by M. D. Cooper
“Not that it matters,” Barne said soberly. “None of us are in the ‘long life expectancy’ sort of business.”
Barne nodded, continuing to speak aloud and question Chase’s manhood while he replied over the Link.
Chase laughed at a joke Patty spoke aloud as he responded to this new information.
Chase didn’t like the trouble an AI could bring.
Barne eyed Chase for a moment before nodding.
Barne shrugged.
Chase shook his head.
MOON LANDING
STELLAR DATE: 02.17.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Persephone Jones, departing Faseema
REGION: Oran System, Praesepe Cluster
When Rika awoke, Chase filled her in on Captain Sarn’s inquiries. She agreed with their decision to hold tight, and, so far, nothing untoward had come to pass.
The feeds from Kandahar City were rife with speculation over what had occurred at the spaceport, though no official conclusions had been drawn. Most people believed the fighting had to do with grain smuggling rings that had been operating at the spaceport for some time—if the conspiracy theory folks were to be believed.
Two hours before they reached Port Londrie on Baqara’s surface, Sarn appeared in the entrance to the deck with a grim look on his face.
“Not an idiot, you know,” he said without greeting. “Well, maybe a bit. Took a few hours to realize you’d tapped our comms. Since then, Niki, our AI, has been filtering out what we didn’t want you to hear.”
“Since you didn’t get to hear the warning, you don’t know that station security at Londrie has been instructed to inspect all ships that lifted off from Kandahar City.” Sarn spoke slowly, as though he was still making up his mind about what to do with his passengers.
“That’ll pose a problem or two,” Rika stated as she carefully rose to her feet.
Sarn nodded. “Yeah, I figured as much. I’ll admit, I thought about spacing the lot of you. It’d be no more than you deserve for bringing this sort of trouble my way.”
“…but I don’t kill kids,” Sarn continued. “Even one that’s fallen in with the likes of you.”
“We rescued her,” Rika countered.
“I’m sure you did,” Sarn nodded. “I also bet that whoever you ‘rescued’ her from has contacts up on Londrie. My money says things’ll get real fun when we land.”
“That’s a lot of supposition,” Barne cut in. “Could just as well be the contraband you’re hauling that gets you in the shit. I bet there’s no way to hang what you’re hauling around our necks, so you need another option.”
Sarn scowled, and Rika could see that Barne had hit the nail on the head.
“Something along those lines may be the case,” the captain growled. “I’m going to divert and dock at Kestry Station. I have contacts there that will look the other way while you disembark; I’ll just need you to keep your mouths shut about my cargo. And I’ll need the extra credit we discussed.”
A chorus of emphatic, negative responses came back over the Link.
Rika nodded. “You have a deal, Captain Sarn. What’s our ETA to Kestry?”
Captain Sarn visibly relaxed, and what probably passed for a delighted expression graced his dour face. “Forty minutes; I got in their priority queue.”
“Perfect,” Rika replied. “We’ll be ready.”
Sarn grunted his thanks and left the bay.
Rika grinned.
* * * * *
Leaving the rest of the team behind on the ship didn’t feel right, but it was the best plan they could form. Rika hadn’t expected it to be her that would take a spacewalk when she proposed the idea, but it turned out that everyone had taken a few hits, and none of their armor was airtight anymore.
Rika’s wasn’t either, but her skin was more than capable of holding out against the effects of vacuum for at least fifteen minutes.
Chase hadn’t been happy with the call, and had applied another layer of the epoxy onto her back and checked over her thigh wound again. In the end, he had begrudgingly acknowledged that Rika was the best candidate for the job.
Barne had worked around Niki, the Persephone Jones’s AI—or so they hoped—and disabled monitoring of the cargo deck’s secondary airlock.
Rika stood at the airlock’s outer door and stared into the black. The ship had turned so that she could see Faseema in the distance, a floating blue and tan blob drifting in space. Beyond it laid the baleful, orange eye of Oran, muted by her helmet’s visor. The star’s light hit her, warming her skin against the cold of vacuum, though only slightly.
It was also bathing her in radiation—not the most comforting of thoughts.
Rika climbed out of the airlock and activated the maglocks on her feet. She had less than two minutes to make it to the engines and jump off. If she didn’t clear the ship before it started its deceleration burn, the star’s radiation would be the least of her worries.
