That was a lot of power, and he had not one set of wing bones, but two. The Stargazer had no way to back itself out of the ground, but it had plenty of power from the reactor in the engine’s core. All the electricity he could ask for.
“Toby, I’ve got a crazy idea,” Scott said.
“This is news?”
Scott laughed. “I guess not. But this one is a doozy. Come on. I’m going to need your help. We’ve got a lot to do and not a ton of time.”
If another attack arrived before he could put his plan into action, he’d have to find some way to fight them off. He might be able to do that, or he might not. The worst case was that the ship would end up damaged. That couldn’t be allowed. The ship remained his best chance to escape this mess and survive.
“I’m going to climb up inside the ship toward the engines,” Scott said. “Your magnetic feet make it easier to get around on the outside of the hull.”
He rummaged around in the storage locker. There had to be something in there he could use! The ship had damned near everything for just about any contingency. He could almost build a new Stargazer, given enough time. But time was the one thing he didn’t have. It had to be a quick fix.
“You’re making quite a mess,” Toby said.
“Yeah, well, I need to find something,” Scott said.
“If I knew what you were looking for, I might be able to help,” Toby replied.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” Scott said, sitting down with a sigh. “I want to attach the wing bones to the Stargazer. If I run a charge through them from the engines, it might be enough to get her airborne again.”
“Would the hull sealant kits work?” Toby asked.
Scott blinked. That might just do the trick. They were packs of a resin that hardened almost as strong as the hull. He’d used one to quick-fix the meteor damage after the ship had taken a hit out in deep space. They still had plenty of the stuff on board.
“Go. Start clipping the bones to the hull. I’ll run power conduits out through the airlock to link them up,” Scott said.
“Not even a thank-you?” Toby asked, shaking his head.
“Thank you. Now get moving!” Scott laughed. He ran to the ladder and started climbing back toward the engines. It was going to take time to get all this done, and that was the one commodity they were short on.
Hooking up long wire leads to the reactor turned out to be the easy part. Toby had only finished gluing two bones to the hull by the time Scott had the leads hanging from the airlock. He wasn’t thrilled about having to leave both airlock doors open for this to work, but there were no other holes for the cables. It left the ship vulnerable, but it would have to do until he could get a more permanent solution.
The ropes still hanging around the ship from Hector’s work crews gave Scott the tools he needed to get the other bones up and into position. Four were glued to the lower hull. Those were relatively easy to put in place. The four he put around the aft section of the ship were a lot harder.
More than once, Scott found himself swallowing hard as he looked down. One slip, and he wouldn’t be worried about finding the cure anymore. It put things into perspective for him in a way he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Yeah, finding the cure was important. He wanted to live, damn it! But living was important, too. Scott had given up everything to find the cure. Now he was risking his life again to get the ship airborne and go looking for it again.
His resolve firmed up again. Nothing was going to stop him from getting to California. If the cure he needed was still out there somewhere, he was going to find it.
Thirty-Seven
Scott stared up at the Stargazer from the ground, running his fingers through his hair. The ship had looked so elegant before. Now those clean lines were covered with wires and marred by bones stretching along the hull down much of the ship’s length.
“It’s a mess,” Toby observed from beside him.
“It looks like something that ought to be flying the Jolly Roger,” Scott agreed.
“Arrr.”
Scott laughed. “Come on. Let’s pump a little juice into those cables and see if this contraption actually works or not.”
“Maybe just a little juice. We don’t want to blow ourselves up,” Toby said.
Scott climbed the ladder, privately agreeing with the robot. They knew next to nothing about the bone material or why it worked, just that it did. Take bone, add electricity, and you had a gravity field. It was like running power through tungsten and getting illumination. But wildly different, and outside every rule of physics he’d ever heard.
Working was good enough for now. He could figure out why later.
Scott reached the airlock door and was climbing inside when something pinged off the hull next to him. He glanced over and saw a spear rebounding from the metal. It fell to the ground. Another spear impacted a few feet below him.
“Shit!” Scott said, yanking his legs into the hatch. The treeline was a wall of people, all of them brandishing spears. None of them looked happy, and he couldn’t close the hatch without cutting all the cables and undoing their work.
“Move it, Toby! Hostiles incoming!” Scott said. He darted inside, trusting the robot would follow close behind.
Scott all but dove down the accessway into the cockpit. There wasn’t time to do testing, not now. The cameras showed the horde swarming from the trees, rushing across the open space straight at the Stargazer. Another few seconds and they’d be scaling the ladder. Scott patted the pistol he still had belted at his hip. He could fight off a few enemies, but not that many.
For a moment his hand hovered over the button that would close the hatch. That would lock them outside, but for how long? Eventually they’d bash their way in, and then he’d be back to trying to fight them all off again. It wasn’t a winning proposition.
