Stranded Justice (The Justice Trilogy Series Book 2)

by Steven L. Hawk

  “Damage assessment, left screen!” Hansen shouted. Immediately, the foliage on the left side of the vid-screen vanished and was replaced by a diagram of the systems that had been damaged by the laser. The commander stared at the screen as he fought his way against the ongoing shaking to reclaim his seat.

  Not good, Eli.

  Aank’s assessment of the situation was as unexpected as it was troubling. Before being assigned to Eli as his personal adviser, the Waa had been an engineer. One of his prior positions had been lead designer for several Alliance ships, including the very class of scout ship they were currently occupying. Eli had not known this about Aank until this moment, which is when Aank pushed it into his consciousness.

  Now you tell me? What do you suggest, Aank? Eli had a moment to consider what he’d learned from the ship’s crew over the past few weeks. He could have learned a great deal more from his very own adviser through mind-speak if he’d only known.

  We have little time. Here’s what you need to do. Aank followed up the mental comment by pushing a plan into Eli’s consciousness—a plan that seemed crazy, impossible. Eli started to protest, but Aank cut him off by implanting an overwhelming feeling of certainty. That certainty convinced Eli that unless he moved now, they were all dead.

  Eli groaned at what he had to do, unsure if he was capable of such a task.

  But his legs were already carrying him toward the corridor.

  Chapter 2

  Eli donned his helmet as he sprinted for the stern. The PEACE armor helped him cover the distance at a speed that his own body never could accomplish.

  He activated the mic in his helmet and sent out a call to his team.

  “This is Captain Justice. Is anyone near the stern?”

  “Private Samna, here Captain,” came an almost immediate reply. “I’m at the stern.”

  Thank goodness. This might just work.

  “Samna, look for the access panel in the center of the corridor. It’s marked SA-201. Do you see it?”

  “Got it, Captain.”

  “Great. Open it and get your ass down the ladder on the other side of that hatch. At the bottom you’ll find a safety line and a bag with tools. Get them ready. Don’t—I repeat do not open the exterior hatch until I get there. I’ll be there in under a minute.”

  “Got it, Captain. Going down the ladder now. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Not for the first time, he was glad for the quality of the troops on his team. He didn’t have to waste time explaining the how or why. Samna would do as he ordered without needing the reasons. The fact that the entire ship was dancing a crazy, shimmying jig probably told her all she needed to know.

  Eli took the turn at the rear of the ship and spied the open hatch twenty meters ahead. Two more of this team—he didn’t pause to see who—were waiting outside the opening. He slowed just enough to enter the opening and pull the hatch closed behind him.

  “Secure the hatchway,” he shouted into his mic as he started his climb down the ladder. The descent was more of a controlled fall than a climb. He grabbed the sides of the ladder with his armored gloves and dropped.

  “We got it, EJ.” So one of the two had been Lieutenant Benson. He was the only person in the Alliance who called him EJ, a nickname that had started on the day they first met in basic training. Although that day was only two years in the past, it seemed like a lifetime ago.

  Good.

  What he had to do would be dangerous. Very dangerous. If anything happened to him, he could count on Benson to take control of the unit and do the right thing, whatever that “right thing” might be.

  Eli landed lightly on his feet and stepped to the side. Private Rossa Samna stood across the shaft and held out a bag of tools with her right hand. In the left she gripped a coil of agsel-coated safety line. Both looked exactly like the images Aank had placed in his head. He looked down to find a hatchway that led to the exterior of the hull.

  “Benson, is that hatchway secured?”

  “All secure on this end, EJ,” the lieutenant replied.

  “Excellent.” Eli reached across the shaft and plucked the end of the safety cable that held the D-ring from Samna. Without needing to look, he snapped the ring onto a small loop built into the back of his PEACE armor for exactly that purpose. He then took the tool bag and clipped in to the same loop. He then looked to Samna and asked, “Your armor buttoned up?”

