Chapter 152 - Riding the Rails

  The null devil was beginning to resemble a partly-blown dandelion with the number of drogue chutes trailing off the thing. That is, if the dandelion bud and stem looked carved from black, alien onyx. Still, the thing had slowed, even if its broodlings had shed none of their alacrity. But those chutes were under terrible strain as they resisted the pull of the creature, and several had torn free already. This was a battle of our resources against the creature’s endurance. Every basic component material and complex machine we had were funneled to a single front above the desert; the might of an expanding technological kingdom measured against the innate brutality of an ancient and powerful predator.

  By rights, this culture shouldn’t exist. The goblins should still be frolicking in the forest with basic spears and stone cleavers, roaming and eating and free of worry. Instead, they were armed with guns and cheering at 15,000 chooms in the sky with breath borrowed from compressed air tanks. I could see the curve of Rava’s surface even better than you could see the Earth’s at this altitude owing to its smaller size. And we were still only 1/10th of the altitude we’d need for low orbit. I didn’t know if any creature on this world had ever seen such a thing—other than the null devil itself who had crashed into the planet ages ago.

  With its eyeless gaze fixed on us (or more likely, the ifrit in our engines and flight control systems), the null devil pressed towards us.

  “How soon until we can fire?” shouted Lura.

  “Soon!” I shouted back, watching several of the capacitor banks reach their redlines. At least one had burnt out and gone to zero, and beyond the zealot’s melee I could see sparkers frantically crawling about the electrical cables trying to fix the faults. Armstrong teetered past them with one of the heavy iron spikes, which he loaded into the back of the carriage and secured. The hobgoblin flashed me a thumbs up, and I returned it. On my console, the loaded light winked on, fizzled, and then burnt out. I threw the toggle from charge to arm.

  “Clear!” I shouted.

  The goblins all edged away from the railgun, which began to traverse as Lura operated the gimbal controls built into the aiming station. The rails protruding from the front of the turret angled down, compensating for Eileen’s steep climb to put us in view of the creatures armor that the missiles had weakened.

  “Lura, I don’t know how many shots we’ve got with this thing before it breaks, so make ‘em count,” I said. “Those darts have expanding tips, so they’ll do terrible damage to soft tissue but they won’t punch through armor.”

  “Aim then, for the burns and the blast marks,” she said, working the gimbal cranks to see how they affected the pan and tilt of the gun.

  “We’re ready to fire on your call!”

  More of the broodlings crashed into the hull. I could hear the thumps of their bodies against the outer skin of the aircraft, and the shouting on the deck above us as the crew rallied to repel one that must have gotten aboard. One of the side guns had gone silent. The zealots, having finally finished off the first broodling, screamed and charged back into the main cabin of the command jet.

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  Lura leaned into the viewfinder and worked the cranks, fine-tuning her aim.

  “Fire!” she shouted.

  I threw the switch to the fire position.

  A flash and a wave of pressure like a rocket detonating early nearly blasted me off my feet. At first I worried the gun had exploded, but when I looked over, the gun was in one piece and the now-empty carriage had slid forward to meet the heavy shock springs at the muzzle end. The rails themselves glowed with heat bloom, and two small fires burned at cable connections.

  Most telling at all was the five-meter geyser of smoking black ichor that erupted from the null devil’s back, as well as its roar of pain and fury.

  “Good hit!” I yelled over the roar. I hauled the firing switch back to the ready position and threw the other switch back to charging.

  Lura pulled back from the view finder with her brow furrowed and clicked her tongue. “For some drop I planned. But flew so true did this bolt that I missed my mark by near the length of a thundercleave.”

  “Yeah, if this thing is anything like the old military test models, it should have almost flat trajectory out to 7 kilochooms or so.”

  “How far is that?” asked Lura.

  I watched the needles rise again. “Do you remember the length of the box canyon where we fought the whistler with those helicopters?”

  “I do. You’re saying it would stay true from end-to-end?”

  “I’m saying lay 7 of those canyons end to end, and after that you might have to account for drop.”

  “Great grandfather spirits!”

  I held on to my console as Eileen banked hard to avoid a sudden surge of speed from the null devil that tore loose a dozen more of its drogue chutes. We began to climb, and this time the null devil pursued us higher into the Ravan sky, weaving a slow circle below us. The running dogfight climbed with it, though both fleets had visibly thinned. More of our fighters limped away and fighting was still raging on the deck above us.

  Armstrong hauled the carriage back with a hooked pole and loaded another dart. I could hear the thick leather of his gloves sizzling from the heat of the railgun carriage as he opened the hatch, but our forward air speed supplied a continuous stream of cooling wind to the assembly.

  “Uh, boss?” came Eileen’s voice on the intercom.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The, uh, wranglers are saying the little ones just broke off from the fight.”

  “Good! The railgun must have frightened them.”

  “Nah, boss,” said Eileen. A note of worry had entered her usually unflappable attitude. “They aren’t scarpin’. They’re all headed for the command jet.”

  I stiffened and then moved to the side to peer out one of the panels. The cloud of swarming broodlings had coalesced into a lance that spiraled up to meet us, even as the orcs and hobgoblins in their jets pursued it mercilessly, cannons rattling rockette trails through the ascending column of miniature null devils.

  The command jet was tough. But it wasn’t take-on-the-entire-brood tough. I ran back to my station. “Clear!” I shouted, throwing the toggle from charge to arm. “Lura, make it quick!”

  “Marksmanship such as this is not to be rushed, little brother,” she said, looking through the viewfinder.

  “It is when there might not be a plane around us much longer!”

  The gimbal was tilted almost vertical, so that the barrel of the railgun hung down below us like a fin cutting through the air. The coils still glowed with heat, and the capacitors were already reaching their redline. 2 more of the broodlings slammed into the side of the jet, followed by another just a few seconds later. The gun on our life side went silent.

  “Lura!”

  “Rush me not!” she spat back, cranking on the aiming wheels. “Stand ready!”

  I gripped the fire toggle, ready to throw it. At the opening near the muzzle of the railgun, one of the null broodling’s’ claws wrapped around the metal, and it hissed as it began to worm its way in, heedless of the scrapper fire. It couldn’t have been more than 3 chooms away from Lura.

  “LURA!”

  “Fire!”

  I swallowed and threw the second switch.