Labyrinth of Night by Allen Steele Page A

Cassidy. ‘You mean to say that nobody told you what happened to Hal?’
    ‘Aeroshell jettison on my mark,’ Spike D’Agostino said into the darkness as he curled his gloved hand around a lever next to his left thigh. ‘Three…two…one…’
    He yanked the lever upward. There was a sudden lurch, a loud bang, and the aeroshell which had enclosed D’Agostino’s tiny spacecraft broke apart like a clamshell. Harsh red-pink light exploded through the canopy of his cockpit, causing him to blink furiously despite the helmet monocle that was fitted over his right eye. ‘Woooo-wee!’ Hoffman’s voice shouted through his headset. ‘This baby bucks like a Texas bronc!’
    D’Agostino ignored him. The F-210 Hornet was plummeting toward the ground some fifty thousand feet below; if he didn’t do anything in the next five seconds, atmospheric drag on the craft’s stub wings would put him into an irreversible flat spin. Grabbing the yoke between his legs with his right hand, he reached up with his left hand to the engine control panel above his head and ignited the engines. The LED lamps on the engine status panel switched to green; D’Agostino shoved forward the throttle and gently pulled back on the yoke.
    The five Pratt & Whitney oxygen/carbon monoxide engines, mounted below and behind the Hornet’s sleek fuselage, roared to life, catching the STS fighter from its deadly freefall and clutching it in the sky. The fuselage shook as the digital airspeed indicator rolled back to Mach One and the black-white ball of the artificial horizon steadied on the Y-axis. Spike breathed a short sigh of relief. He wasn’t going to be splattered all over Mars after all.
    ‘Falcon One to Falcon Two,’ he said. ‘How’ya doing there with that horse of yours?’
    ‘Copacetic, Falcon One. All stations green and we’re flying. Was it good for you too?’
    ‘Just lovely, Falcon Two.’ The eight-ball was rising a little too far into the white; now that its airspeed had been cut, the Hornet was beginning to ascend rather than descend. D’Agostino gently pushed the forward yoke; the port and starboard engines gimbaled back to supply aft thrust, punching the STS fighter forward.
    He glanced to his left. Several hundred yards away at nine o’clock, the other Hornet was slicing through the thin atmosphere, leaving a white vapor trail behind it. Falcon Two looked all right; he knew that Hoffman was in turn giving Falcon One a quick visual inspection. D’Agostino had to hold tight to the yoke to counter the violent twists and lurches of the Martian stratosphere, but otherwise it was much the same as he had experienced in the simulators. All that was missing was a flight instructor chewing his ass off about slow reaction time…
    Fuck it. This was the real-deal now. ‘Okay,’ D’Agostino said. ‘Lock in weapons systems.’
    ‘Roger that, Falcon One. Lock and load.’
    D’Agostino flipped more switches with his left hand. The dashboard fire control panel lit up, showing him in green letters that the two air-to-ground smart missiles below each wing and the 30mm cannon mounted beneath the cockpit were armed and ready. The ECM panel showed that radar and infra-red jamming were in operation; radar was tracking no incoming bogies, so the RWR screen was blank. A tiny crosshairs had appeared in his helmet’s right-eye monocle; he tracked his eyes left and right, and the crosshairs followed the sweep of his vision. The heads-up display within his helmet visor copied the info shown on the dashboard multifunction display.
    ‘Falcon Two, we’re A-OK and on the beam,’ he said.
    ‘Roger that, Falcon One. I take it back. She’s a sweet lil’ pony, fresh out of the manger…’
    ‘We copy.’ Foal or wild mustang, this was a nice little ship he was piloting, and D’Agostino was all too willing to kick mongo ass with it. He grinned and pushed the yoke forward. Falcon One pitched its blunt nose forward and the red horizon rose through the