by Terry Mixon
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” he said. “Grab mine and come on.”
She easily scooped his up and followed behind him as he traversed the empty corridors toward the bridge. “Shouldn’t you armor up?”
“If the AI decides to call, I need to be presentable,” he said as he held the lift doors open. “I personally doubt it will, but one never knows when it comes to homicidal AIs.”
Less than a minute later, they exited onto the bridge. It felt wrong to see it with no one at the controls.
“What’s your plan?” he asked Kelsey.
“That really depends on what the AI does,” she admitted. “If it uses the head bombs, we can probably sneak out one of the personnel airlocks and slip over to the station. That’s true even if it starts maneuvering the ship. We still have control of the ship’s systems, so it won’t know what we’re doing. If it starts shooting, we’ll have to go out the escape pod tube.”
He shook his head. “It will see the escape pod and kill it before we even get to the atmosphere. Worse, we won’t be able to get away from it in time to rendezvous with Kelsey One.”
Even as they were speaking, he was linked into the destroyer’s scanner network. The three cruisers were the most immediate threat, but he had his eye on the large station containing the AI, too.
At this range, he’d know the moment the enemy brought targeting scanners online and they could act. He just needed to decide what the best course was first. He hoped he’d have time to make a considered call.
The com system pinged with an incoming call, with video this time. So, the AI was going to talk after all. He wondered what it would say before it killed them, because he had no doubt as to the fate it intended for them.
He sat in the command seat and gestured for Kelsey to get off far enough to the side so she wasn’t in the feed. Only when he was ready did he accept the call.
The video component was a sine wave that undulated across the screen. He’d barely had a chance to register it when the AI began speaking.
“You have done well,” it said in a sonorous voice.
“Thank you, Lord,” Jared said once he was sure that was all it was going to say as an opening. “We live to serve.”
“I will see that your families are well rewarded for your loyalty, but no word of this mission must ever make way to your fellow humans. My personal reward to you is a quick death.”
The scanners showed the cruisers bringing their targeting scanners online, so Jared killed the com and dove for where his armor lay on the deck. The end was upon them, and they had to act now.
Jared wasn’t nearly as graceful getting into the armor as Kelsey had been, but it only took a few seconds. Hopefully, it would be enough.
He used his implants to give the ship one set of final orders as the cruisers prepared to fire. Not to fight but to shut down the fusion plants. If one of them went, it would incinerate Kelsey and himself in an instant.
The deck shuddered under his body. Not a weapons strike. Too subtle.
Jared levered himself to his feet and saw that Kelsey had ejected the bridge’s escape pod. Not with her in it, but empty.
“What…” he started, and then cut off when he saw her slap a plasma breaching charge on the closed hatch.
“Back,” she ordered, hurling herself away from the explosives.
He barely had time to emulate her when the charge went off. It felt like the end of the world. Even through the armor, his ears rang. Moments later, his implants registered a signal that he knew was meant to trigger the nonexistent bomb in his head. The AI was taking no chances.
The air venting through the hull breach picked him up like a toy and hurled him into space. Just in time to see the first missiles slam into his command. Even without the possibility of a fusion plant containment failure, that didn’t mean the explosions were gentle for the two of them. The exploding missiles blew huge chunks of debris away from Athena, and something slammed into him, spinning him around and dazing him again.
Only as he tried to recover did he see a missile explode far below, no doubt killing the escape pod Kelsey had jettisoned. After a few seconds, he was able to bring his suit under control and arrow toward the station concealing his and Kelsey’s pinnace. She’d be on the far side of the station, away from possible detection.
The plan was to hold up there until the cruisers left. Then, once the AI’s attention was elsewhere, they could slip away. Chancy, but it was the best hope they had.
A small bit of debris hit his leg and spun him around just in time to see Athena come apart completely under the attack. It wasn’t as violent an explosion as when a fusion plant went critical, but it was potentially deadly all the same. The attack was sending debris out in a terrible cloud, with several large chunks slamming into the station he and Kelsey were moving toward.
He felt another jerk as Kelsey grabbed his arm and leveled him out, just before she jetted forward and under the cover of the powered-down station.
Persephone’s pinnace was right there, its ramp already down and an armored figure gesturing for them to hurry. The gray Marine Raider armor told him it was Kelsey. His Kelsey.
The two of them raced forward and past the ramp. It had only barely started to close when the hand of God crushed Jared against the wall, and everything went dark.
Kelsey held on for dear life as her pinnace violently rolled and jerked. Honed reflexes made her rotate so that her back slammed into the side of the craft rather than her head.
