Blood-Dimmed Tide, Chapter II
Absorbed as I was in my self-flagellating revelry, I didn't notice, but now I know why Thull was uneasy.
Slow sweepcorner speedspeedspeed mouthwide airfuel burning roaring speedspeed hardbrake skippingsqueal SIDEWAYS straight speedrun wideopen run run run yellowdots yellowblur yellowline edgeblur gogo gOHSHIT
Topping a low rise at slightly under two hundred miles per hour, I feel the pressure leave my tires. I'm airborne, out of my element, a flying brick. Smartcarbon canards deploy and deform with lightning quickness, stop what would have been a backwards somersault. Gauging the landing, gathering myself for it, suspension adjusting, pneumatic and electrical systems feeding back, radar reading the ground WHOMPH, slight skid, not bad. The canards should have been out before, I'm a jackass. The hills get even worse up ahead, and I kick on the underhood fans, blowing up and out, low smartcarbon skirts sucking me to the ground. I've got enough downforce now that the road could be upsidedown and it wouldn't matter. GO GO GO twobuckandadime I can't go much faster than this, nearly redline: the turbo's pressure sings in my veins like adrenaline. I can feel the lactic-acid burning of the analog telling me this pace cannot be sustained. My chest is hot as my titanium heart strains for speed and my exhaust is rich with unburnt fuel spent like water; my rear tires are slowing glowing more yellow in my awareness as they too heat from friction losses. Friction: can't live with it, can't stay on the road without it. Gives with one hand and takes with the other. A right bastard, is friction.
Absorbed as I was in my self-flagellating revelry, I didn't notice, but now I know why Thull was uneasy. Outside the roar and whistle of my passage, my other hearing indicates an uncanny quiet. I strain my electronic ears and on the edge of recognition pick up a few things -- radio advertisements reduced to hissing mumbles by distance, the intermittent staccato of short range WiFi, some idiot on a satphone telling his wife he's 400 miles from here -- but the silence is there, nonetheless. I hack his account and anonymously mail his wife his real location, the whiny prick.
Regardless, what should be the noise of a city outside the window is instead the hush of a forest in all bad horror movies when the birds stop singing, right before your hear that goddamn cicada noise and Something tears your arms off. I pull up a small virtual window in the corner of my view of the road and access Air Traffic Control (an old hack, on 2D systems they still can't abandon for legacy software reasons) and there's nothing up there. Wait, shitswerve goddamn armadillo not quite: a second window displays, locked to the location of the first, and a passing keyholesat picked up a Big Black Delta coming out of a bank headed north of here and two shots later banking the opposite way. Clearly throttledown curve gogogo diverted off a flightplan that would have taken it over Thull's hidey-hole. I show up like a whitehead on the road. I knew I should have gotten the white car repainted, but you explain "Custom Asphalt with Macadam Trim" to a bodyshop.
Why can't anything ever be easy? Textmode. I don't bother with encoding it, no-one reads anymore.
I'm still trying to concentrate on the road trickybit dogleg fastbrake POWER skid recover go go go so I nearly miss it. The sat updates, and though it's nearly out of range, in the bottom right corner there are two wasplike black smudges. Long training kicks in and I recognize Republic fliers, heavy weapon complement, boostpack. This is, with long experience, Not Good.
Ahshit. I hope he doesn't get carried away.
No point in subtlety. The whip slides back into its housing, iris closure grating on dirt. Thull powers up secondary systems and punches the shields on and out away from the ship, like a man escaping the grave. The waveform pushes the soil out, blistering the cropland like a bubo, tailored corn slithering down its sides with muted static discharges and the dry, disturbing noise of husk on husk. He's just shown up on ever sensor in a five-hundred mile circle, but they already know someone's here.
He goes quickly through a checklist partly mental, partly software. A distant ache reminds him once again the the magnetic bottle in thruster 9 needs aligning and he quickly shuts it down: it's a maneuvering jet anyway. Gaunt can handle it once on board and well away from this ball of mud. He kicks on the combat telemetry, too.
