Traitor's Duty by Richard Tongue Page B

calm, but a bigger part was focusing on the task at hand, pulling around until the enemy fighter was visible head, still diving right for her. He was dodging back and forth as well, trying to deny her a shot; he was learning the rules of the game quickly enough, but it was still taking too long. The race had one simple goal, to get in that first, critical shot.
     By less than a second, Orlova won, and her target began its slow descent to the surface, black gashes running down the side of the ship, oxygen outgassing from the sides. Dipping her wings, she turned back towards her original goal, the Ragnarok Embassy a hundred and twenty miles distant.
     “Great work, Maggie! That was amazing! I can’t wait to write this one up!”
     “The job isn’t finished,” Orlova replied, trimming for maximum fuel economy. “I pushed her too damn hard in that dogfight.” The power indicator began to flash red, and she continued,  “We’ll never make the Embassy; I’m just going to have to hope that we can get far enough away from that convoy.”
     “You mean it was all for nothing?”
     “We’re still alive, and we’re free. Look around for a settlement, I need to bring her down.”
     “There’s nothing on the map.”
     With a smile, Orlova replied, “This part of the surface has lots of illegal ice mines. Find me one, and we can work out the details when we get onto the deck.”
     “Ice mines?” Harriet said, shaking her head. “Never mind. One more article, I guess. I don’t see anything at the moment.”
     “Look closely, they’ll be camouflaged from orbital observation, though we ought to have more luck down here.”
     Gently, carefully, Orlova nursed the plane into a long, slow glide path, turning the engines down as low as she dared. They might have another twenty minutes in the air before she had to ditch into the desert, though unless they could get undercover quickly, the inevitable outcome was going to be capture. At least Talbot and the Commandant had managed to get away; with any luck, they ought to be touching down in a matter of minutes.
     The moments ticked on, guiding the fighter becoming more of a struggle by the second, Orlova taking more and more of the work back on herself to try and eke out her power, thriftier than the automated systems . Finally, just as she was about to start looking for the most sheltered spot she could to go down, Harriet tapped her on the shoulder.
     “To our right, Maggie. About a mile.”
     “Perfect,” she replied, tipping the nose down. “Hang on, this is going to be rough.”
     “You’re going down now?”
     “We can walk a mile before anyone arrives out here. And cover our tracks well enough that we should escape detection. Cross your fingers.”
     The ground raced up towards her as she gently guided the fighter down, warning alarms sounding all around her that she had to filter out as she brought the nose up to the horizon, gently bringing it to the surface. With an anticlimactic bump, the fighter landed, skidding across the sand, sending dust flying high into the air. Throwing a series of switches, Orlova pulled her mask on, gesturing for Harriet to follow suit.
     “Come on. We’ve got to get moving. Radio silence unless you have to.”
     “Right.”
     She stepped out of the cockpit and started to move in the direction Harriet indicated, pausing for a moment to see the fighter alone on the desert floor, running her eye over it. No serious damage, nothing that couldn’t be fixed. That bird would fly again.
     

 
    Chapter 10
     
     “Peace negotiations,” one of the troopers guarding the room muttered, earning a dark stare from Cooper. “I thought we’d taken this damn rock. It certainly cost us enough.”
     “That’s enough, Private,” Forrest said. “I’d rather listen to a million politicians debating than get into another firefight. I’ve done that here once too often.”
     “I’d done it once too