Soroya IV
Four prowlers dropped out of warp in unison, arrayed in a diamond-slot attack formation and cruising at full impulse into orbit on the night side of Soroya IV. Just beyond the curve of the planet’s equator, past the terminator separating light from darkness, the first glimmer of the control station for the planet’s weather network came into view.
Harper’s voice emanated from the transceiver inside the helmet of Seven’s orbital skydiving suit. “All wings, look sharp. Twenty seconds out.”
Ellory was first to respond. “Copy that, Wing Leader. Wing Two ready.”
“Wing Three ready,” Rana chimed in.
“Wing Four ready,” Speirs said, finishing the check-in.
Over their prowler’s internal comm channel, Harper said, “Seven, stand by to initiate CNC links to wings two through four.”
“Copy that.” Seven double-checked the settings for the command-and-control system, which would enable her and Harper’s prowler to remotely control the actions of the other three prowlers once their crews were deployed and their ships left in drone mode. “Ready.”
“Acknowledged.” Switching back to the main comm channel, Harper added, “Five seconds out. Wing Leader dropping back. Vent and roll.”
Seven looked up through the cockpit canopy to see the other three prowlers roll 180 degrees as Harper reduced speed to give them room to maneuver. In the distance beyond them, the broad, disklike control station was now fully in view above the planet’s equator.
“Rolls complete, cockpits vented, sticks released,” Ellory said. “Good to go.”
Harper replied, “Give ’em hell, Wing Two. Seven, activate CNC.”
With a tap on a holographic interface, Seven put the other three prowlers under her control as their canopies slid open, and the six Rangers they carried all leaped away from their ships into powered dives toward the weather-control station.
On the private comm, Harper said, “And the clock starts ticking.”
Watching the Rangers speed toward the station, Seven felt a pang of bitter envy. “I should be with them.”
“Hold your horses, Calamity Jane. You’re still just a rookie. Bad enough I let you run this wildcat op—I ain’t lettin’ you get killed doin’ it.”
Outside, the six other Rangers were barely visible as they neared the station, while the long-range sensors of Harper’s prowler detected a mercenary frigate inbound at high warp.
Seven frowned. “My life isn’t the one to worry about.”
Ellory Kayd had enjoyed orbital skydiving on numerous occasions as an exciting recreational activity under controlled conditions, but until today she had never used it as a means of firing herself like a missile at a moving target in orbit of a planet.
She and the rest of the strike team were still high in the planet’s mesosphere when their suits’ heads-up displays told them to invert their pose and fire braking thrusters. Shifting from head-first to feet-first was harder than she had expected, and she barely triggered the thrusters in time. She hit the platform hard and rolled through the landing to avoid breaking her legs. Her momentum propelled her across the narrow section of level surface on which it was safe to land and almost carried her over its edge—until a gloved hand caught Ellory by her wrist.
Gasping for air and realizing only belatedly how close she had been to panic, Ellory looked up to see she had been saved by the keen reflexes of her partner, Lucan.
He flashed her a reassuring smile. “You good?”
“Five by five—thanks to you.”
They hurried together away from the platform’s edge in search of their respective command nodes, where they would have to use Seven’s preloaded isolinear chips to override the mercenaries’ lockout of the weather-management system. As they passed the others, compliments from their teammates came in over their comm channel.
Rana waved. “Nice catch, Lucan!” Speirs gave Lucan a jaunty salute. “Good hands, Luc!” Ballard just gave him a thumbs-up, while Jalen mock-criticized, “Why can’t you catch like that during intersquad softball?”
Lucan laughed. “Get some bigger balls.”
“I’ll show you some bigger—”
“Settle down, boys,” Rana said. “We’ve got work to do.”
Ellory and Lucan split up as they approached their assigned nodes. As she had feared, working the controls of the nodes while wearing orbital skydiving gloves, even a pair as relatively light and electroconductive as the ones used by the Rangers, was going to be slow, clumsy work. And as the rapidly shrinking countdown timer in the corner of her HUD reminded her, slow was not going to be an option today—not if she and the rest of the team wanted to live long enough to get drummed out of the Fenris Rangers.