Jared wasn’t moving, but his armor’s telemetry said he was in decent shape, only knocked out. The other figure—the other her—was banged up but conscious. She was Kelsey, too, so she was tough.
“Kelsey,” Talbot said, his voice strained. “Get up here right now.”
“Get him strapped in,” she ordered her other self. “Then get secure yourself.”
With that, she made all haste back to the control area. She knew things were bad when she saw Talbot in the copilot’s seat, struggling with the controls. The pilot was still in her seat, but limp.
“She went straight up and hit her head on the overhead controls,” he said. “Bad luck, but she’s out. We have worse problems, though.”
Kelsey quickly pulled the woman from her seat and double-checked Talbot’s assessment. The woman was breathing and had a strong pulse. Her marine implants indicated nothing more serious than a concussion. That was good. An impact like that could have broken the woman’s neck.
She strapped the unconscious pilot into the flight engineer’s seat and took the controls. “What happened?”
“The station blew up, I think. Not a fusion plant overload, obviously, but more than enough to knock us around. There’s a lot of debris in the area around us and we’re going to hit the atmosphere pretty fast on this course.
“I’m no pilot, but I’m worried we’re on a really dangerous entry angle. We could burn up. Worse, one of the drives is out and some of the controls are amber.”
Kelsey finished strapping in and checked the board. Yep, the port engine was offline, and some of the control surfaces seemed damaged. That was going to seriously complicate things.
“I really should’ve prioritized my atmospheric qualifications,” she said as she projected their vector out. “I’ll have to gradually adjust our course so as not to get the AI’s attention. It can kill us just as dead as a bad entry, and everyone on the surface, too.”
“Did you get the admiral on board? Who was with him? Are they okay?”
“Jared is out, but our other passenger has him strapped in. Who it is isn’t important right now, so I’ll explain when I have more time.
“Hey, one good thing is that we’re going to end up on a decent course toward the area where everyone else is waiting down on Terra. It will only take a few tweaks in atmosphere to get us down to them.”
“If we get down,” her husband said.
She shot him a look. “Think positive. We’ll make it.”
In spite of her projected confidence, she was less than sure. Her atmospheric entry skills were rudimentary at best. With one dead engine and some damaged controls, this would’ve challenged someone like Annette Vitter.
She immediately regretted the thought. The fighter wing commander had been piloting an old-style marine pinnace when an asteroid impact on Erorsi had knocked them from the sky. The woman had somehow turned certain death into a crash that had scored a deep wound into the planet, but it had still cost the woman an arm and killed some of the people aboard.
Kelsey was nowhere in the other woman’s league with small-craft handling. If things went badly, they’d almost certainly die.
She took a calming breath and focused on what she could do. Several adjustments to their course put them into a better entry angle, and she let that play out.
The initial wisps of air caused the pinnace to shake a little, but that was just a hint at what was coming. Within a minute, the shuddering of the small craft had her deeply scared. It was far rougher than she’d expected. Something on the hull must be catching air, and that could kill them fast.
Abruptly, the shaking ceased, but before she could react, an alarm blared. One of the control surfaces had just ripped off the hull.
“The good news is that we lost the thing dragging on the air,” she said, trying to compensate for the new damage. “The bad news is that it’s going to make a soft landing really challenging.”
She was grateful when Talbot didn’t say anything, leaving her to focus on the pinnace. The loss of the control surface was complicating the pinnace’s stability, but only a little. The loss of the port engine was worse. It gave the pinnace a recurring tendency to slew to the side, and a spin under these conditions would kill them.
Kelsey lost track of time as she fought the crashing pinnace for every advantage she could wring out of it. Eventually, the buffeting eased, and the small craft was deep enough and slow enough that she was flying rather than falling.
A quick check of their location showed that the landing zone was coming up far more quickly than she’d planned on. She needed to bleed airspeed right now.
She put the pinnace into a series of S curves that dropped their speed, fighting for control when the pinnace bucked under her again and again. She only had the landing coordinates, as the people below didn’t dare signal to them.
Kelsey imagined their entry looked catastrophic to the people on the ground. Hell, it felt catastrophic to her. Still, she reminded herself that this was far from the most violent planetary insertion that she’d ever experienced.
Using a drop capsule on Harrison’s World had taken her from orbital speeds to a dead stop on the ground in about ten seconds. That bit of insanity had earned her the drop commando badge from Ned Quincy, and she was the only living person that could claim that level of crazy. Of course, she’d had no choice if she’d wanted to stop that madman with the nuke.
“I think I see them,” Talbot said. “Off to starboard.”
She looked over and spotted the strobe of a landing light. It wouldn’t be visible from orbit, so they’d taken a chance.
