of strong stuff, the best the Navy could provide, reinforced by the intangible armor of his vector field. The claw couldn’t get through. It had left a pretty deep mark, but it hadn’t broken through.
He breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t out of the woods yet, though.
With the drone obscuring his canopy he could see nothing—if anything was right in front of him, he knew he would plow right into it and his bombing run would end very quickly and very anticlimactically. He had to get the mining drone off his canopy.
Only one way to do that.
He was flying ridiculously low—barely a meter away from scraping his undercarriage on the crater floor. He called up the panel that controlled his maneuvering thrusters and tapped in a very complicated series of burns.
Forsaken Skies Page 22