  “All good to go, Captain,” she affirmed with a nod and knelt down beside the hatch. “Just tell me when you’re ready.”

  Despite the urgency and the danger they were all in, Eli smiled. He had first met Rossa Samna during a Sift exercise back on Telgora. He had been leading a team through their assigned task when they detected a hole in Samna’s armor. He’d managed to get her to a safe place before continuing on with the mission. She’d been part of his core team ever since, and her seeming ability to know exactly what he needed, and when, was one of the main reasons. She was a bit of a savant in that regard, and he felt a surge of appreciation and pride at the soldier she had become.

  “Let’s do this,” he said with a nod. He told her the access code Aank had given him and watched as she keyed it in and spun the release mechanism. “Once I’m out on the hull, I’ll need you to feed me slack.”

  She nodded and the automatic hatch began to open. It moved slower than Eli wanted, but he took a breath to calm his nerves and waited for the first crack to grow into a gap that he could get his armored body through. He tried to ignore the blasts of rushing wind that suddenly filled the shaft. The protection offered by the armor helped. He checked the display on his face plate and noted that the temperature had dropped to negative ten degrees. That was well within the suit’s tolerance, so he put that out of his mind. The growing view of the green vegetation a kilometer below the ship was impossible to ignore. Without Samna to handle the safety cable, any slip could result in a very long fall.

  He shook his head to clear his mind of everything except the task at hand and squatted beside the open hatch. Despite how bad conditions were inside, they got ten times worse when he dropped down and stuck his legs through the exit. He was basically seated above a kilometer-long drop to an alien planet and was about to begin an upside-down jaunt across the belly of a massive spacefaring ship, with nothing to keep him safe except a quarter inch safety cable and the magnetic soles built into his boots. Easy peasy.

  The ship jerked suddenly, the massive shudder much worse than the previous shaking.

  We are nearly out of time, Eli, Aank warned from his spot in the command center. I estimate fifteen minutes until the ship crashes.

  Without bothering to reply, Eli activated the magnetic-assist setting in his boots with a spoken commend. His feet, which dangled through the opening, slammed suddenly backward against the hull of the ship with an audible clang. The ferocity of the action tweaked something in Eli’s right knee and he cried out against the pain.

  What an idiot, he thought. With a grimace, he deactivated the mag-assist and felt his legs return to the dangle position. He’d have to exit the ship and then position his feet properly if he was to get this done.

  “Hang on, Samna. I’m dropping through.”

  Samna nodded and took up a firm grip on the cable. He didn’t doubt her or her armor-assisted grip for a second. He just dropped.

  Although the Agate’s speed was only a crawl compared with what she was capable of, the ship was moving fast enough for the wind to catch him and slam his now-dangling body against the hull. Thankfully, the armor he wore absorbed the impact. He reached back and grasped the safety cable, then used it to maneuver his body so that he was facing the hull, his head pointing toward the front of the ship, his feet backward toward the stern and the three drives. He paused for just a moment, then used the power of the armored suit to pull his legs into his chest. From there, he worked to get his feet positioned between his body and ship. Finally ready, he reactivated the mag-assist in his boots and pushed. With a sigh of relief
he suddenly found himself hanging upside-down, attached to the bottom of the hull by the powerful magnetic current running through his boots.

  He found himself facing the front of this ship, and saw Samna’s torso hanging from the hatch he’d just exited. She gave him a silent thumbs-up with her left hand. He noted the safety cable gripped securely in her right, and returned the gesture. He felt a lance of pain in his right knee, but pushed it out of his thoughts. With the mag-assist activated, and Samna’s control of the safety line, he was satisfied he wouldn’t fall. With that very important step accomplished, he turned his body around so it faced the rear of the craft and spied his goal—the center drive.