Everything Harper saw on his cockpit readouts looked like bad news. “Seven, did that inbound frigate pick up speed?”
“Affirmative. It used the system’s outermost gas giant to perform a shallow slingshot maneuver at warp, adding three-tenths of a warp factor to its velocity.”
“How does that affect the strike team’s countdown?”
“Shortened by seventeen seconds. I’ve updated their HUDs accordingly.”
He heard a ping from Seven’s control panel, indicating an incoming comm had been received. “We’re being hailed by the mercenary frigate.”
“On speakers.”
From Harper’s helmet transceiver came a raspy voice. “Ranger intruders, this is the FAS Ta-Akora. Withdraw your team from the weather platform immediately, and take your ships out of this system in the next ninety seconds. Or else.”
He needed to buy time for the team on the station. “Or else what?”
“You will be destroyed.”
“That doesn’t sound very friendly.”
“You have been warned.”
“So we have. I guess this is it, then.”
“It is.”
“No more second chances for us, eh?”
“None. Order your people to leave the weather station.”
“Or else they’ll be destroyed?”
“As we have already said.”
“No, you said I would be destroyed.”
“What? No. We were using the plural ‘you.’ ”
“Oh. Sorry, that wasn’t clear.”
“It most certainly was.”
“Okay. Here’s my counteroffer. You turn back now, and I won’t impound your ship.”
“You what?”
“You heard me. I’ve got four combat-ready prowlers and a corsair just a few minutes away at high warp. So, you wanna dance? ’Cause I got my boogie shoes on, baby.”
Seven cut in to say, “They’ve closed the channel.”
“Well, now, that’s just rude.” He switched his transceiver to the strike team’s channel. “Wing Leader to strike team. Pick up the pace, kids. Hostiles thirty seconds out.”
If there was anything Ellory didn’t need at that particular moment, it was more stress. “We’re going as fast we can, Wing Leader.”
“For your sake I hope you’re wrong, ’cause the mercs’ frigate just launched a pair of snub fighters that are comin’ in hot as hell.”
All she could do was mumble under her breath and hope she remembered—
“Ell,” Speirs said, “we can all hear you swearing.”
“Sorry.” She muted her helmet’s mic and went on cursing to herself.
Sweat dripped down Ellory’s forehead, through her delicate eyebrows, and into her eyes. More sweat pooled inside her gloves, fouling her fingertips’ contact with the pads inside the suit’s gloves that made it possible for her to work the holographic interface on the command node, and the faster and shallower her breathing became, the more she noticed that her breath was downright hideous. She blamed herself for having scarfed all the garlic bread at lunch.
She finished keying in the last string of access codes for the node’s hard-wired, solid-state interface panel, which was revealed when a panel appeared on the bulkhead in front of her and then slid open. She unmuted her mic. “Node one: I’m in. Inserting isolinear chip now.”
“Node two: ready,” Lucan replied.
“Node four, ready,” Ballard said, and Speirs followed, “Node five, ready.”
“Node six, ready,” Rana said.
It took Ellory a moment to process that the count was incomplete. “Jalen, what’s your status at node three?”
“Still trying to get access. Having some—” There was a scratch of noise over the comm, followed by Jalen spewing muffled profanities in several languages. “Having some technical difficulties with the interface.”
Ellory saw the countdown in her HUD shrinking toward zero, and when she looked up toward the stars, she saw the flash-and-streak of high-speed snub fighters on an attack vector. “Jay, get your shit fixed in the next ten seconds or we’re all dead.”
The frigate Ta-Akora and its snub fighters emerged from warp in a pulse of light and immediately opened fire, filling the space around Harper and Seven’s prowler with fiery streaks of plasma.
“Break left!” Seven snapped, releasing a flurry of sensor-distracting radioactive chaff.
