FREEFALL ( 01/13/25 *)
Lockspur sat in the engineer's seat, behind the pilot's and co-pilot's seats. No big surprise there. He was always at his station, running a hundred different system checks at the same time. Although, he didn't run the checks as fast as he used to. The arthritis in his hands made sure of that. But old age and pain aside, Carlos Lockspur was, if nothing else, consistent with keeping the ship's little details in order. A smooth running ship is a safe ship, that's his motto. But this time, Dahl realized he was running all the checks at once.
The amount of raw data scrolling past his monitors made her dizzy. The lingering effects of hyper-sleep still worked at her misfiring nervous system. She turned from the blaring image, clinched her eyelids shut and wondered how he could make sense of so much data. He may be an old fart, but there was no way he had alzheimers. His neurons were firing just fine.
As for Moss, he was still secluded somewhere in the bowels of the ship. Most likely holed up in weapons storage, where he retreated to deal with stress.
Dahl heard a voice and looked toward the empty commander's seat again. The seat sat empty. But she was certain someone had called her. She turned to the closed entry hatch. He's in the back, playing with his guns. He'll never know.
There was one crucial difference between Lockspur and the much younger interim commander. Moss concentrated on the mission while Lockspur concentrated on the ship. Moss's motto was a well-armed team is a team that comes home alive.
Dahl slipped past Lockspur, eyeing the Commander's seat in the near distance. She had flown in the copilot's seat many times, but never in the Commander's seat. Johns or Moss reserved that seat for themselves. They were the mission commanders. Not her. She was the boss's niece. A surrogate daughter comes to live with her uncle after the mysterious death of his brother- and sister-in-law.
Carlos Lockspur didn't notice Dahl enter the compartment. Or so she believed. He only had eyes for numbers and they were always about keeping the ship up and running like new. Much like Moss and his military toys, Lockspur was obsessed with the inner workings of the ship and all its operating systems. She admired both of their resolve and learned much of hers from them. In the years since the three first met, Moss and Lockspur had become not just her friends, but her teachers and surrogate family. She loved and respected them.
Dahl stepped up beside the empty commander's seat, sneaking a look over her shoulder to see if Lockspur had noticed her pass. She was sure he hadn't. She turned to the empty seat and smiled. Why shouldn't I sit there? It's just a seat. But it wasn't just a seat- not to Moss, and not to her uncle Johns- it represented seniority and status, and she knew that. The seat represented the pinnacle of seniority and authority and she possessed neither.
Dahl ran a slender finger over the contours of the control stick, tickling the surface. She longed for the seat's supple leather against her slender body. It didn't matter if it was the same seat as the one on the left. The co-pilot's seat was ordinary. This one meant something more. She craved the power of command and having her own crew was one more step in her journey to becoming like Lady Hemmingford.
And why shouldn't I? I'm an excellent pilot. I've flown hundreds of times. She flicked a glance at Lockspur again. He was still fiddling with his readouts. They would hold his attention for hours.
Dahl wasn't lying to herself; she was an excellent pilot. When in the co-pilot's seat, she had amazed her three teachers. Intuitive and natural is what Johns, Moss and Lockspur had called her. But regardless of their accolades, she had never flown in the Captain's seat. No. Never In that seat. It'll be OK, she assured herself, settling into the seat, smelling the leather. The material stretched around her backside. I'll just try it on for a little while. No harm; no foul. She peeked around the edge of the seat. Carlos won't notice, she told herself as the corner of her mouth rose into an uncertain smirk. Dahl turned back to her impending awful choice.
Ten minutes later, the ship bucked as if trying to throw the impostor out of the forbidden seat. Lockspur buckled his 4-point harness and called over the comms. "To anyone who may be listening. We're here."
"Hey, grandpa, did you fasten your seat belt? We wouldn't want you to fall out and break a hip," Moss called over the comms.
"Hilarious, Amigo."
After months of frozen travel and waking nightmares, the trio had reached their arid desert target. The lone ship skimmed M6-117s upper troposphere and the ship's autopilot made several course corrections, putting itself in low orbit, skimming only a few meters above the thin air separating the planet's troposphere from the frigid vacuum of open space.
The atmosphere on M6-117 is 2/3s that of most habitable planets. Because of the dangerous nature of this outing, the team will use small 02 canisters to supplement their breathing needs, as labored breathing is not an option on an unfriendly planet.
Dahl eyed the autopilot control. Her silver/blue eyes twinkled. It wouldn't be that hard to take control. No one would see. What could it hurt? Her hand itched, and she glanced over her shoulder again. Hatch still closed. Engineer is still busy. Check.
Dahl saw Lockspur squinting at his monitor, focusing on the desolate, rocky terrain racing by far below. She fingered the joy stick, knowing she shouldn't, but unable to stop herself. She looked over her shoulder, flicked off the autopilot, and a small warning light flashed twice. A split second before the alarm outed her terrible choice, she silenced it. The stick shifted forward, and the ship began an imperceptible nose dive into the upper atmosphere. She pulled back, trying not to draw attention to herself. The ship bobbed up out of the thin atmosphere and Lockspur shifted in his seat. She peeked over her shoulder. The stick steadied in Dahl's tightening grip. She was in control. Ballsy, but I can't hide it now.
Dahl hadn't considered getting caught. Someone back at base would notice the infraction in the ship's log. She reeled around, looking at Lockspur. He was still eyeing his monitor. A few tense moments ticked off, and Dahl pressed the autopilot button again. It did not re-engage. The stick remained planted in her souring grasp. She pressed it again. Still nothing. She pressed it in rapid succession. It refused to engage. "Dammit," she muttered with a scowl. "Should have taken a little more time to consider the consequences of a mini-mutiny." Dahl pressed the button with all her might and heard the button crack. "Great. You fucking broke the autopilot," she whispered to herself. She sat back, looked out at the star filling the void above and the dazzling daylight below. Well fuck, there's no going back now. I might as well enjoy it while I still can.
Dahl didn't understand why she was anxious and downright bitchy. Or why she had sat in the seat to begin with. She didn't want to be commander, she just wanted them to be proud of her, and now, she screwed that up. There was no way her teammates were going to be okay with this insult.
