“How long was I out?”
“Couple of hours. The mech wanted to wake you,” Ballis winked, “but I wouldn’t let him.”
Lev-9 sat at the navigation console getting it ready for Aiben’s interface. His sensor band spun around to face the two men and the central optic flickered several times. Nevertheless, the mechanoid didn’t respond. His hands kept busy keying in the instructions for Aiben to send the code and free them from hypertransit.
Ballis laughed. “Why do they all find it so annoying to be called a mech? Why would they engineer a quirk like that into their own neural networks? It’s been over a hundred years since the Free Accords emancipated mechanoids and granted them a guild charter to create themselves.”
“So they won’t forget, I guess,” Aiben said.
“Do you have the data, Aiben?” Lev-9 asked.
Aiben sunk his hand into a vest pocket and fingered out Oand-ib’s crystal. Or was it Yoren-dal’s crystal? He made a fist around it and let its edges bite into his palm. His skin absorbed the nanomechs that would decrypt it. He thought about the conversation in the Hegirith’s meditation chamber that had put him in this situation.
Oand-ib’s source of information had been Nairom. That’s why his friend had been so angry, why he had left and not come back. Before leaving the Citadel, Nairom had become much more adept at the art of cybermancy than Aiben. Oand-ib had charged him with the task to open the way for Aiben to be the one to fulfill destiny, when Nairom had been the better of the two. That had been the crux of Nairom’s bitterness. The Hegirith’hi Shez hadn’t sent the best to find im shalal; they had sent the second best.
“Well?” Ballis broke Aiben’s thoughts.
“Sorry, just thinking about something Oand-ib said.”
He dropped the crystal into the reader port. The red indentations in his palm dissolved. Aiben’s nanomechs picked up communication with the ship’s navigation system. They extracted the master code from the encrypted crystal and transmitted it to Mora Bentia’s locked-out hyperportal. At the same time, Lev-9’s secret wireless link picked out the cipher and sent it on in a tight-beam transmission through hyperspace. No one, not even Aiben, noticed.
Mora Bentia’s gate activated and drilled through hyperspace. It wrenched gravity and ripped open a hole into normal space. A halo of visible light spewed from the spatial tear and shifted through a multitude of colors. The hole spit out Raatha’s ship, encased in blob of dissipating energy. A small backwash of hyperspace trailed in the craft’s wake, but the portal sealed the tear and cut it off.
“There she is, Mora Bentia.” Ballis jumped the ship from the portal’s hard-wired trajectory into a transfer orbit to get them closer to the spinning, emerald and russet planet. As they moved in, their predicament became clear. “Wow! Why didn’t anyone mentioned there’d be this much traffic in orbit?”
“Because I had no idea.” Aiben’s eyes widened as he scanned space around Mora Bentia. Billions of starship and space station tonnage circled the planet. Space-bound fueling, factory, and supply stations bristled with docked ships jutting out into the inky vacuum. “Can you make it through all that junk without puncturing our hull?” Aiben leaned forward and slapped Ballis on the shoulder in jest with the heel of his palm. His hand was shaking, though.
“No problem, master cybermancer. I’ll just contact port control and have them send someone out in a vac-suit with signaling lamps. At least we shouldn’t have trouble finding an orbital dock we can hook to. We should just look like another merchant craft dropping off or coming in for supplies.”
“I don’t think it will be so easy,” Lev-9 interrupted their banter. “If I’m not mistaken, those aren’t all commercial transports. There are also several hundred Zenzani military craft out there.”
“If you’re right, we’d better move fast.” Ballis frowned at Aiben. “Your move.”
“I didn’t know this was going to happen.” The cybermancer shrugged and shook his head.
During the past two years, the dictatorial hand of the Protectorate had crushed Mora Bentia in its clenched fist. It was an unimportant planet, but unlucky enough to be located at mid-point between where the Protectorate had been and where they were planning to go. Merchant fleets ran the hyperlanes of the centralized system and fed the warships and military transports on routine stopovers. The hyperportal was a popular fixture as they all jockeyed to get prime access to the hyperspace tunneling fields.
“So neither of you had a plan for this?”
