“What, you’re finally coming around to this?”
He shrugged. “Might as well make my last few hours entertaining. And I’m sorry for calling you a lying bitch. That was uncalled for.” He meant to rub his hands together but grimaced for his injured arm. “I’m just cranky right now.”
She noticed it had swollen quite a bit. “It’s okay. Not like I didn’t have it coming.”
“Still…”
“You, erm, want some ice…?” She cleared her throat. Not that it’d matter. “Yeah, okay, here’s the plan.” She turned to the nav chart table, unrolled one of the large plastic films and spread it on the table. Its core, filled with plasma, turned a bright amber when she activated the chart. “There.”
“That’s the plan? ‘There’?” John said through a crooked smile. “I’m bored already.”
“Focus, O’Shaughnessy.” Frankie made a circle with her index finger. “That’s where the juncture is on the pipeline. Technically, it’s closer to the moon than Earth, but because of the power plant and Imber activity up there, we’ll have to go down then come up along the pipe, until we hit that spot. That’s where we’ll anchor the ship.” Her fingernail glowed ginger when she pushed it on the chart.
John narrowed his eyes as he surveyed the chart. “What about that place? Wouldn’t it be better to just ram the ship in that thing, whatever it is? It’s full of conduits and pods. Looks important.”
“Yeah, but look how it’s free of debris. They must emit some kind of repulsive field to keep it clean. We’re supposed to look like debris to them, no heat signature, no obvious propulsion. They’d see us coming a system away. But along the pipeline, it’s quiet.”
“Good. Then let’s go.” He left the chart table to sit at the controls. “Strap in. Those rings around the rosies aren’t the flowery kind.”
“My mission, remember?”
“I’m the better pilot, by a long shot.”
“Hey.”
It all felt so surreal. John by her side. An hour to live at most.
She sat in the other seat, buckled the five-point harness then remembered something. The toffee he’d given her felt soft when she pulled it out of her sleeve pocket. “Want a piece?”
“Sure.”
Frankie shared her toffee with him before he placed long, square hands on the controls and took the reefer nice and slow into a lazy dive. They couldn’t appear to be in a hurry or the Imbers would notice. Funny how the aliens had never bothered to leave Earth and look for the refugees. Finish the job. Maybe they didn’t care. Humans were a non-issue to them, just like someone wouldn’t have a relationship—even a warring one—with one’s parasites.
While he chewed, Frankie watched muscles bulge along his lean jaw. Heat flared out of her coveralls. It didn’t feel so cold anymore in the refrigerated reefer. In fact, she was getting quite warm. She wondered what it would feel like if John worked on her the way he did on the toffee. When he licked his sexy lips, she had to tear her gaze away.
A cluster of Imber ships caught her attention. They’d just taken off from the lunar power plant and flew in a direct line for Earth. If they maintained speed and heading, both the aliens and the reefer would meet in the middle.
“Nice and slow,” she breathed. “I’ll cut power to the rest of the ship.”
A declining drone rumbled under their feet when she switched main power off. An amber emergency light came on, giving everything a coppery glow. John’s hair glistened like dark honey. The urge to touch him nearly overpowered her. Just touch him. On the hand, the arm, anywhere. Just make contact with this man, her friend, perhaps more, for one last time before it all ended. Before she chickened out.
Frankie reached out and tentatively brushed his wrist bone poking out of the sleeve. He shivered. “I’m sorry, okay? For not telling you sooner. For letting you find out this way.”
“Maybe it was better this way. I would’ve raised holy hell, believe me.”
“I know.”
“You should’ve ordered Womack to go instead. What good are ranks if you can’t use them?”
“Ranks mean trust, not power.”
He snorted in disbelief. “That’s no fun. If I had—”
“Here they are.” Frankie leaned back in her seat. She started tapping the deck with one foot, then with the other. “Slowly, slowly. They have to think we’re nothing more than space junk.”
John leaned forward. He made minute adjustments to their heading. Earth’s curvature and its green glow filled their tacscreens. “Shh. I’m piloting.”
