Forsaken Skies (63 page)

He rushed past a new line of scouts like a gauntlet of blowtorches, fire washing over him, but he was moving fast enough that it did nothing but start red lights flashing on his damage control board and moisten his armpits. His engine was running hot but he disengaged the automatic temperature controls. Flooding the reactor with coolant now would just slow him down.

“Interceptors,” Thom called, but Lanoe had already seen them.

Seven of the big beasts, flying in a ring formation between him and the web that covered the queenship's maw. Spaced perfectly so that they could avoid shooting each other but still leave no gap he might fly through.

Well, he had an answer for that. He loaded his disruptors, all of them, and let them go in a broad fan, the FA.2 shaking every time one of them launched.

He didn't need them where he was going.

The rover had been designed for one simple thing: to let Engineer Derrow move around the gun camp at a pace slightly faster than her legs could carry her. It was built of lightweight modular components and a single storage battery that had half run down by the time Ehta got to it.

The engineers did their best.

They stripped out the old battery and mounted four fresh ones in its place, holding them onto the frame with nylon straps. When they started up the little engine it roared but all of the rover's bolts shivered and started shaking themselves loose. They welded those down as best they could and moved on. They tore the little dish antenna off the roll bar and tossed it away, then reinforced the bar with an additional length of pipe, using spot welds to let it carry some real weight.

They unbolted the PBW cannon from the side of the tender. Like all Naval technology it was designed to attach to any available hardpoint. The roll bar almost qualified. They clamped it on tight, then strung power cables from its leads to the batteries. The cannon had
not
been designed to be triggered by hand. Ehta brought a heavy rifle from the tender's stores and they cut its grip off, then ran command lines from the cannon's electronics to the trigger. It would work.

They bolted nylon straps to the rover's back end, so Ehta could wedge herself in back there and hopefully not fall off.

They overhauled the rover's steering, its suspension, its brakes. It was going to be ridiculously top-heavy, there was no getting around that. The PBW cannon weighed more than the rover did. In Aruna's low gravity, though, it could function. As long as it didn't corner too hard.

When it was ready to go the engine thrummed with power. Ehta fired off a quick burst of the cannon and a high-density particle beam shot off into space, making all the engineers duck their heads.

“If I had time, I could put armor plating on there,” Derrow said, all but wringing her hands in concern. “You're going to be pretty exposed.”

“If we had time we could build a squad of tanks,” Ehta told her. “We don't.”

It was Roan's turn to object. “How are you supposed to drive and shoot at the same time?” she asked.

“I'm not,” Ehta told the girl. She wasn't sure if Roan could see the nasty smile on her face behind the flowglas of her helmet. “Jump in.”

Roan stared at the narrow driver's seat at the front of the rover. “You can't expect—”

“You know how to drive. I saw you drive Thom all over Niraya. Get in,” Ehta said, “or explain to all these nice people why they have to die.”

The girl climbed into the seat. She had to duck her head over to one side to avoid the barrel of the cannon, but she could reach the steering wheel and the pedals just fine.

“We'll send you all the data we can,” the engineer promised. “Let you know where the landers touch down. That's about all the help we can give you.”

“I'll take it,” Ehta said. “Roan, get us moving.”

The girl goosed the accelerator and they shot away over the loose soil of the moon, a vast plume of dust jumping up behind them.

The interceptors burst apart, one by one. Big chunks of metal debris spun and bounced before the web, some of it smashing into the FA.2. The jagged remnants of an interceptor gun hit his canopy head-on and a spiderweb of cracks shot across his view. He jettisoned the canopy, sending it hurtling away. He didn't need it anymore.

“Scouts coming in,” Thom called.

“Keep them back!” Lanoe shouted. The queenship filled the view ahead. The web twitched as he approached, its filaments readjusting as debris punched tiny holes through its thin substance.

One thin arm of wire rose from the web, its end twisting toward him like a serpent rising from its coil, sniffing the air. Searching him out.

He set the FA.2's controls to run an automatic program. Reached up and unbuckled his safety harness.

Now came the hard part.

He was still a good kilometer out from the web, still moving fast. The fighter's retros burned hard to slow the pace. He had no desire to die the way Valk had, from sudden deceleration.

“Lanoe, they've seen you!” Thom called.

“Then shoot them!”

The deceleration pushed him backward, back into his seat. He grabbed the edge of the fuselage where his canopy used to be and pushed up until he was standing in the cockpit, his head and shoulders outside the fighter. A piece of a blasted interceptor the size of a cow came rolling toward him and he ducked just in time. It would have taken his head off.

Light flashed off to his left. He looked and saw Thom fending off a whole wing of scouts, laying down suppressing fire and maneuvering hard to keep them from catching up with him. Off to his right he saw shadows moving, more scouts or maybe interceptors rushing in to stop him before he reached the web.

He needed to move fast.

