I didn’t doubt her, but I activated a drone and sent it sailing over the edge all the same. The Preacher was wired into the drones as well—she’d get their targeting information just like I would. “But?” I asked her.
“But, I’m out of rounds, your first turret is spent”—she nodded toward the turret on the platform ledge—“your second has to be close, and what Pax are left are those that have managed to fight their way through the deadliest traps you set. Some of them will have survived just because they were lucky, but enough will be good that it may well represent a problem.”
I double checked my HUD; we were slightly more than halfway to when Scheherazade would be able to swoop in and pick us up. We’d have to hold the platform for a little more than an hour against the Pax making their way up the stairs.
Could we do that? It depended. The entrance to the stairwell was a definite killbox, so we had that in our favor. There were still more traps below, and while they likely wouldn’t pick off that many of the Pax, they would at least slow their progress, make them check each landing for more. After that? We’d see.
High above, the sun was at its zenith, pounding down on the field of dead below. The fires were starting to burn out—grass fires went hot and spread quick, but they also went through their fuel fast. We’d survived the initial attack; now it was time to see if we could handle the close-quarters fighting.
I took up a position inside the bunker, next to Esa—close enough to cover her with my shield—then pointed my rifle at the stairwell door and waited.
CHAPTER 21
The minutes ticked by. The sound of the last autoturret died out, leaving it eerily silent on the tower. We’d spent most of the last two hours surrounded by a cacophony of gunfire; now there was nothing, just the far-away crackle of what few flames remained below. That was wrong. The turret had cut out too soon—it should have had plenty of rounds left, and it had been the last to start firing, which meant it shouldn’t have succumbed to radiation, either.
The Pax must have gotten off a lucky shot, taken it out of the game. Crap.
I breathed in, slowly. Breathed out. Listened, and watched. There was a scream—close, then farther and farther away. Maybe one of my traps had knocked a Pax soldier out of the stairwell entirely, and that was the sound of a bastard falling. Maybe it was something else. I didn’t like it.
The door to the stairwell twitched. It might have just been the wind; it didn’t latch particularly well. I put four rounds through the metal of the door anyway. I would have liked nothing better than to just swing the door wide and empty the grenade launcher below, destroying the stairwell and dropping all that rubble on the climbing soldiers’ heads, but I wasn’t sure what that would do to the structural integrity of the tower.
“Preacher,” I called out. “Switch positions with me.” Inside the bunker, I was close enough that the Preacher’s autoshotgun could cover the door. Where she was standing—just outside the concrete walls—not so much.
“Is that wise?” she asked. “If they—”
I didn’t like how she’d stopped speaking; I snapped my attention away from the door.
One of the Pax was climbing up over the edge of the observation platform.
That had been the scream I’d heard—rather than push through the killbox of the stairwell door, they were trying to climb hand over hand along the underside of the platform, to come up over the sides. The climb was dangerous—at least one had already lost their grip and plummeted the many, many stories to the earth below—but it meant they could come from any direction.
The Preacher’s autoshotgun took out that one—swiveled on its mount and blew the Pax straight off the side of the platform—as I swung my head down; the floor beneath our feet had at least a dozen red fireflies in my HUD, the troops who were climbing hand to hand directly below us. There were more coming. “Esa, watch the door,” I told the girl before I rushed out to join the Preacher.
They were coming from all sides. I was spinning like a top, finding targets, firing as soon as a head or even a hand appeared, but there were too many directions to cover. This was getting bad, fast.
“Hey!” Esa shouted. “Hey!”
I turned toward the stair again. She had her hand extended toward the door—she was holding it closed with her telekinesis, but I could see the metal shivering as the Pax hammered on the inside, probably thinking we had barricaded it somehow. I put the last rounds from my magazine through it, then dropped the clip and reloaded. The bastards were still trying to climb up from the outside, too—we were under assault from all directions.
That was when things got worse.
