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  The seals on the cockpit gave, and I cut the attractor and ducked as it ripped free. It flew past my head cleanly. Fine. The seals were no better than ours. That was good to know. Engines they knew, clearly. Some things were evenly matched, though.

  The pilot wore his gear and kept trying to shake me off even after losing his cockpit. I couldn’t clearly make out what he looked like. Bipedal, his helmet was elongated, but otherwise he was just a life form in a cockpit. A life form flipping a switch and glancing back at me.

  Crap.

  I took a chance, a lifetime of instinct kicking in. I was rusty, but I wasn’t that far gone. I undid my lock to his ship, reversing it to repel myself far and fast. Good timing, too, as he self-destructed. All right, they’d rather die than get caught. Got it.

  “Jonah, come in, did you get clear?”

  “Roger that. Also, have an artifact for you to get back to HQ on the quick. Who can you spare?”

  “Spare?” Bushfield asked, incredulous. “No one!”

  “Wrong answer. Who?”

  I picked another target and slaved myself to it, dragging myself in despite his attempts at ditching me. No one these days was used to GravPack combat, and these guys didn’t seem like they’d ever even heard of the concept.

  “Frogger, this is Deep Water, respond,” came over the radio.

  “Yeah, boss?”

  “Jonah here has a gift for you. Quick march to HQ with it.”

  “Jonah?” Frogger asked.

  “He’ll come to you. On a GravPack.”

  “Deep Water, we can’t spare me, I don’t care who…”

  I pulled up a HUD display keyed to the strike group’s frequency and got call signs over layered over the ships. Much better. I focused over toward Frogger and grabbed onto the underside of his ship. Luckily for me, ships still had storage doors on a separate airlock, just for this kind of problem. Need to grab a friend, or a bit of evidence while on the fly, just tuck it into the hold.

  Except the hold didn’t open. I noticed the chatter stopped, but guessed he has switched to a private channel to argue with his flight leader in private. We didn’t have time for that. I said as much over the main channel and the bay door opened. I tossed the engine inside and hit the manual close, snatching my hand back before the door cut it off.

  “This is Deep Water,” the radio cut in, “When Frogger breaks, press the attack. Don’t let him get tailed. Copy?” Everyone, myself included, copied her on her order.

  Frogger cut out and the rest of us circled the wagons. The enemy, damn them, didn’t care. They regrouped long enough to wedge toward us and then scattered with enough speed that it reminded me of a group on GravPack. And maybe that was the answer. Fight them like they were a GravPack strike team. It couldn’t work worse.

  I radioed my idea to Bushfield who admitted she didn’t know the tactics - they basically didn’t teach them much anymore, and no one drilled the few bits that were still mentioned. So I trusted in her ability to get her team together and explained as fast as I could.

  We had to funnel them through and take their maneuverability and speed away from them. It wouldn’t be easy with slower ships and fewer numbers, but it was, at least, possible.

  I started toward another enemy ship and it fired some kind of missile at me. My display lit up with warnings that I cancelled as quick as possible. I could see the blasted thing, I didn’t need to be told where it was.

  I hit it with a repel angle, keeping my lock on the ship that fired it. I had to jack-knife my body to keep up and felt my knee pop from the stress of it. I lost focus for half a second as the pain flared. It’d be fine. Just hurt like a bitch.

  I knew I’d made a mistake, I needed a third field set-up to pull the maneuver off, and my knee pop distracted me just enough. I’d just started to switch all fields onto that missile when it exploded. Bushfield’s ship cut sharp between me and my target, a passing black blur.

  “Thanks,” I radioed.

  “I’m your squad leader, that’s my job,” she said, “now finish him off, huh?”

  I grinned to myself and hit my pack’s systems harder. I came in on top of the ship, flipped over and came to rest near the cockpit. Gun out, I cut through the cockpit quick and grabbed at the pilot. He hit the self-destruct before I could pull him clear and I had to bail. That was two, but I wasn’t satisfied. We needed to grab one alive.

