Despair
As she sat looking out at the conflict, tears of frustration welled up in her eyes. Although a severe attack was being played out on the convoy, all she could think about was Bones and how she was completely powerless to help him, or anyone else for that matter.
“Captain, I estimate that we are within visual range of Captain Darley’s position,” her suit comp said. Jack was startled with the voice, surprised that they had kept the same trajectory.
“Are you sure? How…” and her voice trailed off as she augmented her eyesight, one out of the long list of standard COMBAT implants all soldiers and fighter jocks got before active duty.
The suit comp had calculated that she should have been roughly 400 or so kilometers from Bones at the time her ship was damaged, and it of course kept track of their direction, yaw, pitch and speed, so it could estimate quite accurately the distance and time for closest view.
“You should be able to see him off starboard on my mark… Now!”
Jack kept her eyes focused in the direction her suit comp indicated. The rolling of her ship was making things difficult, however, and she had to keep positioning herself using Beta-9 as a land mark.
At first, she couldn’t quite make out what she was seeing. The alien ships seemed to be stationary and positioned in somewhat of a circle. As the gap closed between her and them, more details became evident and Jack was able to see that the alien ships were protecting one ship in particular, occupied in picking up an object.
Her eyes were finally able to make out Bones’ suit and the aliens were manipulating it into the cargo hold. Why they were doing it she didn’t know. Aliens killed any survivors – they had no way of communicating with any human and had no need for them otherwise, but this time Bones was definitely being brought into the ship.
She had guessed their distance at about 700 meters, and she was now turning down her eye augmentation as she approached the aliens. Checking her direction, she could clearly see that she was going to pass by them far too close for comfort, and three of her ship systems were still running, including the interior emergency cabin light.
“Comp, I need to shut down any active ship systems immediately!
“To do that you have to pull out the power buss that is just behind your left foot. Disengage the safety by flipping the large clamp upward and then pull it straight out by the handle.”
Jack rushed to unplug the buss, but that was easier said than done. She couldn’t see what she was doing, and her suit gloves made it awkward. She searched around frantically until she found it and then fumbled for the clamp that would allow her to unlatch the buss itself.
Switching her eyesight back to triple augmentation, she was able to see the alien ships surrounding Bones. He was very close to being dragged in. Jack could clearly see his attempts at a struggle but there was no match between his suit and the manipulator arms. Time was almost out and Jack couldn’t think of anything.
Jack was panicking now, trying hard to flip the clamp without breaking it. She had to be careful, knowing that with the power her suit had she could literally tear this ship apart piece by piece if she had to and could just as easily break the clamp.
“Finally!” she said, and with a quick movement she yanked the buss out of its slot. All the ship’s working instruments instantly shut down, except for a rudimentary mechanical flight system in case her flight computer went down and the ejection system which had its own power.
Jack sat still, watching the alien ships she was now fast approaching. She felt as if they were watching her. Bones was now motionless near the one alien ship, and the other ones showed no activity. She hoped that her tumble and dark signature meant a wreck to the aliens, and for a few moments it looked like it did.
***
One of the aliens in the guard ship rubbed a scent sack on the pad in front of him in a certain pattern, and the other ships reacted immediately. Half of those surrounding this ‘Species 2286’ now turned to face the ‘danger ship’ tumbling toward them. Various aliens transmitted their take on the matter, with a general consensus that the ship was inoperable but worth spending a salvo on just in case. Three elected to intercept and target, while the others protected the carrier drone as it collected this ‘Species 2286, number 263’.
Jack noted the three alien ships break formation and knew immediately what it meant. The distance had now closed to four hundred meters and she was now at apogee. Jack new she had to gamble everything.
She grabbed her sidearm, a medium output dual purpose gun firing solid salvos and with pulse detonation capability, one she’d had for years and that had proven itself dependable every time. She looked down at the hole ripped through her ship canopy by the salvo and quickly punched out a larger area. She unhooked the gun from the ship charger with her free hand and set it for self-destruct, low yield. It normally hung on her suit belt with magnets, so she reached through the hole in her canopy and concentrated as she looked at her thruster support beam. At the right moment she awkwardly tossed it high and watched as the gun sailed through space and the ship rotated to come up to meet with it.
“C’mon, some luck for once…” she said, but the gun floated on and narrowly missed the support beam, twisting as the magnet almost grabbed hold. Jack felt her hope drop to nothing and was about to turn away until she glimpsed the mangled Aft thruster that was torn off but hanging on by its cabling. As it came around, the slowly spinning gun clanged off the side of the nacelle and solidly clamped onto the thruster.
