But Carter just breathes, holds the stick in fingers gone numb with shock, keeps his feet away from the pedals because his legs are shaking so badly. He looks out at the night. All around him, the peace of darkness has returned. It is like nothing ever happened at all.
In the comms tent, Diane cranes her neck and looks toward the door. “Did someone go to get the commander?” she asks. “Because we need him in here. Now.”
Artillery.
From above, the explosions unfold like flowers—crimson and sharp at the center, then fluffing outward to pale yellow, gray, then black. They blossom, open, then collapse back in on themselves as the laws of physics, momentarily brutalized, reassert themselves. Flames die, waves calm, vacuums are filled, shock stills, and gravity pulls all that dust and debris and death back down to the ground where it belongs. It’s fast, yet still appears to happen all in one long, slow motion. This is the difference between bombs and high-explosive artillery shells. Bombs are quick all through. They flare and are gone. Exploding shells, though, do that strange trick of seeming slow. That’s how one can tell the difference. See it enough and it’s a hard thing to forget.
Carter had seen it enough. Not here. Elsewhere. Other jobs in other places. He’d been caught once in a similar pressure wave, flying low over the trench and bunker lines on a planet called Feldike way out on the rim. Gravity was different there, harder and heavier, the atmosphere thick and poison. The company’d been flying for the cause then, too—Marxist revolt among the miners who’d decided that they deserved a piece of all the money being burned and cut and melted from the planet’s guts. Maybe not entirely Marxist, actually, but that didn’t matter. Those miners could pay up front, would pay an additional fortune when they won. And they were grateful for the help. Until the arrival of the flying circus (sixteen Flyboy squadrons, plus nearly five hundred command, control, and support personnel) the battles on Feldike had been fought mostly with the mining equipment—enormous rolling ore mills the size of an office block, tunneling machines like nightmare millipedes as long and large as bloated, rock-muddled skyscrapers laid on their sides. The machines could take a phenomenal amount of punishment but carried tools able to dish out phenomenal damage: massive stone grinders, lasers meant for cutting rock, jackhammers and rock drills, atomics. On the ground, they fought in environment suits, loader bodies, whatever was available—men like ants scaling the sides of the massive machines and planting demolition charges meant for blowing tunnel mouths, always going for the track linkages, articulated joints, the heat sinks or pilot’s compartments that sat behind six-inch-thick bubbles of shatterproof diamondoid but could be popped like a zit by a determined enemy.
The company’s arrival had changed the dynamics of the war. The machines still in the hands of management were slow, large targets and could be pummeled from afar by sheaf rockets, laser-guided smart munitions, and bombs meant for cracking mountains. Up close, they could be eviscerated by chain guns firing deuterium-tipped rounds, six thousand per minute, or thermite rockets. They could be crippled by high explosives and then killed by the miners who swarmed over them. On nights off, camped out in the top floors of seized company offices, the pilots would stand with their noses pressed against the diamond glass, watching the distant action like a fireworks show. The best entertainment in town.
The planes they’d flown there had been strange tractor/jet mutants, sucking in the poison atmosphere from a scoop in the nose, accelerating it through the length of the dart-like body and then spitting it out the back end as turbine thrust. They were slow, flew with all the elegance of a brick, fell from the toxic sky like killed birds almost every day from wear and corrosion and just plain orneriness. They’d been custom engineered for the environment just like the biplanes they flew now had been for Iaxo, but Feldike’s was an environment that was hostile to everything. There was no native life there. Just humans who’d come for the stones.
The mining company had been almost beaten, had resorted to desperation tactics to dislodge the miners, when Carter’d had his accident. They’d begun employing the magnetic accelerators, once used to fling things into orbit, like primitive mortars, dialing the charge way down and throwing all kinds of things into them, blind-firing in the direction of the trench lines that had, at that point, been dug within fifty miles of the corporate headquarters and port facilities. One thing the miners were very good at was digging. The war was going to be over within a week.
It was a mining charge that’d erupted below Carter’s jet on Feldike. Smallish. A couple of kilotons, maybe. Enough to rip a fifty-meter crater in the terrible earth and pop Carter’s jet up like a cork, knock it clean into a flip—nose over jet and ass over teakettle. The vacuum caused the turbine to sputter and fail. It’d refused to restart, and Carter had hit the switch, punching out just five hundred feet above the surface, briefly riding a hydrogen peroxide charge clear of the tumbling jet body, then watching the barrage as he descended, sealed cockpit hanging below three drag chutes and heading to ground fast. The explosions then had looked the same as the explosions on Iaxo—weird, slo-mo blooms making umbrellas rather than mushrooms in the heavy gravity but unfolding with the same peculiar indolence.