Night Song (The Guild Wars Book 9) by Mark Wandrey (best ereader under 100 .txt) 📕

was designed such that if there was a malfunction, it hung on, and didn’t release. A dropship banging around inside a bay was far worse than one that refused to launch. Usually. With a groan of effort, Flop got his hand halfway up before it fell back. “I…can’t…”

“Where is it?” Ripley asked, breathing hard to fight the weight.

“<huff>…<huff>”

“Where’s the breaker?” she asked again. No response. “Lieutenant!” she roared, and his head jerked. “Where’s the bloody breaker?”

“Pan…panel seve…seve…seven…” His head fell over, and he was nonresponsive at 6Gs.

Her father was groaning and calling out over the PA. Ripley ignored his call and closed her eyes, concentrating. She’d read the Phoenix manual mere months ago. She recalled the maintenance section on magnetic hull grapples. Since the Phoenix hadn’t been designed to dock with Paku, they’d simply grappled her to the deck. Either the grapples were fucked up, or the impact had caused an overload. Whatever the reason, the dropship was refusing to let go of its temporary home.

She found panel seven in her memory. It was just to her right, about shoulder high, unlike the pilot’s position, where it was overhead. At seven Gs, she had to strain hard. Still, it was doable. She caught the flip-catch, snapped it open, and disengaged the breaker. The Phoenix was flung out into space like a rock from a sling.

* * *

Captain Tucker gritted his teeth and tried not to think about their situation. A split second after Paku had ordered them to launch, they’d cut loose, and the ship had been hit by something big. The impact had slammed them against the bigger ship’s hull on the way out.

The shuttle was stuffed with all the troopers and a bunch of Zuul, and the aliens growled and barked in their language. His translator caught some of it, a mixture of random exclamations and curses. You didn’t have to speak fluent Zuul or be used to a drop in their craft to know it was going sideways.

The Zuul dropship—or assault shuttle, as they called it—spun wildly for a few seconds. He felt and heard the craft’s RCS, reaction control system, working hard to bring them under control. After a few seconds, it succeeded. The pilot kicked in the main drive and began an evasive pattern to make them a harder target.

“This is the tough part!” he yelled to his troopers.

“Piece of piss!” Corporal Salerson replied, getting a series of cheers in response.

Tucker nodded. You might as well relax and enjoy the ride on this sort of launch. However, on his pinplants, he hadn’t acquired telemetry on the Phoenix dropship with his commanding officer and the other half of the unit. Sensor data was showing Paku dropping away, besieged and fighting for its life. The other Zuul shuttle was in formation with his own, and they were both heading toward the only thing not a warship—a dwarf planet a light minute away.

Luckily for all of them, the Zuul assault shuttle was both fast and stealthy. The pair rocketed out of Paku’s engagement zone. There was still no sign of the commander’s vessel amidst all the interference and nuclear detonations. Tucker shook his head and sighed. This wasn’t how he’d wanted to become commander of Silent Night. He hadn’t wanted it at all, ever.

He’d have to trust that some measure of luck would kick in for both squads. With so much interference from explosions and attacks, surely something as small as an assault shuttle or dropship could slip through the noise and get to a docking. Silent Night didn’t specialize in space combat, but they did specialize in surviving to fight another day. He’d have to trust in that.

* * *

“It’s the Gheshu,” A’kef announced as a ship swooped in on them as they fled. Veska snapped her jaw in both surprise and relief. They’d been on the hunt for their lost light cruiser for so long, she’d despaired of seeing battle under a profitable contract again. She should have suspected the clever old captain of their clan’s fiercest ship had found an enormous conflict to be a part of.

“Is it still ours?” Makori asked, leaning around one of the Humans to show his attentive posture.

Veska scoffed in the back of her throat, no matter how carefully the enormous male pricked his ears forward. A’kef would tell them what A’kef chose to tell them. Makori had no business pushing for more from their Rei’shin, not in front of the handful of Humans they’d crammed into the dropship.

Though Humans were forever asking questions, and the Zuul they’d raised certainly wouldn’t have taught them better. Instead, the Human-raised Zuul asked nearly as many questions as the Humans, whether it was a proper time for learning or not. Likely these Humans would have no idea Makori was speaking out of turn, if their translators could even keep up with the multiple conversations. If she were truthful to herself, though she couldn’t imagine a galaxy in which the captain of the Gheshu had lost control of her vessel, Veska very much wanted the answer to Makori’s question, regardless of how it had been delivered.

“Transmission codes indicate yes, but the sheer mass of missiles make it hard to tell who’s firing at who, and we don’t know why they were firing at us.”

“So we’re making a run for the Gheshu,” Veska said, her left ear twisting back thoughtfully.

“That’s the best angle we have, given how we fell from the Paku and the pattern of the battle.”

“The Gheshu? That’s the ship you came out looking for, right?” One of the younger Humans leaned forward as well, making aggressively direct eye contact with A’kef.

A’kef flicked his ears, but inclined his head calmly. He’d spent as much time with the Human mercenary commander who’d raised Rex and his littermates as Veska had managed to spend with Rex. As her lifetime of