by Kal Spriggs
“It should be enough,” I put as much confidence into that as I could.
We continued our fall. “You see if Kyle made it?” Ashiri asked.
“No, not yet,” I answered. The net was so full of calls for help, rendezvous coordinates for evacuation ships, and a host of other communications that I didn't even want to try.
“Promise me you'll try to get out?” Ashiri asked, her voice small and surprisingly fragile.
“What?” I asked, “of course.”
“Good,” she said after a moment. “You don't belong on a planet under alien rule.”
“Neither of us do,” I told her. “We're both getting down fine, we're both going to land and...”
The two craft shuddered as we hit the upper part of the atmosphere. “Ashiri, can you hear me?”
“...breaking up...” I heard her say, then my comms cut out.
We were coming in at a pretty steep angle and the rocking got worse. Alarms started showing on my panels and I had nothing to do but sit there. We were still going way too fast to safely eject, but I saw our speed dropping. I had no idea where we were even going to land. I hadn't thought to take my bearings on entry and my navigational systems were full of garbage numbers. I'd feel awful silly to survive this only to crash in the deep desert and die of thirst or heat exposure
The speed kept falling and I watched our altitude. Then, just as I thought we were good, the docking clamp must have given out. My Firebolt lurched and I heard a loud crack as Ashiri's spun away. Then centrifugal force slammed me to the side as my Firebolt went into an out-of-control spin. I fought with it, but I had no thrusters and the Firebolt had no lift, no ailerons, nothing. My implant told me the speed was falling, but still to fast to be safe, but I heard the Firebolt start coming apart.
I ejected. The canopy blew off and my seat slammed me upwards, out of the cockpit. Wind hammered me, flinging me around. My drop harness didn't activate yet, I was still moving too fast and I tumbled, end over end, losing control of my stomach and throwing up into my flight helmet.
Blue sky and tan ground spun through my vision, over and over and over until the world went black.
***
Chapter 25: Sometimes Home Calls You Back
I woke up on the ground. I must have passed out. It couldn't have been long, the vomit inside my helmet was still dripping on my face. I pulled my helmet off, unstrapped from my seat, and stood up, looking around. I was in the desert, which wasn't much of a surprise. The sun was rising and it was already hot. I could be just about anywhere on Century.
I pulled out my emergency radio beacon and fired it up.
I used sand to scrub some of the nastiness off my face and hands. I wondered if Ashiri had been able to eject in time. I'd made it, but I'd bailed out at way too high a speed. I was lucky I hadn't broken my neck when the wind hit me or something like that. She might have stayed in her Firebolt too long, it could have come apart on her, ripped to pieces by the air friction.
She made it, I told myself.
I didn't have long to wait for rescue. A combat skimmer came howling out of the sky within a few minutes, throwing dust and sand all over me. I hurried over to the side ramp and then nearly fell on my face as Commander Weisfeldt greeted me. He had sand in his bushy eyebrows and his khaki uniform was spotted with dirt and sand.
“Sir?” I asked in shock.
“Hello, Jiden,” he shouted over the roar of the turbines, “get in, we don't have much time.”
I climbed in and he powered the ramp shut. “We happened to be in the area,” he said. “Lucky thing I recognized your transponder, we thought we had a security breach and our pilot was just going to drop a missile on you.”
“What?” I asked in shock.
He gestured at me to follow him and we got up to the cockpit. The pilot flew low to the ground. “What's going on, sir?” I asked. I had half expected for no one to be able to pick me up. The odds that someone was nearby and that it was Commander Weisfeldt sort of made me suspicious.
“Let's not distract our pilot, he gets a little cranky for this part,” Commander Weisfeldt noted.
The pilot was talking over his radio, his voice distorted a bit by his helmet, though I couldn't shake a feeling of familiarity. He wore the black flight suit common among Directorate Thirteen. Even a number of their non-flight staff had worn those, when working on the Alexandria Project.
