“Holy shit! What did he do?”
“The other latch on it held, or it would have dropped to the dirt, as there’s no way he could have stopped the 400-pound missile. While I don’t think it would have gone off, I wouldn’t say the same about one of the Skippers if they hit nose-first.”
Bowden shuddered. He’d shaken all four of his, along with the two Sidewinders, and he realized the drop to the ground was longer than the arming wires. If one had fallen, it would have been armed when it hit, and the 1,000-pound bomb probably would have gone off. Oh hell!
Byrd took a couple of steps closer. “Hey…you going to be okay with, umm, going along?” he asked quietly.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Bowden said. Mostly. “I’m just the airborne spare.”
“I’ll make sure I take out the control station,” Byrd said with a smile. “That way you don’t have to worry about it. Even if the Zoomie misses his target, the transmitter will be out of commission until they build a new control station. If they even have the parts to do so, which they might not. It’ll take them time to rebuild it, and by then we can have more people trained to fly the mission.” He chuckled. “Maybe we can even test out the weapons a few times, too.”
“Yeah, that would be nice.” Bowden smiled. “I guess, since you’re here, you’re ready to go?”
Byrd nodded. “Fiezel is almost done, too.” He looked at his watch. “And right on time. We’re supposed to be wheels-up in twenty minutes in order to be there when we told the people riding the giant Komodo dragon things.”
* * *
The column was riding down a dry riverbed which had cut a crevice through the foothills when it narrowed suddenly. Aliza Turan rode forward to get a look at why Sergeant Cook and Corporal Parker had reined in their whinnies. “What’s up?” she asked as she pushed her mount alongside theirs in the narrow fissure.
Cook nodded to the landscape in front of them. The crevice divided into three separate, smaller paths. “The map we have only shows the terrain near the target, and we’re not close enough yet to be on the map. We’re not sure which of those crevices is the right way forward, and we’re trying to decide which one to follow.”
“Can’t we send scouts up each of them?” Aliza asked.
“No time, ma’am,” Cook said. “We’re already behind timeline. If we get there after the planes go by, Johnson’s loss is for naught.” They’d surprised a group of J’Stull soldiers, who had made a small camp in a place where the crevice widened significantly. Cook, Parker, and several of his men had charged the camp, riding through and killing the enemy soldiers, but they’d lost Corporal Johnson to a lucky shot by one of the enemy.
“What have you decided?”
Cook ran the back of his sleeve across his forehead to wipe away the sweat. “Nothing yet, ma’am. The one going to the right heads up toward some higher terrain and is probably impassable, which leaves us two. Parker thinks that we’d be better off going to the left as it’s less likely to get closed off, and I think the center one is more likely to keep us away from the indigs.”
Aliza sighed and looked at her watch. Cook was right; they didn’t have time for this…yet they had even less time to make the wrong choice and have to backtrack. Without warning, Athena, her whinnie, stood up on its back two legs, and Aliza had to grab the saddle to keep from being thrown. The whinnie trumpeted loudly, then it dropped back onto all fours.
Within a couple of seconds, another whinnie replied from somewhere ahead, and all three whinnies backed away from the split. The three Terrans looked at each other, then refocused on the center passage and the fast thudding of an approaching whinnie. Everyone drew their weapons as an enormous specimen rounded the last corner, side-winding swiftly toward them. The creature didn’t have a saddle or any other equipment to show it had been around humans before.
Athena turned her head and pushed the muzzle of Aliza’s pistol away from the approaching lizard. “Cook, Parker, put your weapons away. My whinnie’s saying this one is friendly.”
The soldiers reluctantly holstered their rifles as the strange whinnie approached and came to rub noses with Athena. It then turned and moved to stand at the entrance to the crevice on the right.
“Huh. It seems to think we should take the pass to the right,” Aliza said.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” Cook replied. “I know we’ve seen some pretty strong indications that the whinnies are smart, but I don’t know if we can trust them to make this choice. I mean, how do we know your whinnie really knows what we’re trying to do and where we’re trying to go? And how would it send that information to this, eh, wild one?”
