Raising Caine - eARC (44 page)

Chapter Forty-Four

Southern extents of the Third Silver Tower; BD +02 4076 Two (“Disparity”)

Caine tossed back another of the amphetamines, listened and glanced up at the light teal sky: a distant sound of thunder that he knew was not thunder. It was their attackers’ final descent. But how quickly would they detect the group and land? Both humans and Slaasriithi were already near their positions, so that was not an issue. However, what was more challenging and uncertain was when he should begin staging his pills.
I have to get the timing just right, can’t afford to peak the effects before, or after, I need them
.

Thnessfiirm jogged up to Riordan with the fast, rolling gait of her kind. “I have offloaded the autonomous munitions platform from the rotoflyer.”

“Excellent. Send the rotoflyer back to the Silver Tower. It will only help the enemy locate us if we keep it here. Any update from the pilot on how soon we might expect the supersonic defense drones to enter our airspace?”

Thnessfiirm’s upraised tendrils went over sideways like dead toy soldiers. “I am sorry, but no. There are only a few ground wire communication links, and the atmospheric defense drones are clustered in the more advanced facilities on the northern continent. When the rotoflyers left the Third Silver Tower to convey the munitions platform here, Prime Ratiocinator T’suu’shvah had still not sent her approval for the supersonic drones, much less their estimated time of arrival.”

A drooping equilateral triangle, hovering on one central and three corner fans, whined into view behind Thnessfiirm, trailing her like a lazy dog. Its upper surface was scored by a hexagon pattern, two sensor masts rising up from either side of the central rotor. “Where are the weapons?” Riordan asked, suddenly concerned that the Slaasriithi had misinterpreted his request for a combat platform: the local lack of personal firearms made this munitions dispenser their only option.

Thnessfiirm trailed three of her tendrils over one of the hexagons. “The weapons are stored in these bays.”

Caine stared at the platform’s three-meter sides. “They must be pretty small weapons.”

Thnessfiirm’s neck retracted slightly. “Do not presume that their size indicates insufficient power. In this environment”—she gestured to the patches of daylight coming through the loose forest canopy—“we cannot employ the larger platforms that carry longer-ranged weapons. The platform’s maneuverability and stealth characteristics are more important, if the system is to survive the first few minutes of engagement.”

If the bad guys have any airborne weapons or observation systems, that’s undoubtedly true.
“What kind of weapons does this platform carry?”

“Mostly conventional high-explosive rockets with enhanced fragmentation. There are also several clusters of miniature anti-personnel heat-seeking rockets and a few surface-to-air missiles.” Apparently, the Slaasriithi were becoming increasingly adept at reading human facial expressions: in this case, Riordan’s surprise and dubiety. “They are
extremely
short-range surface-to-air missiles,” Thnessfiirm qualified.

“How short?”

“Only four hundred meters of active thrust, with small warheads but extremely rapid flight times. All the munitions are independently deployable..”

Riordan knew an insufficient translation when he heard one. “I am uncertain what you mean by ‘independently deployable.’ I presume they can be launched individually?”

“That too, but what I refer to is this.” Thnessfiirm clicked several new ringlike adornments on her toe-tendrils in rapid sequence. The lines delineating one of the hexagons suddenly became deep grooves, and that part of the platform’s—chassis?—dropped down to the ground: a six-sided tube akin to a single cell from a honey-comb. It swayed as it landed; prehensile actuators whipped out of its base, righted it, retracted until they became a short-legged stand for the object. “An excellent feature.” The way Thnessfiirm said it, Riordan had the distinct impression that she was immensely proud of this novel stabilizer but was unsure about its usefulness.

“An excellent feature,” Caine agreed. “If we use it properly, we should be able to minimize—”

The thunder, having diminished somewhat, began a swift crescendo.

“Cover!” Caine shouted. “Now!”

As arranged, the humans darted under cone trees and huddled into the midst of waiting groups of convectorae, thereby blending the two species’ thermal signatures. Smaller clusters of the Slaasriithi, those without any humans in them, moved toward the edges of other, scattered cone-tree canopies; slightly more exposed, they’d present more pronounced thermal silhouettes. Caine glanced at the sky again:
Now sort us out, you bastards
.
If you can.