Harper rolled the prowler to port and then into an inverted dive, expertly evading the frigate’s first barrage. “Two snubs heading for the station!”
“And one on our six,” Seven confirmed. “Permission to engage?”
“Give ’em the heat. I’m making a run at the frigate.”
Stars wheeled and the bright orb of Soroya IV blurred in and out of sight as Harper put the prowler through a series of high-speed combat maneuvers. At the end of a high-g loop, he made a perfect full-impulse strafing run that left white-hot, smoldering scars on the frigate’s hull.
Seven harried the snub fighter pursuing them with regular pulses from the prowler’s aft particle cannon, but between Harper’s daredevil piloting and her own unfamiliarity with the system, she couldn’t land a hit. “Aft gun can’t get a lock!”
“I’ll keep ’em off our back! Switch the other prowlers from wingmen to hunters.”
“Changing modes now.”
Outside the canopy, everything was moving too quickly and was too far away for Seven to see with her own eyes, but her tactical displays showed the Rangers’ three drone-mode prowlers abandoning their campaign of distracting the frigate with hectoring fire followed by evasive maneuvers in favor of a coordinated attack on the lone snub fighter hunting her and Harper. “Hunters engaged.”
“Copy. Stand by on countermeasures—we’re taking another run at the frigate.”
“Acknowledged. I suggest you target its ventral hull, just aft of its comms array. That is our best chance of crippling its warp reactor without destroying the ship.”
“I’ll give it a shot.”
“Yes, that is what I would recommend.”
“No, I mean—… Never mind.”
There was almost no atmospheric pressure at the altitude of the control station, but when the pair of snub fighters shot past at a speed so great that all Ellory saw was a momentary wash of color across her field of vision, she imagined a sonic boom shock wave that never came.
Speirs summed up her feelings when he exclaimed, “Damn, that was close!”
Rana cried out, “They’re coming ’round again!”
Ellory stared at the sync indicator, willing it to turn green. “Dammit, Jalen! C’mon!”
“The chip won’t go in! I don’t know why, it just won’t—”
Ballard cut Jalen off. “Is it upside down?”
A split-second later, Jalen sounded humbled. “Crap. Yes. Chip in, node three ready!”
“All right,” Ellory said, “on my mark! Three—”
Lucan snapped, “Get down!”
Disruptor pulses slashed across the control station’s access platform, blasting away panels in geysers of sparks and roiling plasma flames—and scored a direct hit on Jalen Par. Ellory screamed his name almost as a reflex—“Jalen!”—as his limbs, torso, and head all were scattered by the fury of the artillery-grade disruptor pulse. Before Ellory could put words to the tragedy, she watched his savaged remains fall toward the planet, trailing dark smoke.
The pair of snub fighters streaked past, deadly silver blurs.
Lucan’s voice cracked with grief. “Ballard? I can’t see Jalen’s node. Is it intact?”
“Minor damage, but it looks okay.”
“Then we’ve still got a shot,” Speirs said, “but we’re a body short.”
Ellory knew what that meant. She keyed her transceiver.
“Wing Leader, we have a problem.”
Seven listened anxiously from the prowler’s rear seat as Harper answered Ellory’s comm. “Go ahead, Strike Leader.”
“All nodes ready, but we lost Jalen. Hold or abort?”
It took Harper only a fraction of a second to decide: “Abort.”
Seven cut in, “Belay that! Hold!” She keyed commands into her companels with her right hand and checked her suit’s vacuum seal with her left.
Harper’s temper turned sharp. “Seven! What’re you doing?”
“Going in.”
“The hell you are! Stand down and—”
“Depressurizing cockpit in three—”
“Don’t do this!”
“Two—”
Harper scrambled to confirm his own suit’s vacuum seal. “God-dammit, Seven!”
