Ironclads by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Solaris

CHAPTER SIX

HOWEVER SHE DID it, Viina blessed that drone good. Cormoran flew it through that fly-spattered air and never lost signal once.

The trail took us inland at the start like Cormoran had said, then it broke out of the trees and shadowed the course of a road that the fighting had left shattered like a long strip of jigsaw pieces. All this time we were following on foot, while Cormoran had one eye on the terrain in front of her and one on the drone’s camera feed. We’d reached the road ourselves when she called a halt. “All right, this you’ve got to see.”

What it was, was a castle. This was Europe, and suddenly it had become the Europe we Americans were always promised, because the bad guys were holed up inside an honest-to-God ruined castle. And in the bombed-out restaurant and parking lot across the road from it, but that doesn’t sound half as impressive.

My HUD map called it Brahehus and it was obvious that the end had come for it a long time before anyone thought of airstrikes. It had a few intact walls, though, and the drone showed that there was a prefab cabin pitched in there, and a bigger camp outside the walls around a space that had been cleared and flattened as a landing pad. This wasn’t just some temporary camp. There were plenty of men there; a handful of vehicles. They had been there a while.

“Come on,” I said, and Viina was pacing back and forth like she was about to just take off without us. Cormoran was still messing with the images, though, panning and searching until at last she said, “There!”

They’d roofed off the castle with heat baffles, but the drone had snuck in under them, neat as you like, creeping into that covered space through the gaping eyesocket space where a window had once been. It took a single image before retreating, and even then the enemy security grid had started to wonder if something was wrong. Cormoran did a lot of finagling to stay undetected that long.

We got a good look at that single image of the cabin, as Cormoran zoomed and let her software’s pattern recognizers do their work.

There was a shape through the window there. We couldn’t exactly buzz the drone down to head level to be certain, but it sure as hell looked like an American-made Scion shell to me. We’d found our man. Or we’d found his metal clothes, but either way it was the best lead in a field of one.

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