Hammerhead Resurrection (39 page)

The girl ran. On the other side of the fence, Stacy ran with her.

The next closest Sthenos guard dropped to all six limbs and came sprinting at the girl at perhaps forty miles an hour. Stacy stopped, leveled her gun at the shifting visor, and fired. The Sthenos’ head whipped back, and it tumbled forward, skidding head first to a stop in the dirt. The left side of its visor lens blown out. Dark wetness pumped through the shattered glass.

Stacy looked back for the girl, who still ran full-tilt toward the bushes.

“Good girl,” Stacy said.

Two more Sthenos guards had focused their attention on the running girl. Stacy stopped and fired at each of their visors. Neither shot found its mark perfectly, but caught one in the forehead with a metallic spark and the other in the throat, which seemed to do no damage. But the impacts caused them both to stop and scan the fence-line. Stacy ran to the taxi with the light pole buried in its roof, just as the convict had described. The girl was almost to the two bushes, but the second Sthenos closed on her in a full gallop.

Stacy aimed her pistol with both hands at the Sthenos’ visor.

Make it count.

She fired, and the Sthenos’ head snapped backward as the visor shattered. It fell in a jumble of limbs.

The girl reached the transformer and disappeared between the shrubs. Sticks flew up in the air. Stacy scanned the area. The third guard had stopped coming on when the second had died, appearing now to cautiously survey the street beyond the fence-line. In the distance, other Sthenos were galloping across the field, knocking people down as they ran, but they were running toward the fallen guards, not toward where the girl had disappeared. Stacy came around behind the taxi.

Sure enough, she found a gap in the concrete. A narrow tunnel had been dug out of the side wall. With nothing to do but wait for the girl, she looked over their escape route. She needed a quarter mile at least from the point of singularity, and more would be better.

As she scanned the open ground up to the concrete slabs on 6
th
Avenue, she heard the thumping growl of a patrol ship. It came around the side of the Sthenos destroyer and rushed up to her. As it passed, the girl emerged from the tunnel covered in dirt, standing up waist deep in the hole.

The patrol ship slowed and turned.

“Get down,” Stacy said, and the girl crouched as the patrol ship’s main gun tracked to the taxi and fired. Stacy leapt aside as the concrete in front of the hole exploded and dust obscured the patrol ship, the hole, and the taxi.

Sprinting at the patrol ship, Stacy holstered her pistol and, pulling a thin cylinder-grenade from her hip, pressed its trigger, arming and magnetizing it. Leaping onto the nose of the ship, she slapped the grenade onto the metal below the cockpit glass.

Sliding back down the nose, she ran for a small pile of debris as fast as her feet would carry her. She flipped sideways over the debris and landed on a concrete block, which cracked into her side. A sharp flash of pain told her she’d broken a rib. Gunfire erupted over the pile of debris a moment before a concussion shook the ground followed by thumping secondary explosions.

Stacy lifted her head to find the ship lying on the asphalt not far from where the girl hid, it’s cockpit blown out and black smoke roiling up into the sky. As she stood, a sharp spike from her rib made her gasp. She felt light headed, but as Jeffrey might say, she’d have time to feel the pain later. Looking to her HUD for her time, she found it blank. She looked at her hands. They were in full view, either her fall, the shots, or the grenade had shut down her stealth.

She ran to the gap behind the taxi as the girl stood up, her entire body powdered with concrete dust and asphalt chunks. She looked like a statue.

Stacy pointed to the stair-stepped rubble. “Run!”

The girl hopped out of the hole and ran. Looking over her shoulder, Stacy found all the Sthenos guards staring at her.

“No matter bastards. Stay there a few more minutes and you’ll be dead.” Her eyes shifted to the people, thousands of them, all looking at her. One man shouted out, raising his fist in the air in victory. The hope she saw in their eyes would haunt her the rest of her life.

