Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

great trouble to shut down all its markings and insignia. Either it had been hijacked by Neumen, or it was crewed by Pure Humanity supporters from within the military. Either way, it was big and brutal and coming straight at her at a rate of knots. The whole huge shape of it was protected by overlapping force shields, and it was packed with rows of disrupter cannon, already moving to target her. Emma dove for the ground immediately, practically sticking her sled on its nose. Joy hugged her around the waist with both arms, and she let him. She scowled fiercely, running strategies quickly through her mind. She hadn't anticipated a bloody gravity barge. Big bastards, and powerful with it. Far superior shields and firepower to anything she had. But barges were notoriously slow and hard to maneuver, compared to a sled. She couldn't outrun it, or hope to evade its targeting computers for long, but maybe, just maybe, she could out-think the people running it. A ship's only ever as good as its crew ...
    The first disrupter beams shot past her, worryingly close. She pulled out of her dive, pulling back on the yoke so hard the engine screamed in protest. Emma ignored it, roaring towards the open horizon, sacrificing some speed to her dodging and ducking, barely a dozen feet above the ground now. People traveling on the roads below looked up with startled faces. Emma felt like waving, but didn't. She had her dignity to consider. She pushed her engine's speed well past its theoretical limits, and the whole structure
    of the sled shook and shuddered beneath her. The engine was making really unpleasant sounds now, and threatening to get nasty. Emma spoke soothingly to it. She'd done a lot of work on the sled. It would hold together. It would have to. Disrupter beams stabbed down all around her, blowing smoking craters in the ground, for all her evasive tactics. Think, dammit, think. There had to be a way . . .
    The answer came to her in a flash. It was a crazy, dangerous answer, and if anyone else had suggested it she would probably have shot them outright, just on general principle, but . . . Emma Steel howled her war song in a cracking voice and sent the sled shooting up into the sky again. She shut down all her force shields, feeding the extra power to the engine. Behind her, the Ecstatic had buried his face in the small of her back so he wouldn't have to see what they were doing. Emma didn't blame him.
    The gravity barge loomed up before her, filling the sky and growing ever more massive by the moment.
    She shot up past its nose, missing the prow by barely a yard or so, and kept on going. Its disrupter beams went nowhere near her. Emma pulled the sled over in a great loop, till they were actually flying upside down, held in place only by the sled's emergency crash webbing. The blood poured out of Emma's head and rushed towards her boots, but she was damned if she'd faint. She kept the sled speeding through its great loop, powered on by its straining engine until, so suddenly it took her breath away, they came dropping down out of the loop, right way up again, and closing in fast on the rear of the gravity barge.
    Heading, in fact, straight for the exposed rear vents of its engines. The one place not protected by force shields, so the engines' energies could dissipate safely. Bit of a design fault, really. Emma opened up with every disrupter she had, and the explosions that followed were satisfyingly loud and large and nasty.
    Heavy jets of flame shot out, that Emma avoided only with some desperate last-minute maneuvering, followed by clouds of thick dark smoke. The barge tilted slowly over onto one side, as fuel cell after fuel cell shut down rather than add to the explosions, and the gravity barge began its slow, implacable descent towards the ground below. Emma laughed harshly, turned the sled around, and headed once more towards New Hope.
    "And people say I'm crazy," said Joy, his face still buried in her cloak.
    No one else tried to stop them.
    New Hope was a city in the clouds. A great metropolis twenty miles in diameter, floating high in the sky, serene and untroubled by the woes of the mundane world below. Protected by terrible unseen powers; greater than armies and more destructive. No one troubled the oversoul. The great city blazed with lights, vivid and brilliant against the early evening sky, supernaturally beautiful; a faery kingdom of gossamer glass and steel. Delicate structures of grace and charm, linked by