Drifter's War (23 page)

Now, which one to steal? Helicopters were out; he didn't know how to fly them, and didn't have the required legs. That left the air cars.

Cy rolled in and around a forest of landing gear, rising occasionally to peek in a cockpit, searching for just the right one.

Then he found it. An air car at the very end of the line. The aircraft was shaped like a delta, could seat up to four passengers, and was heavily armed. Cy rose, dropped into the open cockpit, and scanned the control panel. Small hatches whirred open as he deployed both of his articulated arms. His pincers darted here and there, touching, feeling, testing. Computers booted themselves up, fans started to hum, and indicator lights came on.

Cy had never been in an Il Ronnian air car before, but he was an engineer, and knew that form tends to follow function.

Especially where military artifacts are concerned. With that in mind it was relatively easy to identify the ignition switch, the inertial navigation system, the weapons indicators, the com gear, and all the rest.

Cy was just about to start the vehicle when another air car swept in over the fence. Landing lights swayed across the compound and grew smaller as the aircraft touched down.

The cyborg had just turned his attention back to the control panel, and was about to flip the ignition switch into the on position, when something thumped against the fuselage. The top rungs of a metal ladder appeared right next to him. He should have known! The last car in line would be the next to depart!

Cy flipped the ignition switch to the on position and felt both the antigrav unit and the propulsion system come to life.

"What the…?"

The words were Il Ronnian but Cy understood them well enough. A visored face appeared over the edge of the cockpit. A long uniformed arm reached out to grab him.

Cy pulled back on the steering column, felt the air car surge upward, and banked to the left.

The Il Ronnian screamed as he fell away.

What Cy did next was pure impulse, though he later claimed to have planned it.

Steering the air car into a tight turn, Cy activated all the weapons systems and opened fire. Cannon shells churned metal, plastic, and dirt into a terrible stew. Helicopters lurched sideways as their landing skids collapsed, air cars burst into flames as fuel lines were cut, and Sand Sept troopers ran in every direction.

Cy was filled with a terrible exultation. He was kicking ass and taking names! The cyborg uttered a well-amplified war cry and headed straight toward a tower.

Lando stood and yelled at the top of his lungs. "Cy, you idiot! Over here! You goddamn bucket of bolts! What the hell are you doing?"

But the words were lost in the sound of cannon fire, explosions, and the
whoop! whoop! whoop!
of an Il Ronnian perimeter alarm.

Cy released a pair of rockets and banked to the left. He felt rather than saw them explode. A support gave way, the tower shivered and crashed to the ground with a loud boom.

"Yahoo!" Cy yelled as he skimmed across the compound. He walked streams of purple-blue tracers through thin-skinned prefab buildings, laughed as partially clad Il Ronnians spilled out through doors and windows, and yelled insults that no one else could hear. "Take that, you pointy-tailed bio bods!"

Then something scary happened. Indicator lights winked on his control board. The cannons fired twenty rounds apiece and stopped. The last pair of rockets hit the base of the com mast and blew up. It toppled like a huge tree, crushed a pair of air cars, and breached the fence. Blue and white electricity danced in and around the wreckage as new connections were made and the compound's sensors blew out.

Ground fire arched up and around Cy's ground car. It was deceptively pretty. The Il Ronnians were firing back. Fear reached up to pull the high down. Cy banked to the left, circled back, and searched for Lando.

Nothing… nothing… there! Standing up and waving like a damned fool. Good thing the silly so-and-so had his trusty cyborg buddy along to back him up.

Cy sideslipped toward the ground, fired the reverse thrusters, and slowed down enough for Lando to dive in over the side. His legs still waved as Cy put the air car into a steep climb. Tracers wove patterns around them and the aircraft shuddered as a shell punched its way through the rear passenger compartment. The compound grew smaller as it fell away.

Lando was furious as he straightened himself out and fought his way into a sitting position. "Dammit, Cy! What the hell were you doing?"

"Slowing them down," the cyborg replied smugly. "They'll have a heck of a time following us now."