She attributed her bizarre behavior to the long hyper-sleep. But it wasn't. It was an effect of the region. And the closer they came to M6-117, the worse the effect became. Her gums bled and itched as if a million ants were moving under her throbbing gums. She had messaged them for days. And there was a return of the nail biting from her youth. She was jittery and angry. The auto-doc prescribed several anti-anxiety meds, but Dahl hadn't taken them. The meds wrapped her mind and body in a layer of oily plastic wrap.
Dahl's nail beds stung. Her touch left a thin layer of blood on everything she touched. She had tried to stop the biting, but she had become a trapped wolf chewing on a caught limb. In fact, the region brought out a sense of being trapped in all of them. After a few days, Dahl donned a set of black leather driving gloves. They looked ridiculous, but they kept her from chewing her fingertips to the bone.
The ship lurched sideways; slamming her against the console. The ship's nose pitched forward, diving into the upper atmosphere and drilling into the atmosphere. The hull heated, spraying the windscreen with a layer of fiery red ozone.
Dahl fisted the autopilot button, but it refused to re-engage. She slammed the comms button and blared, "Moss. Get up here!" Shit, there's no hiding it now. You fucked up this time. The joy stick jerked in her hand, fighting her, but she regained control and the ship leveled out in the thickening atmosphere. There would be no going back. M6-117 had caught them in its grip, and was pulling them in.
Lockspur lurched in his seat. Dahl's heated tone was the first voice he had heard in months, and to him, it was coarse and grating.
The auto-doc had set their recovery schedules to keep them apart and none of them had minded the added isolation, or gone looking for the others. None of them were descent company for the others. So, they stayed away from each other. And none of them realized the auto-doc had laced their meals with anti-depressants.
Lockspur looked at his console with a smirk, flicked off the auto-pilot bypass switch, and looked at Dahl over his shoulder. He shook his head as Dahl sat in Moss' seat and thought, that won't go well for you, young lady. He looked at the closed hatch, reassessing his decision to mess with Dahl. Great. Moss is going to blame me for letting this shit happen. Like anyone can stop her.
Unlike his teammates, Lockspur had experienced the effects of the region before and he had a plan of how to cope with the glut of negative emotions they were all going to experience. But when he could defuse a dangerous situation, he sat back and did nothing. No. Not true. He made it worse. Maybe bypassing the autopilot wasn't the best idea. He looked over his shoulder at Dahl, sweating the impending conflict.
Lockspur realized they had to question everything twice and before doing anything once. In this region of space, reckless impulsivity, debilitating anxiety, and hostilities were the norm. And he had just given in to a juvenile prank that could get them into serious trouble. Great, he thought. When she needed you the most, you were a dickhead. Real nice.
Both of Dahl's teammates noticed before they left Sol Lucia, Dahl worried they might not take her serious. More than anything else, she wanted to prove herself. They reassured her it was OK. But now that they had arrived, the remnants of a long trip, coupled with the region's peculiar effects on the worked against her better judgment. Under normal circumstances, she would have never considered sitting in that seat. Let alone doing it. As it was, combined moments of piss-poor impulse control that had just put them in danger. And there was no telling what would happen when Moss found her in his seat. If he were acting the way they were. The situation could escalate. And the longer they were in the region, the more its negative effects could take hold.
Dahl wanted to keep Moss and Lockspur from noticing her bloody nails. They were aware of why she had chewed her nails in the past, and she didn't want them to have another reason to doubt her abilities. Unbeknownst to Dahl, and much like her teammates, the visions of old sins had come back to haunt her in a major way. The sounds of her sister's screams chased her around the ship; screams that had begun almost as soon as they dropped out of FTL speed several days earlier. Her sister's voice asked, why did you let them hurt me? Why didn't you stop them? The voice wasn't real, but that didn't mean it wasn't driving her crazy. Dahl mashed a switch on the Pilot's console and cringed. Her gloved fingertips burned and stung. They were constant reminders of a dark time she wanted to forget.
Where there had once been a sense of team and belonging, now, a wavering sense of doubt filled her thoughts. She believed Moss and Lockspur did not want her on this mission. That was not true, but self-doubt is a real bitch. We're always our own worst enemies. A sense of growing doubt separated her from the assembled team.
Although Dahl had hung around her teammates for years, she still considered herself to be a newcomer in a long established team. The main giveaways to her newness being her pristine urban camo pants with matching camo blouse- which were both starched crisp enough to cut flesh. Lockspur had given her 5 pairs of each as a welcome to the crew gift. He also gave her a 500-year-old Japanese tanto with a demascus blade folded a hundred times. It was worth a fortune. Moss gave her 2 just-out-of-the-box pairs of combat boots desperately in need of a spit shine and a custom Colt 50 auto. It had started out as a Colt 1911, 45, but had been re-chambered to fit cut down .50 Action Express casings. The muzzle opening looked large enough to stick a fist in. When she opened the boots, he had cringed. The bare, unprotected leather went against all his years of military service. He told her a soldier should wear boots correctly or not at all. And that meant she should be able to see her own reflection in the toes. She looked at her feet. There was no reflection.
Lockspur watched Dahl with an amused interest, thinking she looked like an Army/Navy store display mannequin propped up in the Commander's seat. Had they not been bouncing and skipping off the upper atmosphere at 27,000 miles an hour, it would have looked comical. As it was, even with the looming fear of burning up on entry, he took the time to snap a picture just so he could tease her later. After the first turbulence bumps almost bounced his face off the Engineer's console, his thoughts of teasing subsided.
In truth, even though Dahl looked green, she was ready for action, and that sobering realization gave him reason to worry about what might wait on the surface. But even that fear wasn't fair, either. She was ready. And he knew it. The three of them had spent a great deal of personal time ensuring she had prepared herself for the riggers of the job.
As they plummeted through the upper atmosphere like a falling meteorite, the early 70s engineer, an olive-skinned half Spaniard / half Native American, sat behind Dahl thinking about the eager little kid hanging around the docks. Back then, she was a bratty pest who had a million questions about being a mercenary. But even then, he and Moss had seen something tough and unyielding in her eyes. They realized there would come a day when she would join the crew. But not like this; Lockspur thought, not without warning and not on a mission this dangerous. She's out of her league, and that lack of experience only increased everyone's danger. Not that he didn't want her there; it was that he didn't want to see her get hurt, or worse yet, killed.
