by Ryk Brown
“Allow me to attack their command and control center in Geneva,” the lieutenant insisted. “If they are utilizing a centralized weapons control system, we may be able to stop the launches. It is our only chance of delaying them until the Aurora arrives and destroys the weapons from orbit.”
“Lieutenant, you’re talking about attacking what is undoubtedly the most heavily guarded Jung facility on Earth. I know the Ghatazhak are good, but are you that good?”
“I offer you no guarantees, Captain,” the lieutenant answered, “but yes, we are that good.” The lieutenant paused a moment before continuing. “Sir, you realize that this means I cannot rescue Lieutenant Commander Nash.”
Nathan’s head fell as the realization hit him. “I know, Lieutenant. I know.”
“I am sorry, Captain.”
Nathan took a deep breath, letting it out in one long sigh. “Good luck, Lieutenant.”
* * *
“Falcon, Telles,” the lieutenant’s voice called over Loki’s helmet comm.
“Telles, Falcon,” Loki answered as the Falcon rolled onto its right side and started a climbing turn from treetop level. “More troops on the ground! More bandits inbound! Fast movers in five! Heavies in ten! You’d better hurry, sir! She’s already surrounded! She’ll be pinned down in minutes!”
“Change of mission,” the lieutenant said, his voice devoid of all emotion. “Combat Two and Three have been redirected to higher priority targets.”
“What?” Josh cried out as he rolled the interceptor to the left and pushed their nose down.
“Falcon copies. ETA to next extraction?”
“Falcon, Telles. Extraction unlikely. Instruct Nash to continue escape and evade for as long as possible.”
“Lieutenant! She is nearly surrounded! They’re moving in on her position as I speak. I can see her on my ground sensors!” Loki argued. “If they get more troops on the ground, she’s done for!”
“Continue ground support as long as possible,” the lieutenant said, “but do not engage superior forces…”
“Is he fucking kidding me?” Josh yelled. “What the hell does he think we’ve been doing?”
“The Falcon’s survival takes priority. Understood?”
“Understood,” Loki answered.
“This is bullshit!” Josh exclaimed.
“The captain has his reasons,” Loki insisted.
“Just like he had his reasons to leave us behind… Yeah, I know. It’s still bullshit!”
“I know.”
Josh pulled the Falcon’s nose level and tightened his turn, circling around toward Jessica’s position. “I’m turning to fly over her again. We have to tell her.”
“I know,” Loki answered.
The Falcon leveled off and continued over the treetops toward the lieutenant commander’s position. “They’re still on us,” Josh said, glancing at his threat display. “Transmission range coming up.” Josh watched his display as they entered the comm circle on his ground track display. “We’re in range.”
Loki said nothing.
“You’ve got to tell her, Loki!” Josh insisted.
“I… I don’t know if I can.”
“Fuck this!” Josh rolled level again, pulled the Falcon’s nose up hard, and slammed his throttles forward, pulling the interceptor into a vertical climb. “Nash, Falcon! Hit the deck! We’re coming to get you!”
“What are you doing?” Loki asked.
“I have no fucking idea, but don’t bother trying to stop me!”
“I’m not. I’m not,” Loki agreed, “but we need some kind of plan!”
Josh looked quickly around his cockpit, hoping for inspiration. “You’ve got more elbow room back there than I do up here, right?”
“A little, yeah, but…”
“Think she’ll fit on your lap?”
Loki looked puzzled for a moment, then looked around frantically, realizing there might be enough room after all. He reached down between his legs and grabbed his seat lever, pushing the seat back fifty centimeters until it stopped at its most aft position. “Yeah! Yeah! She’ll fit! Barely, but she’ll fit! I won’t be able to do anything back here while she’s on board though. You’ll have to do it all yourself.”
“No problem,” Josh assured him, “except maybe the escape jump.”
“I can set that up now,” Loki assured him. “I’ve got several micro-jumps already set up as escapes. They won’t jump any farther than high orbit. Just make sure there’s no one along your jump path.”
