“Hang on!” he shouted to the other two. “Got us in a crossfire! We gotta get outta here now!” He did a belly-flopping evasive maneuver that dropped the Pegasus immediately one-hundred feet straight down. Beside him, Jock screamed in abject terror, before Tiger fired the Vecto-Thrusts off and halted the free-fall.
“Could you give us a little warning before you do that next time?” Jocko screamed at him.
“We need to get down into the treeli—!” Tiger was trying to say, before a pulse round shattered the rear window and went through the top of the cab. Amber squealed, as she felt the heat off of it, as it whistled just centimeters past her head. Others sizzled through the cab, ricocheting dangerously off the windshield and through the metal frame.
“Get down!” he turned to her, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward the floorboard. “Stay down!” The deflective coating was going fast. They had mere seconds.
***
“Are you seeing this, dude?” Number Nine, the pilot of the assault craft shadowing Tiger, turned back to Three, as the light show atop Monte Sano cranked up in earnest. “Looks like our boy didn’t see the “No Trespassing” sign.”
“Shit!” Three scowled. “Frost wants that thing alive and unharmed! That’s all I need is for her to get blown into a million pieces right in front of me.” He repressed a shudder at the thought of Frost’s wrath.
“Whaddaya wanna do?”
“We don’t have much choice. Get in there and let’s bail ‘em out!” As Nine started arming his weapons systems, Three added, “Try not to kill any civilians … at least no more than we have to.”
***
Even though Jocko had turned a pale shade of white after the free fall, he’d still managed to hold onto his PDC, and was now summoning the cavalry. While Tiger was trying to get turned around and headed back down the side of the mountain, using the trees for cover, just as he’d done as a kid, traversing these same slopes, the hijacked gun drone was swooping in like an angry killer bee. Its sensors instantly spotted all three turret’s heat signatures and locked in on the closest, located just below the house, down in the woods. As Ollie had manually targeted the Pegasus, none of the automatic scanners in his defense system picked up the drone. The first turret disintegrated with a precise burst of fire, its ammo pack exploding and sending a ball of flame and smoke into the night sky that could be seen miles away.
The explosion, just in front and down off in the woods below him, sent Ollie and Churchill scurrying for cover. Churchill pissed the deck again before scampering for the locked gate, howling and scratching at it to be opened. Ollie dove under a lounge chair, scanning the skies in a panic. What the fuck just happened? Who blew up my gun? Who fired? There wasn’t any other craft in the area. Without realizing it, he’d let off the firing button, giving Tiger a much-needed reprieve.
It would be a costly hesitation for the second turret, as the drone had already locked in on it before the first one had even finished belching fire into the Alabama sky. Ollie cursed in rage as he finally saw the culprit in his night-vision goggles, some black, bug-looking thing that now blasted his second turret into oblivion. Within seconds, millions of points and months of preparation just went up in smoke.
“Goddamn you! Whatever you are!” he screamed as he tried to crawl out from under the chair. But a blast of small-arms fire, kicking up stinging bits of superheated magnicrete drove him right back under it. From the back of the Pegasus, Amber had joined the fray, pinning him down now with Tiger’s Spacehawk. Ollie knew if he didn’t do something quick, he was going to lose his third and final turret and that bastard Thomas was going to slink away. That couldn’t happen! He wanted that sorry redneck ass above his mantle!
Somehow, through his panic, he remembered something the advisor had told him during training. “If you’re in a firefight with multiple bogies, put it on automatic and the scanners will automatically pick out and attack targets in order of threat priority.”
He knew he had but milliseconds. The wicked little mosquito from hell was already zooming in on his last turret. With fumbling fingers, he scrolled through the menu, found the appropriate selection, and turned it on just in time for the turret to defend itself.
The drone had already begun firing on it, and it sensed the immediate threat and quickly retargeted the little robot that was now killing it. Its gun whirled around and up and began firing just seconds before its deflector shield failed. The big pulse rounds it spit out were meant to take down space ships and suborbital aircraft. The little gun drone had been a valiant little warrior, taking out two of the three batteries it had faced, but it was no match for the heavy firepower. It blew apart with the first direct hit, showering sparks and debris down over Ollie’s pool deck.
“Yeah! Take that you little bitch!” he roared exultantly from his lawn furniture bunker, pumping his fist into the air. It was time to turn his attention back to his main prey. He didn’t have to search long to find the blood trail. The Pegasus was bellowing smoke, as it was barely making way now, moving down the slope of the mountain with just enough speed to stay airborne, hugging the wood line for cover.
“Where you running off to?” he gloated cruelly, like a man standing with the toe of his shoe poised to crush a bug. “Oh no! You can’t leave. This is your party! That would be rude, you uncouth, inbred cretin!” He switched the turret back over to manual mode,
