Read Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes for Free Online

as the glare of the explosion faded, Blair saw that one of the two sneak-attack HKs had been turned into a heap of blazing rubble. The remaining newcomer, still running dark, had escaped and was angling across the airfield, clearly heading for a link-up with the last of the original three attackers.
    “Looks like they’re pairing up, too,” she said. “What’s your status?”
    “I’m at Geth Pete,” he said.
    Blair grimaced. Geth Pete—Gethsemane Peter. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. In other words, Yoshi was completely out of ammo.
    But Skynet was unlikely to have picked up on such an oblique reference, in which case it might still think its HKs were facing two armed fighters.
    “You cut around and hit their flank,” she told Yoshi. “I’ll take it down their throats.”
    “Check,” Yoshi said, and Blair mentally threw him a salute. Charging into battle unarmed this way might help Blair, but it could easily cost Yoshi his own life.
    Though not if Blair could help it.
    She curved her A-10 around toward the two HKs, mapping out her strategy. Whichever one turned toward Yoshi, she would concentrate all her fire on the other, hopefully blowing it out of the sky quickly enough that she could get to the remaining bandit before it could engage with him.
    Unfortunately, the HKs weren’t playing to the script. Both of them were heading straight toward Blair, completely ignoring Yoshi’s one-man Light Brigade charge at their flank.
    Which meant the oblique reference hadn’t been oblique enough. Skynet had figured it out, and wasn’t going to waste its resources on an enemy who couldn’t fight back. At least, not until it had dealt with the one who could.
    “Better idea,” Blair told Yoshi. “Break off and get back to the coop. I can handle them.”
    Yoshi muttered something Blair didn’t quite get. But he was smart enough to realize that, with the jig up, it was the only reasonable course. The Resistance didn’t have nearly enough planes and pilots to let any of them get wasted without a good reason.
    “Check, Hickabick,” he said with a sigh. “I’m gone.”
    “Just watch for unfriendly eyes,” Blair warned. “And don’t forget to go in from the north.”
    “Check,” Yoshi said again. “Good luck.”
    “You, too.”
    The two HKs, which had worked so hard to get into a single formation, now split apart again at Blair’s approach, one swinging right as the other went left. Blair flipped a mental coin and turned to 19
    follow the one to the left. Her turn caught up with it before it could sidle out of range, and a single long burst from her GAU-8 took it out.
    Unfortunately, that left the other machine sitting squarely on her tail. Even as she started to turn back to face it, the HK opened fire, sending a burst of lead across the A-10’s belly.
    There was only one thing Blair could do.
    Throwing full power to her engines, she hauled back on the stick, turning the A-10’s nose toward the sky in a power loop. She kept going, ignoring the enemy fire that was tracking up toward her, curving ever more skyward until the A-10 was nearly to stall configuration.
    Then, twisting the plane around into half a barrel roll, she turned it right-side up again as she finished her half loop.
    And with that single smooth maneuver, she was heading along an opposite vector, and had gained herself a good stretch of altitude along with it.
    She cut back a little on her throttle, breathing out a sigh of relief as she scanned the sky around her. The Immelmann turn was a standard fighter maneuver, one that had probably been taught to every military pilot since World War One. But that didn’t mean anyone especially liked doing them.
    Still, when the trick worked, it worked well, particularly against aircraft like HKs that had been designed more for hunting ground targets than for real aerial combat. And indeed, the sky around her seemed to finally be clear of enemies.
    Though just because the current