The Risen Empire (35 page)

COMMANDO

The recon flyer was kept aloft by both fans and electromagnetics. A sensible design: limited by Imperial technology, neither propulsion system alone was sufficient for a fast, armored vehicle. Moreover, if either system failed suddenly, the other would provide for a relatively soft landing. Only a hit that crippled both would crash the flyer.

It was H_rd's intent, however, to keep the vehicle in good working order. She would have to bring it down intact, although both of the soldiers on board would have to die.

She could see one of them clearly. Silhouetted against the aurora borealis, his head low as he peered into the glowing northern quadrant of the sky. They were bringing the craft in slowly toward their find, unsure yet whether to call for reinforcements. They were duly cautious, no doubt aware that the fugitive Rix commando had killed twenty-one of her pursuers—and shot down one other flyer—to date. But H_rd knew that they would hesitate to ask for assistance.

H_rd had been tracking this flyer for three hours, arranging a series of false targets for the crew. At the beginning of their shift, she'd set out a sack full of trapped arctic hares. As intended, the animals' combined body heat had shown up as a human-scale thermal image on Imperial equipment. The recon flyer crew called for backup. The militia surrounded the squirming sack with fifty troopers, then peppered the captive hares with stun grenades. The hares had somehow remained conscious when a grenade burst the sack, resulting in a sudden explosion of dazed and fleeing rabbits. And that was only the first embarrassment of the day for the two recon soldiers.

During the short daylight portion of their shift, the pair in the flyer had heard a rain of hard projectiles pounding their craft's armor and seen muzzle flashes. They reported themselves to be under hostile fire. A squadron of jumpjets soon arrived, but the projectiles turned out to be a freak occurrence of localized hail; the muzzle flashes that the pilot had seen were merely reflections from an exposed, mica-rich escarpment. The calculations required to bend Legis's cloud-seeding dirigibles to this purpose had strained even Alexander's computing resources. But shining up the mica with her field laser had been easy for H_rd.

In the few hours since this last embarrassment, the luckless recon flyer crew had been traveling in slow circles. Its onboard computer, like all military AIs, was independent from the planetary web and therefore immune to Alexander's control. But it still relied on data from the planet's weather satellites to perform dead-reckoning navigation. The shape of the terrain below changed constantly with snowdrifts and glacial cleaving, and the flyer's computer received frequent updates. Alexander had spoofed it with subtle manipulations of the data, gradually reducing the navigation software's democratically redundant neural net to total anarchy. By this point the troopers knew their machine was confused and lost, but however tired and threadbare their nerves were, the two were reluctant to call for help a third time.

And now they'd found another target: the glacial rift before them held a heat signature of human scale.

Rana Harter was inside, feverish from her wound and breathing raggedly. The flyer crew would soon be certain that they finally had a real target.

A small shape lowered from the flyer, H_rd's sharp ears picking up the whine of its propulsion fan. The remote drone wafted down from the safe, high altitude that the flyer maintained, and moved into the mouth of the rift.

Using her communication bioware, H_rd scanned the EM range for the drone's control frequency. She could hardly believe it: the drone was using simple, unencrypted radio. H_rd linked into its point-of-view transmission. Soon, the ghostly figure of Rana Harter appeared, at the edge of discernibility in the drone's crude night vision.

The commando jammed the connection with a squawk of radio, the sort of EM bump often caused by Legis's northern lights.

H_rd waited anxiously. Had she allowed them too clear a view of Rana? If they called for backup now, the situation might spiral out of control. Rana might be killed by the militia's clumsy, paranoid doctrine of overwhelming force.

The recon flyer hovered for a few interminable minutes, almost motionless in the calm air. No doubt the tired, harried troopers were debating what to do.

Finally, a second recon drone descended from the flyer. H_rd jammed it the moment it entered the rift.

This time, the recon flyer moved in reaction. As H_rd had hoped, it descended, trying to reestablish line-of-sight with the lost drones. The craft's forward guns targeted the rift's opening. The commando allowed a few images to pass through her electronic blockade, tempting the recon flyer farther downward. She noted that Rana had moved out of the drones' sight—good, she was still thinking clearly. Rana's concussion worried H_rd. The woman was lucid one moment, incoherent the next.

