Graham Paul: The battle of Devastation reef

“Yes, Michael. Wha-”

“Listen, don’t talk. Two of the attackers are down. There may be more. I’ve taken their guns. Meet me at the house. Now! And turn your neuronics off.”

Michael ran fast, feet pounding down the track and onto the road. Relief swamped him when he saw Anna’s slight shape, a blur crossing the yard to the house, and then he was in her arms.

“Oh, Michael, what the hell is this all about?” she said, her voice shaking, pushing him back to talk.

“Hit team, I think. Bunch of fucking amateurs, thankfully. They’re after me,” he said, lungs heaving. “Two options. Stay here and wait or go back up the track to the flier”-he waved a machine pistol back the way he had come-“and see if we can get away. Who knows, we might be able to take out a few more before we go.”

Anna shook her head in despair. “No wonder trouble keeps finding you. You bloody well go looking for it.” Her voice hardened. “But I don’t like people who creep through the night carrying guns, and I certainly don’t like the idea of them getting away, so if you want to have a go, I’m with you.”

Michael hugged her again. “Right,” he said, “I agree. Let’s teach the murderous bastards a lesson. You stay back 10 meters or so. Keep me in sight at all times; close up if you lose me. Watch your six o’clock. Keep the gun under your cape and look behind as much as you look around. If you see anyone who’s not me, shoot the sonofabitch,” he said handing her a machine pistol and a pair of spare magazines. “Know how to use one of these, sweetheart?”

“Smart-ass!” Anna snorted scornfully, grabbing the gun. “Just try me.”

“Good. If things get too hot, we’ll go left off the track and hide. The damn cops can sort things out. If they ever get here,” he added. “Let’s go.”

Moving fast while still staying quiet, the pair moved off. They reached the flier pad without incident. Stopping short, Michael waved Anna to the ground while he wormed his way off the path and forward to the edge of the clearing. He moved slowly, careful not to make any sudden movements, scanning the low scrub that bordered the landing pad. The pad was clear; he beckoned Anna up to join him.

“Anna,” he whispered, “pad looks okay, but if there’s more of them, this is a good place for them to be, over there, just off the path back toward their own flier. I’ll work my way to ours and power up. Don’t move until I call you over. Keep an eye on the scrub. Let me know if anything moves. Neuronics on now.”

“On? You sure?”

“We have to take the chance. We need to be able to talk to each other. They’ll know something’s gone wrong.”

“Roger that.”

Michael eased his way around to put the lander between him and where he thought the bad guys might be before setting off through the short grass that covered the pad. He was dangerously exposed. If the bad guys caught him out here, he was finished. It took an age to cross the ground, his skin crawling at the thought of the damage a burst of machine pistol fire would inflict on his unprotected body, but finally he was at the flier. Trembling with a mixture of fear and excitement, he had stopped to recover when Anna commed him.

“Michael. Three o’clock from the flier. Where we thought. There’s someone there.”

He stopped and lay unmoving. With great care, he checked the scrub. No movement, none of the rippling blurry distortion of a chromaflage cape, nothing. “Anna, I can’t-”

He saw movement, just a flicker. Anna was right.

“Okay. Let me indicate it to you.” Michael commed the image to her neuronics overlaid with a scarlet target icon. “Is that it?”

“Yup, that’s the one. Small bush left of the pair of boulders.”

“Okay, on my mark, hit it hard while I go for the flier. On three. One, two, three!”

With ruthless efficiency, Anna fired two quick bursts into the small bush; she was rewarded by a scream of agony, and then a chromaflaged shape burst out of hiding before collapsing onto the ground, unmoving.

With a convulsive leap, Michael was in the flier, ordering the mass driver to power up. It was a lifetime before the flier’s AI confirmed that yes, it really was him, and yes, he was authorized to pilot the flier, and another lifetime until the engine was flight-ready. Michael sat hunched down in the pilot’s seat, waiting for the ax to fall on his naked neck. “About bloody time,” he muttered when the AI confirmed that the flier was good for takeoff.

“Anna. Flier. Go!” he commed. He did not wait for her, feeding power into the mass driver, the air around the flier erupting into a confused cloud of steam billowing up into the night. He lifted the flier into hover, holding it half a meter off the ground until Anna burst through the murk and threw herself into the passenger seat alongside him. The instant she was in, Michael rammed the mass driver to full power. The flier bolted upward, and he pulled it onto its tail, forcing the little machine backward off the ridge before turning it into a stomach-churning drop nose first into the valley below and away from the ridge, accelerating hard.

“Holy shit,” Anna said, her voice shaking while she struggled to strap herself in, “where the hell did you learn that little stunt?”

“I just made it up,” Michael replied, throwing her a grin, easing off on the power.

Anna shook her head. “Now what?”

“Well, the baddies are still on the ground-well, those still breathing, that is. So I think we’ll pay their flier a visit. If we can disable it, they can’t get away. It’s time you were my door gunner. Get the window open. Here, take my gun, too. Make sure you’ve full magazines and get the silencers off if you can. Hate to waste good muzzle velocity. Think you can manage one in each hand?”

“Oh, yeah,” Anna said with a wolfish smile.

“Thought so. Ready.”

“One second,” Anna muttered while she forced recalcitrant silencers off. “Okay, ready,” she said, twisting in her seat, both guns out the window.

“Right, here we go. Hold on,” Michael said, pulling the flier back into a steep climb and turning until the rock outcrop lay right ahead of them, on it the squat shape of the killers’ flier. “Okay, there it is. I’ll make one run low and fast, and then we’re out of here.”

“Roger that.”

Level with the top of the outcrop, Michael pushed the flier’s nose down and brought the mass driver up to full power. Shaking under the acceleration, the craft rocketed past the massive pile of rock, the hostiles’ flier clearly visible against a star-studded sky. Anna let go with both barrels; the cabin reverberated with the appalling racket of unsilenced machine pistols and filled with the acrid stench of burned propellant. They drove out hard across the ridge and over the valley before Michael, throttling back, pushed the flier into a slow turn, straining his eyes to see how the opposition fared. He was disappointed to see nothing but darkness, his night vision degraded by muzzle flash.

“What do you reckon?”

“Not sure,” Anna said, busy changing magazines. “It all happened a bit too fast. One more pass uphill of them, a bit slower this time, and we’ll get clear to wait for the cops.”

“You sure?” Michael replied. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Come on, I think we’ve done enough.”

“No bloody way, pal,” she said fiercely. “Don’t chicken out on me. These fuckers came to kill us. I’ll be damned if we let them get away. So let’s do it.”

“Okay,” Michael said, resigned. He banked the flier back toward the bluff. “In we go.”

The flier turned hard and started its run in. Once again, the outcrop and the flier stood out, looming black shapes against the stars, growing fast as Michael fed power to the mass driver, punching the craft forward.