A row of LEDs, antiquarian's equipment, lights on the board ahead of him. Tickling at the base of his spine, he feels the miniguns turning experimentally like a man stretching his shoulder; the main laz charging like the buildup of ki before a deathblow. The LEDs flicker from red to amber, then glow a steady, cool blue.
If they want trouble, fuck it: bring on the noise.
almostthere going going killrevlimit intothered windwhistle roadblur burns chestburn AIR justenough happygas speedsuchspeed oilburn speedjoy go GO GO
One bonus of Thull's berserker approach to engagement is that he's just shown up in my mind's eye like the rising sun; even eight miles away, the combat telemetry gives me a dead-reckoning on him like ducks know south in winter. I can feel him shut down thruster nine, and give a mental cluck; he's always putting off basic maintenance, despite our training. Let that go on long enough and he'll forget, attempt to use it, blow the whole side of his ship off and get a bird's-eye view of the ground. At least for a short while. Unless he's in space, in which case he'll get a God's-eye view, for a longer while, but it's even odds he'd be too distracted to enjoy it. I just KNOW he's expecting me to fix the thing.
I'm still running dark; they may not know I'm with him, and even if they do, they'll hafta find me by eye or mm-wave radar, and right now they're keeping low enough that I've still got dirt between us; neither of those is going to be very useful. They're also prolly concentrating on the shield waveform Thull is beaconing like a goddamn lighthouse. At least I hope so, because I don't have shields. The generator alone weighs as much as this car.
In the time it takes me to think this, I'm there, decelerating; at this speed the huge, bioenhanced cobs would dent the metal of my hood. I can see the mound raised by the shield activation, and right on cue, the fliers burst over a stand of trees from low altitude, all pretense at subterfuge forgotten. I can hear the sirens start -- they're trying to take us alive, which means they don't know who they've got -- and initiate countermeasures even as I slam the comtelem to life. There's a crump ahead of me, like mortar fire, and I see the lifter leap upward just before I enter the corn. The canards, otherwise useless at this speed, sharpen into cutting implements; harvest is comin' early this year.
Ahead, through flashing gold and shadows, I see Thull. The lifter whips around, nose toward the enemy, bobs down, sideways, up through the air, for all the world like the head of a robin sighting in on a juicy cricket. "No," I shout, and forgetting myself, do so aloud; I know this, though I cannot hear it. "I've got them! Drop the fucking ramp!"
"Check."
Watching the targetting screen closer closer almostthere I turn slightly, feed a bit more power to the rear wheels scrabbledirt sliding AHA and they both are surrounded by rotating halos as I hear them open up at me. Maybe warning shots, but I'm not a gambling man, so I ATTACK fire the hellwhips protruding from the rear access panels, even as I felt the numbing of an ultrasound stunner. Fortunately, I had the car treated.
Now, I know hellwhips were outlawed by the Second Geneva Convention as well as anyone. I was there, pulling guard duty. But that was because they had been used on light infantry, which is just fucking sick. I was there, too, and it was like a sushi chef had gone to work with the mother of all knives. But as far as I was concerned they still had their uses, and this was one: really fucking up turbofans.
A Republic flier has 3 turbofans, one at the rear, enclosed, and two open types providing lift amidships. Most pitch and yaw were controlled with a couple of big gyrosopes below the two-man crew, heavily shielded; the Republic had found out the hard way what happened when one shattered WITHOUT heavy shielding, namely a cockpit full of something that looked like salsa, followed by grieving widows. However, the flier was a lightweight craft, normally fitted with anti-personnel weaponry; nothing like my hellwhips, no, mainly nets, stickyfoam, rubber-bullet guns. Riot-control gear, in other words. Not for nothing is it officially known as the Sheepdog: someone in the higher echelons has a sense of irony. A heavy sense of irony, really.
This pair, as previously mentioned, had the heavy-weapon complement. Or, more plainly, each was fitted with a pair of fully automatic 7.62 mm machineguns, laser-sighted, computer-controlled, adjusted for range, windage, you name it. Thull would shrug them off within his shields, but they could make sure I had a real bad day. However, despite their long range and admirable maneuverability, they were still designed for combatting relatively unarmed civilians, not a full-on combat situation with military-grade hardware. Which is what they had just found themselves in. And military hardware never has anything so vulnerable as an exposed turbofan.