“The freighter Oand-ib commissioned was fitted with a Zenzani challenge and response system. We lost that advantage when we fled in this ship,” Lev-9 said flatly.
“And I’ll wager common merchants don’t have access to that code we just used either. A non-military vessel without an escort coming through the portal using that code is going to look pretty suspicious.”
“They’ve got to be scanning us right now,” Aiben said, his voice shaking.
“We’d better think of something really quick.” Ballis’s hands were flying over the pilot’s console. Fingers jabbed at the complex ideographs. A heads-up display instantiated and a holographic representation of their surroundings pulsated. A warning siren pierced the cockpit.
“What’s going on?” Aiben jumped in his flight couch, but the strong interlace of the safety harnesses held him.
“Proximity warning! Mech, can you get me a fix?”
The heads-up display dispersed like a flurry of rainbow-colored snowflakes. It reconstituted into the spatial grid that had set off the screech. A mechanical digit killed the klaxon with a stab.
“There are five fighters heading towards us on intercept,” Lev-9 said. “Their weapons are hot.”
“I think that’s our invitation to leave.” Ballis rotated the ship along its yaw axis, angling the thrusters to propel them back into the hyperportal’s orbital path.
“We can’t just…” Aiben pushed against the safety harness.
“Take it easy, we’re not giving up. We just have to get back into hyperspace and jump somewhere else so we can plan this out first. Otherwise, your mission will fizzle out even before it begins.”
The escape maneuver was too late. Four of the fighters, flying much faster than anticipated, surrounded Raatha’s ship. They fired their retros to match velocity and hooked the claws of magnetic grapples into the intruding vessel all in one movement. The fifth fighter continued on, passing them, spinning along its axis, maneuvering so that it continued in the same trajectory as its sister fighters, but now facing Raatha’s ship. Several atomic warheads rocketed from the fighter and sped towards the larger, encircled freighter. Ballis swept the projectiles aside with a surge of the ship’s deflectors.
“One of the oldest tricks in the book,” Ballis said. He was full of fire as he struggled with the flight controls. “The four ships on the side grapple us and the fighter looking down our throat pummels us with nuclear missiles until our deflectors overload from radiation. After that, they blow us up, or slice us up, whichever they think we deserve.”
“How do we stop them?” Aiben forced himself not to clench his fists. Still, there was the sharp pain in his arm.
Unexpected acceleration suddenly squashed him back into his seat. The sound of shearing metal grated through the hull. Ballis swung the ship around 180 degrees, threw it into a barrel roll, and decelerated into a lower orbit. The abrupt two-way spin forced the magnetic grapples to twist and pop free of their hull.
“You just have to act before they can tighten up the slack on their grapples.” Ballis turned and winked at Aiben. A wide grin spread across his face. He looked like he was actually enjoying this now.
The five fighters persevered and followed Raatha’s ship down into Mora Bentia’s gravity well. Ballis licked his lips and climbed down between the orbital traffic towards an empty swath of world hurtling towards them. The enemy craft adjusted their trajectories to continue pursuit.
“Excuse me,” Lev-9 said, “but at o
ur present speed and vector, if you don’t make a course correction, we’ll enter Mora Bentia’s atmosphere at an angle too steep for reentry.”
“I’m counting on it.” Ballis keyed in a symphony of maneuvers like a maestro musician. “Those fighters aren’t reentry craft. They won’t have the shielding to keep them from burning up in the atmosphere. I guess even the Zenzani military has budget concerns.”
“Let’s hope so,” Aiben said.
“We’ll just have to see if they can keep up with us and pull out in time. If I know this ship, we’ll make it.”
“Even if we are able to pull out, I don’t believe this vessel will still hold together.” Lev-9 crunched the calculations through his digital brain. His sensor band spun through several rotations.
“Don’t tell me we aren’t going to make it, because here we go!”
Aiben was in utter awe of the man he had called mentor. Ballis key-hopped so fast that his fingers were a blur. His face was a mask of energized emotion, nostrils flared wide, eyes spitting cobalt flames, mouth drawn in a tight bloodless line. Aiben had new insight into how thrilling and dangerous the man’s past must have been and how lackluster his future on Besti must have seemed. No wonder it was so painful for Ballis to dwell in past memories.