Dahl understood her teammates thought she had a great deal to prove before they would trust her or place their lives in her hands. And to some extent, she was right. But for now, she was a part of the team, like it or not. Too bad for them, she thought. Lilith said I could come along, so get over it. It was that lack of say so that increased her teammates frustration, if not, made them mad as hell. Lilith had thrown Dahl into the mix without a care in the world. Or that's how it seemed to them.
Unfortunately for Moss and Lockspur, Dahl didn't see it that way. She had come on several runs prior to this one and while she had not taken part in any actual apprehensions. She had filled a support role from the security console inside the well protected ship. And she had learned everything about the business they would teach her. And the dos amigos had taught her a lot. Marksmanship, Johns said, she was natural with any rifle. Lockspur had taught her hand to hand, and told the others that she was more lethal with a knife than most mercenaries he had ever worked with. Moss had spent hundreds of hours teaching her tactics and strategy. So, he understood why she thought she was ready to be a part of the team? She was ready to be there; it was them who weren't ready for her to be there.
But feelings aside, Moss and Lockspur knew this run was no ordinary recon mission, or simple snatch and grab. There were things on M6-117 that didn't fear the law or weapons, or anything smaller than them. And compared to most of the things down there, they were small. They were the weak ones. Moss had told Dahl, "There are monsters down there that only know hunger."
Dahl's teammates met her on the docks when she was 10. As girls, she and her sister Tahlia had never left John's side. But, unlike Tahlia, Dahl wanted to be a mercenary. All Moss and Lockspur knew back then was that something terrible had happened to their family. That was 8 years ago. And now, here Dahl was, a young, beautiful woman of 18. And for them, that was just another part of the larger problem. Dahl was family. She was their family. They knew she was willful and even defiant, but she was also smart and funny and fearless. And here they were, heading to a world like M6-117, where a lack of fear equated to a lack of respect. And not giving a monster its due respect was foolish and dangerous under the best of conditions.
Dahl sat in the pilot's seat basking in a sense of false command, fantasizing about a time when she would have her own ship. About a time when she could rule the docks. The look on her face gave away her innermost desires. Lockspur didn't like it.
Lilith Hemmingford operated the largest clandestine mercenary outfit in the galaxy. Everyone in her employ either addressed her as mam or Lady Hemmingford. Of course, behind her back, most of them called her the Lady in Black. Some joked that she was the Dark Athena. Some, like Lockspur, believed it. Lady Lilith Hemmingford, the Goddess of war and strife. How fitting. She always laughed when they called her that. Secretly, she liked it. But the legend of the Dark Athena did not describe a woman. The Dark Athena was a creature of monstrous power. A creature capable of filling one with heart, stopping fear.
Neither of Dahl's crewmates liked her recent up-tick of cocky demeanor before joining the team. Her ego was getting big. Sure, Dahl was fast to learn a new skill and lethal if you let your guard down; but all practice and no field experience can make Jill a very dangerous girl to go on a mission with.
To make their uneasiness worse, they had unusual orders from Lady Hemmingford to keep Dahl safe at all costs. She's important to the future of humanity, Lilith told Lockspur. He shrugged with those kinds of cryptic comments, thinking Lilith always seemed to know a little too much about what was coming. And she rarely, if ever, shared information with anyone. The one time Lilith had told Lockspur about an upcoming mission, he had ignored her cryptic warning and it had cost him 30 stitches, a shitload of aches and pains, and a week in traction. Lilith took great pleasure in giving him the whole I-told-you-so speech. He never forgot the lesson.
Before this outing, Lilith had taken Lockspur aside and issued him special orders. That was nothing new to Lilith. She gave specific orders to individual team members all the time. But this time, something was different. Lilith told Lockspur to deliver a small object to someone already on sight, but never gave him the object before they left. In addition, he was not to divulge the meeting or reveal his instructions to the others. Lilith would not tell him any more details than you'll know what to do when the meeting takes place. In all his years working with Johns and Moss, Lockspur had hidden nothing from either of them. And now there was this ugly secret wedged between them, and only he knew it was there. It felt like a betrayal of their trust. But Lilith was compelling. So, he did as she ordered. She knew he would. After all, she is the Dark Athena, or so Lockspur believed. He had seen her true form.
The trio's long-lasting relationship wouldn't make the dangerous mission any easier to get through. Quite to the contrary, as we all know, when feelings become involved, shit gets complicated. And that bond meant shit was going to get worse in ways none of them could foresee. But for now, there was an ugly secret, the effects of the region and the growing wish he hadn't come on this damn mission, burying him beneath a landslide of guilt. In the end, he only came to protect Dahl.
"Are you coming or not?" Dahl said, staring through the windscreen at the now glowing nose cone.
"In a minute. The auto pilot will sort it out." Moss replied. His deep voice boomed through Dahl's headset, making her eardrums vibrate. Moss hadn't meant to be so gruff.
"We don't have a goddamn minute. The autopilot won't engage." Dahl said, eyes going wide. She had just outed herself.
"What the fuck do you mean the autopilot won't engage? Who disengaged it?" He demanded.
"I did," Lockspur blurted, before Dahl could say anything more incriminating. "I was running a systems check and found a ground fault in the circuitry. When I tried to repair it, the system crashed. I'll need to make repairs before we engage the system again."
"You think?"
"Stop giving him shit." Dahl blurted. "He didn't do anything wrong."
Lockspur twisted around and mouthed shut the hell up.
"Then I guess it's convenient you were both on the bridge when the autopilot shit the bed," Moss replied.
"It is, amigo." Lockspur said, holding up a warning hand, signalling for Dahl's continued silence. "And for the record, I told her to take over. Unless you'd like to burn up on entry?"
The suspicious voice emanating from the comms speaker made Lockspur uneasy, and Dahl's unpredictable tones only increased his anxiety that much more.
