13. Chapter 13
The explosion that rocked the ship had the added benefit of waking both Cooper and Marissa up from a deep sleep. Marissa was on her feet and reaching for pants while Cooper blinked blearily at the control panel by the bed. He sat up and pulled up the reports about where the explosion had come from and breathed a brief sigh of relief that they were under attack.
He didn’t think he could handle the ship malfunctioning on top of everything else.
His pants hit him in the face as soon as he turned to look for them, followed by his shirt.
“You’re on your own for underwear,” she told him. “And I would kill for a clean pair of socks right now but we’ll work with what we’ve got. Who are we taking fire from?”
“I can’t tell yet,” he said. “I’ve sent the drones to scout but the ship says the explosion was a proximity hit, not a direct one.”
“So they’re dialing in their targeting, got it,” she said.
“Probably,” he acknowledged. “Won’t know until we get another hit or the drones come back with more answers. Either way, I’m not opening the blast shield until we have more information. Can you wear my underwear?”
Marissa blinked at the question then shrugged. “Maybe? I think we’re close enough in size, at least. They won’t look as good on me as they do on you, though.”
Cooper snorted and reached over to open his clothes storage drawers. He tossed her a clean pair of underwear and socks, then grabbed some for himself and closed the drawers. She ran to the bathroom and he could hear the water running while she did the same thing he was about to do.
The blast shield would hold through almost any weapon on the planet so they had time to clean up and get dressed in clean socks. He used the cleaning oil and his old underwear to clean up the worst of the mess they’d made before bed, this time taking care not to stroke the places that were likely to trigger his arousal.
Not that he objected to a repeat of the night before, he just didn’t want to attempt it while they were under attack. He finished wiping off and tossed the dirty laundry in the cleaner, including the pieces Marissa had left behind when she’d run off to get dressed.
Cooper was dressed and refusing to dwell on the glimpse of Marissa’s backside he wished he’d gotten a better view of when she ran off. It was cute and creamy and jiggled just right and he was going to get himself in trouble if he kept thinking about it so he went to make breakfast. The reports followed him on panels around the ship and he kept an eye on the drone reports while he started the coffee.
One of the many things he loved about the planet he’d found himself on was coffee. He’d drink tea if it was offered, or soda if it was the only option, but he’d developed an immediate love for coffee that had only strengthened as he’d gotten to know it in all its forms. While it brewed, he pulled out one of his other indulgences; fresh eggs.
They were easy to cook, could be done quickly with his tools, and made an excellent excuse to talk to all the locals. Learning how to barter for eggs had taught him a half dozen languages, how currency and exchange worked, and gave him a baseline value for food and other things.
Most planets had something like eggs. That wasn’t something covered in any of his training but he liked to think he wasn’t the first Chelion Scout to figure it out. If he was, he had serious questions about the capabilities of his fellow scouts.
Marissa joined him in the kitchenette just as the coffee had finished brewing. He handed her a cup and a bowl of fluffy eggs which she looked at, then up at him.
“What’s this?”
“Coffee and eggs. I believe your people refer to it as a light breakfast.”
“Where did you get the eggs? How did you make breakfast so fast?” she asked. “Why did you make breakfast if we’re under attack?”
Cooper shrugged. “We don’t know who’s attacking, where it’s coming from, or how we need to handle it. And we can’t leave the ship until we have all of that information. The drones are still scouting and the weapons don’t do any good until we know which ones we need and that might take a minute. We’re going to need the fuel, thus, breakfast.”
He could see her working through his answer while she sipped her coffee until she shrugged. “I can’t find any fault with your logic, it just feels weird to me to not be scrambling to deal with the problem.”
“I can respect that,” he said. “And if we were somewhere else, I’d be the first one reaching for the blasters. As it is, the blast shielding on the ship can handle anything short of a nuclear missile.”
She took the fork he handed her and sat at the table. He joined her, his eyes on the reports from the drones while they ate.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
Cooper adjusted the display to split out the drones into individual feeds, which had the added bonus of making them larger and easier to read. “These are real time terrain and movement reports from the drones. They can all send live video feeds, but it’s easy to miss anything unusual trying to watch all of them at once. What they’re doing is flying over terrain they’ve scouted and relaying any changes in a dozen different parameters. If anything is outside of the range of reasonable or accepted changes, it’s flagged in red and I can review the video feed from that section.”
Marissa nodded. “How much change does it allow for?”
“There are some desert birds nesting in that drone”s territory,” he said, pointing out one screen. “I knew when they’d laid eggs and when those eggs had hatched.”
“So a person walking through or a couple dozen people in armored vehicles will show up.”
“Absolutely. My concern is if they show up outside of the perimeter I’ve set. I don’t patrol past those every day because there shouldn’t be anything outside that perimeter that can see this ship.”
“And if they’re inside the perimeter?”
Cooper shrugged. “Still shouldn’t be able to see it, but could make things unpleasant if they guessed right.”
“So we’re waiting for another hit or a visual confirmation that your perimeter has been crossed.”
“Basically, yes.”
“Might as well eat breakfast, then,” she said with a nod.
“My feelings exactly.”
They ate in silence while the drone reading scrolled by. As far as he could tell, everything was quiet. As the drones continued their patrols with no anomalies, Cooper started to get nervous. He put the dishes in the cleaner and got them both another cup of coffee.
“Do you think it was a fluke?” Marissa asked. “There are enemy combatants between us and the base. Maybe they were shooting at them and it just hit nearby?”
“If you call the Base Commander, would he tell you?”
She considered the question and shook her head. “I don’t know, actually. Maybe, if he really was shooting at them and he wants to get me there faster. If he knows where we’re coming from, he can keep them from shooting at us.”
“But if he was aiming at us, we might just help him dial in their targeting.”
“True. No way to know until we try, though. Do you have your phone?”
Cooper pulled it out and handed it to her. He’d seen something about needing to keep your communication devices from your significant other but he didn’t see the point. Anything top secret wouldn’t be on his phone and he wasn’t going to go out of his way to hide things from her. Especially when she would eventually be able to read his emotions by thinking about them.
The call had started to connect when the ship rocked with another explosion. None of the drones showed anything out of the ordinary but the explosion had been much closer this time.
“Shut it off,” Cooper told her.
“They can’t have gotten enough off the signal to do that,” she protested.
A voice on the other end of the call asked something that Cooper couldn’t hear over the third explosion. The sinking suspicion that he’d been looking too far out for their attackers hit him and he changed the screens to a live feed of the exterior of the ship.
“Sir, we’re under attack,” Major Ozark said into the phone. “If it’s our people, tell them to cease fire. Cease Fire!”
Cooper knew the order would come too late if it was her people when the ship rocked with the fourth explosion. He’d been looking in the wrong direction and could only watch with horror as the dirt around the ship crumbled away with the next explosion.
“Ship, secure passengers,” he shouted and felt the control chair he was in wrap around him. Marissa shouted in surprise in the middle of her angry conversation with her superior officer. If she was in the kitchenette chairs instead of the on the bench, her ass was going to be sore by the time they stopped moving, but she’d be safe. He hoped.
The ground sensors on the ship started their probe but he knew it was too late. He’d run the sensors as deep as he could when he landed and found nothing but a deep aquifer with seasonal underground rivers. Everything he’d expected in a desert.
Cooper sent the commands to secure the interior of the ship for launch and reinforced what he could on the blast shields and waited for the next explosion.
It came and he watched on the monitors as the Earth fell away from beneath his ship and they hung suspended for one awful, heart-stopping moment. Then they fell into the deep, dark void that had opened beneath them and the world shifted.