“Boss.” Schaz, reaching out through the comms. “You’ve got incoming gunships from one of the dreadnaughts in orbit, coming fast.”
Esa had used her gifts; they’d sensed it. Before, maybe they knew we were here, maybe not—they might have thought this was just a particularly well-fortified local position. Now, they knew their goal was here, at the top of this tower, waiting to be plucked up. The Pax were about to get reinforcements.
I swore, and tossed my newly loaded rifle to the Preacher. She caught it one handed, raising it to try and cover all sides of the platform at once, not asking why I’d suddenly changed tactics. I scrambled back inside the bunker—it felt like I’d been diving in and out of that concrete window all day—grabbing up the SAM and readying it to fire. “Why the hell do you need that?” Esa asked, torn between looking at me and staring at the door like I’d told her to. “What the hell is going—”
“Just cover the door, girl,” I growled at her, ducking out of the concrete doorway yet again, then reaching up for the broken ladder and climbing up onto the bunker’s roof.
I dialed my HUD to maximum sweep, scanning the horizon. Which direction would they come from? If they’d dropped in from orbit, it could mean any of them—they could be descending right on top of us. I was about to ask Schaz when I saw the first of them—or rather, my HUD picked up the telltale glint of engine discharge. I steadied the SAM on my shoulder, and prepared.
A moment later, the gunship itself came into view: a boxy, not even vaguely aerodynamic short-range craft, pretty much just big enough for a forward gun emplacement and with enough passenger space to carry a platoon or so of soldiers into or out of a hot LZ. The pulse had to be cooking the shit out of them, but the Pax didn’t seem to mind—where the hell were they getting so much armament that they could just throw it away like this?
The craft was approaching fast, still descending from orbit and smoking from the pulse: gunships, by design, prioritized speed and mobility over armor and shielding, that was their purpose. Small arms fire still wouldn’t do much against their defenses, but thanks to Schaz’s big box of party favors, I had something significantly more powerful than small arms.
I started warming up the SAM, flicking its activation toggles one by one. Waited the infinite five seconds it took for my HUD to synchronize with the weapon’s targeting systems—if I had turned it on earlier, the radiation would have cooked the whole thing by now—then locked on, and fired.
The rocket roared out of the weapon in a slow spiral. The gunship took evasive action—I could read in the ship’s movements a certain level of confusion, even panic, on the pilot’s part; they hadn’t been expecting this kind of defense, not on a planet that couldn’t manufacture or even operate computer chips—but it wasn’t enough, not when the ship had been heading directly toward the missile’s origin point at full burn, and especially not when its systems were already half-cooked by the pulse. The missile blew the gunship apart.
There were two more behind it.
CHAPTER 22
I knelt and reloaded the SAM, my blood rushing through my veins, adrenaline and exhaustion giving me a pounding headache, bad enough that my hands were starting to shake. Not good. Below me, the Preacher was still firing at the Pax trying to climb up from beneath us—the crack of my rifle alternating with the deeper thrum of the autoshotgun. I s
lammed the missile home, reset the SAM, raised it up, and locked on to the next target. Fired.
They shot it out of the air. Prepared, after what had happened to their buddy.
I swore, starting to reload the SAM again, but I already knew it would be too slow. They were almost here, and their weapons were spinning up. If they were willing to strafe the platform, that meant securing the girl alive was no longer their top priority. And that meant we were—
One of them fired a missile in return. Not aimed at the platform, but at the supporting column below. It didn’t matter that they still had men down there; it didn’t matter that taking out the column would certainly kill Esa. They must have figured out we were trying to extract her. Better she die than fall into the hands of their enemies—otherwise known as the hands of anyone not Pax.
There wasn’t shit I could do. I saw the missile roar out of its mount, the gunship hovering as it unleashed its ordnance, but I didn’t have anything capable of taking it out. Maybe if the autoturrets had still been running, maybe they could have, or if the Preacher hadn’t emptied the gauss rifles already, but that was moot, because—
The missile exploded in midair.
