by James Axler
Grant waggled his wings for a second, rolling in place as Kane lined up another shot.
“I hope you saw that, Kane,” he muttered, inwardly cursing that they had been forced to maintain radio silence for the duration of the sting. It wouldn’t do for someone to overhear these two “enemies” sharing tactics over their Commtacts.
* * *
KANE WAS WATCHING Grant’s Manta like a hawk, and so he saw the wing tips briefly waggle as the aircraft cut across the skies to the east of the river.
“It’s on,” Kane told Brigid, and he watched Grant swoop into a trajectory that would take him much lower. “We have an audience yet?”
“Still nothing,” Brigid replied, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. “We’re putting Grant in a lot of danger with this plan,” she reminded Kane.
“Danger’s just a vacation spot to Grant,” Kane snapped back. “It’s his favorite place to visit.”
They were not far from where Mariah and Domi had found the starcraft, just four miles from the burial site. The idea was that they would stage this dogfight in the vicinity of the previous appearance of the golden ships. Hopefully those same people would track this activity, and when Grant’s Manta went down in an apparent crash landing, they would come out of the woodwork to investigate.
It was a long shot, but right now—with no way of tracing Domi and no indication of where she was being held—it was all they had.
Flipping a switch on the joystick, Kane engaged an incendiary missile. It locked in place in the firing bay, waiting for the command to launch. Up ahead, Grant was bringing his Manta around in a long arc that would ultimately place him in line with the open landing area he had identified. Kane urged more power from the air pulse engines of the Manta, waiting for the target reticle to switch from green to red on his heads-up display. The moment it did, his thumb stroked the trigger and the missile launched, whipping ahead of his Manta in a streak of white smoke.
Kane watched the missile go, trusting that those extra hours at the redoubt would pay off now. The tech boys there had retrofitted one of his missiles with a false charge, all noise and light but no explosive—which meant it wouldn’t do much more than dirty the shell of Grant’s Manta when it struck. To be doubly sure, the missile had been primed to go off a few feet before reaching the target, meaning that—to the naked eye, at least—it would still look as if all that fire and noise was coming from a point of impact at the rear of Grant’s wounded Manta.
“I hope if they’re watching, they ain’t watching too close,” Kane muttered to himself as the missile streaked away with a shriek of burning air.
* * *
GRANT’S TACTICAL DISPLAY had switched to alert mode, informing him that someone had his ship in a target lock, and furthermore, that there was a missile cutting its way toward his rear even as he continued on the path toward the clearing.
“Beginning evasive maneuvers,” Grant said lackadaisically, rolling the Manta over as the missile howled toward it.
The Manta flipped over twice as the missile neared, and the missile adjusted its course in response, getting closer with every passing microsecond.
Twenty feet.
Ten feet.
Five feet.
Now.
Grant’s left palm slapped against the newly added bulge on the side of the control board, feeling the button there depress. It was big so that he wouldn’t miss it, since most flying skill is instinct, and trying to add an extra feature to a fighter jet—especially an alien one like this—involved hours of training to get the pilot used to it.
Grant didn’t have the time for hours of training and so the Cerberus techs had settled on a very big, bright red button as the best chance of his hitting the right control when he was thinking at one hundred feet up while traveling at close to a hundred and eighty miles per hour over the rainforest.
There was a fraction of second’s delay—made infinitely longer in Grant’s mind as he worried about something going wrong. Then he felt the back of the Manta kick like a mule as the explosive charge hidden beneath the plating went off, sending a stream of thick black smoke and small debris up into the air behind him. At roughly the same moment, Kane’s missile detonated, sending a burst of light coupled with the sound of an explosion out in all directions, giving the illusion that the missile had hit.
“And after that apparent pain in the aft, boys and girls,” Grant said, “it’s time to crash this bird and crash it good.”
Grant eased back on the throttle and sent the hurtling Manta in a plummeting spiral toward the ground, keeping the tract of open land in his viewport as best as he could without making it too obvious that he was still in control. He was going too fast, he knew, could feel the air buffet his wings as the Manta rocketed earthward, the shriek of engine strain loud to his ears.
Grant’s heads-up display was going crazy, alerting him that he was moving toward the ground too fast and that he needed to pull up now.
“Yeah, I hear ya,” Grant growled to the navigation system. “I just don’t plan on paying any attention.”
A moment later, the tallest of the trees came rushing into view and Grant gritted his teeth. This was what it all came down to, audience or no audience.
* * *
KANE WINCED AS Grant’s Manta dipped beneath the tree line, the trail of dark smoke marking its passage.
“I hope you’re okay in there, buddy,” he said as the Manta dropped out of view.
A moment later, the trees below shook and a flock of startled birds took to the sky, cawing angrily to one another as they hurried from the crash site.
“Still nothing, Kane,” Brigid confirmed before he had time to ask.
“Roger,” Kane acknowledged automatically. “Time we blew this mutie-chomp stand.”