Practical upshot is, the hellwhips, dual rockets attached by a a cable of braided synthetic spider silk, slashed into the starboard turbofans on each Sheepdog. On one the entire wing on that side was sliced off, and it wobbled until the gyros compensated for the reduced lift. That pilot got it quickly: he applied back full throttle and began to settle to the ground. Kudos, textbook response. On the other, the results were more... impressive. The turbofan detonated, the wing hung off in shreds, and the pilot panicked, trying to turn and run. He hit the ground probably still doing fifty knots, and set fire to the corn. And that was the last I saw as I gathered my suspension and lept into the lowered ramp. It shut behind me and I slid to halt in darkness.
Pitons snaked from my underside and burrowed into tiedowns. I hunkered downward even as I felt the thrust. I stayed put -- he was pulling at least three gees -- and listened to the feed from his external antennae on the pitons' conduits.
"Mayday. Patrol Seven grounded, repeat, mayday, Patrol Seven grounded! Hostiles heavenward, EV capable, heading approximately (Thull, on the ship's bandwidth, suddenly attentive) two-five-seven degrees (rageflash bankleft morethrust as Thull headed for the much more fuel-costly and velocity-intensive polar atmospheric escape) repeat two-five-seven degrees. We have wounded, repeat wounded Security officers!" A pause. "Thanks for not killing us."
Ah, this must be the pilot with the textbook reflexes. Obviously some military training. I adjusted a tightbeam antenna on the hull. "You're welcome." I cut it off.
Thull's voice, over the comtel, broadband now that we had linkup. "What the fuck are you doing?"
"Tightbeam, they'll never track it. You think HE knew where it came from? Be serious. By the time it matters, we'll be long gone."
"Just wait until we're Outside, then get up here. And try to shut up."
"Touchy, touchy, Thull," I thought at him, with overtones of parental concern, just to piss him off. "It never hurts to be polite."
Topping a low rise at slightly under two hundred miles per hour, I feel the pressure leave my tires. I'm airborne, out of my element, a flying brick. Smartcarbon canards deploy and deform with lightning quickness, stop what would have been a backwards somersault. Gauging the landing, gathering myself for it, suspension adjusting, pneumatic and electrical systems feeding back, radar reading the ground WHOMPH, slight skid, not bad. The canards should have been out before, I'm a jackass. The hills get even worse up ahead, and I kick on the underhood fans, blowing up and out, low smartcarbon skirts sucking me to the ground. I've got enough downforce now that the road could be upsidedown and it wouldn't matter. GO GO GO twobuckandadime I can't go much faster than this, nearly redline: the turbo's pressure sings in my veins like adrenaline. I can feel the lactic-acid burning of the analog telling me this pace cannot be sustained. My chest is hot as my titanium heart strains for speed and my exhaust is rich with unburnt fuel spent like water; my rear tires are slowing glowing more yellow in my awareness as they too heat from friction losses. Friction: can't live with it, can't stay on the road without it. Gives with one hand and takes with the other. A right bastard, is friction.
Absorbed as I was in my self-flagellating revelry, I didn't notice, but now I know why Thull was uneasy. Outside the roar and whistle of my passage, my other hearing indicates an uncanny quiet. I strain my electronic ears and on the edge of recognition pick up a few things -- radio advertisements reduced to hissing mumbles by distance, the intermittent staccato of short range WiFi, some idiot on a satphone telling his wife he's 400 miles from here -- but the silence is there, nonetheless. I hack his account and anonymously mail his wife his real location, the whiny prick.