  The never-ending shimmy that gripped the ship made movement difficult, so the need for concentration was paramount. It took a few long seconds for him to work out how to move along the hull while hanging upside down, but he finally settled on a system. He released the mag-assist in one boot, shuffled that foot forward in the direction of the center drive, then reengaged the magnet. He then repeated the process with the opposite foot. Release-shuffle-reengage. Release-shuffle-reengage. The back-and-forth process was cumbersome, made especially so by his head-pointed-at-the-ground state, but he managed to cover the twenty meters between the hatch and the center drive in less than a minute.

  Everything Aank had placed in his head came back to him. Patching the severed coolant line to the center drive was crucial. By itself, the undamaged left drive would keep the ship aloft for only a few more minutes. Unless the center or right side drive was brought back online, it was just a matter of time before the ship crashed. He spared a glance at the planet’s surface and estimated the ship had already lost half its altitude since being hit by the laser cannon.

  Applying the short-term fix Aank had given him for the center drive would allow them to regain altitude and exit the atmosphere. Once back in the vacuum of space, they could regroup and the ship’s crew, who were trained to implement real repairs—not merely affix a tourniquet like Eli was attempting—could do their thing.

  Ten minutes, Eli.

  Okay, okay, Aank. Enough with the countdown. How about doing that soothing thing you do? That might actually help.

  A sense of calm immediately flowed into and over Eli, allowing him to focus clearly on the task at hand. He wasn’t sure how Aank was able to do that, but it was a cool trick.

  Eli unhooked the tool bag hanging from the back of his suit, taking care not to disengage the safety cable, and relocated it to his front. The buffeting wind threatened to push him forward so he allowed the suit to assist his movements as he crouched and inspected the damaged drive.

  He immediately spotted the inch-wide fissure that had been burned across much of the hull. His eyes followed the path of the laser and saw that it started on the far side of the right drive, fifteen meters away, and ended just a meter to the left of the center drive. Luckily the left drive had been spared. The altitude of the ship meant the laser cannon had likely expended most of its charge in one blast, which was another positive. A second pass would likely be the end of them all. I wonder how long it takes that cannon to recharge?

  Alliance records do not include that data, Eli.

  Eli clamped down on his reply before it could fully form and focused on the task in front of him.

  He reached into the bag, retrieved the tool that would help release the access panel nearest to the damage, and got to work. Hanging upside-down was a challenge, but a minute later, the cover fell backward and away, spinning crazily behind the drive and down toward the ground.

  Eli poked his head into the opening and surveyed the damage underneath. Just as Aank had mentally shown him, a twenty-millimeter metal line, used to deliver coolant to the drive, had been sliced open by the laser canon. A trail of coolant leaked rapidly from the line and was immediately whisked away to the rear by the wind.

  Acting quickly now that he had reached the most important part of this errand, he retrieved a spool of agsel tape from the bag and began wrapping it around the line as Aank had instructed. It was crazy to consider that all of their lives hung in the balance because of damage that could be fixed by a few wraps of tape around a coolant line. He shook his head at the thought and continued wrapping. The leaking coolant was quickly contained.

  Eli stretched a final wrap of the agsel tape around the line and checked his work. Satisfied, he sent word to Aank.

  Done!

  Excellent, Eli. That should be enough for the moment, the Waa engineer replied. A note of relief accompanied the declaration.

  Eli turned toward Samna and gave her another thumbs-up. He was about to thank her for the help, when a red flash off to his left caught his attention. He turned and gasped as another, second blast from the hostile laser cannon tore across the left engine. As he watched in horror, the laser burned a line of damage through the drive, then moved over the hull toward the center of the ship toward Samna.

  Eli opened his mouth to shout, but he never got the chance.

  One moment he was firmly affixed to the ship’s hull. The next, he was falling toward the green expanse below.

  Flock me. His arms pinwheeled uselessly as the green expanse that covered Cerbius rushed up to greet him. So this is how it ends.

