by N M Tatum
Cody’s face went white. “No. We’ve got a ship on our tail. They just got a target lock on us.”
Chapter Nineteen
Ragnarok rocketed into a nosedive. Sam and Joel were both knocked off their feet as Cody instinctively moved into evasive maneuvers.
“They’ve still got lock,” Reggie yelled.
“Working on it,” Cody said, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the yoke. With a subtle twist of his wrist, Cody turned Ragnarok forty-five degrees to port. Despite the intensity of the turn, the attacking ship maintained its lock.
The warning alarm on the monitor exploded into a bright red flash, casting the entire bridge in a crimson light.
“Missile launch!” Reggie yelled.
Cody didn’t respond. Not to Reggie, anyway. He responded to the missiles like they had personalities, like their attack against the team was personal, not like they were inanimate objects sent after them with the press of a button. He continued into the nosedive, leaving a trail of profanities behind him. Then, with a quick yank on the yoke, he pulled the ship out of the dive and then launched a barrage of countermeasure flares. The torpedo followed the heat trail of the flares and exploded just off their rear.
“Clear,” Reggie shouted.
With the ship leveled off, Joel and Sam were able to stand.
“Get us behind that thing,” Joel said. “We’ll man the turrets and blast it out of the sky.”
Before Joel and Sam ran off the bridge, another alarm sounded.
“How did they get another lock on us so quick?” Joel said.
“They didn’t.” Cody raised the radar display. A dozen red dots swarmed after them like bees. “One of those did.”
“Oh shit,” Sam mumbled. “We can’t fight all those.”
It always stung the guys more when Sam felt the situation was hopeless.
“Then our only chance is to run,” Cody reasoned.
Joel agreed. “That’s a sound plan. I vote for that.”
“Firing up the thrusters.” Cody keyed in some commands he had yet to use since buying Ragnarok. It felt weird being so excited to use them, considering the circumstances. His finger hovered above the ignition button as he counted down. “Three…two…shit!”
The bridge filled with red light again.
“One!” Joel yelled. “You’re supposed to say ‘one’!”
Cody put the ship in a hard dive again. “Those ships are fast. They got too close before I could activate the thrusters. If anything gets in the blast radius of the engines then they can’t fire. It messes with the combustion.” He pitched the ship to starboard. “Hold tight!”
Joel and Sam were knocked off their feet again. They slammed into each other so hard that both were left gasping for air.
Reggie felt his body pull against the seatbelt, like he was clay pressing against a wire cutter. He forced his words out of his mouth—they, too, were being held back by the extreme shift in gravity. “What’s the plan?”
“Step one is to not get blown up,” Cody said. “There is no step two as of yet. I’m open to suggestions.”
Reggie turned to Sam and Joel. He left the force of the dive carry his words now, like leaves on the wind. “Get to the turrets. Provide whatever cover fire you can.”
“Get right on that,” Joel said through gritted teeth.
Reggie opened a map of the area. There wasn’t much to work with. Just the station they left behind and an uninhabited moon. The closest law enforcement agency was an hour away at a hard burn. They had nowhere to run to even if they could outrun these ships, and no one to call for help.
Then something caught his eye on the map display. He zoomed in on it, and a series of geological readings appeared.
“There,” he said to Cody. “Can you get us there?”
Cody glanced at the map. “Maybe. But why? There’s nothing on that moon.”
“I know. We aren’t landing on the moon. It’s what’s around the moon.”
The moon was circled by a ring of space rock, a dense, spinning cluster of projectiles that could smash the ship into pieces.
“That seems like a great place to visit,” Cody said.
“Just get us there.”
Cody punched in the coordinates. He banked hard to starboard and set off for the moon.
With the ship leveled off again, Sam and Joel made for the turrets. Sam climbed to the top one and Joel to the bottom. They strapped in and activated the targeting systems. The local map readouts were covered in flashing red dots.
