CHAPTER 43

Eli Brody’s life had seen its fair share of exhilarating piloting moments, but flying through a humongous sandstorm on his home planet might just have been the most impressive – even if it might be the last.

I can’t decide what’s worse: that I’ll be remembered as a traitor twice over, or that I died doing something this stupid.

The Cavalier was tossed side to side by the crosswinds, buffeted up and down as it dropped through the various layers of whirling air, and peppered continuously by what felt like a hail of small arms fire from the particulates being blown about at hurricane-level speeds.

It took everything Eli had to maintain his hold on the yoke, which kept threatening to vibrate right out of his grip. Control was a laughable proposition. Even figuring out which direction to go was proving its own challenge: visibility out the canopy was zero, even with his heads-up display’s enhancement systems.

Besides him, Andres was still clutching the sides of his seat in a grip that would have, in other circumstances, probably been around Eli’s throat. The big man clearly couldn’t decide whether it was better to have his eyes open or closed to face his impending doom and was going through an endless cycle of peeking through them, seeing the madness out the canopy, and then squeezing them shut again.

Not an option for me. Although would it really matter at this point?

A particularly violent crosswind sheared through the Cav, sending it spinning on its axis. Eli wrestled the yoke back into a modicum of steadiness.

Telemetry from Taylor’s signal was intermittent and, given the speed of the train, every time Eli did get a reading, it was miles from where it had been a minute ago. But it was all he had to home in on. At least he could roughly use it to project the train’s course; with a little luck he should be able to shadow its route and maybe even get ahead of it.

Well, maybe more than a little luck.

From out in the corridor came another muted thump. Eli had hoped that Prentiss would be smart enough to go buckle in; even though she hadn’t been particularly friendly, he didn’t feel great about his flying causing the woman serious injury.

There was a ping from the console as Taylor’s signal surfaced once more, now ahead off the Cavalier’s port bow, and Eli did his best to adjust his heading to follow it, gaining altitude to try and catch an air pocket moving in the right direction.

“This is insane,” Andres muttered, his eyes still shut. “You can’t fly through a sandstorm.”

“Fly, no,” Eli agreed, eyes darting back and forth between the canopy and the few instruments that were providing useful information. “That would be crazy. You gotta ride it.” And with that he pulled back on the yoke and hit the pocket, sending them sliding to port like a surfer catching a wave.

His stomach leapt into his throat as the ship bumped and tumbled through the air, but it was only partly from fear. He remembered this feeling, from his earliest days of piloting, when danger seemed to lurk at every turn and the only way through was to trust his instincts. But the more he’d done it, the more it had turned into a chore – a means to an end. First to get off Caledonia, then to make it through the Imperial Naval Academy, then just to survive. He missed the simple joy of alternately cooperating and contending with nature, the unexpected and the magical.

Even the pants-crappingly insane.

Another ping; was it his imagination or was Taylor’s signal coming through stronger now? He glanced at the range and was surprised to see he was much closer than he’d expected to be. Reaching over to the comm panel, he patched his earbud into the ship’s array.

“Major… uh…” he racked his brain, trying to remember the alias Taylor had been using back on Juarez 7A. “Vine? Vin…tage? Veni… Vidi… Vinson! Major Vinson, do you copy?”

No response. He kept one hand on the yoke while trying to peer out the canopy to the surface below, but the sand was still obscuring everything.

Lower. Need to get lower. He’d been trying to hold at ten thousand feet, plus or minus a few hundred, until he’d localized the signal, but that clearly wasn’t going to work.

“Hold on,” he said, more to himself than to Andres as he pushed the stick forward.

The Cav nosed down and started to slide like it had just crested the steepest rise of a roller coaster. On the console, the altimeter ticked down in a steady, if slow manner, as Eli let the sandstorm’s currents do most of the work for him.

This is going surprisingly smoo–

Alarms blared as the ship jolted and the starboard side dipped precariously. Eli steered port to compensate, but something was wrong; the controls were sluggish, jerky. Even as he kept fighting with the stick, he checked the console and saw a large red warning light on the starboard engine cluster.

Offline.

“Oh, shit.”

“What?” Andres slid one shaky eye open. “What is it?”

“Nothing, nothing. Just a flameout on the starboard engine. No problem!”

“We lost an engine? That sounds like a big fucking problem!”

“It’s fine. We’ve still got two clusters port and stern. I just need to restart it!” Eli reached over and flipped the toggle for the starboard engine.

Nothing happened.