“Perfect,” Josh said as they continued to climb.
“But how are we going to get to her?” Loki wondered. “She’s surrounded, and they’re not more than fifty meters away!”
“How fast can you plot another jump, straight down?” Josh asked.
“Oh, God,” Loki said under his breath. “Can you give me an altitude and speed ahead of time?”
“One hundred kilometers, but I can’t promise a speed.”
“I need something, Josh!”
“Fine! Half a meter per second!”
“You can’t fly at half a meter per second, Josh,” Loki argued. “That’s a hover.”
“More like a stall actually,” Josh corrected.
“Oh, God,” Loki moaned as he pulled his seat forward again.
“You’ve got about twenty seconds to figure it out!” Josh warned. “Reducing power.” Josh pulled his throttles back slowly, trying to time the Falcon’s stall to occur at exactly one hundred kilometers above the surface of the Earth.
“How close do you want to come out?” Loki asked.
“How many meters will I need, at a descent rate of half a meter per second, to come to a hover just above the treetops using full lift thrust?”
“You’re not making this easy, Josh.”
“Do I ever?” he said as he watched their rate of climb begin to drastically decrease. “Passing eighty.”
Loki furiously entered the jump parameters, pausing and closing his eyes for a moment to make quick calculations in his head.
“Ninety,” Josh reported. “Rate of climb is falling fast. Ninety-three.”
“I’ve almost got it,” Loki said.
“Ninety-six.”
Loki closed his eyes again, running over his calculations in his head one last time. Pilot reaction time, time it would take the lift thrusters to come up to full power, the acceleration rate of their descent when they came out of the jump and suddenly found themselves in thicker air: he had thought of everything…
“Ninety-eight.” The stall horn began to beep at them through the helmet comms.
…He hoped.
“One hundred!” Josh announced as the stall horn blared. “Pitching back down!” Josh used the Falcon’s attitude thrusters to push the nose back down as the interceptor transitioned from climb to fall, bringing the ship level with the Earth’s surface positioned one hundred kilometers below. “Falling!” he announced as he reached for the lift turbine throttles.
Loki’s eyes were fixed on the vertical speed reading, waiting for the zero to change to a negative zero point five. A moment later it did, and he pressed the jump button.
The blue-white jump flash washed over the Falcon.
The woods flashed with red light as energy weapons fire flew at Jessica from all sides, forcing her to duck down. She could not rise to return fire from between the rock and the fallen tree trunk where she hid. To do so would have meant instant death. Then the weapons fire suddenly stopped. A man’s voice rang out through the eerily still night air. “Surrender now and you will not be harmed!”
“Fuck you!” she hollered between rapid breaths. She raised her weapon and fired blindly over the log at her back.
“You are surrounded! Yo
ur air support has abandoned you! Surrender or die!”
Jessica thought about Sergeant Tonkton. He had given his life to protect her and the knowledge she carried in her memories. She looked at her watch. Nearly two minutes had passed. Was he right? Had they abandoned her? A million thoughts raced through her mind, but one thought kept coming back to her, interrupting and overriding all the others. Major Waddell.
“Fuck,” she cried to herself in a barely audible whisper. She could her the crunching of leaves as her would-be captors moved in on her. She laid her Corinari energy rifle down on the ground next to her and slowly pulled her sidearm out of her holster. She turned the weapon on, flipped the safety off, and stuck the weapon in her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut as tightly as she could before moving her finger toward the trigger.
There was a thunderous clap, like there had been a tear in the sky. A shock wave hit her, and everything went dark.
A split second later, the flash was gone, and the Falcon was falling at one meter per second from an altitude of only twenty meters… and they were accelerating.
As his visor cleared, Josh slammed the throttles all the way forward, bringing all four lift turbines screaming to life.
Loki glanced to his left as his visor cleared. The tops of trees, each of them dangerously close to the interceptor, shot up above them from all sides, shaking violently in the Falcon’s thrust-wash. Loki braced himself for impact, but it did not come.