"I'll be right there, and when I get there, we're going to sort this shit out," Moss snapped, not appreciating Dahl's need to don a snooty authoritative tone. A tone he was certain she would not have taken if Johns were aboard to hear it.
"Now." Dahl blurted curtly, feeling an urgency to find her place in the pecking order. "We're already in the upper atmosphere, and I need help."
"Just turn it back on again." Moss countered.
"I tried, damn it. It won't re-engage." Dahl said, punching the button. The autopilot engaged and her mouth fell open. She swirled around in her seat and blurted, "You dick."
"I'm not proud of it," Lockspur said, shrugging.
Moss rubbed the sweat from his forehead and mouthed the word fuck. "Do I even want to know what's going on up there, compadre?" Moss asked, turning to leave the weapons compartment.
"No."
"Dammit," he said, punching the steel worktable in front of him.
Dahl knew what she should have said. But what came out was, "Just get your ass up here." It was the wrong thing at the wrong time.
"Listen, Missy." Moss fired back, looking down at his throbbing knuckles. He grabbed the black canvas bag off the bench and continued, "You are aware, I'm... in charge here?"
Dahl rolled her eyes, took a slow restorative breath and said, "I'm aware you weren't at your post when we arrived at our destination."
The ship buffeted in the upper atmosphere as the increasingly dense air squeezed the outer hull. The turbulence almost dumped Moss on the floor before the autopilot snatched the controls out of Dahl's hand.
"What the fuck is going on up there?" Moss raged, turning towards the hatch.
Under normal circumstances, Dahl avoided arguments. It solved nothing and, more often than not, left festering hostilities in the wake of heated conflict. But the longer they stayed in the forbidden planets region, the more Dahl felt compelled to defend herself. Although she didn't know why. To her knowledge, she and Moss had never argued in all the time she had known him. And even now, she didn't want to argue. She just couldn't stop herself. It was as if the region wanted her to lash out.
Dahl latched the heavy clasps of her 4-point safety harness and rubbed her ears. The endless silence of space was becoming the shrill blare of super-heated air rushing over a now blistering hull. The ship was entering the atmosphere much faster than it should have. Adjusting herself in the seat, she prepared for the jarring reentry hurtling towards them at breakneck speed. This could be a rough one and without a copilot with her, it could be a deadly one.
A tall, muscular, black man in his mid-30s yanked the cockpit hatch open, hooked the toe of his spit-shined boot on the lower lip of the steel frame and stumbled in, catching himself on the olive-skinned engineer's chair-back. "Fuck," Moss grumbled as a barrage of inaudible expletives trailed away beneath his panting breath. He had sprinted all the way from the aft weapons room to the bridge. Moss shoved himself upright, shaking off the embarrassment of almost toppling Lockspur out of his swivel seat. "What's going on in here?" he demanded, glaring at Dahl. Then it hit him. She was in his seat and he made to move forward and grab her.
Lockspur swiveled around, threw out his left foot, blocking Moss from entering any further, and warned, "Not gonna happen, amigo."
"Compadre, she's in my seat."
"It's just a seat."
"It's not," Moss replied, not knowing what he liked less, the needless struggle for squad dynamics or the cocky bullshit of a trainee. "If she wants to fly, all she had to do is ask. I'd let her."
"Let it go, amigo. We have bigger issues to deal with."
"Fine. But this isn't over," Moss said in a coarse grumble. Like Dahl, the region had stimulated his rage center since they arrived. "And now she thinks her inclusion in the crew comes with rank." He knew Dahl didn't believe that, but all he saw was her enjoying the pilot's seat a little too much.
"Great," Moss muttered under his breath. "Now, Uncle John's little princess thinks..." He stopped talking mid-sentence, taking a deep breath to calm himself. He knew he was being unreasonable. Lockspur had warned them both about the region's effects.
"Don't go there," Lockspur said, swiveling towards Moss with an empathetic expression. He removed an unused cleaning rag from his left cargo pocket, held it out, and Moss wiped the sweat off his bald head. His hand jittered. He tried to hide it, not wanting the others to think him weak. The hallucinations caused by the effects of the region resulted in him being hounded from the armory to the bridge. A half dozen dead comrades had taken to tormenting him. He knew they were only leftover hallucinations, but damn if they didn't seem real on the way there. Before entering the compartment, he had to stop and check he hadn't pissed himself.
"What were you doing back there?" Lockspur asked, already knowing the answer was Moss was a stickler for clean gear and even cleaner weapons.
Moss stood there glaring at the back of Dahl's head, building a scenario wherein he yanked her out of his seat and paddled her ass as if she was a misbehaving toddler. But more than a vengeful fantasy, what he wanted was for Dahl to just get out of that seat before all hell broke loose. A seat that had taken Moss years to earn the right to sit in. And here she comes, just walking in, sitting down and taking my post. "I don't think so," he said to himself, drilling holes in the back of her head with squinted eyes.
Lockspur cleared his throat, trying to draw him out of the reverie of dream-state before the ever-building negative mindset wove its way into Moss' thoughts any deeper. He knew that under normal conditions, Moss would never act on the outside forces stroking his anger. But these weren't normal conditions, and Lockspur could see Moss was nearing the point of giving in to his darker impulses. Lockspur coughed again, wanting Moss to focus on anything but the inevitable, fast approaching test of wills.
"Weapons check." Moss snapped absent-mindedly, still glaring at Dahl sitting in his seat.
"Let it go, amigo." Lockspur warned again. "It's just the stasis fog." He knew a heated confrontation could put the mission in jeopardy. But neither of them seemed willing to control their behaviors, even though they were both aware they were being unreasonable.
"Compadre, that's my seat." Moss said again, his thundering voice echoing farther than he had intended. Or maybe not. Maybe he wanted her to hear; wanted her to say something. To give him a reason to go the fuck off. He stared at the back of her head, imagining she heard him and was smirking through the windscreen. In fact, she had and was grinning, but he didn't know that. But Lockspur saw Dahl's reflection in the windscreen.
"If you need a seat. Take mine." Lockspur said, trying to further defuse the escalating volatility.
"I don't want yours."
"I said, take mine," Lockspur warned, wanting him to cut the shit.
