The ship took fire. Jessica was jolted forward, away from Talon just as a wave of Gorlites spilled into the ship. Her weapons fired. Her eyes tracked the movements of the ones closest to her, and she came in low and fast, her weapons blasting and smoking.
She dropped an overheated blaster just as the grip began to smolder after a lucky shot from a Gorlite weapon hit that blaster, and nearly took her hand too.
Angry, and more than just a little frightened, she fought harder, snatching up a weapon someone else had dropped from their hand to the floor. Talon came into her line of vision as he used the butt of a weapon to crack open the skull of a Gorlite.
Jessica could not breathe. The enemy just kept coming, disgorging themselves from the ships surrounding Talon’s. Enemy fire kept rattling the ship, and she knew it was just a matter of time before the ship blew apart, killing them all.
Talon knew it too because he shouted, “We have to take this fight to the ground. We are one ship against way too many.”
Jessica called back, “I will cover you!”
She laid down a heavy burst of cover fire as Talon headed toward the controls. His body went taut with tension as he took over control of the ship, which was failing badly, and began to fly it back toward Old Earth.
The parasitic and repulsive race that they were fighting seemed intent on stopping them from making it to their destination. Talon managed to dodge out of the way of heavy fire from several ships that were firing upon them, but there were just too many ships and too many large bore weapons pointed in their direction.
Fire shot up along one side of their ship, and then hunks of metal blew away into outer space. Jessica, caught in a warp pull, had to grab onto the first thing she saw in an effort to keep from being sucked out of the ship.
The ship dipped and spun dangerously close to an enemy ship. One of the wings of Talon’s ship caught the side of one of those enemy ships, leaving a long tear along its side from which spilled that slimy ooze that presaged the presence of Gorlites.
The ones who had boarded the ship were mostly dead or dying and Jessica dispatched another with a brutal blast from the weapon that she had picked up to replace her destroyed one. She spotted Caleb on the floor writhing in pain, and she dashed towards him.
She went to her knees beside him, and her fingers probed at the bloody wound and his side. “I think you are going to live.”
Caleb, ever the joker, groaned out, “Maybe I’d be better off dying now. It doesn’t look like we are doing so well against them.”
Jessica said, “We are not. But when has that ever stopped us?”
Caleb said, “Never. I can stand up; can you help me to the med bay?”
Jessica helped him to his feet and then down the hallway. Quite a few of theirs had been wounded, some seriously. A few were dead. She marked their deaths with a silent nod toward their bodies and a growing rage in her heart.
This whole thing was unbearable. There had to be a way to stop this, but looking at the damage already done and weighing up the odds just made her heart go heavy, and her knees go weak and loose. Jessica was no coward, but that hard, practical streak within her could absolutely do the math on the chances of their survival and come up with about a zero-percent chance.
Once Caleb was at the med bay and being scanned, she ran back down the hallway toward the bridge. It was worse than she had feared. Talon was still flying, still headed for Old Earth, but it was clear that if they were going to land at all, it would be because they crashed.
Terror spiked along Jessica’s nerve endings as the ship began to spiral in a loose and looping pattern. She did not dare go to Talon’s side for fear of distracting him. Instead, she raced to a fallen crew member and helped them to their feet. The crew officer was merely dazed and a little confused but not injured, and Jessica strapped him into a nearby chair, hoping that would be enough to save his life when they crashed.
Talon was strapped in at the controls, and everyone else on the bridge was finding something to fasten themselves to. The air was thick with tension and a sort of grim certainty that this was it, this was how they died. Not in a heated battle, exactly, but close enough for those whose race and religion worshipped death by battle.
As the features of the planet got clearer and as the ship hurtled closer and closer to that surface, Jessica realized just how little she wanted to die. She wanted to live. She wanted to live and have a life with Talon.
She had no idea what kind of life they could have together, really. She just knew that she loved him and that he had the same love for her that she had for him. She just knew that they belonged together and that it would be a tragedy if they died this way, and so soon, without ever being able to enjoy the love that they had found with each other.
She railed at that impending death. She wanted to bargain with it but there was no bargaining with death, and she knew it. The grim specter of the end of her existence, and not just her death but the death of all of those aboard that ship, hung across her mind, blocking out all other thought.
Talon shouted, “I’m going to try to land before the ship simply rips itself apart! Everyone just hold on!”
Jessica stared at his back, thinking, “Hold me. I wish you could. I wish I could hold you and that you could hold me.”
