Страница 46 из 70
The only thing in her favor? A long shot but her only chance; her DropShip, a small Fury, hanging behind Klathandu IV’s only moon. Better armored, equipped with autoca
On the other hand, Sagi would’ve boasted of that. They’d faced off in his office—hand-to-hand and then her blade against his pistol. She hadn’t beheaded him, though she had whipped her blade in a killing blow—and stopped short, just as the edge bit his neck. Enough that she’d bloodied her blade, and she said, as they trussed him to his chair, “Remember I gave you back your life.”
Sagi was purple with rage. “When we meet again, I will not return the favor. Count on it.”
No, Sagi hadn’t found the DropShip, but she’d be damned if she led his fighters to it. So we run, straight on until morning… or until they kill us. She punched her afterburners to full power. The Lucifer leapt forward, chewing up space. The center of her chest tightened; an unseen hand pushed against her chest, flattening her into her seat as she pulled seven g s. Her vision reddened; her pulse thudded in her temples; and she grunted, forcing blood to her head.
“I understand your tactic,” said the Old Master, his voice labored. He was tracking from his instruments and HUD. “However…”
But she wasn’t paying attention. On her HUD, she saw that the Slayers were dropping back… no, no, one was shedding altitude, and the other climbing. Frac! That wasn’t it either! She was a fine pilot, but a better MechWarrior, and she was used to thinking in a grounded dimension, not about when the ground had no bottom.
She figured out what would happen an instant before it did. Suddenly her onboard computer shrilled a warning, and her eyes jerked to tactical. Target lock! Instantly, she broke right—the correct move—and lancets of port-side laser fire streamed past, wide of their target. But then Katana pushed her fighter into what would have been a dive in an atmosphere. A good move, but not when you were in space…
Her heart banged into double-time as her alarms screamed again. No, my God, what was she doing; she’d turned directly into the Slayer; it wasn’t hanging back , it was rocketing y-axis and true, an arrow aimed directly at her heart… “No!”
A volley of laser fire blasted her canopy. She instinctively flinched away from it so hard that her head slammed back into her couch then bulleted forward. Her helmet bounced off her instrument panel with a sickening thud, and her vision swam. Yanking the Lucifer hard left, she angled up and away, blinking away hot blood drizzling into her eyes from the seam split into her skin. She sent the fighter into a rolling Immelma
Stop! An i
Fight. Katana’s eyes sought out the winking green indicators that were the enemy. There! The Shilone the point of a spear, and the two Slayers forming its body, and they’d made a mistake, yes, the bastards were too confident, and they were not samurai!
“Thank you!” Blood filled her mouth from her wound, and she savored the taste: warm salt and moist copper, and her, her essence, what made her Dragon… “Yes,” she hissed, “yes!” Energy, hot and bright, flickered through her limbs, and she grabbed at this, her ki, her energy, focusing a tight cone of determination that she thought on its way, pushing it from her brain with the force of a lion and the speed of a tiger. “Feel me coming for you, you bastards, because here I am!”
She jerked back on her stick and canted the Lucifer y-minus-thirty and z-minus-forty, twirled the craft along its long axis, and then jammed on her thrusters, pushing the ship for all it could muster. A fist slammed into her chest, but she hadn’t felt it as her ki flowed into the machine that throbbed beneath her, and they became one, racing through space. Because she was going to meet the bastards head-on; she would drive right into their midst and give them a taste of their own medicine—and, oh, yes, she just might kill them, too.
Lasers sizzled by in silent streams of death, and she took hits—enough to send the Lucifer’s temperature soaring. And still the fighters came, arrogant in their combined strength, and this, too, was a fatal mistake because they thought that she would break first. Either that—or maybe try to ram.
“Yeah, and I bet you’re counting on that, too; you’re going to sit there and wait and let me come to you. Well, I’m coming, you fraccing sons of bitches, just you wait…” Katana toggled her weapons up full, brought her HUD targeting display front and center, drew in a deep breath and then let it loose with a full, keening, battle cry: “DO!”
At that exact instant she cored into their midst, whirling like a dervish, and snap-fired all her lasers at once: full power. Lasers shot from her fighter in a scatter-sunburst of light and energy. Garnet streams streaked through space, unfurling like the deadly length of a thousand serpents, striking with lethal fangs in many places and all directions at once. The fighters broke apart from this demon in their midst; they fell away, twirling, scattering—but Katana was already turning around, whipping the straining Lucifer on its long axis, turning a sharp, hard, inverted loop, slamming her fighter from side to side so they couldn’t line up a shot and then came roaring down, snap-firing again.
And this time, she hit. “YES!” She let out a long whooping war cry as flares bloomed on the port wing of one Slayer. The larger fighter jogged down and then made a hard right, and she twisted, trying to keep the ship in sight and see; how badly was it hurt, had she…?
A stuttering wink-wink-wink overhead and to her right, and then flashes, much too bright to be a laser and the wrong color…
“Missiles!” shouted the Old Master. “To starboard, z-plus-sixty!”
“HUNH!” Katana slammed her fighter into a zoom dive, roaring straight for the Shilone that was, at that moment, heading for her belly. She hesitated for a fraction of a second. No time to second guess! Move, move, move, go, gogogogogo!
“They’re still on us! Acquiring! Time to impact, eight seconds!”
“Oh, no, you don’t, you bastards, no, you don’t… YAH!” Jamming on the power, Katana bulleted directly into the Shilone’s line of fire, did the calculations with lightning speed, and let fly a burst of laser fire. Then she angled off, hard, skimming in the space perpendicular to the Shilone at the precise instant that her lasers punched through space, stopped short of the Shilone’s nose, and so the Shilone didn’t slow because, of course, the pilot knew that the blasts would come short.
Katana’s laser fire balled… and instead of following after Katana, the missiles locked on the roiling coil of laser fire, here and then gone in a second. But a second was all that mattered, and the Shilone’s pilot saw the danger and reacted, whipping around in an evasive zoom just as the missiles detonated.