"And I said no."
"Take it," Lockspur snapped, standing up and gesturing at the empty seat. He realized the longer this nonsense went on, the more open hostilities would break out. Moss's head wasn't screwed on straight. He needed more time to gain control, and the glaring look in his eyes did little to hide his inner thoughts. And come to think of it, Dahl was looking a little bitchy herself.
"Who's side are you on?" Moss asked, staring at Dahl fiddling with several knobs and buttons on the pilot's console. Unbeknownst to Moss, she was indeed fiddling with them just to aggravate him. He didn't know that either.
"Ours." Lockspur countered, losing a little of his tact and a whole shit-load of his patience. The idea of letting them duke it out crossed his mind, but then he remembered he was supposed to head off the impending power struggle, not encourage it. "No good can come from seat wars, amigo." Lockspur said, rolling his eyes and returning to his seat.
"It's my-" Moss began.
"Christ," Lockspur blurted, cutting Moss off before he could continue. "Amigo, she's just a kid. And you're supposed to be the fucking adult here. You're supposed to be the Commander. So, how about you try acting like one? Because right now, you are failing at that."
Moss glared at him.
Lockspur turned back to his duties, leaving a few moments for Moss to ponder his response. When he felt Moss still glaring at the back of his head, he said, "Let it go. None of this is her fault. I told this could happen before we came and you said it would be ok."
"She is a monumental pain in the-"
"True." Lockspur said, cutting him off again as he swiveled around, almost knocking Moss over. "And such is the folly of youth." He glared up at Moss for a quick moment, before adding, "Pity, you seem so hell bent on returning to your own youth. You big baby." He had finished dancing around. "But aye, amigo. You have always been a little anxious, right before the tailgate drops."
"And you're not?" Moss countered, jabbing a finger towards the hyper-tightened harness holding Lockspur in his seat. The sidebar had diverted Moss's attention from the power struggle. He looked down at the heavy black canvas bag Moss dragged in and added, "It would appear we share a common dread."
"That's why we work so well together."
"In deed, Amigo. In deed."
Prior to joining the crew, Moss had been a high-ranking intelligence officer in an elite Company Rangers outfit. But that was before the corp booted him out for physically disagreeing with several orders that led to the deaths of half the men in his command. Up to that point, Moss had conducted himself as a model officer and a career minded leader. Although, his bruised and battered company commander would disagree. His Company Commander claimed Moss cared too much for the well-being of his men. A sentiment that made Moss wish he had finished the job.
Lockspur left cargo transport to join Dahl's uncle, Colonel Nathaniel Johns, while docked at Sol Lucia some 20 years earlier. That night he had gotten drunk and helped Johns chase a fugitive into an alleyway, only to find Lady Lilith Hemmingford instead. The details of that frightening encounter, as Dahl tells it, are a tale of drunken exaggeration and the dangers of excess drug use. But no one can say what happened for certain, as Lockspur never spoke of the incident in great detail after that night. The surrounding rumors swirled and grew throughout the years. And Lady Hemmingford was more than happy to fan the exaggerations to new heights.
An eye-squinting glare burst through the windscreen as the nose cone heated to a cornea searing orange. The light reflecting off Dahl's eyes made Lockspur remember the first time he met Lilith on Sol Lucia. The memory of what she looked like that night still scared him witless even now, almost two decades later.
"Get strapped in," Dahl ordered, peering over her shoulder at Moss. "I need help to slow our descent or we're gonna skip off the atmosphere and break up in the upper-atmosphere."
"I hate this part!" Lockspur thought aloud, swiveling back around and grabbing the console with a white knuckled death grip. And that is no small feat for a man with an olive complexion.
"And you called me a big baby."
"Not proud," Lockspur replied, bracing himself for the worst; he always braced for the worst. Dahl was a crack pilot that had taken to fucking with him on entry.
"You realize that's my seat?" Moss snapped, standing next to Dahl, waiting for her to vacate his spot so he could sit down.
"Then maybe you should have been in it when we arrived," Dahl said, staring at the glowing nose that was minutes from burning off.
"Don't question me." Moss snapped. Then, noticing the white hot nose cone and red warning lights, he jumped into the co-pilot's seat, throwing the four point harness over his shoulder and securing the large metal buckle. He fumbled through several calculations on a nearby console and said, "Decrease our descent vector by 18°, keep our pitch attitude at 45° and lower the flaps. That'll bleed off enough speed to cool the forward hull."
"That could tear the flaps off."
"It's a risk. But we don't have a choice."
Dahl did as Moss instructed, and as he watched her effortlessly making the course corrections, the glaring light forcing its way through the windscreen dimmed, their flight pattern smoothed, and the warning lights on the console blinked off one by one.
A real natural in the seat, he thought. Then the evil little voice added, just not her seat. He laughed, shook his head and thought, shut up dickhead. Dahl had an intuitive style of flying, like a bird following magnetic fields. But that knowledge didn't matter in the here and now, he was fighting a storm front of raging anger and the ghosts of his own past. And up til that point, they were winning.
If any of them had been in their right minds, they would have waited another day or two before attempting a landing. But, as it was, damn the torpedoes were going in now was the only course of action.
Dahl looked over her shoulder, studied Lockspur sitting at his engineer's station, gripping the console with a bug-eyed death grip, and then a Faustian grin contorted her face. She yanked back on the stick, watching his toasted almond complexion morph into a sickened green grimace. Sweat beaded on his forehead. Spit filled his mouth as if he were speeding up out of the bottom of a roller-coaster dip. He hated roller-coasters. Then the laws of physics reached up, pulled the contents of his stomach downward as if aiming an overloaded slingshot filled with puke at the roof of his mouth and his eyes watered, his guts flip-flopped, and time slowed to a crawl. Invisible forces trapped him in an unwanted game of who will blow first.
"Really," Moss warned, looking over his shoulder at his comrade's worsening facial expression. His face had gone from green to ash and then scarlet. "He's gonna blow." Moss said to Dahl.
