His hands caught the lip of the ramp just as it rose level with his chest. He was hoisted from the deck, swinging under outstretched arms and looking forward under the shuttle’s fuselage belly as the craft forced its way up into the air.
“Horza! Horza! I’m sorry,” Mipp sobbed.
“You’ve got me!” Horza yelled hoarsely.
“What?”
The shuttle was still climbing, passing decks and towers and the thin horizontal lines of monorail tracks. All Horza’s weight was taken by his fingers, hooked in their gloves over the edge of the ramp door. His arms ached. “I’m hanging onto the goddamn ramp!”
“You bastards!” screamed another voice. It was Lamm. The ramp started to close; the jerk almost broke Horza’s grip. They were fifty metres up and climbing. He saw the top part of the doors jawing down towards his fingers.
“Mipp!” he yelled. “Don’t close the door! Leave the ramp where it is and I’ll try to get in!”
“OK,” Mipp said quickly. The ramp stopped angling up, halting at about twenty degrees. Horza began swinging his legs from side to side. They were seventy, eighty metres up, facing away from the wave of wreckage and heading slowly away from it.
“You black bastard! Come back!” Lamm bellowed.
“I can’t, Lamm!” Mipp cried. “I can’t! You’re too close!”
“You fat bastard!” Lamm hissed.
Light flickered around Horza. The underside of the shuttle blazed in a dozen places as laser fire hit it. Something slammed into Horza’s left foot, on the sole of his boot, and his right leg was kicked out as his leg burned with pain.
Mipp screamed incoherently. The shuttle started to gather speed, heading back over the Megaship and diagonally across it. The air roared around Horza’s body, slowly tearing his grip away. “Mipp, slow down!” he shouted.
“Bastard!” Lamm yelled again. The mist to one side glowed as a fan of short-lived beams incandesced within it, then the laser fire shifted and the shuttle sparkled again, cracking with five or six small explosions around the front and nose section. Mipp howled. The shuttle increased speed. Horza was still trying to swing one leg onto the sloped ramp, but the clawed fingers of his gloves were slowly scraping along the roughened surface as his body was slipstreamed back behind the speeding craft.
Lamm screamed — a high, gurgling sound which went through Horza’s head like an electric shock, until the noise snapped off suddenly, replaced for an instant by sharp cracking, breaking noises.
The shuttle raced over the surface of the crashing Megaship, a hundred metres up. Horza felt the strength ebbing from his fingers and arms. He looked through the helmet visor at the interior of the shuttle only a few metres away as, millimetre by millimetre, he slipped away from it.
The interior flashed once, then an instant later blazed white, blindingly, unbearably. His eyes closed instinctively, and a burning yellow light came through his eyelids. His helmet speakers made a sudden, piercing, inhuman noise, like a machine screaming, then cut out altogether. The light faded slowly. He opened his eyes.
The shuttle interior was still brightly lit, but it was smouldering now, too. In the turbulent air whirling in from the open rear doors, wisps of smoke were tugged from scorched seats, singed straps and webbing, and the crisped black skin on Lenipobra’s exposed face. Shadows seemed to be burnt onto the bulkhead in front.
Horza’s fingers, one by one, came to the edge of the ramp.
My God, he thought, looking at the scorch marks and the smoke, that maniac had a nuke after all. Then the shock wave hit.
It slapped him forward, over the ramp and into the shuttle, just before it hit the machine itself, throwing it bucking and bouncing about the sky like a tiny bird caught in a storm. Horza was rattled about the interior from side to side, trying desperately to grab hold of something to stop himself falling back out through the open rear doors. His hand found some straps and fisted round them with the last of his strength.
Back through the doors, through the mist, a huge rolling fireball was climbing slowly into the sky. A noise like every clap of thunder he had ever heard vibrated through the hot, hazed interior of the fleeing machine. The shuttle banked, throwing Horza against one set of seats. A big tower flashed by the open rear doors, blocking out the fireball as the shuttle continued to turn. The rear doors seemed to try to close, then jammed.
Horza felt heavy and hot inside his suit, as the heat from the bomb’s flash seeped through from the surfaces which had been exposed to the initial fireball. His right leg hurt badly, somewhere below the knee. He could smell burning.
As the shuttle steadied and its course straightened, Horza got up and limped forward to the door set in the bulkhead, where the outlines of the seats and Lenipobra’s slumped body — now spread-eagled near the rear doors — were burnt in frozen shadows onto the off-white surface of the wall. He opened the door and went through.
Mipp was in the pilot’s seat, hunched over the controls. The monitor screens were blank, but the view through the thick, polarised glass of the shuttle’s windscreen showed cloud, mist, some towers sliding underneath and open sea beyond, covered with yet more cloud. “Thought you… were dead…” Mipp said thickly, half turning towards Horza. Mipp looked wounded, crouched in his seat, hunchbacked, eyelids drooped. Sweat glistened on his dark brow. There was smoke in the flight deck, acrid and sweet at once.
Horza took his helmet off and fell into the other seat. He looked down at his right leg. A neat, black-rimmed hole about a centimetre across had been punched through the back of the suit calf, matched by a larger and more ragged hole on the side. He flexed the leg and winced; just a muscle burn, already cauterised. He could see no blood.
He looked at Mipp. “You all right?” he asked. He already knew the answer.
Mipp shook his head. “No,” he said, in a soft voice. “That lunatic hit me. Leg, and my back somewhere.”
Horza looked at the back of Mipp’s suit, near where it rested against the seat. A hole in the bowl of the seat led to a long, dark scar on the suit surface. Horza looked down at the flight-deck floor. “Shit,” he said. “This thing’s full of holes.”
The floor was pitted with craters. Two were directly under Mipp’s seat; one laser shot had caused that dark scar on the side of the suit, the other must have hit Mipp’s body.
“Feels like that bastard shot me right up the ass, Horza,” Mipp said, trying to smile. “He did have a nuke, didn’t he? That’s what went off. Blew all the electrics away… Only the optic controls still working. Useless damn shuttle…”
“Mipp, let me take over,” Horza said. They were in cloud now; only a vague coppery light showed through the crystal screen ahead. Mipp shook his head.
“Can’t. You couldn’t fly this thing… with it in this shape.”
“We’ve got to go back, Mipp. The others might have—”
“Can’t. They’ll all be dead,” Mipp said, shaking his head and gripping the controls tighter, staring through the screen. “God, this thing’s dying.” He looked round the blank monitors, shaking his head slowly. “I can feel it.”
“Shit!” Horza said, feeling helpless. “What about radiation?” he said suddenly. It was a truism that in any properly designed suit, if you survived the flash and blast, you’d survive the radiation; but Horza wasn’t sure that his was a properly designed suit. One of the many instruments it lacked was a radiation monitor, and that was a bad sign in itself. Mipp looked at a small screen on the console.
“Radiation…” He shook his head. “Nothing serious,” he said. “Low on neutrons…” he grimaced with pain. “Pretty clean bomb; probably not what that bastard wanted at all. He should take it back to the shop…” Mipp gave a small, strangled, despairing laugh.