Reality slammed him. Squawking, he reached for the joystick and grappled with the helicopter’s stalled controls. The machine shuddered, engines coughed into life, and with rotors wailing, Franco lifted the machine’s nose as the runners cut the heads neatly from a bank of pink flowers. A trailing Dr. Betezh ploughed a furrow through ripe soil, boots juddering.
The thumping machine soared skywards. It spun like a metal toy. It performed rolls and finally pulled up level with the upper storeys of the Mount Pleasant Hilltop Institution. Patients waved enthusiastically at Franco from the barred windows. Those in straightjackets banged their heads against the unbreakable glass in happy appreciation of his aerial display and escape attempt.
The helicopter, barely under Franco’s control, spun in huge, lazy, sweeping circles. Below, trees rushed past. Betezh’s boots somehow scrambled and found purchase on the runner, and he growled a stream of expletives, hoisted himself up, yanked open the door and threw another punch.
Franco dodged erratically.
Suddenly the world seemed to slip into treacle.
Ahh
, said Cam.
This is so tiresome
. Then Franco could see the PopBot; it fluttered alongside the helicopter in perfect parallel, slammed inside the cockpit—entering through reinforced glass—to hang immobile an inch before Franco’s nose.
Let’s get rid of the bully boy, shall we?
Betezh tried another punch. There was a
sizzling
sound, and a tiny blue arc leapt from the PopBot’s black casing and hit Betezh between the eyes. He slid from the helicopter’s runners and disappeared, tumbling into the gloom far below,
“Thank... you,” gasped Franco.
“My pleasure,” said Cam. “Sorry I was a bit late; got caught up in an argument with a petty extortionist bureaucrat about damned exit visas. Gods, border controls, hey? Now, if you’d just like to pilot this heap of junk over yonder perimeter fence you’ll see we’ve got a lovely Fast Attack Hornet waiting for us. Down there, you see it?”
“I see it,” said Franco, enjoying the heady rush of freedom
.
It was better than any drug.
With groaning engines, he took the battered chopper down.
The two men embraced, a tight hug, and pulled apart to stare at one another with barely concealed grins.
“It’s been a long time,” said Keenan.
“Too long!” said Franco.
“You feel OK?”
“Yeah, I will do as soon as these drugs wear off. I swear, Keenan, that place adds layer upon layer to your madness. It spins you on your head. Not so much a cure, more a technique of ensuring you stay mad. I suppose it’s all down to bad management, yeah?”
Distant engine noises raced towards them through the darkness. Franco sighed, and eyed the Hornet squatting amongst the trees, sleek and black, and powerful. “Nice ship.”
“There are a few faults.” Keenan scowled at the innocently rotating PopBot. “But nothing that can’t be sorted on our Fast Jump out of this desolate shit-hole. But hey, after all, it was a bargain.”
Cam ignored the sarcasm.
“Fast Jump?” said Franco. “Where we going, brother?”
Keenan took a deep breath. “We’re going to get Pippa. We’re going to re-form Combat K. I need your help; I need you both like I never needed anything before. I need the old magic.”
Machine guns opened fire. Bullets started to
zip
and
slap
through the undergrowth. Keenan and Franco ran up the short ramp, which consumed them.
The Hornet’s engines droned, glowed red, and the ship leapt up into the sky—seemed to hang for a moment—then became nothing more than a tiny red dot, which faded into an enveloping, velvet black.
“Tell me about the defences,” said Keenan, reclining on a leather couch and closing his eyes.
“Extremely hostile,” said the metallic voice of Fortune over the kube, a Rorschach-splash light array sparkling in synchronisation with his words. “Violet laser backed up with standard mechanical rockets to mop up anything that—improbably—slips the LW.”
“LW?”
“Laser Web. It blankets each of the Five Moons about twenty klicks above the surface. They react to speed and mass intrusion; it is said nothing entering the moons’ atmospheres can escape detection. The LW kicks in and intruders get, effectively, cut into metal blocks. Blocked, as we call it in the business. Ha ha.”