The Imber ships grew closer. Barely one thousand nautical miles ahead. And kept coming.
Frankie bit her thumbnail bad enough to draw blood. “They’re coming. Shit.”
The reefer began to rattle the closer it flew to the planet’s gravitational pull. Stuff not anchored in niches or strapped to the deck jangled and clattered. Sweat pearled at John’s temples.
“Cut the engines,” Frankie said through her teeth. “Let it coast.”
John did as she instructed. Both of them waited while the Imber ships grew nearer and filled their tacscreen. For the first time in her life, she could see the enemy firsthand, alive and functioning instead of studying data from dead specimens found floating in space. Alive they looked even more monstrous than in death. Because their ships were an integral part of their species—humans had learned this the hard way—they became one and the same when in flight. The resemblance also made it clear their ships were more than mere methods of transportation. In the reefer’s tacscreens, metal death flashed and glistened in all its frightening beauty. Exoskeletons made of unknown dark metal, with protruding joints tipped with limbs in long, serrated claws that resembled those of crustaceans of eons past. Amidst the mechanized parts and armature, gray flesh could be spotted. Like silver hide, capable of withstanding the rigors of space or the pressure of Earth’s one-atmosphere. Covering their bodies and heads, thick, glowing veins filled with the green acid so vital to them. With the pipeline gone, they wouldn’t be able to refuel. Not easily anyway. Then the human fleet would come tearing in and attack. Imbers would have to make the hard choice of protecting their power plant—and their precious acid—or defending their new mine, Earth.
“Ugly as sin,” John muttered.
She couldn’t help but agree. Yet to a certain point, the biomecha aliens had always held a sort of strange, sinister beauty.
Still, the cluster of ships kept coming for the reefer.
“They’re on to us.” Frankie shook her head. “Goddammit.”
“This time, I’ll agree.” John swallowed hard then cut a glance her way. The mocking grin was back in force. “But only this time.”
Chapter Four
John had never seen anything so foul. He had watched RSIs of them, had listened with the rest of Frankie’s officers to streams of the alien language—clicks and hisses—yet no remote sensing images and no bits of stolen comms could ever convey the sheer depth of their vileness. Monsters of flesh encaged in metal structures. Surely hell was populated with these things. He couldn’t help it. He crossed himself.
“I think I’ll give just a quick burst, just to get us out of their way.” He reached for propulsion, but Frankie put her hand over his wrist. He tried not to get turned on. Failed. Not the best moment in life to be turned on, but hey, what could he do? Frankie would turn him on if someone was adding the wrong spice to his famous pea soup.
“Wait,” she murmured.
In silence, they waited.
Sweat stung his eyes. He wiped it with the back of his wrist. The Imbers were so close he could see individual ships now. A quick peek revealed Frankie had begun to tap her feet. Both of them. He could relate. On the nav chart table, the glowing orange dots represented by the alien ships grew rapidly. Twenty-thousand meters. Fifteen. Ten.
Nothing but the sound of his heart in his ears. Whoosh-whoosh.
A strange noise like nuts breaking in one’s fist kept intruding in his me
ntal list of everything he’d wanted to do before he died. Learning Japanese, boxing, calligraphy. So many things, so little time before annihilation.
“What’s that noise?”
Frankie shrugged, gaze riveted to the tacscreens. “What noise? Five thousand meters. Jesus.”
The noise resumed. John realized it was Frankie grinding her teeth.
“Here they come.” She gripped the armrests on the seat and spread her feet wider.
Everything happened fast.
One second, about a dozen alien ships were flying a couple thousand meters ahead and the next second, a hit sent the reefer barreling to portside. The impact rocked both Frankie and him back against their seats. Only the harnesses saved them from being projected across the bridge like the rest of everything not anchored or strapped down with thick cargo netting. Clacks, clangs and rattles drowned what Frankie yelled. Alarms wailed, lights flickered, died for an agonizing second then switched back on.
