So matter-of-fact.
I looked at the power levels. Every one of the cutter's powerful thrusters was red-lining.
'Midas…'
'Sit back. There it is.'
'What is?'
The small moon was suddenly filling our front ports as we veered around. It didn't look that small. It looked like we were about to smash into it.
I blurted out a curse.
'Relax, dammit!' he assured me, then added, 'range in one.'
We dived towards the scarred, pocked lime-green rock that filled our vision at full thrust. Nose guns beginning to flash; six interceptors of the Battlefleet Scarus elite fighter school followed us in.
SIXTEEN
Void duel.
Betancore's last stand.
Traces.
The moon was called Obol, the smallest and innermost of Damask's fourteen satellites. It was a dented, irregular nugget of nickel, zinc and selenium, six hundred kilometres across at its widest dimension. Lacking atmosphere and riddled with cavities and gorges, it shone with a lambent green glow in the light of the star, ragged terrain features and craters thrown into stark relief.
I was forcing my mind to calm, forcing my pulse rate down. The old mind skills Hapshant had trained me in.
I focused on the data-file for Obol that I had punched up on the screen – nickel, zinc, selenium, smallest of fourteen – not because I wanted to know but because the facts would act as psychopomps, little fetishes of detail to occupy my mind and steal it away from the hazard.
I looked up from the glowing text bar. A jagged crater, vast enough to swallow Dorsay city and its lagoon whole yawned up at us.
'Brace yourselves/ Midas told us all.
Just a kilometre above, he executed his move. By then, we were deeply committed to Obol's gravity and diving at full thrust. There was no question of performing a landing, or even a conventional turn.
But Midas had been flying ships since he was young, schooled in the pilot academies of Glavia. By way of his inlaid circuitry, he understood the nuances of flight, power and manoeuvre better than me, and better than
most professional pilots in the Imperium. He had also tested the capabilities of the gun-cutter almost to destruction, and knew exactly what it could and couldn't do.
What worried me most was what he hoped it might do.
He cut the drive, fired all the landing thrusters, and pulled the nose around so that the cutter began to corkscrew. The view whirled before my eyes and I was flung around in my harness.
The spin seemed uncontrolled. But it was measured and perfect. With the landing jets driving us up away from the vertical, we fluttered, like a leaf, using the corkscrew motion to rob the vessel of downward momentum. Ninety metres from the dust of the crater floor, we flattened out, burning jets hard, white hot, and then arced around as Midas cut the main drive in again.
The ground leapt away under us, and we hugged across it, climbing in a savage jerk to skip over the crater lip.
From the tactical display, I saw all six fighters had dropped back to six minutes behind us. None wanted to try duplicating that move. They were diving in more conventional, slower arcs.
Midas hugged the moon, slicing us low around bluffs and buttes, down deep dry valleys hidden from the sun, across wide dust plains that had never seen a footprint. At one point, we flew between two massive cliffs of striated rock.
'They're breaking,' Midas said, leaning us to port.
They were. Four dropped into dogged pursuit, chasing us low over the landscape. The other two had broken and were heading anti-clockwise around the blindside of Obol.
'Contact?'
'We'll meet them head on in eight minutes/ said Midas. He was smiling.
He pulled a hard starboard turn down a rift valley the topographer screen had only just illuminated.
Then he slowed down to what seemed a painful, easy velocity, and banked the gun cutter around a butte that glistened green and yellow in the hard sunlight.
'What are you doing?'
Wait… wait…'
The tactical screen showed that our four chasers had swept beyond the rift valley.
This low to the terrain, it'll take them a moment to figure out we're no longer ahead of them.'