“Get on the nose turret!” Josh ordered as the Falcon settled into a hover only five meters above the surface. “Let them have it!”
Loki quickly responded, opening up with the Falcon’s nose turret and sending streams of energy bolts toward every red icon he could target on his ground sensors.
Josh rotated the hovering interceptor from left to right, firing his wingtip energy cannons into the woods beyond for extra measure as he spun the ship full circle. As he finished the circle, he could see Jessica lying unconscious only twenty meters to their port side. She was covered with tree branches that had been ripped from nearby trees by the shock wave of their sudden arrival. As the Falcon’s yaw maneuver ended, he activated their landing gear and hollered at his copilot. “Go get her!”
Loki pulled the canopy release as the Falcon bounced and settled onto the ground. The boarding ladder appeared automatically to the left side of the ship just as Loki swung his leg out over the edge of the cockpit, placing his foot in the first ladder hole that had opened in the side of the interceptor. Two rungs later, he jumped to the ground, falling to one side as he hit.
Josh watched Loki pick himself up and head toward the still unmoving lieutenant commander, climbing over fallen branches in order to reach her. Something caught his eye just to the right of his copilot: three Jung soldiers attempting to move through fallen debris to get to Jessica. Josh pressed a button on his console, and a small control pad jutted out from the bottom edge. He swung the nose turret toward the left, firing as he swept toward the approaching soldiers. The energy bolts ripped through the soldiers, killing them instantly as they fell into smoldering mounds of melted human flesh.
Loki raised his helmet visor as he pulled the fallen branches off the lieutenant commander, tossing them aside. “Jessica!” he yelled, coughing at the heavy smoke. He grabbed her vest and lifted her up, giving her a shake. “Jessica! We have to go! Jessica!”
Jessica’s eyes opened. Thick smoke was wafting through the night air, the woods around them building into a conflagration. She coughed, looking about to get her bearings. She looked at him. “Loki?”
“Yeah!” he yelled, laughing with happiness. “Can you walk?”
“I think so,” she answered as she stumbled over the debris. “What happened?” she asked as they moved toward the idling Falcon.
“Only the greatest landing in history!” he yelled.
Josh opened fire again as Loki and Jessica approached the port boarding ladder, sweeping the turret back and forth in case there were any other troops out there that thought they might take a shot at them.
Loki pushed Jessica up the ladder, following closely behind. “How are we going to all fit?” she wondered as she climbed over the edge of the cockpit wall.
“It’s going to be tight, but we’ll make it. We don’t have to go far, one jump and a landing! Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes!”
Jessica got her other foot into the back of the Falcon’s cockpit, looking around with a puzzled expression on her face.
“Lean forward so I can get in!” Loki told her. Jessica leaned forward over the console. She reached out and tapped Josh on the side of his helmet. Josh responded with a thumbs-up sign.
Loki sat down behind her, fastened his restraints, then closed his visor. After pressing the button to close the canopy, he grabbed Jessica and pulled her unceremoniously backward onto his lap.
Weapons fire began to fly at the Falcon from farther out in the woods as the canopy came down over the back half of the Falcon’s cockpit.
“Let’s go!” Loki yelled over his helmet comms.
“Are you both in? Did it work?”
“We’re in!” Loki answered. “Canopy is closed and locked! Get us in the air!” Jessica was sitting on his lap, twisted to her right with her injured shoulder bleeding onto his pressure suit. Her left shoulder was up against the canopy overhead, and her head was bent over, nearly looking Loki in the face. He could see the pain and fear in her eyes. She had just escaped certain death, and she wasn’t safe yet. None of them were.
Josh pushed the lift throttles forward, causing the Falcon to rise quickly into the air. “Hang on!” he hollered. “We have company!”
Energy bolts streaked over them as approaching Jung fighters fired at the climbing Falcon. There was an explosion as one of the bolts struck the leading edge of the Falcon’s right wing-body, sending debris and melting, molten chunks flying across the fuselage. Tiny pieces of metal struck the canopy, causing Jessica to scream, as they were right next to her head.
