by Melissa Good
“Tac one, Tac two.” Jess’s voice sounded over the intercom. “We’re going to engage the incoming. Stand clear of my zenith please.”
“Done.”
“Clear.”
The male voices answering almost sounded alike, except one was a little deeper than the other. Dev had officially met the other two techs at breakfast in the dining hall and their reaction to her had been so unfriendly that Jess had felt she needed to say something to them about it.
Dev wasn’t sure that was a good thing. She understood why they felt the way they did. Certainly, she thought the two men and also the other agents had resented Jess’s words. But she had to admit to herself she’d gotten a certain odd sensation when it had happened that she still hadn’t figured out.
“Okay, here it comes,” Jess said. “Get ready.”
“Ready,” Dev replied. She focused her attention on the forward window, trading the scans for real time. Ahead of her she could see the heavy cloud bank they were flying under and she searched the edges of it for the first sight of the oncoming craft.
A faint flicker, then there it was. “Visual,” Dev said. “Evading.” She took the craft into a bowing turn to the left, then hit the bottom jets and the starboard side ones, boosting the carrier up and over the intruder.
“Circle back.” Jess yelled.
Dev held the turn, then rotated the throttles and blended the jets to bring the carrier around in a tight turn, half on its side. She spotted the craft and dropped down to come alongside it, close enough now to see it clearly. “It’s another one of these.” She said in surprise.
“Fuckers.” Jess slid around in her station. “Tac one, Tac two loose empty, probably rigged. I’m going to take it out clear standby.”
“Clear!”
“Clear!”
“Hold her steady,” Jess said, as she brought the guns to bear and and fired at point blank range. As a stitching of fire creased the other carrier a bright pinprick of fire erupted near the engines. “Crap! Take her up! Hurry!”
Dev reacted instantly, kicking in the bottom jets and hauling the throttles up at full power, booting the starboard thrusters and peeling the carrier off at a high G arc that took them up into the clouds.
An explosion behind them rocked the air, rumbling through the carrier walls as they punched through the lower cloud layer, and were between that and the upper one. Dev hit the scan and located the other two carriers. She completed the drop, pitching down through the clouds again and sending out a location burst ahead of them on shortwave before she hauled the carrier into a tight turn to bring them back on course.
Her heart was hammering. She was almost at the point where she was overrunning the programming, the sims not quite up to replicating the events she found herself a part of. “Okay.”
“Erf.”
Dev glanced back over her shoulder, spotting Jess righting herself in her chair. “Are you all right?”
“Peachy.” Jess put her comm set back on. “Tac one, Tac two. Stable?”
“Stable, confirmed kill,” Jason answered. “Nice. Sent a squirt.”
“Stable,” Elaine echoed. “Close in scan showed that to be BR24004.”
Jess exhaled. “Crap.”
“Got that,” Jason said. “So we know.”
“Damn it,” Jess muttered, clicking off comm and staring at the readouts. “Damn it, damn it. They’re probably both gone. This is a goose chase. That was one of the two carriers that we’re after.”
Dev adjusted her controls again and put the carrier back on auto nav. She half turned again in her seat and looked back at Jess. “I’m sorry, but does that mean the people we’re going to try and retrieve are not as expected?”
Jess gazed quietly into nothing for a moment. “They’re probably either dead or wish they were,” she said. “It’s hard to get into one of these carriers if the people inside it don’t want you to.” She glanced at the hatch. “There’s an integrity sensor and when it’s breached the gun systems implode.”
“Oh.”
“That carrier looked untouched.” Jess felt sad. “So they must have been let in to tamper with it, and given codes.”
“Oh.” Dev’s voice took on a completely different tone. “You’re...” She paused. “We’re not supposed to do that,” she corrected herself. “Programming told me.”
“No, Dev. We’re not supposed to do that.” Jess sighed.
“So are we continuing on this course?” Dev asked after a long moment’s silence.
Jess sat back in her seat. “Let me think about that for a bit, kid.” She let her head rest against the back of the chair. “Just keep us on track for now.”
Dev turned back around and ran her eye over her settings, then she peered out the forward window, seeing the bulky outline of the clouds overhead in the eerie glow of the infrared. She checked the clock, and snugged her straps a bit tighter, wishing she had a drink of water somewhere around.
She heard Jess unstrapping and moving around, but she kept her eyes forward, watching the horizon for the first sign of land, wondering how this latest development was going to change the plan.
After about five minutes, Jess appeared at her elbow, handing over a sealed vacuum container and opening one of her own. “If it were two carriers I just blew up, we’d have turned back already.”
Dev examined the container and opened it, finding the cold, slightly fizzy kack beverage inside. She took a sip, wondering if Jess had somehow heard what she was thinking.
“But there’s still a team there,” Jess said. “I can’t just go back and leave them and not know.”
“Okay.” Dev nodded. “I’m sorry something happened to that other one. I hope it isn’t as bad as you think it is.” She lifted the container. “Thank you for the drink. I needed one.”