She reached the fuel port at the back of the ship, which rose several meters above the engine nozzles and looked out at the tiny speck in the distance that was Kestry Station.
Rika had only ever done one space jump, and that had been toward a planet. Those were nice, big targets. Kestry was only visible at all because of her helmet’s magnification. If she missed that tiny rock, she’d drift forever in space—after she froze to death…or asphyxiated.
Here goes nothing…
She triple che
cked her aim and pushed off.
Trajectory looks good, Rika assessed as she recalculated her vector. She took long, slow breaths, trying to calm her thundering heart. All I have to do is fall straight down…and pray that I can slow enough that I don’t make a new crater on Kestry.
An alert went off on her HUD, and Rika looked up to see the Persephone Jones pivot a few degrees, and begin its braking burn, directing its engine wash away from the asteroid and Kestry Station.
The effect was dizzying; the ship appeared to accelerate away as it slowed. Rika turned her gaze back to the station below her, maintaining her focus on the small target.
As the station grew in size, her fear of missing diminished, and her other fear increased: Can I slow enough?
Barne had jury-rigged a pair of small tanks containing a combustible propellant and attached them to the jump-jets on Rika’s calves. They should work, but when one had a delta-v of over seven hundred meters per second, ‘should’ didn’t offer a lot of reassurance.
Whose stupid idea was this anyway? she asked herself. Oh…yeah….
Rika reran the calculations on the best time to burn. There was a wide margin of error, caused by the nature of the fuel in the tanks. It wasn’t the same mixture she usually burned, and her efficiency coefficient was really just an estimate.
Everything in space was in motion. Her, the station, and the moon it orbited. Too much burn, and she’d miss the target; too little, and she’d bore into the surface—or maybe punch straight through the station. Wouldn’t that be fun?
The countdown to burn hit zero, and her calf jets came to life, spewing twin flames at the base of the torpedo that was her body. Rika prayed that her armor’s EM countermeasures were enough to fool the station’s tracking systems. If not, the station’s fire-control systems were bound to pick her up as some sort of inbound projectile—or at the very least, a meteor—and lase her out of the black.
She looked up, spotting the Persephone Jones by its brilliant torch as it continued to slow on its approach to the station. Gauging its speed, she determined that the ship was at least fifteen minutes behind her at this point.
The burn continued for another two minutes before the boosters sputtered out, and her freefall to the station resumed. Her HUD registered a relative velocity of three meters per second.
Rika gritted her teeth. This is going to hurt.
During the final minute of her descent, the station grew rapidly, and Rika delivered a series of short bursts from her armor’s attitude controls to place her impact location—there was no other way to consider it—as close as possible to the docking bay to which the Persephone Jones had been assigned.
At the last minute, Rika saw a cargo net stretching over a storage area and aimed for it. She very nearly missed; one last burst from her jets brought her over the net, and she made her target. The net stretched, vibrating as one strand snapped, then another. Two more broke under her mass, and Rika fell through, dropping to the asteroid’s surface.
The impact was still hard enough to jar her, but Rika managed to clamp her hand around a cargo anchor before she bounced off the surface.
Rika righted herself and dug her feet into the asteroid’s surface. She looked up once more to see the Jones slowly growing larger, all the while thanking the stars she had made it in one piece.
She turned her gaze back to the asteroid and noted helpful lights anchored into the stone showing the way toward an airlock set into the rock twenty meters away.
With deliberate steps, Rika worked her way through the external cargo storage area, reaching the entrance a minute later. Once at the airlock, she pushed the helpful green button, and the entrance cycled open without requesting any codes.
It was suspicious, but Rika couldn’t hack a door that opened willingly, so she stepped inside and triggered the airlock to cycle the inner door open.
She unslung her JE84, checking its action while reading that her GNR was ready on her right arm. If anyone thought they could catch her unawares, they had another think coming.
However, when the airlock’s inner door opened, it revealed only an empty corridor—a strange sight after encountering an unsecured airlock.
Now I feel like no one wants to welcome me. Just as well; I probably would have had to kill them.
The thought stopped Rika in her tracks. Have I become so inured to death that it’s entirely casual now? It was one thing to take down an enemy on the battlefield, when they were both soldiers—but in Oranian space, she was the criminal, rescuing a girl whose father had caused the people immeasurable pain.
No.
Rika resolved to avoid any nonessential casualties, if at all possible. No one else should have to die to free Amy.