A voice screamed behind her. Turning, she saw the girl already at the base of the rubble holding out her hands as if asking if she was going to run. The thumping of another patrol ship rose up. Stacy sprinted toward the girl. “Go!” she screamed waving the girl up the pile. The singularity would trigger in a few seconds.

The girl was halfway up the rubble.

If I can see her get over the pile, if I can just believe that she got out of here it will be okay. I just need one.

The girl scrambled over the pile and out of sight, but the rubble was still within the quarter mile distance to the singularity warhead.

Stacy didn’t look back as the thumping increased behind her. She sprinted up the rubble pile on hands and feet, her palm and rib screaming pain at her. As she came to the top, she saw the girl running down the street. Stacy leapt off the last half of the debris, rolled on the asphalt and came to her feet sprinting, the broken rib stabbing her in the side as she gasped for air.

The thumping behind her became louder and the roof of a car beside her flashed with green light and melted away. The heat threw a concussion that knocked her over. Skidding across the street, her helmet crashed into a curb. Rolling to her back, she saw the patrol ship, now coming off the rubble pile, racing toward her. Beyond it the stood the spire of the Sthenos destroyer against the sky. A heavy wind picked up sucking dirt and loose papers toward the debris pile, which chewed away from behind, until it had vanished.

The singularity’s triggered.

The patrol ship fired again, and the green beam, lanced into the asphalt a few feet away and raced toward her, the chunks it knocked free flying away on the wind. Then the patrol ship was shredded to nothing in a blink. The beam vanished, leaving a shattered line in the asphalt, which ended a few centimeters from her feet. The wind intensified, pulling her toward the destroyer. She snatched the iron bars of a gutter drain.

The street began tearing away as the event horizon raced up on her, the buildings on either side peeling away.

Stacy wasn’t outside the blast zone, but the girl had made it. Knowing that made Stacy’s death okay. She’d saved one and felt she deserved no less than she’d given to the people in the fence. The event horizon flashed up to her feet and her boot tugged on her leg as though a powerful animal had gotten a hold of it, and then… nothing. The wind swirled around her and fell into silence. A haze of dust hung in the air. The buildings on either side of her rained down sheets of glass and papers, into a half mile void gouged out of the island’s hide, which she now lay at the edge of.

Torn pipes hung from the walls of the cavernous bowl. Dark subway tunnels yawned. A spray of water whipped away to a black mass, where everything within the event horizon had been crushed to its atomic mass. A perfect sphere about the size of a medicine ball. The sewer water misted as it raced to the sphere and meshed with it, wetting the dark surface. The stream of water fell as the singularity died away. The sphere fell as well, crashing down into the great bowl. A moment later, the crack of it landing reached her, followed by a shockwave in the ground.

Stacy looked up to the Sthenos destroyer, its entire stern gone, floating high above, the last two thirds of the ship suspended in the blue sky with a great, curved bite taken out of it. It began to fall, tilting toward her. She leapt to her feet and ran. She felt as though she had a knife jammed in her lung, but she gave everything she had.

A great shadow blocked out the sun as she sprinted between the buildings. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the prow of the destroyer tilting out over her line of escape. The buildings pinned her in to the north and south. She had no way out. Sliding to a stop, she stuffed her fingers into a sewer cover and hauled on it, her injured hand and broken rib searing with pain as she pulled it free. The destroyer crashed through the tops of the buildings above her. She hopped into the circular pit of darkness and let herself fall straight down into the unknown. If it was a few feet deep, she’d be killed by the falling ship. If it was deep enough to survive the ship, she might break a leg or worse. The wind roared around her as she fell into the pitch black. The unseen bottom of the hole slammed into her feet. Her right leg and ankle exploded with pain as the ground crashed into her arms and face.

With her last ounce of will, she rolled into what she hoped would be open space. She found i
t, rolling over and over until she heard concrete and dirt crash down where she’d been. As the floor jolted, she turned face down with her arms over her head, waiting for the unseen ceiling to crash down on her. It didn’t. A moment longer… silence. She took a small flashlight from her chest and flicked it on. Grayness surrounded her. She could see nothing save swirling dust.

