[01] Elite: Wanted (29 page)

Change of tactic. This had turned into a case of getting up close, throwing as many rocks as hard and fast as you could and then getting out again, fast. Ziva could see the
Omerta
now. There were half a dozen Sidewinders out and the Anaconda was manoeuvring. The hangar bay doors were a mangled mess and a great scar ran down half the Anaconda’s length. She'd hurt it.

‘Drones away. Target their engines.’ Oh, what was the point? ‘Just scatter the fuckers as soon as they’re loose and point them in about the right direction if you can.’ The Sidewinders already out would have to wait. Ziva blew another one to bits as it tried to escape. She’d lost both decoys now. Brilliant light flared around the back of the Anaconda as warheads randomly broke through the defensive fire of the
Omerta
’s pulse laser. Yes, she’d hurt it, but not enough. Another two seconds and she’d be right on top of it.

Warnings flashed. She was being lased now – hard, military grade X-rays with as much punch as her own. She put the
Dragon Queen
into a corkscrew roll to spread the damage as best she could and lit her own fusion torch. Christ, the
Omerta
was already burning through her shields and vaporising her ablative armour.

‘Out! Fast! Strafe as we pass her!’ She felt the acceleration crushing her back into the pilot couch and the needles biting her skin as the
Dragon Queen
pumped her with another dose of nanites and adrenaline to keep her alive while the engines ripped up to twelve gravities of acceleration. ‘Particle. Canister,’ she grunted. The
Dragon Queen
shot past the Anaconda, the two ships spraying laser fire and micro-missiles at each other. Another bright flash came from the Anaconda’s stern, a last few lucky sub-munitions hitting home. The Fer-de-Lance sprayed the space between them with smoke and gamma-absorbent aerosols. The
Omerta
was doing the same; the ships passed only a few hundred yards apart and yet they could hardly see each other.

Ziva had open space in front of her and what amounted to a violently furious light cruiser behind her. ‘Cut engines.’ The sudden lack of acceleration felt as if it almost catapulted her out of the pilot couch. ‘Turn and face!’ The
Omerta
was still hitting her with laser fire and a deluge of jamming and the
Dragon Queen
’s targeting system was picking up missile launches, a hell of a lot of them. And there were still god-knows how many Sidewinders out there somewhere. ‘Throw out a membrane, countermeasures across every spectrum and then find me a way out of here …’

The pulsar beam swept over the Cave. All the
Dragon Queen
's systems crashed and then came back up. She spotted a Sidewinder out in the open, momentarily exposed. The
Dragon Queen
flipped sideways, lurching her in the couch. Ziva tracked it by eye and brought her main laser to bear. The Sidewinder vanished in its own tiny nova.

‘Membrane! Now! Countermeasures!’

The
Omerta
’s lasers were all over her, flaying what was left of her shields. Damn thing was packing a punch far beyond its size. The
Dragon Queen
returned fire, lighting up the
Omerta
’s bows and raking its side and then the membrane went off and six tiny rockets shot out in a spiral, throwing an opaque, micron-thick, semi-rigid screen between the two ships. The space behind it filled up with the
Dragon Queen
’s countermeasures: aerosols, gamma-absorbing smoke and corner reflectors with a smattering of microscopic nuggets of metallic anti-hydrogen. None of which would stop the
Omerta
’s lasers for a second but that wasn’t the point – what the
Omerta
couldn’t see, she couldn’t shoot and Ziva had already put the
Dragon Queen
into a random erratic corkscrew, the best manoeuvre pattern she knew to throw off a targeting system. She dropped another pair of decoys. Next thing was finding a way out, a place to hide. Then damage assessment and then …

The
Song of Stone
was right there, barely half a click away, duking it out with what looked like a Federation corvette. In the chaos of ten thousand other targets flying about the place, she’d lost the
Song
’s track and forgotten about it.
Forgotten
, for fuck’s sake. Khanguire had her cold. That was how you got killed. Just as well the
Song
had that corvette to keep her busy …

The same corvette that had followed her from
Whit's Station
? It seemed a good bet. Ziva’s finger flicked the safety-cap from over the energy bomb release. Right here, in the state she was in, in a confined space like this with no way obvious exit, she’d blow herself to pieces too. They'd all go down together.

