by Blaze Ward
“Anna Team, this is Heather,” the Sky Goddess was back. “Evan reports that the cops on scene have panicked and called for any reinforcements on an open channel. Mine security has responded. Expect more help soon.”
Just for verisimilitude, Trinidad opened fire on a cactus ten meters in front of the two cops racing for the flank. Pulse pistol really couldn’t set fire to a healthy tree, but the cactus exploded, throwing green, squishy guts everywhere. The two cops threw themselves on the ground with bawls of surprise.
And maybe a few needles stuck in sensitive bits.
Trinidad ducked as the other cops spotted him and opened fire on the building.
For fun, he took one of his normal assault grenades and threw it as hard as he could out into the street well beyond the officers, where it wouldn’t hurt anyone.
Assault grenades had no shrapnel at all, designed for clearing the hallway just outside a hostile airlock, but they were loud. And flashy.
The cops panicked some more, probably afraid they had just walked into a planetary invasion and were trapped in the crossfire. One of them apparently opened fire on a hardware store down the block. Trinidad watched the glass façade melt into a river of pieces.
“Boss, we could probably take them,” Nakisha called. “They’re pinned and pissing their pants over there.”
“Negative,” he ordered. “We’ve done all we need to, and they’ve got help coming. Somebody put an assault grenade right under the nearest car. Everybody else mount up. Nakisha, prepare to kill the first car you’re using for cover.”
Assents. Bok told his people to forget the rest of the boxes and board.
Trinidad watched Nakisha’s little junko bird fly true across the open space, roll to a halt just under the driver’s door, and go bang, tossing the car in the air and nearly flipping it over.
That was his cue, as the cops all started to run for better cover. He ran to the corner at a hard jog, holstering his pistol and making sure everyone below was in motion.
“Fire in the hole,” Nakisha called as she started to run for the truck.
Markus had the beast up on the repulsors now. Nakisha was running headlong, and got to the back bumper before Trinidad did, but that was okay. She needed to be farther away from the explosion when it went boom.
“Markus, start moving,” Trinidad ordered.
“You aboard?” Siobhan called nervously. “I don’t see you.”
She was checklisting noses out the back window, but she was looking down, not up.
In his head, Trinidad was counting.
The truck rose and started to drift forward, the repulsors fighting the overload Bok had put on the flatbed.
Trinidad bounced up in the air, put his foot down on the concrete balustrade, and leapt into space.
Behind him, the shot would have won the Director of Photography an award, as the thermal grenade went off. Unlike the assault grenade, thermals were all about damage.
The car flipped backwards on its long axis in a tremendous fireball recorded on Gerry’s camera, standing perfectly still to capture it. He was good about that.
In the foreground, Trinidad flying across open space, backlit and silhouetted by the flames, as he came down on the cab of the truck.
He had been expecting Markus to be moving faster by now, but hadn’t taken mass into account. Instead of spiking the landing, he was about to pitch face first over the front of the vehicle and get run over, when Vlad lashed out like a snake and grabbed his ankle.
For a moment, there was nothing below him but pavement and broken bones. Then that human anchor turned him into a figurehead, breasting the open skies of Barnaul and scaring away the bad sea spirits.
“Cut,” Nakisha yelled with a laugh. “Print.”
Just because he was a marine didn’t mean he had ever stopped being an actor.
Besides, they still had to get off this planet.
Receding Tide (April 21, 402)
Markus had apparently left the front gate to the starport field open on his last run to town. Siobhan could see it propped open now as the truck hurtled at high speed down the rough roadway, an overloaded tortoise with its ass on fire.
Anna was dark and invisible from here, as she should be, but Cherokee was lit up like a Midwinter tree.
“Yamaguchi,” she ordered over the line as they entered the reservation. “Kill all external lights, right now. We know where you are. The bad guys don’t need to.”
Long pause, and then that lit corner of the field went dark.