Huh. He peered as closely at the console as he could while still keeping an eye on the flight instruments. The starboard engine cluster was misfiring and not igniting – probably, in Eli’s expert opinion, because it was full of sand.

Still, they could get by on two engines; he’d just have to adjust the output to compensate, and they’d lose a little stability.

“Soooo,” he said, one hand flipping switches on the console as he kept the other on the controls, “this may get a little bumpy.”

Andres’s head slowly swiveled to face him, both eyes now open wide. “It may get a little bumpy? What the hell do you call this?”

“A pleasant thrill ride?”

“If we survive this, I am going to kill you.”

“Optimism! That’s the spirit.” And with that Eli hauled the controls to port and down, pressing them both back into their seats.

The ship was definitely bucking even more under Eli’s hands than a few minutes ago; he could feel the loss in stabilization. Nothing he couldn’t handle, but the tolerance for further failures was going to be a lot lower. He wasn’t sure how much longer the Cav could hold up in this storm. One thing he hadn’t told Andres: he’d checked the readings on the other two engines, and they were rapidly clogging as well. Maybe fifty percent on the port, and thirty-five on the stern. That meant there was an upper time limit before they could bug out of here, and it probably wasn’t more than about ten minutes. Possibly a lot less.

So if they were going to find the train, sooner was definitely preferable.

As if summoned by that particular worry, a repeated beeping issued from the comm panel, and he glanced over to see Taylor’s signal coming through much more clearly. There were still occasional drop-outs, but cohesion was upwards of eighty percent.

He toggled the transmitter again. “Cavalier to Vinson. Do you copy? We are inbound on your position. ETA…” He looked back at the console, did some rough math and hoped that he’d remembered to divide instead of multiply, “…five minutes. Hope you’ve got all your luggage packed, because we are definitely not sticking around.”

Only static came back.

Eli’s jaw clenched and his hands tightened on the yoke. This was going to work. He was going to make it in time. Addy, Tapper, Taylor, Gwen – they all needed him.

He pushed the controls forward, diving further through the storm, winds and sand whipping at the canopy with so much force that he wondered if they were leaving permanent scratches on the transparent aluminum. The ship rocked beneath him, as though it were a boat awash on rough seas, but he anticipated the swells, leaning into the turns until it felt like he and the Cavalier had become one.

And then, with a sudden thump, there was a break, and they dropped below the storm’s strongest layers and into skies that felt, by comparison, relatively clear. Windspeed dropped and some semblance of control returned. There was even a few miles of intermittent visibility and, through it, a long winding silver snake that Eli recognized, after a moment of trying to get his bearings, as gravtrain tracks.

He grinned. “Now we’re in business.”

Beside him, Andres slumped in his chair, releasing some of the tension he’d been holding, and even going so far as to crack his eyes open.

The ride still wasn’t smooth and the ship continued to jostle and bump, but it was far from the maelstrom they’d just weathered.

Eli throttled up, one eye on the console, and followed the tracks. The signal from Taylor was coming through even more consistently now, and he had a bead on its direction and speed. They ought to close with the train in just a couple minutes, but this calm in the storm wouldn’t last indefinitely. Atmospheric sensors suggested that he only had a few minutes before they were back in a bad patch.

“I don’t know how you think you’re getting out of this,” said Andres, shaking his head. “You’re a dead man.”

“Not the first time I’ve heard it. And yet, here I am.”

“She’s going to hunt you down. You, your family, everyone you love.”

Eli sighed. “You’re a real cheery guy, anybody ever tell you that?”

Outside the canopy, Eli caught a glimmer of movement; he upped the magnification on the HUD to see the tail end of the gravtrain skimming through the barren expanse at what, from the perspective of a ship going probably half again its speed, seemed surprisingly slow. They’d be on top of it in just moments, and none too soon: on the horizon loomed another wall of sand, the end of this relatively peaceful stretch. If he didn’t get them out before then, well, it was going to get a whole lot harder. And sandier.

Time for another approach. He tapped the comm panel again, adjusting the frequency; it was a long shot, but they might be close enough for a point-to-point transmission to punch through the interference. “Gwen, do you copy? Cavalier on approach. Pickup clock at five minutes and counting down.”

No response; not even a double-click of acknowledgment. Eli felt a lump forming in the back of his throat. More than anything, he avoided looking in Andres’s direction, sure that the other man would have a self-satisfied smile on his face.

It’s not over, he repeated to himself, even as his eyes went to the imposing wall of sand and dirt just ahead of them. It’s not over yet.