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"Then I'll drive the dozer," said Shenzu. "I'm coming with you. You just make sure a skimmer doesn't drop a plasma slug in my lap."
"Dragon's Den is much closer to the damaged dozers than we are," said Mazer. "Why not send a rescue team from their end?"
"They can't reach our man," said Hunyan. "They don't have dozers to get through the obstructions."
"So much for a full night's sleep," said Mazer. "Where's the airfield?"
Hunyan led them outside where a truck was waiting. Shenzu, Wit, and Mazer climbed up into the bed, and Hunyan got behind the wheel. They drove west through the city, the truck's headlights cutting through the darkness. The night air was cool and damp, and Mazer pulled his jacket tight around him. They saw no one and heard nothing. The buildings stood like giant hovering shadows, dark and vacant and eerily quiet. A stale, rotting smell permeated the streets: uncollected trash, perhaps, or the stagnant water of the sewer lines, kept still because the power was out.
On the outskirts of town, the buildings gave way to large industrial complexes, with their oddly shaped pipes, towers, and silos. Next came the flat rice fields, which to Mazer's surprise were still alive, the tall grass swaying in the dark like the surface of the sea.
Hunyan turned onto a service road, passed through an open security fence, and drove up onto the tarmac at a small airfield. A HERC sat parked outside a hangar, where a team of technicians with lights on their helmets were giving it a once-over. Beside the HERC was an armored spearhead dozer, its massive blade extending outward like a wedge. The satellite image hadn't done the spearhead justice. It was twice as large as Mazer thought it would be. Each wheel was taller than the truck.
"You sure that little aircraft can pick up that thing?" said Wit. "That's like an orange lifting a pineapple."
"We'll be fine," said Ma
zer. "Science is on our side."
Hunyan parked the truck inside the hangar beside three large crates. He hopped out, opened the crates, and began distributing the gear. "You'll wear these biosuits at all times. Each can carry four mini tanks of O2. There's extra oxygen in the HERC. I'd advise you to keep at least two cans on your person at all times." He handed Wit an assault rifle. "It has built-in smart targeting. Pick your Formic with your HUD, and the smart munitions do the rest. If the target's within a thousand meters, it's a near guaranteed kill. Snap on this secondary barrel here for the grenade launcher."
Wit snapped on the barrel and removed it, getting a feel for the mechanism. Mazer took a rifle and a box of grenade rounds then unwrapped the biosuit and pulled it on over his clothing.
"We'll be tracking your progress from here," said Hunyan. "Good luck."
Shenzu, Wit, and Mazer zipped up their biosuits, donned their helmets, and loaded into the HERC. Shenzu sat in the copilot's seat while Wit buckled into a jump seat back in the main cabin.
"You give the word to go, Shenzu," said Wit. "This is your op."
"I'm just the liaison officer," said Shenzu. "You're the experienced field commander. I say you're in charge."
"Very well," said Wit. "Mazer, take us up."
"Yes, sir."
Mazer lifted off, maneuvered the HERC over the dozer, and turned on the talons, which unfolded from the side of the HERC and descended to the dozer like giant spider legs. Four of the talons gripped the dozer's side and lifted it off the ground to allow the last two talons to extend underneath and lock in place beneath it. Mazer ran a few tests to ensure the load was secure, then he adjusted the lenses and slowly lifted off.
They picked up the highway south of Lianzhou and flew straight up the center of the road, low and fast, the bottom of the dozer just a few meters off the ground.
"Watch the skies," said Wit. "With a load like this, we're easy targets. We'll have very little maneuverability."
"If something zeroes in on us," said Mazer, "we should set the dozer down, land fast, abandon the HERC, and make for cover."
"Why not drop the dozer and fight?" asked Shenzu.
"Because dying doesn't accomplish anything," said Mazer. "This isn't a combat aircraft. It's a load carrier. It's not nimble. The Formics can dance around us. I learned that the hard way. Plus we're not armed for a fight. We've got a few rockets and a laser. That hardly makes us battle-ready. If we fight, we lose."
"He's right," said Wit. "If the bugs close in, we bail or we fail."
They flew in silence, Mazer watching the radar screen for Formics. It felt strange to fly without Patu, Fatani, and Reinhardt beside him. They had been with him through thousands of flight hours, every takeoff, every maneuver.
And now they were gone.
Mazer had played the crash over and over again in his mind. The HERC had fallen in a dead drop from a low altitude. The chutes had failed, and the rotor blades hadn't deployed fast enough. All things considered, Mazer should have died also, and yet somehow here he was, saved by airbags and luck with nothing more than an ugly gut wound to show for it.
It was the angle at which the HERC had landed that had saved him. Fatani was heavy and sitting on the opposite side and in the rear, and perhaps that was what had tipped the HERC just enough to have it land the way it did, with Mazer farther from the ground than the others at the moment of impact, giving his airbags a microsecond more time to deploy.
He never saw what punctured his lower abdomen. A torn section from the front console perhaps. Or a flying piece of shrapnel. Whatever it was, he was lucky it hadn't torn him in half. Perhaps he had removed it immediately after the crash, yanking it out in some survival reflex. He couldn't remember. Everything was hazy at that point, a murky blur of noise and heat and pain.