Regardless, what should be the noise of a city outside the window is instead the hush of a forest in all bad horror movies when the birds stop singing, right before your hear that goddamn cicada noise and Something tears your arms off. I pull up a small virtual window in the corner of my view of the road and access Air Traffic Control (an old hack, on 2D systems they still can't abandon for legacy software reasons) and there's nothing up there. Wait, shitswerve goddamn armadillo not quite: a second window displays, locked to the location of the first, and a passing keyholesat picked up a Big Black Delta coming out of a bank headed north of here and two shots later banking the opposite way. Clearly throttledown curve gogogo diverted off a flightplan that would have taken it over Thull's hidey-hole. I show up like a whitehead on the road. I knew I should have gotten the white car repainted, but you explain "Custom Asphalt with Macadam Trim" to a bodyshop.
Why can't anything ever be easy? Textmode. I don't bother with encoding it, no-one reads anymore.
+
BEOWULF
GRENDEL?
HALL TOO QUIET
CONCUR
+
I'm still trying to concentrate on the road trickybit dogleg fastbrake POWER skid recover go go go so I nearly miss it. The sat updates, and though it's nearly out of range, in the bottom right corner there are two wasplike black smudges. Long training kicks in and I recognize Republic fliers, heavy weapon complement, boostpack. This is, with long experience, Not Good.
+
GRENDEL AND MOM SSE
SEE THEM. HALL IS ALERTED
+
Ahshit. I hope he doesn't get carried away.
No point in subtlety. The whip slides back into its housing, iris closure grating on dirt. Thull powers up secondary systems and punches the shields on and out away from the ship, like a man escaping the grave. The waveform pushes the soil out, blistering the cropland like a bubo, tailored corn slithering down its sides with muted static discharges and the dry, disturbing noise of husk on husk. He's just shown up on ever sensor in a five-hundred mile circle, but they already know someone's here.
He goes quickly through a checklist partly mental, partly software. A distant ache reminds him once again the the magnetic bottle in thruster 9 needs aligning and he quickly shuts it down: it's a maneuvering jet anyway. Gaunt can handle it once on board and well away from this ball of mud. He kicks on the combat telemetry, too.
A row of LEDs, antiquarian's equipment, lights on the board ahead of him. Tickling at the base of his spine, he feels the miniguns turning experimentally like a man stretching his shoulder; the main laz charging like the buildup of ki before a deathblow. The LEDs flicker from red to amber, then glow a steady, cool blue.
If they want trouble, fuck it: bring on the noise.
almostthere going going killrevlimit intothered windwhistle roadblur burns chestburn AIR justenough happygas speedsuchspeed oilburn speedjoy go GO GO
One bonus of Thull's berserker approach to engagement is that he's just shown up in my mind's eye like the rising sun; even eight miles away, the combat telemetry gives me a dead-reckoning on him like ducks know south in winter. I can feel him shut down thruster nine, and give a mental cluck; he's always putting off basic maintenance, despite our training. Let that go on long enough and he'll forget, attempt to use it, blow the whole side of his ship off and get a bird's-eye view of the ground. At least for a short while. Unless he's in space, in which case he'll get a God's-eye view, for a longer while, but it's even odds he'd be too distracted to enjoy it. I just KNOW he's expecting me to fix the thing.
I'm still running dark; they may not know I'm with him, and even if they do, they'll hafta find me by eye or mm-wave radar, and right now they're keeping low enough that I've still got dirt between us; neither of those is going to be very useful. They're also prolly concentrating on the shield waveform Thull is beaconing like a goddamn lighthouse. At least I hope so, because I don't have shields. The generator alone weighs as much as this car.
In the time it takes me to think this, I'm there, decelerating; at this speed the huge, bioenhanced cobs would dent the metal of my hood. I can see the mound raised by the shield activation, and right on cue, the fliers burst over a stand of trees from low altitude, all pretense at subterfuge forgotten. I can hear the sirens start -- they're trying to take us alive, which means they don't know who they've got -- and initiate countermeasures even as I slam the comtelem to life. There's a crump ahead of me, like mortar fire, and I see the lifter leap upward just before I enter the corn. The canards, otherwise useless at this speed, sharpen into cutting implements; harvest is comin' early this year.
