My top camera showed me the platform rotating counterclockwise. I rotated too, clockwise, and sideslipped once more. I found myself exactly where I wanted and didn’t want to be—a meter below the level of the ’copter’s gun emplacements. The port-side guns passed by over my head, the forward-facing guns rotating toward me.
Compensating for once again being under the rotor wash, I rose, even though I knew this would put me right in front of those forward guns for as much as a second.
Stupid idea. But the weapons platform had to come down. Had to.
I rose straight across the forward-firing gun emplacement, rose to stare for just a moment at the surprised faces of the pilot and cockpit gunner as they realized they’d missed the window of firing opportunity I’d given them. The gunner fired. Streams of lead passed centimeters below my personnel pod.
Then I fired, spraying the cockpit with assault rifle rounds, emptying half the magazines of both my guns. Holes with cracks radiating from them appeared in the helicopter’s glossy plass windshield.
Both men jumped and shook. Bloody divots appeared in their unarmored chests, bellies, thighs.
I drew back, sideslipping to stay directly ahead of the platform as it continued rotating—keeping me out of line of fire of the port and starboard guns. There were screams, shouts over my audio receptors; it took me a moment to realize they were sounds of victory from the other ’gangers, not pain from the humans.
Then a Bale slammed into the weapons platform from the side. Meriah, taking her shot of opportunity. The helicopter’s aft rotor assembly went to pieces, flinging lengths of rotor in all directions. The weapons platform tilted, nose up, then backslid away from me.
It slammed down onto the graytop, crumpling. I thought I could still see some movement within the two gunnery stations.
I took a look around, checked my status board.
Gunner Two was still in the air! The drone she’d engaged was in burning pieces on the graytop. Lina’s HummingHawk wobbled; it had clearly sustained damage to the landing struts and starboard-rear fan assembly, but she was still up.
I expelled a breath I’d been holding for I didn’t know how long. I switched to radio so she could hear my voice. “Gunner Two, do you remember my orders of a moment ago?”
“Yes, sir.” Her voice was subdued.
“Execute them. And thanks.”
Status board—Eyeballs One and Two, Belly One reported in as undamaged and fully functional. Bale Two had expended all four of his missiles against the side of the Coracle bunker, and the concrete wall he’d been hammering was looking damaged but unbreached. Bale One was down to one unfired missile. Gunner Two’s guns were disabled and she was now headed to the fence and beyond. I had 46 rounds left in each of my guns and was undamaged. Team Coffee reported no change; they were still standing by.
Then, Parfait’s voice: “I have the second weapons platform inbound from east-northeast. It seems to have three heat drones following. Arrival in forty seconds.”
I grimaced. We were a little underpowered now. BeeBee and I had counted on having more guns and missiles at this point. But those were the resources we had, and Team Cream still had two objectives to accomplish.
I transmitted, Bale Two, go to cover. As soon as we’re engaged with the weapons platform, join Gunner Two.
Understood, Gunner One.
Bale One, go to cover and stand by to take your shot. I’ll deal with the heat drones and open you up an opportunity.
Roger, Gunner One.
Eyeball One, transmit to the potholer. Tell him ‘Take position’. That meant, “Exit your hangar and taxi to launch position”. Our window of opportunity would soon begin to close. We needed to have the yacht standing by to take off.
Understood, Gunner One.
Now I could see the second weapons platform, coming in low, a straight-line approach, its three heat drones a protective screen. Two flew ahead of the platform, one split to port and one to starboard, the third trailing behind. It would be an easy target at this range for a human-sized machine gun emplacement or autocannon. Sadly, we didn’t have either.
I gulped. This was going to be bad. I brought my HummingHawk down to hover beside Meriah’s behind the cargo trailers, which had finally stopped.