“Wouldn’t a WorldClass Cruiser have the armour to withstand such a global weapon?”
“Yes,” said Fortune, “but a WorldClass Cruiser is so big and heavy it could never exit a planet—or moon’s
—
gravitational pull under its own thrust: engine to mass restrictions as defined per The Law of Zear. An LW is effective against any vehicle that can achieve self-propelled space travel.
Nihil obstat.”
Years ago, when Combat K worked missions for the Quad-Gal’s military and Secure Police Services—with the singular aim of bringing an end to the Helix War—Keenan, Pippa and Franco had set up a deal with an illegal mercenary AI. Fortune was wanted by the Quad-Gal authorities—had always been wanted by the Quad-Gal authorities—and travelled from hiding place to hiding place within the Sinax Cluster. Combat K kept Quad-Gal and combat squads off Fortune’s back. In return, Fortune acted as an illegal NMH Bridge when the squad worked deals. In the past, this had meant the difference between life and death.
Currently, Fortune was holidayingin a highly radioactive derelict frigate floating on the fringes of the Hesol Spiral. When contacted by Keenan, Fortune had agreed to take up the role of NMH Bridge: navigator, monitor and hacker. This meant Keenan would have access to the Quad-Gal military Factory Class database.
“Supposing I could get us through the Laser Web, how advanced are the standard SAMs?”
Fortune contemplated for a moment; then his voice rattled through the kube. “The SAMs are pretty standard fare; your Hornet is fast attack, with MGrade armour, and according to manufacturer’s specifications it should take quite a few hits. With engines on max you could possibly outrun many makes of standard construct missile. You also have adequate firepower, and an exceptional gunman could shoot them down manually.”
“A strong trait of the lady we wish to rescue,” smiled Keenan. “Any other surprises?”
“Keenan, down there the criminals roam free. Land, get me a terraform fix and I’ll locate Pippa for you. Getting through the Laser Web will pose you the greatest problem. And if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, then you’re madder than I think I thought.”
“I’ve done it before,” said Keenan.
“But you crash landed,” said Fortune, metallic voice little more than a
hum
.
“I’m aware of my mistakes.”
Franco groaned. “You’re talking about the Doppler Shift, aren’t you? No, Keenan, no way. That’s damned dangerous, not even the top stream of Central K Academy Pilots could pull that stunt off. You’d have to be mad, or desperate...”
“Or on a mission of truth and revenge,” said Keenan, face grim. “Hold onto your seatbelt, Franco. Five minutes to
Hardcore...
and closing. Shutting down external energy sources now.”
Cam spun around. “Franco? What’s a Doppler Shift?”
“I’ll tell you if we make it through alive,” grunted Franco, tightening his harness and closing his weary eyes. “Yeah: a big ‘if’
.”
The Hornet glowed against the vacuum of space.
In the distance, strung out like pearls, the Five Grey Moons glided majestically into view.
Keenan began to spin the Hornet until internal anti-gyration alarms shrieked. Faster he spun the war machine, hands carefully balanced on controls.
“I don’t understand what he’s doing,” said Cam, as the small Security PopBot was flung unceremoniously around the insides of the Hornet, trying its hardest to remain immobile. It yelped as it bounced from one of the walls. “This whole process is making my gyroscopes malfunction! I wish he’d stop spinning!”
“This is how it works,” said Franco, teeth gritted. “A Doppler Shift applies to radiation waves; the radiation is redshifted when its wavelength increases, blueshifted when it decreases. Do you know what a soliton is?”
“The self-reinforcing solitary wave thing? When a wave is set in motion, and due to perfect environmental circumstances and its own structure, it continues uninterrupted for a distance? Hypothetically, in space this phenomenon could continue unto eternity because in a perfect soliton it would lose no energy during transition: a perfection of non-energy self-propulsion. An Infinity Engine, of sorts.”
