I shook my head. “Things are changing fast. Hauk can fill you in. I’m going to need to drop, hopefully on the next rotation.”

  She nodded and followed as I began walking away, already pulling off my battle armor. She could see a massive bruise rising up over his shoulder and wondered what in the hell had done that.

  The report didn’t take long, and honestly, I had little to offer. I’d dropped my gear off at the armory. The guy working as the chief armorer looked familiar, but I was too exhausted to recall from where. He looked at the dents in the outer shell and shook his head.

  “I’ll need that back in an hour, Chief, with drop-rig and full kit resupply.”

  “Where are you going, Joe?” Bayou asked.

  “To the shower and…then to get some answers,” I growled before heading off.

  “So, Joe is aboard?” Carol asked eagerly as the other members of Banshee made their way into the mess hall. The increased number on board was filling out the large space. All the new arrivals seemed to have headed for bunk rooms or here. As a civilian, Carol was no longer allowed back in the arrival hangar. She didn’t mind, the open hangar door looking out into the black space beyond gave her the chills.

  “He is,” Priest offered between bites of something that may have been a rough imitation of chicken. That was, assuming you had never seen or tasted an actual chicken.

  Carol had already heard some of the others talking about the fighting. Her concern for Joe was obvious, but she still wasn’t sure where she stood with the man. Yes, they’d had a bit of a ‘thing.’ Maybe they were still an item, but she knew it was mostly just physical. Since his regaining consciousness, she still couldn’t bring herself to think of it as coming back to life. He had been different, distant, and if possible, even more driven than before. More than one of the overheard conversations described how he fought; fearless was one adjective. Inhuman was the one she heard more often. That disturbed her.

  She saw a woman sitting alone. She’d been with the last transport and looked miserable. Her blonde hair hung limply as she stared down at the untouched tray of food. Carol stood, realizing she would not get much more from these guys. They were shoveling food and undoubtedly headed to get some shut eye soon after.

  “I’m Carol. Welcome aboard,” she said, sitting down across from the woman. The other woman’s eyes didn’t rise to meet hers.

  “Low gravity. Right?” Carol said. “I get it. Took me days to be able to hold food down when I first arrived. Still have moments, you know?”

  If the woman heard her, she offered no sign that the words registered. Carol studied her; she was young, late twenties probably. Attractive enough, but a face that seemed clouded by trauma. Carol had no idea what the woman had been through, but the emotional damage was clear. Her years of running predictive behavior modeling began to add up the visible data-points, and she did not like where they were leading. She leaned over and patted the woman’s hand. The blonde recoiled slightly from the touch. Carol didn’t know why, but a shiver ran down her back.

  She stood quickly and offered cardboard platitudes to the newcomer as she turned to leave.

  “Witches.”

  “Huh?” Carol was several feet away but clearly heard what the woman had said. She turned back, but the girl’s face held the same blank expression as before.

  Carol’s son Lux was hard at work on his project. Something his mom had briefly shown interest in but now was simply happy he had a hobby. The systems all checked out, but he had little understanding of what to do next. Honestly, he wasn’t even sure what he could build out of the pile of junk he’d been given access to, but it was fun. He wouldn’t admit it, but he was holding out hope the new coder, Xero, would help him. Maybe together they could find a backup of his old NannyBot Marcie and load her into the system.

  He now knew that NannyBots were for babies, but he missed her just the same. She’d saved his life, and stuff like that mattered. He carefully added the peripheral board to the sensor array. This was the third time he’d tried it, but the thing kept giving false signals. All he wanted it to do was pick up a signal when he or his dog Junie was in the vicinity, but the sensor kept showing two heat signatures where there should have only been one. Junie had run off to find Sumo when the soldiers returned, and shortly after, the ghost signal started occurring on every boot up.

