Starship Eternal (War Eternal Book 1) (14 page)

Somehow, the disc avoided the Shot. The laser hit a car in front of them, burning through its engine and dropping it to the pavement like a stone. A moment later, the disc hit the ship and exploded, knocking the craft from the sky. The largest piece of debris plummeted onto the street behind them, leading to crashes and screams.

The destruction seemed to spur the defenses into more aggressive action. Two more of the drone ships fell into the space between buildings, cannons rotating towards them and preparing to fire. The assassin skidded to the left and down an alley before they could take the Shot, cutting into a space too narrow for the ships to follow. He came to a stop halfway through, dropping a small device onto the street before returning to the original path.

"Dummy signature," he said, explaining the maneuver. The device would fool the AI into thinking they were still sitting in the alley, a trick that would buy them a little bit of time.

"It's still a kilometer to the spaceport," Mitchell said. "It's going to be crawling with military."

"We're not going to the spaceport. We just want them to think we are."

They burst back out onto the street, finding the traffic stalled in the mayhem and the pedestrians retreating to the safety of the buildings. It made it easier for them to travel, the bike able to climb the hoods of the other vehicles, or ride along the sidewalks. They cleared another four blocks, still headed in the direction of the spaceport.
 

An armored Suppressor moved out into the street in front of them, the turret on top rotating and opening fire. Bullets kicked up pavement in front of them, and the bike swerved back and forth in an effort to stay ahead of the targeting computers. Mitchell watched it coming, wincing as the bullets drew ever closer to them, waiting for the moment they began to sink into his flesh. The ping of slugs against the frame of the bike was cut short when the bike reached another alley, getting out of the line of fire and escaping the storm.
 

They crossed the alley onto another street, turning and lurching forward, cutting across before the Suppressor could catch up. It fired at them from behind as they moved away.
 

More drones began flowing in from overhead. If they managed to lock on with their lasers, they were as good as dead.

"We aren't going to make it," Mitchell said. He didn't even know where his rescuer was taking him, but the net was closing fast.
 

The bike continued to accelerate, weaving around stopped cars, bouncing over the sidewalk. He stayed as close to the civilians as he could, knowing the AI wouldn't take a shot as long as innocents were at risk.
 

"We already did," the assassin replied. He shifted his weight and turned the handle of the bike, forcing it into a leaning skid that brought them out onto the edge of an overpass. Stretching below them were the hyperlanes, fully autonomous highways that carried ground vehicles from city to city at ultra-high speeds.
 

Mitchell felt his heart stop. He couldn't possibly...

The bike zipped forward, straight towards the divider that separated the above-ground city lanes from the hyperlanes below. A third disc came to his hand, and he threw it forward at the wall.

Mitchell closed his eyes. The AI would sense the debris and stop the traffic, but would it be fast enough to keep innocent people from being killed in a horrific crash? He didn't think so, and he didn't want to see his fear confirmed.
 

He heard the explosion, felt the heat of it. The whine of the bike's repulsers changed as it shot out into open air, twenty feet above solid mass. Then they were angling downward, dropping to the ground below at the same time he heard the din of the destruction at their backs. The repulsers scraped along the ground and the bike wobbled and almost fell out from beneath them before the rider straightened it up, and the automated systems caught the new vehicle. His rescuer hit a button, and a weak energy shield wrapped around them. It wouldn't be enough to stop a bullet or a laser, but it protected them from the elements as the lane system pulled them to speed.

Mitchell couldn't believe they had made it.

They exited the hyperlanes twenty minutes later, nearly eight hundred kilometers from York. The spot wasn't a designated exit, but a stretch of open air surrounded by fields. The assassin had done something to override the autonomous control of the bike and impressively steered them off the grid.
 

They had ridden through the fields, over an embankment that separated the hyperlanes from the land and into a massive growth of wheat. The farms on Liberty were corporate owned, thousands of acres across, tended by huge machines that towered over the crops and were surrounded by smaller drones that did more delicate work. Mitchell could see a couple of them off in the distance, but their own path was clear.

"They won't expect that we ditched ahead of an exit," his rescuer said. His voice sounded strained. "We should be safe."

"Where are we going?"

"There's an old hanger fifty klicks east of here. It's going to be torn down in the next couple of weeks, but it's there now. So is our ship."

"Our ship?"

"Yes. It isn't pretty, but it will get you off Liberty."

"Who are you?" Mitchell asked again.

"Not yet. When we reach the hanger."

They sped through the field in silence, the energy shield throwing up sparks of brighter light as the wheat bounced off. They reached a narrow road and raced along it, headed east. Mitchell sat behind the assassin, focusing on his breathing, trying to clear his head. What the hell was he doing on this bike? The man he had escaped with had killed an untold number of people getting them out of York, not to mention Corporal Kwon and four civilians two days earlier. And he had tried to kill
him
.
 

Or had he?

He had been shot in the side of the head. Grazed, right at the place where his neural implant was located. It had been damaged, shorted, and ever since then...
 

