Sky Hunter

*
Thank You, as always, to Tracy Leach and Dee
Solberg

Copyright
©
2013
Chris Reher

All rights reserved

Smashwords Edition

ISBN:
978-0-9916985-9-2

More about Nova Whiteside:

The Catalyst

Only Human

Rebel Alliances

Delphi Promised

Flight To Exile

This book is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents on this planet or any other are
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales
is entirely coincidental.

The sight of nine Air Command Kites swooping
around the towering buttes guarding the plains of Bellac Tau was
either a thing of beauty or of terror, depending entirely on whose
side of the war observed the approach. The planes had arrived,
cloaked by technology as much as the dawn, to deliver their payload
only hours after leaving the Union’s military base on the other
side of the flatlands.

“
Downtown is in sight,” Nova Whiteside
said when the external cameras confirmed what her onboard navigator
had found.

“
But where is everybody?” her wingman’s
voice came from speaker in her helmet. “I thought this was going to
be fun.”

The dusty settlement supposedly making a
living by catering to the tribes of nomadic locals huddled empty
and desolate in the lee of the foothills. They knew enough about
this continent to expect open markets, animal pens, caravans and
desert vehicles among the brick buildings. None of that in sight,
nobody home. Something had compelled the plains people to heed
their ancient instincts for self-preservation and move on to some
other village.

“
Going to have to poke a stick in it,”
she said.

A scattering of metal sheds, much newer than
the town, came into view and into her gun sights. They housed
Rhuwacs, according to the scouts, barely-sentient creatures trained
by the Shri-Lan rebels to invade towns and villages, maiming and
destroying as directed by their handlers. Cheap, expendable, and
easily-replaced cannon fodder imported to this remote planet for
just that purpose.

“
Chow time! I think someone’s noticed
us now.”

Nova’s sensors showed a horde of them pouring
out of the buildings when the attacking Air Command squad pounced
onto the village. She did not zoom in for a closer look, knowing
these people to be slow-moving mountains of muscle under skin so
thick that it often cracked in places to give the appearance of
scales. Armed with cudgels, simple ballistic weapons, knives and
massive teeth, they stood little chance against the airborne threat
descending upon them. This was the third of such camps found and
routed along the Rim.

“
Whiteside, Tonda,” her flight lead’s
voice reached her. “Check out the cave system Jack found before
they scram. We’ll clean out the Rhuwacs.”

“
Aye. Save me some, will you?” Nova
replied and veered east, toward the additional coordinates provided
by their scouts.

“
Just get that bunker,
Lieutenant.”

“
Bunker, right,” she mumbled to
herself. “Now where did they put that bunker?” The plane faithfully
obeyed her mental commands, conveyed via the neural interface at
her temple, to navigate while she consulted the sensors. They knew
the location precisely and finding it was not the
problem.

“
Probably shielded,” Tonda said. His
plane glided noiselessly beside her own Kite toward the
sporadically forested hills edging the salt flats. “They know we’re
coming.”

A steady ticking sound over their receivers
indicated that someone had tapped into their communication. “I
don’t know how Dakad expects us to find it up here,” she said to
those who might be listening in. “No one mentioned all those
tree-things.” She turned her head and signaled to Tonda through her
cockpit canopy. He veered away.

She swung the other way, her mind now
entirely on directing the Kite toward the next valley where the
rebels had hidden their important goodies below ground. Com arrays,
weapons, senior members of the faction, likely valuables and
contraband as well. The town they had left at the edge of the
plains was as expendable as the Rhuwacs corralled there.

Shooting at a pack of mishandled Rhuwacs was
a favorite bloodsport among her fellow soldiers and pilots but Nova
was secretly glad not to have a part of that today. The creatures,
although without empathy and trained to kill, were hardly animals
and their role as enemy simply a matter of relentless and cruel
conditioning. The Union’s xenobiologists had classified them as
sentient, a Prime species, and none of this was of their
making.

Worse yet, the ramshackle town that her squad
was about to destroy surely also housed civilians, even if most of
them seemed to have deserted it. A discouraging number of the
red-skinned, white-haired locals had sided with the rebels, but
most of the residents of this region cared nothing about either the
Commonwealth of United Planets or the rebel factions that opposed
it. She hoped that the presence of the Rhuwacs had driven the
locals from the valley.

Nova shook herself out of these thoughts.
“Blow stuff up, Nova,” she said. “Get back home in one piece.
That’s it, that’s all.”

“
Huh?” came Tonda’s startled
reply.

“
Going over my notes,” she said. She
saw him approaching from the east now to rendezvous above the
coordinates they had been given. At this distance, his Kite looked
like a dark, graceful bird swooping over the treetops. Deploying
the ordnance designed to penetrate shielding known to be used by
rebels was not, unlike some of their other weaponry, a
long-distance maneuver. “Do we have news?” she asked, both of him
and her own systems in search of the shield’s
configuration.

“
Yep,” he said and she could almost see
the grin on the Centauri’s face. “Calibrating now.”

“
Clever, clever rebels,” Nova said when
her sensors picked up the communications array embedded in the bare
face of a cliff, invisible from afar. The entrance to the bunker
would be at the foot of that rock, behind a line of trees. In this
part of the planet the trees were little more than gaunt frames for
long ropes of gray-green foliage but still dense enough to impede a
clear vision of the ground. “Fire at will,” she said.

