Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [91]
Jesus Freak would be waiting there, a one-litre pitcher of non-alcoholic lager spiked with two milligrams of phencyclidine to give it kick. It would be sitting on the bar of the Ice Maiden, condensation forming on the cold glass. Dozy Joe behind the bar with the bottles of stolen vodka and the solid holograms of the KIA.
Francine pulled the nose up until her forward view was filled with the violet sky. There amongst the bright stars she saw sunlight glint on two small fast-moving objects. No chaff, no flares and no ECM gave her only one option. A forward quarter evasion.
Chicken at two klicks per second.
There would be one right moment to evade. Too early and the missiles had time to correct their course, too late and they went off in your face. There was no machine for this, no clever bit of hardware that could do the calculation for you. Head to head with a SAM was a hindbrain thing. You either had it or you were toast.
The Angel had it.
She fired the VTOL thrusters and the jet did a seven-G backflip. The missiles streaked past, hobbled by their own momentum.
Now the canopy was filled with the Martian landscape as Francine dived for the cluttered radar shadow of the ground. There was a strange silver sheen to the surface, as if it was lit by reflected light from an impossible moon. Francine wondered if this was a bleedover from some weird kind of Greenie ECM.
The sensors picked up heat signatures indicating a main engine bum by the two missiles as they fought to regain lost altitude. Francine was betting that they'd loop over before making another attack run.
She cut the turbines to make an IR lock just that little bit harder and used the gyros to lift the nose again. The jet picked up some chop falling tail first like that, even in the thin atmosphere. She sure hoped the missiles were using pattern recognition; if they were this should confuse the hell out of them.
They were coming round again, locked on to the jet and screaming down at full bum. Francine was aiming for as close to a right angle to the surface as possible.
It became another race, this one to see which hit her first, the missiles or the ground. Francine retired the turbines and put them on idle.
At two hundred metres altitude Francine redlined the turbines, pushing them all the way past safety. The world came down on top of her as the jet decelerated. The missiles screamed past, heading straight down. There were two brief splashes of light on the rear-facing look-down imager.
Smart weapons, thought Francine. Just another military oxymoron.
'Angel - break left.' Flash Harry yelling in her earphones.
Without thinking Francine threw the jet over. Sneak missile, a third Vulture running quiet, relying on the telemetry from the other two missiles. Making a leisurely loop to fly right up her tailpipe.
The radar-proximity fuse mounted in the missile's nose behind the avionics saw the jet in its kill radius and fired. A shaped charge of flaked Brazilian TNT exploded. Thirty-three marble-sized bomblets were blasted forward in an expanding cone.
The aft quarter thermal imager on the jet flared out with the explosion. Francine felt the airframe shudder as three of the bomblets ripped through its carbon-fibre skin. The starboard turbine rev rate shot up as fragments of its shattered blades spewed out the exhaust outlet. Francine shut it down with a mental impulse while another part of her mind assessed damage to the fuel tanks and tailplane servos.
Without the starboard engine Francine was looking at a glide landing in a near vacuum. She put the nose at twenty degrees above level and expanded the stubby wings to maximum. Trying to use the wedge-shaped airframe as a single aerofoil. She made a slow bank until the Jacksonville beacon was dead ahead. Easily enough altitude to get there and plenty of time to figure out what she was going to do when she did.
Francine keyed her radio. 'Hey Flash, thanks for the warning.'
Static answered her.
'Flash - this is Angel.