Daring (30 page)

Kris fired off flares and threw her craft into another S turn. That done, she popped chaff and more flares, then took off into another S, while aiming for the deck and praying her ugly old hog could still take as many gees as the ancient design specs called for.

The first rocket missed off to her right, but another exploded behind her, knocking her craft around. Like the good hog it was, it kept running, and Kris kept dodging.

Behind Kris, Jack was doing his best to get a view of the alien site. He slammed his helmeted head against the canopy first to the right, then to the left.

“I see infantry,” Jack shouted on net. “Lots and lots of infantry deploying from the buildings.”

There was a pause while he switched sides. “Two battalions. No make that three. Maybe four.”

Again Kris heard his helmet bounce off the canopy as he changed his viewpoint. “There are vehicles with them. Moving fast. Looks like guns on them.”

Kris slammed out of one turn, just dodged a rocket, and hurled the old hog into another.

Jack didn't pause in his shouting this time. “Abort the landing. They are preparing to oppose the landing with a major force. Abort the landing.”

“I hear you,” came in the colonel's calm voice. “The landing is canceled. We will return to orbit.”

“Don't go near the alien site,” Kris said. “They're gunning for us.”

“Understood. Avoid the alien construction.”

“Enough of this noise. They are shooting at my ships,” snarled Admiral Krätz. “I will show them you do not fire on an Imperial Greenfeld battleship.”

 

Kris coughed as she came awake. There was smoke in the cabin. She could smell it inside her suit. That wasn't good.

“Jack, you okay?” she asked.

“I was wondering when you would rejoin the living,” he said.

“I'm alive,” she sputtered

“We need to get out of here.”

“Yeah, I think you're right.” Kris hit the button to eject the canopy.

Nothing happened.

“Ejector doesn't work,” she said.

“I could have told you that. Nothing works on this busted bucket of bolts. Want to try that crowbar you and the chief were talking about that we'd never need?”

Kris glanced at her elbow, not easy with her suit halfpressurized. “It's not in its holder. Must have come loose when we crashed.”

“Check at your feet,” Jack suggested.

The bottom of the cockpit was a mess. “I can see daylight coming in. I think the crowbar busted out when we came down. It's probably in the mud somewhere up ahead of us.”

“Won't help us there,” Jack noted, then went on. “Let's try pushing the canopy together. On three. One. Two. Three.”

Nothing happened.

“Can you climb up on your seat and put your back into that push?” Kris asked.

“I'll try.”

A moment later, Kris was staring at Jack's butt and shouting, “One. Two. Three.”

This time it budged. Several more concerted pushes later, and they found themselves sprawled in the mud beside the wreckage of their hog.

“There's an emergency kit in there somewhere?” Jack shouted. The smell of fire was getting stronger. Considering that Kris was still on her internal oxygen, it was looking like there was a whole lot wrong with this picture.

She clambered over Jack, found a bright yellow bag marked EMERGENCY behind his seat, and got it out on the third yank. She did that with no help from Jack.

She was about to comment on his unhelpfulness but lacked the breath, so she limited herself to doing the best mudsplashing run she could manage away from the now smoking craft.

Jack tried to stand up . . . and collapsed at his first step. “My ankle's shot,” he yelped.

Kris dropped the survival bag and lurched back to give Jack a hand. With one arm around his waist and him leaning heavily on her, they struggled back to the yellow bag.

Kris grabbed it as they went by. Staggering from one step to another, they slipped and slid for a good fifty meters through the thick yellow mud.

Then the first fuel cell exploded.

“How long until the antimatter goes?” Jack asked.

“It's supposed to be safe for several days,” Kris said.

“May I point out that it was provided by a Greenfeld lowest bidder,” Nelly said.

“Let's move,” Jack said through gritted teeth.

They actually started moving fast enough to make splashes. Some small creatures took flight. Kris aimed them off to their right, where a low ridge offered something of a shadow if the antimatter container lost battery backup.