Instead, he picked up the little control panel he’d hacked together for the electrical cables. It had a long row of levers, each of which regulated the power going into one bone. The plan was to nudge the power up just a little to see what happened. There wasn’t time for that anymore.
“Whatever you’re doing, boss, I’d suggest you make it happen fast,” Toby said. “They’re climbing the ladder.”
That settled things. He wasn’t going to lose his ship today. No way.
Scott put his palm across the control box and shoved all of the levers up to the halfway position.
The ship shuddered. There was a creaking noise as the metal came under stress again. Scott winced with each new groan. The ship hadn’t been built to handle strain of this sort, but she was a solid vessel. He was more worried about the resin holding the bones to the hull. If it came loose, the bones would go flying up and leave the ship behind — at least until they snapped free from the power lines.
There was another shake and the Stargazer began to slowly rise from the ground. It continued to climb at a steady rate. Within seconds, the ship was clearing the treetops.
“Yes!” Scott said. He boosted the power to the nose-mounted bones, and the nose of the ship swung upward.
Once they were leveled out, he decreased the power across the board to about twenty-five percent. That seemed about right to keep them level, floating a few hundred feet above the trees.
“Company coming!” Toby warned.
Scott whirled back toward the open hatch just as the first snarling warrior came inside. He stood from the pilot’s chair and yanked his pistol from its holster.
At this point shooting was becoming second nature to him. His attacker took a few steps toward him before Scott pulled the trigger three times, putting him down for good.
“How many?” Scott called.
“Camera says one more in the airlock, one more outside. These guys are persistent!”
That was one word for it. Crazy might be the other. Scott couldn’t imagine clinging to the outside of a ship as it started taking off. What if he’d been taking the ship into orbit?
The second warrior came in through the inner door as he was thinking. Scott raised the pistol again and fired. The shot blasted the man backward into the airlock. He crawled backward. Scott frowned and shook his head.
“I’m not being stopped today. Not by you or anyone else.”
He fired again. The shot sent the man tumbling out the hatch into open air.
“Where’s the third one, Toby?” Scott asked.
“Still outside on the ladder. Looks like he’s messing with the cables.”
That was no good. Lose the power from those cables and the ship would fall. Just as he had the thought, the ship shuddered and leaned to one side, slipping slowly toward the treetops.
“He cut one, boss! Better stop him. He’s working on another,” Toby said.
“Boost power five percent to the other bones to compensate,” Scott called out.
Then he went forward into the airlock. Wind whistled through the opening as the ship continued to tilt and drift. Scott held on to rails as the ground swung by beneath his view for a moment. The trees were still coming closer, but it was a long way down.
He grabbed onto a rail with his left hand, holding the pistol in his right, and leaned outside the hatch. The man was there, hanging on the ladder. But his legs were sticking out straight away from the ship, like gravity was sideways! He was near one of the bones. It had to be warping gravity around him enough to leave him hanging like that.
In the man’s hand was a steel knife. He was working to get close enough to another cable to slice through it.
“Don’t do it!” Scott shouted, struggling to be heard over the howling wind.
He didn’t want to shoot, damn it. Anyone with as much guts as this man showed was someone who shouldn’t die like this. But he wasn’t going to allow him to crash the ship, either.
The man glanced up at him, his face a mixture of terror and fury. He must have seen the gun in Scott’s hand, but probably had no idea what it was. He grabbed the nearest cable and brought the knife up to slice through it.
Scott pulled the trigger.
The bullet slammed into the warrior. His mouth opened in a startled O, and then he shot sideways away from the Stargazer about a hundred yards before arcing toward the ground. A moment later he was gone, vanished into the treetops.
Scott hauled himself back inside the ship and holstered the pistol. His hands felt dirty, unclean from all the blood they’d spilled today. He’d gone from being a man who’d never killed anyone to someone who pulled the trigger without more than a second’s hesitation.
That he’d been forced to do those things because of the nature of the world he’d found himself in didn’t make it feel any better. But at least it was done now. The Stargazer was airborne. He could put all of this behind him.
Scott settled into the pilot’s seat once more and powered up the laser drive.
“It’s time to head west, Toby. We’ve been off track too long,” he said.
He flicked another switch and the drive lit up, sending a high powered beam stabbing out from behind the vessel. The laser was heavily attenuated by the air it passed through, only stabbing back a thousand meters or so before losing power. But it was hot enough to superheat the air it came in contact with. The expanding air behind the ship created a pressure wave that sent the Stargazer forward.
Angling the laser let Scott steer the ship. The switches on his new control panel would let him adjust altitude. Finally, he had the power to get underway. He turned the ship’s nose toward sunset and added a little more power to the laser, shooting the ship forward.
Thirty-Eight
Scott kept their speed down. He didn’t know how the rough patches attaching the bones would react to high speed, so it seemed the safest course. The last thing he needed was to have bones start falling off when they were moving a few hundred miles an hour.
