Hammerjack (25 page)

“What are you complaining for? I got rid of her, didn’t I?”

“You’re going over the side, pal.”

“Better think about that, sport,” Heretic warned him. “Right now, I’m the only thing holding this bucket together. Unless you can automate flight stress controls all by yourself.”

“
Fuck
you, Heretic.”

“Business before pleasure,” the hammerjack said. “How are you doing up there? Looks like Batgirl stuck you pretty bad.”

“I’ll survive.”

“Good. I need you frosty for what’s coming up.”

Cray couldn’t take it anymore. “What is it
now
?”

“Your other buddy.” Heretic punched up a tactical construct of the second
Inru
hovercraft, displaying its current location on the MFI screen. “Right now, he’s hanging back at Shinto checking out the damage, but it ain’t gonna be long before he’s back on your six. We need to get the hell out of here.”

“Dammit,” Cray swore under his breath. “Can’t these guys take a hint?”

“Not on your life, Alden—which is about to end unless we get some juice going in that pulser.”

“That’s impossible. She hasn’t got anything left.”

“Then you better find some,” Heretic said, the display showing the hovercraft on the move. “Because we’re gonna have company in about fifteen seconds.”

Cray leaned over to his side of the window, straining for a backward glance. The blip on his screen took on very real dimensions as the hovercraft jumped over the Shinto tower, clearing the top and heading straight up toward the flight grid.

Suicidally fast.

Great. Another goddamned fanatic.

“What kind of evasive options do we have?”

“You gotta be kidding,” the hammerjack groaned. “We’re on a straight-line trajectory beam, my man. That doesn’t leave us with a lot of choices.”

“Then I better get creative,” Cray said, locating the box for the manual flight controls. “I need to fly this thing myself. Can you unlock the stick for me?”

“No problemo.”

The box popped open, pushing out the stick and throttle on a hydraulic. Cray put the MFI back in his pocket and cautiously took the controls into his hands, testing out the pulser’s maneuvering capability. It lurched to port sluggishly, then back over to level flight. The ship protested loudly under the miniscule load.

“No way this is gonna work,” Heretic said.

“You worry about the stress inhibitors, I’ll worry about the flying,” Cray snapped. “What’s the word on weapons with that hovercraft?”

Two bright flares of pulse fire immediately exploded just above the ship. Cray was certain he had been hit—but instead of buckling, the pulser merely reacted to the shock of a near miss, rocking up and down as it skipped along the edges of the blast wave. The hovercraft then roared past, visible only for a second before it dipped out of sight. Its pilot had applied maximum power to the strafing run, expecting a kill—but was forced to come around again to take another shot.

“Answers that question,” Cray said grimly.

“Negative impact,” the hammerjack reported. “Photon wash from the grid must have drawn his fire off target. He’ll have to tighten up his beam for the next run.”

“Can we take that kind of hit?”

“Unlikely. Even if we were in good shape, he could probably take us out with a single shot.”

“Swell.” Cray checked on the trajectory flow again. The weapons fire weakened it even further, down to minimum tolerance levels. The
Inru
didn’t even need to score a direct hit. Just grazing the flight grid would be enough to knock the pulser out of the sky.

But it gave him an idea.

“What’s the status on our receptor dishes?” Cray asked.

Heretic ran a quick diagnostic. “We sustained some damage fore and aft, mostly from overload,” the hammerjack told him. “The dorsal support pylon is cracked, but not severely. Ventral is still fully functional.”

“So I can divert power from the trajectory beam through the dorsal if I want.”

“Sure,” Heretic laughed. “If you don’t mind falling off the beam. You won’t have enough power to maintain flight if you pull a stunt like that.”

“That’s precisely what I want,” Cray said. “How much time do we have before that bastard gets back here?”

“Twenty seconds.”

“Distance to the traverse grid below?”

“One hundred and fifty-seven meters.”

Could be worse,
Cray thought, doing the calculations in his head.
As long as I can keep the y-axis foils fully deployed
. . .

“It just might work,” he finished out loud.

For the first time, the hammerjack sounded nervous. “What the hell are you talking about, Alden?”

“The only chance I’ve got,” he replied, rubbing his hands together and putting them back on the controls. “Heretic, I need you to feed the tactical data on that hovercraft into the tracking system for the dorsal receptor dish. Correlate all dish movements relative to the position of the hovercraft—and make damned sure you don’t lose him. We’re only going to get one chance.”

Heretic made the adjustments.

“Complete,” he announced.

Cray set his eyes dead ahead, watching the
Inru
hovercraft as it emerged from the canyons of the city and made a course straight for him. The tiny pinpoint of light grew larger as it approached, taking on malevolent form as it closed to killer range.

Just like a game of chicken.

“Time to intercept,” Cray said.

“Ten seconds.”

The hovercraft showed no signs of backing down.

“Wait until he fires,” Cray said. “Then all power to the dorsal.”

“Five seconds,” Heretic informed him, then after a brief pause added, “Been nice knowing you, boss.”

Cray smiled, but his hands shook.

Then up ahead, incandescence as the
Inru
let go of his fire.

“NOW!”

Twin bursts of pure energy traversed the void between the hovercraft and the pulser, exploding off the flight grid like fireworks. The
Inru
ship then lurched into a dive—its pilot anticipating the powerful concussion that would occur when the beams struck their target, steering clear of the debris cloud that would form when the pulser disintegrated. With full weapons at point-blank range, a miss was impossible on a stationary object. It only remained to go back and visually confirm the kill once it was done.

