Chapter 18
“What are the odds that offering them drugs will open the door for us again?” Alisa asked, activating the comm.
“Poor.” Leonidas scraped his fingers through his hair and glanced back. “Any idea how your people got in here, Leblanc?”
“No, sir,” the chef said, leaning forward in his seat.
The sir surprised Alisa, especially coming from the corporate head of a giant restaurant business, and she wondered if he had some military service in his background. No time to ask now.
“Greetings, air traffic controller,” Alisa said over the comm. “This is Captain Andromeda again. We were unable to make arrangements for a wholesaling deal, and we’d like to leave the dome now.”
Mica snorted from the seat behind Leonidas. Abelardus had been left in the back—or had chosen to stay in the back—standing over the mafia man, who seemed to be unconscious. Beck was also standing over him, a fist on his hip, as if he had something to say and was annoyed the man wasn’t awake to hear it.
If there was anyone in the air-traffic control tower, the person did not answer Alisa’s message. She eyed the weapons panel as she guided them in circles in front of the forcefield. Would shooting at it do anything? The next time she came around, she tapped the weapons. A blazer bolt streaked out, landing in the center of the forcefield. It absorbed the energy with bland indifference.
“That’s not going to work,” Mica said. “We’ll have to find the air-traffic control tower, blow it up, and hope the forcefield generator is inside.” She pointed between the seats. “That’s probably it there.”
“Blow it up?” Alisa banked, taking them in another circle. “This is a city. Those are normal people down there, not imperial soldiers.”
Leonidas gave her a flat look and reached for the comm.
“Think they’ll be more likely to respond to a cyborg?” Alisa asked.
“I’m not comming the tower.”
“Uh oh,” Alisa said, noticing a change in the battle taking place over the Comet Compound. Several ships were veering away and heading in the charger’s direction. “Leblanc? Those look like food freighters.”
Leblanc waved his stolen earstar. “I got through to Captain Varesh. They’re coming to protect us.”
“I’d rather they came to open the door.”
Not surprisingly, at least a dozen of the mafia ships took off after the freighters. Alisa groaned. She had preferred it when nobody had been noticing them. She had a feeling she was going to have to do more than fly in circles shortly.
“Just hit the traffic tower,” Mica said. “The city is already in ruins. Look at all the smoking buildings. What does it matter now?”
Alisa admitted that having a war going on in the airspace over a city was not healthy for its citizens. But she did not need to add to their problems.
“We’re not going to shoot at non-mafia civilians,” she said.
“I bet they cleared out of the tower when this started. Wouldn’t you have? Especially if you were the idiot who let all these angry enemy ships inside?”
Alisa hesitated, tempted by the logic.
“This is Solstice,” the woman’s voice came over the comm, and Alisa looked at it incredulously. “What can I do for you, Colonel?”
“You have her private comm code?” Alisa whispered, unable to believe she had answered personally and also unable to believe Leonidas was comming her. What could she do to help from thirty miles away?
“We’re trapped in the city with the forcefield up,” Leonidas said. “Can you do anything to lower it? The odds of us returning your ship to you are poor if we can’t escape.”
Alisa ground her teeth. She hated the idea of asking that woman for help. Even though they needed it, she hoped Solstice did not have the power to provide it. It wasn’t as if she would have a remote control to some other mafia family’s dome, right?
“Which means the odds of you returning would be poor, too, I imagine,” Solstice said. “That would distress me far more than losing a ship, Colonel.”
Mica made a gagging noise.
Alisa might have done the same, but those two armadas of ships were drawing closer, and she had to concentrate on flying. She broke away from her circling pattern, eyeing that control tower again, and she headed along the dome away from the forcefield. The freighters turned to follow her. Or were they trying to cut her off? No, she realized, as a big one moved to flank her. They were protecting her.
“Captain Varesh,” Leblanc said from the back seat. “How did you get in before? We need to get out before those mafia ships realize we have one of their leaders.”
Something he didn’t need to announce over an unsecured channel…
“We bribed someone for a code, Chef,” came the response over the earstar. “It’s not working anymore. Looks like they shut down all access in and out of the city.”
Weapons fire slammed into the interior wall of the dome less than a hundred feet ahead of the charger. Alisa hit the button to raise the shields. Thanks to Leblanc’s buddies, the mafia ships were now firing at them too.
“What if we land, rent some bikes, and ride back?” Abelardus said. “I’d rather deal with dinosaurs than the mafia.”
Leonidas glanced back at him. “We should return the ship we borrowed if possible.”
Alisa kept herself from glaring at him. Barely. It wasn’t his fault that Solstice had taken a fancy to him, and he was saying the honorable thing, not the enamored thing. Technically, Alisa agreed with it. She would not ditch a ship she had borrowed, not unless it was a last resort, no matter who the owner was.
“I’ll wake up my hacker and see what she can do, Colonel,” Solstice said over the comm.
“I’ll hold my breath waiting for magic,” Mica muttered.
“Pardon?” Solstice asked.
“The crew appreciates your help,” Leonidas said.
“Who knew the cyborg would be the diplomat here?” Abelardus said from the back.
