Dusk (41 page)

A sharp twinge seized Uzziah’s insides as he
flew out of the cave entrance. The burning husk of the assault lev
was deeply worrisome, but as the hologram gave him a clearer view
of the outside, he could see the other assault lev rising toward a
fighter that was evading and dipping toward them. Cyrus’s plan
included diverting their attackers’ attention, and most likely he
had survived the diversion, but there was not time for Uzziah to
worry. He opened up the throttle and sped over the rising tank
toward the fighter. Using these outmoded, underpowered mining
vehicles to fend off fighters that had undoubtedly superior
technology was virtually suicide, and judging from the way the tank
beneath him shuddered on the hologram, it had already been hit at
least once. Neither evasion nor a dogfight was much of an option
here. The only chance for survival was to catch the fighter in a
Fringe-stampede and hope this dumpy mining lev could get inside the
arming range of the fighter’s missiles before it fired again.

Luckily, the fighter’s sights must have been
trained on the tank, because it was slow to react to Uzziah’s
approach. Unfortunately, the fighter had reacted by slowing its
descent, and the ship Uzziah was piloting, even at full throttle,
was too slow to close the distance. This ship had always been a
mining craft and contained no early warning systems, but Uzziah
knew the lock-on sound well, and imagined it in his own head as the
fighter in front of them leveled to fire.

And then two thick white lines spread out in
front of him like the fluorescent landing guides of a lunar
spaceport. For a moment, Uzziah was confused until he remembered
the ship-to-ship lasers mounted on the assault lev beneath him. He
continued his course toward the fighter, planning to roll left if
the lasers did not move, but as he closed on the fighter, the
lasers stayed the same distance in front of him. The fighter dipped
to its left, but because it had slowed to fire, it was unable to
maneuver completely out of the path of the lasers. One of the
blue-white streaks passed through the fighter, illuminating the
side of the craft as it shaved off an appendage.

Uzziah charged the coring lasers mounted on
the outside of his own lev. Milliken had informed him the lasers
would have at least a ten second lag before firing. “Grab on to
something!” Uzziah yelled back to Milliken, who was rummaging
through the mining equipment in the rear of the craft. Milliken
only managed to get to a seat in the center of the craft before
gravity changed direction. As Uzziah passed over the fighter, the
line carved in the sky by the extraplanetary lasers disappeared.
The piece that had been excised must have been a stabilizer of some
sort because the clipped fighter recovered, albeit slowly. But
Uzziah assumed the fighter was most likely still just as deadly.
Uzziah pulled the mining craft into a loop. The craft had obviously
not been designed for that type of maneuver because the gravity
drive and the thrusters seemed clumsy and out of sync. Even though
Uzziah came out of the loop in the orientation he had planned, his
descent still felt like trying to teach a turkey to dance. The
contents of the ship were mostly tamped to the floor or the walls,
but something hard, metal, and thankfully small hit Uzziah in the
back of the head. He could hear Milliken yammering behind him, but
Uzziah dared not look to check his condition. And then, as Uzziah
closed the distance between his craft and top of the fighter, it
fired its thrusters and began to move through Uzziah’s path of
travel.

But whoever was firing the assault lev lasers
was on top of his game. The white lines stretched out again, this
time to the right of Uzziah’s craft, but directly in front of the
fighter. The fighter’s thrusters died immediately, stopping it
directly in Uzziah’s path of descent just as the coring lasers came
on. The coring lasers fired and formed four blue lines from each of
the four corners of the windshield. The lasers squeezed together at
a point in the center of Uzziah’s view, and then spread back out
again in less than a second. The coring lasers left a blue X etched
in Uzziah’s vision as the fighter beneath him fell in five distinct
pieces. Milliken was moaning in the back of the lev, and Uzziah
turned to see him tossed face-down across the arms of one of the
seats as the mining craft leveled. Uzziah checked the hologram and
then spoke the command to radio Cyrus’s envirosuit. “The credits
ain’t rolling yet. The fighters that chased Paeryl’s lev are coming
back. Is everyone over there okay?”

“Still breathing at least,” came back over
the sound transmitters.