John’s instinct surprised him. Instead of trying to stay the ship, he extended an arm to grip Frankie by the back of her coveralls. Just in case. He’d never known a protective nature hid under his cynical crust. Great timing…
As the reefer gathered speed in its gut-flattening spiral, John braced his feet wide apart on the consoles. Gs built up. Space flew sideways in the tacscreens. Stars became white lines. Interspersed with these lines, a green blur—Earth. Fighting against nausea, John forced himself to focus on the altimeter. Too low. Too damn low.
“Take…the nav,” he growled. “I’ll…take…propulsion.”
Both wrestled the effects of gravity, which tried to keep them glued to their backrests, as they struggled to control the ship’s spiral. Frankie quickly punched in coordinates while John gripped the engines control and pushed them as forward as they could go. The only way out of a spiral was down hard and fast. With any luck, they’d gain enough momentum to break out of the corkscrew, skim along Earth’s atmosphere then bounce off into space. But then again, luck was a bitch these days.
“Hang on,” John warned a split second before the attitude jets responded to his commands. By his side, Frankie held on to the console corners.
Turning, turning. Slower. Another turn that stretched out told John their maneuver may just work. Alarms finally clicked off when the reefer pointed downward and entered into a dive just as scary as the spiral. Except that now they were in control. Somewhat.
“Tell me when it’s five degrees,” John said through his teeth.
Frankie nodded. Sweat coated her face and made limp ribbons of her usually curly hair.
Silence was only broken by their panting as they each fought with their assigned console.
“Five degrees!”
John gunned it.
The reefer shot forward and up, at thirty-five degrees to starboard, higher still, until they’d made a complete U-turn that sucked every iota of power out of his poor ship. When the moon appeared in the tacscreens, John spared a hand to pump his fist. Had to let out the testosterone somehow.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she muttered. “They hit us and didn’t even come back for a look.”
“We just don’t matter to them. Would you come back to look at a bug you just squashed?”
“Still, for Pete’s sake.” She combed a hand in her sweaty hair. “Man, that was close.”
“I’ll go check for damages. That hit can’t have left just a scratch.” He unclipped his harness, worked his stiff legs and neck. Without his brain’s consent—his brain had pretty much taken an extended vacation…wasn’t he on a suicide mission?—John bent over and placed a loud kiss on her forehead. “We make quite the team, Commander Beaumont. Want to recruit me? I promise I won’t spoil your other recruits’ young, impressionable minds.”
Her beaming smile made everything all right. Her betrayal, her lies. Nothing mattered anymore. Affection swelled his heart, and pride his head. This woman, strong and capable and hot as the coals of hell, made him feel as if he could take on the world. Which in a sense he was about to do.
He left her in command of his reefer while he climbed down below into the detachable section of his refrigerated ship. Used to transport produce and other perishables, his reefer had never been meant to withstand the hit it’d just taken. Not without serious damage. They were lucky not to have been sucked out into space.
All along the passageways, metal plating had buckled, rivets popped off and steam whistled out of bent pipes. Not good. Near the airlock, e-suits hung on hooks and resembled a row of hanged men. Those environment suits may come in handy if the ship had suffered hull damage. At least until they connected to the pipeline. Afterward, well, it wouldn’t matter much, would it?
John breathed a sigh of relief as he inspected the seal between the main portion of the ship and the separate cargo area. It seemed intact. But as he stepped through the hatch to survey the damage to their precious cargo, he couldn’t abort the long string of curses. He didn’t know much about explosives, but the way the charge had shifted on its rails in the hold, with yellow wires pulled out of connectors and plastic coils all crumpled up against the glowing blue core… That just could not be good.
“Shit.”
The comms panel still worked so he switched it on. “Hey, Frankie. You know how to build that thing, right? Because right now, it looks like something the cat spat out. Except in metal and plastic.”
Her voice crackled but he got the last bit. “…goddamnsonovabitch.”
“Indeed.”
“I’m coming down.”