“Yeah.” Franco nodded, as all around them the Hornet started madly vibrating. “Keenan is going to set up a displacement wavelength using the Hornet’s mass and speed, and some carefully selected manoeuvres, to set in motion a radioactive soliton. This will preclude our Hornet, and we’ll tuck in behind the energy pulse, effectively masked and mimicked by a fist of radiation.”
“So when the Laser Web initiates, it will destroy something that is in effect our radioactive foreshadow, our imitative pulse
,
and we will glide through invisibly behind it?”
“Yes.”
“I calculate,” calculated Cam, “that due to the size of window one would need between each laser strand, this manoeuvre is in fact highly impossible.” He sounded smug, but not too smug. If he was right, he was dead.
“Not so,” said Keenan, glancing over his shoulder. “The Laser Web initiates from a single source, a global hub. Like a web, it expands across the moon from this central point, and like a web, the further from the central point you move, the larger the gap between laser strands expand in sequentially increasing steps. If you can successfully hit the moon from the opposite global position to the Laser Web’s core projection, there should just be enough space... when combined with the soliton
...
Hold on, shit... here we go. We’ll talk later, yeah?”
“If there is a later,” muttered Cam.
Keenan killed the cockpit lights.
The Hornet, sleek and black, hammered behind its own pulse of radioactive energy, a radioactive imitation of the Hornet... a synthetic doppelganger.
The Grey Moon loomed.
The Hornet entered the higher reaches of the atmosphere, streamlined in a shadow of imitative existence. They dropped, faster and faster towards the surface of the grey rocky moonscape, and suddenly there came a splash of violet fire blasting skeins of light before them, a glow of criss-crossing energy beams that lit the inside of the cockpit and made the human inhabitants temporarily blind.
“That is beautiful,” said Cam, the violet aura washing lines over its black casing.
“And deadly,” whispered Keenan. “Fingers crossed.”
“We’re getting way too close,” said Cam. Alarms started to beep proximity warnings. “We need to slow down... we’re going too fast, Keenan...” Cam’s voice rose in sudden pitch. “Oh no, we’re going to—”
As suddenly as they had arrived, the lasers of the Web were gone, and the Hornet sailed through, plummeting towards the rock and levelling out to cruise at a high whining velocity, before sweeping low into a valley and landing with a crunch on the uneven stone-scattered ground. Hydraulics hissed and Keenan and Franco sat back, wiping sweat from their brows.
“Neat,” said Franco.
“I’ve had some practise.”
“At least you didn’t crash this one.”
“Like I said, practise. Come on, we’ve got to find Pippa.”
“I have her,” said Fortune, coming online via the kube. “You can make some of the journey in the Hornet—the first few hundred kilometres at least—but then you’re on foot. The awkward young lady is camped underneath one of the largest SAM sites on the whole damned moon!”
“Trust our little Pippa,” said Franco.
Keenan nodded. “Yeah, she’s attracted to danger like a corpse attracts maggots: a bad news hurricane.”
“She’s going to rip off your head, compadre.”
Keenan met Franco’s gaze. He licked dry lips. A curious light shone in his eyes. “You really think so?”
“After what you did to her?”
“I had no choice.”
“She didn’t see it like that.”
“Shit.” Keenan lifted the Hornet into the air and cruised down the valley. Grey volcanic walls scrolled by, uneven and sporting thousands of jagged chimneys. “Well mate, she’ll have to forgive me, or kill me. We’re going in, whether she wants to see my ugly face or not.”
Keenan and Franco climbed the ridge and keeping low, peered down the steep rocky slope that tumbled unevenly to the banks of a lake. The surface of the water was perfectly still. It shone, almost silver, under tendrils of bone-grey witch-light.
At the moss encrusted shore, Pippa sat cross-legged on a huge cubic rock. To her right lay the husk of a battered, rusted HTank with twin barrels and a smash of destroyed panels.
She did not acknowledge their approach as they descended, Franco cursing and moaning, and scattering pebbles that clattered down to the water’s edge and sent ripples undulating outwards, concentric circles that shouted his name louder than any megaphone.