A distant smudge on the horizon began to grow. A moment later, I recognized it... it was Black Mesa, also known as Basalt Mesa. The large, table-flat block of basalt rose out of the desert. I'd grown up in the huge mountain's shadow. It was far south of most inhabited areas in the northern hemisphere, outside of the areas that normal wildlife could even function.
My parents had run the research station at Black Mesa Outpost. They'd been the lead scientists. That was, until a pirate named Wessek had burned the entire place to the ground after murdering everyone. Everyone but my brother and I.
The pilot looped around, staying low as he flew over where the science outpost had been, near the entrance to the million-year-old alien ruins. Looking down, I saw no sign of the buildings and a large sand dune had been pushed up against the cliff face, covering the entrance to the catacombs. I looked at Commander Weisfeldt, who held up one hand to forestall my questions. The pilot flew us around, to canyons worn into the south side of the mesa.
He flew into one of the canyons. I wasn't familiar with this area. We were a dozen kilometers or more away from where I'd grown up, across the central mass of the mesa or dozens of kilometers around. He flew along for a bit and then put the skimmer into a hover, waiting in front of what looked like a box-canyon.
A moment before I opened my mouth to ask what we were waiting on, the cliff face split. My jaw dropped as I saw a hangar bay revealed, and the pilot settled us to the landing pad.
“We don't have long,” Commander Weisfeldt told me. “Let's go.”
I followed him off the skimmer and then into the hidden facility. There was something familiar about the place, about how it was formed, about the layout that made me feel like I was missing something. That was, until we walked past a viewport and I froze, staring at the looming form of a ship. “Wait...” I shook my head, “That's the Alexandria, isn't it?”
“Indeed,” Commander Weisfeldt didn't stop and I hurried to catch up, still looking back over my shoulder at the shipyard behind. “We built this facility shortly after the Enforcers finished their investigation. We needed a location where initial personnel movements could be overlooked. The Enforcers only cared about Militia personnel investigating the site itself. We made up a story about looking for their initial landing site and they lost interest soon enough.”
“You used the murder of my parents as a cover story?” I demanded.
“It's not like we killed anyone, we just made use of the situation,” Commander Weisfeldt told me. “We used that time to build the facility. By the time we finished, the prototype shuttle was complete and we could ferry personnel and in and out.”
I still was a bit horrified that he'd so calmly admitted that my family's murder had been a convenient cover for building a top secret shipyard facility.
“Think of it this way,” he told me, “the people who murdered your family thought they had everything of value from this place. They would look just about anywhere else before they came back here, right?”
I nodded at that.
“Then we made sure that your parents didn't die in vain, right?”
I felt tears well up in my eyes and all I could do was nod.
“Right, none of that, here,” he passed me a tissue, seeming embarrassed by my tears. “And here we are...”
It was the embarkation area for the facility's shuttle. About a dozen people, half of them Militia, the other half civilians, were waiting, many with datapads and papers in hand, looking as if they'd just come from their work labs. I was frowning, though. “You can't fly a ship through warp in atmosphere, the impacts
are too severe.”
“Normally, yes,” Commander Weisfeldt acknowledged. “If our shuttle were only using a conventional tactical warp drive or even a warp envelope like many shuttles and fighters do, you would be absolutely correct. But as you remember, the prototype used strategic warp, it was out of phase with the rest of our universe as it traversed distances.”
“But it doesn't change the effect of emerging inside another material, even atmosphere, you're coming back into phase with two bits of matter overlapping,” I argued. It was bad enough with just air and normal matter, generally causing explosions. It sometimes happened when a ship emerged from strategic warp, when there was a rock or small bit of debris in the area a ship emerged. You'd get a small explosion, a detonation as matter overlapped.
With a matter-antimatter power plant or munitions, it was much worse. Matter materializing over antimatter was essentially triggering an uncontrolled combination and released appropriate levels of energy compared to the quantity of overlap.