The weapons platform approached and then passed over the fence just north of where we’d blown our entry hole. It didn’t appear to have noticed Lina, who would now be on the far side of Kieran’s low hill, hiding. The platform passed over me and Meriah but it did not fire upon us. Inexplicably, it was now going faster, accelerating so that its drones were losing ground. I banked to follow—
The weapons platform banked, too hard to port. It slid sideways and down all the way to the graytop, smashing into that unyielding surface. It rolled, erupting in aviation-fuel flame, the sounds of impact and explosion audible over the air-raid howl still suffusing the air.
I’ll admit I sat there stunned. Luck? I don’t believe in luck. It’s something humans apparently have, but I’ve never met a Dollganger who admitted to experiencing it. Until now.
Then a voice, over our radio frequency, soft and a little sad: “Got him.”
“Trigger?” My jaw hung open for a moment.
Of course. Kieran’s laser. After he’d lit up the Coracle bunker so Jitter could sight in on it, he was supposed to have packed up and raced off for safety. Instead, he must have switched the laser over to pulse/combat mode and waited to pick off targets of opportunity.
He had to have lined up the shot against the weapons platform with meticulous patience, hitting the helicopter pilot as the vehicle made its closest pass to his position.
Disobedient, stupid, stubborn Dollgangers, every one. Bless them.
“Well done, Trigger.” I tried to shake myself out of my momentary state of shock. We weren’t done, our goal was still not accomplished. “Uh—Eyeball One, loft Belly One.”
“Understood, Gunner One.”
That would be our endgame. Belly One, hovering near the roof of the hangar where BeeBee had left it, would rise vertically until it was a distinct blip on military radar—and clearly well away from any resource the humans would be worried about. It would drift laterally until it was directly over the Coracle bunker. Human spotters in the spaceport tower would report all this, report that the Dollgangers were making yet another attempt on that bunker.
At some point during all this, perhaps the instant Belly One appeared on radar, the laser cannon at General Milfield Base would uncover itself and blow Belly One out of the sky. It would be a big explosion; Belly One still held its original bomb cargo, and BeeBee had rigged it to detonate if superheated or breached.
And who was waiting less than a hundred meters from the laser cannon emplacement, just below the exact line of sight between the cannon and our position? Wolfe and Creepy-Crawly were, with their laser. Kazzy was there, too, in Bale Three.
When the laser fired, its systems would heat up, making it a viable target for Bale missiles. Kazzy would fire one-two-three-four. Creepy-Crawly, her tripod-mount laser sighted in, would expend its entire power pack pumping a kill-level laser attack into the same aperture.
That would be the end of the laser cannon, the end of any weapon that had a reasonable chance of interfering with our yacht. Granny Knot would be able to make orbit.
On my radio receiver, I saw the 256-character alphanumeric code that was Belly One’s “go” command flash by.
The visual feeds from my HummingHawk’s sensors all shut down. The winch at the back of my pod whined and the weapons hatch thumped closed.
12: Light and Dark
“Hello?” I shook my head to reorient myself and returned my visual input to my actual eyes. I looked at the monitor screens in front of me—backups for the visual feeds. I’d thought, hoped, they’d never be necessary. But now they were my only way to see what was going on outside. I swept a finger across my starboard monitor, centering it on Belly One’s position.
The drone just
hovered in the camera view, not rising.
“Belly One is not responding.” That was BeeBee, coming across my built-in radio, not the HummingHawk’s communication system.
Bow? Can you read me? Text from Parfait.
I frowned at the image of the motionless drone. “What do you mean, not responding?”
And I replied to Parfait. I read you, Eyeball Two. Have I been hit by something? What did you see?
“It’s not acknowledging my order. Wait, it’s moving.” It was, in fact, sideslipping straight toward the hole by which we’d entered the base. It zoomed out by Kieran’s and Lina’s hill and then was out of my sight.
You are going to draw the laser fire, Bow. As Parfait transmitted those words, I heard—felt, actually, since the air-raid siren drowned out the faint change in engine noise—my fans spin up faster. I began slowly to gain altitude. Belly One has another job to do. It is going to drop its bomb on the juice factory.
