Back From the Dead (7 page)

“Why didn’t you call me?”

Harbin shrugs. “Only three of them.”

Guard One is now in the back next to Dopestick, tied up similarly. The two bodies lie nearby. Helton and Harbin are at the end of an aisle, looking into an open gun crate. “If we can find ammo, things just got easier,” Harbin says.

“I’ll see what there is,” Helton replies. He moves off down the aisle and around the corner, searching shelves. Harbin stoops down, removes a shrink-wrapped rifle from the packing crate, and peels back the plastic.

“Found it,” Helton calls.

“Good. Drag a few thousand rounds up front, then find magazines.”

“
What
?”

“Hope we don’t need it all, but ammo is like money. I have yet to have too much.”

Flight

Harbin and Helton stand near the door of the warehouse, rifles slung across their chests, pockets loaded with full magazines. Nearby is a heap of stuff ready to go: two duffel bags, 20-liter water cans, two more rifles, opened cases of ammunition, and bandoleers full of magazines.

“Almost time,” Helton says.

“Still need to get more info on the fliers from our unhelpful friends, though,” Harbin says. “You might want to plug your ears.”

Helton looks at him uncertainly. “I thought Sikhs were all peaceful and into the sanctity of life?”

“Mostly, yes. Never said I was a particularly good one,” Harbin says. “And others are depending on us.” He walks to the back of the warehouse. An agonized scream rings through the room. Then another. Another. Helton winces more each time.

Harbin returns to the front of the building holding a small bag. He walks to the pile of things he pulled out of the slaver’s pockets and fishes out an electronic key. He holds up the bag and key and says, “I think we have what we need. Time to go.”

“What’d you do?”

“Pegged his give-a-shit meter.”

They pick up the gear and walk out the door.

Helton and Harbin walk confidently by the corner of the building toward the landing area with rifles, duffels, water and ammo cans, and three bandoleers apiece. They stride boldly to the largest of the fliers, as if they have every right to be there. At the boarding hatch near the front they set down the gear and water. Next to the closed hatch is a handprint scanner.

“What now?” Helton asks.

Harbin retrieves the bag from a cargo pocket. From it he takes a severed hand and places it against the scanner. It flashes green, and built-in stairs fold down as the hatch opens. He casually drops the hand back in the bag, tucks it in his pocket, and picks up his load. They march up the stairs and inside, and the hatch closes behind them.

They drop the supplies on the deck and head for the nearby cockpit door. They arrive at the door at the same time and both pause, each waving the other to go first. Then awareness dawns.

“Aren't you a pilot?” Harbin says, incredulous.

“Aren’t
you
? It was your idea.”

Harbin shakes his head. An awkward silence follows as they consider their predicament.

Finally Helton asks, “Not … at all?”

“Not even
barely
.”

“Then let’s hope this thing doesn’t crash as easily as a simulator,” says Helton, as he leads the way into the cockpit. Harbin looks at Helton in surprise, then fatalistic acceptance.

They climb into the seats and buckle in, then sit for a moment as Helton looks over the cockpit controls, which are very different from the layout in his simulator test. Helton mutters to himself as he identifies various controls. “Okay, master ignition, keylock, attitude indicators, pedals, landing gear. That must be …” he cocks his head and frowns in confusion for a moment, “hopefully something I don’t need. Ah! Security check!” He points to a pad off to one side. “Give me a hand, there.”

Harbin puts the severed hand on the handprint-scanner, which blinks, then lights up with the message: “Pilot authentication: POSITIVE.” Harbin gives the electronic key to Helton, who inserts it into the keylock, which lights up the control panels. He examines screens, flips a few switches, and a moment later they hear the sound of machinery spinning up to speed.

“Here goes,” Helton says grimly. “Hang on tight.”

Their flier starts to rise, slowly and unevenly. It tips, lurches to one side, and runs into the other large flier, tearing a big gash with the landing strut and tangling the forward landing gear. It twists, tips, and turns trying to get free, but the strut just gets more tangled. The flier struggles, swaying and sagging, over-stressed drives whining, but after a few seconds it settles down, front end on top of the other large flier, back end crushing one of the small fliers.