With that, Kane engaged the full force of the pulse engine, sweeping over the crash site of Grant’s Manta as if to eyeball it before roaring away through the cerulean skies. His vehicle notched up to two hundred miles per hour in a second, was closer to three hundred by the time his shadow had crossed over the crash site below.
In five seconds, Kane’s Manta was gone, and the only evidence of its passing was the smoking shell of the identical craft it had apparently brought down.
Chapter 5
Strapped tightly into the acceleration couch of the felled Manta, Grant strained to peer out of the viewport and into the skies above. He watched for a moment as Kane’s aircraft hurried away from the scene, the imaging software in the heads-up display picking out highlights and focusing on the air trail it left long after the craft itself had disappeared from view.
“I hope you caught all that, bad guys,” Grant said, settling back down into the pilot’s seat. “Because I’d hate to have to put on an evening show, having already used up all our best tricks for the matinee.”
Grant pushed back the helmet and took a breath of unfiltered air before adjusting the straps that held him in place. There was nothing out there now, just the trees—which he had deftly managed to avoid in his faked crash—and the empty, cloudless sky hanging above him like a brushstroke of blue paint. He could be here awhile, he knew, and he had come prepared.
First, however, he checked the hand weapons he had brought with him. There was his Sin Eater pistol, which clipped neatly into a holster that attached to Grant’s wrist. The weapon retracted out of sight while not in use, its butt folding over the top of the barrel to reduce its stored length to just ten inches.
The Sin Eater was the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, a compact 9 mm automatic that both Grant and Kane favored from their days as Magistrates. The holster operated by a specific flinch of the wrist tendon, powering the blaster straight into the user’s hand.
The weapon’s trigger had no guard; the necessity for one had never been foreseen sin
ce the Magistrates were believed to be infallible. Hence, if the wielder’s index finger was bent at the time the weapon reached it, the pistol would begin firing automatically. The blaster was a reminder of who Grant had been, and its weight felt natural on his wrist the same way a wristwatch seems natural to the wearer.
His other weapon of choice was a Copperhead assault rifle, an abbreviated subgun that was less than two feet in length. The Copperhead’s extended magazine contained thirty-five 4.85 mm rounds that could be fired—or perhaps unleashed was a better term—at a rate of 700 rounds per minute.
The grip and trigger were set in front of the breech in a bullpup design, allowing for one-handed use, and the weapon’s low recoil permitted devastating full-auto bursts, chewing up anything that came into its path. A scope with laser autotarget facility was mounted on the top of the gun, but Grant’s hand-eye coordination was refined enough to operate the weapon without the autotarget feature.
Grant slipped the Copperhead down beside the pilot’s seat, the safety on and grip within easy reach. If anyone tried to pry open the cockpit without warning, they’d get a face full of lead for their troubles.
Certain that his weapons were primed, Grant reached into the storage pouch at his left and pulled out the book that his girlfriend, Shizuka, had loaned him. It was an ancient and well-thumbed copy of Family Traditions on the Art of War by Yagyu Munenori, a samurai treatise from the sixteenth century. He could be in for a long wait.
* * *
FOUR HOURS PASSED without incident. Kane had taken his Manta away to the north, settling down by a clump of trees in the densely forested Serra do Norte three miles from where Grant had set down. He left his engines powered down but idling, ready to reignite at any moment, should Grant patch an alert to him.
“This is taking too long,” Kane grumbled as the clock ticked into the start of their fifth hour hiding in the forest. “I’m going to call Grant and let him know it’s a bust.”
“Don’t,” Brigid replied from the seat behind his. She sounded sleepy, as if she had been dozing when she had first heard him speak. “Give it time.”
“How much time?” Kane asked, a note of challenge in his voice. “We’re going to start getting old if these twerps don’t show up soon. More to the point, my stomach tells me it’s lunchtime.”
“Then eat,” Brigid told him calmly. “You have ration bars there, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Kane grumbled and he reached into a storage pouch located beside his right knee and pulled out one of the foil-wrapped bars. He unwrapped it and took a bite, his nose wrinkling in disgust as he was reminded why he hadn’t eaten them earlier. “This ain’t food. These things look like cardboard, smell like cardboard and taste like cardboard.”
“Quit complaining and eat your lunch,” Brigid chided, closing her eyes again as she settled back into a light doze.
* * *
BY THE SIXTH HOUR, Grant was more familiar with the philosophical musings of Yagyu Munenori than he would have wanted to get in one sitting, and the straps of the pilot’s couch were chafing him no matter which way he sat. His Manta had long since cooled down, and the plume of smoke that might have acted as a location marker to any passing scavengers or cosmic tow trucks had long since faded.
Putting the book down, folded open and resting on one knee, Grant leaned forward and glanced through the canopy once more. The skies remained clear. The trees were swaying with the breeze and, as he watched, tiny, brightly colored birds flitted between branches, dining on berries or aphids, whatever it was that they were finding up there that was good enough to eat. Watching them, Grant remembered the ration bars he had in one of the storage pouches in the cockpit and pulled a face. “May as well eat cardboard,” he muttered, recalling their taste.
