Foreigner

The engine sound came clearer and clearer, illegal use, unapproved use, to fire from the air—they’d designed the stall limits to discourage it, considering that Mospheira was situated as it was, easily within reach of small aircraft. They’d kept the speed up, not transferred anything to do with targeting—no fuses, no bomb sights; it was the paidhi’s job to keep a thing like this from happening…

His mind was busy with that train of thought as the plane came down the stream-cut roadway, low, straight at them. Its single engine echoed off the hills. The riders around him drew guns, a couple of them lifted hunting rifles—and he didn’t know to that moment whether atevi had figured out how to mount guns on aircraft, or whether it was only a reckless pilot spotting them and trying to scare them.

The plane’s skin was thin enough bullets might get to the pilot or hit something vital, like the fuel tanks. He didn’t know its design that intimately. It hadn’t been on his watch. Wilson’s, it had probably been Wilson’s tenure…

His heart thudded in panic. Their column had stopped entirely now and faced about to the attack. He held Nokhada on a short rein, while gunfire racketed around him, aimed aloft.

The plane roared over them, and explosions went off in midair, over their heads, making the mecheiti jump and all but bolt. Puffs of smoke lingered after the fireballs. Rocks rolled down the mountain, dislodging slides of gravel.

“Dropping explosives,” he heard someone say.

Bombs. Grenades. Above all, trust that atevi handled numbers. They wouldn’t make that many mistakes. “They haven’t got the timing down,” he said urgently to Banichi, who’d reined in near him. “It blew above us. They’ll figure it. They’ll reset those fuses. We can’t give them any more tries at us.”

“We haven’t got a choice,” Banichi said. Atevi didn’t sweat. Banichi was sweating. His face was a color he’d never seen an atevi achieve, as he methodically shoved in another clip, from the small number remaining on his belt.

The plane was coming around again, and their group moved as Babs started out at a fast pace, descending as the stream-cut road descended. The mecheiti bunched up now, as close as the terrain allowed, trampling shrubs.

Changing the altitude, changing the targeting equation, Bren thought to himself—it was the best thing they could do, besides find cover the land didn’t offer them, while that atevi pilot was trying to work out the math of where his bombs had hit. Somebody behind him was yelling something about concentrating fire on the fusilage and the pilot, not the wings, the fuel tanks were closer in.

It was all crazed. He heard the roar of the engine and looked up as the plane came streaking down at them, this time from the side, over the mountain opposite them, and gave them only a brief window of fire.

Explosions pounded the hill above them and showered them with rock chunks and dirt—Nokhada jumped and threw her head at an enemy she couldn’t reach.

“Getting smart, the bastard,” someone said, and Ilisidi, in the lead, led them quickly around the shoulder of the hill, off the road now, while they could hear the plane coming back again.

Then came a distant rumble out of the south, the sound of thunder. Weather moving in.

Please God, Bren thought. Clouds and cover. He’d nerved himself for the bombs. The prospect of rescue had, his hands trembling and the sweat breaking out under his arms.

Another pass. A bomb hit behind them and set brush burning.

A second plane roared over immediately behind that, and dropped its bombs the other side of the hill,

“There’s two of them,” Giri cried. “Damn!”

“That one’s still figuring it out,” Banichi said. The number one plane was coming back again. They were caught on an open hillside, and Banichi and Jago and Cenedi and the rest of them drew calm aim, tracked it as it came—Cenedi said, at the last moment, “Behind the cowling.”

They opened up, gunfire echoing off the other hill.

The plane roared over and didn’t drop its bombs. It ripped just above the crest of the hill and a second later a loud explosion shook the ground.

Nobody cheered. The second plane was coming in fast and they were on the move again, picking their way over the rocks, traveling as fast as they could. Thunder boomed again. One assumed it was thunder. The second plane came over again and dropped its bombs too soon. They hit the hill crest.

They descended the steep way, then, into a narrow ravine, a smaller window for the plane at its speed than it was for them. They heard a plane coming. Its engine was sputtering as thunder—it had to be thunder—rolled and rumbled in the distance.

That plane’s crippled, Bren thought. Something’s wrong with it. God, there’s hope.

He didn’t think it would drop its bombs. He watched it make its pass in the narrow sky above them.