In the pilot’s seat, Grant reached toward the fire-control console. “Locking a Shrike.”
“That’s a big neg,” snapped Salvo’s voice through the comm link. “We don’t want to give Reeth forewarning.”
Kane and Grant exchanged puzzled, irritated glances. “With all due respect, sir,” Kane said, trying to smooth the tone of annoyance from his voice, “he must know we’re here.”
“He doesn’t know that we know,” Salvo replied sharply. “My order stands.”
“Yes, sir.” Kane’s voice was neutral, but his lips were tight.
He glanced again at Grant, and their eyes met in a silent, wry acknowledgment of their opinion of the order and the man who had issued it. Since all three Deathbirds were communications linked, they couldn’t voice their opinions.
They could make faces, though, and Grant’s long, heavy-jawed face momentarily twisted into an imitation of their superior officer’s standard expressionpursed, puritanical and miserly. Kane smiled wryly in appreciation of the mockery. He noticed Grant was sweating. Droplets of tension-induced perspiration reflected the lights of the control console, causing them to sparkle against his ebony skin like stars in a black sky.
Kane realized he was sweating, too. He could feel the drops forming in the roots of his thick, dark hair, starting to slide down his high forehead from his hairline.
Grant and Kane hated forestalling preemptive action. Like all hard-contact Magistrates, they cursed the long hours of preparation for a mission, the seemingly endless briefings and strategy sessions that burned the details of the operation in their memories. The other four members of the hard-contact team, deployed in the two Deathbirds behind them, were finely honed enforcers, superbly conditioned by a constant regimen of merciless training and even more merciless experience.
But it was the minutes directly preceding a deep penetration into a hellzone that felt like a long chain of interlocking eternities. Those minutes were the hardest to endure. Though the streets and alleys and Pits of Cobaltville were sometimes dangerous, leaving the security of its walls was always a little unnerving. There had been no outward display of fear, or even false bravado about the mission just a calm, self-confident and professional ease.
Banking the Deathbird slowly around a curve in the canyon wall, Grant kept one gauntleted hand near the fire-control board. The course was narrow, with little room for fancy evasive maneuvering if it was called for.
Kane kept his gray blue eyes fastened on the display monitor and the rapidly changing features of the terrain above, below and all around them. He intoned, “Coming up on the anomaly in thirty secondsmark.”
Grant nodded, glanced at the illuminated compass on the panel and made a three-degree course correction.
From ahead and below, a searchlight came on.
A white funnel of incandescence swept up and across the ramparts of the canyon walls. It struck the Deathbird and stayed there. Despite the tinted Plexiglas canopy, the light was momentarily blinding.
“Well, shit,” Grant mumbled mildly, squinting and pulling back on the yoke.
The Deathbird rose swiftly, the rotor blades whining, churning to a blurred, hazy circle. Before Grant was able to correct for attitude, a fireball bloomed portside, barely two yards below the missile-fitted stub wing.
The craft shuddered from the rolling concussion. Kane felt the shock from the deck plates traveling up from his feet to the top of his head, only slightly absorbed by his body armor.
From the bottom of the canyon, a cylindrical tower rose, a hump of textured brown plastic falling away, popping up like a trapdoor, sand and pebbles cascading down.
The tower rotated, and the searchlight mounted on top of it swung up, following the Deathbird’s sudden ascent. Protruding from four oblong slits on each side of the ten-foot-tall tower were multiple blaster barrels.
“What the flash-blasted hell?” Grant bellowed, angling the Deathbird away from the questing finger of light.
Kane stared with stunned disbelief at the image of the Vulcan-Phalanx gun housing on his tactical display. The rotating multibarreled weapons fired uranium-tipped explosive shells at 6600 rounds per minute. Only one shell had been fired, either as a feint or as a range-finding tactic.
The Vulcan-Phalanx system was a standard defense at Cobaltville and most of the other network of villes stretching across the length and breadth of the Outlands. The housings were automated, containing tracking and fire-control radars. Finding one of them in a Colorado hellzone was as unprecedented as finding a swamp-mutie in Baron Cobalt’s bathtub.