“Open the hatch,” Khan ordered, and Evelyn complied. When Faridah’s co-pilot moved to climb out of her seat, the Belltower mercenary held up a gloved hand. “No. You wait in here. We won’t be on deck for long.”
When he was gone, Evelyn glanced at Faridah. “He doesn’t want us to get a good look at what they’re loading.”
Faridah leaned forward in her chair, peering through the wet glass of the canopy. She made out figures bringing up cylindrical white containers, tubes a little over two meters long and half a meter around the width.
“So now we both get to add smuggling to our resumes,” Faridah said quietly. “Must be some kinda cargo they don’t want anyone from customs to see.”
“What do you think it is?” asked Evelyn. “Drugs? ”
“Maybe…” Faridah considered that possibility. “Weapons would be more likely. Something the government of the People’s Republic would not want on their shores…” An unpleasant thought occurred to her as she realized that the containers would be large enough to hold anything up to and including a tactical nuke. A chill ran through her, and she pushed the thought away.
The Osprey shifted on its undercarriage as four of the capsules were dragged aboard and lashed down with cargo nets. Sharp white light flashed in the corner of Faridah’s eye, drawing her attention away. Over the sound of the waves came the low, bass rumble of thunder, followed a few seconds later by a second flash of light. This time, she was looking right at the lightning as it zigzagged down to the surface of the sea. Faridah’s augmented vision cut the glare from the jagged line of white, and she saw the flash-glow pool on the Bel Canto’s deck.
There was Kahn, standing off to one side in conversation with a tall, whipcord-thin woman dressed in shiny black leather; but not exactly in conversation, she thought, he’s doing all the talking. Tugged by the wind, a spindly pennant of black hair trailed from the top of the woman’s half-shaven head, and her expression was one of feral patience. She was very still, Faridah noticed, while Kahn was moving from foot to foot around her. Fighter’s reflexes, she guessed. The big Belltower merc seemed to consider the woman a threat, despite the obvious disparity in their physical builds.
Faridah watched the woman give Khan something – a pocket secretary, maybe? – and then wordlessly dismiss him, stalking away across the deck. It was then she noticed the woman’s legs; they were augmentations, but exotics of a type Faridah had never seen before. Steel curves, thin like the limbs of a gazelle, that gave her walk an unnatural grace. The lightning came again and Faridah blinked reflexively. Impossibly, in that instant the woman with the black jacket was gone. Faridah frowned and rubbed at her eyes, unsure of what she had – or had not – just seen.
“Pilot,” called Khan, as he climbed back into the cargo compartment. “We’re done here. Close up and get in the air.”
Evelyn scowled. “This is going to be fun.” Faridah’s co-pilot tapped out a command on the control panel in front of her. “No, wait. Not fun. The other thing. Sure you can do this?”
“Buckle up,” Faridah said, by way of a reply, and applied power to the rotors. The VTOL quivered and then rose sharply into the air, slipping sideways as a crosswind caught it. She gritted her teeth and compensated with a foot down on the rudder pedal, angling the props to lift them safely away. One of the Bel Canto’s masts came unpleasantly close to the tail planes, but then they were up from the freighter’s deck.
The Osprey turned hard and lurched unto a wall of heavy rain, shouldering its way back toward the Chinese coastline.
***
They were six miles out when the VTOL was hit.
In the half-second it took to happen, Faridah was cursing herself, cursing Cheng, cursing Khan and whoever the hell had set them up for this idiotic flight into danger. Lifting off the Bel Canto, she had made the choice to gun the motors and push the Osprey back to shore as fast as it could go, gambling on the power of the engines and the tailwind to get them home before the storm could overtake the aircraft. The other option – to push up through the cloud, go high and over the storm front – hadn’t seemed safe. But it was too late to second-guess herself now.
The sky that had toyed with her only hours earlier now seemed determined to grab Faridah’s aircraft and rip it apart. The wind beat at the Osprey’s wings, turbulent air causing it to drop into gut-twisting dives that brought the churning surface of the ocean too close for comfort.
But she was getting it there. Together with Evelyn, they were going to make it back ahead of the storm. And then the lightning.
A shriek of ionized air rattled the canopy windows and a spear of white light, bright as a laser, stroked the VTOL’s fuselage. A fug of burnt-plastic smell flooded the cockpit, and lights went out across the dashboard in a wave from right to left as the electrical system overloaded. The Osprey twitched and lost power, the control returns becoming thick and unresponsive. Back in the cargo bay, something big and heavy shifted abruptly, crashing against the inside of the fuselage.
Faridah swore under her breath and punched the restart panel, but the controls remained dark. The Osprey’s starboard wing dipped into the hard wind and the aircraft shuddered toward a flat spin.
“Screens are not coming back up,” called Evelyn. “Ah, hell.” She had her hands on the controls, struggling with the same inputs as Faridah. “We got a short. And this son of a bitch glides like a brick.”
“The secondaries!” said Faridah, reaching for the latch on her chest that secured her four-point harness. “I’ll go for it. Can you hold this thing on your own?”
“No!” Evelyn shot back, grimacing as the Osprey ignored every effort she made to bring it to a stable attitude. “So be quick!”
She didn’t need to explain what she was doing; both pilots knew that the reconfigured VTOL had a secondary set of circuit breakers behind a panel in the cargo bay, and if Faridah could get to them, they had a chance to get
power running back to the Osprey’s vital systems before it collided with the wave tops. At their speed and angle, it would be like striking a concrete wall. The V-22 would crumple and sink in seconds.
Faridah launched herself out of the pilot’s chair and across the cramped cabin, catching sight of the sea flashing past the nose as the spin dragged them down. She cracked her arm against the hatchway, nerves numbed by the impact, but Faridah couldn’t let it slow her.
She slipped across the tilting deck into the cargo bay and almost fell over Khan. He lay sprawled on the metal flooring, groaning and semi-conscious. The ends of the seatbelt on his chair flapped against the frame where the first bucking impact had jarred them loose; Khan had fallen hard, cracking his head on the deck, but she had no time to look to him.
Faridah pushed forward, past the white cargo pods straining against their nets, fighting the pull of gravity dragging her toward the hull wall as the Osprey’s death-spin tightened. Hand over hand, she pulled her way to the breaker panel and tore off the cover with a savage yank. Faridah clawed at the flip-switches and with a sudden shiver of power, the doused lights inside the cargo bay flashed back on.
From the cockpit, Evelyn gave a yelp of success and the Osprey rocked as she applied more power to the props. The aircraft’s engines howled and the fuselage creaked under the tension, but Faridah could immediately sense the shift in attitude and she knew that her friend had arrested their deadly descent.
Relief came over her in a wave and she let out the breath she didn’t know she had been holding. Faridah started back toward the front of the aircraft, and it was only then she noticed how cold it was in the cargo bay.