Kelsey hit the general com. “I’m coming around for final approach. Hold on tight.”
She killed the com. “We’ll have one chance at this. If I don’t nail it, we’ll crash for real. The controls are getting worse by the second.”
It was going to be a race to see if they could set down before the controls failed altogether. If they hadn’t been on an approach vector, she’d never have been able to even get close.
“Altitude a thousand meters,” Talbot said. “Start slowing us down.”
“Can’t,” she said. “We’re a damned flying brick. If I lose any more speed, we’ll fall right out of the sky.”
“We’ll be a crater if we don’t.”
Dammit, he was right. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and activated the general com again. “Coming up on the LZ. This is going to suck. Thirty seconds to landing.”
She somehow managed to balance losing speed with staying in the air for almost twenty-five seconds. Then the remaining engine failed catastrophically.
Kelsey forced the pinnace out of the skew the exploding engine had sent them into and saw the ground racing to meet them. “Brace for impact!”
The pinnace slammed into the ground, throwing Kelsey harshly against her restraints. They were on the ground but skidding wildly, and a new danger popped up right in front of them. They were headed directly for the other pinnace at an insane rate of speed.
The ground slowed them faster than she’d hoped but not nearly fast enough. They crashed into the other pinnace hard enough to shatter the console in front of her and crush her against the wreckage.
Thankfully, her armor protected her from what might otherwise have been a fatal impact, even for a Marine Raider. She sat there in her seat, blinking stupidly at the mess piled on her.
She used her enhanced strength to push herself back even as she was verifying the health of the three of them in the destroyed control area. Everyone was alive. Miraculously, no one was even seriously hurt.
“Allow me to be the first to congratulate you on a stellar landing,” the pilot said weakly from behind her. “Just remember that all damage to the pinnace comes out of your pay.”
Kelsey laughed in spite of herself. “I’m never going to be out from under the debt of destroyed and damaged equipment. You get used to it after a while. You okay?”
“My head hurts, but I’ll damned well walk away from this landing. Seriously, good job, Highness.”
Kelsey unstrapped herself with shaky hands as Talbot also dug himself out of the debris.
“I’ll make sure she’s okay,” he said. “Go check on the others.”
On unsteady feet, Kelsey got into the back of the pinnace. The floor sloped at least ten degrees to the side, but the body of the ship seemed intact, and one figure was standing. The other Kelsey.
“How is he?” she asked.
The other version of herself popped her helmet and shook her blonde hair out. “He has a concussion, but he’ll live. I’m afraid I’m going to have to complain to the management about the landing. It did indeed suck.”
Kelsey checked Jared’s readouts and satisfied herself that he was going to make it. That relieved her no end. She popped her own helmet and stared at her twin.
She started to say something, but someone started banging on the outside of the pinnace by the ramp. That would be the ad hoc crash-and-rescue response team the others had put together. She’d better let them in before they had a stroke. If she could.
The ramp was crumpled and would never open again. There was an emergency exit on the side hull. It was visibly warped but might still be useable to two Marine Raiders in powered armor.
“Give me a hand here,” she told her doppelgänger.
The other Kelsey stepped up beside her, and together they put all of their considerable strength against the jammed hatch. It groaned and finally popped open, letting in the sun and air of the homeworld.
Kelsey took a deep breath and turned toward the other her as the people outside looked for the best way up the gouged earth toward the opening. She clapped a hand on the woman from another universe’s black-armored shoulder.
“Welcome to Terra, sister mine. Now the real work begins.”
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Also by Terr
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You can always find the most up to date listing of Terry’s titles on his Amazon Author Page.
The Empire of Bones Saga
Empire of Bones
Veil of Shadows
Command Decisions
Ghosts of Empire
Paying the Price
Reconnaissance in Force
Behind Enemy Lines
The Terra Gambit
Hidden Enemies
Race to Terra
Ruined Terra
The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 1
The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 2
The Humanity Unlimited Saga
Liberty Station
Freedom Express
Tree of Liberty
Blood of Patriots
The Fractured Republic Saga
Storm Divers
The Scorched Earth Saga
Scorched Earth
The Vigilante Series with Glynn Stewart
Heart of Vengeance
Oath of Vengeance
Bound By Law
Bound By Honor
Bound By Blood
About Terry
#1 Bestselling Military Science Fiction author Terry Mixon served as a non-commissioned officer in the United States Army 101st Airborne Division. He later worked alongside the flight controllers in the Mission Control Center at the NASA Johnson Space Center supporting the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and other human spaceflight projects.
He now writes full time while living in Texas with his lovely wife and a pounce of cats.
www.TerryMixon.com
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