“We should retreat back to the cave. If they
lock their missiles, we won’t stand a chance,” Uzziah reported.

Milliken chimed into the radio stream, “The
size and makeup of the cave should interfere with their long-range
scanners just like it did ours.”

Uzziah turned the mining craft and dove back
toward the floor of the crater. “I have an idea. You pull in behind
me,” he reported to Tanner and Cyrus.

At the bottom of the crater, Uzziah flew into mouth
of the cave and then slowed and spun the lev to face the entrance
as Tanner pulled in the assault lev and also turned in front of
him.

Tanner followed Uzziah’s instructions and
waited a couple hundred meters inside the mouth of the cave. Cyrus
powered the lasers and prepared for their attackers to give chase.
He trusted Milliken’s assessment of how many meters of rock the
lasers on the assault lev could cut through in a second, but he
could not stop himself from going through the numbers in his head
himself.

Tanner should have been afraid, should have
been chilled to the center of his body, but he wasn’t. He was
ablaze, enraged by the confusion that was now building in him like
an artesian fount. He should have been overjoyed to see what they
had seen in the cave, but everything about the strange city was
wrong. Catastrophically wrong. And he couldn’t shake the feeling
that everything he had ever believed, ever, was horribly and
irrepressibly wrong as well. The idea alone reduced him to an
automaton who followed instructions barked at him without complain
or digression, even in the face of impending demise.

Tanner killed the throttle and set the
assault lev to hover. It shuddered in protest. Something in its
stabilization system had been damaged when the missile had hit, but
it didn’t matter to him now. He just waited, trying his best to
focus and quell the conflagration of doubt that threatened to tear
him inside out.

And then the mouth of the cave exploded in
front of them. Flames splashed against the windshield, rocking the
lumbering assault lev. The visor of the suit compensated for the
high contrast between the flames and the darkness of he cave, but
Tanner eyes still ached as his pupils were squeezed to pinpoints
too fast.

The flames died around the front of the cave,
and Tanner expected a fighter to be sitting in front of him, but
the smoldering assault lev at the front of the cave was the only
thing visible in either the windshield or the imager.

Tanner’s system of beliefs had been
undermined, but his martial instincts died hard. At its heart, a
dogfight was not much different than a fistfight as far as he could
tell; the same rules applied. A man who held a knife blade-downward
often knew what he was doing. A man who threatened you with a gun
within arm’s reach most likely did not. The missile strike had been
the fighter equivalent of a blind technique—a wild attack directed
at something the fighter could not see. It was not a good indicator
of inexperience, but it was a definite indicator of a certain
amount of desperation.

And that desperation might be enough to get
them out of this jetwashed expedition alive. Tanner was surprised
he even cared as the fire within him dulled and the flames in front
of him dissipated. The anger did not go away completely, but he
could sense that, despite the bile building up in the very depth of
his soul, it may not stay forever.

And then the lev shook again, and the cave
mouth was illumined by the massive lasers on their roof. The rock
above them glowed in a dismal orange glow and then gave way to the
bolts of energy that bore through it. After Tanner heard Cyrus
count one one-thousand, two one-thousand over the radio, the lasers
moved in an arc. Tanner, despite his distress, felt eager as he
waited to see if their counterattack had succeeded. Then the wall
of the cave shook around them and Tanner saw the still sputtering
booster of one of the fighters plummet to the ground outside the
cave. As it hit the ground, a confetti of large metal and composite
pieces of shredded fighter showered the crater floor.

Even through his disillusionment Tanner
almost wanted to cheer. But his brief levity was squashed by the
realization that the vibration had not stopped, and it was getting
louder.

“Get the hell out! Go! Go! Go!” Milliken’s
voice eclipsed the rumbling, but it took a cascading rock smashing
against the windshield to whelm Tanner’s foot to the throttle. As
the lev began to move, he saw Uzziah and Milliken’s lev in the
imager so close it looked like the two ships were connected. Then,
angular blobs began appearing in the imager around the two levs.
The assault lev shook as it was bombarded by rocks falling from the
roof of the cave that was slowly closing in on them.

