Flight (14 page)

Juan’s face turned
green.

“I’m gonna go see what’s going on.
If you get into that jeep and try to ditch me, I’ll put a grenade
from this launcher into it before you know what
happened.”

He stared at her.

“You believe me, right?” she
asked.

He nodded.

“You’d better. You’ve got my back
and I need you to cover me. You shout if you see
anything.”

He nodded, but he looked more like
he wanted to throw up.

She moved forward to the end of
the buttress and looked up. Bullets sprayed around her in greeting.
They were coming from a steep angle, which was good. It’d take
someone a few minutes to get down to the overpass they were under,
and Eva hoped to have a plan by then.

She peeked out again, this time
behind a blaze of MP23 fire. She could tell they were on top of the
roof of a parking garage, but they didn’t return fire until she was
under cover again.

Good. It meant they weren’t
professionals. A little bit of firepower might keep them
down.

She discarded her magazine and
reloaded.

She switched to grenade launcher
and popped out just enough from her cover to fire. They say,
‘Ready, Aim, Fire’ in training, but in combat it was more like,
‘Fire, Fire, try to Aim, Fire’.

The first grenade crashed into the
side of the structure, exploding as it fell back towards her. She
tried to adjust and the second grenade went up over the top of the
garage and probably landed harmlessly on the other side. The third
went wide to the right as Eva came under fire again. She ducked
back completely into cover.

The high caliber sniper rifle
caught up with the firefight, and the gouges in the concrete and
roadway around her were bigger now.

She reloaded grenades and
thought.

The sniper could keep them pinned
until someone could get onto the overpass. At that point, they were
dead meat. Instead of fear, Eva was a little surprised that all she
felt was frustration, like she was losing a game or
something.

She prepared to jump out again and
try to take out the sniper when she felt a hand on her shoulder.
She jumped.

It was Juan.

“Don’t do that to me!”

“Sorry, ma’am. Can you shoot at
them for ten or fifteen seconds?”

The MP23 fired a lot of ammo in
fifteen seconds.

“Maybe. Maybe just
ten.”

“Okay, ma’am,” Juan said. “Can you
show me how to use these grenades?” He had an armful of
them.

“Oh my gosh, Juan. Not
now.”

“Please, ma’am?”

“Juan, you could never throw them
far enough. It’s at least a hundred feet to the garage and it’s
another hundred feet high.”

“Piece of cake, ma’am.”

She shook her head. It was his
life.

She gave him a ten second crash
course on how to pull the safety, pull the pin, and throw the
grenade. Half the ones he held were smoke grenades, and she pointed
that out.

“We have smoke grenades,
ma’am?”

“Yes.”

“These explode, and these ones let
out smoke?”

“Yes,” Eva replied in
frustration.

Juan grinned.

“I have a plan, ma’am.” He
explained it to her.

“Okay,” she said. It was better
than anything she’d come up with. And if it didn’t work, well, it
wouldn’t matter anyway. Eva wouldn’t get to save the world, but she
would go out in a blaze of glory.

“Let me know when you’re ready,”
she said. The fire had gotten heavier from the rooftop. Five or six
shooters up there now. She wondered how many were on their way to
the overpass.

“Now, ma’am!”

She stuck her weapon around the
concrete and blindly fired up towards the garage roof. She had to
move a little out of cover to get her second hand on the weapon,
then she launched her three grenades in quick succession, just
trying to get close to the shooters. After the last grenade, she
emptied her clip.

In the meantime, she watched Juan
out of the corner of her eye take two grenades and drop them right
on top of the garage, right in the corner where they expected the
shooters to be. He dove back into cover with her, but there was no
return fire.

“No way,” Eva
exclaimed.

“Should I put two more up there to
prove myself?”

“It couldn’t hurt.”

Two more grenades went onto the
parking garage roof and they ran back to the jeep. Juan tore off
like a madman and Eva dropped smoke grenades behind them, covering
their escape. She added a few more cartridges of fire from the MP23
for good luck, aiming first up at the garage, then at the overpass
when she saw a white pickup truck drive onto it.

Then the smoke obscured her vision
and she let the growing distance be their cover.

They got safely past the Strip and
fifteen minutes later were in the open desert. Las Vegas was a
strange town, Eva thought.

Feeling somewhat safer, there was
likely no reason for roving gangs to hunt passersby in the desert,
Eva crawled over Mark and into the passenger seat with its missing
head rest. She checked on him and he hadn’t taken any hits. He
still looked terrible. They had to get him help as soon as they
could.

She wasn’t sure how far it was to
Palmdale (if only her phone had signal!). She tried to look at her
map, but it was impossible to unfold it in the ninety mile an hour
wind. The windshield on her side had been shattered, and she had to
duck and sit to the side to reduce the wind buffeting.

She eventually crumpled the map up
and shoved it in the glove box. A few hours was her best
guess.

“When you get a chance, we should
probably get over to the correct lane,” she suggested. They were
still heading south in the north bound lanes.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How did you learn to throw like
that, Juan? Military?”

He grinned.

“Baseball, ma’am.”

“No one can throw that far. That
was like almost two hundred feet.”

“You’re not very good at math, are
you ma’am?”

Eva gave him a quizzical
look.

“Mind you, it was up, so I had to
throw it like it was about three hundred feet, but that’s no
problem for me, ma’am. But according to the Pythagorean Theorem, I
estimate the actual distance was about a hundred and fifty
feet.”

