The G-force he pulled would have made him black out if he were still built with his original equipment.
According to the altimeter, he couldn’t have dropped as far as it had felt like. He could have sworn he’d kissed the ground, but when the car’s trajectory flattened out, he flew by just under the top of the fifty-meter-tall perimeter towers.
Once he cleared the edge of the GA&A property, the ground started dropping away. The foothills below him began to sprout thick purplish-orange forest as he shot west, away from the mountains.
Red lights began to flash across the control console. The Hegira had soaked up a few hits. Even as Dom started to assess the damage, the little craft began shaking.
The view out the windshield wasn’t encouraging. It looked as if he were skimming right on the top of the forest canopy. Barely a second would go by without an outflung branch throwing ocher foliage across the nose.
He switched on the rear video. There wasn’t any sign of pursuit. The attack didn’t want him, or at least he wasn’t a priority target. They were after the GA&A complex. That gave him room to breathe. If he could land this thing.
Woods shot by around him, getting closer. Godwin was still a good ten klicks away, and now that the grade below him had flattened out, he was losing altitude. The pressure in the vector jets wasn’t enough to keep him airborne, and there was no way he could cut them and let the pressure build back up.
He should have budgeted for a contragrav.
The view out the nose was now totally obscured by dark foliage. Warning beeps sounded from every available speaker. The Hegira was shaking like someone having a seizure. It crashed through the canopy with a sound as though it was tearing the universe a new asshole.
He needed to gain altitude—quick.
He lowered the rear of the Hegira, hoping to use the main drive in the rear to boost him up.
The craft reached a forty-five-degree angle and he stopped losing altitude. As the Hegira began rising on a ballistic arc, the violent shaking subsided, and the night sky drifted into view.
Just as Dom started smiling, the Hegira hit something. A final devastating thud shook the entire craft, and the remaining half of the warning lights came on in front of him.
In the rear camera view, Dom could see a single tree pointing out of the canopy, about twenty meters more than it had a right to. It was broken and burning. He had clipped it with the main drive.
He assessed the damage. Rear vectors were out. All he had were the nose jets and the main drive, and the main drive acted erratically. He was in trouble. The damn thing now needed a runway—
The craft hit four hundred meters altitude and the main drive started stuttering. Damn it! He needed at least another fifty meters for the ejection seat—
Five klicks to Godwin and he was losing altitude and going three hundred klicks an hour. Time to start decelerating and hope for the best.
It was an opportune time to make that decision because the main drive quit altogether. He was going to ballistic into Godwin on only his maneuvering jets, a third of which were dead.
Dom pulled the crash harness around him just in time. The Hegira plowed into an abandoned warehouse on the east side of Godwin at one-fifty klicks an hour.
* * * *
CHAPTER FOUR
Industrial Espionage
“Industry is amoral.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Honor sinks where commerce long prevails.”
—Oliver Goldsmith
(1728-1774)
Tetsami had that sinking feeling she always got near the end of a job. This was the part she hated—the waiting.
She could cruise a proprietary operating system laced with lethal security without breaking a sweat. But now, sitting in the dark outside an old bunker waiting for the meet, she could feel her palms getting damp under her driving gloves. She straddled her jet-black Leggett Floater and idly eased the drive back and forth. The little contragrav bike obliged her by pacing back and forth in front of the loading bay.
She shouldn’t have taken the Leggett. It was an expensive piece of hardware, and East Godwin was full of maggots.
Tetsami cussed herself. The time for second-guessing was before the operation. She had taken the Leggett for a very good reason. The few hours before the payoff were when things were most likely to go bad. It wasn’t that she expected her employer to pull a double cross—if she had, she wouldn’t be here—but it was a good idea to have an escape route, in case....
Nice if I had a job where that wasn’t a priority concern. Nice if I had a life where that wasn’t a priority concern.
Tetsami put those thoughts out of her mind. Right now wasn’t the time.
She concentrated on the meet.
The place the execs had chosen for the payoff seemed relatively clean. They’d found a place with one hell of an approach radius. The area around the bunker had been blasted clear for a few city blocks in any direction. Blasted by an artillery barrage or an orbital strike.
The bunker she waited by had once been a very secure building. It was the only survivor of whatever had reduced the surrounding blocks. The ruin still had shelter-quality armor, but the façade had been blown off. All that was left was blackened metal in the shape of a truncated pyramid.
The only entrance, the loading dock, had been blown inward by a direct hit from an energy weapon.
She wondered what this was the remains of. East Godwin had once been a corporate center before a few ugly company wars reduced a lot of the neighborhoods to rubble. The bunker could date from that blowup—around the time her parents had come to this ugly little planet.
Why Bakunin, Dad? she thought at her long-dead father. The question occurred to her even though she knew the answer. After Dakota, Bakunin was the only place that would accept their kind.
She wished the execs would show up.
Every minute she spent waiting for them to show, the data package under her seat got hotter. She wasn’t made of time. The op had gone without a hitch. But that only meant that the spuds in Bleek Munitions weren’t going to discover that their R&D database had been compromised until the next routine cataloging of the user list. In less than fifteen minutes now the spuds would see a red flag next to a user that logged out without any record of logging in.
The snag was unavoidable. Bleek’s system was too tight for a dry run. She’d spent over a week planning the break-in, an hour weaving her magic into the system, and ten minutes on-line. After all that, she’d cut out with very little finesse or ceremony when she had what she wanted.
What the execs wanted.
If Bleek security ID’d her while she still had the data, things could get real hairy. She was a target until she passed the package to her employer. Once the exchange occurred, once she’d been passed the gold, she’d be free and clear.
Until then, she was hotter than a megawatt laser with a gigawatt power cell.
Think about the payoff, she told herself. Fifty kilos in the Insured Bank of the Adam Smith Collective. Not enough for her to retire on, but it might be enough to get her off-planet.
Off this slimy godforsaken rock. A graceful exit, as soon as possible. She wasn’t like some software jockeys who went exponential until they crashed and burned. She knew she was pushing the envelope. If she didn’t realize that, she had Ivor—her adopted father—to tell her she was eight years into a profession that chewed up and spit out most in less than three.