“If you'll remember, we had you emerge in microgravity and vacuum,” he noted. “The first was to fool any potential security threats into assuming it was a deep space location. I thought up emplacing inverted grav plates to simulate micro-gravity. I actually got the idea from some of the Takagi equations...”
I cleared my throat.
“Ah, yes, as I was saying, we pumped the destination room down, no atmosphere, nothing to cause any issues. The pilot just had to hit the target, dock with the facility, and everyone would assume that we were at some distant asteroid base.
“But faster than light warp has accuracy issues,” I told him. “Hitting even a large chamber, without issues...”
“I'm just that good,” a drawling voice said from behind us. “Plus the short range micro-jumps you can see your target so there's less issues with drift and accuracy. How you doing, Armstrong?”
I turned around, and my jaw dropped, “Mackenzie?”
“In the flesh,” he gave me a nod. He still wore the Directorate Thirteen black flight suit. He had taken off his helmet, though, carrying it under one arm, his smile cheerful, despite the circumstances. “I got pulled for this whole mission last year, thanks to the Admiral. She put me on flying the prototype shuttle.”
I shook my head, “I'm surprised to see you, I mean, I would have figured you would have been assembled for the attack.”
His expression hardened. “Probably. God knows, I would have rather been there... but after your confrontation with Commander Seibert, there was a lot of talk in the militia about whether you'd been insubordinate or if she deserved what she got. I sort of spoke up, mentioned I thought you could be insubordinate, but it was more likely that the Commander had got what she deserved. I'm not sure how word of that got where it did, but after the investigation wrapped up and she was forced to retire, I ended up having a hard time finding a unit to fly from. I guess Admiral Drien didn't like me vouching for you and he put out that any unit that took me on would have to answer to him. The Admiral found out, made me an offer, and here I am.”
I shook my head. “Sir, it's good to see you, but Ashiri Takenata is out there. She and I crashed together...”
“We don't have time, I”m sorry,” Commander Weisfeldt shook his head. “Lieutenant Mackenzie, we're running low on space, but we can fit you, are you sure...”
“I'll be staying here with the caretaker crew, sir.” He gave Commander Weisfeldt a nod, “I'm good with that.” He shot me a look, “I won't be abandoning Cadet Takenata, either, don't worry. If she survived, I'll find her. If she didn't, well, I'll still find her. Sand Dragons don't abandon their own.”
“Sir,” I nodded, grateful for the reassurance. Anyone else, and I might have doubted their sincerity. But Mackenzie had been our Senior Cadet Drill Instructor. I knew I could trust him.
“Wait, if you're staying here...”
“You'll be piloting us,” Commander Weisfeldt told me.
“Oh, great,” I replied. “Where are we going?”
“I've made contact with some evacuating militia forces. Things will be cramped, but our shuttle has over-sized environmental systems, seeing as it was a prototype and there was always a chance that something could go wrong and we would need environmental systems for a sustained period of time. So we'll be a net benefit to the ship we're linking up with,” he told me. “Our drive isn't really rated for long distance travel, so it's best that we link up with them before they leave the system.”
“Sir,” I nodded, moving to the hatch. I paused, “Anything I should know about the shuttle, before I bring it up?”
“She's a pain to maneuver,” Lieutenant Mackenzie told me. “The micro-jumps are hard to wrap your head around. You'll have to do two or three to get where you're going. The drive isn't really designed for sustained jumps, it sort of bounces when you try that. I was going to do the route, but after we picked you up, I volunteered to stay back.”
“How many are staying here?” I asked. I wondered if they'd be prepping the Alexandria to fight or if it were just a caretaker team. For that matter, with their proximity to the alien site, they may have tunneled down to it. What would Directorate Thirteen be looking at in the alien ruins?
“Ask us for anything but time,” Commander Weisfeldt told us impatiently. Behind us, all the engineers and scientists were shuffling in place.
