Be My Enemy

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Book: Read Be My Enemy for Free Online
Authors: Ian McDonald
in the corner of each eye. Sen flicked them out with her fingers, and she saw something. Something in the ice, a dark streak, barely visible, moving in line with her, ahead. It could have been meters or miles deep. She saw it for only in instant, then another object grabbed her attention. Dead ahead. Right at the edge of her vision, where land merged into sky, white on white, a movement.It looked like a whirlwind of glitter. The white ice and the white sky took away any sense of scale: this new object too could have been kilometers away, or right in front of her. Sen waved to catch Anastasia's attention, pointed forward. Anastasia gave her a thumbs-up. They both pulled on their steering bars and swooped the hedgehoppers up to surveillance height. Anastasia stabbed a mitten at Sen. Sen nodded. She let go of the throttle cable and reached into the knitted sock. The gloves made her fingers thick and stupid. She could barely grasp the object inside. It was as slippery as wet glass.
    “Come on,” she hissed at the thick gloves, the dumb fingers, the freezing wind. “Got you.” She held Everett's crossplanes telephone. He'd trusted her with it before, when she wore it to send images back while she infiltrated the Tyrone Tower. It was a bonaroo piece of E10 tech and it was the only camera they had. He'd shown her how to use it. Tap here for still photographs, here for video. Slide that bar up and down to zoom. It focuses automatically. Tap to take a picture. Easy. Easy for you, Everett Singh. He wasn't swinging in a sling beneath four ducted fan engines, with the wind driving needles of ice into his face so he could hardly see, one hand needed for steering and only one hand free to operate the camera, a hand thick and numb with the cold, like there's a frozen cod there instead of a hand, flying headlong into something completely unknown. Yeah, easy Everett.
    The flying ice storm was close, and it was big. Sen glimpsed a dark heart to it, something huge, half seen, relentless. The Dear, but it was fast. What was that thing?
    Captain Anastasia circled her hand in the air, then pointed at the storm thing. Going in. Sen made sure her hand had a firm grip on the phone, pulled the steering bar back, and swooped in. She could see the dark at the heart of the ice blizzard. It was big, it was fast, it was scary. It was a hovercraft. She'd seen the Thames hovercraft, nifty little flitters that shuttled those poor people who had to go to jobs in offices, in buildings attached to the ground. This was nothing likethose. This was one hundred and fifty feet of armored death on a cushion of air and shattered, scattered ice. It was a tank that could do ninety miles per hour. It was a battleship for a frozen ocean. It had not just one gun turret but three, two facing forward, one covering the rear. As Sen zoomed across it, phone shaking in her hand, hatches opened in the armored upper deck and missile arrays slid out. Chain guns turned this way and that on their mountings, tracking her. Click click click click click. The turbulence from the big fans engines sent her rocking dangerously in her fragile hedgehopper. The phone slipped. Sen shrieked and caught it.
    Captain Anastasia glanced over, shook her head, and made a cutthroat gesture. Cut and run. Sen shook her head in reply, swung the hedgehopper so that she banked almost horizontally to the ground, and went back for a second run. Her gloved thumb danced over the tiny, fiddly controls. Video video video. She had it. She held the cameraphone out and shot a long tracking shot over the back of the leviathan. The guns tracked her as she zipped over the great battlecraft. She shrieked with the joy of fast movement and at her own cleverness, weaving and dodging between the propellers. They would shred her faster than thought, turn her into a red spray in the cascade of ice and snow thrown up by the aircushion, but Sen Sixsmyth was too fast and clever and cute for that. At the last moment she pulled

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