“Gunnery deck here, we're down nine cannons and sealing into sections! Get us the hell out of here!” shouted Frost's third in command.
“If you panic and fall apart, I swear I'll go up there and shoot you myself! Keep it together!” Alice shot back.
“We've lost containment in compartment E71 to E84,” Price said sedately. “No casualties.”
The carrier's main batteries began to open fire as the three destroyers and many other smaller ships moved out of the way.
“Forward shields are taking massive fire, they'll be down in eleven seconds at this rate,” Laura said, trying to keep her voice steady and calm.
Lalonde, Randolph
Spinward Fringe Frontline
“Nice of them to clear a path for us,” Alice said with a wolfish grin. “Plot a course that takes us into hyperspace at a six degree upward angle from them. Panloo, start on this trajectory right now,” she said as she sent the course to her station.
The Triton angled up with a jerk, reflecting the anxiousness of her pilot and started suddenly away from the line of fire, but through a narrow, clear space between the engaging ships.
“Course ready!” announced the sweaty navigator to her right.
“Go!” Captain Valent ordered.
The Triton accelerated suddenly and before anything else could get in her way they were far from the defensive fleet.
Loose Wiring
Ayan's attitude was unprofessional, inappropriate, but that didn't change how she felt. I'm a highly trained engineer whose worked on starships, developed new technologies, analysed mysterious devices and even consulted on a new class of ship. There are several bots and even a few people just a hundred meters away who could do this just as well, but I'm here because none of them could squeeze inside this tiny claustrophobic space hundreds of meters up.
“How's it going in there?” Jason asked through the slim line that extended from her suit all the way back through the tiny darkened passageway that ran the length of the landing pad the Regent Galactic and West Keeper soldiers were holding position on. They had entered the blocky, thick hulled general purpose vessel that was on the pad and were dug in.
“It's fine,” she answered peevishly. “Still moving.”
Three more small combat drop ships had made hasty landings since they had joined the random gathering of resistance fighters adding over two hundred soldiers to the fray. They pushed the resistance fighters back behind their secondary makeshift barriers, a much more dense, well built wall made of bulkheads and other heavily constructed equipment and hastily moved and welded fixtures. The soldiers wanted access to the subway station behind the resistance, which used it to move between different key levels in the spaceport and were keeping it open for more refugees and survivors to join them. More worn and injured people arrived every hour, and though the numbers in the resistance was swelling, the more well armed and prepared soldiers were still winning ground.
Ayan had started looking at schematics and blueprints of the starport as soon as she had a handle on the immediate situation and within an hour a plan was formulated. The enemy had cut the communication and power lines that linked the ship to the spaceport, but the landing gear of the ship was still locked to the landing pad and there was no way of severing that connection without using heavy cutting equipment. Thus far the resistance had been able to keep the enemy away from the forward struts effectively enough so the physical cables were still linked from inside the landing platform.
Her plan was simple. Someone would climb inside the tiny cable passage with power and data cables and tap into the hard mooring systems under the old general purpose vessel many of the West Keeper soldiers were using as a base of operations. With no one else her size equipped with the basic knowledge to make the link, or wearing a thermal and sound dampening suit, that person would be her. Being sent on the errand shouldn't have been insulting, she had infantry training and had been sent into small spaces before but there was a nagging thought in the back of her mind; I'm about four hundred meters up and the sheathing for this passage is about half a millimetre thick.
Sweat beaded on her forehead and wetted her palms, the suit took care of it before it started to be a problem and she knew the metal support she had her safety hook around was strong enough to bear ten times her weight but her fear of heights was an irrational thing and as she came up on the section of the landing pad's underside where the protective sheath had been blown away she stopped. The monitor on her faceplate informed her that her heart rate was elevated, her overall stress level was increasing fast.
Ayan made sure her safety tether was securely attached to the support running the length of the pad and took a deep breath while her hand followed the pair of slim lines leading to her belt and shoulder. Everything was secure, regardless of how high up she was she was completely safe. Biting her lip, she pushed off slightly and felt the comforting thin metal sheeting disappear from beneath her as she moved out into the open air to hang by two strong lines the thickness of human hairs.
It took all her concentration and determination to combat the fear that twisted her stomach in knots, forced blood to rush to her head so severely that she could hear her heart beating between her ears and made her sweat profusely.
“Ayan, your vitals are way too high, are you all right?” Jason asked again.
“Shut up, oh please shut up!” she snapped.
“Oh no, you're-”
“Afraid of heights! That wasn't in my intelligence jacket? Guess you spooks don't catch everything, do you?”
“Guess not,” Jason chortled. “Just focus on your safety line and what you have to do.”
“What do you think I'm doing!” She moved carefully along the support rod, one hand moving above the other rhythmically and methodically. If for some reason the hook or lines gave way she could always hold on to that rod until her suit could form a bond with the smooth, hard underside of the platform. Her breath caught in her throat as the rod she was attached to ended. The blueprints said that the support rod went all the way to the end of the platform, not that it bent inside the metal above then came back out several meters later.
Her instinct was to look around in an effort to find something else to attach her safety line to. She looked in the wrong direction first. Peering over her shoulder and down into the yawning depths of the dark inner station landing pit, her heart leapt into her throat. Landing platforms jutted out from the sides like shelves and spoons leading to hangars, transit ways and hallways. Her eye was drawn mostly to the shadowy depths in the center. The bottom was a thing imagined and not seen, a place where her mind's eye painted her crushed and ruined. “Jason, I'm sorry I snapped at you,” she whimpered.
“It's okay. I understand.”
Ayan laid her forearms and shins against the underside of the platform and her suit started to form a bond with the metal. Her heart felt like it was going to break free of her chest, she just wanted to stay right where she was until someone else could come get her, come save her. Her military training was winning, however, even if just barely. “The support rod ends, I'm going to have to use the climbing tech in the suit to get across,” she whispered in a hurried, panicked tone that surprised her when it echoed in her ears. She'd only heard herself sound so frightened once before.
It was during her first tour on the Sunspire, before she met Jonas Valent. Her Captain had ordered her and a few of the engineering crew into the reactor core to shield them from a massive electromagnetic burst that killed everyone else on board. The darkness, filled with drifting corpses who had been her friends, and the possibility that their enemies could return to salvage the ship, to kill her and everyone else who had survived was something she'd never forget. They managed to get the ship back to Freeground, but for weeks she couldn't so much as look at an image of that ship, it was enough to send her into tears.