Except for K-Strike mercs. They deserve it for being so shitty at their jobs.
Rika sent one of her two remaining probes ahead, sending it down the passageway to the right while she turned left. Based on what she saw of the station while falling toward it, that direction should be where the Jones’s docking bay lay.
As she strode through the well-lit corridor, she heard voices around a corner to her right. Rika froze, considering her options. There was nowhere to hide; she could fall back to the airlock and pray they didn’t look inside…There’s no time for that. Her only option was to continue forward as though she had every right to be there.
She walked through the intersection and spotted the speakers, a man and a woman, walking toward her. They weren’t station personnel or wearing any armor; though they did both have sidearms hanging from their belts.
The man raised an eyebrow as his eyes raked over her, but the woman only shook her head and muttered something degrading about Genevians.
For a moment, Rika considered grabbing the woman and tossing her down the hall. A little fantasy to make her feel better as she walked past pretending she hadn’t heard the couple.
“I mean, she’s just mech meat,” the woman was saying, raising her voice for Rika to hear.
Rika clenched her teeth and kept moving, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. She was surprised the woman would insult an armed and armored mech—though Rika had to admit that she did look a little worse for wear, at present.
By some miracle, her taunter decided not to goad her any further, and the pair turned left down the passageway, their voices fading.
The corridor branched once and then passed through another intersection before coming to a large pressure-door that stood open, revealing the docking bay beyond.
She thought that she saw the Persephone Jones on the far side of the bay and feared she was too late; then she realized it was a different ship of the same class.
Rika let out a long breath and recalled the probe she had released upon entering the facility while sending the other one into the docking bay. She tried not to think of what the Marauder quartermaster on the Romany would say at the loss of yet another allotment of drones.
She remained out of sight in the passageway as the nearest drone fed an overhead image of the bay to Rika, and she overlaid it atop her vision, looking for locations where the enemy could be lying in wait and correlating them with the cradle assigned to the Persephone Jones.
After one sweep across the bay, the probe hadn’t picked up anything out of the ordinary, other than a dearth of dockworkers.
If I jumped down to this rock for nothing….
Rika sent it on another pass, wondering if the team had been overly paranoid, when she caught sight of an armored woman in the shadows behind a row of cargo floats.
Rika had the drone pull EM readings from the woman and perform a new sweep, focusing on the detected spectrum. Sure enough, there were two more armored figures in the bay. One was crouched in the armatures of a docking cradle, while the other was high up in the bay, crouched in the Y where two support arches met.
The sniper in the arches was Rika’s biggest worry. He would have a clear line of sight on two of the Persephone Jones’s airlocks. Rika knew that if
she were running the ambush op, there would also be another sniper covering the far side of the ship.
Rather than using suppressive fire in an attempt to overwhelm Basilisk—like the K-Strike soldiers back in Kandahar City had done—this crew was going to take out as much of the opposition as possible in an initial strike.
During her drone’s reconnaissance, Rika had continued to remain outside the bay, leaning casually against the passageway’s bulkhead, her line of sight limited to a small corner of the docking bay, also remaining out of sight of the enemy.
She considered moving in to take up a better position, but decided against it. While her drone had flitted about undetected—Rika hoped—there was no way the enemy wouldn’t have eyes on the entrances. Better to wait until she could use the element of surprise for distraction.
Rika wondered if the reason the airlock’s security had been offline was the enemy in the bay. They couldn’t just hunker down in there without station security taking notice; they must have had someone on the inside disable the security measures in this area.
Nice to catch a break once in a while.
A minute later, a warning klaxon blared. Through her drone’s feed, Rika caught sight of the Persephone Jones sliding through the grav shield and into the bay. Overhead, a grav emitter armature slid over the ship, guiding it to its cradle.
This was it—once the cradle locked on, and the ramp extended, it would be time for her to move.
Rika checked her GNR’s loadout: seven depleted uranium sabot rounds, sixty two projectiles, and a half-charge on her electron beam’s last SC Batt—enough for five more shots.
In the bay, the Persephone Jones touched down, and the docking ramp began to extend.
Rika took a deep breath. Time to do this…
She casually walked into the bay, turned left, and strode past a line of cargo containers. Once in their shadow, she stopped, took two long steps backward, and raised her GNR, taking aim at the sniper in the support struts high above.
