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Midday now, fiery yellow sun high ahead, glare bright enough to blind, so they wouldn’t have to worry about raptors. What they had to worry about was getting tagged by some trigger-happy planetary guard slinging an SRM, maybe, or an RPG.
And, of course, there was the sand; you couldn’t forget about the damned killer sand. Hines cut her eyes right to her three o’clock and a blast crater that hadn’t been there two weeks ago, and to the twisted hulk of the DropShip. The ship was a gutted, twisted skeleton of titanium and ferrosteel lying in a scalloped trough of sand rimmed with a crust of flash-glass dyed rust red. Base camp was thirty klicks south of the crash site, but still, she’d heard the ship before she’d seen it: a guttering roar louder than the scream of the sandstorm, followed by a dark hulk bulleting through pillows of swirling sand, orange flames shooting from the tail like a meteor. They’d felt the impact, too, a seismic shake and shudder that rattled Quonsets and vibrated bone. No survivors, and near as they could figure, the ship crashed because of sand, wind, heat—and really, really lousy luck.
Luck. Hines’ lips compressed to a thin line. Yeah, right. Deneb Algedi was some kind of mutually exclusive thingamabob when it came to luck. First, the DropShip; then their ’Mechs, frozen in their tracks by scorching heat, one of those ironic oxymorons Hines could do without; intake valves on their people movers clogged with sand; and their infantry down to quarter-strength after getting cooked in their battlearmor. Oh, yeah, and then that one lonely little Republic JES II had made hamburger out of two Lucifers before the lead pilot plowed into the thing and set off the remaining missiles in its rack in a series of big and bigger: bah-bah-BAH-BOOM.
Finally, someone in Vegan Air Command wised up. Like, hey, don’t we have, you know, a couple helicopters just kind of lying around, doing nothing? Hines and her guys had ponied right on up: a regular eagles’ flight of six Donars and two Balac Strike VTOLs, and her ru
A crackle, then the pilot: “Ten o’clock.”
The chopper’s polarized windscreen was scored with hash marks left by blowing sand and Hines had to work before she spotted them; streamers of churning red sand heading for a cleft of deep gorge and winding arroyos.
“Roger that. Bring us around,” she said, and then, as the pilot did a looping one eighty, she got on the horn to the lead Donar. “Mad Max Four, this is C2. Confirm contact, four Demon Mediums and two SM1s bearing twenty-five degrees west by northwest true.”
“C2, copy that,” the Mad Max Four pilot came back. “We are ten klicks from your position, angels three. They still heading for that canyon?”
“That’s an affirmative. Give ’em another three, four minutes, and it’s a cakewalk,” said Hines, her voice jittering with the bump and skid of the Crow. Stupid strategy. Whoever was the brains behind the outfit, the guy leading that tank column, he’d just sacrificed his one advantage. There were ten commandments chopper pilots lived by, things like: He that leteth his tail rotor to snag the thorns shall surely kiss his sorry ass good-bye. But the big problem with helicopter assaults over open terrain boiled down to this: line of sight. Helicopters were terrific where there was dense ground cover, lousy when it came to wide open spaces because then copters got clobbered. But once those tanks got themselves boxed in by the gorge’s high walls, they’d have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. All her people had to do was watch their altitude and stay out of range of those SM1s; the rest was like popping tin cans with a pellet gun. “Mad Max Four, you are go for Charlie.”
“Roger Charlie,” the Mad Max Four pilot said, and then relayed the command to his strike force. “This is Mad Max Four to all units. Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.”
Roger Charlie. Hines listened as the other pilots acknowledged the signal and then watched as the choppers slewed down into an attack wedge. Go get ’em, boys. Rock and roll.
Fifty-eighth Tank Battalion, Deneb Algedi Planetary Guard
Kafa Island, Batambu Chain, Deneb Algedi
Prefecture II, Republic of the Sphere
25 July 3135
They were the last ones into the gorge, and just in the nick of time. As his Demon rumbled onto what was left of the river, a rocky, sand-choked avenue that curled for twenty klicks before dropping into a scalloped depression that had once been a lake but was now solid red basalt, Major Frank McGi
For the first time all day McGi
“Hold up, Clemens,” he said into the open hatch, and in another second the tank jerked and squealed to a halt. Then McGi
“Mac.” It was Eberhardt, in the lead SM1. “You sure about this?”
“Yeah, absolutely.” Actually, McGi
“From your mouth to God’s ear,” said Eberhardt. “Just say when.”
“Roger that,” said McGi
“On my mark,” he said into the radio. He was waiting for the bump: that little jig up and down that dropped a copter’s nose to bring missiles, lasers and machine guns to bear in an attack.
And the copters bumped.
McGi
As her attack force screamed in, Hines saw the tanks open fire: searing red darts of laser fire and the lesser puffs and sparks of machine guns. No autoca
Later on, Hines wouldn’t ever know what she’d have thought next. All she knew was, at that moment, something black ballooned from the rock. At first she thought, haze from exploding munitions, but the angle was wrong: growing out instead of up. And then the black grew and grew, and then roiled and billowed—and resolved into legs. Talons. Wings.