Shutting the light off, she lay back and finally allowed herself to scream against the pain of her broken leg, ruined ankle, injured hand, and cracked rib.

The engines of Whitetip’s Lakota whined as they rose to operating temperature. She stared at the clock on her HUD. Beyond it, looming in the darkness above Tokyo some ten miles off, she could see the spire of the Sthenos destroyer. The digital display ticked from 4:59:59 to 5:00:00 GMT, and the seconds continued on. Her eyes shifted to the base of the destroyer. Having no idea what a detonated singularity warhead would look like, she imagined a deep blackness growing into a sphere.

But nothing happened.

The clock moved on through 5:00:30 GMT. At 5:01:00 she was to launch if there was no damage to the destroyer. Its base still glittered in the lights, and… nothing.

Her eyes moved to the clock. 5:00:45. Fifteen seconds to live. Eyes back to the destroyer… nothing. Something had gone wrong. At that moment, a dark sphere formed, not at the base of the ship, but in the sea of city lights halfway to the destroyer. It expanded in a few seconds to half a mile across before collapsing back down, leaving a circular void in the lights. X had failed. In his failure, her time had come to an end.

…

“What are we looking at?” Jeffrey asked, leaning over the Nav-Con operator’s shoulder, as he shielded the bright sunlight from his eyes.

Leif, Dr Monti, and Commander Holloway all stood behind this one operator.

In a calm, focused voice, the kid said, “I won’t know for a few more minutes.”

Jeffrey looked at his mission timer. 5:02 GMT now. It should be on now. The destroyers were either falling to the ground or launching into the stratosphere.

Jeffrey looked out to where the Wraiths should be taking off out of the valley, and as if he had awakened them with the thought, a horrible roar rose up among the trees. Flights of snow-white birds lifted away across the valley. The Wraiths ascended after them, stubby delta wings and canard-bladed nosecones. As they leaned back on their main engines, the roar grew, thundering across the valley. Thirty-three ships shot into the blue sky, their thunder fading into resonant thuds.

As the glow of their engines turned to specks of light, the thunder grew distant, as if a far off storm that might never realize itself.

“God speed friends.”

A hand touched his shoulder. He looked to find Leif pointing to the displays.

The operator had live screens, but the Nav-Con was still dark.

“What do you have?” Jeffrey asked.

“It’s a communications satellite operating at a geosynchronous position over the North Pole. I’ve located the spaceborne Sthenos destroyer and am sending coordinates to the Wraiths now.”

“Is there only one?”

“As far as I can tell.”

Jeffrey felt a rush of relief. The possibility that more Sthenos destroyers had come during their blackout had been eating away at his confidence for weeks. Looking up, he found the Wraiths had disappeared. He imagined what the pilots were seeing, the ground dropping away, the blue deepening to violet as the first stars came out. The Earth’s broad horizon curving. He wished he could be up there with them. He’d never realized how difficult it was to be
a mission leader, to be absolutely responsible for those men and women, and when the most important part came, to have to sit and wait, to watch them burn.

“What about the ground-based destroyers?”

“I’m gathering data now sir,” the Nav-Con officer said as he adjusted the controls and entered commands. In a moment the globe of the Earth appeared on the Nav-Con the size of a basketball.

Jeffrey leaned forward as the markers for the twenty-two ground based Sthenos destroyers appeared. As the image of the Earth rotated New York came into view. The green fleck of light that marked the ship Stacy had been sent to destroy flicked to red. The globe kept turning and Denver’s light flicked red. Los Angeles flicked red as did Mexico City.

“Sir,” the operator said, “We have the ships all where we expected them. Twenty-two planet side and only one in orbit.” He listened for a moment, gripped his fist in a quiet celebration, and reached out, spinning the globe with a swipe of his fingers. With quick, excited words, he said, “We have confirmed kills on all destroyers… save Tokyo.” He zoomed in on Japan, where the destroyer’s marker lay nestled in the belly of the Tokyo sprawl. As the image zoomed in, the ship began lifting away from the city.