He put his hand to the side of his helmet and wondered at the implications. Had the whole assassination attempt been a ruse? Had the engineers who fixed the implant done something to it in the process? The implant was a direct link to his brain, and it had routines built in that could both monitor and assist in controlling nearly every basic function.
 

Could he trust his own mind?

The idea almost frightened him more than the thought of his impending public implosion when Tamara went live with her report of his fraud, when the Prime Minister called him out as a rapist, and when General Cornelius sang in tune to all of it and denied the military's involvement in the lie.

It all felt so surreal, and at the same time so oddly familiar. As if he had known this was going to happen.

Or, as if it had happened before.

What about Christine? He hoped she had managed to get through it with her own integrity intact. He still didn't get why she had helped him escape, or what was with that kiss. He also didn't get why his mind kept going back to that, of all things. The Major was physically attractive, sure, but there was so much about her he found grating. Why did he care that her lips tasted like honey? That her mouth was soft and warm and perfect.

He stopped himself. It was those kind of thoughts that got him into this mess to begin with. If he survived, if he managed to get off Liberty and make it through another day...
 

He was done with women.

The bike pulled off the road a few minutes later, making a beeline down a small path between overgrown brush until finally reaching the abandoned hanger. It was made of poly-alloy and ultralight molded concrete, a grayish-rose color that looked like a pimple in the middle of the green field that surrounded it. There was rust showing around the edges, and part of the back corner had either collapsed or been knocked down by vandals. The doors were closed, a magnetic lock bolted to it and keeping them that way.

His rescuer stopped the bike, and they both dismounted. Mitchell noticed the man was the same height as him, with a build that was probably very similar beneath his rider's padding. He reached up to take his helmet off.

"Don't," the other man said. "Inside." He walked up to the lock and put his palm against it. It deactivated, and he pulled the doors halfway open. Then he turned and headed back for the bike.

That was when Mitchell saw the blood.

"You were hit," he said.
 

It was thick on the man's chest, flowing steadily enough that it had stained the entire front of the padded suit he was wearing.
 

"Yes. Three times." He grabbed the handlebars and led the bike into the hanger. Mitchell followed behind him.

A single light went on when they entered. It was resting on a simple metal table in the corner, a bright diode that bathed the entire building in a daylight glow, including the ship the assassin had mentioned.

It was a starfighter. Not a Moray. Older. A dual-purpose configuration, intended for use in space and atmospheric missions. He stared at it, trying to remember the model. A pair of vectoring thrusters on the top and bottom and fixed gun mounts facing front, a long beak with seating for two in the cockpit, a wedge-shaped set of wings with small missile launchers extruding along them, and a flat tail that sported a pair of thrusters at the rear. Compared to the Moray, the thing was a brick.

 
"An S-17," the man said. "It's more agile than it looks."

He stood at the table, picking up a tool from it that Mitchell didn't recognize.

The S-17. That was it. The ship had to be sixty years old, at least.

"We need to disable your implant," his rescuer said.

"What?"

"The helmet you're wearing is jamming the signal, but as soon as you take it off the Alliance will know exactly where you are. You don't want to get caught, do you?"

Mitchell stared at the device.
 

"Trust me, you don't want to get caught." The man walked over to him. "Take off the helmet."

"Why don't you take off yours?"

"I don't have a fixed implant. The helmet is a surrogate. I need it to help me zoom in on your skull. Now lean down and let me do this. We don't have a lot of time."

Mitchell leaned down, and the man positioned himself next to his head.

"Now, take off the helmet. Quickly."

Mitchell grabbed the sides of the helmet and pulled it off. The moment he did he was greeted with a shrill tone that forced him to clench his jaw. Then he felt a sting and the warmth of his blood on his cheek. The tone vanished.

"Remote disable," the man said. "Nasty. It won't bother you again."

"I didn't know they could do that," Mitchell said.

"If they used it, it means they have no intent on bringing you back alive to tell anyone else about it."

He returned to the table, bending down and reaching under it. He came up holding a jumpsuit similar to his and a pair of boots.
 

"Lose the uniform, put this on."

Mitchell didn't question. He stripped out of the jacket, shirt, and pants, and then slipped on the jumpsuit and boots. They were both a perfect fit.
 

"You obviously know who I am, where to find me, what size clothes I wear," Mitchell said. "Isn't it time you told me what all of this is about?"

The man paused. Then he reached for his helmet.

"Yes. I think it is."

He lifted the helmet from his head.

Mitchell found himself looking back at... himself?

EARTH. October 21, 2055

"Smile team, you're about to make history."

Kathy smiled, careful not to squint her eyes when she did. It was hard enough to keep them open with the glare from the New Mexico sun. Rising up a kilometer behind her was a massive block of alloy and carbonate. It was spread almost two thousand meters long and two hundred meters tall across the plains, bolstered another twenty meters by the repulser sled that had been built beneath it.