“Do we know where we’re going?” asked Wan.
“No idea,” Clarissa said.
“Anywhere but here,” Ada said.
“Wonderful plan,” Wan said. “You pick.”
“How gracious of you,” Ada said sarcastically. She pushed her hoverbike forward. She was comfortable on it, even if it had a wicked shimmy that didn’t bode well for a long trip. Her boyfriend had had a similar hoverbike back in Sweden. He used to take her on rides all the time. When they broke up, she’d gotten one of her own. Partly out of spite, but partly because it was just so damn fun.
“Let’s go.” Ada shot out of the garage and into the wide fields of Europa, and pushed the bike to top speed as soon as she could.
The others followed close behind, though Wan started to lag, and it dawned on her that their erstwhile captain had no idea how to fly without a spaceship under his feet and a pilot behind the controls. Typical.
Even though they were out of the scout base and away from the threat of being crushed to death, Ada knew they were far from safe. She risked a glance over her shoulder, expecting that they’d been spotted. The missile strikes on the base were continuing, though she was sure now that the battleships were simply preserving their missiles and waiting to come in closer to pulverize the base with kinetic rounds. That would be a much cheaper way to level it.
Then she spotted a pair of specks breaking free of the lead battleship and starting in their direction, hugging close to the ground.
“What are those?” she shouted back at Clarissa, hoping the former agent knew whatever tricks the AIC were up to out here better than her.
Clarissa looked back. “Those are crabs!” she shouted over the wind noise.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Wan said.
“It’s not,” Clarissa said. “It’s very much not.”
Of course, Clarissa thought. Nothing can be easy. “Crabs” were low-altitude fighters designed to fight on a planetside battlefield, not in space. They got their name from the frontal design. Two sharpened, sickle-like half-moon blades protruded out from both sides of the sharp-tipped cockpit. On the field they could literally fly through troops like a smart projectile, cutting down anyone unfortunate enough not to hear them coming—which was made worse by the fact that they were designed to be as quiet as possible.
“How far?” asked Clarissa as she and Congo noticed their pursuers.
“Hard to say.” Ada in fact didn’t know. She’d been to the base on Europa, the UEF HQ, for training, but that was a while ago. It didn’t help that everything on Europa kind of looked the same. There weren’t landmarks or anything like that to use as a guide.
“Give it a try,” Wan yelled from the rear. “And I hope it’s real close!” He turned on his hoverbike, armed with his old pistol. He fired at the two crabs quickly closing in on them. The bullets bounced off the forward armor. He’d need a perfect shot to do much damage to the bastards.
He kept firing lamely anyway. If you couldn’t be clever, be relentless. Hadn’t some famous general said that at some point? Probably not. But Wan wasn’t going to let facts slow him down.
He saw the bladed sickles on the AIC vehicle. “Who designs these things?” he growled impotently as ships were getting dangerously close. It was bad enough to be killed by these things. But cut in half? That was just rude.
“I’m going to have to take extreme measures!” he yelled forward to the others. His hoverbike had been slowly falling back as he fired.
“What?” Ada said, looking behind her just as Wan pulled on the hoverbike’s handlebar-mounted brake levers. “What are you doing?”
“Hell if I know,” Wan said, barely loud enough to be heard over the wind and the sudden distance between them. Then he leaned his body weight all the way to the left, pulling with his arms at the same time. The crab flew just overhead of him, its bottom scraping the protruding right side of the pirate’s ride. Sparks rained down on him as he gritted his teeth, barely able to hold on.
The crab flew over and past Wan towards the others.
Ada didn’t know Wan was doing and she didn’t care. She knew that the crab ships needed to be dealt with or they’d be dead within the next couple of minutes. Wan was the only one armed and if his early efforts were any indication, his gun wasn’t going to do much good. Still it was better than nothing, which is what the rest of them had—that was, unless they got creative. She had an idea, but needed some help from one of the others.
“Clarissa!” Ada pulled up next to Clarissa as they both pushed their hoverbikes as fast as they could go. “Let’s get low!” she yelled over the sound of the bikes’ engines and the whoosh of air through and around their ears.
Clarissa looked at her quizzically.
“Trust me,” Ada said.
She waved at Congo and after a nod at Clarissa, the three hoverbike riders dropped down and shifted their weight towards the back of their bikes in unison.
Their vehicles’ rears scraped against the black soil, kicking up dust and dirt clouds. Then they wove in and out of each other, creating a shield of dust.
If Ada had hoped to force the crabs to fall back, she was disappointed. If anything, they came even faster, firing into the large dust and dirt cloud as they did so.
Ada, Clarissa, and Congo managed to dodge the shots, which hit the ground harmlessly. But eventually one would hit them, even if just a lucky shot. They had to go on the offensive.
Wan watched the choreographed dust storm as he urged his own hoverbike forward. “What the hell are they doing?” Wan said out loud to himself as he watched the three women do everything they could to avoid getting clipped by the crabs. “All they got to do”—he aimed his pistol at the exhaust on the back of the crab that had flown over him seconds earlier—“is be patient.” He smiled at the irony of him saying those words.
Wan fired at the crab’s engine exhaust again. This time his bullets didn’t bounce off. Smoke began to billow out the back of one of the crabs. It peeled off, undoubtedly to try and figure out what happened, and stabilize. But it didn’t return to the fleet to make repairs.
The AIC fleet hadn’t stopped, of course. After leveling the base, it kept coming. Either it was following the hoverbikes or, more likely, it was heading toward the same destination they were. Wan wasn’t a fan of that, either.
Wan saw that the other crab had veered off to one side and turned back to head straight towards him. “Oh damn, he didn’t like that,” he said, guessing the pilot wasn’t thrilled that his buddy had gotten his wings clipped.
Wan had to think fast. In a matter of a dozen seconds he was going to be a bloody smear on the wastes of Europa. But for all his laziness and interpreted cowardice, he’d been nicknamed “Golden Lion” for a reason. Sure, it was mostly self-promotion, but the man could fight. Even more important, the man knew how to use his brain and whatever limited resources he had to survive.
Before leaving the scout base, Wan had made a point to pocket some goodies. It was a little party bag, if you will. Among them were a couple of high-explosive grenades. At the time he didn’t know why he’d need them, but he was happy he had taken them.