Ричард Бейкер - Valiant Dust

“Hang on!” Colonel Yusir shouted as he wrestled with the controls. The oversized personal flyer that served as Sultan Rashid’s transport was armored and equipped with defensive systems for just such a situation, but it couldn’t outclimb surface-to-air missiles. The pilot instinctively dove to get the transport on the deck as fast as he could and use ground clutter to break the missile lock. Of course, that meant throwing the transport toward the streets below in a reckless power dive. Ranya looked forward, saw the ground rushing up, and screamed again despite herself.

Behind the sultan’s transport, a second missile clipped another one of the escort flyers. This one survived the hit, just barely; it veered wildly out of control and wound up making a hard landing in a vacant parking lot two kilometers distant. The third missile never locked on to anything; in his excitement, the young insurgent who’d fired it had neglected to activate the seeker head before launching the weapon, although no one in the sultan’s skycade saw where it went or learned why it missed. The two remaining missiles established a good lock on the sultan’s transport, and they streaked after the diving and twisting vehicle despite Colonel Yusir’s desperate effort to escape.

Only fifty meters behind the sultan’s transport, the third flyer in the escort squadron dove headlong into the path of the oncoming missiles. The brave Royal Guardsman piloting the craft could not intercept both weapons, but he traded his life and the lives of the other guardsmen with him to stop one missile streaking toward the royal transport.

It was almost enough.

The last missile exploded just above the sultan’s transport, shredding the vertical stabilizer and blasting shrapnel through the engines and the cabin. Shrieking wind and the sound of tearing metal filled the cabin as a dozen fist-sized holes suddenly appeared in the ceiling, with bright blue sky showing through. Ranya felt a hot searing sting crease the nape of her neck, and missed decapitation by a matter of centimeters. Sultan Rashid was hit in the left arm and shoulder; an aide sitting just behind him was killed instantly by a piece of shrapnel that struck between his eyes. The engines failed with a burst of sparks and flame, and the transport dropped sickeningly as alarms wailed in the cockpit. Ranya screamed again. And this time Sultan Rashid and the two Royal Guards who were still alive in the damaged transport cried out as well.

The sultan’s transport glanced off the side of a water tower, digging a ten-meter gash across the tank. The impact threw the heavy flyer into a violent horizontal spin, wrenching Ranya from one side to the other as blinding bursts of daylight and black shadow strobed madly through the cabin. Then the sultan’s flyer smacked into the street below, crushing a pair of parked ground transports and hurling debris in all directions. She heard screeching metal, shrieking alarms—and then nothing, as merciful darkness rose up and claimed her.

Some time later—seconds, minutes, she could not tell—she came to back to her senses when she felt someone fumbling at her restraints. Her neck stung, her back ached, and her mouth was full of the metallic taste of blood. Numbly, Ranya reached up to push the hands away. “No,” she mumbled.

“Let me help you, Amira. We must get you out of here, there is a serious risk of additional attacks.”

Ranya opened her eyes, and found herself looking up at Captain Tarek Zakur. Blood splattered his singed tunic, and his face was grim with anger. “What happened?” she said. Blood trickled from her mouth. “Where are we?”

“The transport was shot down. We’re in Tougana, about three kilometers from the palace.” Captain Zakur gently moved her hands aside and unfastened the seat restraints. “Are you hurt, Amira?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Come with me, please,” Zakur said. Without waiting for her answer, he pulled her upright and somehow maneuvered her through the twisted wreckage of the cabin to the door. Then Ranya found herself outside, standing in the street beside the broken transport.

She saw that the sultan’s flyer had landed hard on its belly and skidded two hundred meters or more along a residential street before a large tree had stopped it. Several medical techs clustered around the nose of the vehicle, where Colonel Yusir and his copilot appeared to be trapped in wreckage. The two surviving flyers of the escort had landed in the middle of the street, bracketing the crash site; two more now orbited overhead with gunners manning heavy autorifles perched in their doors. Several ambulances and firefighting vehicles were already on the scene, their bright red and blue lights flashing, and the wailing sirens of more on the way echoed through the city. Everywhere Ranya looked, soldiers of the Royal Guard swarmed over the scene, their faces full of fear and anger. Scores of bystanders stood outside the cordon or watched from their front doors or windows.

What a nice neighborhood, she noticed. Why did we decide to land here? Then she realized that she was not making sense, even in the privacy of her own thoughts. Clearly she was not at her best. It was hard, but somehow Ranya forced herself to focus on what was going on.

She steadied herself on Captain Zakur, ignoring everything else except for his face. “The sultan?” she demanded.

“He is injured but alive, Amira,” the guard captain replied. He glanced at a medical transport that rested alongside the wreckage of the royal transport; Ranya saw a number of medical techs clustered around a stretcher there. She pushed herself away from Zakur and hurried over to the side of the stretcher.

Sultan Rashid groaned and shifted, his arm encased in a pressure sleeve and bloodstained wound dressings taped to his bare shoulder. Small cuts and abrasions marked his face, but his eyes were alert. He looked up at her as she reached the side of his stretcher. “Ah, good,” he murmured in a weak voice. “I was worried for you, my dear.”

“I am fine, Uncle,” she said. “Don’t concern yourself about me, save your strength!”

“I do not mind that they tried to kill me,” he murmured. “After all, they killed Kamal, and Grandfather, too. But I could not stand it if something happened to you, Ranya. Enough is enough. If it’s a war the Caidists want, we will give them one.”

Ranya had difficulty in following Rashid’s words, but she managed to organize her thoughts with sheer effort of will. “The insurgents are trying to provoke you, Uncle. Don’t give them that power over your actions.”

Rashid spat a mouthful of blood onto the stretcher. “I am provoked,” he snarled—perhaps the first time in her life that Ranya had ever seen him truly angry. “Trust me, my dear, I am very much provoked. And our enemies will be sorry indeed for it.”

Captain Zakur appeared by her side, and set a hand on Ranya’s arm. “Please, Amira, we must get the sultan onto the med transport,” he said. She allowed him to draw her away from the stretcher; the medical technicians immediately lifted Rashid up and into the flyer. “One will be here for you in a matter of moments.”

“But I’m not hurt,” Ranya told him.

Zakur shook his head. “That is for the doctors to say, Amira. You have a cut on the back of your neck, and another one on your leg. And you probably have a concussion, too. Please, this way.”

Ranya put her hand to the back of her neck and felt that it was warm and wet. When she looked at it, her palm was covered in her own blood. “Oh,” she managed to say. Captain Zakur just managed to catch her when her legs gave out.

10

CSS Hector, Gadira II Orbit

The brown, gold, and blue surface of Gadira seemed to drift slowly past the wall-sized vid display in the wardroom. From the altitude of three thousand kilometers, almost half of the hemisphere was visible. Sikander gazed absently at the view from his seat at the large table in the middle of the room, enjoying a coffee break as he mentally organized the rest of his day. Judging by the position of the terminator dividing the planet into day and night below him, it was midday in Tanjeer, but there was little point in adopting local timekeeping for ships in low or middle orbit; Hector currently circled the planet in a little less than three hours. The crew instead observed Naval Standard Time, and accepted the fact that visits or communications to the planet below might sometimes come up in the middle of the ship’s “night.” It’s close to noon for Ranya, Sikander noted. I wonder what she does for lunch?