Armed and uniformed prison guards, sloppily dressed and unkempt, exit one of the large buildings abutting the mesa. They start firing at the ship, now sitting off-kilter, half on and half off the other large flier. The rear cargo ramp drops, and Helton and Harbin run out, heading for the remaining medium flier. Helton carries most of their supplies — water, duffels, ammunition — while Harbin has only bandoleers, one ammo can, and a rifle.

Harbin drops to one knee — into a good supported firing position — and squeezes off a dozen rapid aimed shots. Guards fall to the ground in rapid succession. The survivors are spraying fire wildly on full-automatic kicking up spurts of dust, but none very close to Harbin. More guards run out of the building while others try to run back in, making for a generally confused and chaotic scene. Harbin is calm and precise, a professional. He keeps shooting, drops a magazine, and smoothly inserts another with barely a pause in his firing.

A pintle-mounted light 25mm grenade launcher with a telescopic sight stands on a parapet that forms one wall of a building that overlooks the landing field from a high angle. A half-dressed guard runs out from a nearby door and throws himself behind the grenade launcher. He scans the field and sees Helton, standing at the flier’s open door, tossing in essential goods. Helton turns, waves to Harbin to hurry up. The guard quickly centers in, setting the crosshairs high on the center of Helton’s back. BOOM! The launcher jerks up a bit in recoil. Then the guard settles the scope back onto Helton’s prostrate form. He is stretched out face down, motionless, a charred smoking spot covering much of his upper back.

The guard swings the launcher around to point at the foot of the ramp of the crashed flier, where Harbin is still firing. He looks through the scope and sees Harbin aiming directly at him. Harbin’s gun jerks slightly, smoke puffing from the barrel, and the launcher jerks crazily, pointing skyward as the guard falls.

Twenty-one dead guards lie scattered on the ground between Harbin and the mine building. The lifeless form of a shirtless man hangs over the parapet wall next to a grenade launcher. Two guards stand at the edge of the large doorway just inside the mine building. One starts to peek around the corner, toward the airfield. Harbin squeezes off a few rounds at the open doorway and into the sheet-metal walls on either side. The guard pulls back sharply as a hole appears with a CLANK in the wall next to him, and bullets buzz past to ping on the back of the building.

Harbin grabs his ammo can from the ground and sprints to where Helton has fallen. He kneels, takes a few more covering shots, and looks down at Helton. Smoke rises from Helton’s coat, and the back of his neck and head are blackened and blood-spattered. The grenade explosion burned all the way through his coat, but underneath is the shiny silver-white of the book that Helton had tucked away in the cave. Harbin grabs his shoulder and carefully rolls him over. His face is blank, stunned, uncomprehending.

A ringing, roaring, muffling of sounds. It’s all blurry, dark, and moving in slow motion. Helton stares up at Harbin’s mouth yelling, “COME ON! ON YOUR FEET! WE GOTTA GO!” and he closes his eyes for a second. He shakes his head gingerly, squints, and half sits up, looking sideways. Dust puffs kick up from the bullets hitting nearby. Harbin holds his rifle in one hand and helps Helton to his feet. He fires covering shots as Helton stumbles to the next flier, drops to one knee for aimed shots as Helton works his way up the stairs. Then he stands, tosses the last things through the door, runs up the stairs, and empties his magazine at the building. He ducks through the hatch, following Helton into the cockpit.

Sunlight shining in through the cockpit’s windshield casts stark shadows on the grimy seats and screens. Helton looks over the controls for a moment — the layout is much like that in the simulator he crashed — rubs his face, shakes his head gently to clear it, winces, then begins the launch sequence. He clumsily slips the electronic key into its slot, and Harbin places the severed hand on the scanner. Helton flips switches, struggling to keep focus. The drive system spins up, and its sound fills the cabin.

The flier rises smoothly from the landing field, leaving the wreckage of the other below, angles away, and heads toward a valley between two mesas. It sweeps up and around the building, across a small spur and around a bend in the valley, then swoops down to land near the cluster of waiting passengers.

The cargo bay is small, about seven meters long and five wide, lined with flip-down seats. Harbin stands next to the ramp, pulling tight the straps on a safety harness. The flier lands with a thump and a jerk. Harbin hits a large button on the bulkhead, and the rear ramp lowers rapidly to the ground. “Thank God!” someone yells, and the passengers start scrambling up the ramp as fast as they can, carrying the smaller children.