“One. Venting.” She purged the cockpit’s atmosphere, and then she used the emergency override to open the canopy, exposing herself and Harper to the vacuum of space. “Brake to space normal and come about, thrusters only, bearing two-zero-nine mark one-seven, sixteen degrees starboard yaw, and stabilize.”
Harper executed the maneuver even as he said, “Seven, this is crazy. Our people are sitting ducks down there. We’ve got to get them out.”
“I will. As soon as we free the station.”
“How’m I supposed to hold off that frigate and a snub fighter without you?”
“You strike me as a resourceful person.” Seven unfastened her flight safety harness and pushed herself up and out of the cockpit.
As she floated free she looked back at Harper. “You will think of something.”
Seven turned toward the control station, fired her suit’s main thrusters, and shot away from the prowler without a moment’s hesitation or regret.
The sensible thing to do would have been to countermand Seven, halt the op, and evac the team. Instead, Harper pushed his prowler into a full-power dive so that he could get in front of Seven and chase off the two snub fighters that were angling to pick her off before she reached the station’s platform. Harper almost had to laugh. No one ever accused me of being sensible.
The other three prowlers were close behind Harper, defending his aft quarter while he lined up a warning shot just ahead of the lead snub fighter. At thousands of meters per second, there was no room for error, no second chances—
Ellory cried out over the comm, “They’ve got weapons lock!”
Now or never.
Harper fired, filling the sky ahead of the snub fighters with particle-beam pulses an order of magnitude more powerful than anything the snub fighters possessed. The lead fighter charged ahead—and was torn to pieces, which fell away in smoky spirals. A fraction of a second later the second snub fighter broke off and accelerated into a recovery pattern.
That just left the fighter lining up its shot from behind Harper’s bird.
He fired braking thrusters and pulled up to slow his dive, but his pursuer matched him, too sly to lose their advantaged position. So he pushed his prowler to its limit instead, thrusters and impulse drive working together to test both his and the ship’s abilities to handle extreme stress. Crushing force pinned him against his seat as his ship’s inertial dampers lagged a few hundredths of a second behind his maneuvers. His pulse thundered in his temples, and for a moment he was sure this was the moment he’d feared, when his skull would crack under the pressure, and blood would pour from his nose as he blacked out behind the stick—
—and then he was gulping in a breath of concentrated oxygen while banking out of a corkscrew turn into a perfect attack angle above the lead snub fighter’s wingman.
He squeezed the trigger by instinct, without waiting for the targeting computer. A searing particle beam from his prowler slashed through the wingman’s impulse engines, setting them ablaze, and then carved off a chunk of the snub fighter’s starboard wing.
A flash of fire enveloped the wingman’s ship, and then it was on its way down to the planet’s surface, nothing but a burning husk in a flat spin.
Harper’s sensors showed the mercenaries’ third snub fighter was on its way to take the downed wingman’s place in the dogfight, and the frigate was closing in on the control station.
Not good.
With one command he directed the three hunter-mode prowlers to land on the planet at the Valen Colony, where the strike team could recover them, and then he opened a channel to the strike team. “Time’s up, kids! Everybody out of the pool! Proceed to evac and exfil, RFN.”
Seven protested, “Not yet! I’m just seconds away from the station!”
“It’s too late, kid! We gotta bounce. Now.”
“Twenty seconds, Harper. Give me that much.”
What was he supposed to say? He couldn’t force her not to do something stupid. All he could do was try to make sure she and the others didn’t die in the process. “Kid, if you get me killed, I am gonna be so pissed. Twenty seconds on the clock—go!” Left with no way out but through, he poured on the speed and steered his prowler back into the fray.
Seven fired the thrusters of her orbital skydiving suit at the last possible moment and slammed down onto the station’s ring-shaped access platform like a hammer striking an anvil.
Agonizing jolts of pain from the impact traveled up Seven’s legs and into her spine, which felt as if it had compressed on contact. If not for the Borg nanoprobes in my bloodstream, I would likely have been paralyzed the moment I hit the station.