Lando looked back over his shoulder. Cy was correct. The compound was a quickly shrinking mess. Fires burned, electricity shimmered, and searchlights carved panic-stricken circles in the sky. There were no signs of pursuit. He looked at the cyborg. One vid cam was aimed forward while another looked his way. He would have sworn that he saw it wink.

The cyborg kept the air car low to avoid Il Ronnian radar and followed the terrain toward their destination. It felt like a high-speed roller-coaster ride.

Lando didn't mind the motion but would have preferred to fly the aircraft himself. But Cy had refused his repeated offers to take over so there was nothing he could do but wait and worry.

His main concern, other than for Della's safety, stemmed from above. Surface radars are one thing, but orbital detection systems are something else. Lando imagined delta-shaped fighters dropping from orbit, their target acquisition systems locking up on the air car, their missiles leaping outward.

Would they know what was coming? Would they get some sort of warning? Or simply cease to be?

The smuggler had no desire to find out.

But the minutes became an hour and nothing happened. Finally, after what seemed like an endless series of ups, downs, and sideways jogs, they turned into a long V-shaped valley. It took little more than a glance to see that a major battle was under way.

Light blossomed over the far end of the valley as a series of illumination rounds went off. The smuggler saw that the Il Ronnians had constructed a compound, which though crude, had been heavily reinforced. There were weapons pits galore, automated energy cannons, and a network of interlocking trenches. All heavily sandbagged.

An oval-shaped fence extended out from the compound, and at one end of it, as far from the fighting as they could get, hundreds of constructs lay huddled on the ground. Whether dead or alive the human couldn't tell.

Lando saw pinpoints of light sparkle across the surrounding hillsides as fire was directed inward toward the Il Ronnian compound. But it was nothing compared to the volume of fire that was returned.

Fire stabbed outward like the blossoms of some terrible flower. Entire sections of the surrounding hillsides seemed to soar upward, then fall toward earth. There would be no way to survive that terrible fire. Constructs were dying by the scores.

Lando felt a terrible emptiness in the pit of his stomach. What the hell? There was no attack on for tonight. And with Della missing, who had ordered it anyway?

But his thoughts were snatched away as a tidal wave of air hit the air car, flipped it over, and rushed away to bounce off the opposing hillsides. Their harnesses held them in. Lando's better than Cy's… since no one had anticipated the possibility of a globe-shaped pilot.

Lando thought Cy had blown it and lost control. But the sudden roar told him otherwise. No, the problem consisted of aerospace fighters, the same ones he'd wondered about earlier. Now he knew why they'd been allowed to travel unmolested. The Il Ronnians had focused all of their attention on Holding Area Two.

Cy flipped the aircraft right side up and hugged the left side of the valley. He flew low and slow. If the fighters spotted the air car, and they almost certainly would, chances were they'd leave it alone. And why not? The Il Ronnians controlled the air, so any and all aircraft automatically belonged to them.

Lando activated the comset and punched his way through the frequencies. The smuggler heard code, encrypted voice transmissions, and the sound of a familiar voice. His heart took an unexpected leap. He went back a freq. The voice was familiar indeed! It belonged to Della.

"Listen to me! Pull back. Disengage. That's an order, dammit! I don't care what God said. He doesn't know anything about war, and I do. That's why he brought humans here in the first place. Remember?"

Wexel-15 sounded confused. The chatter of a machine gun threatened to drown him out. "But we thought you were dead, and God said to destroy the compound, so we attacked."

"Well, I'm telling you to retreat, and to do it
now.
Understand?"

Wexel-15 sounded contrite. "Yes, Della. We will pull back."

True to his training Wexel-15 switched to the team frequency and left the command channel open. Lando wasted little time in fumbling an Il Ronnian headset into place and activating the mike. "Della! Where the heck are you?"

Della was cautious, understandably reluctant to reveal her position unless she was sure it was him. "Pik? Is that you?"

"And who else would be wandering around in the middle of the night looking for stray bounty hunters? Give me your position and we'll pick you up."

