enormous power driving it through the sound barrier and well beyond, passing through the clouds and up into a brilliantly blue sky. Finally he leveled off and eased back on the power. If he did not, the lander would be in orbit and. .
Michael cursed out loud as he shoved the lander’s nose down hard, the sudden negative g-force shoving him hard against his safety harness.
“Oh, Jesus. What the hell are you doing?” Yazdi protested. Michael ignored her and kept cursing. He had completely forgotten the Hammer’s battlesats. Climb too high and the lander would be easy meat without the planet’s atmosphere to take the edge off the enormous power of the battlesats’ ship-killing lasers. They had not been hit yet, which he could only attribute to confusion in the Hammer command hierarchy. Initiative was not a trait much encouraged in Hammer subordinate commanders, and Michael thanked God for that, driving the lander in a plunging dive to safety below the thick gray mat of cloud.
The lander punched through the cloud, and the ground reappeared, closing at a truly frightening rate. Michael chopped the power and pulled the nose up sharply to aerobrake the lander to a more reasonable speed, the violent maneuver bringing yet more protests from the long-suffering Yazdi. She was not the only one who was upset. The lander’s flight management system was beginning to get pissed, too, and the endless warnings-terrain, overspeed, wing loading, hull loading, engine overthrust, vectored thrust nozzles overtemp-were getting to be a real pain in the ass. Even as Michael reminded himself that there was no point going so fast that he’d hit an object bigger and stronger than the lander, he flinched. Something extremely large-it looked remarkably like a rocky, snowcapped mountain peak-had flashed past below the lander’s port wing. “Ouch, that was close,” he muttered. Maybe he should listen to some of the warnings the lander was throwing at him.
He pulled the lander up to a safe altitude, tucking it just below the layer of thick cloud that protected them from orbiting battlesats and their ship-killing lasers. Easing the throttles forward, he settled the lander down to run fast, straight, and level on a course direct for McNair. The good news was that the lander’s long-range search radar was working faultlessly. So far, apart from commercial traffic, there was not one military aircraft in the skies around them.
Barely a minute later, that changed in a hurry. First one, then five more contacts popped onto the holovid display, his headphones warbling to report multiple search radar intercepts. Damn, Michael thought, squinting at the command pilot’s primary holovid. Judging by their speed and rate of climb, they had to be air superiority fighters, probably Kingfishers from the O’Connor Marine Base south of New Berlin; an instant later, the lander’s threat management system confirmed the intercepts as Kingfisher search radars.
Tough as the lander was, it would be no match for a Kingfisher’s heavy long-range air-to-air missiles. What he needed now was speed. He needed to keep the buggers as far away as possible for as long as he could. Slamming the throttles hard onto the stops, he pulled the lander up into a shallow climb, the speed picking up rapidly as clouds swallowed the lander.
“Corp!”
“Sir?”
“Okay. They’re on to us. Air superiority fighters. Six of them. By my reckoning”-Michael did a quick bit of mental arithmetic-“they’ll be close enough to launch missiles in a matter of minutes. So hang on. This is going to be rough.”
“Roger that,” Yazdi replied without enthusiasm.
Anxiously, Michael watched the hostiles closing in from the west. They were joined minutes later by four more coming from the north, probably from one of the bases that ringed McNair: more Kingfishers probably.
Things were getting tricky. The lander was about to become a flying death trap; the only safe place for them was on the ground. They would be cold and hungry, true, but at least they would be safe. For the moment, that was all Michael cared about.
“Hang on. I’m putting down,” he shouted. He pitched the lander downward, the negative g-force setting off a barrage of alarms. He ignored them as the lander drove down hard in a desperate dive for the safety of the sheer- sided valleys that cut through the mountains below. Then, as Yazdi closed her eyes, unable to look at the awful sight of rock walls screaming past only meters from the lander’s left wingtip, Michael cut the power and pulled up the nose sharply. Holding the lander on its tail, he fired belly thrusters, and the lander, protesting loudly at the appalling way it was being treated, began to lose speed rapidly as it came into a hover.