I don’t understand. I did understand that in the near future, I’d rise above the ground-clutter threshold and become a target for the distant laser cannon. It would light me up, incinerating me and my HummingHawk in a bright, fatal flash. I relayed all of Parfait’s texts to BeeBee and set up a quick protocol to relay each new one as it reached me.
If I kept rising, Kazzy and Creepy-Crawly would deal with the laser. Granny Knot would fly. Happy ending, except for me—I’d be ash and melted circuitry.
Bow, you and BeeBee taught me how to do everything. How to recruit. How to bypass human security. How to build detonators. So I got Shinbone Ted, Silverback, and a few others working for me. They thought they were building us an advance hideout under the juice factory.
What were they actually doing? I unstrapped, stood, and clambered up onto the port-side mounting bracket to undog the top hatch. I’d be able to heave myself out, drop, and parachute to safety. Meriah would retrieve me.
Well, I tried to open the hatch. It didn’t budge. I swore to myself. When Parfait had shut that hatch, she must have slathered some fast-hardening resin in the mechanism. It would take me a little time to break my way out.
It would take me too long.
The night we blew up Kresh Assemblies, the first thing I did when I was alone in the transport room was load up a little hauler full of bombs just like the one in Belly One. I programmed the hauler’s route out of the factory—out of the city. To near the juice factory. And the humans did not detect it—they were too busy sending emergency personnel to the factory. Silverback and Shinbone Ted got the bombs into the juice factory’s nooks and crannies underground. Placed them exactly where I wanted them. I wired them to blow. There is a seismic sensor on them. Belly One’s bomb will go off against the roof, then the others will all go off, too.
She didn’t have to tell me what that meant. If she’d done her job right, planting the bombs in the right places and with the right triggering sequence, the power plant wouldn’t go up like a fission bomb, but it would spread radiation all over Zhou City. Thousands would be irradiated, a ghastly percentage of them fatally.
I shook my head, a hopeless denial. Civilians. Innocent humans. I went aft and got back atop my assault rifles. Maybe I could trigger them, blow a hole in my cockpit fuselage, squeeze out through the hole. But the human trigger mechanisms were long gone, replaced by electrical gear controlled from the HummingHawk’s master control system.
THERE ARE NO INNOCENT HUMANS. They did this to me. You LET them do this to me.
Text can’t convey emotions, but this message did anyway. Nor did I have to ask what “this” was. Her years of helplessness, abuse. Hers had been the most common sort of relationship there was between Dollgangers and their owners, and I hadn’t really begun to understand this sort of thing until the Escape.
So in twenty seconds you will reach radar altitude and die. In sixty seconds, Belly One will reach the juice factory. Goodbye, Bow. You butt-licking lap-dog bastard.
“Enough.” BeeBee’s voice was pained.
Another alphanumeric code flashed by on the Coffee and Cream frequency. A few moments later, I heard a boom like distant thunder.
BeeBee’s next message didn’t sound any less pained. “That was the bomb, Parfait. Two kilometers from its intended target. Bow, you have control of your HummingHawk.”
I jumped for my command chair, brought the aircraft’s ascent to a quick stop, began a descent, all before extending my fingertip data wires and resuming full control of the craft. Once I reconnected, my vision was flooded once more with the full range of video the HummingHawk’s cameras offered me. I reopened the gun hatch. And finally I breathed a sigh of relief.
Then ... realization evaporated the relief. “Eyeball One, we’ve lost our laser target.”
“I know.”
I chewed on that fact for seconds, several of them.
Granny Knot had to launch. For this plan to have been worth anything, for our future to mean anything, Granny Knot had to fly.
I resumed my ascent.
“Bow, what are you doing?”
I ignored BeeBee’s question and sent her a text order. Eyeball One, prepare to take command.
... Understood, Gunner One. Once again, there was no emotion in text. I wondered what she was feeling. But I didn’t ask about that. How did you know to blow up Belly One? And return control of my HummingHawk to me?