Ahead, through flashing gold and shadows, I see Thull. The lifter whips around, nose toward the enemy, bobs down, sideways, up through the air, for all the world like the head of a robin sighting in on a juicy cricket. "No," I shout, and forgetting myself, do so aloud; I know this, though I cannot hear it. "I've got them! Drop the fucking ramp!"
"Check."
Watching the targetting screen closer closer almostthere I turn slightly, feed a bit more power to the rear wheels scrabbledirt sliding AHA and they both are surrounded by rotating halos as I hear them open up at me. Maybe warning shots, but I'm not a gambling man, so I ATTACK fire the hellwhips protruding from the rear access panels, even as I felt the numbing of an ultrasound stunner. Fortunately, I had the car treated.
Now, I know hellwhips were outlawed by the Second Geneva Convention as well as anyone. I was there, pulling guard duty. But that was because they had been used on light infantry, which is just fucking sick. I was there, too, and it was like a sushi chef had gone to work with the mother of all knives. But as far as I was concerned they still had their uses, and this was one: really fucking up turbofans.
A Republic flier has 3 turbofans, one at the rear, enclosed, and two open types providing lift amidships. Most pitch and yaw were controlled with a couple of big gyrosopes below the two-man crew, heavily shielded; the Republic had found out the hard way what happened when one shattered WITHOUT heavy shielding, namely a cockpit full of something that looked like salsa, followed by grieving widows. However, the flier was a lightweight craft, normally fitted with anti-personnel weaponry; nothing like my hellwhips, no, mainly nets, stickyfoam, rubber-bullet guns. Riot-control gear, in other words. Not for nothing is it officially known as the Sheepdog: someone in the higher echelons has a sense of irony. A heavy sense of irony, really.
This pair, as previously mentioned, had the heavy-weapon complement. Or, more plainly, each was fitted with a pair of fully automatic 7.62 mm machineguns, laser-sighted, computer-controlled, adjusted for range, windage, you name it. Thull would shrug them off within his shields, but they could make sure I had a real bad day. However, despite their long range and admirable maneuverability, they were still designed for combatting relatively unarmed civilians, not a full-on combat situation with military-grade hardware. Which is what they had just found themselves in. And military hardware never has anything so vulnerable as an exposed turbofan.
Practical upshot is, the hellwhips, dual rockets attached by a a cable of braided synthetic spider silk, slashed into the starboard turbofans on each Sheepdog. On one the entire wing on that side was sliced off, and it wobbled until the gyros compensated for the reduced lift. That pilot got it quickly: he applied back full throttle and began to settle to the ground. Kudos, textbook response. On the other, the results were more... impressive. The turbofan detonated, the wing hung off in shreds, and the pilot panicked, trying to turn and run. He hit the ground probably still doing fifty knots, and set fire to the corn. And that was the last I saw as I gathered my suspension and lept into the lowered ramp. It shut behind me and I slid to halt in darkness.
Pitons snaked from my underside and burrowed into tiedowns. I hunkered downward even as I felt the thrust. I stayed put -- he was pulling at least three gees -- and listened to the feed from his external antennae on the pitons' conduits.
"Mayday. Patrol Seven grounded, repeat, mayday, Patrol Seven grounded! Hostiles heavenward, EV capable, heading approximately (Thull, on the ship's bandwidth, suddenly attentive) two-five-seven degrees (rageflash bankleft morethrust as Thull headed for the much more fuel-costly and velocity-intensive polar atmospheric escape) repeat two-five-seven degrees. We have wounded, repeat wounded Security officers!" A pause. "Thanks for not killing us."
Ah, this must be the pilot with the textbook reflexes. Obviously some military training. I adjusted a tightbeam antenna on the hull. "You're welcome." I cut it off.
Thull's voice, over the comtel, broadband now that we had linkup. "What the fuck are you doing?"
"Tightbeam, they'll never track it. You think HE knew where it came from? Be serious. By the time it matters, we'll be long gone."
"Just wait until we're Outside, then get up here. And try to shut up."
"Touchy, touchy, Thull," I thought at him, with overtones of parental concern, just to piss him off. "It never hurts to be polite."