  The rest of the strike group tried to box the remaining ten ships, to not-great success. We were down to four ships, and me on top of that, but still. Then Bushfield had an idea. “Guys,” she came on over the radio, “everyone but Jonah, launch half of all remaining missiles on my mark. Target blank space near the enemy but not on top of them. Let them have room to scatter. Set fifteen-second fuses when you launch.”

  It was a great plan. I felt stupid for not seeing it earlier, and I’m sure she did as well. The strike group readied itself and launched. The enemy scattered, as expected. The missiles went off and the bursting explosions were fairly random, but covered enough area to do the job.

  Some of the ships wobbled in their patterns, slowing down, two got caught square and exploded. Eight to five felt much better. And most of that eight was now dinged up enough to be fightable.

  I came in at another ship, Blue Water on my tail. Bushfield was sticking close to me. Either she was worried I’d screw up again or she felt flying my vector gave her a chance to peel off and deal with something else if need be without worry. Couldn’t tell.

  I popped an enemy ship from a distance, my gun managing to wobble the engine a fair bit. The ship spun and started to bank without intent, and Bushfield nailed it with her nose guns.

  I was stupid. Too close to the explosion, still locked on. I got sucked into the heat of it before I could retarget, my own combat rust playing its hand. My GravPack spazzed out and the HUD went offline for a reboot. While it did, I couldn’t do anything but float. Dead in the water - which is when I realized that my comms were out, too. Damn.

  I floated there while Bushfield drove past me at speed, not concerned yet, or, frankly, noticing. I had at least ten seconds before the system rebooted enough to get me somewhere. Another enemy ship came in and fired a missile at me.

  At least there were no useless warnings, with the controls dead. Eight seconds and the missile was only about seven seconds out. Ten if I were lucky. Turned out to be around nine. I hit a quick lock on the largest thing around, Trasker Four itself, and tried to drag myself out of the way. The missile was too close and went up near me. Too near.

  Systems went critical, but caught as they were coming up, somehow managed to not go down fully a second time. Sheer luck. I was stuck, however, in Trasker Four’s gravity well. I went down toward the planet, flames and bits of debris following me, fast.

  Nothing for it but to ride it down and land, hoping I could get back off planet quick. If the GravPack was fine, it wouldn’t be too big a problem, but if it was toasted…I tried to remember everything I knew about Trasker Four and not worry about landing.

  If nothing else, the GravPack should have been functional enough to save me from hitting the planet hard. That was the plan, anyway.

  Chapter 14– Shae

  I SCANNED THE FLOOR again and caught it. A bolt. That was all. A simple bolt with a perfectly ordinary hex-shaped head. The bolt sat on top of the plate that held the plank I was tied to. And that clicked in my head loudly, like a gunshot.

  The clawed hands of the bird aliens wouldn’t work with hex bolts. I’d met more than my share of aliens, overall, and everyone used slightly different shapes for their fasteners. But hex bolts, those were human in design. The bird-aliens’ hands wouldn’t stand a chance working them. Oh, sure, they could have tools that made the bolts work fine, but why would they have built a bolt like that in first place?

  Following that chain of logic took me to a place where the aliens weren’t real. Which meant I was being held in a human ship. Suddenly, far less made sense. The “waiting around
and collecting data” phase ended right there.

  Instead I focused on getting myself free before they came back. I tensed my right shoulder and started to raise it, inch by inch, pressing it against my side. I may have been strapped down at the wrist and across the upper arm, but there was still enough slack if I shifted myself right. It hurt along my arm and ribcage, but freedom was worth some pain.

  The wrist shackle would be the worst part. My thumb popped as I dislocated it and I bit my own lip hard enough to draw blood. Once I got my right arm free, the rest proved simple enough. My thumb clicked back into place with no more pain than the dislocation itself.