They almost made it, but Michael had left it a minute too late.
The instant he got the lander stable above the only flat piece of ground he could find and lowered the undercarriage, the first Hammer missile, swooping down on them at hypersonic speed, smashed into the lander aft of the port main engine. The shock of the impact hammered the lander’s tail down, with the missile’s boosted high-explosive warhead and residual kinetic energy ripping most of the lander’s port quarter to shreds. Desperately, Michael struggled to regain control, the lander sagging and wallowing, a hairbreadth away from rolling over, the mountainside now dangerously close to their left wing and getting closer by the second. With the shock-damaged port main engine struggling to stay online-Michael had diverted what little power he could get out of it down to the lander’s belly thrusters-he somehow got enough control back to walk the lander away from the mountainside. He did not mess around; he did not have the time to. Chopping power, he let the lander drop like a stone for a second before ramming the throttles back up to full power, the efflux from the belly thrusters incinerating the ground below them. Great clouds of rock and steam billowed up around them in a massive roiling column.
Probably it was the cloud of ionized rock and water that saved them. In its terminal dive, the second missile lost lock only seconds away from impact, enough to drift fractionally off target to slice through the base of the lander’s port wing. The warhead exploded in a huge ball of flame on the ground below, the blast smashing the lander into an uncontrolled roll to starboard and into the ground. Michael winced as the armored hull absorbed the impact of the explosion.
Then the lander hit hard. The impact was much harder than Michael had expected, the shock whipping him violently from one side to the other, his unprotected head slamming back into the headrest with sickening force as the lander bounced one last time before coming to a stop. Blood from a new cut to his head ran down the side of his face. For a moment he teetered on the edge of unconsciousness, waves of foggy blackness threatening and then receding. Head spinning and ears ringing, he struggled out of his harness, slapping the emergency button to blow out the lander’s doors and hatches. Yazdi was slumped forward in her harness. She looked half-dead, a long gash in the side of her head gushing blood all over the place.
Michael ripped her harness off. Grabbing her, he half dragged, half carried her to the ladder. With one hand on her collar, he pushed her through the hatch, hanging on as long as he could before her dead weight took over. He dropped her-he did not have much choice-and she fell with a dull thud to the main cargo deck below.
Pausing only to retrieve their packs and the long-dead DocSec trooper’s gun, Michael dropped into the payload bay. Somehow he got outside, the air stinking of burned rock and acrid with explosive residue, hot gas and steam still rising from the glassy black patch of flame-scorched ground below the lander. Michael looked around in frantic, heart-pounding desperation. Kingfisher air superiority fighters might not have been built for ground attack, but they carried cannon. He and Yazdi had to get clear-now.
Michael found what he was looking for: a small copse upstream, a wind-battered collection of pines clustered around a large boulder-strewn outcrop. It would have to do. With strength born of desperation, he heaved Yazdi over his shoulder, thanking God that she was so small as he struggled onehanded to get his chromaflage cape across them.
With a deep breath, he set off in an awkward shuffling run, head down, with one hand holding Yazdi firmly on his shoulder, the other gripping their packs and his gun. His lungs were heaving as he forced himself to keep going. The terrible fear of falling into the Hammer’s hands again drove him on.
They barely had made it to the copse when the first Kingfisher howled overhead. The rest followed a minute later, the air above ripped into ear-shattering shreds as one after another they climbed under full power over the smoking wreckage of the lander. Trusting that his chromaflage cape would keep the two of them safe from the Kingfishers’ optronics, he staggered on, heart pounding and legs burning, scrambling and scrabbling over broken rocks up into the heart of the copse. A massive slab had split off to form a shallow, flatroofed cave, its entrance protected by the huge boulder keeping it off the ground. It would have to do, and Michael gratefully dumped Yazdi’s dead weight onto the ground, sliding around her to pull her inert body into the cave.
He could not see the lander, only a small patch of sky; he watched the Kingfishers run up the valley in line ahead. One after the other, they raked the lander with withering cannon fire until, with a blinding flash of ultraviolet