Beside her, Jack grunted in pain but said not a word in protest.

A couple of hundred years later, they topped a saddle in the ridge and began to half stumble, half fall down the other side of it. Kris took a last look over her shoulder.

The old GAC had a cheery fire going, sending up gouts of black smoke. Far across the plain, several vehicles were hurrying toward the smoke, gun turrets pointed eagerly at the source of the fire.

“It looks like we got company coming,” Kris said.

“Well, we did want to talk to them,” Jack pointed out as cheerfully as his pain allowed.

“Yeah, but not as
their
prisoners,” Kris said, in her own defense.

“Kris, what do I do?” Nelly asked. “The aliens blew up their computers when it looked like we'd disabled their ship. Do you have anything to blow me up?”

“No,” Kris said.

“I've been organizing my own matrix for some time now,” Nelly said. “I guess I could dissolve it. They'd know we had some pretty fancy materials, but they wouldn't get any information out of me.”

“Let's not jump into any conclusions just yet,” Kris said. “Nelly, can you reach anyone? Is there any net?”

“I can't pick up a thing, Kris. Not even the Greenfeld battleships thirty thousand klicks above us. We're on our own.”

Kris glanced down as they struggled along. Their footsteps and the dragged bag left a clear trail from the smoking GAC right to them. There was nothing Kris could do about that. She might be able to find a rock outcropping. Maybe a cave. Knowing the Greenfeld people, there might be some weapons in the sack she was dragging.

Kris sneezed. The air in her suit stank of sulfur. What was outside was leaking inside. She sneezed again, clogging her breathing mask and getting junk all over the inside of her helmet visor.

This planet, like so many others, did not like her. Unlike the others, where she was just unwelcome for political and legal reasons, this one was making it personal.

Kris raised the visor so she could see. The outside air immediately assaulted her eyes, making them water.

“That's not nice,” Kris muttered.

“My suit's leaking, too,” Jack muttered.

Kris paused for a moment. Holding her breath, she did the best she could to clean out her air mask. When she pushed it back on her face, the mucus seemed to help it seal better. That didn't help her eyes.

She took a moment to unzip the survival bag. Bad idea.

The zipper stuck with it halfway open, then jammed up hard there in the middle. Kris used her survival knife to cut the bag open, then rummaged in it for what she could. There were a couple of packages of emergency rations . . . which looked like they were as old as GAC-7, which was to say eighty years. The oxygen bottles looked to be no younger. There were a handful of flares that were mashed together.

They might fire off. Then again, they might not. On third thought, they might fire up if she looked at them hard.

It crossed Kris's mind that they might do to burn Nelly's matrix into something the aliens would never recognize. She found her hands trembling. It couldn't be at the thought of her own impending death. Or Nelly's. It had to be the exertion of dragging Jack through the mud and up the hill.

Yeah, that was it.

She found a flare gun . . . and tossed it aside. She had enough drawing her pursuers after her; she didn't need to send up a flare.

“Kris, I've got the colonel on net calling for you,” Nelly announced.

“Tell him where we are.”

“He wants you to send up a rocket or light off a flare.”

“The flare I can do,” Kris said. She set Jack down gently, then just as gently lifted the clump of flares out of the yellow sack. Keeping them at arm's length, she stepped off several paces. Deftly separating one out from the melted mass, she pulled off the top.

Nothing happened.

She tossed it aside and risked a second flare from the glob. When she flipped its top off, it fizzled for a second . . . and then went out.

“This is not working,” she grumbled. She decided to flip the tops off both the remaining flares. Both came off.

One just lay in her hand. The other started to fizzle. It kept fizzling, neither turning into a full light nor going out. Kris made a face at the two failures of one sort or another in her hand and figured she couldn't do much worse.

“Don't you dare,” Jack said.

But Kris was already tipping the fizzling flare over and pointing its small stream of fire into the dead one.

It caught.