  I wanted to throw up. More than that, I wanted to use a few grenades on people. I held that desire close. I let it blot out the pain, but also allowed myself a ten count to lean against the platform and wait for my legs to get steady again. Freed, I did a quick scan for cameras again, knowing I wouldn’t find any. They couldn’t afford to tape me being imprisoned, not if it got out. No, then they’d have to deny everything.

  The door stood between me and getting out of the cell. I studied the palm scanner, but made sure not to touch it. The last thing I wanted was to find out that the system logged and alarmed unknown prints trying to access the system. I had no tools, nothing to break the panel open with or to access the system once I had. The door sat locked and I considered my options.

  Option one: Wait for them to come back, try and surprise them and make a break for it. I loved it, except I didn’t know where I was or what I was up against yet. So that made it a fool’s move.

  Option two: Get the door open. Much better for stealth, except the lack of tools, a key, or explosives. All right, the explosives wouldn’t help with stealth anyway.

  I studied the door and its access panel again. Assuming these were humans after all, then the tech could only go so far up the ladder. All I had to do was find the right way to outsmart the higher-end, military-grade stuff and work my way down.

  I kicked the wall twice out of frustration but, strangely, it didn’t result in the door opening. There was, however a seam. There was always a seam, even if it sat recessed into the wall. That would be a weak point. Wait, I was an idiot. The door slid open from my right to my left. Which meant the wall to the left would be hollow for the door to slide into.

  I went back to the plank they had tied me down to and tore one of the straps free. Bending the buckle back was work but I managed it after I braced it against the floor with a foot. Five minutes counted off in my head as I worked the edge of the bent metal buckle into the seam to the left of the door. Bending back bits of the edge of the door frame let me see the retraction mechanism for the door itself.

  The fact was that there should have been a safety release on the inside of the door, but they were easy enough to “forget” installing to make rooms secure. A little-known addition to that fact, though - the interior mechanism always had a security retract, just in case. Almost never used and generally impossible to access, they weren’t worth a damn until they suddenly were.

  I saw the trigger for the release and tried to reach it with the buckle, but even bent flat it would be too short. I’d have to resort to using my fingers. The metal of the door frame, now badly bent and worn, sliced my pinky open, but the blood lubricated my way and made flipping the emergency release easier.

  The door hissed as the release caught and I pushed the thing open, staying behind it while I did. No way to know what was on the other side. As the hallway beyond came into view, I felt my jaw go slack.

  This was military. This was us. What the holy hell was happening? I didn’t even want to guess. Instead, I slid out into the hallway. I kept to the walls, ducking into doorways when anyone came by. So far, so good.

  Strange situation or not, there were two things I needed to do: let the family know I was all right and get out of here. The first proved fairly easy. I came across one of the many backup comm rooms any decent sized ship had. You never knew when sending a message would be important, and enemies targeted main communications hubs as a matter of course.

  I closed the door behind me and took a deep breath. Time would be running short. Even if no one had come to check on me, someone would notice the open door and have trouble closing it. Security would find out quick and be looking for me. Hallways were decently monitored in general so I wouldn’t be hard to find.

  Keeping that mind, I jotted out a quick message to Mud and Jonah and sent it. I didn’t bother to look up my location, just tagged the message with a normal location packet so they could find the source. That’s all they’d need. I wiped the message, thought again, and smashed in the comm deck. They definitely wouldn’t work out what I had sent who.

  The door slid open and a sonic blast hummed through the air, catching me in the leg. Guess security had worked out where I was. They wouldn’t take me easy. No need to hurt any of them badly, not yet - I didn’t know the score and they might innocently think I should have been a prisoner.

  I kicked one of the guys in the faceplate and grabbed his sonic rifle. Two quick shots took care of the second security thug. I dove for the ground as the third and fourth spilled into the room. They laid down suppressing sonic fire and I winced as the walls of the room rebounded the effects back at me, catching me square. The world started to go black but I fought it, getting off another shot.

