As Cromwell went up the ramp and heard it close behind him, he asked, “Anybody here or above discovered those bloody guns yet?”
“No, sir. They’re pretty well hid. We can guess at a few, but there’s no way we can cover them all. Remember, they had thirty years to disguise them, and deploying, setting up, and hiding those guns was the number one priority. They were certain they were still being chased.”
“All right,” the security chief sighed. “I just hope the engineers are right on what sort of guns were removed and what their limitations are in planetary mounts,” he said. “Otherwise, this is going to be a very short trip.”
“Stand by for motion!” the ship’s intercom warned. “Secure all loose items, strap in if you can or hold on. Thirty seconds.”
Even Robey, who had yet to get rid of the ringing or hear much of anything else in spite of some treatment, knew what it meant when he felt the vibration in the deck and he was suddenly almost overcome with sheer panic.
My God in Heaven! he thought to himself. I’m about to be blown up!
It was one thing for the Doctor to have full faith in miracles, but having the same sort of faith in engineers and their computers was quite another. And only a miracle would keep this ship from being blown to bits in the next minute or so.
John couldn’t help it. Unable to move, to run, to do anything much at all, he instead just sat there in the Arm’s quarters and stared at the clock on the wall.
When first one minute dragged by, then another, he began to doubt his senses, then wonder if in fact they were really going anywhere. By all rights they should be dead by now.
Now he desperately wanted to see where they were, how far they’d gotten, how far it was to the safety of the union in The Mountain, but he dared not move while the red flashing danger light was on or his hearing might well be the least of his problems.
He couldn’t understand what was going on. They should be well up in the planetary stratosphere by now, essentially in space, yet the vibration continued at its maximum and there was a fair amount of buffeting, the kind of ride you got when you were maneuvering to land rather than blasting off at full speed.
Something was definitely wrong, yet it was impossible to tell what when you were inside such a massive flying structure.
When the clock passed the twenty-minute mark, he knew that they weren’t headed up to Sinai and he suspected that they weren’t headed up at all. The back and forth rolling and jerky motions were continuing, and even getting a little worse.
Suddenly, he realized what they were doing, what they had to be doing.
Olivet had taken off, all right, and it had gone straight up—for maybe a couple of meters. Then, with the landing sensors on, they had been moving not up but sideways, following the topography at just that couple of meters height. Somebody smart had figured out that you could not depress those naval guns so that they’d be useful as surface-to-surface weapons; instead, they were aimed at creating a crisscross defensive pattern that would be certain to nail any spaceship either landing or taking off.
Olivet was doing neither, but there were at most only twelve naval guns in place and they were large and required separate fire control positions when not networked into the ship as designed.
He could see the engineers now, working out the most effective and broadest pattern for total defense. Now, extend that from the lake area and their ship over to the village and perhaps even to the original colony headquarters site and you were already short a gun or two. Get beyond there, towards the other side of the continent, even a few hundred kilometers, and you would be out of range. Then you could launch on a trajectory that their firing patterns could not be altered to nail without moving the guns. Move those big guns and their power supplies and you were a sitting duck for Archangel.
It was a long, rough ride because this sort of lateral movement was something Olivet was never intended to do. But as a former orbit-to-ground-to-orbit cargo shuttle it had that capability, at least theoretically. Now it was more than theory, but it might well be a couple of hours before it could move beyond the curvature of the planet, far enough away so that even an orbital trajectory wouldn’t be anywhere in the line of sight of the armorers staffing those gun emplacements.
Robey let out a breath and relaxed as well as he could. Only the faces of those poor devils maimed and murdered kept him from feeling exhilarated at the now obvious escape. He wondered how the downed pirate captain was taking it. Certainly it would not do to be all that close to him physically right at this moment, he bet.
In point of fact, Olivet’s lateral motion was barely fifty kilometers per hour; it was too massive to move any faster at such a low level, and the whole lateral movement capability designed into it was to make it move several meters one way or the other, not long distances. There was always the danger that the small engines would burn out before they made it far enough to feel safe; these were not the big engines designed for orbit, after all.
Still, while one was showing real signs of strain and another was giving intermittent readings, the movement was steady and solid as a rock as far as the bridge was concerned. They’d built these lifting bodies, as the engineers called them, for harsh conditions on planets never intended for humans and far from space dry-dock and repair facilities, and it was sure showing the quality of its construction now.
They didn’t need to complete the journey before Captain Sapenza knew he was licked. The ship was already well out of sight over the horizon, and the captain had no planetary tracking equipment or orbiting satellites to tell him just where the fleeing quarry was nor how far it could go.
“They blew up the arsenal at the same time,” Gregnar told him. “That lift shot so far in the air it came down five kilometers away in the middle of a maize field.”
“Figures,” Sapenza commented in an almost disinterested tone.
It was only when Almarie, his longtime chief woman, started nattering that he showed what was going on inside him.
“Yeah, sure. Kidnap ’em. The Holy Joes’ll freak and give us our ticket. Torture a few to make ’em scared. They scared real good, didn’t they? You couldn’t have tried it straight with them first? Maybe cut their throats later if it didn’t work? No! You hadda screw ’em from the start! Now we’re stuck here! You happy now?”
Sapenza sighed and said nothing, but he took out a small pistol and shot her at point-blank range on maximum blast. Her whole form shimmered and then there was only the smell of burnt flesh and a little pile of gray powder where she’d stood.
Gregnar and the rest moved back several steps.
The Captain turned towards them and they all froze, half expecting this to be their last moments anywhere. Instead, he said, “Can we still contact them?”
“Yeah, boss. They use standard frequencies. You just call them and if they’re out of range it’ll be intercepted by their orbiting ship and passed along,” somebody told him. “But, boss—you start broadcasting, you tell ’em just where we are.”
“Who the hell cares now?” he asked them. “Get me to a transceiver.”
They quickly brought him to a communications terminal inside one of the camouflaged gun emplacements. Not a shot fired, he thought ruefully. Maybe their God really is somebody. Or maybe we just blew it.