The fire would have taken Kris's hand off if not for the flight gloves. However, inside the glove, her hand felt like it had been parboiled. Still, the flare shone bright as its manufacturer ever hoped it would.

“They see us,” Nelly said.

“Oh, Kris, what am I ever going to do with you?” Jack said with a sigh.

“The flare is lit,” Kris yipped, trying to shake the pain from her hand. “We are spotted. We're going to get rescued. And someone will put some ointment on my burn. What are you griping about?”

“Nothing,” Jack said. “Nothing you're likely to listen to.”

Two landers came toward them. One was low and breaking for a landing in front of them. The other was higher. It fired as it crossed over them. Its rockets flew past them and vanished beyond the ridge.

And were quickly followed by a huge explosion that kept on going for most of a minute. “I'd say that got the antimatter pod and the underwing armament,” Kris said.

“And those aliens that were following us,” Nelly said. “Two of their gun rigs were stopped, looking at the GAC. Two others were headed for us. Not anymore.”

Kris waved as the lander came to a halt. From its aft ramp, two gun trucks full of Marines drove out and hightailed it across the dusty yellow plain toward the two downed flyers. Behind them, they left a plume in the thin air that might have mattered if the lander's sister hadn't settled a lot of alien hash.

Three minutes later, under the alert eye of a gunner at a rocket launcher, a medic was bagging Kris's burned hand. Something in the bag made the pain go away. She relaxed into the backseat of the gun truck as it made best speed for the lander.

“Another day, and I'm not dead yet,” she muttered.

“Not for a lack of trying,” Jack added.

“We stopped the Marines from landing into a trap,” Kris pointed out.

“What is it with these jokers?” Jack asked no one in particular. “They won't talk to us. They cram all sorts of armament into a small little mining outpost, and did I mention, they won't say a word to us.”

“I think you did, Jack,” Kris said. Another try at talking to them and another complete failure. Another encounter and another fight. What was it with these people?

She was about to go to war with an entire alien race, and she had no idea why. Or what they were. Or what they wanted.

Well, she did know something. They didn't want to talk. And they wanted her dead. Her and anyone else they met.

This was crazy.

An observation that she was pretty sure her grampa Ray had made several times as he fought the Iteeche.

The takeoff run gave Kris a good look at the alien site. It boiled like an active volcano. Of the two buildings, not a stick remained. Of the people who had rushed out to defend it, not so much as a single body. The rock ran like flaming lava from the pounding it had taken from Greenfeld lasers.

The flight back to the
Wasp
was short and silent.

40

The
Wasp
had already broken orbit by the time Kris got back to the bridge.

“Prepare for high-gee acceleration,” Sulwan announced from the navigator's chair.

“Let's get to that jump point,” Captain Drago said. “We've wasted enough time on this distraction.”

“Did they get off any warning message?” Kris asked.

“We can't tell for sure, but they don't seem to leave message buoys at the jump points. At least, we've never seen one,” Drago said. “I checked with the other corvette skippers. None of us saw anything at any of our jumps.”

“So there's not a web of trade or anything like that,” Kris said.

“Lonely and solitary,” Penny said. “That's the life they seem to lead.”

The rest of the battle fleet followed the
Wasp
's lead, hard acceleration until they were halfway to the jump point, then hard deceleration the rest of the way. Several hours later, the
Wasp
came to a halt a few kilometers from the jump point and launched the periscope to take a glance through.

“Nothing,” Chief Beni reported once the electromagnetic sensor was through the jump point. “There's a sun making the usual noises and nothing else. We got here ahead of the hostiles.”

They had won one gamble but must now take another.

If the aliens had beaten them into the system, Kris would very likely have called it quits. There was no way she could risk a long approach course toward the huge mother ship. Kris had to get in position to blast the mother ship, hopefully with its swarm of deployable ships still aboard. Otherwise, those ships, each several times the size of a battleship, would maul Kris's tiny fleet before it could so much as dent them.