As he leaned forward, the book began to slip from Grant’s leg and he reached for it in a rush of limbs, bashing his right elbow against the side of the cockpit as he tried to stop the book from disappearing into the foot well. He snared it with two fingers, pressing it against the lower part of his leg to stop it dropping until he could get a better grip.
“Dang!”
Knowing Shizuka, Grant guessed the book had been in her family since her great-great-great grandfather—some all-wise samurai or other—had gone to a book signing in 1640. He could just imagine what she’d say if he managed to step on it while it rattled around in the crashed Manta’s foot well. “You stepped on the most precious and most sacred tome, which has guided my family for a thousand years, Grant-san. You have dishonored my ancestors with your big feet.”
“My big feet won’t be dishonoring anyone’s ancestors today,” Grant muttered as he brought the book back from the brink. As he did so, something whipped past the corner of his eye, and he looked up, peering into the cockpit viewport.
Blue sky. Empty.
Grant kept watching, folding Shizuka’s book closed as he scanned the skies. He couldn’t see anything different—but he could hear something. It sounded like a distant stampede.
“What is that?” Grant muttered, eyeing the sky.
Blue. Empty.
The noise was growing louder, which usually meant whatever was making it was getting closer. Grant took a moment to return the book to the storage webbing by his leg before pulling the flight helmet back over his head. The heads-up display automatically reengaged, sensors scanning where he looked, picking out details of the trees and the birds as they tracked into view.
“Come on, twitchy,” Grant muttered to himself.
Blue. Empty.
Then came that irritating moment of self-doubt, when Grant felt sure he had seen something but started to wonder if he had just imagined it. He ran his tongue along his teeth, counting the seconds, waiting for something to happen.
The Manta’s sensors caught it first, circling and highlighting it on the multicolored heads-up display. It appeared from the edge of the tree cover, traveling high and fast. Grant focused automatically, and the display focused with him, zooming in on the speck of light as it shot across the sky like a streak of lightning. The image magnified, magnified, magnified—and then whatever it was had passed, leaving only a ghost image in its wake. Specifications ran down the side of the display, giving Grant an estimation of its velocity and a bearing on its direction.
A moment later it was back, and the thundering horse hooves were suddenly much louder in his ears. This time, the Manta’s software caught it, bringing up a close-up still overlay image of the aircraft—and it was an aircraft—alongside the real-time moving speck, running down the full specifications including an analysis of its armor shielding.
It was light on armor, Grant saw, which made it fast. That was the classic trade-off with fighter jets—the more armor you carried, the more weight you needed to propel and the slower you became.
Grant reached forward for the control panel, his fingers drumming against it as he pondered whether or not to start up his engine.
Then a second craft appeared in the sky, this one much, much closer and accompanied by the deafening noise of galloping horses. Grant watched as it circled overhead before plummeting toward him, its shell gleaming like liquid gold. Before Grant could think, the Manta began to shake around him, and he felt himself being drawn up into the air.
Chapter 6
Kane was sitting in the cockpit of his own vehicle watching the skies, three miles from where the twin golden craft were circling the crashed Manta.
“Hey, Baptiste? You see that?”
When Brigid didn’t answer, Kane raised his voice and tried again.
“Hey, wake up, Baptiste!”
“I wasn’t asleep,” Brigid insisted, brushing a stray lock of red-gold hair from her eyes. “Just resting my eyes.”
“I hope you rested them good,” Kane snapped, “because I’m going to need a second opinion. You see tha
t?”
He pointed through the viewport and Brigid looked where he was indicating.
“What am I looking for?” she asked.
“A flash in the sky, some kind of light or something,” Kane told her, reaching for his flight helmet.
“You think it’s...?” Brigid began.
“Let me see if I can get a better visual,” Kane cut in. If the force that had abducted Domi was here, Kane didn’t want to move too soon and scare it away. He slipped the flight helmet over his head. Its bronze-colored faceplate covered his features entirely, granting him complete access to the Manta’s sensor technology in its colorful heads-up display. Numbers raced before his eyes as he searched for the flash he had seen a moment ago.
* * *
GRANT FELT AS if something was tugging at his whole body, like a magnet lifting the bones through his skin.
Around him, the Manta shuddered as it was lifted from the ground by some invisible force. There was no hook that Grant could see, no beam showing in the visible spectrum.
He screwed up his eyes for a moment, forcing himself to look beyond the sensation. When he opened them again, he saw the trees appear to descend around him as he rose gently in the cockpit of the ascending Manta. Up above, two bright gold aircraft were poised in place roughly a hundred and fifty feet above the ground. The vehicles were ovoid and looked smooth all over, like a pebble washed by the sea. They glimmered a brilliant gold, bright as the sun’s rays, which they reflected. But Grant could see something else within that gold—dark patches forming lines and shapes across the flawless shells. They hadn’t moved for the last thirty seconds, just waited there as Grant’s Manta was gradually drawn up toward them.