Whitetip’s assignment.

We have about half of the special warfare operatives back to their origin points,” the Nav-Con officer said. “The other half are unaccounted for.”

“Have the fuelers arrived in New Mexico, and the Ukraine?”

“Yes, sir,” the operator said, “We have only one Lakota down with a mechanical malfunction in Mexico. Everything else is in place.”

As Jeffrey watched the Tokyo based Sthenos destroyer lift away, he asked, “Current altitude?”

“5,000 feet and climbing at Mach 2, sir.”

…

She was halfway across the city of Tokyo now. While they were invisible in the dark sky, on her IFF display red sparks of light swarmed across the sky as Sthenos fighters poured from the upper reaches of the destroyer. The destroyer itself glowed a brilliant, ruby red at the center of her HUD. She began to jig and turn, barrel rolling and twisting as she crossed the open space. A beam of green energy lanced by to her right.

“Got him,” Kodiak said over the radio. Yellow fire bloomed in her small kidney-shaped rearview mirrors.

“These guys really can’t keep up with us,” Kodiak said.

She understood why not. With each jig she was pulling G’s which should have blacked her out. She had to will herself to go beyond rational limits. As she curved over, her vision tunneled only when she pulled 16 G’s. She felt as though her brain was a fusion reactor, a smoldering glow of awareness. She felt she could keep every single element on the IFF in her mind at once. She sensed the space around her aircraft as if it was her own skin and could imagine multiple pathways from each moment as clearly as if she’d had hours to draw them out on a flight plan board.

Kodiak continued to strip Sthenos fighters off of her as she kept up a scattered pattern, assuring that both she and he kept their six clear. Racing across the blurring sea of city lights, she leaned the Lakota onto its mains and shoved the throttle to its stops, growling against the crushing acceleration. Beyond her HUD, the Sthenos Destroyer’s glowing volcano-red engines lifted into the sky. The delta between her acceleration and the destroyer’s cascaded from 1200 to nothing and then into negative hundreds as she passed into Mach 3.

As she passed the destroyer’s engines, their blast buffeted the Lakota. She fought the stick to keep her line close and true. She could have triggered the singularity then, but Kodiak was right behind her, well within the quarter mile radius. Also, there were too many Sthenos fighters outside of it. At the top of the destroyer, fighters still poured out. If she could destroy that portion, the fighters would be gone as well. But what if the destroyer could achieve orbit with only the back half?

Slowing, she let the ship slide back by, so she flew just beside it, the air coming off the ship shaking the
Lakota’s wings.

Kodiak flew 100 meters behind her.

She keyed the radio, “Get out of here Kodiak.”

“I’m—”

“Get the hell out of here… please.”

His ship dropped away and when he had moved more than a quarter mile away Whitetip flicked open the plastic switch cover. She wondered for a moment if she would feel herself be crushed. In that moment she would have given anything to have just a bit more time. One more love affair, one more day on a warm beach, one more snowfall. But so that others might have them instead, she threw the switch.

…

Kodiak hadn’t seen the singularity form. He’d turned away, taken a Sthenos fighter, barrel rolled out of another’s sights, and when he came back around, the ship was simply missing it’s lower half… and Whitetip was gone. The destroyers prow slowed to a stop, seeming to go weightless for a moment before dropping back down into the sea of light that was Tokyo.

As the ship crashed into the lights, dark swaths forming as it hit, he felt no victory, only emptiness for the young woman now gone. Turning toward a large group of fighters, he throttled on. The fighters seemed for a moment lost, unable to respond to the loss of their destroyer, and he fired into the poorly formed group, taking ten with as many shots. He fired again, and again.

…

The Nav-Con operator shouted out as though he were at a baseball game when the red marker for the Sthenos destroyer over Tokyo winked out. Beside him Dr. Monti hugged Leif and kissed him—not passionately, but with the unrepentant joy of a victory wholly unexpected.