Blazer fire slipped past the freighter attempting to guard them and kissed the charger’s shields. More mafia ships seemed to take to the air with every passing minute. Alisa had a feeling the daring rescue Leblanc’s people had planned was going to end in an ugly way if someone couldn’t lower that forcefield. Their charger might meet an ugly end, too, if she relied upon the food freighters to protect her. As it was, she could barely see around them to figure out what threats were coming.
Alisa spotted a surround-flow holo option on the control panel and flicked it on. The display wrapped around her head, showing her the three-dimensional layout in all directions with the charger at the center. Ships and anything else moving were highlighted, showing up more brightly than the contours of the dome and the city lying below, and the computer quickly sorted out enemies and non-aggressors, displaying the former in red and the latter in blue. The amount of red floating in the air around Alisa was daunting. Nonetheless, she saw the field better now and started flying more defensively instead of simply letting the freighters try to protect her charger from fire using their bulk. She swept down toward the streets, zipping between buildings, hoping the mafia would be reluctant to shoot up their own city.
“Beck,” Alisa called back without looking, “is your new friend awake yet?”
“No.”
“How about finding a first-aid kit and stabbing him with something to rouse him? I can’t help but feel that we shouldn’t be getting shot at by mafia ships when we have the mafia boss aboard. That is who we have, isn’t it? You didn’t just pluck up a random passenger, right?” She glanced at Leonidas.
“He’s the brother I wanted to kidnap, yes,” Beck said. “Medric. A lot of the others were already dead or buried under a collapsed deck. Medric was injured and needs medical attention too.”
“I thought you were torturing him,” Mica said.
“I just want his people to stop hunting me.”
“He’s going to wake up airsick and puking if Alisa keeps flying like that.” Mica g
roaned, perhaps on the verge of airsickness herself.
No less than eight mafia fighters streaked after them, following the charger as Alisa dove through streets that were empty, either because of the hour or because of the battle raging overhead. She flew between buildings and around corners, trying to make sure their enemies were as likely to hit friendly targets as they were to hit her if they fired.
It worked to a degree, with the shots coming less frequently, even though the mafia ships chased after her, but she couldn’t do this indefinitely. They had to figure out a way to lower that forcefield.
“Abelardus,” she called, banking hard to whip the charger around the corner of a dome-scraper and into a wide boulevard leading to a green, tree-filled park that looked like it belonged on Perun rather than this marshy gray hole. “How close do you need to be to people to manipulate them?”
“Depends on if I’m familiar with them,” he said.
“How familiar are you with air traffic controllers?” She weaved between oak and maple trees brought from Old Earth centuries before, their branches stretching toward the top of the dome, leaves fluttering down in the charger’s wake. One of her pursuers cut his turn too close and smashed into a park fountain in an attempt to avoid the trees. Unfortunately, most of the mafia pilots were wiser—they were simply flying above the city, tracking the charger’s path from above. The surround-flow showed other ones zipping ahead, trying to find a way to cut her off or corner her.
“Not very,” Abelardus said.
“I’ll fly close to the tower, so you can try to acquaint yourself and convince whoever’s in there to lower the forcefield, since the city could use a breath of fresh air right now.”
“Fresh air or toxic air?” Mica asked.
“No need to quibble. Abelardus, will you do it?”
“Yes, I’ll try. Get me close. There are thousands and thousands of people in the city, and it’s hard to isolate a single aura.”
The charger’s shields clipped a streetlamp as Alisa cruised out of the park and into an industrial part of the city. The post tipped over, cracking as it fell.
“Oops,” she said. It was the first thing she had hit, which seemed miraculous given her wild path, but she glanced at Leonidas, her expression sheepish. She liked to think she was good enough not to wreck cities when she flew, especially since this craft was faster and more maneuverable than the Nomad.
Leonidas rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he watched the broken lamp recede in the rear camera.
“No follow-up from Solstice, eh?” Alisa asked, though they all would have heard it already if she’d come over the comm.
Leonidas shook his head and leaned forward, pulling up a holomap in front of his seat, the virtual edges overlapping the edge of her own map. “I have an interesting thought.”
“Interesting? Does it involve me in underwear?” Alisa asked.
He blinked and looked over at her.
“That’s extremely interesting. I assure you. One day, you’ll realize that.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it again, appearing more puzzled than interested.
Alisa took the charger around a bank of warehouses, the curve of the dome visible up ahead. Aware of four Cobras and Strikers angling in to cut her off—it was as if they knew she was heading for the control tower—she rose up above them and gunned the engine. The ship burst forward with impressive speed, but their enemies opened fire at once, targeting her more easily without the buildings in the way. She weaved, dipping back low and flying through the shop-lined arcade of a mall. One ship’s e-cannon blast took off the roof of a building.
“That wasn’t my fault,” Alisa said. “What’s your thought, Leonidas?”
Leblanc was muttering into his comm again, trying to get a couple of his freighters to provide protection at the control tower, but with the map floating around her head, Alisa could see that his people’s ships had trouble of their own. The mafia had finally had time to get all of their forces into the air, creating a fleet of attack craft. They were swooping all about the bulky freighters, dodging their cannons and pummeling them with weapons of their own. Alisa doubted the charger would get more help from that quarter. In fact, if they didn’t find a way to open that forcefield soon, the mafia ships would take down all of Leblanc’s people.