Taking the bait, the flyer lowered itself one last critical degree.

H_rd burst out of her covering of snow and thermal camouflage skin. The commando threw her snare at the rear of the Imperial machine.

The polyfilament line was anchored on both ends with depleted uranium slugs. It flew with the orbitlike sway of a bola, rotating around its center of gravity as it rose, the polyfilament invisibly thin. H_rd's aim was true, and the makeshift bola tangled in the rear fans of the flyer. The machine screamed like a diving hawk as the unbreakable fibers exceeded the fans' tolerances. H_rd's night vision spotted a few metal shapes spinning from the wounded flyer. She ducked as a whirring sound passed close by her head, and set her jamming bioware to attack every frequency the flyer might use to summon help.

The recon flyer's front reared up like a horse, the undamaged forward fans still providing thrust, and it began to slip backwards as if sliding down some invisible hill. H_rd drew her knife and ran toward the careening craft.

She heard the front fans shut down, an emergency measure to level the flyer. The electromagnetic lifters flared with an infrasonic hum, the static electricity raising small hairs on H_rd's arms. She felt lightning in the air as the recon flyer's descent began to slow, rebounding softly just before it reached the snowy ground.

H_rd had timed her approach perfectly. As the flyer reached its lowest point, she jumped.

The flexormetal soles of her bare feet landed on the flyer's armored deck without a sound. The craft tipped again as her weight skewed its balance, and the rearmost crewman—the gunner—spun in his seat-webbing to face her. He started to cry out, but a kick to the temple silenced him.

The pilot was shouting into her helmet mike, and heard nothing. H_rd decapitated her with the monofilament knife, cut her body from the webbing, and threw her overboard. H_rd had studied the controls of the other flyer that she'd shot down in preparation for this attack, and easily found the panic button that triggered the machine's autolanding sequence.

The unconscious gunner's helmet was chattering in the local dialect. Some emergency signal from the flyer had gotten through to the militia. H_rd hoped they would be slow in responding to this third alert from the flyer. Her jammer was chopping the incoming transmission into bits and pieces of static-torn sound.

She tossed the gunner from the craft, saving his sniper's rifle and crash-land rations. (Despite her small size, Rana ate more than a Rix commando—the two fugitives were running out of food.) As the craft settled onto the ground, H_rd whistled for her accomplice and leapt from the flyer.

Tilting up the rear fan cases, H_rd saw that she was in luck. Only one of the fans had disintegrated, the other had shut down when the polyfilament had arrested its motion. H_rd sprayed a solvent with the polyfilament's signature onto the intact fan, and it soon spun freely under the strokes of her hand.

Rana emerged from the rift, wrapped in thermal camouflage against the bitter arctic cold. Her ragged breath was visible against the aurora's light. She labored to carry the heavy fan blade that they had salvaged from H_rd's earlier kill. The commando turned to the shattered fan before her, and lased the small rivets that held on the remaining pieces. By the time the spinner coil was free of detritus, Rana was by her side.

H_rd threaded the salvaged fan onto the naked coil. It fit, spinning in perfect alignment. However crude the Imperials were, they did make their machines with an enviable interchangeability. With her blaster, H_rd burned the fan blade fast.

The commando lifted Rana gingerly into the gunner's seat, pausing to kiss her midway. The gesture brought a smile to Rana's lips, which were cracked with dehydration despite all the snow-water she consumed.

"We'll go somewhere safe now?" Rana asked in Rix. Her voice had changed, the chest wound giving it a strangely hollow sound.

"Yes, Rana."

H_rd leapt into the recon flyer and brought the fans up to speed. She closed her eyes and listened to their purr.

"They sound true," Rana Harter said. "It'll fly."

H_rd looked back at her captive, ally, lover. The woman could hear things outside of even Rix range. She saw things too: results, extrapolations, meanings. She could predict the day's weather with a glance into the sky. When H_rd hunted hares with her bola, Rana knew in the first second which throws were hits, which would fly long. She could deduce how far glacial rifts—their hiding places these last days—extended, just from the shape of the cracks around their mouths.

