door out of its housing and hurled it in a twisting arc across the open area outside. Blair caught a glimpse of an HK swooping down toward the spot where she’d left Barnes—.
And with a teeth-tingling screech of metal against metal, the flying door slammed into the HK’s tail.
The HK nearly lost it right there and then, as the impact threw it violently to the side. Its left tail fin hit the ground and dug in, spinning the whole aircraft a quarter turn around the pivot point.
But the computer controlling the craft was faster than any human pilot. Before the HK’s nose could slam into the tarmac, it managed to pull up and out of its spin, its engines revving madly as it tried to regain its equilibrium.
It was still trying when Barnes sent a final burst of fire squarely into its nose, igniting its fuel and munitions and blowing the whole thing to scrap metal.
The fireball was still billowing skyward as Blair snagged her helmet and jammed it on over her head.
“Jinkrat: go!” she barked into the mike.
“Roger,” Yoshi’s voice came back. The hum of his engines became a sudden roar, and Blair’s plane bucked beneath her as the backwash blasted against the rear wall of the hangar and bounced off again in all directions. Yoshi’s A-10 lurched forward, rolled up the ramp, and turned sharply right as he made for the pockmarked runway and the relative safety of the open air.
Blair grabbed for her safety straps and started pulling them on as she peered through the dust and fire and the pieces of raining metal. Wince and Inji were on the move, weaving their way through the buffeting turbulence of Yoshi’s backwash as fast as the weight of their backpacks and shoulder bags would allow. Another few seconds and they should be out of the way of her own exit.
Until then, here she sat in an open hangar, as vulnerable a sitting duck as could be imagined.
Apparently, Yoshi had the same kind of imagination.
“Hickabick, what’s the trouble?” his voice called through her headset. “Get your butt out of there.”
“Can’t—penguins are still on the move,” Blair told him.
“The penguins may just have to hump it,” Yoshi warned. “You’ve got three bandits on the way; repeat, three on the way.”
“Check,” Blair said, resettling her grip on the throttle as she watched Wince and Inji running across the open space.
Another three seconds…
Two…
One…
The A-10 surged forward, again swaying and shaking as the big turbofans bounced their streams of superheated air off the back wall. Blair maneuvered the plane up the ramp, easing back slightly on the engines as she negotiated the tight left-hand turn that would take her onto the other section of runway. She left the throttle where it was for another three seconds, rolling relatively slowly down the runway, giving Barnes and the ground crew as much margin of safety as she dared. Then, bracing herself, she kicked it into full power.
The runway here had been short to begin with, and the meteor storm of falling debris on Judgment Day had left it riddled with pits and ridges. But the A-10 was a close-air support fighter, specifically designed to work on the less-than-ideal airstrips typically found near the front lines of battle. The jet bounced badly as Blair did her best to steer around the worst of the damage, but it kept going, its speed increasing.
The three incoming HKs had just reached the edge of the grounds when she pulled back on the stick, sending the A-10 rocketing up into the sky.
“Three on your tail, Hickabick,” Yoshi’s voice snapped in her ear. “Jink right—I’ll see if I can shake them off you.”
“Check,” Blair said, twisting the A-10 hard to the right. She caught a flicker of movement as Yoshi crash-dived from somewhere above them, his GAU-8 spitting armor-piercing shells at the deadly machines behind her.
Spitting it accurately, too. Blair was halfway through her turn when the ground lit up behind her as one of the three HKs blew to splinters. She straightened out momentarily, then jinked right again.
Her turn brought her into sight of the two remaining HKs, and she armed one of her Sidewinders, locked it onto the nearest bandit, and fired.
There was another blast, this one even more spectacular than the last, and the enemy count was down to one.
But Blair’s combat instincts were screaming like an Irish banshee. This was too easy. It was
The two backup HKs were coming in dark and low, weaving smoothly between the ruined buildings, hugging the ground where a careless pilot might easily miss them.
“Eight o’clock low,” she snapped a warning to Yoshi, twisting her stick hard around in an attempt to bring her plane into firing position before Skynet tumbled to the fact that its little sneak play had failed.
The race ended in a tie. She squeezed off her last Sidewinder just as both HKs opened fire, one targeting her, the other targeting the missile. A second later the Sidewinder blew up, well short of its intended targets, as Blair shoved her joystick forward, trying to duck under the lethal stream of lead coming in her direction.
She shoved the stick forward perhaps a bit too hard. The sudden change in direction, coupled with her lack of sleep, sparked a wave of lightheadedness that sent the universe tilting violently around her. Dimly, she was aware of her pulse throbbing in her throat, of Yoshi shouting in her ears, of the ground rushing up toward her—
She snapped out of it just in time, yanking back on the stick and pulling up out of the dive close enough to the ground to feel the buffeting as her shockwave bounced off it and up against the A-10’s underside.
“You all right?” Yoshi called.
“I’m fine,” Blair managed, twisting the A-10 sideways and clawing for some altitude. “Are you—?”
She broke off as another explosion ripped through the air.
“Jinkrat!” she snapped, looking frantically around.
“S’okay,” Yoshi assured her. “Just reminding Skynet that we usually come in pairs.”
And as the glare of the explosion faded, Blair saw that one of the two sneak-attack HKs had been turned into a heap of blazing rubble. The remaining newcomer, still running dark, had escaped and was angling across the airfield, clearly heading for a link-up with the last of the original three attackers.
“Looks like they’re pairing up, too,” she said. “What’s your status?”
“I’m at Geth Pete,” he said.
Blair grimaced. Geth Pete—Gethsemane Peter.
But Skynet was unlikely to have picked up on such an oblique reference, in which case it might still think its HKs were facing two armed fighters.
“You cut around and hit their flank,” she told Yoshi. “I’ll take it down their throats.”
“Check,” Yoshi said, and Blair mentally threw him a salute. Charging into battle unarmed this way might help Blair, but it could easily cost Yoshi his own life.
Though not if Blair could help it.
She curved her A-10 around toward the two HKs, mapping out her strategy. Whichever one turned toward Yoshi, she would concentrate all her fire on the other, hopefully blowing it out of the sky quickly enough that she could get to the remaining bandit before it could engage with him.
Unfortunately, the HKs weren’t playing to the script. Both of them were heading straight toward Blair, completely ignoring Yoshi’s one-man Light Brigade charge at their flank.
Which meant the oblique reference hadn’t been oblique enough. Skynet had figured it out, and wasn’t going to waste its resources on an enemy who couldn’t fight back. At least, not until it had dealt with the one who could.
“Better idea,” Blair told Yoshi. “Break off and get back to the coop. I can handle them.”
Yoshi muttered something Blair didn’t quite get. But he was smart enough to realize that, with the jig up, it was the only reasonable course. The Resistance didn’t have nearly enough planes and pilots to let any of them get wasted without a good reason.
“Check, Hickabick,” he said with a sigh. “I’m gone.”