Dahl had taken to provoking explosive reactions from Lockspur on entry. In part, because Moss and Lockspur spent hours pranking each other and, in part, because she thought their lack of inclusion meant they saw her as an outsider. She was wrong, of course. However, they had decided before starting the mission, like or dislike, had nothing to do with her lack of field experience. A lack of experience they now blamed themselves for. Partially because they never let her leave the ship during previous missions, but primarily because of the brutality of what had happened to her in the past. They were well aware she wanted a little payback. And that her misplaced need for vengeance that made her dangerous to anyone around her. More so, herself. Although, to a lesser extent, they too.
The rubber band snapped, releasing the entirety of Lockspur's stomach contents upward, coating his throat with a tenacious bile that splattered against the roof of his scorching mouth. He gagged and covered his blistering lips, preventing a geyser of chunky bile from spraying the pristine console in front of him. A split second later, he leaned to the side and laid down a soggy carpet of acrid goo that wafted through the cockpit like a cloud of mustard gas drifting through a WWI trench line. Everyone's eyes watered. Moss gagged and Dahl covered her nose in disgust.
"Every time?" Dahl asked, as if she weren't responsible for the gastronomic eruption spreading across the cockpit floor.
"No," he lied, forcing down the acid clogging his constricting esophagus. He fought off the urge to grab his clipboard and hurl it at the back of her head. Then he mused, a boot perhaps. But how do I get it off without her noticing? The thought trailed away, replaced by the realization his cohorts were about to break into laughter.
"Compadre, that's disgusting." Moss said, waving the stench of stomach acid away from his nostrils as he stifled the grin forming on his face.
"You think?" Lockspur replied, spitting a multi-colored gob of snot on the back of Dahl's headrest, missing the back of her short blonde hair by an inch. It oozed down the back of the back of the seat.
As it trickled down, he thought it would have served her right if he hit his target. He wiped his dripping chin with the back of his well-pressed sleeve, bitching beneath his breath as his giddy teammates stifled their giggles.
"What did you eat?" Dahl asked, struggling to contain her own stomach contents as the stench churned in her searing sinuses.
Lockspur peered down at the festering floor mat through a take that you little shit expression and said, "Chimichangas and a bag of sour patch candies. Tasted OK on the way down; not so much on the way up."
"Out here?" Dahl replied, waving a hand in front of her face, trying to clear away the assault on her sinuses. "Where the hell did you find chimichangas out here?"
"Chimichangas are one thing," Moss said, "Where the shit did you get sour patch candies? They haven't made those in a 150 years."
"Lilith gets them for me. No idea where. Must cost a fortune. "
"Suck up." Moss said.
"Suck this," Lockspur blurted, and then both he and Dahl broke into hysterics. "I always try to bring a bit of home with me wherever I go," Lockspur added, thinking about the duffel bag full of snacks he had hoarded in a locker out back.
"Home." Dahl repeated, then chuckled. "What do you know about Earth? You've never been there." And she was right. Lockspur, like most mercs, had never been to Earth. Most mercs were off world trash or military rejects looking to earn a few easy credits just to get by. Most mercs never survived more than a few missions. But John, Moss and Lockspur had survived hundreds of missions. She wanted to be that good.
The ebbing red glow illuminating Dahl's alabaster features gave way to an empty pale blue sky of the arid planet far below. It was over. The ship flew straight through the lower atmosphere. They had arrived 5 months, 14 days, 6 hours and 5 minutes after leaving Sol Luca, 16 days early.
Moss jumped out of his seat, scaring Dahl and making Lockspur laugh. He ran out of the compartment at a frantic pace that caused Dahl to lurch in her seat. Lockspur shook his head, knowing Moss headed towards the armory.
Moss returned a short while later, hauling two heavy black duffel bags in one arm and a load of weapons slung over his shoulder. "Crap," Lockspur said, as Moss lugged the overburdened load towards the front of the compartment. "You are fucking paranoid."
"If by paranoid, you mean prepared." Moss replied, tossing Lockspur a bag of armor that pushed him deeper into the engineer's seat. "Then yes, I am. And thanks for noticing." Moss said, remembering of his final meeting with Johns the day before they left Sol Luca. "Johns warned me what's down there." The ominous warning warped his face into a mixture of concern and uncertainty. The worried expression gave rise to an ominous dread in the others.
"Vanjo," Lockspur whispered, shoving the bag off his lap just in time to catch the weapon hurtling towards him. The bag fell off his lap, barely missing the puke,. He fumbled to secure his rifle.
Moss looked at the bag sitting at the edge of the puddle with a raised brow and said, "Nice job, compadre."
"Funny. I was just about to say the same thing." Lockspur replied, kicking the bag away from the vomit.
"Doesn't count. I said it first."
"Cut the shit." Dahl said, still amped up on the leftover adrenaline of entry. She stared over the edge of the windscreen as an icy chill ran up her spine as if someone had raked her with an ice cube. She, too, knew what waited for them down there. And the inevitability that they would encounter the creatures scared her more than a little.
Lockspur's left brow lifted his chiseled face into a dark scowl that drew a sympathetic snicker from Moss. Apparently, Lockspur didn't appreciate being told to cut the shit anymore than he did. Even he had a limit to the shit he would take from Dahl.
"Let it go, compadre," Moss teased, flashing a- how-do-you-like-it smirk. "She's just a kid."
"Fog you." Lockspur said, considering the idea that he should spit at the back of her head one more time.
Dahl stared out at the sun bleached surface far beneath, thinking about the luck it took to get this far out. Riding the ghost lanes out to the forbidden planets was a dangerous proposition during the best of times. They had just completed the entire journey while in stasis chambers. She thought it was a gutsy move passing through an unregulated region used as a haven for pirates, rogue mercenary factions, clandestine Mega Corp Security teams and fleeing criminals of all varieties. None of whom came there for anything good; and none of whom you wanted to encounter while in a stasis pod.
"Can you feel it?" Dahl asked.
"Feel what?"
"It's gone," Dahl answered. "The effects of the region are gone. I don't feel angry, pissed off or out of control."
Moss turned to Lockspur with an expression asking if he felt the same way. He nodded he did. Why had the effects of the region vanished without a trace? While the sudden change was a welcome relief, it added a tense uncertainty to an already complicated mission.
