It was an assignment that warmed the cockles of Ockerman’s heart.
He took the airship up to three hundred feet and banked a turn for the canyon mouth; once there, he swung 180 degrees and hovered. The anonymous village spread out below him was tinted in various unnatural shades of green, blue, orange and yellow, depending on the relative intensity of radiant heat.
“There goes Connors,” Hylander said. “Man, is he honking!”
Ockerman’s infrared sensor displayed a yellow Captain Connors driving a green ATV out of town at high speed. Like Ockerman, Connors ran without lights, relying on his battlesuit’s simulations to find his way through the dark.
After adjusting the parameters of his visor’s infrared scan, Ockerman cranked up the magnification to ten power and zoomed in on the ground. The gyroplane’s forward-looking sensor could detect temperature differentials on the soil surface of less than one-one hundredth of a degree. Variations that slight were meaningless without a computer search for specific patterns of difference, patterns that could be expected to be left behind when six people were running for their lives.
Finding their footprints was almost too easy.
Even after more than half an hour, there was enough of an elevated heat signature for the system to isolate them. Ockerman located one set of tracks and followed it until it joined three others. At the base of the cliff, the four sets of prints were joined by another two.
“Connors,” he said through the helmet-to-helmet comm link, “I have all of our targets heading up the south side of the ridge, about half a mile from the canyon entrance.”
“Got any direct visual on them?” Connors asked. “If so, you’d better feed it to me.”
Ockerman magnified his view field even further, holding the gyroplane steady as he scanned a greenish-blue landscape of craggy pinnacles. After a minute or so he said, “Pedro, I got nothing. What about you?”
“I can’t see them,” Hylander said, “but I can see the chute they climbed to reach the summit.”
“Yeah, I mark that, too. Are you getting the video feed, Connors?”
“Roger that. I’ll drive around to the other side of the ridge and cut off their retreat. From the map sim, it’s going to take me a while, though. Maybe fifteen minutes, depending on the terrain I have to cross.”
“No worries,” Ockerman said. “In the meantime, we’ll try to locate them and give you their exact bearings. I’ll wait until you’re in position before I make my first run.” With that, Ockerman signed off.
The systems engineer tensed his lower back and his right biceps simultaneously. The gyroplane responded with a gut-wrenching, five-g loop.
Taken completely by surprise, his passenger could only moan.
As much as Ockerman enjoyed developing the complex artificial intelligences used in military weaponry, he liked the no-limits, hands-on stuff even better.
This dog loved to hunt.
Under a three-quarter moon, with the airship’s sensory enhancements, its complement of lethal weaponry, its speed and maneuverability, there was no doubt about it. He was Shadow World’s ultimate predator.
If the opportunity came his way, he had no intention of sharing the action with Connors.
“Ockerman, you’re killing me back here,” Hylander complained after he found his voice.
“Toughen up, Pedro. This is the AirCav.”
“If you make me puke inside my suit”
“What a fucking Grandma!”
“Let’s just find the bastards and get the job done.”
“Yeah, but with style.” Ockerman gave his body a little twitch. The assault gyro juked upward as if about to pull another balls-to-the-wall, overhead 360. Ockerman didn’t complete the maneuver; he didn’t have to. The juke was enough to wring another highly satisfying groan out of Hylander.
The mission they were on was twofoldto preemptively stop the Shadow people from making another hit on the missile, and to recover as many live subjects as possible for Hylander’s tissue studies. Part of the biologist’s mission was to evaluate the health danger the indigenous population presented to migrants from Earth. FIVE’s CEOs were concerned that the natives could be carrying infectious diseases that newcomers had no defenses against. It was conceivable that in order to make Shadow World safe for colonization, military units were going to have to isolate the existing human population in internment camps, or simply exterminate them.