I didn’t, about Belly One. I just have remote detonation sequences set up for any explosive device I build. As for your HummingHawk—I worked a lot on our two Gunner craft because I knew I’d be in one. I detected some control lag in One, traced it down to some new code patched into its control system. But I didn’t know who’d patched in the code or why.
I nodded. So that’s why you took Eyeball One. You didn’t want to be distracted from figuring out what was going on.
That’s it exactly.
Thanks, BeeBee. I mean it. Thanks for everything. I was reaching the point where I’d begin to show up on the radar at General Milfield Base. I wondered what my end would feel like. I suspected it would be a sudden flash of light, heat, pain ... then nothingness.
In my visual feed, Eyeball Two rose from its position beside the roof of the spaceport tower. It shot straight up into the air.
A second later, it became a tiny nova in the sky, a bright flash that overwhelmed my HummingHawk’s cameras and fuzzed them out.
My mouth open, I stopped my ascent and began losing altitude again.
As the cameras regained coherence, I could see little bits of flaming debris float down from Parfait’s last position. Smoke rose from the same spot in the air.
Radio crackled in my ears: “Bale Three to Gunner One. I have three hits, I say again, three hits on my target. Target disabled.”
I actually couldn’t answer for a moment. My voice failed me.
BeeBee stepped in for me: “Well done, Team Coffee. Get the hell out of there. Potholer, go go go.”
“Roger that.” Kazzy again. Pothole Charlie, observing radio silence, didn’t reply.
I found my voice again. “Team Cream, we’re outbound.” I spun my HummingHawk in place and headed toward our exit hole.
***
Why did Parfait do it? Not the destroying-Zhou-City thing. That was pretty obvious. Why did she sacrifice herself when just standing by idle would have resulted in me being killed, as she clearly wanted?
I’ll never know for sure. But as she waited there beside the tower roof, knowing she couldn’t trigger her dirty radiation bomb, maybe she’d had just enough of a sense of tribe, of being one of us, that she wanted to be remembered for something other than a mass murder attempt. Maybe she wanted to be remembered for a final sacrifice that meant something. So she’d taken her third and last Scrap-Walk.
The depleted and damaged remnants of Team Cream didn’t stay together long. As the siren wail from the spaceport faded behind us, BeeBee spoke over the operation’s radio frequency. “I’m splitting off. Jitter, come with me.”
I toggled
my radio and switched to an encryption scheme private to the two of us. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“The juice factory. We need to disable those bombs. We don’t want an earthquake setting them off.”
“What if Silverback and Shinbone Ted try to stop you? You and Jitter aren’t a match for Silverback.”
I heard her laugh. “You think they’d try to stop me? If they’re there, Parfait was willing for them to die in the explosion. And they didn’t know they were setting up a bomb. They’ll help me, Bow.” She peeled off from our formation, Jitter following.
“All right. And, BeeBee? Thanks for saving me.”
“I had to, Bow. I’d have missed you.”
I think I rebooted again.
13: Facing the Music
Granny Knot wasn’t a big white rocket. A deep purple with gold markings, shaped like a manta ray, most of it lifting body in atmosphere, it took off from the Shavery Corporation’s landing strip like a thruster-based aircraft. From our location, we couldn’t see it.
We did pick up some radio transmissions from the government’s air controllers, asking about Granny Knot’s flight plan, demanding its return. But what could they do in the face of radio silence? It was a civilian craft on an ascent to orbit well away from any target. And they had no laser with which to shoot it down, no weapons platform with which to force it down.
We got brief text confirmations when it achieved orbit, when it exited Chiron’s gravity well and could engage its main drives, and when it—unmolested, unchallenged—reached the nearest wormhole entry point. Then we heard nothing more from it.
Chiron’s Dollgangers were in space.
We reached Coffee Summit and I battered my way out of my sealed-shut pod. Lina had an embrace for me, as did Kazzy and Meriah. Kieran, Wolfe, and Creepy-Crawly, traveling on foot and hoof, would take longer to make it back.
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