Hopefully, whoever was chasing them hadn’t put two and two together. The field was completely flat and bare, but in the darkness, both ships were just suggestions rather than neon enticements to come over and party.
If they could gain a few extra minutes to load, there would be that much more stuff to get everyone to the next waypoint. Probably not enough to get them home, but every day got them farther away from bad guys.
One advantage of a repulsor truck was that the pits in the road got smoothed out. She could only imagine how rough this ride would be with the sorts of solid tires those cops had been using, back when their vehicles worked.
Still, everyone had gotten away unhurt, and they had a head start on Johnny Law catching up. Time to put it to use.
“405, this is Siobhan,” she tried to sound calm, “What’s our company look like?”
“You have two vehicles headed in your direction, Team Anna,” Heather replied a beat later. “By scale, the front one looks like a riot control van. Think your chassis, with an armored box on it and a turret weapon up top. Can’t tell how big the gun is, but they’re chasing you.”
“What’s the second one?” Siobhan asked when she realized Heather had stopped talking suddenly.
“Uhm, that thing’s a dump truck, right, Evan?” Heather said, apparently forgetting the line was voice-activated. “Really? Crap.”
Now Siobhan was beginning to get nervous.
“Team Anna, be advised,” Heather continued in a sharp, professional voice. “Second vehicle is a dump truck from the mine. For scale, the tires are ten meters in diameter, and the truck you are currently driving would fit sideways in the bed. Scan suggests that it might outweigh Anna’s Vindication on pure, empty mass.”
Yup. Crap.
“Understood, 405,” Siobhan said. “Anything you can do to slow it down?”
“Negative, Siobhan,” Phil’s firm voice suddenly came on the line. “We would need a Type-3 tuned just right, to even penetrate that depth of atmosphere. Judge your situation accordingly. You are on your own.”
“Can you tell that Bedrov fellow it would be nice to add a single-shot Primary on the nose of the ship?” Siobhan asked. “Turn us into a unicorn or something, even for just one blast.”
“Not the worst idea I’ve heard today, Siobhan,” Phil said. “What’s your status?”
“Sixty seconds to Cherokee,” she answered. “Then unloading. We’ll just drive the truck onto Anna and run, after that.”
“Don’t stay too long,” he chided her. “We don’t know if that turret can kill either of you, if he gets close.”
Yeah, no doubts on that one.
“Cherokee, this is Dunklin,” Marcus called out. “Open your aft bay doors now and make sure to stay inside the shuttle until we come to a stop. We’re coming in hot.”
“Acknowledged,” Yamaguchi replied.
Siobhan turned to peek back over the top of the truck, looking for gaps between legs and crates. For a moment so short it was probably a strobe’s afterimage, she caught a wall of headlights in the distance. Not to the gate yet, but closing fast.
A gun on Anna, any gun, would have been nice, right about now. Get Cherokee loaded fast, since he was the lighter vehicle, then cross to Anna.
“Boss,” Bok was suddenly in her ear. “When Markus stops moving, you need to get your ass aboard the freighter and start your preflight.”
“I need to be here,” she retorted. In command, as it were.
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“Negative,” the Boatswain snarled out the words. “We already have a partial load. If we can escape with that, we come out ahead, even if everybody else is captured. Your place is flying us home.”
Siobhan ground her teeth rather than answer. He was right, of course. Bok had been doing this since before she was born, and had his shit together.
But it stung. She couldn’t be doing anymore. She had to be commanding.
She turned to make eye contact through the back glass of the cab. He was all of about ten centimeters away. Apparently he had been staring at the back of her head.
“Understood,” she nodded defeat.
“Ten seconds,” Markus yelled. “Everybody grab on. And somebody grab Trinidad, too.”
That got a round of laughs on the comm that took some of the weight off Siobhan’s shoulders. She didn’t have to do it all. She had a team of crazy, efficient pirates working for her.
