behind them warned anyone watching that they were coming, but the thruster's snarl echoing up the channel would do that in any case. They could only hope that the Feds were too busy to worry about 725-or that their shots missed.
Steam was the first sign of their quarry as well. The bluffs ten klicks up the river sloped and were only half the height of those nearer the mouth. From side to side and spilling out of the channel was a white pall from which slowly lifted a starship with its guns run out. Vortices shot horizontally through the fog. The captain was using his attitude jets to bring his broadside to bear on the troops south of the city.
Godden bawled something on the intercom. Sal pulled back her control yoke, lifting the cutter's bow and pointing them more directly toward the Federation vessel; the six-tube laser had only 15° of traverse to either side of center.
'Aim for the attitude jets!' Sal shouted, hoping that Godden heard and understood. Harrigan kept 725 flat in the turn so that banking wouldn't introduce another variable in the gunner's calculations.
The laser fired, sequencing the tubes in microsecond pulses. 725 was flying ten or fifteen meters above the river when the first flash lit the channel and ripped a collop from the target's hull plating. The cutter lost all thrust for the duration of the burst, dropping like an anvil until its belly hit the water. Only the up-angle Sal had dialed in for aiming purposes kept them from drilling into the bottom muck to explode.
'
They-she, Piet, Godden, and Tom Harrigan-had worried about the laser's weight, bulk, and means of mounting. Sal had glanced at the weapon's power requirements, found they were within the excess of the fusion motor's output over what the cutter required to stay airborne, and dismissed the question. The others had probably done the same.
The figures were wrong, and the mistake had almost been fatal.
The laser was powered by a magnetohydrodynamic generator that in turn used the cutter's plasma motor as its prime mover. The generator, drawing from upstream of the thrust nozzle, had absorbed virtually all the motor's output. The trickle of plasma that remained wasn't sufficient to drive the cutter forward. Gravity and inertia took control.
Because the water bath enclosed the exhaust, 725 bounced forty meters into the air at a higher acceleration than Sal would have chosen for a craft so flimsy. The Fed starship had a ragged tear where the laser had struck it, so the weapon was a good choice-if they could use it without killing themselves.
'What happened?' Godden demanded. 'What happened?'
'Godden, don't shoot till I tell you!' Sal ordered as she fought her control yoke. She brought the cutter around in a wide arc that took them over the city, climbing as she did.
Troops lay flat or dead on the open ground south of the city. The starship, though not seriously damaged by the laser bolts, grounded momentarily in a geyser of dirt because the clanging impacts startled the people at the controls. The thick hull paneling of another Fed vessel was strewn like tinsel around the hole its crash dug nearby.
'Get ready!' Sal warned. 725 was a kilometer high and a similar distance from the Federation vessel, a metallic cigar gleaming in a setting of iridescent exhaust. The cutter was a possible target for the guns of the port reservation, but if that happened at least it would be sudden.
Sal put the yoke over and dived on the target. 'Get 'em, Godden!' she said.
The laser fired, ringing at high frequency through the fabric of the cutter. Sal's screen dulled the sparkle of the bolts, but metal burned from the starship's hull was an opaque white radiance wholly different from the wisps of steam still hanging in the river valley.
Again the thruster lost power, but Harrigan lifted 725's nose by increments, making up for frictional losses that steepened the glide angle. Godden traversed as he fired, drawing his stream of pulses along the target's hull at about the level of the open gunports.
When they'd dropped to a hundred meters above the ground, Sal shouted, 'Cease fire!' Godden obeyed, and Sal used the thruster's resurgent power to hop 725 over the starship they couldn't have avoided in any other fashion.
The Feds fired a starboard plasma cannon at the cutter. The bolt came nowhere near a target angling past at more than 100 kph. An instant later the Feds fired their five-gun port broadside uselessly toward the eastern horizon. The vessel had yawed after it touched the ground, throwing the programmed plasma bolts wild.
A second cutter, Piet's 551, screamed past 725 on a nearly reciprocal course less than a hundred meters away. The light cannon mounted on 551's hatch fired a slug of ions into the starship's hull, low enough to threaten the stern thruster nozzles. 551 twisted into a banking turn west of the river.
The Federation captain lifted his ship to gain control. He swung the bow north to bring the remainder of his port broadside to bear on the Venerian infantry. Stampfer center-punched the vessel with a 10-cm bolt, powerful enough to smash through both inner and outer hull.
The starship dipped back over the edge of the bluff. None of the damage it had received was fatal; none of it would have prevented a Venerian captain from continuing to fight.
This captain
A bullet cracked on 725's belly. The projectile didn't-couldn't-penetrate the ceramic plating, but the vicious sound made Sal twitch at the controls. The cutter shuddered under her unintended input.
She climbed to three hundred meters over the spaceport. Sal threw the cutter into a hard, banking turn to head back to the delta. 725 staggered and lost thrust as Godden's laser ripped down into a Fed gun position.
'Hold your fire, you cack-handed fool!' Sal shouted. 'We're short on reaction mass and I don't want to waste it fucking-'
The thruster burped and quit. Harrigan brought them level with the attitude jets while Sal fought the yoke. The cutter glided better than a brick, but only slightly better.
The motor found a little more water in the tank. Plasma flared, bringing the nose up. Sal deliberately shut the thruster down, husbanding the last of their reaction mass to cushion the shock of landing. Air swept across the open hatch with a
There was no point in trying to maneuver. Sal aimed for the largest open space in their direction of movement, the park facing the Commandatura of St. Mary's Port. She'd underestimated the flow when the motor was trying to power both the laser and the thruster nozzle. .
At twenty meters she screamed, 'Hang on!' and lit the thruster with the nozzle gimballed 60° forward. The water tank gave them a second and a half of burn. It was enough, if you didn't care what you said. Cutter 725 hit and slid forward through flowers and an ornamental hedge. The stern lifted, but they missed doing an endo by 10° and a prayer.
725 slammed back down on the skids. The instruments were black. Another bullet rang from the hull.
With a roar like that of a colossal beehive, Cutter 551 set down beside them under power. Sal felt a surge of relief. Whatever they'd gotten into, Piet Ricimer wasn't going to leave them there alone.
ST. MARY'S PORT, BERRYHILL
January 18, Year 27
2220 hours, Venus time
Stephen Gregg saw movement behind the lace curtain blowing in the window across the street. He fired. A cat yowled briefly, despairingly. Stephen pumped a fresh cartridge into the chamber of his rifle, feeling as though the sky had fallen on him.
'Did you get one, sir?' Beverly asked. The loader wore a swatch from a cloth-of-gold altar hanging across his forehead and right eye. Blood had dried black against the fabric.
'Not this time,' Stephen said.