I looked down at the platform, gape-mouthed. The Preacher had dropped my rifle—small arms fire like that could never have taken it out—and instead, her hand had retracted beside her arm, revealing an energy cannon hidden in her wrist. That was not a standard feature of the Barious. She’d taken the fact that the pulse had refused to target her kind and retrofitted her own chassis to include a weapon the radiation normally would have ripped apart, counting on the pulse radiation’s inability to target Barious to cloak the cannon from its radiation. And with that hidden weapon, she’d managed to track and fire and hit a fast-moving missile before it could kill us all.
I was too stunned to be impressed.
“They’re still coming!” she shouted up at me.
I shook myself out of my shock and dropped down to the platform into a roll, scooping up my rifle as I went. The third gunship tried the same trick, but again, the Preacher blew the missile out of the air—this time close enough to the ship that it was rocked backward by the explosion. Stalemate, at least as far as missile attacks were concerned.
Meanwhile, the Pax were still trying to climb up from below—I took over covering them, turning and firing each time I saw one start to appear, tracking the red haloes through the steel beneath our feet—as the second gunship approached at a fast hover. The Preacher took a few shots at it with her cannon, but it was energy-shielded for aerial combat, a massively more powerful version of the same tech behind my intention shield; her gun just wasn’t strong enough.
Still, they weren’t strafing the platform, which they could have done. It looked like they weren’t finished with the idea of taking Esa alive after all. Why they’d fired missiles, in that case, I had no goddamned idea.
The assault door on the side of the gunship slid open as it came closer, almost on top of the tower, now. I’d known that was coming—they were about to drop troops with antigrav gear directly onto our heads.
I dove for the grenade launcher, picked it up, then rolled onto my back and emptied every single round through the open door: they couldn’t shield and deploy troops at the same time. Only a few of the Pax soldiers managed to deploy before the explosions rocked the gunship from the inside and it came crashing down, smashing onto the side of the platform.
The whole thing tilted to one side. It had been built as a landing pad for exactly that sort of craft, yes, but they were supposed to land on the platform over the bunker, not come smashing down on one corner.
Even with the whole world swinging sideways, I managed to scramble to the bunker’s ladder and grab for the SAM as it tried to slide off the roof, the roar of the Preacher’s autoshotgun somewhere behind me, answering the Pax troops who had scrambled clear of the gunship’s demise.
With one hand tangled in the ladder’s bars, I lifted the SAM launcher to my shoulder and aimed for the third gunship, the one that had retreated after the Preacher had blown its missile up in its face. Stalemate again—at this distance, their pilot could still evade the rocket from the SAM, but if they came any closer to try and deploy their troops, that would change.
Of course, if the whole platform was about to collapse, the point would be moot.
I saw the turrets at the bottom of the gunship’s wings beginning to spin up. They were going to tear us apart with a strafing run. I didn’t have an answer for that.
Then the turrets ripped free of their housing, seemingly of their own accord.
“Shoot!” Esa shouted from somewhere below me. “Shoot the fucking thing now!”
I could see the gunship’s engines flaring—it was trying to move, but it couldn’t.
She was holding it steady with telekinesis; holding it in place with her mind.
She shouldn’t have been able to do that. None of the gifted had been able to do anything like that. Lift a pencil? Sure. Lift a man? Maybe. Even holding up the collapsing building—as she’d been doing when I first saw her—had been a deeply impressive feat. But holding several tons of gunship steady, in direct contradiction to all the force its engines could muster? That was impossible. It was impossible.
Didn’t matter. She was doing it anyway. Which meant the pilot couldn’t take evasive maneuvers.
I fired the SAM. It was like shooting someone in the head at point-blank range. It wasn’t a duel; it was an execution.
The gunship disintegrated into a fireball, dropping to the scorched fields below.
