If you fire rapidly and wide, you can catch him.
But she was shooting at the drone. How many times? Five?
Assume you have one shot left. Two if you’re very lucky indeed.
—close enough. Cooper took a step left himself, aimed, faked a trigger pull. Soren didn’t budge. The time dilation again. Trying to fake him out would be like a man on crutches trying to juke Muhammad Ali.
Behind him, he heard a snap and a whir, and knew what it was. The gliders were launched via massive winches that yanked them a mile in seconds. Shannon had just taken off. He had at most a minute before she sacrificed herself. And that was assuming she could make it at all; if not, the drone would loose its payload and everything they had done would be moot. The militia would kill Natalie and their children, and the virus would kill the country he had fought for his whole life.
Can’t dodge, can’t plan, what can you do?
Get reckless.
Cooper yelled through gritted teeth and charged at Soren, the shotgun held in one hand at waist height. He could see the man’s confusion flicker quickly, and for just an instant Cooper’s gift had a hold. There was no time to aim, just hope, and so he pulled the trigger as he ran, the recoil ripping his wrist back, pain shooting up it.
The blast jerked Soren halfway around. When the man turned back to face him, there were deep gouges across his right cheek. His ear had been shorn away. Blood flowed slick and dark down his face. His smile had vanished.
Cooper considered gambling on another shell in the gun, but if it was empty everything was over, so he just kept going, bringing the shotgun up to hold it by the barrel, the heat of it scorching his hands as he swung it like a club.
Soren stepped aside and jammed two locked fingers into Cooper’s shoulder. His hand tingled and his fingers opened automatically and the gun flew off to skitter across the tarmac. He tried to use the momentum to crash into Soren, get him on the ground and land on top of him, but his opponent just wasn’t there, he’d slid sideways and kept one foot out and braced to catch Cooper’s, and now it was him falling, one arm numb, the other unable to get up in time to keep his face from colliding with the concrete, an electric shock through his teeth and a flash of white in his skull. Everything jumped, became two worlds that didn’t line up. Before he could process the stereoscopic images, Soren grabbed Cooper’s hair, yanked his head back, then slammed it into the concrete again. Fireworks exploded behind his retinas.
His body was distant and trembling, nothing working quite right, but he tried to rise, had to get off the ground, the ground was death in a fight, but there was a pressure against his shoulder, Soren’s foot, he realized, pushing him so that instead of rising to a crouch he flipped over onto his back.
For a moment, Soren just stood looking down at him, a black silhouette against a burning city.
Then he reached down and drew a hunting knife.
“Do you remember,” Soren said, “what you did to Samantha?”
The cable stretched taut ahead of her glider, the carbon fiber body racing down the tarmac, air whistling beneath the wings, that sense of yearning in it to take to the sky, bouncing less and less, and then the easy smoothness as wheels left runway, the cable still tugging. She’d blown past the drone, and there was the final yank and then release as the cable uncoupled, hurling her upward like a child throwing a paper airplane. As always, it felt like her stomach remained behind.
Normally, the thing to do would be to use the momentum of the launch to gain as much elevation as possible. Gliders loved the rocky desert, the howl of wind and the bounce of updraft, and with care and skill, could soar for hours. But this wasn’t a pleasure trip, and she didn’t have hours. Shannon grasped the stick with steady hands and pulled into a hard starboard roll, barely three hundred feet above the ground.
Still high enough for a marvelous view of hell.
Tesla wasn’t her home, but the Holdfast was, and watching the capital city under siege was like being a Chicagoan watching enemies overwhelm DC. The battle lines were easy to see from up here; it was a real-life view of the battle map on her d-pad, only instead of using colors to represent the action, she could see the flicker of gunfire, a constant back-and-forth crackle like grains of gunpowder strewn in a circle and lit ablaze. At this height the attackers and defenders looked the same, ants locked in battle, fighting with weapons and hand-to-hand in the streets, their bodies lit by a thousand fires, Molotov cocktails and burning barricades and, she saw, quite a few of the buildings. Countless columns of greasy black smoke rose and smeared the view with a blanket of ash. The city looked like a Bosch painting, all smoky black and bloody red and writhing agony.
Shannon tore her eyes from it, focused on the runway. Somewhere down there Nick was facing Soren, and she threw a prayer his direction and then forced herself to scan for the drone. They were built for stealth, so there were no running lights, no shining surfaces, but its motion gave it away; there it was, in the air now and climbing. The glider took to the sky faster because of the winch, but that was the only advantage she had and it was fading fast. Unlike her craft, the drone was powered, which meant both more maneuverability and, soon, greater speed. If she was going to catch it, she had to do it now.
Not to mention that it doesn’t have far to go.
She pitched downward in a hard spiral. The move built her speed at the cost of elevation, and while common enough as a soaring tactic, she didn’t have much altitude to waste. If this were a fighter jet with roaring engines and mounted cannons and a targeting system, she could lock onto the drone and wipe it from the sky. But it wasn’t. And besides, she didn’t know how to fly a fighter jet.
Shannon lined up on the drone below her, plotting the vector of its motion against her own as she dove, the distance between them narrowing fast. Wind roared over the thin body of the glider, the material humming with it as she dove.
She’d have one try. If she missed, she might have time to pull up and regain altitude, but by then the UAV would be out of range. Her hands moved fluidly, the glider an extension of her body; she maneuvered it with the same precision she moved her limbs, the drone growing rapidly. It banked steadily, and she matched the motion, aligning the trajectories to intersect neatly.
Ten seconds.
Soren had launched the drone; he must have a way to control it. Cooper would have figured that out, and would be trying to bring it down.
Shannon stared at the drone. Barely blinking. It loomed larger and larger. She could see details now, the vapor trail from the engines, the registration number on the tail, the seams of its wide wing. She imagined it sputtering, the engines dying. Willed it to pitch downward into a fatal dive. Pictured it simply exploding, the self-destruct triggering the fuel tanks.
Five seconds.
It did not sputter.
Four.
It did not dive.
Three.
It did not blow up.
Two.
Come on, Nick. Don’t make me do this.
One.
Cooper’s vision was hazy, black gauze creeping in from the edges. His brain was trapped in a vise, like the worst hangover of all time, every beat of his heart ringing crystalline agony. His mouth was full of copper, and one of his teeth had broken, the exposed nerve shrieking. The sounds of battle had faded away, replaced by the thin thunder of breathing. He threw an awkward punch as Soren knelt to straddle him, but there was no power in it, and the man brushed it aside as he dropped down, knees pinning shoulders. The victory maneuver of a childhood brawl, and normally something Cooper could have countered easily, but his body was weak, he couldn’t get any leverage. Every move he made, his enemy had time to read and counter.