The thunder became an oncoming, rocket-propelled freight train, up-dopplering sharply. The Slaasriithi shied closer into their cover. The four humans who were carrying the pathetic survival rifles—Keith, Dora, Xue, and Salunke—glanced at Riordan. He shook his head, waved his hand from upriver to downriver—

Just as a TOCIO-manufactured armored shuttle roared overhead at an altitude of five hundred meters, following the trajectory Caine had indicated with his wave.

“How did you know it would be flying toward—?” Thnessfiirm began.

“No big trick.” Veriden checked that the action of her weapon cycled smoothly. “They clearly found our wreck, started river-following. And by the time we heard them, they were moving too fast to slow down and drop in on us here.”

“So what do they mean to do, then?”

“Sweep down-river,” Caine answered. “They’ll double-back when they find that this area had the only large collection of biothermal signatures gathered in one place.”

“Should we not have spread out more?”

Riordan shook his head. “Wouldn’t have mattered. For us to be able to defend ourselves, we have to be relatively close together. And once you cluster up that way, there are too many bodies in one grid for them to mistake us for anything other than their target. They can’t be sure until they sweep the whole of the river, but once they have, they’ll be back.” He turned to Unsymaajh. “What did your subtaxae see? Did the craft drop anything off?”

“My convectorae saw nothing separate from the vehicle.”

“It couldn’t have, moving at that speed,” Keith murmured.

Riordan nodded. “Only milspec ROVs hardened for high-speed deployment could have survived getting dumped out at that velocity, and those systems are too big to miss. Okay; we’ve got thirty minutes, forty at most. Let’s get into positions.”

Thnessfiirm was staring northward, downriver. “I am confused,” she admitted finally. “The craft resembled images of your own crashed shuttle.”

Riordan nodded. “It’s a variant of that design.”

“But—are your own people trying to kill you?”

Caine shrugged. “The people in that armored shuttle might or might not be from Earth. But they are certainly using our tools. Which might be good news; if all their tools and weapons are ours, we understand what they have and are not at a technological disadvantage.”

“But how could it be your people? You humans cannot shift this far, cannot reach our space on your own—can you?”

“We cannot,” Riordan admitted.

“Then what other species would have access to, and be able to use, your equipment?”

Caine selected a carefully worded, technical truth. “I can’t be sure. But we are certainly going to find out.”

Thnessfiirm’s sensor cluster swung back northward. “They will see the boat. And destroy it.”

Riordan did not answer. There was no point in confirming what was now an inescapable conclusion. “Let’s get into position.”

* * *

Pehthrum called to Jesel. “A lateen-rigged sail boat on the river up ahead. In a river gorge. Trying to stay in the lee of overhanging rocks.”

Jesel pulled himself forward into the cockpit, looked out the starboard window. “Is there any way we can get close enough to take it under effective small arms fire?”

Pehthrum slowed the shuttle, spun up the ducted tilt-fans to slow their approach into a gradual forward hover. He glanced at the walls of the gorge. “Not without coming down between these rock faces. And if they have any rockets—”

Jesel nodded. “An unacceptable risk. Maintain altitude and maneuver to a position directly adjacent to the boat, but keep the overhang between us. Keep pace with it.”

Pehthrum swung the shuttle, now in VTOL mode, toward the right side of the river. “Complying. Our visibility of the boat is very limited from this angle, though.”

“We only need to know where it is,” Jesel tossed over his shoulder as he returned to the passenger compartment. “Suzruzh, ready the package.”

His distant cousin was out of his seat, four of the clones following him back to the access hatch just aft of the shuttle’s waist and just forward of its engineering section. Following the drill they had practiced a dozen times before, one pair of the identical soldiers opened the hatch and extended a small aluminum ramp, adapted from a freight-moving kit. The other two man-handled a container out of the largest of the ship’s lockers.

Suzruzh bent over the container, opened it, adjusted a single control on a detonator slaved to the two ship-to-ship missile warheads bolted to the plastic bottom. “Primed,” he shouted as he closed the lid and locked it. At his nod, the two clones who had removed the container from the locker now positioned it at the top of the aluminum ramp.