The Preacher’s autocannon went off again; the damned Pax were still trying to get through the stairwell door. They were committed—you had to give them that. The whole damn observation tower was tilted to one side, and clearly wouldn’t be standing for much longer, and they were still trying to get through to their target. They hadn’t been told that their capture order had been rescinded.
I dropped the SAM—it went tumbling over the edge; I didn’t know where the last few missiles were anyway—and carefully retrieved my rifle. At least it hadn’t gone sailing off into oblivion when the whole world had shifted its angle. I crawled into the bunker with Esa, and trained the barrel of the gun on the stairwell door.
It started opening. I fired through the door again, the cracks of the rifle shots echoing against the concrete of the bunker walls; Esa made a little unintentional scream at the deafening noise. Soon, there would be more holes in the damned door than there was metal.
“Justified!” the Preacher shouted at me. “More incoming!”
Fuck. I turned; she was right. Three more gunships, moving fast, already loosing missiles. I didn’t know how many of those munitions the Preacher could shoot out of the sky, but I doubted it was that many.
Then Scheherazade appeared behind them, brilliant azure laser fire sweeping through the smoke and cutting the missiles apart in mid-flight. With a twitch of her engines she changed course, rounding on the gunships and giving them much the same treatment. The Pax craft were designed for troop transport, assault against ground positions, or maybe aerial combat against similar vessels, not for a fight with an interstellar-rated combat ship. They were deeply outclassed; Schaz took them out in one pass.
“Need a lift?” she asked over the comm, her new voice sounding smug as the Pax gunships fell from the sky.
CHAPTER 23
Scheherazade hovered near the side of the tilted observation platform, lowering her main ramp. Even amid the chaos of the battlefield, I had to admire her. Of all the ships I’d flown with, she was by far my favorite, both aesthetically—sharp, cutting lines that slashed, more than flowed, giving her a profile more like a blade than a bird, even with the back-set wings that swept toward the cockpit in her nose—and for her AI personality. Case in point: she adjusted her angle as she approached, so that the aft airlock ramp matched the slope of the decking on the tower, making it easier to clamber aboard in a hurry. Which we did.
Could I have stayed behind, packed up all the gear and saved Sanctum some coin in replacing it all? Sure. But I didn’t know how many Pax were still in the stairwell, and I didn’t know how long the observation tower had left to remain standing. JackDoes could bill me for the loss of the supplies. They were there to be used, after all.
“Orbit,” I said to Schaz even before the ramp closed. “Orbit, orbit, orbit.”
“This is so cool!” Esa was enthusing, passing through the airlock—which doubled as my armory—and stepping into the living quarters that made up the bulk of Schaz’s usable interior. I had to bite back a smile; I kept Schaz as spartan as I could manage, very much on purpose. Compared to most ships out there, she was downright humble. But I’m sure she appreciated the comment.
“Thank you very much,” the ship replied, making Esa jump.
“Is that you?” she asked the thin air around her. “Errr . . . ship?”
“My name is Scheherazade,” Schaz told her. “You may call me Schaz, if you wish. I would also suggest buckling yourself in, as it appears that the boss plans to take the helm, and that always leads to . . . discomfort for anyone in the common areas.”
“Stow it, Schaz,” I told her, making my way toward the cockpit, a straight shot through the open living quarters.
Of course I was planning on taking the helm. Scheherazade was entirely capable of flying herself, but here’s the thing about letting AI fly: they’re not very good at dealing with sentient pilots at the helms of other machines. AI versus AI is fine—whoever has the better craft wins, every time. But against humans or other thinking, fallible creatures, computers—even thinking computers like Schaz—were just no good at adjusting to the tiny, seemingly insignificant errors or tactics that non-AI invariably make when they have the stick. Strangely enough, our faults make us more effective pilots than machines, even more so than our better qualities.
“Stowing it, sir,” Scheherazade said, a dry note of sarcasm in her voice.
The Stars Now Unclaimed Page 9