Profiteer

The Hegira’s vectored jets hadn’t reached full pressure yet. Dom didn’t wait for them. He hit the main drive units on full and rolled off the edge of the roof. The car was designed for vertical takeoff. It needed those vector jets to maneuver. It fell.

 

Dom had a great view of a platoon of marines below him. They saw the descending craft and—probably a smart move—broke formation and ran. Behind him, the main drive blew out windows down the side of the residence complex.

 

He wasn’t in free fall. The drive accelerated him faster than gravity wanted him to. Dom watched the pressure of the vector thrust build. Slow, too damn slow. The ground was too damn close.

 

He opened the vector jets prematurely and hoped it would be enough to maneuver the craft.

 

The Hegira shot away from the wall, and Dom desperately tried to get the nose up. The front end drifted upward, giving him a view of scattering marines, landing craft, and the blown perimeter defenses.

 

The G-force he pulled would have made him black out if he were still built with his original equipment.

 

According to the altimeter, he couldn’t have dropped as far as it had felt like. He could have sworn he’d kissed the ground, but when the car’s trajectory flattened out, he flew by just under the top of the fifty-meter-tall perimeter towers.

 

Once he cleared the edge of the GA&A property, the ground started dropping away. The foothills below him began to sprout thick purplish-orange forest as he shot west, away from the mountains.

 

Red lights began to flash across the control console. The Hegira had soaked up a few hits. Even as Dom started to assess the damage, the little craft began shaking.

 

The view out the windshield wasn’t encouraging. It looked as if he were skimming right on the top of the forest canopy. Barely a second would go by without an outflung branch throwing ocher foliage across the nose.

 

He switched on the rear video. There wasn’t any sign of pursuit. The attack didn’t want him, or at least he wasn’t a priority target. They were after the GA&A complex. That gave him room to breathe. If he could land this thing.

 

Woods shot by around him, getting closer. Godwin was still a good ten klicks away, and now that the grade below him had flattened out, he was losing altitude. The pressure in the vector jets wasn’t enough to keep him airborne, and there was no way he could cut them and let the pressure build back up.

 

He should have budgeted for a contragrav.

 

The view out the nose was now totally obscured by dark foliage. Warning beeps sounded from every available speaker. The Hegira was shaking like someone having a seizure. It crashed through the canopy with a sound as though it was tearing the universe a new asshole.

 

He needed to gain altitude—quick.

 

He lowered the rear of the Hegira, hoping to use the main drive in the rear to boost him up.

 

The craft reached a forty-five-degree angle and he stopped losing altitude. As the Hegira began rising on a ballistic arc, the violent shaking subsided, and the night sky drifted into view.

 

Just as Dom started smiling, the Hegira hit something. A final devastating thud shook the entire craft, and the remaining half of the warning lights came on in front of him.

 

In the rear camera view, Dom could see a single tree pointing out of the canopy, about twenty meters more than it had a right to. It was broken and burning. He had clipped it with the main drive.

 

He assessed the damage. Rear vectors were out. All he had were the nose jets and the main drive, and the main drive acted erratically. He was in trouble. The damn thing now needed a runway—

 

The craft hit four hundred meters altitude and the main drive started stuttering. Damn it! He needed at least another fifty meters for the ejection seat—

 

Five klicks to Godwin and he was losing altitude and going three hundred klicks an hour. Time to start decelerating and hope for the best.

 

It was an opportune time to make that decision because the main drive quit altogether. He was going to ballistic into Godwin on only his maneuvering jets, a third of which were dead.

 

Dom pulled the crash harness around him just in time. The Hegira plowed into an abandoned warehouse on the east side of Godwin at one-fifty klicks an hour.

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER FOUR

 

Industrial Espionage

 

 

“Industry is amoral.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“Honor sinks where commerce long prevails.”

—Oliver Goldsmith

(1728-1774)

 

 

Tetsami had that sinking feeling she always got near the end of a job. This was the part she hated—the waiting.

 

She could cruise a proprietary operating system laced with lethal security without breaking a sweat. But now, sitting in the dark outside an old bunker waiting for the meet, she could feel her palms getting damp under her driving gloves. She straddled her jet-black Leggett Floater and idly eased the drive back and forth. The little contragrav bike obliged her by pacing back and forth in front of the loading bay.