Mel Odom - Preying for keeps

"You don't know if it's clear?"

"No." Archangel looked at Skater. "We won't know that till we're there."

"How big are the tunnels?"

"The ones coming from the river, we can walk through. Even Elvis."

The troll stroked his silver-capped tusk. "That's good news."

"The downside is that they'll be patrolled by maintenance drones that could alert security. But I think I've got a utility that'll get us by them." Archangel touched the yellow line on the screen. "This tunnel, though, is less than a meter across."

"Crawlspace," Skater said.

Archangel leaned back in the bench seal. "At best."

"Then that's what we'll do. Can you print out a copy of those schematics? I want to overlay them with the maps I've got."

In seconds, she handed him the hardcopies. Briefly, their hands touched and she met his gaze. "Don't start feeling responsible for me being here," she said softly, in a voice the others couldn't hear. "I was bitchy when I caught up with you at the warehouse. That wasn't how I really feel. I'm just scared. Haven't had any sleep, and I've been running on kaf and sheer nerves. I came along for myself. Life may not be great in the sprawl, but at least it's mine and no one else's. It means a lot to me to be able to say that."

Before Skater could respond, she turned back to her deck and immediately became absorbed in working on it. He watched her for a moment, checking the throb along her neck, then faced forward again.

Abruptly, sheets of rain fell across the amphibian's nose and blotted out a discernible view of the sky. The roaring winds buffeted the small plane. Skater studied the maps and the hardcopy as the light in the Fiat-Fokker's cabin dimmed intermittently. Lightning blazed a ragged rip of color and heat only a few meters from the right wing, drawing a curse from Duran.

Wheeler juked the controls to bring the amphibian back on-line. "And to think," the dwarf cracked in the silence that had filled the plane, "this is the easy part."

Even watching the power of the storm envelop them, Skater knew it was the truth.

"Look alive, chummers," Wheeler said over the radio two hours later. He sounded like he was far away. Jacked into the amphibian's controls, he was the plane. "We've been tagged. Portland Border Patrol has given us a knock-knock, wants to know who we are and do we know we've violated Portland airspace."

Skater roused himself and glanced out the window, which showed him they were still enmeshed in roiling black clouds.

They'd ridden the edge of the storm into the area, sometimes bucking hard, alternately losing altitude, then climbing frantically to regain it. All of them had stayed buckled into their seats while the cargo shifted in the hold.

"How far out are we?" Skater asked over the headset.

"Seven kilometers," the rigger answered.

"How soon will we be there?"

'Three minutes, give or take. If this drekking storm isn't shoving us forward, it's sucking us back in thermals."

"The next time there's a good jolt of lightning," Skater said, "shed some altitude and make it look like we're having a harder time than we are." He leaned forward in his seal, captured by the harness.

"We catch another near one," Wheeler said with genuine feeling, "it might not be play-acting."

The signal from the Portland Border Patrol was garbled and broken up. A glance at the altimeter showed Skater they were at something over three thousand meters. He shifted his attention to the sweep of the arm across the radar screen. Two green blips appeared and the Fiat-Fokker's navigational computer began tracking them, showing their increasing altitude in rapidly changing red numerals. 'They've got two away." Skater said over the headset. "I feel them out there. They won't hesitate."

"Fiat-Fokker," a harsh voice barked over the radio, "be advised that you are on the verge of entering Tir Tairngire airspace. Identify yourself and your business, or be shot down." The message was repeated in Sperethiel.

"Those are EuroFighter aircraft," Wheeler said. "They'll come fully loaded. And if they don't get us, there's always the SAM-sites."

Skater peered through the heavy rain as the warning was repeated, broken up by the electricity swirling around them. He couldn't see anything. The amphibian was hanging there like a kid's kite, waiting for a load of buckshot to take it down. His mouth was dry.

"Fiat-Fokker, this is your last-" The lightning knifed a blinding arc through the storm tossed clouds, cutting out the radio. Less than a heartbeat later, the peal of thunder cracked a sonic whip across the sky.

By then Wheeler was already moving. The amphibian heeled over sideways in response to his command. "No holding back now. We hesitate, we're soup meat."

"Go," Skater told him.

The amphibian's motor screamed. Under other circumstances the noise trapped in the cabin would have been deafening, but it was drowned out by the storm's fury. Another heated blast of cold white lightning slashed through the bowels of the dark clouds, momentarily creating a light funnel.

The altimeter dropped to twelve hundred meters. From what Skater had learned, the Border Patrol had standing orders to shoot anything that went below the thousand-meter mark. He glanced at the compass, a swirling ball suspended in a silicon mixture. The latitude and longitude, fed into the Fiat-Fokker's computer by a GPS satellite overhead, printed on the sides of the vibrating ball. The numbers shifted erratically as the amphibian tumbled.

Skater peered out the window but couldn't see anything. Lightning cracked again, but this time it was echoed by 20mm cannonfire that blew white-hot holes in the cloud cover less than thirty meters away. The concussions battered the amphibian. He brought up the IR panel, using the forward-looking infrared Wheeler had added to the plane's nose. Even with the IR and the memorization of the terrain maps he'd studied, he had a hard time spotting the Portland Wall until they were almost on top of it. The Wall surrounded the city and was controlled by heavily armed and well-guarded checkpoint stations. The Willamette River was a black ribbon that twisted through the green-hued landscape on either side of the Wall.

"Someone's got a target lock." Wheeler juked the amphibian left and down.

The Wall swept by below them, and a Fresh swarm of cannonfire lit up the airspace in front of them. Wheeler powered through the twisting gray smoke (hat was being quickly ripped apart by the storm winds. Screaming in protest against the abuse and the howling gale of the storm, the Fiat-Fokker shivered.

"Find a spot," Skater told Wheeler. "Put it down." He tapped on the radio com and put out a message that he guessed would be picked up by the Border Patrol. If it wasn't, it wouldn't affect the outcome. "Bushwhacker, this is Special Delivery. We're coming in hot and heavy. If you can assist, give me some kind of fragging response here." He repeated the message, then stopped in the middle of another ragged streak of lightning that nuked the cloudfront.

"Drek," Wheeler said. "Those jets have just kicked loose a pair of missiles."

Wheeler dropped altitude quickly, hitting five hundred meters and still plunging. The two heat-seeking missiles the EuroFighters had fired impacted against the heat flares the dwarf dumped out of the tail section. For the most part, the flares did the job of keeping the warheads away, but fragments holed the amphibian in a deadly drumbeat.

At two hundred meters and low enough now that Skater could see the landscape with his low-light enhancement, cannonfire ripped through the right wing, shearing off the last third of it.

"Frag me running." the dwarf groaned. "This is going to get ugly now." He tried to level the amphibian out, but it was no use. The tallest trees in the forest scratched against the Fiat-Fokker's underbelly while white phosphorus flames chewed the amputated wing. The plane flipped, twisted sideways as it sheared through a copse of trees. The amphib pancaked, rammed its good wing into the ground long enough to rip it free of its moorings, then skidded to a stop against a rocky hillside.