  Pretty sure I hit one of the security goons, but the blackness swam fully over my eyes and I gave in, passing out.

  Chapter 15– Mud

  AN ALARM WOKE ME from a nap. I rolled off my bunk and slapped at the control panel on the hull nearby until it played back. It was from Mom, sent to me and Dad. The entirety of the message was “Held by Gov, no ws, n ext.” No location code or anything.

  The fact the message itself was in plain, unencoded text, coupled with the hurried shorthand, worried me. Expanded out it told me she was being held by the Government, and with no other indication as to which Gov, she meant Earth’s. Tossed in for extra fun was the fact she didn’t know where she was, why she was being held, or anything else at all. That “need extraction” at the end didn’t create a thrilling cap to the message, either.

  I send a few packets to Dad, figuring he would be on this already, and wondering why he wasn’t. For her to send to both of us meant one of two things - She thought they’d need help, the two of them, or she was out and alone, not knowing where he was. Chances were with the latter, but chances could get someone killed.

  I grabbed up a cup of something warm and took a deep breath of the moist, hot air in the cabin. Time to get to work on this. On my way to the cockpit’s hot seat I kicked the metal slab again. Still don’t know what happened there. No time now. I tossed it into a storage locker and then sat down heavily in the pilot’s chair.

  No location on the message. But the headers looked complete. That meant there would be standard codes embedded. I could translate them and backtrack from there. Shouldn’t prove too hard. I loaded the file into my system and took it apart. The message ID would be embedded at the top, the station info at the bottom. Strip out the coding for the body of the message itself and toss it. The message ID would prove useful if I could get another message from the same relay point. The IDs increment, and that’d give me a decent time lock. Margin of error, of course, based on how many messages they sent, but I could guess that once I knew what sent it in the first place. Which meant the station ident.

  Easy enough to grab out, but a pain to decode. Gov equipment doesn’t like to tell you who it is unless you’re reading the message on authorized Gov equipment. My ship most certainly wasn’t that. Fine, enough of why this sucked, more doing it regardless.

  Dad had shown me how a few years ago, just in case: one of his paranoid moments. What if, he reasoned, I worked for the Gov and my transmitter broke and I had to rely on non-spec stuff. How would I know where to go? Heh. Good old Dad.

  I ran a few tools against the encryption, betting they’d upgraded. They had. Still, I knew what
markings to look for in the code and was able to get enough of a match to run that against a database of known bases. I came up empty so I switched to larger ships. That got me a few matches. Which meant Mom was certainly on a ship somewhere.

  The class was full-compliment battle cruiser, and only six of those were active currently. Narrowed it down more for me. I grabbed the registry numbers for all six and crossed them against the code snips I had. Narrowed the field down to two ships: the Kingsburg and the Dozier. Kingsburg was a bigger ship, but Dozier sat closer to Earth, normally.

  I tried to find some information on where either ship sat currently and got nowhere fast. Well, they didn’t tend to publicize that sort of thing. Fine. But even military class ships are required to post trajectories and flight plans, they just don’t have to give a public ident. Troublesome, but not if you knew where a ship launched from.

  I ran a simulation for all flight plans that matched both the Kingsburg and Dozier launch points for the previous month. With us not at war with anyone, the chances grew small that either of them wouldn’t have hit a home berth in that time. I pegged the Dozier easily, actually. They weren’t trying to hide, and why should they?

  The Dozier fit. It fit good enough that I felt confident they were holding Mom. So I sent them a routine ping to grab a message ID. The number of the message I got back fell right in line with my theory.

  Now I knew where she was. I checked the console for any other incoming messages, but Dad hadn’t replied. Bad on bad. I was a bit farspun from where the Dozier should be. I set two courses, one submitted and the other real, just in case, and took off at a full burn toward a large rock that the Dozier would be approaching at around the time I could get to it.