A sensation like twisting eels in her gut told Seven that her body’s nanoprobes were knitting her organs back together, even as she sprang to her feet and ran toward the empty node station. The magnetic soles of her boots alternately hugged her to and repelled her from the station’s surface with each stride. She reached the interface panel and verified that Jalen had set everything as directed. I could have used my nanoprobes to control all six nodes at once, but I’m done using my Borg enhancements as a crutch. It’s time to do things for myself.
She set her hand above the switch that would release the lockout on the station’s master-control system. “Strike team! Ready?”
Ellory answered for the team: “Ready!”
“On my mark! Three! Two! One! Mark!”
In synchronicity the strike team members pressed their switches, canceling the lockout. The panel in front of Seven refreshed to show a full suite of command interface tools. “Stand by. I’m setting a new access code, one the pirates won’t be able to break.” Again, she knew she could have done this in the blink of an eye with her nanoprobes, but as she swiftly secured the system against future intrusions, she realized that she possessed skills of her own that were already exceptional by nearly anyone’s standards. It felt good to know that for a fact.
Lucan’s voice warbled over her suit’s comm, “Snub fighter on attack!”
Harper added, “I’m on it, but y’all had better get moving!”
Seven reset the station’s operations to their default configurations and closed her command interface. “Done! Strike team evac!”
The strike team retreated from the station’s core, fired their thruster packs in midstride, and launched themselves over the platform’s edge and into powered dives toward the planet.
But there was no outrunning the snub fighter.
The sky around the team filled with disruptor pulses. The Rangers rolled, accelerated, decelerated, or veered away in random directions, scattering as the fighter streaked past.
A fraction of a second later, Harper’s prowler blazed past in pursuit. His voice crackled over Seven’s helmet comm. “He’s comin’ ’round again! Get planetside, on the double!”
Seven saw the sky below dotted with clouds, and her team regrouping for a mad run toward the Valen Colony. She calculated multiple variables in her head and arrived at a troubling conclusion. “We will not reach the surface before his next pass. But I have an idea.”
She rolled to give herself a clean line-of-sight transmission vector to the weather-control station, and then she switched her transceiver to the station’s executive frequency. Using the access code she had established to secure its systems, she patched its command interface through to her suit’s HUD—and initiated prioritized adjustments for the sector grid around Valen Colony.
When she looked down she saw the results of her inspiration: a swiftly gathering storm head of black clouds flashing with lightning and rumbling with thunder.
She switched back to the team’s channel. “Everyone! Use the storm as cover!”
The team responded in overlapping transmissions—“Are you crazy?” “Oh, hell no.” “You’ve gotta be kidding!”—until a fresh barrage of disruptor pulses from the fighter quelled dissent and spurred them all into powered dives toward the thunderhead.
“Don’t cluster! Split up and regroup on—”
Another fusillade of disruptor blasts cut across the strike team’s descent vector—and one tore through Ellory’s thruster pack, which exploded in a burst of sparks and shrapnel.
Seven struggled to see past the inky plume of smoke pouring from Ellory’s fragged suit. “Ell! Talk to me, Ell! Ell, can you hear me?”
Harper cut in: “Her suit’s offline! No power, no comms! Anyone got eyes on her?”
“Affirmative,” Speirs said. “No movement, falling like a rock.”
“About to lose her in the clouds,” Ballard said.
Seven keyed her suit’s thrusters to maximum. “Everyone, get clear. I’m going in.” Hands outstretched and pointed ahead of her, she chased after the unresponsive Ellory and speared her way into the thundercloud just a second behind her.
Everything went pitch-black, and then the world flared blinding white—lightning slashed in great forks all around Seven, and entire banks of black cloud pulsed with inner light, all of it followed almost instantly by crushing roars of thunder that hit her with walls of sonic force.
Her eyes pulsed with green and purple afterimages, and her head spun from the shock of thunderclaps—but she forced herself not to blink, not to pass out, not to pull inward or do anything to slow her dive. Hands first, head lowered, she arrowed through another wall of roiling black and gray vapors—to see Ellory just a hundred meters ahead of her, tumbling wildly, out of control, with no sign of consciousness.