“EVERYONE MAKE IT?” Harbin shouts, in a voice trained to cut through the noise of battle and the fog of confusion.

“Yes,” one of the women replies happily, “All here!”

“One per seat and buckle up!” Harbin takes a young girl from her father and buckles her into a nearby seat with practiced speed and efficiency, then looks around the cargo hold to see others doing the same. “LIFT OFF! GO GO GO!” he yells toward the cockpit, then he slaps the ramp button, and it slowly starts to rise.

Back at the landing field one of the slavers runs, carrying a light machine gun with a long belt of ammo, headed for the remaining flier, a small open-topped two-man quad-rotor with ducted fans. He jumps into the flier, drops the gun into the pintle mount on the front right corner of the cockpit, grabs the controls, and hits a button. He waits a moment for the propellers to spin up, then takes off after Helton.

The cargo bay loading ramp is about two-thirds closed and rising slowly. A loud roaring fills the cargo bay as air rushes past and through the opening, tugging at hair and loose clothing. Passengers line the wall of the cargo bay, buckled into the flip-down seats, holding the duffels, ammo, and bandoleers. Harbin, now with a safety line clipped to his harness, checks their buckles. Next to him, a passenger is pouring a cup of water from a 20-liter can when a metallic CLANK sounds and the water can sprouts two holes, one facing the open ramp and one on the opposite side. Another bullet strikes one of the ramp lift pistons, hydraulic oil spurts out, and the ramp stops closing. Harbin jerks his head around to look out the opening and sees the small quad-rotor flying close behind them, the guard trying to pilot with one hand and aim a machine gun with the other.

Harbin snatches his rifle from the man holding it for him, barrel-down, steps to the back door and braces with a knee and one hand, then fires one-handed at the quad-rotor as it dodges and jerks behind their swooping, twisting flier. He struggles to keep his feet as Helton dives and swerves, his view out the back door shifting wildly. A series of holes runs up the loading ramp, and a splash of bullets glint as they ricochet around the cargo hold, and one tears through Harbin’s leg in a small spray of gore. No bones hit, but more than a scratch. Harbin is trying to pick his shots, but the combination of Helton’s evasive flying and the quad-rotor’s erratic motion makes the challenge impossible even for him. Frustrated, he drops the magazine and slams another into the gun, switches to full-auto, and hoses down the general area of the quad-rotor, sending hot brass flying all over the cargo area.

The quad-rotor pilot has one hand on the belt-fed pintle-mounted light machine gun, the other on the control yoke. He fires in short bursts at the escaping flier as he flies erratically back and forth. A bullet breaks his windscreen, making him swerve. He fires back. The two aircraft swoop through a series of tight turns with steep canyon walls on each side, and another round tears a small hole in the front of his quad-rotor. He starts to fire again, but a stream of full-auto tracer fire blossoms out from the flier, and he dodges wildly to avoid it.

In the flier cockpit, Helton twists and turns the control yoke as the canyon walls flash by through windows and screens. He flips a switch, adjusts a large lever forward. He grits his teeth and, seeing a sheer wall ahead, pulls back hard on the yoke.

The tracer fire stops and the guard banks the quad-rotor back into position to fire another burst. Suddenly, the flier pulls straight up, revealing a sheer rock wall ahead.

Harbin inserts another magazine without removing the rifle from his shoulder, and Helton stands the craft on its tail and climbs straight up. Harbin pitches forward and down through the half open ramp door, finally getting a clear and close, if unanticipated, shot at the quad-rotor. He fires a long burst on full-auto as he falls. Tracer rounds stream across the aircraft and its pilot.

The guard rocks back as bullets rip through him. Others plow through one of the engines, disrupting rapidly spinning parts. The engine explodes and the windshield shatters and the aircraft hurtles directly at Harbin. He hits the end of his safety line hard and is jerked up out of the way, like a high-speed yoyo being reeled in, barely clearing the quad-rotor as it hits the sheer rock wall of the canyon and explodes.

Relaxing

The spaceport lounge is a busy place, with lots of booths and tables, screens on the walls, varied lighting. A dozen passengers from the rescue sit at a long table, talking over drinks and the remains of meals, while Helton and Harbin sit across from each other at the far end.