The targeting system on Ragnarok was leagues ahead of that on Sonic. Joel was distracted by the upgrade. He toggled between the flashing red dots, each one displaying detailed specs on the target.
Twelve attacking ships in total. They were all registered to Layton Corp, part of their personal security fleet. Each ship was a single pilot vessel, armed with twin blaster batteries and six photon torpedoes. There was enough firepower on their ass to kill them twenty times over.
“Only fire at the ships if they get too close.” Reggie’s voice emanated from the speaker in the small turret. He was too loud for such a small space. “Try to keep as much distance between us as you can. Otherwise, focus on picking off any torpedoes fired our way.”
“Roger that,” Joel answered. He looked past the exciting features he had yet to fully explore and focused on the fleet of ships about to fly up their ass.
“How long until we reach the moon?” Reggie asked Cody.
“Couple minutes. Three at the most.”
Reggie scanned the bridge for some way to help. He felt like a fly on the wall. Then an idea struck. He was suddenly grateful that Cody had forced him to read the manuals for Ragnarok between their last jobs.
He unbuckled from his chair and moved to the seat on the opposite side of the bridge. If they were set up like a legitimate crew, this station would have been the technician’s, the person responsible for monitoring the ship’s internal systems during flight. He couldn’t recall all of the minute details of this responsibility, but there was only one that he really cared about.
Ragnarok’s engine was a cutting-edge model, one of the most advanced available outside of the military. The overburners were what set it apart. They pushed the ship as close to light speed as any private vehicle ever got, but they required a huge amount of maintenance and were super-finicky. The fuel lines needed to be flushed after every time the overburners were prepped. The fuel used to reach those speeds was extremely volatile and left combustible sediment in the lines. If it built up too much, the lines would burst into flames, and the entire ship would explode.
A light flashed on Cody’s panel. “What’s happening? Why are the lines flushing right now?”
“That’s me,” Reggie said. “Just focus on flying. I have an idea.” He activated the flushing procedure, surprised that he remembered how from the instructions he’d read once.
Two of the Layton ships went full on their thrusters, rocketing up along either side of Ragnarok. At that close of a range, they couldn’t fire torpedoes without risking blowing themselves up, so they unleashed a barrage of blaster fire. They peppered Ragnarok’s unshielded hull, rocking the ship, but not causing any significant damage.
Joel and Sam locked onto them with their turrets, but the Layton ships fell back before they could get a shot off. The attackers employed this tactic several more times before it became a real problem. The last wave pierced the outer shielding on the starboard side.
“They’re starting to punch through our defenses,” Cody said. “Whatever you’re doing, you should do it quick.”
The flushing procedure had finished, but Reggie held off on the dump. “Almost. Just get us a little closer.”
Cody grunted as the ship rocked from another attack. Another alarm sounded. “Two torpedoes inbound! With shield integrity compromised, a direct hit could put us down.”
“Can you launch flares?” Reggie asked.
“We’re out. This is on you guys.�
��
Sam and Joel squeezed the turret controls, both silently getting in the game. Sam cursed the Layton pilots, Dr. Suzz, every person who had ever wronged her. Anger was her most potent motivator. Joel sang the Final Fantasy fight music.
Then they launched into action.
Sam maneuvered her turret to follow the path of the torpedo, like a bird chasing down another bird. Joel jumped ahead, picking a point he thought in his torpedo’s trajectory.
Sam’s method may have been more proactive, but it wasn’t more effective. She unleashed a wave of relentless blaster fire without hitting her target. The torpedo must have been armed with a remote, because it was maneuvering as if it had a pilot. Sam altered her understanding of the situation, changing from shooting an inanimate object out of the sky to hunting some prey. She anticipated its moves, put herself in the head of her enemy, and soon noticed a pattern to its moves. It dipped and climbed at regular intervals, avoiding her fire more by luck than evasive skill.
Not that cracking the pattern mattered if she couldn’t land the shot.
She took a deep breath and a cue from Joel. She waited.