But there was no bright flash, no dust cloud, no kill—and no pulser. The deadly beams seared through thin air, going off wild until they were harmlessly absorbed by the grid. The
Inru
pilot jerked his head around, looking everywhere for the target he knew was there, but saw nothing but empty space.

Until his proximity alarms went crazy, and the weight of something ominous fell over him.

A scant two meters off his starboard side, the pulser thundered past him. It had dropped completely off the grid, its nose pirouetting downward to move enough air over the foils to maintain a steep glide. The fore and aft receptor dishes had gone dark—but the dorsal remained active, spitting out residual energy from the trajectory beam like a powerful laser.

The pulser’s wake flipped the hovercraft over, sending it into a flat spin. The pilot reacted quickly, mashing down on his reaction control jets and slowing his forward velocity to a hover—a maneuver that saved his ship from barreling into one of the surrounding skyscrapers, but also made him fatally vulnerable. Sitting out in the open sky,
he
had become the stationary target; and as the pulser’s energized dish swung around to catch him, the
Inru
pilot had just enough time to realize he was the cause of his own death.

The waning power of the trajectory beam lanced out at the hovercraft, one fraction of what it had been—but still enough to cut the small ship in half. Fuel components scattered as its tanks ripped open, creating a volatile mist that exploded as soon as it came in contact with the beam. The resulting concussion shattered windows in the nearby towers, creating a shower of glass that fell into the streets below. Pieces of the hovercraft joined in that downpour, consuming themselves in fire as they trickled down.

The bright halo above Manhattan faded.

And the pulser rushed to meet its own fate.

“Distance to grid!” Cray shouted.

“Ninety meters,” Heretic replied, barely audible in the melee of noises filling the cockpit. “Eighty meters . . . sixty-five—
shit!
We’re gonna splash all over that grid if we don’t lose some goddamned speed!”

Cray didn’t need the hammerjack to tell him that. It was spelled out in lethal terms by the images outside the canopy glass. Swallowed by the narrow corridor between the towers of Church Street, Cray was assailed with peripheral flashes of brilliant radiance—lights shining through the windows of surrounding buildings, coming together into a blur as they marked his accelerated fall out of the sky. Down below, traffic along the busy traverse grid loomed closer and closer, vehicles idling back and forth, suspended above the city streets by threads of light—unaware of the bomb about to drop on them.

“
Fifty
meters!”

Cray held his breath, pulling back on the dead stick as hard as he could. The pulser was never designed to function as a glider, and responded to his commands like a sinking stone. It bounced from side to side, metal grinding against metal, tossing Cray around and threatening to murder his wounded shoulder—but still he held on, too stubborn to let go, too hopeless to wish for a miracle.

“Thirty-five!”

A loud screech penetrated the cabin from behind. Looking back, Cray watched the dorsal receptor dish tear loose from its support pylon. It caught the wind and was yanked away, tumbling a few times before dropping out of sight.

“Thirty meters,” Heretic reported. “Twenty-five . . . twenty.”

The pulser’s nose began to rise.

“Hot damn, boss!” the hammerjack said. “I think we got ourselves a head wind!”

Precious air spilled over the foils, allowing Cray some more control of the ship. It wasn’t much—but it flattened out his angle of attack, giving him a chance at parking this thing. Trying out the z-axis foils, he nudged the pulser to starboard and lined himself up with the closest grid lane he could find.

“Ten meters. Leveling off.”

Damn,
Cray thought. The lane was choked with traffic, pulsers lined up with no more than thirty meters between them.

“Jack the traverse grid,” he told Heretic. “Spread these guys out. Gimme some room here.”

“No time. We only got about eight seconds.”

Cray looked around for other options, but couldn’t find one. With the head wind dying fast, he was committed. “Bring the gain up on the dishes to full,” he instructed. “Catch the photon wash if you can. Channel it through our main axis to get us some more stability.”

Cray saw the forward dish come up, sniffing around for any energy it could find. Delicate tendrils of static electricity formed along its rim before being drawn in. He positioned the pulser as best he could, then thrust down on the flight stick.

“Contact,” Heretic said.

The injured ship hit the traverse grid like a hammer, hijacking the trajectory beam and greedily stuffing photons down its throat. The beam nearly collapsed under the weight of the abrupt drain, creating a ripple effect that thrashed the chain of pulsers in the lane like objects on the end of a whip. They snapped back into place as soon as the beam regenerated itself—including the unexpected guest that had caused the trouble in the first place. Spewing an intense blue flare out of its aft dish, the pulser flipped over several times before righting itself—then roared off on a collision course with the ship directly in front of it.

The Port Authority computers, detecting a major malfunction, slammed on the brakes. The polarity of the trajectory beam neutralized, its component particles redirected to absorb the pulser’s inertia. That brought all the other ships in the lane to an instant halt—all except the runaway, which continued to lumber forward, driving a shower of sparks ahead of it.

A backflow of energy built up within the body of the pulser, growing to proportions that could blow the ship apart. Some of it bubbled over into the hole where the dorsal dish had been, venting into the atmosphere as the pulser finally began to slow down, creating an otherworldly aura that made it seem as though a ghost ship had appeared in the middle of New York. The ghost menaced the other pulser in its path, deliberately creeping up on its tail, threatening to crush the aft receptor dish and create another disaster. It came within less than a meter, but then relented, easing off as the forces that drove the runaway abated.

The ghost ship was still.

As was the city around it.

Cray sank into his seat.

It was the first time he could recall breathing since he left the Works. Closing his eyes, he soaked up the sounds coming up from the street below: the traffic, the sirens, the collective pulse of a thousand souls staring up into the sky. His body ached terribly, but it felt good just the same. He was alive—and that was more than he deserved.