  Lux hated going to Xero about every little thing. He knew she was working on the important stuff. He had to figure this out on his own. Dragging a datapad out of his bag, he turned it on and heard the familiar voice of his father as soon as he hit the play button.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I didn’t want to jump before talking to Carol but, shit… what was I going to say? If I let her know it was because Voss asked for my help, she might try to toss me out an airlock without my suit. Couldn’t say I would blame her, hell, I had enough doubts for both of us. Bayou had also been upset; she had a significant number of refugees that seemed to grow every day.

  One thing I’d noticed was the attention she was paying to Captain Hauk. There was definitely more there than she had let on. I wasn’t sure what, but perhaps having him aboard would help stabilize things. After all, most of those aboard were his people. Like it or not, Red-7 was now a space-borne fighting force. As I walked down the corridor and heard the sounds coming from many of the billets, I knew space was not the peaceful refuge many had hoped for.

  Space Force had rigorous testing to weed out those who were overly susceptible to space or motion sickness and had a sensitivity to pressure changes like altitude sickness and even anxiety caused by confined spaces. You simply had to be comfortable up here to do your job. That the cold vacuum of space was only millimeters away couldn’t be allowed in your thoughts. Even with the screening, the corps doctors still gave us regular drug cocktails to combat the effects. One of the new men stumbled out of his room and held on to the far wall as he hurriedly rushed toward the communal toilets.

  I knew from experience that many of these guys could not adapt to life up here. They would need to be back dirt side within a few weeks, or they would wither and die. It was just not a life most were prepared for.

  “You’re going back?”

  I turned to see who was speaking. The voice threw me momentarily, but seeing that it wasn’t Carol Reynolds was a relief. I nodded in response.

  “Yeah, more work to do.”

  “Can you make a difference, change anything?” she asked, before running her fingers through her short hair.

  I shrugged. “That’s a good question, Xero, but we can’t just hide up here. Not long-term anyway.”

  I motioned her to follow me. “I appreciate your help in getting ship’s functions back up, but we need full control. Any chance you can manage that?”

  Xero shook her head. “The access level required is beyond even what I can crack. Perhaps Ada with your own command levels could help.”

  My AI had been trying since we had come aboard and gotten no further than the woman had. “What if we could target Gateway’s own comms array? Would that end it?”

  “Target how?”

  I shrugged. Her face took on a look I couldn’t quite read. “Just asking hypothetically.”

  “Simple answer is no. I investigated that, but we aren’t getting a constant signal. It might help them from updating the code to work around my own countermeasures, but I believe they have built-in fail-safes.”

  “Fail-safes?”

  “Venting atmos,” she said. Her matter-of-fact tone reinforced her certainty on the issue.

  “Shit. So, they will just kill us all if we block them out. Vent our oxygen into space?”

  Xero pursed her lips and nodded.

  We were nearing the ready room, my gear was ready, and Sumo was standing in the doorway waiting on me. The other little dog of Lux’s had her front legs down on the ground and her butt raised up as if she was ready to attack the big husky. I could tell they’d been playing and hated pulling my partner away.

  I fumbled in my locker and finally found what I was looking for. The small object felt cold to my touch. My fingers ran over the smooth multi-faceted shapes. I held it out and dropped it into her hands. Her confused expression let me know she wasn’t sure what it was.

  “I think you are the right person to have this.”

  “Too big for a ring, should I wear it as a necklace?” she asked smiling. “Either way, it’s very kind…”

  “Cut it out,” I interrupted. “I recovered this from… from Magnus. Ada believes it is a holographic data storage device.”

  She hefted the object in her open palm trying to judge the weight. The artificial gravity of the ship was only about two-thirds of Earth normal, but Xero got the feel of it.

  “Maybe – never seen anything like it. Must be a Hammer Industries design.”

  “Or maybe nothing,” I offered. “Just look into it when you can, okay? And I’d appreciate it if you kept this between us.”

  I’m not sure why I added that last part, nor why I was trusting this person I’d only met two days ago.

