13

Two months later

- Charlotte -

“Come on!”

Charlotte made the dropship hover over the ground and grit her teeth in frustration. The warriors sauntered towards it, not too worried. They had accomplished their mission without any casualties, and now they were relieved and pleased with themselves. It had been a hard mission, like they all were, but as usual the squad had done things that most other Acerex would have deemed very hard.

Still Charlotte wanted to bang her head on the controls. The end of a mission, when everything seemed to be great, was the most dangerous part. Things could go from success to disaster in a second if the warriors relaxed their guard and celebrated before they should. There were no enemies in sight right now, but this was a very wily species of alien and they had come up with bad surprises before. And here the squad was walking to their airlift, chatting and laughing as if they were in a bar.

She pressed the Transmit button on the radio she'd convinced Cori'ax to give all the warriors in the squad.

“Guys, the mission isn't finished until we're in space,” she reminded them with a tight voice. She couldn't talk to them too harshly – in the eyes of the Acerex, the pilot was the lowest ranking member of the squad, although they never treated her as anything other than an equal.

“Pilot's right,” Cori'ax's deep growl said into her earpiece. “We run until we're either dead or home.”

That worked. The warriors tightened their formation and jogged towards the hovering dropship in groups of five, with Cori'ax at the rear as a group of one. He was always the last to leave the battlefield and the first to enter it.

Charlotte both loved and hated that – he was a superb leader, but it was also risky. Well, that was the man he was and she knew it would be hard to change that, if she'd even wanted to.

Neri'on leapt into his seat and shut his hatch, the other warriors got inside and sat down, and Cori'ax said “dust off» into her ear again.

Charlotte immediately gunned the engines and made the dropship jump into the air. And then she yelped as a blue streak shot right in front of her windshield, followed by another. The enemies had been hiding and were now trying to shoot them down.

“Hang on,” she said into the comms and banked hard left, coming within an inch of making the engine pod on that side touch the rocks on the surface. That level of precision in flying was Charlotte's pride – no one else in the Acerex army could have done that. And no other dropship would respond so well to her commands as this Earth-made one.

She skimmed the surface, accelerating hard to keep a low profile and make it hard for the enemies to aim their missiles, whatever they were. The streaks were following them, and she could see on the radar that they were pretty large. If they contained any kind of explosive, they could probably blow the dropship right out of the sky.

Suddenly the air around the ship came alive with blue light as a large number of missiles were fired and tried to track the craft.

Charlotte ducked and veered and flew so erratically that it would be difficult for the enemy to aim at all, and then she made a sharp right turn that placed a low cliff between her and the source of the missiles. But she was only met with more blue streaks coming straight for her from straight ahead, and she plunged the ship even further downwards until the terrain alarm was wailing its piercing, last-chance warning. She leveled off so close to the ground that the missiles were so confused they hit the ground and exploded in blinding sprays of white light and fragments. The dropship shook as it was hit by the shockwaves, but no missile got close enough to do much damage. Still, with all this enemy fire, she couldn't evade forever.

She shoved the gas lever all the way forward and the acceleration pushed her back in her seat. They were approaching three times the speed of sound in this atmosphere, and it was about time to change direction. The ship was not designed for this kind of speed in an atmosphere. No, this was fighter jet speed and maneuvering she was doing.

The thought gave her an idea. This dropship wasn't a fighter jet at all, but it was so sturdy that it could probably handle it.

“Duck and crouch,” she ordered into the comms. When the dropship was in flight, she was in charge and could issue orders to the warriors.

She hoped they were obeying back in the cargo compartment and that they hunched forward and put their heads down between their knees. If not, more than one of them might faint after what she was planning to do now.

She tightened her thigh muscles as hard as she could, tensed her body and breathing and felt the pressure suit help her compress her legs and lower body to keep the blood from draining from her head. Then she pulled back hard on the controls. She heard the dropship's stubby wings creak and rattle at the sudden change of direction, sensed the engines spinning wildly in a sudden vacuum before they drew air again and felt the immense pressure down into her seat as huge speed straight ahead was transformed to huge speed straight up into the sky within two seconds.

One blue streak passed far below as the dropship gained height very fast. They were pulling out of range of the enemy. Now that they were much higher, the radar showed fifteen enemy missile launchers surrounding the place they had just left. Charlotte checked again. Fifteen? That had been a straight ambush.

The pressure from the acceleration subsided and she started breathing normally. The display showed that the ship had registered almost three hundred missiles being fired at them. And not one had hit.

She pumped her fish silently in the air, then sighed as she experienced a moment of expert's regret; no one except her would realize exactly what she had just pulled off. She'd never heard of anyone escaping that many missiles in a simple dropship. Even Neri'on in the copilot's seat seemed clueless about what has just happened.

Then she heard a deep, calm voice in the comms. “Best pilot in the army.”

She checked the settings on the comms. Yes, everyone aboard had heard that.

Her cheeks went hot and she smiled. Public praise from Cori'ax was rare at any time. And more so with her, because now everyone knew that they were a couple and he was careful about not giving her any special treatment.

She wouldn't have thought it was possible, but his simple statement made her blush with happiness. He realized how good she was, and that was important to her. Still he had the power to make her blush.

The ship left the atmosphere and she set a course for their camp on another planet in the same solar system. For once, they'd found a nice planet with a pleasant climate, and they had a loose village of tents.

She dropship guided itself, and Charlotte could relax. Heat surged in her girly bits at the mere thought of her nightly routine of getting into bed naked and waiting with breathless arousal for Cori'ax to come and fuck her good for hours.

She turned her head so Neri'on couldn't see the grin on her face.

She had never enjoyed life more.