“I don’t know,” Aliza said, “but I say we trust them.”
“I’m with the Sarge on this one,” Parker said. “I’ve done a lot of scouting in these hills, and that gulch looks like it’s going into some pretty significant terrain.”
Athena blew out her breath in a snorting noise and walked forward into the crevice on the right. The large male whinnie stepped ahead of her, jogged forward, and Aliza’s whinnie picked up her pace to match. “It seems,” she called over her shoulder, “that the decision has been made!”
She risked a glance behind her, and she saw the two men shrug and start after her. She turned back in time to lean into the turn as Athena negotiated a rocky outcropping, and she hunched forward to pat the whinnie’s shoulder. “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
* * * * *
Chapter Seventy-Five
R’Bak
“Rocket assist in five,” Lotho Ferenc said once the tow vehicle had moved off the runway, leaving his aircraft—the mission’s lead platform—with its nose aimed down the long, groomed strip.
Although usually reserved for old-fashioned ramjets that had to be accelerated to generate the airflow necessary to ignite the engine, the RATO—rocket-assisted take off—modules had been mounted on each of the three combat craft. Conventional take off—vertical or otherwise—consumed a great deal of their dual-phase engines’ fuel, and Bowden’s flight was going to need every drop in its tanks since they would have to loiter near the target until they got the go-ahead from the laser designation team. Although built for operations in-atmosphere, the SpinDog craft were not optimized for it, and they consumed fuel rapidly, even during the most normative missions—and this one was going to be anything but.
Five seconds later, the dual rockets on the back of Ferenc’s craft fired, and it leaped forward. Halfway down the runway, both of its dual-phase engines rose to a low burn, trailing additional plumes. Ferenc rotated with about a quarter of the runway remaining, and the craft soared up and away as the rockets died out. Ferenc turned downwind and jettisoned the spent rockets, which deployed parachutes and descended to be picked up and used again.
As the second craft bearing Fiezel and Burg Hrensku leaped forward, though, Bowden could immediately see something was wrong. Only one rocket plume emerged from underneath the tail of the craft.
“Bad rocket!” Jukhal Samkamka yelled on the radio next to him. “You’ve got a bad rocket, Burg.” No second rocket meant extremely uneven thrust, and that meant disaster. The only remaining question was: how bad?
There wasn’t enough time to correct with thrust from the vehicle’s own dual-phase scramjets, and frankly, this wasn’t the sort of failure the SpinDog pilots had ever had to worry about and for which there simply hadn’t been enough time to train.
Fiezel and Hrensku were on a runaway craft, and it was unstoppable until the rocket burned out. There was no sense hitting the brakes until it did—it would only have blown out the tires and stripped the brakes as the craft skidded along.
The rocket burned out just over halfway down the runway. Instantly, the craft’s spoilers popped up and smoke poured from underneath; Hrensku had jumped on the brakes, trying to keep the craft on the runway. But Bowden could tell it wasn’t going to stop in time. He’d once seen an F/A-18 go off a runway, and it had looked just like this. The two vehicles t
hat served as fire engines—stationed at the 3/4-point on the runway—churned up a cloud of dust as they chased after the runaway craft.
The bird was still going about 50 miles an hour as it left the prepared surface of the runway. It traveled about 30 meters, and then the left main mount either went into a hole or hit a soft patch of dirt; Bowden couldn’t tell which. The left main mount stopped, but the craft kept going. The mount was torn off in a spray of shredded parts, and the left wing dropped to the surface. The sudden increase in off-center drag spun the craft about 90 degrees before it stopped.
Bowden sighed. “And that is why we have a spare.” The full significance hit him a moment later: his was no longer the spare third craft. It, and he, were now a “go” asset. It was like he was waking from a nightmare, only to realize he hadn’t been dreaming at all.