With a grace that belied his years, Lanoe flipped himself out of his cockpit and grabbed a jagged piece of metal that used to be one of his airfoils. The whole side of his fuselage was dented in and broken by enemy fire. It hurt to see that damage, when he'd been with the FA.2 for so long.

He knew it was only going to get worse.

He crawled across the fighter's body, pulling himself along to its undercarriage, wrapping his legs around one of the landing gear. There was so much debris flying past him it was like being in the middle of a dirty snowstorm. He reached for another handhold just as a stray impactor, left over from some long-ago salvo, smashed into the fuselage and he had to yank his hand back in a heartbeat or lose it. The impactor tore open a plastic fairing and shredded the sensitive electronics behind it, and he felt the whole FA.2 lurch to one side, the start of what was going to be a nasty flat spin.

Ahead of him more filaments of the web had lifted away from the main mass, tentacles groping toward him in the dark. There was no more time. He found the panel he wanted, a recessed part of the fuselage about as long as his arm. He got the fingers of his glove under the edge of the panel and tore at it with all his strength. The whole panel came loose, cartwheeling off into the debris cloud. Underneath lay six lumpy spherical objects, each the size of his fist. Bombs, just like the ones he'd used to destroy the geothermal power plant on Aruna.

One by one he tore them loose from their restraining clips, then stuck them to his chest with adhesive patches. He was pretty sure they wouldn't go off accidentally, that they needed to be armed manually. Pretty sure. He'd never tried anything like this before.

A whip of steel smacked across the back of the FA.2, tearing at its thruster cones. One of them cracked apart and bits of it showered down across Lanoe's helmet and shoulders, making him duck.

Another filament snared the nose of the FA.2.

A third got its landing gear just a split second later.

The fighter had been decelerating and it was moving nowhere near as fast as Valk had when he'd been caught by the web. Yet when the filaments caught the FA.2 and dropped its velocity to zero in a fraction of a second, there was still a lot of momentum that had to go somewhere.

Lanoe was torn free of the fighter's undercarriage. He bounced hard off its side, then went spinning off into the dark, like any other piece of debris. Blood rushed to his head and his vision dimmed. He could hear himself breathing a hundred times a minute. Feel his heart bursting in his chest.

“Lanoe!” Thom cried.

The rover bumped and bounced over the rough terrain. Ehta held on tight to the cannon and forced herself not to lock her knees, riding with the suspension rather than against it. Roan kept her head down as she drove, as if she expected a lander to come crashing down on her at any second.

They headed down a long slope at the outer edge of the crater, the rover constantly threatening to come up off its rear wheels and send them somersaulting down to the plain below. Ehta focused on the heads-up display in her helmet that showed the orbiters lining up in the sky above. She thought maybe she saw one, an especially bright star streaking over the horizon.

They had a pretty good idea of where the landers would come down. The landing zone was a stretch of relatively flat ground a hundred kilometers across, right outside the crater. That left a huge amount of ground to cover but—

“There!” Roan shouted, pointing up at the sky.

“I see it,” Ehta replied.

A thin streamer of fire coming straight down from above. Even the thin atmosphere of Aruna was still thick enough to heat the lander up as it fell, and it was glowing a dull red as it touched down in a crown-shaped spray of dust, maybe ten kilometers from their position. Roan poured on the juice, sending them careening over a low rille, so they briefly went airborne, then crashed back down with a thump that made Ehta's shins ache.

“Easy!” she called, but the girl ignored her. She drove straight for the landing site, then pulled up short three hundred meters away, turning into her deceleration to keep the rover from rolling. They rocked to a stop, side-on to the impact site.

Ehta peered through the slowly settling dust. She thought maybe she could see it, a dark, angular shape in the murk. Climbing to its feet, its legs straightening.

She'd forgotten how big the damned things were.

Six meters high. All legs and pointed claws and nothing else. No head, no face, no eyes. Nothing even remotely human about it. It didn't even look like an insect, or a cephalopod. It was alien, just alien. Something human eyes were never meant to see.

A wave of dust blew over them, fizzing quietly as it scoured her helmet. The dark shape was moving, she was sure of it. Walking toward them on its many legs.

Then, as the dust cleared a little more, she saw she was wrong. It wasn't walking toward them.

It was running at full speed.

Its wickedly pointed claws stabbed at the ground, shoving its mass forward until it was bounding at them, one or two legs always in the air, reaching as if it could extend those legs across the intervening space and impale them where they stood.

“Shoot it,” Roan said, breathless. Then louder. “Shoot it!”

“I can shoot while you drive,” Ehta called back. She brought the cannon around on its pintle mount and tried to aim. No virtual Aldis sights here, not so much as an iron tab at the end of the barrel to help her get a bead on the thing. She squeezed her trigger and the particle beam spat from the gun, scoring a deep black line through the soil between them and the lander. She brought her aim up a little, just as Roan threw the rover into gear and got them moving again, lurching forward in an arc that took them around the lander. Ehta fired again and again, trying to get a feel for the cannon, trying to hit something.