“Abelardus?” Alisa said—Leonidas was frowning at the map and hadn’t answered her yet. “How’s that tower looking?” It was dead ahead, along with the still-closed forcefield. “Any sexy ladies in there waiting for you to manipulate them?”
“No ladies at all,” Abelardus said grimly. “Or men.”
“What do you mean? It’s abandoned?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. There’s nobody in there to manipulate, and I’m not familiar enough with the controls to operate them. Mechanical devices aren’t my specialty.”
“Guess you and Mica will never get together then.”
“I hadn’t realized that was a possibility, regardless,” he said.
“It wasn’t,” Mica said. “You’re going to have to manipulate that tower the physical way, Captain.”
“What, by blowing it up?”
“That is physical.”
“Some manipulation.”
Though Alisa hated the idea of willful destruction, especially when that tower rose up from tenement buildings where people were probably pressed to the windows, gawking out at the chaos, she lifted the nose of the charger so she could fly toward it. She skimmed the rooftops, one hand resting on the weapons panel. Would blowing it up do anything? She had no way of knowing if the generator that controlled the forcefield was inside of that tower. She might hurt—or kill—innocent people for no reason.
“Here,” Leonidas said, zooming in on three black rectangular buildings a third of the way around the dome from them. The dark, windowless lumps rose from amid open pavement, with fencing around them littered with warning signs. “These are the geothermal power generators for the city. If we knock them out—”
“Yes,” Alisa said, banking to head in that direction, immediately liking the idea. If they knocked out power to the whole city, the forcefield should go down, and it would create chaos—and darkness—everywhere. Even better, there weren’t any tenements around those generator buildings.
She was tempted to reach over and thump Leonidas on the shoulder to thank him for the idea, but a pair of Cobras sprang out from behind the control tower as she veered away from it. They hadn’t shown up on the display, and she cursed, urging the charger to greater speed as she streaked away from them. They zoomed after her, weapons firing. Alarms lit up as the blasts slammed into the rear shields.
“I think they knew what we had in mind,” Alisa muttered, diving for the streets again.
She would have preferred to fly straight toward the generators, but she was forced to whip between buildings again, using the structures for cover from the fire. The charger had decent shield power, but it couldn’t take hits indefinitely, and she had no idea if Leonidas’s plan would work. What if there was backup battery power allocated to the forcefield? Or what if the generators were too shielded to blow up, even with e-cannons?
“The sexy mind manipulation of air-traffic tower employees?” Mica asked.
“Exactly,” Alisa said. “Though technically, it was the employees I thought would be sexy. Not Abelardus's mind manipulation.”
“It’s possible I’m offended,” Abelardus said.
“You don’t know for sure?”
Alisa turned into an alley to avoid a Striker flying directly overhead and shooting downward. Its blasts struck the street she had left as she flipped the charger on its side to make room for the wings.
“I won’t know until I see whether you actually get us out of this,” Abelardus said.
“I’m sorry about this, Captain,” Beck said from the back. “I didn’t mean for you all to get in trouble on account of my being predictable to the White Dragon folks and getting trapped.”
A maf
ia ship waited for her when she came out of the alley. Instead of veering—which would have opened her flank up for fire, Alisa drove the charger straight toward it. Their enemy only got off one shot before pulling up in an alarmed jerk. Alisa flew them through the airspace it had occupied and onward. The bank of generators came into sight.
“Don’t worry about it, Beck,” Alisa said. “We managed to find trouble of our own without you. This is part of a typical day.”
Leonidas looked over at her.
“Going to argue?” she asked him.
“I thought to nod in agreement, actually.”
“It’s good when we’re in agreement about things.” She smirked at him, but dared not look away from the controls for long.
The Striker she had startled into moving had gotten over its surprise and was chasing after them. Four Cobras appeared behind it, and several more jumped into the pack. The alarms beeped as weapons fire found the charger’s rear shields again. The display flashed yellow at her, the power dropping below forty percent.
“Any particular one look nice to you?” Alisa asked as they sped toward the generators. “I don’t think we’re going to get a chance to do this more than once.”
Even as she spoke, more ships veered away from the fight with the freighters. She had a feeling the mafia people knew what she had in mind. Their rush to defend the generators made her hope that Leonidas was on to something, that this might work.
“All of them,” he said and reached for the weapons panel in front of his seat.
She fired her weapons at the same time as he did. The charger reverberated with the power of both of the ship’s e-cannons firing. The blasts slammed into the dark, featureless buildings, and Alisa held her breath as they flew past. Were they shielded? Had they gotten them?
The rear cameras caught an explosion, and she found that encouraging. As she banked, willing to risk the fire of all those pursuers in order to unload the charger’s weapons one more time, the dome went dark. Every light in every building went out, and so did every lamppost lining the streets—the ones that remained standing after Alisa’s wild flight.
“That’s it,” Abelardus said. “The forcefield is down. Go, go!”