  Eli felt a blanket of calm settle around him as he fell and knew it was Aank. Even with the Waa’s own death only a few minutes away, the alien was trying to help him one last time. The kindness of the act was not lost on the doomed ranger. He offered a silent thank you to his friend, gave himself over to the inevitable, and turned his final thoughts to home and to the woman he’d left behind.

  Adrienne.

  Chapter 3

  Aank observed from the back of the command center as the captain and his crew struggled to keep the scout ship in the air.

  “Center drive is back on line!” Ensign Sheen shouted. Even had Aank not been able to read her thoughts, her relief at having a second drive would have been palpable. It would be a momentary solace, though. Through Eli’s eyes, he had already seen the damage to the port drive.

  Aank knew this ship and its capabilities. It was built for space travel, not for prolonged atmospheric orbiting. A single drive could easily propel it through the vacuum of space at faster-than-light speeds. Atmospheric navigation, however, required that the drives serve a different set of physical laws, and to serve those laws at least two drives were needed. Within seconds, the Agate would begin a relatively slow, but wholly unsalvageable dive to the surface.

  “Excellent,” Captain Hansen replied. “Employ standard protocol and get us out of this orbit.”

  The Waa observed as the captain restrained his own feelings of relief and struggled to present a calm, professional outlook for his crew. He did a much better job at hiding his emotions than the young female. Not for the first time, Aank pondered the inner workings of humans. They spent tremendous amounts of personal energy trying to communicate the most basic ideas, emotions, and intentions to those around them—and more often than not, they failed miserably. Their tenacity, however, was unmatched by that of any other creature the collective Waa had ever encountered.

  No amount of tenacity would be able to save the ship, though, and Aank put his thoughts toward the next steps.

  The ensign slapped her console and shook her head, and Aank read the mix of anger, disbelief, and fear she suddenly radiated. Her instruments had just informed her of what Aank already knew. From the moment the second blast took out the third drive, the ship was doomed.

  “Port side drive is down!” the ensign shouted. “Diverting all power and control to the center drive.”

  “Captain,” one of the other crew members announced, “it looks like we’ve taken a second blast from the laser cannon. It’s knocked out the port drive.”

  Resignation flowed from the captain. The man understood their situation and his mind raced through possible scenarios and contingencies. Aank knew there were only two choices: stay on board the crippled ship and hope they survived a
crash, or abandon the vessel.

  Without any hesitation, he pushed a vision into the captain’s mind, along with the logic that let him know there was no other option. He then observed as the human struggled to come to terms with the knowledge.

  To the captain’s credit, it did not take long to reach a decision. The man squared his shoulders, stood tall, and reached for the switch that would open comms to the entire ship.

  “This is Captain Hansen,” he announced. “The Agate is going down. All personnel should make their way to the loading bay for immediate evacuation. This is not a drill. You have three minutes. If you’re not on one of the three carriers by then, you will be left behind. May peace be with us.”

  The captain disengaged the comms and looked around the command center. “Ensign Sheen, you know what to do. Everyone else, you should be moving already!”

  Aank turned and exited the command center. As he made his way along the corridor to the waiting carriers, his thoughts—always carefully compartmentalized into tidy little packets, ready for logical consideration when the circumstances were most optimal—returned to Eli. The burden of grief that dropped suddenly onto his consciousness was heavy.

  As the only Waa on the voyage, he had no shared mental collective system upon which to rely, no one to expropriate a portion of the pain and thereby diminish its intensity. Still, he performed his duty and consecrated the sacrifice his friend had made for everyone on the ship.

  By the time he reached the loading bay, Aank’s grieving was as complete as he could make it, given the circumstances. He found a seat in the first carrier and promptly returned his feelings of sorrow to their proper packet. Perhaps he’d retrieve it at some future time to revisit the loss.

  As the shuttle exited the stricken scout ship, he looked up at those around him. He found himself seated with the surviving rangers and instinctively reached for their thoughts.

  Grief, at the loss of their leader.