“What alter…”
The troopers opened fire on the transport. Maser bolts cracked off her hull.
“I’m not debating it, Petrov! Just go!” She snapped the communications link off. She turned to Kane, the confidence she’d had in the radio conversation evaporating. “Okay, Kane. How do we get to the Vodyanoi without being cut into pieces?”
“First, we wait. Let Petrov stay centre stage for a while longer.” The three of them watched the transporter. It didn’t move. “They have got a pilot, haven’t they?”
“That boy, Suhkalev,” replied Lukyan, watching the transport closely.
“Really? Oh.” Kane seemed to be looking for something optimistic to add. “Oh.”
CHAPTER 17
Stormy Weather
Petrov remained calm. “Take your time, Suhkalev. They can’t penetrate the hull. Take your time and get it right.” He did not voice his concerns that they might bring up weapons that could penetrate the hull soon; he didn’t want Suhkalev to panic and crash the lot of them into the hangar wall at close to the speed of sound.
“I can do this,” Suhkalev kept muttering to himself as he examined the controls, “I can do this.” The sweat beading his lip did not lend confidence. “The lift controls are normal contragravity but, these,” he waved at a display of inscrutably complex figures and status levels, “I don’t know what they are. They should be the thrusters, but I’ve never seen anything like them.”
Petrov thought back to the blue fire streaming from the engines of the transporter that had collected the Vodyanoi from the ocean. “They’re Goddard units. Space manoeuvre drive, almost reactionless. Rediscovering how to build them is something else they didn’t bother telling the FMA.”
“You know how they work?” asked Suhkalev with pathetic hope.
“Of course I don’t. The principle was lost during the original colonisation. Try and use the lift units to get us into the open air before engaging the thrusters. At least we won’t have walls in front of us when you light them up.”
Suhkalev visibly steeled himself and put his hand on the lift controls. As they wound up to power, the transporter jolted slightly on its landing-pylons. Slowly, the hydraulic shock absorbers extended as the aircraft lifted uncertainly from the deck. Almost immediately, one corner sagged lower than the others and the whole vehicle started to slowly drift to one side as it spun gently, if not actually out of control, certainly not entirely within it.
“What are you doing, Suhkalev?”
Suhkalev was barely listening. He was chanting “I can do this, I can do this, I can do this,” under his breath as he manually rebalanced the lifters, slowing the spin and angling the drift to take them under the open hatches.
Looking out of the cockpit window Petrov saw something to worry him. He walked back, keeping his balance by gripping the rails that ran along the ceiling for exactly that purpose until he was back in the crew disembarkation room aft of the flight deck. The remaining crew of the Novgorod looked up at him from where they sat cross-legged on the floor. All of them had weapons lying across their laps taken from the transporter’s arms locker. They looked about as confident as Petrov felt. “They’ve brought up some sort of support weapon. I don’t know what it is, but it’s about two metres long and looks like it’s shoulder-fired. Best shots to the door so they don’t have an easy time using it.”
Three Novgorods moved to the main external hatch, pleased to have something to do rather than sitting and waiting for Suhkalev to fly them into a steel wall.
The hatch slid open and the storm blew in. Suhkalev had managed to manoeuvre the transporter beneath the open hatch in the FP-1’s topmost landing area and was now gingerly making it ascend. The rate of climb was slow and it would be almost a minute before they were hidden from the Yagizban troopers scattered around the deck below, plenty of time for them to score several hits. The Novgorod’s best surviving shots braced themselves against the door frame and took aim.
The Yagizban weapons team had been drilled in using the rocket launcher, they had been trained in maintaining it and its ammunition, they had even been trained in how to carry it in victory parades. Nobody, however, had ever shown them what to do in the event of the target shooting back. As the first maser bolts, fired more in hope than expectation of hitting anything, came raining down from the escaping aircraft, the weapons team dumped the launcher and scattered for cover.
Interesting, thought Petrov. Once again they have the technology but they don’t have the training, or perhaps the will to fight. They want their toys to take all the risks for them. That’s a weakness.
It was not a weakness shared by all the Yagizban, though. The Chertovka was living up to her name, throwing terrified troopers out of her path as she made a bee-line for the discarded rocket launcher.
“A standard FMA reward bonus to whoever kills that woman,” said Petrov.
Bonuses were handed out by the FMA with miserly tight-fistedness. Instantly, all three rifle barrels twitched onto the new target and started firing careful bursts. Petrov knew that the chances of hitting her at this range from a moving platform with what felt like half of Russalka’s oceans pouring down on it were vanishingly small, but they only had to slow down her advance for the few seconds it would take the transporter to clear the lip of the hatch and get into the open sky.
Tasya was built of much sterner stuff than the rocket team, that much was clear. She zig-zagged from cover to cover, reaching the dropped weapon far too quickly for Petrov’s comfort. She was down on one knee with the launcher tube over her shoulder and her eye to the targeting scope inside five seconds. A second after that, fire flared from the rear of the tube and a rocket zipped from the front. Petrov heaved his snipers back inside and slammed the door shut. “Brace for impact!” he barked at his crew. The command was usually applied to a submarine crew when a torpedo was about to hit or the boat was about to ram or be rammed. Petrov had never used it except in exercises and hoped they would understand what he meant by it in this situation. They seemed to, as they scurried for places where they could hang on if the transporter was thrown about. He didn’t have time to make sure they were all safe, he was already throwing himself into the cockpit. He landed at full stretch, grabbed the supports at the back of the co-pilot’s seat and shouted at Suhkalev, “Thrusters! Now!”
Suhkalev had been listening to the situation in the disembarkation area over his headset and didn’t need telling twice. They were still an agonising five metres short of the hatch, but he cut the aft lifters and the transport suddenly swung nose upwards. The forward lifters whined alarmingly as they tried to take the full weight of the transporter by themselves and their status displays flashed red. Suhkalev was aware of Petrov’s grunt of surprise as he suddenly found himself dangling from the co-pilot’s chair by his arms but didn’t have time to pay him any more heed than that. Suhkalev reckoned he’d figured out the thruster controls. Now was the moment to discover whether he was right. Already the transporter was falling backwards, the forward lifters unable to take the whole weight.
I can do this, he thought, and opened the main thruster throttles.
From the control room Katya, Lukyan and Kane watched the transporter suddenly stand on blue columns of iridescent fire. “Down!” shouted Lukyan putting one great hand on the scruffs of Katya and Kane’s necks and pulling them to the ground. As they hit the floor, the observation window exploded inwards. The room filled with the furious blue light and a million glittering shards of reinforced glass. Then, as abruptly as it had appeared, it vanished. Kane crawled rapidly to the console and activated a traffic control camera. The blue light of the transporter’s thrusters were already fading into the stormy sky.