The truck grounded hard, dragging the skids nearly a meter rather than stopping first and landing. It saved them several seconds.
And Trinidad would have gone ass over tea kettle, if he’d still been on top of the cab.
Pirates exploded into motion.
Siobhan was out the driver’s door a second after Markus. She took one look at things, and then ran the fifty meters to the front door of Anna’s Vindication, a whale’s mouth intent on swallowing her whole.
Bok’s two helpers were racing the other direction to help unload. They waved as they went by silently, and she was alone for the first time in a week.
Into the mouth of the beast. Across the throat. Up the gullet into the brain.
Up the sinuses? Something.
The bridge had not changed. Her autopilot course was still plotted. All anybody had to do was push button number one on the left side, and the ship would take itself to orbit politely enough.
But there might be incoming fire shortly.
She dialed up a link to 405 and put a map on the screen, updated as the two vehicles, big and monstrous, raced closer.
Another screen was slaved to a camera turret midship. She spun that around and watched big men and women bodily toss heavy crates to the ground, where others threw them on hand trucks and hauled them off. Even at fifty kilograms a box, the group was moving fast.
Siobhan brought the engines to ready and the repulsors just shy of lifting the vehicle, but still starting to kick up grit. Anna would get much heavier when the truck drove aboard, but having the collective tuned now saved her two or three seconds then.
Might make all the difference.
In the distance, the bad guys crept closer.
“Cherokee, you are full,” Bok called over the radio. “Seal now and go for broke.”
“Roger that.”
On the camera, the truck began rumbling towards Anna, men and women running full tilt in its wake.
The shuttle’s repulsors came alive and the vessel took off.
A flash of light cut the night.
“Shit,” Yamaguchi yelled. “What was that?”
“You are taking ground fire from the lead vehicle, Cherokee,” Siobhan said calmly. She hoped it sounded calm. “Begin evasive maneuvers.”
The man didn’t answer, but the shuttle’s ascent changed chord. Grew flatter and started to wiggle.
The second shot came closer but missed. Still damned good marksmanship, especially from a moving platform at an evading target.
“Markus,” Siobhan called. “Land hard when you get in and lock yourself to the deck with the magnets. We’ll worry about dents in orbit. Bok, tell me when everyone is safe. Don’t worry about closing the hatch first.”
Both men answered.
Siobhan saw the third shot just miss clipping the shuttle. She didn’t know if they could shoot it down or not. Land vehicles were at a different scale from spaceships, but he only had to get lucky.
“All accounted for,” Bok called. “Closing the bay door.”
“Everyone grab something solid now,” Siobhan answered, lifting the repulsor collective another notch and slamming the engine button to full thrust.
With the ship going forward, anyone not holding on would slide deeper into the ship, but that was acceptable, since the aft end was sealed off. Bruised and broken bones beat prisoner of war.
Rather than go for sky, Siobhan held the repulsors just high enough to get the ship to about fifty meters off the deck. She would never try this stunt anyplace that wasn’t flat as a snooker table, but that’s exactly what she had to work with here.
“Hang on,” she repeated, slamming the thrusters forward so Anna could work up a good head of steam.
Siobhan spun the camera turret around aft and lit every external flood the ship had. She let the altitude dip to twenty meters as her velocity increased.
Overhead, that fourth shot never went at Cherokee, as the gunner suddenly realized she was on a ramming course with their little tank. Siobhan was close enough to see the barrel suddenly slew around and start to depress, trying to line Moby Dick up for a shot.
The mouth of the great whale finally slammed shut with an audible jolt that rang through the entire hull. Around her, Siobhan felt Anna speed up, without that extra parachute slowing her.
Siobhan laughed out loud with the extra, near-orgasmic surge of power from her mount, and drifted the ship to the left.
The gunner’s shot went high anyway, but he also hadn’t been able to track her sideslip.
Three. Two. One.