The
Dragon Queen
started setting targeting solutions and hit the
Song
with a hard narrow-beam scan. The missiles already primed to go after the
Omerta
switched targets and turned active and locked up on the cutter. Not that it was going to help. If the
Song of Stone
decided to ignore the corvette and opened up on her with a full salvo right now, the best thing Ziva could do was eject …

No. She had the
Dragon Queen
drop weapons lock. Whatever the hell Khanguire was doing, she could keep on doing it for now. The Anaconda was already more than she could handle and Khanguire looked to be conveniently busy.

The Anaconda’s lasers were shredding her membrane. Any moment now and the first missiles would punch through and start hunting for her. Or flying randomly and blind, whatever the case was. She flipped the safety back over the E-bomb release and guided the
Dragon Queen
towards the nearest tunnel out of the cavern. As the membrane finally failed and the
Omerta
picked her up and its missiles turned to give chase, Ziva kicked in the Fer-de-Lance’s fusion torch and bolted.

Like a rabbit running for its hole.
The thought pissed her off, but that was the way it was. The
Omerta
should have been dead but only a tiny fraction of her drones had actually functioned properly and only a tiny fraction of
them
had actually hit.

They’d had a word for this sort of thing back in the twenty-first century. Clusterfuck. That was it.

The canyons of tooth-like rock protruding from the cavern wall were at a roughly ninety-degree angle to the mouth of Jackson’s Hole. Ravindra was aware of a battle being fought above her but didn’t have much time to pay a great deal of attention to it. It looked like Eschel had taken the bait and now, for some reason, the
Dragon Queen
was taking on the
Omerta.
A Fer-de-Lance against an Anaconda converted to a light cruiser. That wasn’t a fair fight either, but she wasn’t going to complain.

The corvette had found the
Song of Stone
again. The corvette was right behind the cutter, which was bad. Unguided missiles were a waste of time amongst the canyons as they were banking and turning too quickly. This was good. Ravindra was still using just the existing momentum and the manoeuvring engines. She was triggering the fusion torch only incrementally whenever the manoeuvring engines caused the
Song
to lose inertia, for a sudden burst of speed, or to light up the corvette’s world when it got too close. The
Omerta
, despite its Fer-de-Lance shaped troubles, was still finding the time to launch missile after missile at the
Song
. Bad. That blind strafing pass on the corvette must have done some damage, because the pilot was flying like he was angry. He wanted the
Song
too badly. Good.

Rock loomed up against the transparent hull at the front of the bridge. The
Song
veered hard left. More rock, slightly further away, then close again. She banked hard right as they veered in and out between the rock protrusions. The
Song
’s pulse lasers fired up again and again, taking out incoming missiles from the
Omerta
. The beam lasers were expensive, energy-hungry flashlights refracting against the chaff and countermeasures that were constantly being discharged from both vessels. Only the military lasers on both ships were punching through. Ravindra was concentrating on flying. She seconded control of the military laser to Orla who was hitting more than she missed. Jenny was running damage control. You couldn’t dodge a laser – the secret was being where the laser hadn’t been aimed. Inevitably, this meant a degree of erratic flying. And there was only so much counter-intuitive flying you could do when you didn’t want to slam into a rock at velocity. The pilot in the corvette had definitely been gene-altered, Ravindra had decided.

The missile fire stopped. Ravindra spent a moment checking the windows showing feed from the upwards-pointing lenses. The
Omerta
had disappeared.

‘Incoming! Eleven o’clock!’ Orla shouted. There was a series of staggered explosions amongst the rock teeth, submunitions warheads detonating in quick succession as someone tried to walk missiles in on their position. Ravindra slaved the beam laser to point defence along with the pulse. She rolled the
Song
, and the laser batteries reached out to touch the incoming spread of submunitions. Multiple waves of force from the explosions battered the
Song
. Orla fired a spread of missiles along the incoming trajectory, the submunitions programmed for a wide spread. She was using the missiles like a shotgun and was rewarded with an explosion. Ravindra wasn’t even sure who had shot at them and what Orla had just killed. She had a moment to register debris raining down into the teeth and then she had passed it.