  She nodded and pocketed the cube and reached down to pick up Junie. “Come on, girl. Your boyfriend has to go back to work.”

  I’d already started fitting my dog’s combat gear as they left.

  “That may not have been wise,” Ada said.

  She’d already warned me, but I didn’t know why. “Xero was one of your programmers, and you don’t trust her?” I snugged up the Kevlar vest and mounted the dog’s helmet collar.

  “She’s brilliant, Joe, extremely talented but also volatile. She dislikes authority and has anarchist tendencies. That was one of the reasons she was never fully brought on board the projects. She was a contractor they used when no one else could figure things out.”

  I could get behind that. Wasn’t too far from what my profile might say. “It’s done. Give her increased access to the ship’s computer up to a point. Make sure Bayou can monitor and override.”

  Ada had made more progress with the ship’s AI than I had let on to the hacker. Even so, we weren’t able to break the command lockout the admiral had triggered. In the back of my mind, I kept coming back to the Stone Mountain’s sister ship. They had taken Alice Springs out in the days just after the attack. Someone out there had ship killer weapons, or it had been an inside job. Either way, I didn’t think we had time to wait around to find out. This was a ship of war, and to perform its duty, we had to be able to steer it at the very least.

  I pulled my hastily repaired armor out of the rack and headed toward the drop bay. I was rushing my mind with whirling thoughts at lightning speed. I hadn’t told the rest of the team. The truth was, there was so much that needed to get done up here, but fate seemed to keep pulling us back into the fight down below. I decided not to work out the logic, just trust my instincts.

  Locking the coffin lid tight from the outside, one of the space engineers gave the thumbs up as he slid the unit onto the launch tube tracks and disabled the safety interlocks. I heard him secure Sumo’s own compartment just below my feet. The ballistics system we used for launches kept him and me tethered but gave him an even more confining space than my own. We needed it to survive the high G-forces of reentry and the thermal barrier between us and the nearly 3000-degree temps outside as the air thickened and compressed when we punched through it to the surface.

  The technician slapped a hand on the pod’s shell, and I felt the movement down and into the firing chamber. “You okay, boy?” I knew Sumo could hear me through his comms if not through the thick padding separating us. He gave his standard disinterested wuff just before my screen flashed yellow, orange, and then green. An audible whoosh of air was followed immediately by total silence as we were fired down the tube and out into space.

  My battle suit compensated as the air left my lungs due to the sudden acceleration. The first few times I had dropped I blacked out, which was not that unusual. Honestly, the suit’s AI and the ballistic pod could handle most things whether we were conscious or not. Right up until they couldn’t, which had happened to me on more than one occasion. I preferred staying awake as terrifying as it was.

  The ballistic pod quickly scrubbed speed which caused a corresponding decrease in altitude. Each of the pods differ from the early rocket capsules in the fact that we maintained some thrust throughout to help stabilize and keep us on our specific trajectory. The old Apollo capsules topped out at about 36,000 feet per second near the top of reentry and used the denser atmosphere to slow to just over a hundred feet per second as they deployed the big parachutes. My start speed was similar at around 38,500, but I only needed to slow to around 380 feet per second, or 260 miles per hour. After that, my pod would eject me and Sumo into a very high-altitude freefall. Our battle suits still had to absorb a tremendous amount of heat and cold as soon as the super-heated plasma bled off.

  Every drop was different, and the terrain, need for stealth, and atmospheric conditions all played into the exact way we handled it. Today, we were having the pleasure of dropping through a massive storm front on our way down. In the later afternoon light, I could see the swirling cloud mass below me as the capsule ejected us. I would need to drop several more minutes before I could deploy the lightweight glider wings and have any means of maneuvering away from the heart of the storm. My right hand instinctively patted the mag lock gripping my rifle on my back.