Their eyes met briefly. “There’s a dispenser there, behind the scan console. It’s tucked in back, you can barely see it,” Jess said. “Sorry. Should have told you when we came in. It’s not standard.” She was perched on the edge of the console, running the edge of her finger against the container.
Dev wasn’t sure what to do. She sipped her drink, watching her readouts, and from the corner of her eye, watching the silent figure at her left hand side.
“Anyway.” Jess straightened abruptly. “So maybe we won’t drop. At this point, I don’t know what to expect when we get there.” She went back to her station and sat down, setting the container in a swinging holder as she went back to looking at scan.
Dev put her own cup down and ran over the engine settings, making sure the power levels were where they needed to be and everything looked normal.
Normal. Dev had to rub the bridge of her nose for a moment. Normal? She had gone from her classes in the crèche to driving a half strange transport into a big fight in just a sun’s complete turn. Her life could not possibly have changed more than it had in the last day.
Could not possibly.
“Thirty minutes to the edge of the storm,” Dev said.
Jess put her pad away and drained her drink. She got up and went to the drop pack, checking the harness carefully and running the device through its diagnostic checks. Little more than a set of small, tightly controlled air jets it was designed to let a person wearing it fall out of the lower hatch of a carrier and land without killing themselves.
Or that was the theory anyway. Jess had several long healed bone breaks from using the thing, but it was safer and more controlled than either gliders or chutes, and in an area like they were going into, full of cliffs and rocks, at least it would give her a chance at an upright landing.
She opened the harness and got it clipped, ready for her to step into if the time came. Then she set up one of the big laser rifles in its holder on one side, and a grenade launcher on the other, balancing out the weight.
She made sure they were secured, then she sat back down in her seat and powered up the weapons systems again.
So what was the plan now? Jess glanced up at
the pilots seat. Joshua would have asked a dozen times already, nervously messing with switches and toggles up there. In contrast, Dev was quietly running her checks, and getting ready to take the ship off auto nav, her eyes never ceasing to move over the readouts, watching them closely.
Very surprisingly competent. Jess was uncomfortably stunned at the level of knowledge the crèche had given this kid in a week, aware of just how long it would have taken a natural born person to get to this level.
On the one hand, at least she knew the kid probably wasn’t going to drive the bus into a cliff. At least, not more so than any of the other techs. On the other hand, if they could do this with just one week’s lead time...
Holy shit. Maybe that’s what Bain really wanted. Get rid of all the troublesome, stubborn artifacts in the company and replace them with cute, competent, smart kids.
Who he could trust.
Who he could order by the dozens if he wanted and not have to pay the family tender rights.
Jess stared at the back of Dev’s head. Should she let that happen? “Did you say you were the only one of you?” She asked, suddenly.
Dev turned and looked back. “Yes. I always sort of envied my crèchemates who were part of a set group. They always had people to talk to.”
Jess managed a brief smile. No, there would be no instant conversion. Even bio alts took the same years to grow up and mature as natural born did. So even if Dev did work out, it would be... “How old are you?”
Dev’s nose wrinkled a little. “Seventeen and a half standard years,” she said. “We’re not supposed to be assigned before eighteen, but this was a special request.”
A kid indeed. Jess did the math. Even if it did work out, she’d be either retired to a watchman’s role, or dead by then. So what the hell. “I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “Let’s get in there and see what we see. Play it by ear. I’d like to find out at least what happened to our four.”
Dev nodded. “I’ll do my best.”
“I bet you will.”
THEY WERE MOMENTS from the edge of the storm, and Dev throttled back to match the carrier’s speed with the energy shot edge of clouds she could now clearly see on the horizon. She checked the positioning estimate and saw the edge of the Gibraltar outpost on the far position on the grid.
That was where Jess said they would start chasing them. She rechecked the sensors, moving from one view to another until she was sure they had a good view all around the shuttle so she could see things coming at them.
The scan would tell her positioning, but she knew enough about the systems to know that sometimes they weren’t one hundred percent correct. It was good to be able to see for yourself too. The sims did that. More than once she’d requested a perimeter view and found obstacles, or once even a stalled shuttle that the scan hadn’t reported.
So she checked and rechecked, feeling a nervous ball start to form in her stomach as they crept closer.
This was hard. Dev wasn’t sure she was up to this task, its demands overrunning the amount of programming she had for it. She knew what to do, but she also knew things would start happening so fast she would have no time to think about it.
Jess exhaled, bringing her systems live. “Okay. Let’s get ready to run the gauntlet, kid.”
Dev had no idea what a gauntlet was or why they would want to run one, but she settled her hands on the controls, put her boots on the thruster pedals and hit the toggle that would flood her comms with all the inputs of the carrier.
Instantly, the sound of the wind outside trickled in, and she could hear the thunder and crackle of the storm. The screens over her seat came alive with views around the carrier and she focused on the forward screen, where she knew the storm would roll over their target any minute.
Behind it, they were hidden. There was so much disruption in the atmosphere in the leading edge, no scans could see past it. They were coming in hard behind it, the two other carriers to their left and right, a few thousand feet to their rear.