"You have transportation?"

Lando grinned. "An air limo complete with round chauffeur."

Della laughed. "Okay. I'm just below the ridge line on the north side of the valley, halfway between the spires."

Another set of flares went off enabling Cy to see the jagged ridge line and twin spires. He banked in that direction and activated the air car's running lights.

As the ridge came closer Lando felt an almost overwhelming desire to take over the controls. It seemed as though Cy was coming in way too fast. But the cyborg braked, the air car slowed, and the smuggler saw a light blink on and off.

Cy made a course correction, slowed even more, and coasted along the side of the hill. The light blinked again. It was ahead and off to the left.

The cyborg killed all forward movement and nudged the aircraft in until the running lights colored the rocks.

Della appeared out of the darkness. She had a pack on her back, and a rifle in her hand, and a smile on her face. Rocks slid and clattered as she moved.

Lando felt the nose of the aircraft sink as Della climbed aboard, then rise again as she made her way back toward the open cockpit. He stood to help her in. They sat side by side on the bench-style seat.

Della handed Lando the rifle. The barrel was bent and clogged with dirt. She grinned. "It made one heck of a pry bar."

Lando didn't say a word. He just dropped the weapon into the back seat, put an arm around Della's shoulders, and pulled her close.

A fighter roared the length of the valley and pulled up toward the stars.

Cy killed the air car's running lights and headed away from the valley.

Lando looked past Della. The fighting had died down to an occasional shot. A flare went off. It lit up her face. There was dirt on it. Lando looked into her eyes.

"They said you were dead."

"They were wrong."

"I love you."

Della looked at him for a long time. She nodded soberly. "And I love you."

"Good," Cy said matter-of-factly. "I'm glad that's settled. Now, let's find God and ask him what the heck's going on."

17

Pik Lando and Della Dee followed Wexel-l5 and Dru-2l into a drab, somewhat utilitarian room. In fact, judging from the now empty bins that occupied one wall, it had once served as some sort of storage area.

The room lay at the heart of the long-disused industrial complex that served as construct headquarters. Lando knew that not too far away a thousand recruits were busy studying newly made training tapes, marching back and forth across an empty warehouse, and making their way through a really tough obstacle course.

The entire facility was located deep underground, safe from prying eyes, and invisible to electronic sensors. And like everything else on the planet, the constructs had kept the complex in perfect repair, awaiting the return of their long-departed masters.

The storage room was empty now, empty except for a sturdy metal table and some matching stools. Lando found that these were tall, and almost comfortable, suggesting that they'd been designed for either the lights or the Lords themselves.

Wexel-l5 tried one, got off, and tried it again. He looked like a mountain on a stick.

What light there was came from two strip panels mounted on the ceiling. They flickered from time to time as if reacting to a distant maintenance problem.

There had been more and more of those lately, as the Il Ronnians herded thousands of constructs into concentration camps, and prevented them from performing their traditional duties.

Lando looked at Della. She looked at him. While the storage room was an unlikely venue in which to converse with a being who called himself "God," it was the logical place to interface with what amounted to a super-powerful maintenance computer. Not only that, but it also served as a useful reminder of the machine's original status, one device out of many.

Still, God was the only computer that had survived the night of death, and like any survivor deserved some respect.

Dru-21 wore a purse belted around his waist. He opened the flap, reached inside, and gathered something into his hand.

Then, moving with what Lando interpreted as dramatic deliberation, the light held his hand over the table. Construct looked at construct. Wexel-15 nodded.

The two of them had become quite close in recent days. Whether as a result of his advice, or because of necessity, Lando couldn't tell. But it was good whatever the reason.

The disks clattered as they hit. Some spun like tops, others fell over on their sides. Light winked off glossy black plastic.

Lando looked up at Dru-21. The construct took a disk and placed it at the center of his forehead.

"You are the first off-worlders to commune with God. There could be danger."

Lando turned to Della. "I'll go first. If I survive you can follow."