“Well?” Daria pressed.
“I have a plan.” The name of Pahnee was famed throughout the known universe with good planning.
“Thank God. What do I do?”
“Remove this window,” Tagen said, tapping the glass beside him.
Daria’s left hand flew from the guidance wheel to her door and the window hummed down to admit an angry jet of air. “Now what?” she asked anxiously.
Tagen leaned his head out and shouted, “Pull over!” in his most authoritative voice.
She stared at him.
He pulled his head back inside the vehicle. “Well, that did not work,” he said.
“No, it sure didn’t.” She brought his window back up, her chin thrust forward. One of her hands rose in an aimless bird-like flutter before slapping back down on the guidance wheel. “You know, this whole thing has been one nightmare after another!”
“You have no idea.”
“All right,” Daria said, and suddenly laughed. It was an unexpected thing, like sunshine rendered as sound, and completely free of hesitation or fear. She smiled broadly straight ahead out the console fore-window and said, “Hold on to Grendel.”
“What—” are you planning, was how that was meant to end, but it was superfluous. He was not a man of great insight, but he was a soldier, and the soldier in him knew instinctively exactly what she was planning. If there was time to argue or even to be alarmed, he might have indulged himself, but there was not. He reached into the cargo hold, hooked out the crouching cat, and hugged its struggling body securely to his chest. “I love you,” he said simply. “Aim true.”
As last words go, those were fine ones. Tagen watched, at peace, as the distance between their two vehicles was eaten under the fore-wheels of Daria’s car. E’Var seemed to shout something; his arm cut an arc through the air, harnessing himself in the last instant before impact.
Daria struck the rear left quarter of E’Var’s vehicle and yanked the guidance wheel hard to starboard as she did, not merely pushing at the enemy but slapping them violently from the road. It was an unimportant sound, neither a bang or a crash, but only a hand-clapping sort of bump followed at once by the shrieking of tires as both cars spun out. E’Var’s vehicle shot off at nearly a crosswise angle to the road. There came a resounding detonation as it smashed into a tree, but this was peripheral. Daria’s car twisted violently side to side and she fought with it for control, spinning over the roadtop in a shroud of tire-smoke until the moment came that Tagen had been waiting for. The right front tire, the same one that had split away earlier, caught the road’s edge and suddenly they were airborne.
The groundcar rose and flipped twice, producing a howl of bent air and a swirl of highway and sky all around them. The cat screamed but it was the only one. Tagen felt the churn of gravity in motion. He waited tensely and in silence either to live or die.
The tumble was cut short by a crunching collision with a number of bushes that caught and suspended them nose-down and not quite fully on one side. Gradually, thin branches snapped and bent and the vehicle settled. With a muted thump, the left side of the car evened out and there they were, the rear of the car slightly hoisted and the wheels spinning freely as the engines hummed, but more or less intact.
Tagen opened his arms and the cat sprang into the rear hold, all its long fur spiked out, leaving several rips in Tagen’s uniform as proof that it had struggled. He could hear Daria breathing, which was a relief; her eyes were wide and unblinking as death, and blood was steadily making its way down her cheek to drip onto her shirt.
“Speak if you hear me,” he said tersely. The shoulder of his gun-hand was aching. He tried to move it and could, but only through a haze of white-hot pain. He unharnessed himself with his clumsy left and reached out to her. “Daria, speak.”
“Arf,” she said, which was speech, even if it was nonsensical. She drew a single shuddering breath and craned her neck to look out the fore-window at the sky. “My God, we’re alive. What are the odds?”
“Slim.”
She panted out a laugh, and then suddenly, she jerked and stared around at him. “What are you still doing here? Go on!” She began to pull at her harness, grimacing with some hidden hurt. “Go on, go get him! Run!”
Her harness wasn’t opening. Tagen tried to help her, but she slapped at his hands.
“Leave me!” she said, sounding more exasperated than anything else. “I’m not going anywhere! Don’t let him get away!”
“Daria—”
She left off her battle with the harness lock to slide her hand around his neck. He let himself be pulled to her and he kissed the mouth that sought his so urgently, but she pushed him away with the taste of her still new on his lips and gave him a severe stare. “Go get him, soldier,” she said quietly.
He held her eyes for a moment more, and then pulled out of her grip and turned away. His door was blocked and bent inward by broken trees. He crawled into the rear hold, kicked out the hatch window, and left her. He could feel her danger like a live coal in his chest, but he made himself be an officer now. He made himself leave her behind.
E’Var’s groundcar was smoking and empty. The passenger’s door hung open. The pilot’s was torn entirely away. Tagen reached into the crumpled interior and took the keys from the ignition, not to prevent the use of the car (which even Tagen could see had passed into the realm of the non-functional), but only to silence the tortured engines. He heard nothing, but E’Var’s trail was evident and bloodied.
Tagen drew his gun and started running.
*
Raven would not wake up. Her face was half-painted with blood from a wound in her scalp. Right before his eyes, her throat was purpling in a wide bar the very image of the groundcar’s harness. Her right leg had been pinned when the front hull buckled inward in the crash. It was bleeding heavily and was probably broken. He hadn’t had time to check for injuries beyond these obvious ones. He’d torn the shirt from her body to wrap her leg in and that was all.
He’d been lucky by comparison. His left leg had been knocked a damned good one when the console erupted. It ached relentlessly, but it wasn’t broken. His chest was scored by the same harness-mark as Raven’s, only in reverse angle, and it burned with every breath, hinting at a cracked rib or two, but more likely it was only bruised. Nothing seriously wrong, in other words, just wrong enough to keep him from running to his ship.
Kane had no intention of running anyway, even if he’d sprung from the crashed groundcar utterly unmarked. The Jotan he’d glimpsed in the car just before the impact had been the same one from the fair and he’d been the only Jotan in the car. The Fleet had sent just one officer to bring Kane down and now he was here, on foot and fresh from a collision. It was time to settle this.
Kane laid in a trail from the wreckage of his groundcar. He didn’t run far, but he did run clumsy, favoring his good leg much more than it deserved and counting on Raven’s extra weight in his arms to throw his tracks even more off-kilter. The blood from her injuries added an extra dimension to the lie, but it was a cold comfort with her lying so limp, so silent.
He took his time circling out after he reached the end of his false trail, even with time at such a high premium, making the best of his considerable skill at leaving no mark as he came around and back toward the site of the Fleet-fucker’s car. When it was in view (and on all four round feet, how in the fuck did he manage that?) Kane knelt and lay Raven out. She looked impossibly small and fragile against the dry earth, and the sight put the heat in him for killing. He hunkered over her, his claws combing at her hair. One of her alluring white stripes had been turned into a matted spike, and he rubbed at it futilely, trying to work up the nerve to leave her. If only she would open her eyes!