Read Online Cosmic Rift by James Axler - Free Book Online

hard to hit the target. Rather, it was just a question of whether they could convince an outsider that it was unintentional. Grant figured it was the best they were going to find at such notice, which meant it would have to do.
    Grant waggled his wings for a second, rolling in place as Kane lined up another shot.
    “I hope you saw that, Kane,” he muttered, inwardly cursing that they had been forced to maintain radio silence for the duration of the sting. It wouldn’t do for someone to overhear these two “enemies” sharing tactics over their Commtacts.
    * * *
    K ANE WAS WATCHING Grant’s Manta like a hawk, and so he saw the wing tips briefly waggle as the aircraft cut across the skies to the east of the river.
    “It’s on,” Kane told Brigid, and he watched Grant swoop into a trajectory that would take him much lower. “We have an audience yet?”
    “Still nothing,” Brigid replied, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. “We’re putting Grant in a lot of danger with this plan,” she reminded Kane.
    “Danger’s just a vacation spot to Grant,” Kane snapped back. “It’s his favorite place to visit.”
    They were not far from where Mariah and Domi had found the starcraft, just four miles from the burial site. The idea was that they would stage this dogfight in the vicinity of the previous appearance of the golden ships. Hopefully those same people would track this activity, and when Grant’s Manta went down in an apparent crash landing, they would come out of the woodwork to investigate.
    It was a long shot, but right now—with no way of tracing Domi and no indication of where she was being held—it was all they had.
    Flipping a switch on the joystick, Kane engaged an incendiary missile. It locked in place in the firing bay, waiting for the command to launch. Up ahead, Grant was bringing his Manta around in a long arc that would ultimately place him in line with the open landing area he had identified. Kane urged more power from the air pulse engines of the Manta, waiting for the target reticle to switch from green to red on his heads-up display. The moment it did, his thumb stroked the trigger and the missile launched, whipping ahead of his Manta in a streak of white smoke.
    Kane watched the missile go, trusting that those extra hours at the redoubt would pay off now. The tech boys there had retrofitted one of his missiles with a false charge, all noise and light but no explosive—which meant it wouldn’t do much more than dirty the shell of Grant’s Manta when it struck. To be doubly sure, the missile had been primed to go off a few feet before reaching the target, meaning that—to the naked eye, at least—it would still look as if all that fire and noise was coming from a point of impact at the rear of Grant’s wounded Manta.
    “I hope if they’re watching, they ain’t watching too close,” Kane muttered to himself as the missile streaked away with a shriek of burning air.
    * * *
    G RANT ’ S TACTICAL DISPLAY had switched to alert mode, informing him that someone had his ship in a target lock, and furthermore, that there was a missile cutting its way toward his rear even as he continued on the path toward the clearing.
    “Beginning evasive maneuvers,” Grant said lackadaisically, rolling the Manta over as the missile howled toward it.
    The Manta flipped over twice as the missile neared, and the missile adjusted its course in response, getting closer with every passing microsecond.
    Twenty feet.
    Ten feet.
    Five feet.
    Now.
    Grant’s left palm slapped against the newly added bulge on the side of the control board, feeling the button there depress. It was big so that he wouldn’t miss it, since most flying skill is instinct, and trying to add an extra feature to a fighter jet—especially an alien one like this—involved hours of training to get the pilot used to it.
    Grant didn’t have the time for hours of training and so the Cerberus techs had settled on a very big, bright