“Wait…uh…maybe they’ll want to come and fly this craft instead,” Bowden said as his lunch threatened to come back up.
“After they just wrecked, they are going to want to try it again?” Samkamka chuckled. “Even if they are uninjured—which is unlikely—I find it improbable they will be eager to take our place.”
“Uh…yeah,” Bowden said lamely.
“There is a problem, though,” Samkamka added.
“What’s that?” Bowden asked, feeling like a drowning victim who’s suddenly been thrown a life ring.
Samkamka motioned down the runway. “They are still in the way. If we experience the same malfunction, it is likely we will run into them. Our normal procedure would be to not attempt a takeoff until their aircraft is towed clear.” He shrugged. “As they are missing a wheel, that will take some time.”
Bowden looked down the runway. It would be hours before they got the aircraft moved, and—even if they launched then—it would be dark when they got to the target. Who knew if the ground force would still be there, or if they would be able to see the cables anymore. To say nothing of the fact that the first craft would have to come back, refuel, and get new rockets. Which might also fail.
No. If we’re going to go, we need to go now. As much as Bowden wanted to cancel the flight, he knew he couldn’t. The weapons were untested, and some probably wouldn’t work. They had an airborne spare for a reason—if something went wrong with Ferenc and Byrd’s craft, then all of this had been for nothing, and the J’Stull would be able to call Kulsis before a second strike could be mounted.
He had to go. All the Lost Soldiers, both on the ground converging on the target and those in space, were counting on them to get the mission done. As scared as he was, and as little as he wanted to go, he knew there was only one thing he could say.
“We have to attempt it, even with the other plane sitting in our abort lane. It’s now or never.”
Samkamka nodded. “Yes, it is.” He started moving switches. “Ten seconds.”
Bowden pressed himself back into his seat. “Hey, Samkamka?”
“Yes?”
“If we get a rocket failure, swerve right to miss them, okay?”
“I will try.”
That didn’t give Bowden the confidence he was looking for, but he had no time to comment or object. Samkamka pressed the red button in front of him, and the rockets lit off underneath them. With only the launching of the other two craft to go by, Bowden was pretty sure both rockets had ignited as he was smashed into his seat, and he saw stars as his head slammed against the back of his helmet.
“Uh…past one quarter,” he said. They’d already passed the marker by the time he was conscious enough to notice and call it out. It was like a catapult launch, but one that didn’t end. A catapult stroke was over in 300 feet—about three seconds—and then the feeling like you were being crushed was over. This one extended past 6,000 feet, and—finally—ended up with them going considerably faster than what a Hornet was traveling at the end of the catapult stroke.
“Engines increasing to nominal…now,” Samkamka said through gritted teeth.
“Rockets out…now.” Bowden confirmed, watching both the timer and the runway markers.
The pressure on Bowden’s chest diminished as Samkamka eased the craft off the ground and put it into a right turn so they didn’t overfly the wreckage of the second aircraft.
“Jettisoning.” Bowden pushed the two release buttons and felt the thumps as the rockets were kicked away.
Bowden shook his head to clear it. He’d always thought being a naval aviator was the pinnacle of “badass.” He now knew he’d been wrong. “Let’s see if our weapons systems made it through that ride without shaking loose.”
Samkamka nodded. “Beginning systems checks.”
The ground continued to drop away as the horizon rushed at them.
* * *
Athena stopped alongside the wild whinnie as the trail ended in a near-vertical outcropping of rock and sandy soil about 100 feet high. Aliza looked up the hill as Cook moved alongside her.
“Just what I was afraid was going to happen if we came this way,” he said. “We’re not getting up that hill.”
Aliza sighed; Cook was right. No matter how strong and powerful the whinnies were, there was no way they were getting up the incline with riders and loads. It was so close to vertical that even ascent by a human was going to be perilous, at best. And with their current loads…
“I can try climbing up with a rope,” Parker said, reining in beside them. “Once I’m up there, I can help pull you up. The gear will still make it dangerous, though,” He assessed the steep slope again. “But this will be as far as we take the whinnies.”