“Give me the status of all other ground-based destroyers,” Jeffrey said.

“All destroyed, sir,” the officer said and gave a whoop of innocent joy.

Jeffrey was glad to let him have it. They’d done nothing but lose until this moment, and even Jeffrey had to admit that he felt… vindicated. To turn the tables this much… However his thoughts turned to Whitetip, who now, he knew, had to be gone, and the Sthenos destroyer in orbit, which could still ruin them. The hardest fight remained. Dealing with the Sthenos fighters in atmosphere had proven simple. In the vacuum of space, the advantage was largely washed away. He had only thirty-three Wraiths on an intercept with the goliath ship. Thirty-three chances to take it down, and nothing more. The Sthenos had thousands of fighters in the air on Earth, and Jeffrey assumed hundreds were pouring by the second from the Sthenos destroyer in space. The modified Hammerheads could pull more G’s and if history rang true, outthink their opponents, but thousands to thirty-three…

The Spartans at Thermopylae hadn’t survived, but they’d made enough of a difference…

In that
, Jeffrey felt hope rise. The Sthenos were more advanced. They had incredible numbers and powerful weapons, but they weren’t accustomed to losing, and right now they were, badly… again. This time the Hammerheads and Special Warfare had done more than bloody their nose. This time they’d cut their damn arms off. What would a fighter do with no arms?

They’ll run.

He looked to the Nav-Con. “Get me a close up on the Sthenos destroyer in orbit.”

“Yes sir,” the young officer said.

…

Kodiak spun and fired. He
jinked. On his IFF two Sthenos fighters behind him winked out of existence as they collided. He fired again into the darkness. Two yellow blooms rose ahead, and he had to swoop around them, grunting as he braced himself against the G’s. Another Sthenos fighter, unable to follow his turn, winked out on the IFF as it passed through the cloud of debris.

He’d lost count of how many dead, but he felt now, as he arced upside down and looked to where the hulk of the Sthenos destroyer had landed in Tokyo,
fires burning around its dark outline far below, that he’d done enough. He would kill as long as he could, but if he died now, it would be all right. He’d paid them back for Whitetip.

He chased down one Sthenos after another, never staying more than a few seconds on each target. He used short bursts and, as he shot another and another without missing, began to laugh. He felt almost god-like in his ability to see a target and turn it to a blooming cloud of yellow fire and streaking debris. He had a Sthenos on him now and a green bar of energy lanced below him as he turned. He turned so hard that the tunnel came on deep and pacifying. For a moment he was unsure where he was. He found himself surrounded by an electric-blue field. Had he been shot? Had he died? The field faded. He was in the Lakota, still turning hard. He’d blacked out. As he came to his senses he realized he’d come all the way around on the Sthenos who’d been on his six. He flicked his trigger. Nothing. He’d run out of ammunition. He switched to rockets, targeted the Sthenos, and launched a needle-thin mamba missile. Lancing away on a trail of smoke, its bloom of cluster warheads missed the Sthenos.
He fired again, but the mambas wouldn’t track.

“Too bad,” he said and turned the Lakota toward the largest concentration of Sthenos fighters, all vying for position on him. He fired off all of his mambas in a spiraled pattern, sweeping the nose of the Lakota in an outwardly increasing spiral. All twenty were away
and several found lucky hits. Those explosions caused a few other crashes.

He was done. No more weapons.

He considered what to do as he spun away from lancing green energy beams. He could harry them. Fly among them until they shot him down, but he was growing tired. He could crash into one, try and pick out one of the best and take it out, or he could run, get refitted, and kill more later. He hated to run from the fight, but that was the right choice.

Kill as many as you can if you get the chance
had been Holt’s final command to him, and he had. He’d run his guns until the barrels glowed, run them empty.

He slammed the stick forward, and dove for the deck, jigging and swooping. Beams from the pursuing Sthenos lanced around him, striking the ground. Buildings and streets scattered into flame and cloud where the beams struck, leaving smoking craters in the lights.