Instead of seeing tracers issue from his
Kite, a much broader trail shot up from the ground just as her
system warned of additional power sources below them. “Abort,” she
shouted. “Shielded anti-aircraft positions. We’re too low. Abort!”
She broke to the right, away from the valley, expecting Tonda to do
likewise. “Whiteside to Dakad.” She switched her com system to
reach her wing commander. “Taking fire from the ground. Looks like
coilers. Requesting backup.”

The reply was a curse.

“
Yessir,” she said. “Four
launches.”

“
Manage, Whiteside,” Captain Dakad
snarled. “We’re taking fire, too. Someone knew we were coming long
before we left the damn base.”

“
Three now,” Tonda corrected. “Got one
gone. Where the hell did they get those? What kind of lunatic uses
coilers on the ground? Jack didn’t mention any of this. Remind me
to kick his buttery ass when I—”

“
Tonda!” Nova shouted when she saw the
other Kite spin away. “Captain, he’s taken fire.” She veered to
describe a wide arc around the likely range of the gun on the
ground. Her weapons training did not include anticipating armament
not even meant to work inside an atmosphere such as Bellac’s. When
she saw the telltale tracer of another missile race toward her she
rolled and returned fire. The explosion below her confirmed the
hit.

“
Going down,” Tonda yelled, his words
distorted by panic. He was barely twenty-five, by Human terms, and
this tour was his first aboard a Kite. “Got holed, elevators
toasted. I can’t punch out!”

Nova watched him streak away from the valley
in search of a place to land. She came about when her scanner
reported another launch from the ground. The guns had an impressive
reach but not enough speed for the Kite’s evasive maneuvers. She
eluded that one as well and blanketed the location with a few
missiles of her own. “Tonda! Did you bail? Tell me you made
it.”

“
Made it. Sort of,” he groaned. “Kite’s
down and not in a good way. From what I can see through all the
blood on the dash.”

Nova cursed and set after him. She found him
in a clearing left by some long-ago rock slide. His Kite leaned
drunkenly among some boulders but seemed largely intact. She
hovered overhead. “Captain, Kite Four is down. Tonda’s still in it.
Still talking.”

“
Where?”

“
Too close. If they have skimmers
they’ll be here in minutes.” She scanned the area around the downed
plane. To allow even a damaged Kite to fall into enemy hands was
unthinkable.

There was a brief silence. “Mitigate.”

“
By
Cazun
!” Tonda’s oath was a
mere whimper.

“
Sir?”

“
Deal with it, Whiteside!” Dakad
shouted.

Nova circled the wreck, knowing damn well
that she was pointing out their location to anyone looking skyward
even if their own scanners hadn’t shown them yet. Mitigate.
Meaning, don’t leave the rebel with anything valuable. Not a plane
and not a hostage. She glanced over her available arsenal.

“
Gods, Nova,” Tonda said as if he could
see her finger on the trigger.

She ground her teeth. “I’m not leaving you.”
She took manual control over from her neural interface, expecting
the Kite to refuse to land here. Indeed, her warning systems
engaged peevishly while the vertical descent system hovered her
Kite lower, into a clear space not far from Tonda’s plane. The
camera at the belly of her plane found a few spots for the landing
struts to settle among the rocks. She exhaled sharply. “Can you
make it here, Tonda?”

“
No. I’m stuck.”

She switched the Kite’s sensor output to the
data sleeve on her forearm. Snatching up a gun, she climbed out of
the cockpit and slid over the edge of the triangular wing onto the
rocky ground. The loose scree sliding out from under her boots
slowed her sprint to Tonda’s plane. A glance to her screen showed
four vehicles approaching from her left, just above treetop
elevation. “That’s what I get for saying ‘skimmer’ out loud,” she
said to herself.

She climbed up to his cockpit canopy, already
shattered by his attempt to eject. The missile had impacted
somewhere below the pilot seat and warped pieces of the interior
had cut deep into Tonda’s leg and right arm. “Damn,” Nova breathed
when she saw the damage, again grudgingly impressed by the rebels’
ability to innovate. She leaned heavily against a piece of the
starboard console that had wedged across Tonda’s knees, hoping that
the ejectors didn’t choose this moment to deploy. “You Centauri are
just too long for these seats. Move!”

He heaved himself past her, out of the
cockpit and onto the wing. With a groan, he let himself slide to
the ground where he collapsed. She followed after entering a
command code that would destroy the plane’s onboard programs and
data storage. “Get up, they’re coming.” She grasped his parachute
harness to pull him up again. His face was about as pale as a
Centauri could get and the violet eyes had turned nearly grey.
“Stay with me now,” she snapped.

They stumbled back to her plane where she
pushed him up into the cockpit to crumple into the small space
behind the pilot seat. The shock of his injuries had worn off and
he howled in pain. Nova leaped into her seat and launched at once,
somewhat unsteadily because of the terrain and the extra weight
behind her but the Kite finally agreed to cooperate. She rose up
and shot away from the wreck.

“
What are you doing?” Tonda
exclaimed.

She moved out of coiler range and focused on
the plane’s sensors. “Did you nick an artery or something
urgent?”

“
What? No.”

“
Then shut up a moment,” she said.
“Don’t bleed on stuff.” She swung around in a wide circle, waiting,
counting. The four skimmers had arrived at the downed plane now.
Three more were closing in from the direction of the bunker. When
they had all stopped she turned the Kite and raced back to the
site. Wasting no time with a close approach, she lobbed an
incendiary missile at the wreck which promptly exploded in
spectacular fashion, disintegrating the skimmers and whatever
number of rebels they had brought with them.