“Either way it was a long
throw.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Juan said. “1957,
Glen Gorbous threw a baseball four hundred and forty-five feet, ten
inches. That record stood until three years ago.”

“You beat it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Wow.”

“Yes, ma’am. Four hundred and
forty-six feet, three inches.”

“You didn’t beat it by
much.”

“I still hold the record,
ma’am.”

“So you’re a famous baseball
player. Why haven’t I heard of you?”

“I expect you don’t have much time
to follow baseball, ma’am. And I’m not that famous. Nobody’d ever
heard of Glen Gorbous either, until I broke his record.”

“Do you still play?”

“No, ma’am.”

Eva waited for more. Juan sighed a
little, shifted in his seat, then explained.

“Have you ever been the absolute
worst at something, ma’am? I don’t mean bad at something, I mean
the worst. You know, like the doctor who graduates at the bottom of
his class in medical school or the lawyer who gets the lowest
possible score on her exam, but still passes? That kind of
worst?”

He grinned.

“I was the worst hitter in the
minor leagues, ma’am. Not just once either. Three years in a row.
The only reason I kept a contract was because I could hit the cut
off man from anywhere on the field, and from a lot of places I
could place the ball right in the catcher’s mitt. Not a lot of
people can do that.

“But there were plenty of guys who
could throw half as good as me who could hit twice or even three
times better. And I’d move to another team.”

“Ouch,” Eva
sympathized.

“Yes, ma’am. It hurt. But I never
gave up. Finally, a club took some pity on me and hired a special
hitting coach. He worked with me like no one else ever did, and I
finally got it. I could finally hit the ball like I’d never been
able to hit it before. I dreamt of big league contracts. I was
going to make it. I had my best year ever.”

He paused for effect, grinning,
and giving away that there was a punch line.

“I wasn’t the worst hitter in the
minor leagues that year. I was fifth from the worst.”

“Oh no.” Eva genuinely felt sorry
for him.

“Yes, ma’am. That did it for me. I
was done. But fortunately for both of us, I’ve kept in shape and I
can throw a grenade just like I can a baseball.”

“Thank you, Juan. You saved our
lives.”

“I’d say we’re even, ma’am, but I
don’t actually think that. I think that now we’ve saved each
other’s lives, we are inextricably bound together.”

Eva laughed. She liked
Juan.

“You can call me Eva.”

“No, ma’am. I’ve seen what you can
do. I will treat you with nothing but the respect you have earned
and deserve until my dying day.”

His words saddened Eva. Now that
they were out of danger, his words reminded her of exactly what she
had done.

She had probably killed more than
one person that day, but she’d only seen one of them. The shooter
running from the burning bus shelter.

In the heat of the moment, he had
felt like a threat. The jeep was still on its side, Mark trapped in
it, and Juan was an unknown hiding behind a statue behind
her.

But the shooter hadn’t been much
of a threat. He was running away. And in the moment she pulled the
trigger, she also knew he hadn’t been old. Sixteen, twenty,
twenty-two, fourteen. She had no idea. He had a slight build and
ran awkwardly. She almost hoped he had just been a gangly eighteen
or nineteen year old, but she was afraid he was younger than
that.

She wanted to tell herself it
wasn’t her fault. He had engaged her in combat. He had been part of
a treacherous ambush. He had injured her partner who lay gravely
ill in the seat behind her.

But he had seemed so
young.

She steeled herself against
tears.

She had killed an enemy combatant
who had attacked her unprovoked. It was as simple as that. He
wasn’t running from her, he was withdrawing to a more defensible
location and may have been seeking reinforcements. That’s the way
it was, and she had to accept it. She had done what she had to do
to stay alive and to save her partner and her new
friend.

She felt better when Juan
interrupted her train of thought.

“Do you got any food,
ma’am?”

“You want a protein
bar?”

“Ma’am, look at me. I’m a big guy.
I haven’t eaten in over two days.”

“Fine. Two protein bars. And a
bottle of water.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

21

1804 returned to its precalculated
location near the fourth planet. It monitored the orbiting
satellites, attempting to determine the function of each one. There
were only six, a paltry number, and only two of them, the only ones
in geostationary orbit, appeared dedicated to communications. It
calculated their paths carefully, redoing its numbers several
times. It had to have them exact. Speed was of the
essence.

Stanley didn’t know how to respond
to the Lord Admiral’s assertion that the same God had created
humans and Hrwang in his own image. Like most scientists, he was an
avowed atheist. Belief in God seemed foolish, especially in the age
of space travel. He knew how the Universe was formed, knew how a
supernova had triggered the development of the Solar System and the
Earth, and knew how chance had led to the evolution of life. How
could such an obviously superior race of aliens believe in a God?
How were they without a basic understanding of science? It seemed
so primitive. Stanley understood the cosmology of his existence,
and they didn’t.

Perhaps he had something to teach
them after all.

The Lord Admiral smiled. “We will
have time for a talk about religion at another time.” His face
turned serious. “There is something more important we must talk
about now.”

Stanley relaxed a little.
Diplomacy was about finding common ground, and obviously religion
was not that common ground. He felt grateful the Lord Admiral
wanted to discuss something else. He waited for him to
continue.

The Hrwang clasped his hands
together and looked at the deck. It appeared as if the next words
he wanted to say pained him. He finally overcame some internal
struggle and spoke.