“Like sausages in a can,” Radek put in.
Carson glanced back at him. “Don’t you mean sardines?”
“You have your fish, and I will have my sausages,” Radek said primly.
“Eighteen,” John tried to push his way between Marines to get to the front. Whether or not that would be a weight issue was something he’d have to find out. He’d never had eighteen in the jumper before. “Carson, can you lift this thing?”
“Just a moment,” Carson said. “I’m having trouble getting the back gate closed.” The blue fire of Wraith stunners glanced off the windscreen as John shoved his way into the forward compartment, stepping on Radek in the process.
“Ow, ow, ow,” muttered Radek, who was inexplicably barefooted.
“Well, hurry up,” John said. “They’ll get something with heavier firepower out here any minute.”
In the front co-pilot’s seat, Teyla pointed. “They just did.” Above the colonnade, the Wraith cruiser was lifting into the air.
“Not good!” John elbowed past Rodney, who was standing in the aisle. “Carson, let me take the chair. Rodney, get that back gate closed!”
“Anytime,” Carson said fervently, sliding out of the pilot’s seat, which involved nearly sitting in Teyla’s lap as John shoved past him into the seat.
John’s eyes flicked over the board. “Somebody’s standing on the manual release,” he yelled. “Rodney!”
The cruiser began to rotate on its landing jets, its guns tracking toward them.
“Crap.” John got the shields up just as the first barrage of shots from the cruiser hit them, rocking them sideways, one of the jumper’s drive pods scraping along the stones of the courtyard. Indicators lit red. Running into the ground wasn’t recommended.
“Rodney!”
“Got it!” The back gate locked into place, a really important thing if you didn’t want to spill your seventeen passengers out the back of the jumper when you hit the gas. He’d learned that the hard way in a pickup truck once.
The jumper shot into the air, dodging around the next fire in a surprisingly clumsy fashion. The scrape to the drive pod seemed to have damaged one of the lateral thrusters. Well, no time to worry about that, and not much need to. He could hold it steady and compensate manually if he needed too, as long as nobody expected anything really tricky. John eased the indicator for the cloaking device to full.
And nothing happened.
A quick glance at the indicators — the port cloaking emitter was damaged.
“Rodney!”
“What?” shrieked Rodney from the very back.
“We’ve lost the cloak.” John spared another look at the heads up display. “It says the emitter is damaged on the port drive pod.”
“Do you expect me to climb out and fix it?” Rodney yelled. “I can fix power problems inboard. I can’t fix an external emitter that you bent up with your lousy take off!”
The cruiser’s next shot shook the jumper, sending Carson flying into Teyla’s lap. “Sorry,” he said, trying not to squash her, her nose against his chest.
At least the inertial dampeners seemed fine. John banked the jumper steeply to the right. Not so hot. It was definitely pulling. That lateral thruster was important. He’d fought the cruiser before, in the other jumper, but he still didn’t remember a moment of it.
John gave it full speed, streaking out over the sea at low altitude. He’d done this before. This was what Teyla said he’d already done. And it hadn’t been a good plan before. With the energy shield above he couldn’t go for altitude, and with no cloak he couldn’t disappear.
The sea blurred past beneath him, no more than a vast expanse of blue. Behind, the cruiser was gaining, and had still not achieved her full speed. Flat out, she’d probably have the advantage, especially as heavily laden as the jumper was. He spared a glance for the heads up display. The little jumper could handle the weight, but it was definitely slowing them down.
The coast of the mainland was coming up ahead, Pelagia on the far eastern horizon. This was exactly what he’d done before. He was sure of it. No need to make the same mistakes twice.
John pulled the jumper around in a steep turn, banking hard and coming onto a new course at full speed, closing on the cruiser at better than nine hundred miles per hour as they ran toward each other.
Shots streaked out, closer and closer, splattering off the forward shields.
Straight toward the cruiser. Holding steady. Holding steady. They couldn’t go any higher. Even the slightest deviation…
“Forward shield at 20 %,” Teyla said quietly, her eyes on the readouts.
“What are you doing?” Carson squawked.
“A game I used to play in a pickup truck,” John muttered.
The cruiser grew larger and larger, fragments of a second elongating, seeming to take forever to close the distance between them.
“Oh God,” Carson said.
Another shot splashed the shield with blue, rocking the jumper wildly. They were going to hit. They were going straight into the forward superstructure…
And the cruiser pulled up. The instant it twitched John dived, one hundred percent power in a ninety degree dive toward the sea.
Above, there was a tremendous explosion as the cruiser hit the energy shield, pulling away from the jumper and fatally into the shield above. Pieces fell toward the sea, caught in gravity’s inexorable grip.
The jumper pulled out at two hundred feet, skimming along over the waves as detritus rained down.
Teyla let go of her white knuckled grip on the chair arms, but said nothing.
“It’s called chicken,” John said, euphoria surging with adrenaline through his veins. He knew he had a silly grin on his face, not the kind of expression that you ought to have at a moment like that. “You drive at each other as fast as you can and see who blinks first.”
“This is a way of killing your friends,” Teyla observed.
“It’s kind of a rite of passage,” John said. “I never wound up in the reservoir. But I did bend the gas gauge all to pieces once.” His hands felt light and fine as fire, like he could move at the speed of sound.
“Lovely,” Carson said.
“My mom wasn’t happy,” John said. “She ran out of gas when the tank looked full. Man, you could put a lot of weight in the back of that car! You could actually get it airborne if you took a hill at about seventy.”
“And this is how people die on your world,” Teyla observed.
Carson nodded. “I hope someday you have a boy to keep you up nights doing crazy things like that. Your poor mother!”
He was coming down now. Each breath seemed to take a normal amount of time. John put the jumper over carefully, looking at the screen to reorient himself to the heads up display of the mainland coast that the jumper helpfully provided at a thought.
“Ok, folks,” John said. “Next stop, taking our guests home. Suua, can you get up here? I need you to show me where to go.”
Behind, the slow rain of smaller particles descended to the waves and were swallowed up.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Evening was falling over the sea, and the first stars were showing, the sparks from the campfire flying like fireflies before the wind. John stood behind the beach dunes, the wind tugging at his hair, taking a sip of the local beer that Suua offered him.
“Is it good?” Suua asked hopefully. He was taking playing host to the visitors very seriously indeed.
“It’s good.” John said. “It’s really great beer.” It wasn’t his taste so much, malty and dark, but at least it was beer here, not tea. On a good day that was how it turned out, drinking tea in a place you’d never been before with some would-be enemies turned friends. Behind Suua, a vast number of his relatives and friends were spit-roasting fish over a fire, turning them quickly so that they wouldn’t burn. It smelled wonderful.