Despite Ballis’s skill as a pilot, Aiben feared Oand-ib’s secret might die with him and Magron Orcris would continue his conquest unimpeded. The thought of dying before completing his task, though disparaging, provided him with a strange sense of guilty release.
The halath in him still doubted his ability to bear the Hegirith’s expectations. He immediately felt the sting of his conscience and chastised himself. Besides, he had just begun to suspect the full meaning of the fragmented memories that jostled in his mind. Once those memories became a little clearer and more certain, he had to believe he would find something there to give him the power to overcome his uncertainty.
Raatha’s ship cut a wild arc through the flight paths of several other craft on its way down. Ballis jigged back and forth on the lateral thrusters to avoid any collisions. Zenzani fighters clustered around them in the mad rush. One of the fighters wasn’t able to follow the jagged course and slammed into the side of a massive fuel tanker. It smashed into bits and spewed flaming depressurized atmosphere into space. The fuel tanker, knocked out of its course, plummeted towards the emerald surface of the planet.
Ballis dipped them into the upper atmosphere. He thumbed a switch and yanked back so hard on the control stick that his knuckles whitened. Thrusters strained to slant the ship back up. They pushed against Mora Bentia’s unforgiving gravity, ignoring the screeching protests of a tortured hull. As soon as they hit the right angle, the ship skipped off the atmosphere as a flat stone would across a calm lake. Ballis and Aiben let out a whoop of triumph when two of the remaining four fighters couldn’t make the angle and broke apart against the enormous heat and friction that slammed into them.
“Before you begin celebrating, gentlemen,” Lev-9 interrupted their revelry, “I suggest we focus on the two remaining fighters still trailing us.”
“Let’s see if we can lose them in the orbital traffic,” Aiben said. A rush of adrenalin was now pumping him on.
The two fighters were closing in on them and their ship was angling down once again with the tug of planetary gravity. Ballis brought them back up through escape velocity into orbit, but it was too late for him to make a quick course correction. Their low orbit put them right into the path of the flailing fuel tanker.
He tried to cut under the bloated ship and drop back into the upper atmosphere before collision, but he snagged the ship’s port engine on a communication spike jutting out from the tanker’s main hull. The impact tore a gap in the engine. A leak of flaming fuel streamed into the thin layer of oxygen now surrounding both ships.
Behind them, the two fighters couldn’t react fast enough and hammered into the tanker. They ripped apart in a massive explosion that threw pieces of burning hull into Mora Bentia’s atmosphere. Punctures in the tanker’s hull belched fire and sent fingers of flame to tear the ship apart into a thousand blazing meteorites.
Raatha’s ship continued to streak towards Mora Bentia like a comet gone off course. A tail of fire billowed around the skin of the ship as the increasingly oxygen-rich atmosphere and fuel mixture ignited from heat and friction.
“Start praying!” Ballis yelled over the deafening scream of the damaged engine vibrating through the hull. “We’re going to need all the luck we can get to pull through this!”
“What do you mean luck?” Aiben yelled over the howling bulkheads, “Can’t you pull us out of the dive like before?”
“I’m a good pilot, but not that good,” Ballis groaned. “The port engine is out, the other one failing. There’s no way I can level us out enough to slow our descent. The remaining engine will give us enough breaking speed to prevent us from blacking out due to higher g-forces, but it won’t last long.”
Aiben could already feel the blood pounding in his ears from the climbing pressure of an uncontrolled acceleration. Nanomechs worked to counteract the imbalance, but the stress on his body was increasing. If it continued to rise in intensity, it would crush his bones and jelly his marrow, nanomechs or not. Aiben couldn’t even imagine the kind of pain that was battering Ballis without the aid of molecular assistants.
Aiben wondered how he could brace himself for impact. It would be a vain attempt anyway, the pressure had already pinned him to his flight couch. It was at this moment, death staring him in the face, that he decided he couldn’t let it end. He had to see how the destiny the Hegirith’hi Shez had thrust upon him would play out.