Talon couldn’t hold her. He had his hands full just trying to hold the ship steady enough to get it out of that spin and into a position suitable for whatever type of landing they would be able to make.
The ship continued to plummet downward and so did her heart. Time stretched out, the seconds ticking by far too fast but taking an eternity at the same time. Jessica wanted to be brave. She wanted to keep her eyes open and to face death with courage and conviction, but as the planet’s surface came alarmingly close, she had to bite her lips together to hold back a scream, and her eyes squeezed shut despite her best efforts to keep them open.
A hard jolt made her teeth click down onto her tongue. The taste of her blood, coppery and rich, filled her mouth and left her feeling both sick and somehow alive. The smell of fire roasting both enemy flesh and metal made her hand come up and cup her nose and mouth.
Her breath blew warm against her palm, and a small trickle of blood came from her tongue and slid down the corner of her mouth. The ship jolted and bounced yet again, hewing sideways and then taking a hard spin. There was a thick crumpling sound followed by several long and loud bangs. The air burst of an explosion and the crackle of more flames hit the air, as did screams from somewhere nearby.
Jessica’s eyes flew open in time to see a long tongue of flame streaking across the floor toward her feet. Her fingers worked quickly to remove the straps and buckles she had used to hold herself to the seat. Her feet stomped up and down, crushing the littler flames but the larger ones just kept coming.
One of the straps was stuck, wedged in tightly below the buckle. She was going to burn to death! Panic set in, making her fingers fumble. Smoke blew toward her, obscuring her vision and cutting off her breath. Her pulse raced higher, making her breathing ragged and too fast and she began to drag and gulp lungfuls of that rancid, acrid air.
Talon shouted, “Jessica! Stop! Put your hands up!”
Her head spun. The smoke going down her lungs was seductive. It spoke of an easy death. One in which she would feel no pain. She couldn’t focus her eyes, and the panic had long since erased her ability to reason.
Talon’s familiar hands yanked her fingers away from the buckle. She tried to fight him, but he held her hands easily with one of his own while the fingers of his other hand undid the buckle. She came out of the seat and into his arms and then he was hauling her away from that seat and the sudden cone of fire that surrounded it.
Tears, some of them from the smoke, flew down her face. She could barely see in front of her, and everything was veiled and fuzzy behind the gray-blue smoke and the orange-blue flames dancing across every surface.
Sirens screamed out warnings as they staggered down a hallway that would lead them to an exit. Caleb and dozens more were already running ahead of them; she could barely see their dim figures, but she could hear their shouts and recognize their voices.
They burst out of the ship and onto the flat hard surface of a docking station. The ships above them sent down wave after wave of weapon fire, crumbling the ground and sending larger conflagrations to join with the one spreading from the wrecked ship.
They ran. There was nothing else they could do. The Gorlites were destroying every ship at the docking station. Debris rained down all around them, most of it flaming or glowing with radia-spore.
Beings, humans and others, who had been aboard the ships now under attack, fled the ships in waves. Jessica screamed in a mixture of both rage and horror as she watched the enemy mow down fleeing civilians.
“We have to help them!”
Her cry struck the air but was lost below the cacophony of sirens, explosions, screams, and weapon fire. They ran faster because there was nothing that they could do at the moment.
The lines for arrivals and departures were in chaos as people bolted and ran for whatever safety they could find as more enemy fire rained down upon the large buildings, destroying them into piles of rubble and ash.
Jessica’s feet stopped, her heels digging in as she watched a small female child, obviously too terror-stricken to do anything to help herself, huddled against the side of a tumbling building that was about to fall right on her head.
Jessica bolted toward her. “Come here!”
The little girl’s eyes rolled upward, and a long scream rolled from her mouth. Jessica’s hands came out, but the little girl ducked away from her just as the rubble collapsed and poured down toward her. Jessica’s fingertips caught just a bit of the thin tunic the girl wore, and she yanked her forward, her body already arcing away from that lethal fall of rock and other debris.
The ground below her feet rumbled and shook, and the little girl screamed loudly in her ear. Her arms went around Jessica’s neck so tightly that all of Jessica’s air was cut off.
Talon shouted, “Give her to me!”
The little girl refused to be unseated, and Talon had to pry her arms away from Jessica. Black spots danced on the edges of Jessica’s vision as the little girl’s arms pressed closer around her neck, cutting off all airflow.
Talon yanked the little girl, still screaming at the top of her lungs, away from Jessica and then handed her off to a startled looking human woman who merely gripped the little girl’s hand tightly and ran onward, heading for the underground entrances.
