Thnessfiirm was staring northward, downriver. “I am confused,” she admitted finally. “The craft resembled images of your own crashed shuttle.”
Riordan nodded. “It’s a variant of that design.”
“But — are your own people trying to kill you?”
Caine shrugged. “The people in that armored shuttle might or might not be from Earth. But they are certainly using our tools. Which might be good news: if all their tools and weapons are ours, we understand what they have and are not at a technological disadvantage.”
“But how could it be your people? You humans cannot shift this far, cannot reach our space on your own — can you?”
“We cannot,” Riordan admitted.
“Then what other species would have access to, and be able to use, your equipment?”
Caine selected a carefully worded, technical truth. “I can’t be sure. But we are certainly going to find out.”
Thnessfiirm’s sensor cluster swung back northward. “They will see the boat. And destroy it.”
Riordan did not answer. There was no point in confirming what was now an inescapable conclusion. “Let’s get into position.”
* * *
Pehthrum called to Jesel. “A lateen-rigged sailboat on the river up ahead. In a river gorge. Trying to stay in the lee of overhanging rocks.”
Jesel pulled himself forward into the cockpit, looked out the starboard window. “Is there any way we can get close enough to take it under effective small arms fire?”
Pehthrum slowed the shuttle, spun up the ducted tilt-fans to slow their approach into a gradual forward hover. He glanced at the walls of the gorge. “Not without coming down between these rock faces. And if they have any rockets—”
Jesel nodded. “An unacceptable risk. Maintain altitude and maneuver to a position directly adjacent to the boat, but keep the overhang between us.”
Pehthrum swung the shuttle, now in VTOL mode, toward the right side of the river. “Complying. Our visibility of the boat is very limited from this angle, though.”
“We only need to know where it is,” Jesel tossed over his shoulder as he returned to the passenger compartment. “Suzruzh, ready the package.”
His distant cousin was out of his seat, four of the clones following him back to the access hatch just aft of the shuttle’s waist and just forward of its engineering section. Following the drill they had practiced a dozen times before, one pair of the identical soldiers opened the hatch and extended a small aluminum ramp, adapted from a freight-moving kit. The other two manhandled a container out of the largest of the ship’s lockers.
Suzruzh bent over the container, opened it, adjusted a single control on a detonator slaved to the two ship-to-ship missile warheads bolted to the plastic bottom. “Primed,” he shouted as he closed the lid and locked it. At his nod, the two clones who had removed the container from the locker now positioned it at the top of the aluminum ramp.
Suzruzh stood sideways in the wind-buffeted open hatchway, his hand gestures telling Jesel how to shift the position of the shuttle. Jesel relayed the appropriate piloting commands to Pehthrum. “Three meters more to the right. Wait — correct for the prop-wash coming back off the rocks. Now, another meter to the right…”
Suzruzh held his fist upright: Jesel motioned for Pehthrum to hold the shuttle in precisely that spot. As soon as the craft stabilized, Suzruzh nodded to the two clones holding the container on the slide. They released it.
Where he was, Jesel knew he would not be able to see or hear the splash as the container hit the water almost thirty meters beneath them, and a few meters to the left of the boat as it hung tight against the side of the gorge. Suzruzh, on the other hand, watched the container’s descent, and after what seemed like several long seconds, pressed the remote activation stud on his belt-com.
At such a short range, the signal got through the radio interdiction easily, and the detonator went off, triggering the two warheads not more than two meters beneath the surface of the swift current. A blast came up from the river. Jesel gestured for Pehthrum to spin the shuttle, which had passed the drop point. Pehthrum did so, just in time for them to see the lateen mast reach the peak of its upward course atop the explosion’s white-frothed plume. It began tumbling back down toward the wreckage-strewn waters.
“Any sign of bodies?” Jesel shouted at Suzruzh over the whine of the VTOL fans.
“No sign of anything,” he answered. “Except that mast and a few shreds of hull.”
Jesel nodded, turned back to Pehthrum. “You have performed adequately, Intendant. Now return us to the coordinates where we detected the biosignatures upriver.” He moved back into the passenger compartment, affixing the straps of the ridiculously primitive Aboriginal helmet. “We have a job to finish.”
* * *
Karam Tsaami peeked overhead — the direction in which he would be falling, if he wasn’t being held upside down by the straps of the pilot’s chair. Through the sliver he’d opened in the cockpit’s sliding covers, he saw greens and teals and violets streak past in a psychedelic rush of formless color. He looked away: if he’d withdrawn all the blast-shields at this point, he wouldn’t even have trusted his own well-honed instincts of spatial orientation. Flying upside down, for this long, at this speed, and this altitude, was for stunt fliers and test pilots, not boat jockeys.
The intercom crackled. “Karam?” Bannor’s voice.
“Yeah, Major, what is it? Kind of busy up here.”
“I figured as much. Now that all the bumping is over, give me a report on the ship’s systems.”
“Not much to report. Coming in belly-up should have protected the weld points in the hull, but with our hard aerobraking attitude on the way in, I suspect all of our surfaces still got baked somewhat. So I’m going to fly Puller inverted until after you jump.”
There was a long pause. “Say again, bridge. Sounded like you said you were maintaining inverted attitude until after you clear the drop zone.”
“You heard right, Major. If I were to roll over now, we could find ourselves with a hole in the hull catching the air in excess of fifteen hundred kph. That could tear us to pieces in seconds. So we’re going to get you where you’re going first, which also means we’ll be down to about four hundred kph, give or take. Once you’re out, I’ll roll her and we’ll see what happens.”
Behind Karam, Morgan Lymbery may have choked back a curse or a whimper or both.
“You’ve still got a location on the enemy craft?”
“Sure do. They are clearly not worried about being spotted. Going in straight lines, leaving a thermal trail as wide as the Strait of Gibraltar and running active sensors. And moving from objective to objective like they don’t have to do a lot of searching.”
Melissa Sleeman, although pale-faced and white-knuckled, had evidently been following the conversation closely. “So the attackers have a fix on the ground team already? How could they?”
Karam sighed. “Either there is a still a traitor among them or the bad buys have miracle sensors. And I don’t believe in miracles. I particularly don’t believe in miracles coming from a lander that is throwing off the thrust signatures of a TOCIO-made shuttle.”
Bannor’s voice was quiet. “You’ve confirmed that?”
“Can’t confirm anything at this range, and I’m running passive sensors only. But if I was a betting man — well, I’d say we’ve got some interesting questions to ask whoever’s flying that lander. Like, where’d they get it?”
“I agree.” Rulaine sounded excessively composed. “Give me a two-minute warning. I’ll be back at the aft hatchway preparing for the jump.”