Dev’s heart started beating faster. She felt uncomfortable, her mouth was dry and her hands were shaky. Her forward display was showing the nearby flashes and behind her, she heard Jess hitting contacts, making a strange low noise as she did so.
Disconcerting.
“Dev?”
“Yes?”
“Good luck,” Jess said, in a quiet tone. “Just go with it.”
Dev had no idea what that meant. “Okay,” she said. “Storm is over Gibraltar, standby for clearance.”
“Here we go.” Jess brought the targeting systems online and started hunting. “Tac one, Tac two. Soon as we clear for scan, split left. We meet at the drop zone. Look for the remaining carrier and report.”
“Understood,” Jason said. “Meet you on the flip side.”
“Go,” Elaine added. “Luck.”
“Thanks,” Jess said, clicking off just as the storm cleared the rocky promontory and her scan came alive with signals. “They can see us.”
Dev sorted the incoming signals, almost feeling the scans bounce off the hull of the carrier as the storm rolled over the big rock and exposed its raw, rugged flank to them. She could see lights peppered across its surface, and then a beacon flared out, heading toward them.
Instinctively, she pitched the carrier forward and nosed down, and the beacon flashed past them. Lights started to blink on the rock face and the scan told her multiple targets were moving their direction. She hauled the throttles up and hit the engines to full.
Two dart shaped forms came whipping toward them. Dev brought the nose right between the attackers, trying not to flinch as a barrage of laser fire came right at them.
A bare second later, return fire flashed past in her peripheral vision and the two darts split to either side. She arched between them, seeing another line of darts now heading their way.
“Draw them to the right,” Jess said. “Get behind the rock then go down to the deck. The waves’ll confuse em.”
Dev waited for the line to come into range, then she pitched down, then hard right as a hail of hard point missiles rattled against the hull.
“Bastards.” Jess twitched her fingers, keeping on scope as the carrier turned half on its side, and the projectiles thumped against the well shielded bottom. The gyros kept pace with the motion though and she let loose a burst of laser pulses that streaked against the gray sky and wrote a stitching of fire across one of the darts.
It blossomed into fire and the machine headed for the water, a small ball heading the other direction marking the pilot’s ejection.
Jess tracked the ball and squeezed off a shot just as her world turned upside down as the carrier did. Just as quickly it rolled around right side up and then she was under at least five Gs as they went into a steep climb.
Targets, targets. Warning bells chimed in her ears and she focused on her task, firing long, ripping bursts at the dozens of ships heading toward them.
Laser fire was everywhere, blossoming to the right and to the left, and blanking scan briefly as the carrier dodged the shots.
She was heartened by the reaction. The defenders hadn’t been there waiting for her. She’d had a good ten minutes inbound before they reacted. That could only be a good sign. She now capped off the comms, putting the intercom between her and the other two carriers on battle silence, knowing they would be doing the same. “Go go go.”
Dev didn’t take a second to look back. She was fully engaged in figuring out how to get out of the way of the dozens of ships chasing them, and keeping the carrier in constant erratic motion to dodge the bolts headed their way.
It was scary. She tried to keep them all in view, her heart thumping hard. A group of six heading her way triggered a burst of programming. Something told her about that group, and about that formation. As she pitched away from them she saw them split apart.
She knew, somehow, that they were going to encircle her. She focused on the six, and saw them curving around. Two headed for the waves to cut off
an escape. She rolled the carrier and dodged a blinding flash of laser fire then she caught sight of three of the darts closing in on her.
A blast hit them on the left side. She felt the shudder and two red alerts started flashing on the board. Another flash went to port side, and then she twisted the throttles, kicking the side thrusters hard as she slid under one of the darts and the screens momentarily blacked out, as the rumble of counter fire hit at such close quarters it nearly fried the scans.
Another alarm went off as she turned in the other direction, then she pitched the nose down and skimmed past one of the lower guards, so close the dart peeled off and dropped into a spiral to avoid hitting them.
Fire erupted all around them. Dev was totally unsure if it was against them or from them. The flares were so vivid it was causing sparkles in her own eyes. She pushed the throttles forward and dove for the waves, seeing them white and stark against the rock as the gray light grew around them.
She saw one of the darts cross her path, and she turned the carrier onto its side as the dart fired at point blank range, their bottom armor rumbling as it absorbed the energy. The vessel shuddered again as their own guns cut loose.
There was an explosion so close to them they lurched sideways in mid flight. She righted their flying angle and looked frantically around. For a moment, they were in the clear and she saw a ledge projecting out from the big rock and she aimed for it, intending to duck under it and curve along the rock.
She saw a sudden flare of lights along the granite surface, and scan erupted as the darts that had been diving at them diverted and streaked for the wall to get between her and it.
She heard Jess laugh behind her, but she wasn’t really sure why. She dodged a spinning dart heading for the waves and reached the ledge moments before the rest of them, turning alongside it and increasing speed as she felt Jess let loose with the guns in a long, continuous, rumbling barrage.
The rumble was replaced with a larger one and all of a sudden the darts were heading away from her and she had a clear shot around the edge of the promontory.
“Faster,” Jess said. “Got a boom coming behind us.”