‘What was that?’ Ravindra asked.

‘Sidewinder,’ Orla answered. ‘There’s two more left. That I can see.’

They must have come from the
Omerta, Ravindra decided. They were playing cat and mouse now. All the corvette needed was a clear shot and some distance to use its energy bomb and it was all over, probably for the other ship as well. Ravindra wondered just how insane the corvette pilot was.

They started taking beam laser fire from above. The two wedge-shaped fighters were staying out of the canyons and just firing down on them. The fire was inaccurate but, like the misses from the corvette’s military laser, each time the beam hit the cavern wall it caused a molten plume of superheated rock. It was like flying through a firework display. The
Song
had been hit more than once. The rock did more damage than a pulse laser and the countermeasures were no good whatsoever.

‘I have the laser,’ Ravindra said. She hit full burn on the manoeuvring engines, angling them down so the
Song
shot out of the canyons, firing as they rose. Orla fired a spread of missiles at the fighters coming in, skimming the tops of the rock teeth. Ravindra flipped the
Song
until they were upside down and travelling backwards over the teeth. The military laser was still firing. The beam and pulse laser batteries were targeting incoming missiles fired from the two Sidewinders, missiles that had just blossomed into submunitions. Ravindra triggered the fusion torch. About a mile of space was lit up. It turned the top of one of the hard-rock teeth into so much molten slag and halted, then reversed the
Song
’s momentum. Now they were going in the opposite direction, though still upside down. The two Sidewinders realised what was happening too late. Both started a sharp bank. One of them made it. Ravindra’s military laser fire lacerated the other one and then it all but flew into Orla’s hail of missile-borne submunitions.

The corvette rose out of the canyons firing at the
Song
. Ravindra triggered a hard burn and banked back down into the canyons. Slower this time, still weaving in and out of the spires. It would take the corvette a moment to find and then catch up with the
Song
, but Ravindra kept the
Song’s
speed down. She saw the mouth of the tunnel complex ahead. She used the manoeuvring engines to curve in on it so she could enter in a shallow arc that wouldn’t take her above the points of the teeth.

The
Dragon Queen
rocketed through a twisting, winding tunnel. She had three Sidewinders on her tail – too may of the damn things for an Anaconda so maybe the corvette had brought a couple too – and more micro-missiles than she could count and the
Omerta
was also powering after her. None of them knew where they were going, all of them were flying half-blind, and they were already moving fast enough that the
Dragon Queen
’s collision sensors were permanently screaming at her. Long spires of almost molten stone speared the tunnel, their surfaces glassy. Long ago, this would have been a vein, heavy in iron, running through the planetoid’s heart. The currents induced by Jackson’s overwhelming magnetic field had melted and vaporised parts of the Cave and made these tunnels; other parts of the planetoid were still molten under the skin, oozing and pulled into odd shapes by the tidal effects of the pulsar’s gravity. Ziva flew around the spires, nipping to either side. The
Omerta
was too big for that. She blew the spires apart with her lasers, filling the tunnel with super-heated vapour, or else simply crashed through them, barging them aside with her shields and her massive armoured nose. The stone didn’t so much shatter as burst, its semi-liquid insides scattering in globules from under a thin hard crust. The Sidewinders stayed close to Ziva, nipping at her heels. Her defensive pulse lasers were firing almost constantly now, keeping them back and picking off any of the drones that got too close; and if the lasers weren’t enough and a warhead looked like it might be about to get through, a brief burst of the main fusion drive soon put an end to that. Only trouble was that it meant she was going faster and faster and didn’t have a clue where the tunnel was leading.

She dropped the
Dragon Queen
tight to the tunnel surface and powered through a narrowing too small for the
Omerta
. Three missiles chasing after her hit the tunnel wall, exploding in a cloud of debris and vapour and light. The Sidewinders followed, frantically shooting pieces of spinning debris as they curved away; and then behind them all came the
Omerta.
She fired a salvo of missiles into the tunnel wall, blowing great chunks out to make it wider and then smashed head-on through the debris, firing her lasers all the time.