And then the mining lev was on top of them, a
slab of stone was on top of it, and they were all literally
squeezed out of the mouth of the cave to the sound of metal and
stone grinding. Another explosion spread around them as Cyrus and
Tanner’s assault lev bounced across the floor of the crater.

The assault lev slid, smacked against the
disabled tank, and then spun to its left as Tanner fought to resist
the momentum. The lev collided with something jutting from the
ground and tipped to the right, but the z-drive kicked in and
Tanner lifted the lev from the ground before it could roll. It
shuddered and shimmied as it rose from the crater floor, but
quickly accelerated up toward the crater’s rim.

Cyrus zoomed out the hologram and saw Uzziah
and Milliken’s mining craft following close behind their assault
lev—and the fourth fighter was right behind them. Cyrus spun the
ship-to-ship lasers in an attempt to aim at their pursuer, but the
controls were sluggish, the turret was jittery, and when he noticed
the image of his own lev on the gram, he could see the left laser
was off its mount and facing the opposite direction of the other.
He thought he heard himself curse, but it was hard to tell over the
timorous pounding of his own heart.

The collapsing roof the cave had knocked them
into the turret of the assault lev and the impact and the weight of
the slab had launched them from the mouth of the cave
nose-downward. The sheer awkwardness of their egress was the only
thing that had caused the second missile to miss them and detonate
against the side of the cave. Uzziah had instinctively killed the
boosters, rolled to the right, and had used the momentum to follow
the assault lev. Tanner and Cyrus’s tank had collided with the
other, gone into a spin, and then had almost flipped over before it
had lifted off the ground and had begun rising out of the crater.
Uzziah had put his foot back to the throttle, had pitched up the
nose of the mining craft, and against everything he had ever
learned about fighter-to-fighter engagement, had flown directly
between the wobbling tank and the fighter that was moving behind
them.

The fighter stayed low, and as Cyrus yelled
“Shit!” through the radio link, Uzziah saw that the massive laser
jury-rigged to the assault lev was mangled and twisted beyond
usefulness. But it didn’t matter, the fighter was staying beneath
the assault lev, outside the arc of the lasers, and it was slowing
down.

“He’s dropping back to fire again!” Uzziah yelled,
not sure what he expected anyone to do. And then, he felt the air
pressure inside the mining lev shift as the door opened behind him.
He turned to see Milliken, carrying a hand-held coring laser in one
hand, while tying something around his waist with the other. Then,
before Uzziah could ask what he was doing, Milliken yelled, “Fuck
this guy!” and jumped out the door.

He was tired of being tossed around. He was
tired of all the running, running, and more running. But most of
all, he was tired of being scared. Adrenalin had numbed his face to
stone for the second time in two days. He was sure his bladder had
released into his envirosuit, and he had been knocked around by
missiles and collapsing caves one too many times. So when he leapt
from the mining lev, counting to himself in his head as he
activated the coring laser, the thought of,
What the bloody hell
am I doing?
never crossed his mind.

Milliken fell downward, and even though he
could not see the ground coming up to meet him, it still felt
strange, like either the diminished gravity of the planet, or the
heightened gravity of his choice, had slowed time to a more
manageable speed. The rigging strap that he had secured caught him
just beneath the lev. The wind pushed him back behind the doorway
toward the fighter that was still chasing them as the distance
between them and the fighter slowly increased.

…but it was still close enough. Milliken
closed his eyes to steady his own head and then opened them again.
He lifted the vibrating hand laser up past the edge of the mining
lev and dropped it.

The air caught the laser and it spun as it fell
toward the fighter. The fighter didn’t dodge because it didn’t need
to. The laser fell harmlessly beneath it—harmlessly, until it
activated. A thin blue line of light shot back behind the fighter
and then spun like an antiquated saw blade beneath the pursuing
fighter. Sparks flew from beneath the fighter as the laser cut
through the bottom of it. The fighter pitched, dipped, and then
fell and rolled, sputtering sparks and flame from its underside.
But as it fell from view, a piece of it flew toward them. And then,
Milliken realized it wasn’t a piece of the fighter, it was a
missile, and it wasn’t aimed at them.