Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire by Timothy Zahn Read Free Book Online Page A

disintegrated the windshield in front of her.
    She twisted her face away from the flurry of flying glass, reflexively twisting the stick to spin the cockpit away from the incoming fire. She heard a shout from beside her, but with the wind suddenly roaring in her ears she couldn’t tell whether it was a shout of pain, anger, or encouragement. She blinked something out of her eyes— sweat or blood, she wasn’t sure which—and kicked the engines to full speed.
    The enemy had gotten in the first punch, and her job now was to get away, get out of its crosshairs, and buy herself enough time to regroup. At least this was one of the older H-K models, still packing Gatling guns instead of the new plasma weapons some of the Skynet Central defenders had been armed with. Small favors .
    Abruptly, the Blackhawk bucked, dropping like a rock, as if Blair had suddenly flown it into a downdraft. She fought the controls, trying to get the aircraft back in hand.
    It was only then that she noticed that the wind was not only blowing in at her through the disintegrated windshield but was blowing down on her as well.
    She looked up, squinting against the blast. The H-K had taken position directly above them, flying with its underside bare meters from the Blackhawk’s main rotor.
    Instead of simply blasting them out of the air, like H-Ks usually did, the damn thing was trying to force them down.
    Twisting the stick, Blair tried jinking to the left. But at these speeds the Blackhawk wasn’t nearly as responsive as an A-10 would have been, and the H-K easily matched the maneuver. She jinked the other direction, dropping her nose a few degrees to give herself some extra speed. Once again, the H-K stayed right there with her.
    “Barnes!” she shouted.
    “I see it,” he called back, and out of the corner of her eye Blair saw him pop his restraint harness. “Drop and dust.”
    Blair made a face. Drop and dust —put the Blackhawk on the ground, or close to it, and immediately head up again. A standard enough tactic, but in this case it might prove fatal. If the H-K matched the move, she would end up virtually pinned to the ground, with nowhere to go and no maneuvering room at all.
    But continuing to play Skynet’s game would be to lose by default.
    “On three,” she called. “One, two, three .”
    Slamming the stick forward, she dropped the Blackhawk to the ground. The wheels hit hard, bounced her a meter back up—
    And as Barnes dropped out the starboard side door she angled the helo as far as she could to port and clawed for altitude.
    She nearly made it. But at the last second the H-K managed to sidle back into place above her, once again trapping her between earth and metal. With her last bit of maneuvering room she turned the Blackhawk in a tight circle, bringing the pair of them back toward where she had dropped Barnes.
    She could feel the buffeting as her rotors’ airflow bounced off the ground and up into the Blackhawk’s belly when Barnes finally opened up with his minigun.
    The H-K’s nose took the full brunt of the blast, the smooth metal shattering into scrap. Instantly, it swerved away, abandoning its attack on Blair as it tried to get clear of the deadly stream of lead.
    But Barnes was clearly expecting that. Without letting up on the trigger, he shifted his attack from the H-K’s nose to its starboard turbofan. Blair skidded the Blackhawk sideways as she heard the turbofan disintegrating, managing to get completely out from under the H-K as its starboard wing suddenly drooped nearly to the ground.
    Once again it tried to dodge away.
    Once again Barnes shifted his attack, this time back to the machine’s nose and the Gatling guns nestled there.
    Blair was circling back toward the battle when the H-K was rocked by a massive explosion as the minigun’s rounds ignited the machine’s ammo supply. Floundering like a beached fish, the H-K swiveled around, making one final attempt to escape.
    It had gone fifty meters when