"Where is it?" Dahl muttered to herself, searching the desolate terrain below as if she might find what they came for by happenstance. Of course she didn't. The long buried answers hidden on M6-117 would not come out without a certain amount of blood-letting and toil.
Moss returned to the seat on Dahl's left, switched on the topographical sensor and scanned the terrain for signs of the Hunter Gratzner wreckage. They were just outside scanner range, but he figured the sooner they found what they were looking for, the sooner they could head home. "This could take a while," he warned, switching on the back-up telemetry array in order to run overlapping scans of the planet's surface. That was a trick he had learned from Johns long ago. Sure, he was in a hurry to get what they came for and leave; but he didn't want to miss anything important either, and running overlapping scans meant they could search from a far greater distance.
Lockspur pulled up the mission brief Johns gave them at the start of the mission. It had been months since they had discussed the plan and now was as good a time as any for a quick refresher. "After accessing MegaCorp's crash report. Johns made a cloned copy."
"What are the coordinates?" Dahl asked, maintaining their altitude. She, like her teammates, was in no hurry to reach the surface before they knew where to look. Walking out in the open was a dangerous proposition on M6-117. There were hungry eyes everywhere.
"These coordinates are shit. Someone redacted the latitude numbers," Lockspur answered, scrolling through the files. When he didn't find what he was searching for, he turned to Dahl with a grave look and added, "Let's hope we didn't just put ourselves through months of hell for nothing."
"Let's," she agreed, trying to decipher the data files in front of her. The bright crimson readout reflected off her pale skin. "We need to locate the abandoned mining facility cited in the report. We have a full set of coordinates for that location. Let's start there."
"Agreed."
Dahl banked hard left, lowered the nose, and headed towards the mining facility. "A small group of survivors reached the facility before the eclipse." The ship dropped, approaching a small mountain of jagged rocks. The facility was just on the other side.
"Already on it." Moss replied, trying not to lose his temper at her constant need to issue a steady stream of unwanted and unappreciated commands. He sighed and shook his head, knowing he was being petty, and that she was right. He widened his scan to include the area surrounding the mine.
"The crash site shouldn't be far." Dahl continued, staring out the side window at the rocky, barren terrain far below. "Accounting for shit terrain, low O2 and blinding sunlight. They couldn't have traveled over 10 kilometers before the eclipse blotted out the sky."
Lockspur walked up between them. His sudden appearance made Dahl shift in her seat. She wished he would stop doing that. He had an odd habit of appearing out of nowhere. It reminded her of Lilith. He steadied himself in the windscreen's reflection by holding onto the backs of their seats. He leaned forward, peering out the windscreen with an ominous squint. "Aye, amigo. Do you think Johns was messing with us? You know... about the vanjo." The sincerity in his deep voice only made Dahl feel that much more uneasy.
"Vanjo?" Dahl repeated, staring at the deepening grooves dividing Lockspur's dark brows. She knew what he meant. There were differing forms of vanjo littered throughout the known galaxy. And all were lethal.
"Type 2, Bio-raptors." Moss clarified, in a foreboding tone that contorted his features even deeper than Lockspur's. The creatures looked like giant scorpions with the heads of hammerhead sharks. He had encountered them before, during a mission with the Rangers. In fact, it was the mission where most of his team had died and he ended up spending a week in the infirmary with a half dozen tubes jammed in every hole God gave him.
"Johns doesn't mess with anyone. The mission comes first." Dahl blurted, coming to the defense of the man who raised her. She did that all the time. They told her it was precious.
"Sure. Sure. If you say so," Moss said, voice stretching out in a playful, sarcastic tone. She missed the playful part. Moss looked over his shoulder at Lockspur and winked as if she was being naïve. She didn't miss that. Both men laughed in unison, only making her feel more like an outsider, and more pissed off than ever.
"Aye, amigo, remember..." Lockspur began, signalling a memorable tale was on the way.
"Pegrino 3," Moss said, finishing his thoughts for him. The two men shared the unspoken memory replaying in their heads, causing Dahl's sense of being left out to grow 10 fold. "Did he believe he could hide in a world of farmers?"
She frowned and her soft features turned pensive. "It's best to prepare for anything." She said, staring down through the side screen.
Lockspur strained to get a look at the terrain far below, his nose almost touching the thick windscreen. "Why does it always have to be chupacabra? Why can't it be fuzzy bunnies or glittery unicorns?"
"Hey," Moss said, in a half-hearted tone that meant he and Lockspur had encountered an assortment of bizarre creatures in the past. "Everything out here can't be cute and cuddly, but if they were, anybody could do this."
"I'd be happy with a hard shelled herbivore. Why does everything have to have jagged teeth and eat meat?"
"Yeah," Dahl added, staring out the windscreen as if this wasn't her first mission. "It would be nice- just once- to go somewhere everything wasn't trying to eat us."
"Not gonna happen." Moss replied, tilting his head in Dahl's direction. "No matter though," he continued, looking at Lockspur out of the corner of his eye. "At least we're gonna have time to see how the newbie measures up."
"Newbie," Dahl blared, face reddening. "Screw you."
"Too bad Johns had to stay on Sol Lucia?" Lockspur teased, winking at Moss as if to say, this will push her buttons. "He's going to miss a real shit show," he added, drawing out his words to an exaggerated length he knew she wouldn't like.
"Shut it," Dahl snapped, squinting through the windscreen at something below.
"Seems like convenient timing." Moss added, raising an eyebrow at Lockspur and then shooting him a sly wink Dahl had missed. He wasn't just messing with her to be an ass, but they were including her in their lighthearted teasing. It was tradition. However, the pain of coming out of stasis prevented her from realizing they had included her.
"Say that to his face."
"Remind me later." Moss countered, becoming agitated by her reaction to the game. "Like... when he's here."
"Point is." Lockspur cut in, rolling his eyes at Dahl. "We're here; he's not."
"Yeah." Moss said. "He's 150 light-years from this sundried shit hole."
"And safe." Lockspur added, as Dahl's face became a deep burgundy.
"F you," she snapped. "When Lilith gives an order, he follows it like everyone else."