John felt the ship decelerate to automatic pilot. A minute later Frankie barged into the cargo hold like a Valkyrie down the hills. His nape tingled with arousal. He forced his mind to clear.
Not the time, O’Shaughnessy.
“Argh, no, no, no.” She rushed to the sad-looking bit of Imber destruction smashed against the side of the cargo hold and muttered for a good minute as she inspected her patient. In the end, she straightened, fists on hips—sending his testosterone fever into the danger zone—and blew air through pursed lips. “I think we’ll be good. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Is this like ‘it’s-not-as-bad-as-it-looks-just-a-sucking-chest-wound-Ma’am’?”
Her snort of laughter unreasonably stroked his ego. “No. I can fix this. We’ll reroute some power to the charge, hook it up to the ship directly. It’ll work.” She nodded, muttered to herself some more. “I can fix this,” she repeated.
“Well, get to it then because we can’t take another hit like this.” It was one thing to die in the name of humanity and all that, it was an entirely different thing to just get blown into bits by a passing Imber ship. Not as, well, fulfilling.
Before he left her to work while he checked the rest of the reefer for damage—something told him he’d find much, much more—John stopped inside the hatch leading to the main part of the ship. Frankie was crouched underneath the electrical panel and muttering through her teeth as she yanked on knotted wires. He tamped down the regret. He wasn’t doing this only for her. Well, mostly for her. But along the way, he’d begun to believe that maybe, just maybe, it was better than doing nothing at all. He’d never tell her that, of course, in case she started to think of him as a romantic. John O’Shaughnessy had a rep to keep. Catholic Irishmen weren’t a flower-in-the-hair, bright-eyed bunch. Or he liked to believe. But then again, to his widowed father’s horror, his eldest child and only son of four children had become a cook. His little sisters all teased John about his choice of career, especially since he was a trained machinist like their da. Oh well, to each their own path.
They better dedicate a whole city to her name, complete with wide boulevards, airy gardens and gurgling fountains. Frankieville. Frankburg. Francine-sur-Mer. Ha.
When she let out a long string of curses, John smiled and turned away to hide what he knew was in his eyes.
Surreptitiously, Frankie watched John watching her. Funny how neither of them had ever been shy to tell the
other what was on their mind. Since John had kissed her—and since she’d let him—there was a thin layer of awkwardness. Subtle but there. It chapped her ass to let him think his kiss had had no effect. The devil knew it had. But what was the use now? And it pained her so much to think John would end this way. Goddamn stubborn…man. Still, she’d be lying to herself if she didn’t admit his presence, his willingness to stay with her, made her feel important, valued. Something worth fighting for. Dying for. The realization he was dying to be with her filled her eyes with tears.
John is dying for me.
With him, the end wouldn’t be dull, that was for damn sure. His kiss still created a steady heat all over her body. Not only was he a good-looking, witty and understanding man, but it seemed as though he would’ve wanted to take their relationship to another level. She would never know what that would be like, waking up in John O’Shaughnessy’s arms. The thought made her feel self-conscious, and she adjusted her collar.
Stop being silly, woman, and start thinking about fixing that damn thing.
A couple of the connectors on the charge had been pulled out. The charge itself had shifted on its rails and rested against the cargo hold’s bulkhead. The core was intact—good thing because no one wanted an impromptu explosion to happen too far from the target. She intended to detonate that thing when the reefer sat directly on top of the pipeline. Not a second before. The kill box would be humble, maybe two hundred meters or so. The Magellan and the rest would be safe from the initial blast. Then only their skill would matter. But she—and John—would give them a hell of a head start.
It was only after she had pretty much connected every damn wire and hooked the main power to the hold’s electrical grid that she noticed the way the rails had all but fused to the bulkhead. With the impact, both steel plates had become merged in intricate accordion-like folds.
She knelt by the crumpled rails and ran her hand along the bulkhead. She wouldn’t dare put the blowtorch to this mess for fear of cutting the wrong layer.
Okay, think, Beaumont.
Metal Reign: An Impulse Power Story Page 5