Suzruzh stood sideways in the wind-buffeted open hatchway, his hand gestures telling Jesel how to shift the position of the shuttle. Jesel relayed the appropriate piloting commands to Pehthrum. “Three meters more to the right. Wait—correct for the prop-wash coming back off the rocks. Now, another meter to the right…”

Suzruzh held his fist upright: Jesel motioned for Pehthrum to hold the shuttle in precisely that spot. As soon as the craft stabilized, Suzruzh nodded to the two clones holding the container on the slide: they released it.

Where he was, Jesel knew he would not be able to see or hear the splash as the container hit the water almost thirty meters beneath them, and a few meters to the left of the boat as it hung tight against the side of the gorge. Suzruzh, on the other hand, watched the container’s descent, and after what seemed like several long seconds, pressed the remote activation stud on his belt-com.

At such a short range, the signal got through the radio interdiction easily, and the detonator went off, triggering the two warheads not more than two meters beneath the surface of the swift current. A blast came up from the river. Jesel gestured for Pehthrum to spin the shuttle, which had passed the drop point. Pehthrum did so, just in time for them to see the lateen mast reach the peak of its upward course a top of the explosion’s white-frothed plume. It began tumbling back down toward the wreckage-strewn waters.

“Any sign of bodies?” Jesel shouted at Suzruzh over the whine of the VTOL fans.

“No sign of anything,” he answered. “Except that mast and a few shreds of hull.”

Jesel nodded, turned back to Pehthrum. “You have performed adequately, Intendant. Now return us to the coordinates where we detected the biosignatures upriver.” He moved back into the passenger compartment, affixing the straps of the ridiculously primitive Aboriginal helmet. “We have a job to finish.”

* * *

Karam Tsaami peeked overhead—the direction in which he would be falling, if he wasn’t being held upside down by the straps of the pilot’s chair. Through the sliver he’d opened in the cockpit’s sliding covers, he saw greens and teals and violets streak past in a psychedelic rush of formless color. He looked away: if he’d withdrawn all the blast-shields at this point, he wouldn’t even have trusted his own well-honed instincts of spatial orientation: flying upside down, for this long, at this speed, and this altitude, was for stunt fliers and test pilots, not boat jockeys.

The intercom crackled. “Karam?” Bannor’s voice.

“Yeah, Major, what is it? Kind of busy up here.”

“I figured as much. Now that all the bumping is over, give me a report on the ship’s systems.”

“Not much to report. Coming in belly-up should have protected the weld points in the hull, but with our hard aerobraking attitude on the way in, I suspect all of our surfaces still got baked somewhat. So I’m going to fly
Puller
inverted until after you jump.”

There was a long pause. “Say again, bridge. Sounded like you said you were maintaining inverted attitude until after you clear the drop zone.”

“You heard right, Major. If I were to roll over now, we could find ourselves with a hole in the hull catching the air in excess of fifteen hundred kph. That could tear us to pieces in seconds. So we’re going to get you where you’re going first, which also means we’ll be down to about four hundred kph, give or take. Once you’re out, I’ll roll her and we’ll see what happens.”

Behind Karam, Morgan Lymbery may have choked back a curse or a whimper or both.

“You’ve still got a location on the enemy craft?”

“Sure do. They are clearly not worried about being spotted. Going in straight lines, leaving a thermal trail as wide as the Strait of Gibraltar and running active sensors. And moving from objective to objective like they don’t have to do a lot of searching.”

Melissa Sleeman, although pale-faced and white knuckled, had evidently been following the conversation closely. “So the attackers have a fix on the ground team already? How could they?”

Karam sighed. “Either there is a still a traitor among them or the bad buys have miracle sensors. And I don’t believe in miracles. I particularly don’t believe in miracles coming from a lander that is throwing off the thrust signatures of a TOCIO-made shuttle.”

Bannor’s voice was quiet. “You’ve confirmed that?”

“Can’t confirm anything at this range, and I’m running passive sensors only. But if I was a betting man—well, I’d say we’ve got some interesting questions to ask whoever’s flying that lander. Like, where’d they get it?”

“I agree.” Rulaine sounded excessively composed. “Give me a two minute warning. I’ll be back at the aft hatchway preparing for the jump.”