Jessica shouted at Talon, “They shouldn’t go underground! The first thing that they will do is get trapped down there if the Federation traitors and the Gorlites decide to seal it off instead of fight them!”
They found themselves with Caleb, Harlon, and a dozen others. They put their backs against a wall and managed to get a few minutes of respite there.
Jessica bent forward, her hands going to her knees as she dragged in long breaths of air. Her pulse eventually regulated and her breathing return to normal. The dizziness left her, but the fear remained.
“What do we do, Talon?”
Her face turned to his when she asked the question as she immediately looked away. He looked as uncertain as she felt. She knew that of course he had no plan; how could he have had a plan for this? This was not supposed to happen!
Talon said, “They knew. They knew that we knew they were there.”
Jessica shook her head. Her hair moved across her face as she did so, bringing in a singed and burnt smell. “They could not possibly have known. They must’ve just decided to go ahead since… Perhaps they recognized us. You’ve been hunting their kind for so many years, and you know they are a race that vows revenge for every death.”
Talon said, “Jessica. Please just hear me out. Even if they had recognized me or us and our ship, they would not have jeopardized such a huge price; they would not have gone ahead with the plan in so early unless they knew that there was a plan in place to stop them.”
Jessica’s back met the brick wall. She knew what Talon was trying to tell her, but she could not believe that.
She would not believe that.
“Maybe Yori’s intel was incorrect. It had to be. He gathers as much as he can when he can but he can’t possibly know everything, and he has been wrong before. Or maybe somebody deliberately fed him wrong information.
“I hear what you’re saying to me right now, Talon, and I’m telling you he, of all people, would not betray the people on this planet. He would not see them die and be hurt in this way. They’re his people. He has risked his own death hundreds of times to save the lives of the people below.
“They must’ve captured him. They must’ve taken him to the mind miners, and if they got enough out of him to know that there was a plot in place, they would’ve given the order to go ahead. Or perhaps it was the civil war you incited that got their attention. What better diversion to take over a planet than a planet killing itself with infighting?”
Talon’s hand rested on the nape of her neck, soothing away the tension there. “We have to find a way to stop them. I only brought it up because at this moment, we really cannot trust anybody.”
No, they couldn’t. She had no idea what had happened to Yori, and she had to worry about the population at the moment, and not the resistance’s leader.
Caleb said, “Hey boss, are those fighter crafts?”
Talon looked to where Caleb pointed. “Yes, they are.”
Caleb said, “I hate to say this, boss. I cannot argue that we had to put down the ship, but the truth of the matter is, we’re not doing any better down here on the ground. I don’t know about you, but I’d feel better if I was above, taking some of those ships down.”
Talon said, “So would I.”
Jessica’s heart ached, as she understood exactly what had to happen now. She could see from where she stood that the fighter planes were small craft capable of only holding several people. She was a hell of a fighter, but she knew nothing about flying, and she was needed there on the ground.
Talon and Caleb and a few of the others could command those fighter crafts, and they’d stand a better chance they could get some of those enemy ships down.
Talon reached for her, and she went into his arms. His lips came down on hers in a fierce and passionate kiss that sent shivers down her spine. The kiss was brief, too short and too fast because that was just too little time.
Everything they wanted to say and do would have to wait. It would have to because they did not have the time to say it now, and if they tried to make the time they might all very well just die and the world as they knew it would end all around their dead bodies.
Talon leaned back and said, “I will see you again. I would much prefer that you be alive when I do.”
“The same goes here for me.” There was a hard, salty lump in her throat that tasted like the tears she could not and would not shed in front of him. She wanted to tell him that she loved him, but she had this dreadful feeling that if she told him she loved him at that particular moment, it would be akin to saying goodbye to him.
Talon said, “Stay above as long as you can. I think you’re right about concealing off the below. I know I would if it were me. The best way to keep an enemy from fighting back is to cut them off completely.”
Jessica nodded. “I will take nobody with me, at least none of your regular crew. I just saw some of the resistance members run by and I can join up with them. They know where the weapon caches are hidden. Fly well and bring your ass back here in one piece.”
He gave her a mocking salute and a grieving smile. A loud explosion rattled the ground below them, knocking her slightly off balance and toward him. He held one hand up to steady her and then he was gone, racing along the ruined and smoking surfaced toward the fighter crafts.
The enemy was taking out every large ship, and it seemed that they had overlooked those small but deadly ships there on the other side. Jessica waited until she saw Talon climb into one and shoot skyward before she turned away and headed down the street after the resistance fighters and directly into the heart of a pitched battle.