H_rd hoped Rana was right about the flyer. The machines were quick, but their Imperial metals were terribly fragile in the brittle arctic cold.

The commando boosted the fan drive's power, gunned the EM, and the small craft pitched northward into the air. They flew toward the shimmer of the fading aurora, her eyes narrowing as the frigid wind of their passage built.

At last, she had acquired the means to assault the entanglement facility, and to finally escape the Imperials' fumbling search for her and Rana. They were headed to the farthest arctic now, to await the proper time to continue their lonely campaign.

To await Alexander's command.

MARINE PRIVATE

Private Bassiritz did not understand his orders.

Normally, this was not much of a concern for him. In his years as a marine, he had performed crowd control, jumped into friendly fire, executed snatch-and-runs, and even carried out an assassination. Ground combat could include myriad possible tactical situations, and generally the details were complex and beyond his ken. But as long as Bassiritz knew ally from foe, he was happy.

Bassiritz had always thought of the crew of the
Lynx
as his allies, however. As the Time Thief stole more and more faces from home, his shipmates had effectively become his family. But here he was, under orders delivered
straight from the captain,
ready to do violence to some of them. This didn't make sense. It seemed as if the tribulations of the gravity ghost over the last week—the jittering of his bunk, the reeling of floors and walls, the complaints from his sense of balance—had begun to affect the very fabric of reality.

For the thousandth time, Bassiritz went through the orders in his head, visualizing the motions his body would take. It was simple enough. And he knew that he would follow orders when the time came. He could comprehend no other course of action. But he didn't like the feeling it gave him.

Bassiritz felt out of place here in Navy country. The floors and the freefall handholds were the wrong color, and everyone had given him slanty looks as he'd followed Executive Officer Hobbes down the corridors. And now they were here, waiting in the
captain's
cabin. The room seemed fantastically large to Bassiritz, bigger than his parents' house; the skyroom alone could have held the bunk coffins of his entire squad. What did the captain
do
with all this room?

There was no way to guess. The captain wasn't here.

Executive Officer Hobbes was. She would be the only friend in this operation, Bassiritz knew. The other three officers had gone bad, mutinous.

There was a tall woman waiting beside the door across from Hobbes, with pilot's wings on her shoulders. She was sweating, twitching from nerves or intermittent bumps from the gravity ghost. Outside, a slight gunner waited on watch. He was bad too, but Hobbes had asked Bassiritz not to kill him unless it was absolutely necessary. The marine private hoped he wouldn't have to kill anyone.

The last conspirator, another gunnery officer, stood in the room's center, holding a short, wide knife. Bassiritz had never seen a blade of error before. He had hoped he never would. They were bad luck, it was reckoned back in his village. Once you possessed the tool, you'd eventually be called on to do the work, they said at home.

When Bassiritz was done with this operation, he was going to use up his payment of privilege chits and take a long, hot shower.

There were two quick raps on the door. Hobbes had explained to him that this was the signal that everything was going right. The captain was approaching alone. Bassiritz shook his head involuntarily—none of this was
right.
But he was pretending to be a conspirator, so he smiled, wringing the old rag he held in one hand.

The smile felt wrong on his face. He didn't like this one bit.

ExO Hobbes stole a look at him. She winked one lovely green eye—a sign, but one that meant nothing really. Just a reminder that he was here under orders.

"Stay cool and everything will go fine," she had said to him an hour ago. "That's what a wink will mean."

Nothing was fine, though.

The door opened. The captain entered.

The four of them leapt into action. Hobbes and the pilot grabbed Captain Zai (striking the
captain
—an Error of Blood right there) and propelled him forward. Bassiritz's quick eyes could see Hobbes slip something into Zai's hand, but he knew from long experience that the subtle motion had been too quick for normal people to see. As the captain fell toward him, Bassiritz's reflexes took over and he forgot the gross impropriety of his actions. He pushed the rag into Captain Zai's mouth with his left hand, stifling the cry that uttered from it. Bassiritz felt the captain's roar of anger vibrate his hand, but the marine was already focused on his real task here. The big gunnery officer was jumping forward, his blade of error leveled at the captain's stomach.