"Kid, Johns and I have worked for Lilith since before you were in diapers." Lockspur said, looking down at the planet with an expression that encompassed their storied exploits. "And it's always been the same. She lines up the work and we get it done. Hell, now and then she comes along just for fun."
"So what?"
"I'll tell you what," he added. "This is the first time Lilith has ever told him to stay behind." He turned to Dahl, concern twisting his features. A concern she could tell was genuine. "Staying behind isn't S.O.P. Hell. Nothing about this mission is." His impending meeting was drawing guilt from his pores like a poultice sucks pus from an infected injury.
"No one cuts off their strongest arm right before getting into a fight for their life." Moss said, shaking his head. He turned to Moss. "Something just feels wrong with this mission."
Lockspur looked away.
The two men were not joking anymore. Their employer's willingness to deprive them of a seasoned team member while letting them embark on a dangerous mission with an inexperienced crew member in his place, especially one that was family, made them worried. To them, it seemed more than wrong; it seemed irresponsible; if not outright reckless and dangerous.
"She's his mother, for God's sake." Dahl stressed, grabbing Lockspur's arm. "She's family. She wouldn't put us in danger."
"Adoptive, mother," he said, looking at her hand with a raised brow. His dark expression warned she was about to cross a line. He didn't like the sudden invasion of his personal space, and lucky for her, he had long since come out of his own fog.
"There are some who say she's the Dark Athena." Moss added, knowing it would get another rise.
"Superstitious bullshit." Dahl countered, scowling at him as if he were messing with her. "There's no such being. Besides, I have known Lilith for most of my life, and she has always been normal, as far as I can tell."
"Yeah." Moss said with a slanted grin. "Just be glad you don't have a bounty on your head. If you did, I can assure you, you'd redefine your idea of wonderful."
"Leave her alone."
"What do you think people would say if I told them about the day I met her? About what I saw?" Lockspur asked, removing her hand from his arm. He thought about the first time he met Lilith in an alley twenty years earlier. The night he cornered a dark-skinned man with jet black hair at gunpoint. The man had led him into the empty shadows of a back alley, and when he demanded he come out, Lilith emerged instead. Tall and sleek, pale as the grave and fierce as anyone he had ever encountered. Her look was both eerily enticing and yet... frightening. Then, as she stepped back into the shadows, he was certain she had changed again. Only that time, she had changed into something massive and terrifying. When he illuminated the spot, she had vanished, leaving behind enormous inhuman footprints on the wet pavement.
"They'd say you're exaggerating. Or you're lying." Dahl interjected, with furrowed brows. "There's no way Lilith can change or disappear. That's crazy talk."
"Why." Lockspur asked. "I've seen her black magic for myself. That bruja is no more human than the things down there are. She looks like us. She sounds like us. But she's not one of us. She's-"
"Have you said any of this to her?" Dahl asked, straightening out his sleeve. "No. I didn't think so. You see. Superstitious nonsense."
"Maybe," Moss added, the tone of his voice suggesting there may be some validity to Lockspur's story. "But you have to admit, Lilith has a dark-side. It's like she's two different people."
"Like one minute she looks hot; and the next, she can scare the shit out of you with a single glance." Lockspur added. "And that brings me to her age. Look at her. She looks 35."
"So," Dahl said.
"She looked 35 when I met her 25 years ago." Lockspur replied. "She hasn't aged a single day."
"And I swear, she can see inside your head." Moss added, remembering she seemed to know everything about him before they met.
"And what about the way she vanishes whenever she wants?"
"Typical," Dahl warned, cutting them both off. "That's what happens when a strong woman threatens a man's frail ego. There is something wrong with her and not with you."
"Oh, chica. There's a whole shit-load of things wrong with me. But that doesn't mean I can't see oddities in others."
"And since when have you ever heard of a strong woman?" Moss said, winking at Lockspur.
"Right," Lockspur replied.
Dahl wanted to jump up and hit him until she saw them grinning like idiots and realized they were just teasing her. She felt a sense of relief. They had accepted her. She felt a pang of guilt for messing with Lockspur and how she had treated Moss when they arrived. If this guilt shit is how it feels to be on the team, I don't think I want to be on it; she thought.
"Over there." Moss blurted, gesturing down at an instrument cluster. "The wreckage is twenty degrees off the starboard bow." Moss tapped the console touch screen in front of him. "I put the coordinates in the nav-system."
Dahl pitched the ship hard to starboard, pushed the nose into a steep dive and said, "Hold on. I'm taking us in. She turned to Lockspur, who had turned green. "And don't puke on the console. It stinks enough in here."
He looked at the noxious gob of puke hanging off the back of her headrest and thought; I bet it does.
Dahl circled the wreckage as Moss checked for signs of life on a nearby instrument cluster. When he was certain nothing was in the vicinity, Dahl set the ship down one hundred fifty meters in front of the wreckage with the tail ramp facing the crash site. She didn't lower the rear tailgate, as all three of them feared the area may not be secure.
"Suit up," Dahl instructed, walking towards the rear of the craft, donning her equipment. She halted, thinking of her recent bout of guilt, turned to Moss and added, "I mean, we should suit up, sir."
Lockspur laughed at Moss, as if to say the girl has spirit. Then pursued her towards the rear of the ship, ensuring she didn't get too far ahead. After all, he cared for her in his own way, and he had his orders. Keep her safe at any cost.
A few minutes later, Dahl stood by the ramp control waiting for the others to finish gearing up. "Everyone ready?" she asked. The danger of what they were about to do filled her wide eyes with an ominous sense of foreboding.
"Do we have a choice?" Lockspur asked, flipping his weapon's selector to fire as he took a deep, restorative breath before the ramp opened. He wished he had not come.
"Not if we want to get paid," she answered, starting the ramp open sequence. "Make sure your 02 is on. This rock has a less than optimal atmosphere."
"Affirmative." Moss replied, pulling his nasal cannula down and pushing it inside his nostrils. The high 02 levels made him feel jittery. A side effect, he attributed to getting too much of a good thing. The feeling would lessen outside. So too, would the good things.
"Come on." Dahl said, squinting as light pierced the lowering ramp.