Forsaken Skies (28 page)

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.

Then he pushed his stick forward as hard as he could.

His various jets and thrusters all fired in carefully timed bursts, keeping him from just crashing headfirst into the ground. Instead, the FA.2 rolled forward in a somersault, ass over teakettle, without actually losing a millimeter of altitude. He didn't so much as brush the ground.

The mining drone on his canopy wasn't as lucky. It scraped along the ground for a fraction of a second before disintegrating into a cloud of broken metal claws. Lanoe watched the debris tumble and bounce off the ground behind him—then watched the sky roll past above him, a sky like a mirror broken by streamers of plasma—then watched the facility come back into view before him as the fighter completed its flip.

He could see just fine, now.

And what he saw cheered him—the central pit, the deepest part of the crater, lay just ahead. In a few seconds he was going to reach the loops, the power plant that kept this place running, and he would release his bombs, and—

Right in front of him four of the big landers stood up on their many legs, forming an impenetrable wall.

Streamers of plasma cut through the air left and right, far too close. The sweat on Zhang's face dried as fast as it came, leaving a crust of salt on her cheeks and nose. She felt like the blood inside her skull was starting to boil.

Still she leaned on her stick, the nose of her BR.9 pointed straight at the ground. Her airfoils pulled her into a tight spin that was just enough to keep the towers from getting a solid lock on her. The more altitude she lost, the greater the danger that one time, just one time, a shot would get through.

She had her orders. She didn't care—Lanoe was down there, waggling back and forth in distress as he tried to avoid slamming into a wall of drone legs. She started firing long before she could actually see the drones with her cybernetic eyes, giving the computer free rein to pick its targets.

Superhot plasma washed across her canopy, but it was an old shot that had already started to dissipate. Just hot enough to give her a nasty sunburn. She knew this because she didn't vaporize in a puff of carbon.

Then she was through, below the crowns of the towers, and they stopped shooting. Most likely they didn't want to damage their own facility, but she didn't care—any respite was welcome. She saw the four landers below her, saw her PBW shots go wide, splashing against the dusty surface, making tiny, useless craters.

Computers never could shoot worth a damn. She grabbed back manual control of her cannon and stabbed at her weapons panel. Virtual sights were useless to her—she couldn't see them—but Zhang had been shooting PBWs since she was a teenager, and that was a very, very long time ago.

One target. Two. Three. Four. She yanked her trigger again and again, moving on from one target to the next without even checking to make sure they were down. They fell, but with painful slowness, and she could only watch as Lanoe shot right between two of them, two killer drones that hadn't finished dying yet. One of them made a halfhearted stab at the FA.2 but it was through and clear well before the blow landed.

Good old bloody old Zhang
. Lanoe wanted to whoop in joy.

She dropped down beside him, flying just off the edge of his left side airfoils, and he could see her through her canopy, see her wink at him. He gave her a cheery wave and then bent back over his controls.

The FA.2 raced over the innermost of the concentric terraces and then, suddenly, there was nothing beneath him, nothing but the deep pit. A floating display near his knees showed him what was down there and the vision cut through his ebullient mood. He couldn't see the bottom of the pit—the whole thing was full of spidery mining drones, their hands still plunging into the moon's rock and tearing loose pieces of ore, as if nothing at all were happening above them.

He tore his eyes away from them and saw the giant loops of the power plant before him, pipes so thick he could have flown down them if they were empty. He called up a virtual bombsight and let his computer find the weak points in the loops, the spots where they were hottest, the places where they'd been bolted to the side of the pit.

The bomb rack on the belly of the FA.2 was full of very smart, very tiny munitions that could glide to their targets without any human help. Lanoe tapped a virtual key and they all fell away at once. His fighter bobbed upward, ten meters up—high enough to draw fire from the plasma towers. He ducked back down before any of them got any ideas, then banked hard—
hard
—to get away from the pit.