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

“About time,” Flop replied. “Half my board is dead. How’s your engineering panel?”

“Huh?” she asked. There were more than a few globs of blood floating around in the cockpit. By the feel of her head, at least some was hers.

“Wake up, Private!”

The barking order in both command voice and Zuul snapped her fully back to awareness. “Yeah, yeah, I’m here.” She blinked hard and focused on the panels. “My panels look good, except tertiary hydraulics.”

“Good to have you back,” he said. “Find the resets for RCS, panel #2.”

“On it,” she said and found the panel. “All of them?”

“Yeah, throw the master reset.”

She’d noticed most of the normally colorful display boards were out, as well as all three of the glass cockpit displays, and the pathetic Tri-V. Focus was returning, so she reset the requested panel. A slew of displays came back alive, then everything went dark again. “Breakers popped,” she said.

“I noticed,” Flop said. She could see over his shoulder as he took the slate on his thigh board and flipped pages back and forth.

“You’re not using your pinplants?”

“Pinlink fried,” he said. “Either feedback or a nuke too close.”

“Nuke?” she said with alarm, looking for the cockpit dosimeter. The computer tracked radiation exposure, but it was out. Ships usually had a couple of old-school dosimeters in various places, just in case. She found it, and the little physical needle was still in the green, though elevated.

“We’re fine on rads,” he said, “I checked when I came around.” He glanced out the cockpit and shook his head. “Like being inside a cement mixer.”

Ripley looked up as well and gasped. They were in a constellation of debris, spinning wildly along with all the junk. Most of it was smaller than them. “What’s all this?”

“Parts of Paku, mostly,” he said.

“Was it destroyed?”

“Don’t know, but I don’t think so. I do think we took part of the hull with us in our non-conventional departure. Found a power routing,” he said. “Okay, follow this series of resets.”

She listened and repeated back each instruction before flipping the requested switch. Nothing happened until she was done and then reset the master switch again. Like before, everything lit up, but this time they stayed alive. “Excellent!” she said.

“Piece of piss,” Flop replied. “Stabilizing.” A series of thumps announced the return to life of the RCS thrusters. In just a few seconds, the dropship was no longer spinning and was facing a tiny, greyish dot in the distance. That had to be the dwarf planet; it wasn’t moving.

The awkwardly-placed cockpit hatch, which was behind and below Ripley, creaked open. When she looked down, her father’s head was there. “You two up here playing funny buggers?”

“Does it look like we’re wanking off?” Ripley said, but her tongue lolled out and floated in happiness at seeing her father.

“We got it in wraps,” Flop said.

“Why are you out of your CASPer?” she asked him.

“No room to move around,” he said. “Small air leak back there; we wrangled it into place. How’s the ship?”

“A little more fucked up,” Flop said, “but amazingly, everything works.”

Alan nodded and held out a data chip. “Got this from Captain I’kik before we went woop woop.” He released it, and it floated up to Ripley, who caught it. “Navigational data and such, everything the captain could give us on the system in a nutshell.”

“Dardy!” Ripley said and slipped the chip into her own thigh board slate. The computer hadn’t been one of the systems to return. It wasn’t bad—the Phoenix was fly-by-wire—but those computers were separate and tough as nails. If they went down, you usually didn’t have enough ship left to fly.

Flop had been finishing his systems checks while Ripley talked to Alan. Every so often there would be a bump, or something would move. He finished and said, “Starboard rear engine pod will only translate to 82 degrees. Gonna make landing vertical a right proper cockup. Hopefully there’s some flat ground so I can go STOL. Better strap in, Skipper. Good chance if there’s any bad folks about, they’ll notice a big chunka debris stopped spinning.”

“What about the Zuul shuttles?”

“I’m keeping radio silence for now. Don’t want to run up a flag. We can hear you in the rear, but we can’t transmit back.”

“Figured it was something like that. Get us to that dwarf planet; likely anyone in charge will be there.”

“Right you are, Skipper.” Alan left and dogged the hatch. “Your pop is a good leader, doesn’t try to micromanage.”

Ripley nodded. She’d sipped some water from her gear and popped a couple analgesic tabs. Luckily the stuff that worked on Humans also worked on Zuul, or they’d have had a tough childhood. She’d also been using her thigh board slate to go through checklists to get some more sensors online. All they had now was close approach radar and a rear-mounted thermal camera. Not much to fly a spaceship with.

“Any luck on the sensors?” Flop asked.

“Not yet,” she said distractedly.

“Well, we’re gonna need them.”

She looked up, and he was pointing to the side. Three tiny little sparkles were moving against the junk and stars. “What are those?”

“Drive plumes. The speed they’re moving, must be drones. Hope they’re strapped back in, because here we go.” He brought the engines back online and applied thrust. “Better get ready for a scrum, kid.”

“Bloody hell,” Ripley said as she grabbed the tactical headset. Then something occurred to her. “Hey, Flop.”

“What?”

“How come I never knew you spoke Zuul?”

Flop chuckled while Ripley cursed as she struggled with the tactical headset. It was, of course, made for a Human’s round head, not her more elongated one. Her nose and mouth were many centimeters further away from her eyes than her Human friends and family. Luckily, she’d quickly learned ways