Siobhan pushed hard at the altitude controls and Anna stood on her ass in the moonlight, like a horse rearing up.
For the briefest moment, Siobhan was afraid she had cut it too close, as the aft of the ship pitched down as the bow when up, but there was a lot of power driving them now.
Anna’s Vindication cleared the top of the riot control vehicle by at least five meters, near as she could tell, but that was enough.
Flying this low, this fast, and then pushing the engines into the ground had created the effect she wanted, a smoke screen of dust and dirt blasted into the air in her wake, solid enough to blind everybody, especially with every light turned on and diffusing through the cloud.
And she cleared the front end of that stupid dump truck by at least twenty meters, which was impressive, since the damned thing was at least fifty meters tall.
Siobhan wasn’t too sure she couldn’t have landed Anna on the back of the thing, if the top was flat, rather than a bowl.
But the guys on the ground stopped firing, completely blind.
Just in case, Siobhan doused all the lights suddenly and banked hard on to her side for a bit, running hard for the north pole horizon before she got much higher.
“Bok, what’s the status down there?” she yelled as Anna finally flattened out.
“Max will be busy shortly,” the Boatswain replied. “But nothing serious. Might need to shut off gravity in orbit, in order to unwedge the truck from Markus’s parking job. Still better than Nakisha would have done.”
“Hey!” the marine took exception. “I park better than that.”
“No, you don’t,” Trinidad and several others weighed in as laughter filled the comm.
“CS-405, this is Anna’s Vindication,” Siobhan let all the mad energy flow out of her chest into her voice. “We have departed the surface. Rendezvous in orbit in three hours.”
“Roger that, Blackbeard,” Phil replied in a voice that betrayed his own relief. “Good job.”
Dinner Companions (Day 121? Common Era 13,449)
Lan was careful to keep his opinion on the topic entirely neutral, especially considering his dinner companions tonight at the small table.
Director Kosnett was charming and gracious. First Officer Lau had learned enough Mongolian to translate some alarmingly-funny jokes. The others were equally pleasant.
It was the food that concerned him. And his reaction to it, which made it much, much worse.
On the one hand, tuna had stopped being every second or t
hird meal. Considering where this crew had gotten the tuna, Lan had originally been prepared to take umbrage at the entire affair, but these pirates could have also shot he and Kiel rather than going to the effort to feed and entertain them. There was that.
Conversely, dinner tonight was apparently a celebration. The cook had done a magnificent job with chicken, adding vegetables Lan couldn’t always identify, and smothering the whole thing in an alfredo sauce that was better than Kiel could make.
Although he might never tell her that.
Lan had his suspicions as to the provenance of the meal. Some other of Buran’s children had apparently been overwhelmed by this plague of extremely polite, mostly-friendly locusts.
Did enjoying such a repast make him an accessory after the fact to the crime of interstellar piracy? It was an interesting legalism to consider.
He supposed that some might make the case that he and his spouse should have undertaken a hunger strike rather than consume food taken from others against the common good. But that was a Warrior mentality. And the Imperials might have ignored them, letting them starve, or forcing them to eat, so nothing would have been gained.
In his heart, Lan also held firm to the belief that a Scholar would have acted thus, quietly learning as much as he could about the barbarians against the future ability to share his knowledge with others, once he was released.
Lan had no reason to doubt Director Kosnett’s word. The man had been proper all this time.
Hopefully, The Eldest would not see fit to punish Lan as a collaborator, given the circumstances. Collaboration suggested a voluntary action, something Lan had been denied. He was a prisoner, a hostage.
All he could do at present was wait, and learn.
Next to him, as he cogitated on such deep topics, Kiel scraped the bowl clean with her spoon, getting the last bits of noodle along with the sauce.
“Chicken Alfredo?” she finally asked First Officer Lau with a grin. “Where did you steal it?”
Lan blanched at the apparently poor manners of his spouse, but then he saw the reciprocal grin on the tall woman.
