“Just watch for unfriendly eyes,” Blair warned. “And don’t forget to go in from the north.”
“Check,” Yoshi said again. “Good luck.”
“You, too.”
The two HKs, which had worked so hard to get into a single formation, now split apart again at Blair’s approach, one swinging right as the other went left. Blair flipped a mental coin and turned to follow the one to the left. Her turn caught up with it before it could sidle out of range, and a single long burst from her GAU-8 took it out.
Unfortunately, that left the other machine sitting squarely on her tail. Even as she started to turn back to face it, the HK opened fire, sending a burst of lead across the A-10’s belly.
There was only one thing Blair could do.
Throwing full power to her engines, she hauled back on the stick, turning the A-10’s nose toward the sky in a power loop. She kept going, ignoring the enemy fire that was tracking up toward her, curving ever more skyward until the A-10 was nearly to stall configuration.
Then, twisting the plane around into half a barrel roll, she turned it right-side up again as she finished her half loop.
And with that single smooth maneuver, she was heading along an opposite vector, and had gained herself a good stretch of altitude along with it.
She cut back a little on her throttle, breathing out a sigh of relief as she scanned the sky around her. The Immelmann turn was a standard fighter maneuver, one that had probably been taught to every military pilot since World War One. But that didn’t mean anyone especially liked
Still, when the trick worked, it worked well, particularly against aircraft like HKs that had been designed more for hunting ground targets than for real aerial combat. And indeed, the sky around her seemed to finally be clear of enemies.
Though just because the current generation of HKs weren’t particularly good at this kind of warfare; it didn’t mean Skynet didn’t have something more maneuverable already in the works.
There were also rumors of some kind of plasma gun that would replace the HKs’ Gatlings. Given time, she suspected, every advantage the Resistance had been able to find or carve out would be blocked.
It was her job, and the job of people like John Connor, to make sure Skynet was taken down before that happened.
She checked her mirrors. The HK she’d thought she’d left far behind was still in pursuit, moving as fast as its little midships turbofans could take it.
Skynet wasn’t yet ready to call it a day.
Fine. If the massive computer system wanted to lose another HK, Blair would be happy to oblige.
In fact, there was a little maneuver she’d been saving for just such an occasion, and with three of Skynet’s four radar towers currently down, it was the perfect time to try it. Watching the blip behind her, adjusting her speed just enough to let the HK start closing the gap, she headed due west, toward the edge of the city and the dark ocean beyond.
The HK had closed about half the gap between them by the time Blair came in sight of her objective: a pair of twenty-story buildings about fifteen meters apart, probably once the towers of a hotel, with a fair amount of wall and ceiling still clinging to their skeletons.
She didn’t know why so much of their structure had survived, especially that high off the ground, unless there had been something even bigger and taller to the south that had shielded them from the worst of the nuclear blast. However it had happened, though, the buildings presented her with a golden opportunity.
Smiling tightly to herself, she reached over and shut down her starboard engine.
It was like throwing fresh meat into a shark tank. The HK behind her abruptly leaped forward, drawing on a reserve of extra speed that Blair had never realized the damn things had. As it closed the gap, it began firing, sending quick bursts across her wingtips and tail, clearly targeting her remaining engine.
Blair swore under her breath as she checked the distance back to the HK, then ahead to the two buildings, then back again to the HK. It was going to be tight, and with the enemy firing at her the whole way. Briefly, she considered restarting the starboard engine and getting back her speed advantage.
But the minute she did that, Skynet would know she wasn’t as vulnerable as she was pretending and realize it was a trap. At that point, it would either break off the attack entirely or else send the HK in with more caution than Blair really wanted from it.
On the up side, after all the shooting tonight the HK had to be running low on ammo. On the down side, so was Blair. Of the 1100 rounds she’d started with, less than 150 were left. At the A-10’s cycle rate of 3900 rounds per minute, that was roughly two seconds’ worth.
It was definitely going to be tight.
They were nearly to the buildings now, and despite Blair’s evasive jinking the HK was starting to get the range. She could feel the thuds and hear the whining screeches as the enemy’s Gatlings tore bits and pieces off the A-10’s skin and dug furrows into her wings and tail.
The HK made another surge forward, closing the gap even more as Skynet apparently decided that Blair was on her last legs.
She shot past the first building.
And with a hard yank on her joystick, she turned the plane into a tight right-hand turn. The maneuver banked the A-10 halfway up onto its right wingtip, the angle shortening its effective wingspan, and without scraping even once against the half-demolished structures, she curved neatly through the narrow gap.
Putting the first of the two buildings directly between her and the HK.
Three weeks ago, with all four of Skynet’s radar towers providing intermeshed coverage of the L.A. basin, this trick would never have worked. But three of those towers were down now, with only the one at Capistrano way to the south still in operation.
Which meant that unless there was a stray T-l or T-600 somewhere nearby on the ground, being out of the HK’s sight also meant Blair was out of Skynet’s sight.
She had maybe five seconds before the HK maneuvered its own way through the gap. But she’d spent a lot of time mentally working this through, and she knew exactly what to do. With the A-10 still curving to the right, she fired up her supposedly dead starboard engine and simultaneously hauled back on the stick.
And with that, her tight right-hand circle turned into a tight right-hand upward spiral. She rode skyward, gripping the stick with two hands as she fought against the g-forces that were trying to pull the blood away from her brain. The spiral took her over the top of the first building, and she shoved the stick forward again, dropping her nose toward the ground, curving over the broken steel girders and into a power dive headed toward the narrow strip of ground between the two structures.
Which, exactly as she’d anticipated, put her directly above and behind the pursuing HK.
Skynet must have known instantly that it had lost this round. But it still wasn’t willing to concede defeat without a fight. The HK tried to roll itself over far enough to bring its Gatlings to bear, just as Blair’s last 143 armor-piercing rounds blew it to hell.
She puffed a little sigh as she pulled out of her dive and eased back on her engines. The sky around her finally showed clear, and it was time to head back to the new hangar Connor had set up near Fallback One. Blowing a drop of sweat off the tip of her nose, she sent the A-10 in a leisurely circle that would take her back eastward toward the team’s territory. She glanced at the ground, scanning for the distinctive shapes and glowing red sensors of Skynet’s Terminators.
And abruptly felt her heart seize up.
Six blocks to the south, squatting motionlessly on the ground like silent gray moths, were four more HKs.
And Blair was out of ammo.
Automatically, she kept the A-10 turning on the curve she’d set for it, her pulse pounding in her neck as she gazed at the enemy aircraft. They were sitting at the four corners of a narrow parking lot around a half-crushed warehouse surrounded by a lot of rubble, their lights dark, their turbofans either completely off or else turning
