Chapter 1 #3
“Lacey.” Jonah set a hand on her shoulder. “You know he loves you. I reckon he just wants the best for you.”
Her face crumpled. “No, he doesn’t.” Before he could react, she’d unbuckled her harness and flung herself into his lap, pressing her face to his shoulder.
Jonah sighed and patted her back. “Aw, honey.”
“I knew he’d never take me with him.” Her words were muffled, but he could make them out. “He brought me here just to leave me; he only waited until I was old enough to be on my own, and now he’s going back to his life in the Central System. He doesn’t care, and I don’t want to be here anymore!”
“Well …” Hell, Garrett was going to kill him for this. “You could always come back with me.”
Lacey’s shuddering breaths suddenly froze. “R-really?”
“Sure. If you get your pilot’s certification, that is. You could help me run supplies between here and Olympus. Garrett can walk you through getting the permits for it.”
Lacey pulled back and looked at him. “Are you sure it’s okay?”
“Not completely,” Jonah said. He had to be honest. “But we can talk to Garrett about it when we get back. I’m supposed to comm him in an hour.”
“We should go back now!”
“Nah, we’ve still got some—” The proximity alert suddenly shattered the relative silence, screaming at full volume.
Lacey jumped back, and Jonah reached for the controls, checking the computer.
“What the hell?” The ship rocked as something blasted past it.
Lightning? But they were well away from the center of the storm.
“Buckle in!” he shouted at her as he took over flying. “Computer, identify object!” Maybe something had gotten swept up in the hurricane; maybe it was a really large chunk of ice—
“Classification: energy projectile.”
“Like lightning?” Lacey asked as she strapped herself back into her seat, face pale.
Jonah shook his head grimly. The computer knew how to differentiate between natural and man-made strikes. “No, that was a plasma weapon. Somethin’s shooting at us.”
“Shooting at us?”
The proximity alert picked up again. Jonah made a split-second decision and hauled back on the thrusters while cutting power to the engines by ninety percent.
The ship rolled onto its end, torpedoing down toward the roiling ocean beneath them faster than the g-shield could adjust for.
The next burst of plasma fire missed as well, but Jonah couldn’t count on the storm to keep helping them and hindering whoever was attacking them. They needed to get back to the Box.
He thumbed the communicator on. “This is Helms, calling Box Station. Station, do you copy?” Nothing but static. “Station, do you copy?”
“Why won’t they answer?”
“It might be the storm,” Jonah said. He didn’t articulate what else it might be. If something was firing on them in the middle of a fucking hurricane, then it was likely that Pandora City was under attack.
“What if it isn’t?”
“Lacey—shit!” Jonah ripped the ship to the right, not quite far enough to avoid the next blast. It grazed the belly of the ship, and the sudden blare of security alarms almost drowned out the wailing proximity alert.
Jonah grimly checked the controls. Well, there went their landing gear. “I’ve gotta put us down.” He could see the edge of the cliffs that protected the colony from the worst of the weather.
“Put us down where?” she demanded. “There’s no protection out here from the storms! We’ll be swept off the rocks into the water as soon as the hurricane hits the coast.”
“Either we take our chances on land, or we get blown to pieces in the air!” Jonah diverted the power to all noncritical functions and boosted the excess to the thrusters. This was going to be hell on the engines.
He increased their speed by seventy-five percent, losing most of their maneuverability in the process.
The cliffs were coming up fast, but the proximity alert was starting to pick up speed again.
Their angle of potential descent was so narrow …
a lot depended on whether or not the bottom of the ship would be able to handle the impact.
The thrusters could help there but only as long as Jonah didn’t blow them out during their mad dash toward the lesser evil. Three kilometers. Two. One …
A flare of energy crackled across the viewscreen, killing the computer. The ship wavered but managed to maintain its altitude. Only now, Jonah couldn’t actually see any of the projections that had filled his vision a moment ago. The last plasma strike had taken out all the automatic functions.
“God motherfucking damn it all to deep space hell,” he muttered. “Okay. Brace yourself, Lacey, this is gonna be rough.”
She was staring blank faced at the dark screen. “I can’t see the ground.”
“I remember where it is, we’ll be fine.”
“I can’t see the ground!”
“Well, you’re gonna be feeling it any second, so get ready for—”
The impact snapped Jonah into his harness so hard he felt his ribs break. Blood filled his eyes, gushed from his nose. White light turned to red, which quickly faded to black.
Jonah passed out before the ship finished rolling.