Beneath them, the belly of the cloud flared white with electrical fury.
Seven accelerated directly into Ellory and wrapped her arms around her, and then her legs. “Computer! Shields!” Her suit’s command system activated the low-power shield normally used for extra protection during the most perilous moments of atmospheric entry.
Please be enough—
She and Ellory plunged through the bottom of the cloud as it resounded with thunder and flashed—just for a few milliseconds—with sheet lightning hotter than the surface of a star.
And then the two of them were clear of the storm, back into open sky, steam and smoke trailing from both their suits as a barren expanse of the planet’s surface rushed up to meet them. Seven was about to release her parachute—and then she saw the snub fighter break through the storm cloud and level out, no doubt lining up its targeting sensors on her and Ellory.
Speirs shouted over the comm, “Seven! Release your chute!”
“I can’t! The fighter’s locking—”
A bluish-white particle cannon beam lanced down, out of the storm head, and slashed across the snub fighter’s wing-mounted weapons arrays, reducing them to spark-spewing junk. Then Harper’s prowler burst free of the storm and dropped into a perfect kill position behind the snub fighter, which broke off and fled for orbit.
“You’re clear, kid! Pull the cord!”
Seven released her chute and fired braking thrusters just in time to hit the ground at a speed that hurt like hell but which she could survive if she bent her knees and rolled through it, using her torso and limbs as buffers to shield Ellory from the worst of the hard landing.
She came to a halt, grateful to be alive—but terrified by the possibility that Ellory wasn’t.
Consciousness returned in flickers. Dull waves of deep red pain. A viselike sensation of pressure inside her skull. The nauseating agony of multiple broken bones competing for attention.
Ellory wanted to speak, but her mouth was dry. She wanted to assess her surroundings, but her eyes felt as if they had been glued shut. What parts of her didn’t hurt were numb.
She tried to draw a deep breath. The air was hot. It stank of fried optronic cabling, and it tasted of copper. A leaden weight had settled upon every part of her.
Am I dead? Or a locked-in quadriplegic? Where am I?
She struggled to remember how she had gotten into this state. The harder she tried to force her brain to produce short-term memories, the more confused she became. Exhaustion took hold. She was starting to slip back into the shadow….
Then she felt herself being lifted and cradled by many pairs of hands. Pressure, near her neck. Something was happening. She wasn’t alone.
Someone removed a helmet from her head. Muggy air that smelled of dust kissed her face. A wet cloth wiped grit from her eyes, her lips, her nose. The sweet kiss of cool water sharpened her focus. She opened her eyes.
Gathered around her, looking down with faces full of hope, were her fellow Rangers. Speirs gingerly tended Ellory’s wounds with a soft washcloth, which Ballard refreshed with her canteen. Lucan, Ellory’s partner, was at her side, holding her left hand. Rana cradled Ellory’s head in her lap. Seven kneeled and held Ellory’s right hand in both of hers.
Ellory smiled through her pain. “Can someone catch me up?”
Speirs asked, “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Liberating the weather station.”
Concerned looks passed from one Ranger to another. Lucan gave Ellory’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Remember the dive to the surface?”
Ellory shook her head no. She looked around; it hurt to turn her neck more than a few degrees to either side. “Guys… what happened?”
“You got hit,” Ballard said. “Lost your power pack, and that fried your suit.”
Rana added, “You were in a wild spin when you hit the storm head.”
A raindrop landed on Ellory’s cheek. Then came a steady patter, which swelled into a summer shower that within moments became a torrential downpour.
Her memory came back like a lightning bolt. She looked at Seven. “It was you. You caught me. Held me during the landing…. You saved me.”
As thunder rolled and the breaking storm drenched them, Seven smiled and tightened her clasp of Ellory’s hand. “You’re welcome.”