The torpedoes closed in.
Cody screamed through the comm, begging Sam and Joel to take the shot.
Closer.
Twenty meters. Ten.
Sam and Joel fired at the same time. Both torpedoes exploded, the force rocking the ship.
“Thirty seconds until we reach the ring around this moon,” Cody said. “What’s the plan?”
Reggie keyed up the dumping protocol. “Sam and Joel, you need to target the rear of the ship. You’ll see a cloud in fifteen seconds. Shoot it. Then close your eyes.”
Reggie counted down. He needed to time it right. Too soon or too late, and the move would be wasted. They’d be left with nowhere to go. Out in the open.
“Get ready to slow us down,” Reggie said to Cody. “Steer us straight into the ring and find a place to hide.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Give us some cover.”
They were ten seconds from the ring. Another second, and Cody wouldn’t have time to slow down. He would slam into it like a wave against the rocks.
Reggie dumped everything that had been flushed from the overburner fuel lines. “Fire!”
Sam and Joel opened fire on the cloud. One shot was all it took. The cloud combusted like a small star being born. There was a sudden and silent flash of intense light.
When the light faded back to black, Ragnarok was gone.
Chapter Twenty
Joel was blind. At least temporarily.
“He told you to close your eyes,” Sam reminded him as she sat him on the couch in the common area.
“When someone tells me to close my eyes, my immediate reaction is to open them wider so I can see whatever it is they don’t want me to see. How was I supposed to know what he didn’t want me to see was a blinding white light?”
“Because he told you to close your eyes.”
Joel scoffed.
Sam rolled up his sleeve and injected the medical nanites into his arm. “Your sight will return within the hour.”
“What am I supposed to do until then?”
“Sit here and think about how you’re blind because you can’t follow directions.”
Sam left Peppy to look after Joel, then joined Cody and Reggie on the bridge, careful to make as little noise as she could as she walked through the ship.
Cody was hunched over the radio panel. Reggie sat low in his chair, watching Cody and trying to read his face.
“What’s the word?” Sam said.
Cody shot her a rabid look. “Nothing new. We run silent.”
It had been close to ten minutes since they’d escaped Layton’s attack ships. After Reggie’s flare gambit, Cody had steered the ship into the ring of rocks around the moon. Reggie had determined the rocks to be highly magnetic, which would interfere with the Layton ships’ sensors, so Cody attached Ragnarok to the largest rock he could find. They’d been sitting there ever since, hoping to remain unseen. The Layton ships couldn’t pick them up on scanners, but audio scans might still pick up signals, hence the tyrannical dictate that they be as quiet as possible.
Sam sat in one of the empty chairs. Cody remained fixed on the radio panel, waiting for any sign that they’d been found. Reggie remained fixed on Cody, ready to spring into action.
“I know we need to be quiet,” Sam whispered, “but we also need to plan our next move.” Cody tensed, but he didn’t snap at her. She took that as an invitation to continue. “Even if we make it out of this belt, even if we escape those Layton ships, there will be more right behind them. Suzz is obviously insane and has proven she has no compulsion to show restraint. I get the feeling she’ll deploy every ship Layton has to hunt us down.”
“We can’t stay here forever,” Reggie said.
“Nope,” Sam said. “We can’t. So where do we go?”
A map display appeared in the center of the room. Cody still didn’t peel himself away from the radio display, but he involved himself in the conversation.
“The closest military installation is on the other edge of the galaxy. The closest police base is hours away at a hard burn. No way we could get to either if there’s a fleet of Layton ships patrolling for us,” he assessed.
“Who do we know that could hide us for a while?” Sam stood and studied the map. “Malibu? Millie owes us.”
Reggie shook his head. “She does, but I doubt she’d agree that she owes us that much. What about Kaufman? Maybe Graham would let us hide out for a while.”
Sam wasn’t convinced. “That guy’s a creep. And there’s no way he’d risk upsetting his business by welcoming the heat we’ve got on us.”