“We’re hit!” Loki yelled. “Starboard side!”
“I’m losing the starboard lift turbine!” Josh yelled as the interceptor began to roll to the right.
“Punch it!” Loki yelled. “Get some air moving over the wings!”
Josh pushed the main jet propulsion turbine’s throttle all the way forward. The Falcon immediately began to speed away. As she did so, her right wing began to rise, leveling them off. “That’s it! Pitching up! Stand by to jump!”
An alarm sounded in Loki’s helmet comms. He tried to see his console to identify the alarm but could not see around Jessica. Another red energy weapons bolt from the pursuing Jung fighters flashed past them on the right side, followed by several more. The light revealed the cause of the alarm. There was a crack in the canopy just above them and slightly to the right. “Wait!” Loki cried out.
“Jumping!” Josh announced.
The blue-white flash washed over them.
Loki’s visor cleared. He could barely make out the inside of the canopy in the darkness, but the crack appeared to be spreading.
“Woo-hoo!” Josh yelled over the comms. “We made it! Was that awesome or what?”
“The canopy is cracked!” Loki yelled.
“I’ve got the Aurora on sensors, three minutes out.”
“The canopy is cracked!” Loki repeated.
“What?”
“We’re losing pressure!”
“Oh, shit!” Josh exclaimed. He pushed the throttles forward. “I can get us on deck in two minutes.”
“I don’t think she’s got two minutes!”
“How fast are we losing pressure?”
“I can’t see my console!” Loki told him. “Call up the systems data on your displays!”
Josh did as he was instructed, switching his main data dis
play to show the ship’s various systems. “Oh my God! We’ll be fully depressurized in just over a minute!” Josh keyed his mic to transmit. “Mayday, mayday, mayday! Falcon inbound, two minutes out! Losing pressure! We have Lieutenant Commander Nash on board! Request emergency landing and medical rescue!”
“Falcon, Aurora flight. Copy your mayday. Cleared for emergency landing. The apron is all yours.”
“Screw the apron! That will take longer! We’ll use the forward elevator like usual!” Josh said.
“Negative, Falcon. Forward elevators are offline.”
“Fuck!” he swore in frustration. “Copy! Ninety seconds! Open the outer doors on bay two so I can roll straight in!”
“Falcon, Prechitt! Did you say you have Lieutenant Commander Nash on board? How is that possible?”
“She’s sitting on Loki’s lap, sir! We’re losing pressure, and she doesn’t have a suit!”
“Copy! Come straight in and get down quickly, Josh. We’ll be standing by.”
“That’s my plan!” Josh assured him.
Jessica was not looking at Loki, but he could see that she was in distress. “She’s having trouble breathing!”
“Touchdown in one minute!”
Jessica turned her head toward Loki’s face, twisting her body around so she could face him. He could see the fear in her eyes. Even worse, her skin color was changing. “Oh my God! She’s turning blue, Josh! Hurry!”
“I’m at full power!” Josh told him. “Coming over her bow now! Pitching over!” Josh cut his main drive and flipped the Falcon end over, putting her into a tail first attitude. He fired his mains again to slow down as they passed over the top of the Aurora’s forward section. As they passed aft of the forward section’s highest point, he began to translate downward, closely following the curve of the Aurora’s upper hull on his way to the flight apron at her midsection.
Jessica’s expression changed from fear to panic as she grabbed at Loki’s helmet. Her neck muscles were straining and her mouth was opening wide with each breath as she desperately tried to breathe in oxygen that simply was not there. “Oh, God. Oh, God.” Her eyes began to bulge as she felt their landing gear slam onto the deck harder than usual. As they rolled into the main transfer airlock, she lost consciousness completely. Her hands released their grip on his helmet, falling onto his shoulders as her entire body went limp. Loki was speechless, in shock at the horror he had just witnessed.