Remembering that it was a double sun system and that the radiation must be fairly intense at this distance, she said to her suit comp, “Comp, raise the suit temperature to as high as I can take without dying, and monitor alien activity. If they lose interest, wait five minutes and lower my temperature again.”
“Confirmed. We are sun-side so the average temperature is 320 degrees. Is your gun set to low yield?”
“Yes.” Jack was surprised it was watching her to this degree. She knew that her suit computer wasn’t going to question her decision, but the programmers did an amazing job with its A.I.
“Comp, you spook me sometimes,” she said as an intense but short lived flash burst out. Almost immediately after the explosion she felt the temperature go hot, but not so hot that she couldn’t take it.
The alien craft had set themselves for a run against her, but with the explosion they had broken formation and returned to their protective positions. Within a few moments the group passed by her field of view as she drifted by. Her last glimpse was of Bones, his suit twisting as he followed her path.
The explosion had added another dimension to her spin which made everything look very confusing. Jack closed her eyes in resignation and to prevent disorientation. Finally after what seemed like at least fifteen minutes, her suit cooled down and the comp said, “My computations suggest that the planet’s gravitational pull is unusually strong for its mass and is pulling you in. You need to re-orient the ship or your life will be in danger.”
“How long do I have?”
“Your ship’s final trajectory intersects the planet’s upper atmosphere in 12 minutes.”
“How do I re-orient without power?”
“You must install the power buss again and locate the main wire harness that’s just behind the left side of your front panel. Although the computer is dead, the main power may still be available. If so, you can short out and activate the thrusters to correct your spin and prepare your ship for initial reentry.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
Jack sat there not believing what she had just heard.
“You have eleven minutes. Scratch may have survived re-entry, his ship may be capable of flight, a WF ships may send a rescue… ”
“OK! Enough!” Jack said as she awkwardly scrambled to grab to the buss floating around her feet somewhere. “Anything I need to know about putting that buss back in?”
“Yes. Once it snaps in, flip the power switch. It automatically switches off when disconnected. This procedure will take approximately 7 minutes. You need to hurry.”
“Screw you,” she said as she finally found the buss.
As she was blindly groping for the slot to put it in, the scope of the alien attack became visible to her, and Jack momentarily lost her focus as she watched the carnage outside of her rapidly spinning canopy. Off in the distance, 221’s shields were being pounded as thousands of alien ships attacked from all corners. The other ships in the convoy had already prepared for the jump, and 221 was maneuvering into position. ‘Why hadn’t they called all wingmen in?’ she wondered.
She sat there drifting and feeling helpless as she watched her ship, her home, take barrage after barrage of incoming fire and die a slow death.
“Jack, you have 5 minutes.”
“Ouch! Ok.” She snapped the buss in and flipped the switch down.
The hard restart caused a short and she watched as breakers popped off on her breaker console. She couldn’t tell if any systems were still working because her monitors were dead, but her suit HUD didn’t come on at all, so she presumed the worst.
“I detect no activity on the system but I can’t be sure,” her suit comp said. “Try igniting your forward maneuvering jets for one half second.”
Jack found and toggled the rarely used switch that controlled the forward thruster, but nothing happened.
“Look on the breaker panel and find the breakers that control the thrusters. Once you turn them on, reset the switch on the power buss. It may have flipped off with the short.”
Jack turned to look, but her cumbersome suit made it awkward. She adjusted her eyesight and looked carefully until she finally found the two breakers that controlled the eight thrusters and turned them on. Then she reached down and re-toggled the main buss switch. This time, the already tripped breakers prevented any more shorts.
Jack tried the forward thruster, timing the ignition to stop one axis of her tumble, and she was happy to see the thruster respond. She then toggled the other thrusters expertly and within moments had her ship righted, but it was still quickly sinking into the planet’s gravitational well. She watched as the planet loomed ever closer while trying to avoid looking at the numbers her suit had displayed on her visor.
“Jack, you have 1.3 minutes until atmospheric entry. Please hit thrusters two, four and six for five seconds at my Mark…”
She got her fingers ready at the toggles and tripped them when her suit comp told her to. The ship started to vibrate with the tenuous but definite atmosphere now hissing as it passed over its leading edges.
“Please relax but be ready to hit the eject handle at my Mark,” her suit comp said.
Jack felt so utterly hopeless at her inability to do anything. Her final thoughts as she noticed the edging of her non-atmospheric ship glow was the thousands of people on board WF221 that would die as the World Federation ship disintegrated before it could jump, and the pain of that thought made her double over in agony. She knew that the suit itself was almost indestructible and it had calculated a complex path that would avoid the deadly atmospheric spin that would tear her body apart. But at this point she didn’t care. She didn’t even notice the buffeting that was slowly tearing up her own ship as it entered the atmosphere.