Cook frowned at the long climb Parker was proposing. “If you can make it up there. The ground looks really soft. Pretty good chance of a landslide.”
“We’re not getting any closer to the target, Sarge, and going back will take too long.”
Cook looked over to Aliza, who shrugged. “You might as well let him try, Sergeant. As he said, we are running out of time.”
Parker started tying several coils of rope together. As he was working on lashing the third 20-meter section to the second, the wild whinnie grabbed the first rope in its teeth and sprinted up the slope. Although it had to step on some of the looser soil, causing clods of dirt and small stones to slide down the side of the hill, the whinnie was able to use the rocky outcroppings to turn and leap upward to the crest.
The rope was yanked from Parker’s hands as the whinnie achieved the summit, and the end of the rope pulled forward to rest at the base of the hill.
Aliza looked over to Cook, whose jaw was hanging open. “One stairway, no waiting,” she said, pleased that her use of American idiom had been, apparently, accurate. She dismounted. “Gentlemen, as you observed, time is short.”
* * *
The squad made it to the top of the rise and found another crevice that led in their direction of travel. Unfortunately, half the whinnies weren’t able to make the leaps necessary to get up the cliff, and the crevice that led forward was too narrow for the ones that could.
“We will go on our own from here,” Aliza said with a pat on Athena’s shoulder. They had taken off the saddles. Hopefully, the whinnies would wait for them; if not, it was going to be a long walk back to the base. As there was a chance of enemy action, though, they didn’t want to leave the whinnies tied up. Athena made a purring noise as she rubbed her nose on Aliza’s shoulder, who smiled and murmured, “Thank you, my friend.” Athena purred again.
Aliza walked over to the large male and patted him on the shoulder, too. “Thank you for showing us the way.”
The male also purred and turned to rub his nose on Aliza but wasn’t as gentle and knocked her back several feet. “Ouch,” she said, rubbing her shoulder. “We will have to work on your people skills.”
“All right,” Cook said, calling down from the top of the slope, “I’ve got the first good news of the day. I just found where we are on the map, and we’re closer to the target than I thought. We can still make it in time, but we’re going to have to hurry.”
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* * * * *
Chapter Seventy-Six
R’Bak
Samkamka rendezvoused with the other aircraft and flew in a loose cruise position on it. Bowden pursed his lips as the airspeed indicator continued to climb through 800 kilometers an hour. “We need to slow down,” he said.
“The dual-phase engines work most efficiently when supersonic,” Samkamka replied. “Mach 3 is best.”
“That’s great and all, but none of the things we have strapped to the craft have been flight tested for those speeds. The laser designator, especially, wasn’t designed to be flown in-atmosphere and isn’t aerodynamic in the slightest. If you put too much of a load on it, you’re going to tear it off, and then where will we be?”
Samkamka grumbled a little, but then he called the lead aircraft and got them to slow down. Even at that speed, though, they passed over the mechanized columns in just over a minute and reached the contact point, fifty kilometers south of the J’Stull town, after a few minutes more. Behind the small town sat the mountain range, and in the valley directly behind the town, Bowden could see the antenna strung from one mountain to another. It seemed surreal to actually see it in person after all the target study and preparation. Especially since I never planned to be here.
“Cookie, this is Bluebird, over,” a voice said on the radio.
“Who is that?” Samkamka asked.
“That’s Byrd calling the ground troops,” Bowden replied.
“Cookie, this is Bluebird, over,” Byrd repeated.
“Where do you suppose the ground team is?” Samkamka asked. “Do you think they got captured?”
Bowden shrugged. “No idea. I hope they didn’t get caught. Maybe their radio is bad.”
Murphy's Lawless: A Terran Republic Novel Page 67
