A trick. It was all a trick. And it was his master, Davlo Lentrall, that they were after.
At that moment, he heard the sound—the sound of an aircar coming in fast and hard, from a great height, diving straight in. He looked up, and saw the car, and realized it was not over. He prepared himself to defend his master.
Whatever good that could do.
JUSTEN DEVRAY TORE his eyes away from the chaos of the bus crash, and spotted the fast-dropping snatch car. He saw it in the same moment Kaelor did, but there was nothing he could do in response. The robot pilot of his aircar would prevent him trying to shoot the aircar down, of course, but Justen would not have tried the shot himself—not with a plaza full of innocent people below, and Government Tower close enough that a disabled, uncontrolled craft might crash into it.
But he could pursue—or at least order his pilot to do so.
“Get with that aircar and stay with it,” he ordered.
Gervad obeyed at once, flipping Justen’s aircar out of its slow orbit with a hard, sharp dive. They were, quite suddenly, dropping like a stone. Justen felt his stomach trying to turn itself inside out, and fought back the feeling.
This car had to be the way they were going to get them out—Davlo Lentrall and all their own people. If Justen could prevent it from landing, or even from taking off after it had landed, then the game would be up. But where the devil was the arrest team?
He punched up a status display, and got the answer—they would be on the scene in ninety seconds. But in ninety seconds, it was likely to be far too late.
Justen thought fast. One thing was clear. This was no attempt at assassination. It was too elaborate, too complex. It would have been easy to kill Lentrall by now, if that had been their aim. If the opposition—whoever they were—could arrange chemical spills on Government Tower and crash buses to create diversions, they would surely also be able to get in a shooter and a long-range precision blaster, or some sort of slug-throwing rifle. They could have picked off Lentrall that way. Even now, with Lentrall barricaded in under the stone bench by his robot, a well-placed shot from a grenade launcher would do the job. Hit Lentrall’s robot clear in the chest, and the force of the explosion would be enough to drive the robot’s body back and mash Lentrall to a pulp.
So it was a kidnap attempt—but they might have orders to kill Lentrall if they could not grab him.
Justen Devray still did not have the slightest idea what Lentrall was up to, or why he was important. Right now, that didn’t matter. Lentrall was important. Important enough for the governor to see him, for the Settlers and the Ironheads to spy on him, for Kresh to want a full security detail on him, for this whole scene of chaos to be cooked up in his honor. If that was all he knew, it was enough. He had to protect Lentrall.
“Emergency landing!” he told Gervad. “Put us down as close as possible to the rear of the stone bench where Lentrall is.”
His aircar lurched again, but less violently this time, as their new course was rather close to their old one. But it was also close to the snatch car’s course. Justen’s aircar pulled almost even with them, close enough that he could actually see into it.
And he saw that the snatch car had a distinct advantage. A human pilot. A human pilot could and would take chances, take risks—something a robot pilot could not and would not do.
And this human pilot proceeded to do exactly that, putting on extra speed, accelerating as he fell, diving in under Justen’s aircar. Clearly the human pilot knew First Law would keep a robot pilot from copying that move—and that First Law would force the robot to back off, for fear of a midair collision.
Which is exactly what happened, of course. Gervad put on the speedbrakes, hard, and the snatch car dropped out of sight below the nose of Justen’s aircar. They were going to get there first.
And that was just about enough for Justen. “I’m taking the controls!” he shouted as he undid his seat restraint and moved forward into the co-pilot’s seat.
“Sir, the dangers of doing so—”
“Are minimal, compared to the danger to humans represented by that aircar,” Justen said as he strapped himself in. “There is too much delay between my orders to you and execution! I order you to let me fly this machine.” Either that would be enough to overcome Gervad’s First Law resistance, or it would not. Justen twisted the knob that shifted flight control to his console and cut the speedbrakes, and Gervad made no effort to stop him. Well, that was at least one minor victory. The aircar began to drop faster again.
Justen watched eagerly out the viewscreen, watching for the snatch car to come back into view below them. He spotted it again just as it was about to touch down, moving fast enough that the landing would be little more than a controlled crash.
And at that moment, Justen had an object lesson in the distinct disadvantage of having a human pilot. Humans could take risks, all right—but sometimes risky choices went wrong. The snatch car was plainly braking as hard it could, but just as plainly, it wasn’t hard enough. The ground was coming up fast under it, too fast.
The snatch car landed ten meters from Lentrall’s bench with a crash that was plainly audible even in Justen’s aircar. It slammed down hard, bottoming out the shock absorbers on its landing jacks and lurching a good fifteen meters back up into the air, its port side angling high up into the air, until it seemed all but inevitable that the craft would topple over and slam back into the ground on its side.
Somehow, the pilot managed to regain control of the craft and bring it upright. The snatch pilot held the aircar in a hover for a moment or two, during which time Justen managed to dodge around the snatch car and put his own vehicle down, in a hard but passable landing, so close to Lentrall’s bench that he nearly clipped it with his rear landing jack.
Justen popped the cover on a rarely-used part of the control panel and pulled up on a red lever, unlimbering the aircar’s topside swivel blaster. Justen powered up the targeting system and locked the gun on the snatch car just as its pilot finally managed to bring it in for a safe—if ugly—landing. Its portside rear landing jack seemed to have collapsed slightly.
“Sir! I cannot permit you to fire on a craft with humans aboard.”
“I’m not going to shoot!” Justen said. Not unless I have to, he told himself. “And please note that I am targeting their propulsion systems, not their control cabin. I just want to intimidate them, make them know we mean business. I promise you I won’t fire.” Breaking a promise to a robot didn’t amount to much, if it came to that.
“But sir—”
“Quiet!” There were times that the benefits of robot labor was not worth the effort required to negotiate the robot’s cooperation.
Not that there was time to worry about such things at the moment. The snatch car hadn’t given up yet. Not completely. Justen could see the pilot, a hard-faced woman, and he saw the look of surprise on her face as she spotted the swivel blaster aimed at her craft. But surprise did not keep her from reacting quickly. She popped her own topside gun—and aimed it straight through the viewscreen of Justen’s aircar, straight at his head, leaving him looking straight down the barrel of a most powerful-looking blaster.
Suddenly they were both down. Suddenly things had stopped happening. Suddenly it was quiet. And suddenly he didn’t dare move a muscle unless he wanted to die. Justen didn’t think he had even seen anything bigger than that blaster in his life—and he had never heard anything louder than the pounding of his own heart. But fear could kill him. He had to remain calm, clear, focused. He shifted his gaze from the barrel of the gun to the face of the pilot. It was easy to imagine that the willingness to shoot was plain in her expression.