  Several things were wrong with my jump. First, was the fact I was doing it alone, totally against regs. The second was the time of day; we always jumped at night or early morning when the upper atmospheric winds were more predictable. Lastly, was the complete lack of intel. I was totally unprepared for what I was getting myself into as I stared down at my freshly ruined planet. Normally, command would be programming the jump, and I just had to ride the guidelines in my HUD. Today, Ada was handling that. She would be adjusting the small flight surfaces built into the pod and later on my suit and hopefully, guiding me safely toward Voss.

  On the terrain map, the entire region was shaded in red. I’d just been rescued from one red zone only to jump back into a different one. After several minutes, I got the signal to deploy the glider wings. Always another moment of terror as the wings were extended from each side of my backpack. If these failed, there was nothing to slow me down for the rest of the brief journey to the planet’s surface. I used a series of eye blinks to confirm deployment and waited for the sound of my suit’s access panels to open. Only… they didn’t.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SIX

  My panic threatened to take over before an almost irrational feeling of calm took its place. One part of my mind knew something in my system had to have shunted off the flood of endorphins, but I was too busy working the problem to actually care at that moment. Ada was doing her part as well, quickly going through the emergency procedure to allow me to manually release the servo motors controlling the deployment rig.

  The 32,000-foot mark quickly came and went; that was where I’d intended to have my glider wings fully extended. Now, I was entering the storm in a very non-aerodynamic position, and the thickening air was buffeting me side to side like a ragdoll.

  I’ve experienced almost every failure in a drop before but not a failure of the glider wings. The system was so simple and thought to be so bullet-proof as we no longer even drilled on it not working. Twenty-six thousand feet. Lightning arced across my path so close as to blind my display momentarily. Sumo bucked in the harness dangling a half-meter below me. The normally placid animal was terrified and unlike me, had no stress augmentation to help calm him.

  “Joe, you are in excess of terminal velocity. You risk severe injury if you don’t slow your speed or shed weight immediately. You can’t deploy glide wings successfully unless you slow.”

  I knew what she was saying but ignored it. I wasn’t losing any of my body armor, much less my partner. We were in this together. My eyes were trying to ignore the maelstrom as I concentrated on screen after screen of maintenance menus. I was looking for anything that might help. Sure, Ada could do it faster and probably had already done all this, but she was a computer. Maybe something didn’t occur to her.

  The narrow access doors on each side of my suit’s back panel covered the glider wings but also the grenade launchers. The gliders were single use items which were discarded upon landing. The idea was you would never need grenades in the air or wings on the ground. Made sense, it’s how I would have designed it, if I could do that sort of thing.

  “Ada, fire grenades both sides.”

  “That system is unavailable in freefall,” she unhelpfully responded.

  “Bypass it, I know you can.”

  We passed 17,000 feet, and my airspeed was still climbing.

  “Times running out!” I yelled.

  “I have to slow your speed. Deploying emergency chute now.”

  I hadn’t expected that. The emergency chute was a small drogue that wouldn’t even hold half my weight. None of us even knew why it was part of our suit’s standard kit. Sumo had one the same size that I sometimes used when I wanted to drop him farther out than where I was landing.

  Ada let me know she was gauging the wind gust before deploying both our chutes. She needed our relative speed to be momentarily almost dead stop before the grenades would launch. I felt the control surfaces on my armor biting into the wind to maneuver us, then a massive updraft hit, rolling me sideways as the chutes popped out. The jarring motion rattled my insides, but simultaneously, I felt the pop of grenades being launched.

  “Cutaway the chutes, Joe.”

  That was something I had to do manually, at least for mine. Sumo, who was now hanging right in front of my face, had an automatic release but only when he was nearer the surface.

  “Hey, buddy, if you could like move your ballsack to one side, I’ll umm… you know, cut away your rescue chute.” Yeah, that sounded stupid to me, too. Either way, I had both chutes released as we passed 10,000 feet and trusted Ada to get the glider deployed and locked in time.