Battlefield Earth

Chapter 26

A few miles to the north, Terl and the minesite cover plane were engaged in a dance of battle.

Jonnie slammed his battleplane toward the two ships. Suddenly they moved farther north. One plane was running away to the north. The other took off in pursuit. Two Scots running away? No! Jonnie suddenly understood what was happening. It was a trick! Terl was pretending to run away to lure the Scots into a trap maneuver.

Radio silence. Damn radio silence!

The Scots fell for it.

Before Jonnie could get there, Terl had looped back and deadly fingers of flame were raking the Scots’ ship.

The target flamed! It roared toward the ground.

Two men ejected, right and left, from the burning plane. Their jet packs smoked as they bit and arrested their falls. They were sailing some distance apart.

If Jonnie could get behind Terl while he was still concentrating on the plane … yes! Terl dove to shoot one of the pilots, unable to resist a s******c touch.

The pilot was hit and spun back upward.

Jonnie was right behind Terl. He pressed his g*n trips and the artillery blasters knifed into the ship.

Then abruptly Terl’s plane was gone!

A quick glance at the viewscreens. Terl was above him.

But Terl didn’t shoot.

Abruptly Jonnie realized that Terl was going to ignore him and try to get back to the compound and shoot up the ground troops.

The keynote of Psychlo battle tactics was outguessing with a plane’s keyboard. The planes could dart so quickly and at such changing speeds that one had to divine what the other would do and do it first.

Jonnie snapped his battleplane in front of Terl’s. For an instant he could see the face-masked Psychlo through the armored windscreen. It was Terl. A madly efficient Terl, a Terl who for all his insanity was a past master at flying and a top marksman. Jonnie wondered whether he could match this maniac.

Terl went to the right. Jonnie had outguessed him and gone the same direction. Terl went farther right. Jonnie had outguessed him and was in front of him with ready firing guns.

Terl went up. Jonnie’s hands on the keyboard did not outguess him and Terl was almost able to dart past and return to rake the compound assault teams. Jonnie corrected and almost rammed Terl from below.

Why hadn’t he battered the monster’s head off in the morgue? But there had been no time.

Terl went low to the right, then to the left, then to the right. Rhythmical. Easy to predict. Jonnie was in front of him every time.

Too late, Jonnie realized it was a trap. The fourth time, Terl’s guns were firing at the place Jonnie was about to be. Only the slip of a finger on a key saved him from being blasted out of the sky.

Abruptly Terl seemed to abandon his effort to get through to the compound. He headed straight north.

Down below, the burning plane sent up soaring piles of black smoke.

Was this another Terl trick? Luring him off?

Ears blasted by the scream of tortured motors, Jonnie swept his eyes across his viewscreens. Where was Terl going and why? With a sudden hunch he flipped on a heat detection screen.

Chrissie and Pattie, riding to the north! Their horses’ bellies to the ground as they raced along.

Leverage. Jonnie suddenly realized Terl was trying to get back his leverage! If he could recover his hostages he might bring pressure on Jonnie.

Jonnie flipped open the local command radio. Sure enough—Terl’s voice!

“If you don’t go down there and land, animal, I’ll kill them both.”

Terl was right ahead of him, dropping down to about four thousand feet.

Jonnie hit his keys. He estimated exactly where Terl would be.

Jonnie’s battleplane slammed into the back of Terl’s. Jonnie closed the switch for the magnetic grips. The skids of his plane locked to the back of Terl’s.

Half-deafened by the thud of contact, Jonnie stepped up his speed control to hypersonic. His motors shrieked. He punched in coordinates to compare with six feet underground directly below them.

He glanced over the side to see that the riders were clear of that spot. They were.

The motors of both ships were screaming in discord, fighting against one another in howling dissonance. They jerked and wrestled in the sky, suspended in space. The motors began to get hot. Very shortly they would burn and explode.

Jonnie reached back for the jet packs. The straps had already been shortened. He shrugged into it. He made sure he still had Terl’s beltgun.

He took one final glance at the keyboard. Locked in. Six feet underground, directly below, four thousand feet down, speed control at hypersonic.

Jonnie dove out the plane door. The air bit at him as he plummeted down.

His jets barked alive and the descent slowed. By swinging his legs, he went up to a higher altitude.

He looked at the locked and fighting ships.

He had expected that Terl would bail out. The outcome was inevitable. The ships would explode. He was counting on Terl’s having no beltgun, and he intended to hunt him down in a jet pack or on the ground. But Terl didn’t bail out. Jonnie could see him battering away at his control console.

Jonnie, holding in space with his backpack jets, had the sickening feeling he had made a mistake. Terl, after all, knew Psychlo tactics backward.

What Terl was doing in that jerking, fighting mess where one ship’s motors fought the other’s, was trying to outguess the settings of the plane that rode his back. If he could, both motors would agree. Possibly, then, a quick roll and reversal of the settings would throw the other ship off his back.

The smoke from those conflicting motors was already beginning to rise in the battleplane Jonnie had bailed out of.

Suddenly, Terl got the combination! Both ships’ motors smoothed into shrieking agreement.

But Jonnie’s combination was straight down and six feet under, hypersonic.

At an abrupt two thousand miles an hour, both ships hurtled toward the earth.

In an instant, Terl apparently realized that this set of console coordinates was sudden death.

Jonnie could see him in the cabin, moving urgently.

With only five hundred feet to go, Terl frantically punched in the reverse combination. His ship motors went into a fighting howl.

The inertia of the mass carried it down to within twenty feet of the ground before the descent halted.

But the force on the hot motors was too great for them to overcome.

Both ships burst into an orange ball of fire!

Terl’s body hurtled out of the door and struck rolling.

The ships struck!

With a swing of his legs Jonnie headed downward into a dive. With a thumb on the jet pack throttle, he guided himself to land about a hundred feet from the fiercely flaming wreck.

Terl was still rolling.