If he didn’t survive, he would never know what the memories Oand-ib had implanted in him meant. He would never find out if Oand-ib were still alive or if his mind had simply given Yoren-dal his anab’s face for some unknown reason. He would never know if Magron would forever trap Nairom in his grasp, as he rotted away in a pool of his own anger and fear. He would never know if Achanei had survived the invasion. He would never again touch her cheek to his, or be able to look her in the eye and admit the unspoken love between them. These thoughts forced Aiben to come to a decision.
“Lev, what is it like planet-side?” His throat was sore and raspy.
“Gravity is .92 Besti. The atmosphere is breathable, though somewhat thinner,” Lev-9 answered. He had been scanning planetary conditions from the moment they had entered orbit.
“Good. We’re going to have to bail out then!”
“What?” Ballis craned his neck against the oppressive forces that glued him to his flight couch. He managed to look over his shoulder at Aiben. Acceleration stretched his face, but Aiben could still see surprise in the man’s puttied features.
“Vac-suits and jetpacks.” Aiben’s lungs burned with each word. “Didn’t Raatha have some stored in the aft storage bay, remember?”
“Yes,” Lev-9 said, “I found some during my reconnaissance of the ship.”
“Good thinking.” Ballis was starting to shake. “Just how do you propose we get to them?”
Aiben tried to peel himself out of his chair, but couldn’t defeat the g-forces. Even the nanomechs failed to give his muscles the strength they needed. “Lev, do you have enough power in your hydraulics to get up?”
“I believe so.” The mechanoid pushed up and without further word, pumped to the aft storage bay. He returned in several seconds with two vac-suits and three jetpacks. He fitted himself with one of the jetpacks and then extracted the humans like a pair of stubborn eyeteeth from their seats. Together, they fought to wrap themselves in the remaining vac-suits and jetpacks. Once that was finished, Lev carried them to the portside airlock.
“I’m not so sure about this now,” Aiben said. “I’ve never done this sort of thing before.” A sudden feeling of unease came over him as he realized his limited survival experience didn’t include jumping out of a ship in an uncontrolled decent. He hadn’t changed his mind about
surviving, but fear surfaced now as he ran through the scenario in his head.
“I haven’t ever attempted anything like this before either,” Lev-9 said. “But it appears to be our only alternative to dying in a crash.”
“Don’t worry,” Ballis slurred. “It’s not that hard.” His eyes were fluttering. He was pale and on the verge of passing out. “I’ve ship-jumped a lot of times, never at such re-entry speeds, but I’m sure it’ll be the same. Just keep in mind you’ll be falling spread out. You need to upright yourself before the jetpack kicks in. You’ll have about thirty seconds before that happens.”
“OK, how do I…” but before Aiben could mine further technique from Ballis, Lev-9 hit the release switch on the airlock. The metal iris grated open and cut off his words with an explosive decompression.
Lev-9’s steel grip on the two humans and a magnetic hold on the deck plates kept the screaming wind from sweeping them out of the plummeting ship. The mechanoid waited for the pressure to stabilize and then let go of the two men. They slipped through the wall of fire that encased the cascading hunk of metal. Their vac-suits protected them. Lev-9 shut off his magnetic grip and flung himself out behind them into Mora Bentia’s dusky sky.
An array of stimuli assaulted Aiben’s unprepared senses right away. He experienced a lightning-fast flash of heat as he slid through the ship’s blazing corona. The vac-suit’s nanofibers shielded his skin from burning. A freezing blast of ice-cold air followed. It threatened to paralyze him as it rushed to envelop him. The nanofibers switched function to thwart the cold.
Aiben’s ears tingled from his own ragged breathing reverberating against his helmet’s faceplate. Dark swirling blurs of patchwork green and brown landscape hurtled towards him, bombarding his field of vision. A sickening taste climbed up from the back of his throat.
A minute to upright yourself echoed in his head. Aiben did the only thing he could think of; he tucked his knees in and furiously pumped his arms in circles. Seconds after having flipped himself upright, the jetpack’s automatic delay expired and it jolted to life. The thrust propelled him back up several feet, but then settled him into a controlled descent.