“What do you mean, you think?” Blair asked as she stopped beside him.
“I got you an extra 150 rounds for your GAU-8, just like you wanted,” he said, patting the Gatling gun protruding from the plane’s nose. “But I have to tell you: there’s a chance—a really small chance—that the gun will jam up first thing off the chocks.”
“Really,” Blair said. “Let me get this straight. My options are either I get to completely snooker the HKs with extra firepower, or else I get to be flying toast?”
Wince made a face.
“Something like that.”
“Good enough,” Blair said, grabbing the cockpit ladder and heading up. “I’ll let you know what happens.”
The hangar doors were open, and Yoshi was jockeying his A-10 out into the wide street beyond by the time Blair got her engines up to power. She gave Yoshi a thirty second head-start, then followed him out.
To her mild surprise, both planes reached the end of their avenue airstrip and made it into the night sky without any HKs appearing overhead to argue the point.
“Hickabick?” Yoshi’s voice crackled in her headset. “How you doing?”
“Smooth and hungry,” Blair replied, glancing over her board. The GAU-8’s counter, she noted, still indicated her ammo load at 1100 rounds, which implied that Wince’s extra one-fifty weren’t being registered. She would have to remember that as she watched her fire count. “Ready to kick some?”
“You bet,” Yoshi said. “You’re on cleanup—follow me in.”
His A-10 turned left toward the Skynet staging area. Blair matched the maneuver, falling back far enough off his tail to make sure he had all the fighting room he might need. There were four HKs in the air over there, running dark and probably quiet, drifting along over the multi-block region like vultures waiting for something to die.
Little did Skynet know.
She and Yoshi had covered about half the distance when the HKs suddenly seemed to notice that they had company. Two of them veered suddenly out of their lazy search pattern and turned toward the A-10s, jumping like scalded frogs as they kicked their turbofans to full power.
“Watch it—two more coming in from the north,” Yoshi warned.
Blair peered in that direction, to find that the two new bandits were also coming in dark. Big surprise there.
“I see them,” she confirmed. “Which ones do you want?”
“You know how my vertigo is,” Yoshi said.
Blair smiled tightly.
“Happy hunting,” she said. Twisting her stick over, she sent the A-10 into a hard turn north toward the incoming HKs, a turn that would certainly exacerbate the imaginary vertigo of any pilot.
The two newcomers were coming in fast she noted as she settled into an intercept course. Way too fast for a typical dogfight. Had Skynet analyzed her performance over the years and concluded its best bet was a high-speed skimmer attack?
Or had it conceded the point of her combat record and decided to simply ram her and be done with it?
There was one way to find out. Aiming her A-10 squarely between the two incoming aircraft, she nudged up her speed.
The hardest part about playing chicken, the old saying went, is knowing when to flinch. But the HKs didn’t seem to have heard that one. Neither aircraft veered so much as a degree off their intercept course as they all rushed toward each other. Blair gave it three more seconds, and then it was time to flinch.
But not the kind of flinch she would normally do in this situation. Not her usual tight evasive turn to left or right. Doing the same thing over and over against Skynet was a guaranteed way of getting yourself killed. Instead, she jammed the stick forward, dropping her nose and throwing her A-10 into a power dive toward the streets below.
She was instantly vindicated as the two HKs split formation, twisting to right and left as they shot past overhead. Had she turned in either of those directions, she would have ended the evening inside a massive fireball.
Which might still happen. For the second time in three days, the dark streets were rushing up at an ungodly speed. Gotta stop doing this, she told herself firmly as she hauled back on the stick, twisting her fighter up again just in time to avoid splatting herself all over the landscape. Setting her teeth as her plane switched from power dive to power climb, she waited to the near-stall moment and rolled over into her signature Immelmann turn.
She leveled off, eased back on the throttle, and searched the sky fix her opponents.
She’d half expected the HKs to try to take advantage of her vulnerability during the dive by turning around and attacking. Instead, the two aircraft were speeding away from her at full speed, curving around toward the northeast and continuing to angle apart to keep her from taking both of them in a single one-two shot.
In the absence of a one-two shot, a one-one shot would do just as well. Lining up her nose with the HK on the right, she keyed for the GAU-8 and squeezed the trigger.
Wince had been concerned that his upgraded system would jam. Blair hadn’t had any such doubts, and as usual she’d been right. The Avenger roared to life with all its throaty glory, spitting a river of 30mm destruction at the enemy aircraft. The river reached the HK, and in the fiery light of the machine’s explosion Blair continued her turn and nailed the second one as well.
The two groups of flaming debris rained down on the long-suffering city. Blair put her A-10 into another curve back around toward the west. There was a third bonfire on the ground in the distance over there, where Yoshi had apparently taken out the first of his two targets, and Blair could see the faint flickers of gunfire flashing back and forth as he engaged the second. Beyond the dogfight, the two remaining HKs were still gliding over the staging area neighborhood, playing spotter duty for the mass slaughter going on in the streets below.
She gave the sky a quick scan, and then a more careful look. Far to the south, faintly silhouetted against the moonlit clouds, were two more HKs, probably part of Skynet’s Capistrano radar tower defense. Either the neighborhood slated for tonight’s destruction was a particularly important one, or else the computer figured it could afford to spend a few HKs for the chance to take out a couple of Resistance A-10s.
Blair smiled tightly. If burning through HKs was Skynet’s plan for the night, she would be more than happy to accommodate it.
Turning her A-10 onto an intercept vector with the newcomers, she headed in.
The Terminators who had destroyed the Death’s-Head compound were finally on the move.
Though not very well, or very quickly, Kyle noted. Even after a couple of hours’ of running repairs, the three skinless machines were still limping badly as they headed toward the gap in the north barrier where he and Star had entered the compound earlier. Limping badly enough, in fact, that the three machines were actually shuffling along together as a group, with the two outer ones supporting the third. Their red eyes glowed bright in the moonlight, the faint sheen from their metal bodies looking strangely like human sweat.
But if those three no longer posed a serious threat, the fourth Terminator most certainly did. It walked a few paces behind them, matching their speed but with no trace of their limping. Its own eyes swept the compound alertly as it herded the damaged machines toward the gap, its minigun poised and ready.
Kyle tensed, holding himself as still as he could. If any one of the four Terminators happened to look into the cars they were passing…
But none of them did. One by one, they maneuvered through the gap and disappeared into the night.
Kyle took a deep breath, feeling the tension running out of him like rainwater off a collector gutter.