“What about Bruiser?” Reggie said. “Seems like a guy who knows how to hide.”
Sam scoffed. “He’s also a guy who would sell us out at the drop of a hat if he could make a profit.” She paced around the map. “We need someone who understands the threat. Someone who hates Layton as much as we do.”
“Dewayne,” Cody said. “He knows what Layton is capable of. He knows what they’ve done.”
“But Jasob doesn’t have the resources to help,” Reggie said. “They’re barely staying afloat.”
“So we bring in someone who does have resources,” Cody said. “Chrisoff.”
Doubt flooded Reggie. He was ashamed that it was his first reaction. He’d doubted Cody from the beginning. He’d doubted taking the conference center job. But their current situation proved that Cody had been right about Layton going over the edge. Suzz was a danger to everyone. She needed to be stopped.
But even though he could rationalize Cody’s plan, his gut still clenched at the thought of it. It felt too big.
Sam saw the hesitation on Reggie’s face. “What?”
Reggie shrugged. “Bringing together two corporations to take down a third? It’s so far beyond what we set out to do.” He remembered what his dad said. It’s time to grow up. “But it’s what we’ve got to do. I don’t see another way.”
Cody smiled. Finally, he had everyone on his side, and they had a way forward.
“So how do we do this?” Sam asked. “The magnetic field that’s scrambling the Layton fighters’ sensors is probably jacking up our comms, right?”
Cody’s smile widened. “Yeah, but I’ve got a gadget I’ve been dying to try out.”
Sam followed him to the cargo bay while Reggie stayed on the bridge to monitor the fighters.
“It’s a comm buoy,” Cody said, holding up the beach ball-sized device. Antennae poked out of it like a pin cushion. “Made specifically for this sort of situation. We record a message on the buoy, tethered to the ship, then launch it out of the ring. It’ll transmit the message outside the zone of magnetic interference and alert us when we get a message back.”
Sam shrugged. She knew Cody wanted her to be as psyched to use it as he was, but she couldn’t muster the energy.
/> That did nothing to dampen Cody’s excitement. He recorded the message and input the recipient’s coordinates. Then they loaded the buoy into the airlock.
“I programmed the targeting system to communicate with the airlock doors,” Cody said. “Once the system determines the best shot for getting the device out of the ring, the airlock doors will open, and the buoy’s thrusters will kick on.”
They waited almost ten minutes for something to happen. When it finally did, it was terribly anticlimactic. Though Cody could have been watching a rocket launch, the way he reacted. He leapt into the air as the buoy launched and faded into the blackness.
“That was awesome,” he said.
“Now what?”
“Now we wait.”
Sam was done waiting. She ran some drills in the cargo hold, taking the need for silence as an added challenge. She moved stealthily, slitting imaginary throats, until all her invisible adversaries were dead.
Joel wandered in as she was cleaning the pretend blood from her sword. He felt his way around like he was walking through the dark.
“Any vision return?” Sam asked him.
“Some. I can make out shapes and stuff, but not much detail. This is the bathroom, right?”
Sam smiled, knowing he couldn’t see it.
As he felt along the wall, Peppy trotted to his side. He pressed his head against Joel’s hand and gave a whimper. Joel gently grabbed a bit of Peppy’s scruff. The alien dog guided Joel to a crate where he could sit.
Sam watched this, and her breath caught in her throat. She quickly cleared it. “Your bond is impressive.”
“He’s a good dog. Well, you know, dog-type thing.”
“He is,” Sam said as she nodded. She smiled again, but this time, she wished Joel could see it.
Cody emerged from the hallway with a tablet in his hand. He raised his eyebrows and nodded for the others to follow him.
“You know he can’t see you,” Sam said of Joel.
Cody nodded, smiled and left.
“That was Cody, wasn’t it?” Joel said. “He’s really loving this, that son of a bitch. I’ll get him back somehow. If I can just find a way to make him go deaf.”