Toby had already patched the damaged line, but the ease with which that guy had sliced through it just emphasized how vulnerable this quick-fix really was. He’d need to make more permanent modifications as soon as it was safe to land.
A cruising speed of twenty miles an hour was enough to get them out of the immediate area, anyway. Once they were clear of this little war they’d found themselves in the middle of, Scott could worry about finding a place to set the ship down.
He kept the Stargazer close to the treetops, too. Two dragons was more than enough. If he poured on the speed, he could probably outrun any dragon that saw them and attacked, but then he ran a risk of wrecking the ship. Better to drift along and avoid attention.
“That’s smoke,” Toby said, breaking into his thoughts.
They’d only traveled a couple of miles. The smoke was rising through trees another four or five miles away. There was a lot of it, too. More thick black smoke was coming up by the minute.
“It’s Hero’s Keep, isn’t it,” Scott said. “That’s where Tamara and Hector live.”
“The coordinates look about right. I’d guess the battle isn’t going well for them,” Toby said, his voice solemn.
“Not our problem,” Scott said, slicing his hand across the air in front of him to emphasize his words. “We have a rendezvous with the west coast, and we’re overdue.”
Toby didn’t reply, leaving Scott alone to his thoughts. The ship continued forward, the tall plume of smoke gradually coming nearer until they passed by about two miles north of it. Scott trained a rear-mounted camera on the pillar as the Stargazer cruised on.
He wondered how Tamara was doing down there. Was she fighting for her life, trying to defend those long tunnels? What would happen to the rest of those people, if the warriors fell and their enemies took the Keep? This was a harsh world. Scott had a feeling the penalty for losing was equally dire.
They’d hit him over the head and taken him prisoner, then tried to capture his ship. It wasn’t like he owed Hector anything. But then, Tamara had rescued him. Or tried to, anyway. She’d done her best to right her father’s wrongs.
Hector wasn’t a bad sort in his own way, either. He was a product of his environment. Scott couldn’t imagine what it was like, trying to maintain a population in a barbaric world where dragons ruled the skies. He’d been trying to do the best he could for his people. When Scott helped rescue Tamara from the dragon, Hector had stepped up and offered to return the favor.
He had honor. That was more than Scott could say about most of the people he knew back in the twenty-first century.
It made him wonder if leaving those people to their fate was the honorable thing to do. He realized it probably wasn’t, but damn it, he had to get going, or he was going to run out of time! It was sheer luck he’d even been able to get the Stargazer back in the air, and there was no telling how long he’d be able to keep her there.
“Shit. Shit, shitty, shittiest,” Scott growled.
He yanked on the controls, firing the nose thrusters to spin the ship rapidly around. In only a short time, he had the nose aimed back toward the smoke plume.
“We going back?” Toby asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s the plan?”
“We’re going to go kick a little ass, rescue Hector and Tamara from the mess they’re in. Then we’re headed out west,” Scott said, and he meant it.
Maybe he couldn’t leave these people to their fate, but his own would be sealed if he didn’t see to his future soon.
Scott brought down the laser’s power level as they drew closer. By the time they were over the little clearing in front of the Keep, the Stargazer was almost stationary. The battle raging below them had largely stopped, too. Everyone was too busy staring at the sky, trying to figure out what they were looking at.
The ship was
n’t a dragon, so most of the people below weren’t dashing away in fear. Tamara would recognize the ship, though. Scott just hoped she would be able to rally her people enough to take advantage of the confusion he was sowing.
“Hold our position above the clearing,” Scott told Toby.
“Got it. Where are you going?”
“They’re afraid of dragons, but not of the Stargazer? It’s time to show them why they should be.”
He stopped by the weapons locker and snatched the AR-15 back up, grabbing a vest full of magazines at the same time. Reloads were going to end up being an issue before too long if he had to keep using rounds like this. But while he had the guns, they represented an insurmountable advantage for his team. Scott figured he should take any edge he could get.
The breeze blew only lightly through the open airlock doors. Scott smelled the smoke wafting in with the wind. One side or both had used fire as an attack, and there were bits of still-burning material scattered all over the battleground.
He leaned out, scanning the field. The attackers had hauled up several large constructs on wheels. They were trying to pull those towers up to the edge of the wall so they could climb in through the top. So far, they hadn’t succeeded, but one tower was coming close.
The men and women hauling the tower were shielded from Hector’s people attacking them. But the cover’s angle didn’t give them any shelter from Scott’s weapon. He took aim with the rifle and fired a shot.
It pinged off a wheel.
The target was too far away to make aiming easy. He lay down on the floor of the airlock, bracing the rifle as carefully as he could, and squeezed the trigger again. This time, one of the attackers went down. He shifted his aim point and fired again. Another fallen foe.
Now the others were looking around, alarmed. The tower’s forward motion ceased. That would do for the moment. Scott swept the barrel across the field, looking for anything that resembled a command post.
The Quantum Dragonslayer Page 15