“Sir,” I gave Mackenzie a last nod and hurried aboard the shuttle. I made my way to the cockpit and went through the start-up procedures. “Where are we going?”
He transmitted coordinates straight to my implant. “They're understandably eager to get out of this system. So you might want to expedite.”
“Sir,” I nodded, bringing the systems online and then connecting to the shuttle directly with my implant. Running the warp calculations with it was relatively easy, even three jumps out like it was going to take us. “Let me know when all passengers are aboard, sir,” I told him as I wrapped things up.
“They're aboard,” he told me, “if they're not strapped in, well that's their problem. Tick tock, Armstrong.”
“Sir,” I told him.
I undocked from the facility, feeling strange as the shuttle hovered there in the enclosed space. Just to be certain, I checked the vacuum conditions of the chamber. Sure enough, they kept it at a near-perfect vacuum, so the warp drive shouldn't tear things up too much when engaged. The docking collar withdrew, leaving us floating in the center of the open space. I checked things over one last time and then initiated the first microjump.
It was far smoother than I remembered, but then again, I was balancing the drive with my implant, keeping the energy spike smooth as an afterthought. Even as we emerged, fifty thousand kilometers from Century, I was already spinning up the drive for the next jump.
We darted to our second emergence point and I noted that we'd matched projected arrival location down to the error factor of the sensors, which was measured in centimeters over a distance of thousands of kilometers.
The warp coils hadn't had time to really spin down before I engaged the third time.
We emerged from strategic warp only a few hundred meters off the flank of a waiting vessel, its drive powered down. “We're here, bringing us in to dock.” I went through the motions smoothly enough, though I felt exhaustion waiting in the wings.
“Fascinating,” Commander Weisfeldt noted as I brought us in. “Your quicksilver implant managing our systems gave us a forty percent increase in accuracy and a seventy percent improvement in efficiency of the drive.”
“Huh,” I said. I didn't figure there would be any other quicksilver implants in the future. Doctor Aisling was dead, thankfully. Doctor Schoeffelk had been knowledgeable about them, but he hadn't exactly been favorable of the project. He'd been there to manage the fallout after Doctor Aisling had turned out to be some sort of mad scientist who also happened to be an alien of unknown origins.
“I was actually pulling in data on the combat performances of you and your compatriot
s,” Commander Weisfeldt went on. “Something to look into: the only quicksilver implant users we lost as pilots were those killed during atmospheric ascent, where they couldn't use evasive maneuvers.”
“We were sitting ducks,” I remembered, fighting the urge to curl up and cry as I remembered the hopeless, helpless feeling.
“Well, after that, those of you with implants were able to identify enemy fire patterns and react far faster than even our normal implanted pilots. You were also able to pilot better evasive and attack patterns. There's a thirty percent or more increase in kills compared to normal pilots, and that's just from the initial data.”
“Huh,” I wondered what the point of all that was. This fight was done. We were retreating. Some part of me realized I was going to live... or at least, live to flee my homeworld's fall, and I almost wanted to collapse into tears, but I didn't have time for that, not yet.
“Yes, it'll be interesting to really dig into the analysis. I think you and our other quicksilver cadets are going to be the first off many, especially as we plan to retake our home.”
“Retake?” I asked in shock. I unstrapped from my seat, floating a bit in the micro-gravity, and spun to face him, where he waited.
“Well, yes, of course, that's the goal,” he told me. His dark eyes were intent and he quirked one of his bushy eyebrows at me. “Why do you think we left caretakers to finish construction of the Alexandria? It would have been done but for the need for secrecy with Admiral Drien taking over... but it'll be done soon enough, and her sister ships too. With upgrades to their weapons systems, mind you. The medium disruptor cannons will be extremely useful for her and her sister ships.”
“We're coming back.” Just hearing him say it rekindled hope. I heard the airlock door open and the engineers and scientists clearing out of the shuttle.