TEN

Holy…!" Johanna Nilsson wasn't sure which expletive to use, but she didn't get out anyway, not before the gunship banked hard and sent her rolling on the passenger bench, the straps barely containing her. She braced herself with her bad hand and then howled at the bolt of pain that ran up her arm.

The view outside the open shaft showed a blur of dark, jungle canopy, the rushing stars, then the jungle canopy again.

"Watch it, Keyla!" Osnullus shouted over the open comm-link to the cockpit. "This thing has performance limits!"

Keyla's laugh rang over the link. "Oh we are taking this bitch to the limit!"

Osnullus and Johanna exchanged a look, which very clearly said, we are going to die and it is all Keyla Detmer's fault.

The gunship lurched again, and Johanna felt the G-forces grab her stomach in an iron claw. A second later the world outside the hatch flared and she saw jungle canopy bloom with orange flame.

"They're shooting at us!" Johanna yelped, then felt silly for stating the obvious.

"Well, we better start shooting back," Osnullus snapped, and unlatched her straps, then wound them around her waist in a makeshift tether. She stumbled her way to the door gun.

"Aw, dammit…" Johanna sighed and rearranged her own straps in the same manner, then she staggered toward the door gun, fighting centrifugal force all the way. Finally, she managed to grab the gun's grip in her left hand and she felt it come alive; its servos and gyroscopes engaged at her touch. She was pleased to find she could use it one-handed.

The gunship lurched again and picked up altitude, leaving Johanna's stomach somewhere to the left of her boot soles.

"Always run in a zigzag from a Komodo dragon…" Linus drawled from his supine position.

"Geez…" Nilsson draped her right arm over the gun's receiver and sighted out into the darkness. The gunship dropped, returning her stomach to her body—somewhere in her pelvis now—and she saw the ferocious, bat-like shape of the Klingon landing craft. Green energy crackled near its wingtips and harsh disruptor bolts hurtled past the gunship. Johanna felt the side of her face prickle with their heat. She squinted through the optical sight and pulled the trigger. The door-gun fired disruptor pulses in such rapid succession they were almost a solid beam of light.

"Cool!" she shouted to Osnullus. "It real easy to aim!" Osnullus gave her a thumbs-up.

Suddenly, the Klingon ship drew abreast of them, close enough that Johanna could see the insignia for House of Hak'karrl on one leathery-looking wing, illuminated by the running lights. A hatch opened on the ship's skin-like surface and Johanna found herself face to face with a half-dozen or so Klingon warriors, clad in ornate armor, their heads shaved. They shouted and pointed, and raised weapons that looked to Johanna for all the world like French horns fused with survival knives.

Green energy bolts exploded inside the cabin, burning the bulkheads and blowing out the interior lights. Osnullus lost her balance and fell to the deck. Johanna gritted her teeth and sprayed the Klingon ship, walking the rapid disruptor pulses to the open cabin and sending Klingon warriors falling to the deck as she mowed them down.

Johanna raked the Klingons with fire until the ship tilted and fell back

"Yeah, you better run!" she shouted.

Then something flashed.

Keyla watched as the night became day, ever so briefly. White, burning, bright day.

"What the hell was that?" Owosekun exclaimed.

"Impulse missile," Keyla answered. "Warhead with an impulse drive. Should be fire-and-forget, but they must be too close for the AI to kick in."

"How do you know these things?"

"Tell you later." Keyla cranked on the stick and gunship nosed down and ripped the tops off of a swath of jungle as she dropped the craft into a ravine carved by a river.

"Keyla, that's too low!" Owosekun shouted, her eyes saucers. "Sensors can't even read the ground at this attitude!"

"Exactly. They can't get a lock on us. This is called nap-of-the-Earth!"

"Stop enjoying this!"

Keyla just laughed. She thought, fleetingly, of her mother—a fine pilot in her own right—and of Old Greta Shiemann, who'd taught her to fly and then her daughter. Old Greta was full of stories about the waning days of World War Three and the air war against the Gallic Air Force that had played a crucial role in stopping the French Imperialist Forces from spreading any further West. Old Greta was dead now, some twenty years.

She couldn't wait to tell her mom about this.

Another missile flared past. Closer this time. It exploded in the treeline, sending a sheet of organic shrapnel into their fuselage.

"Goddamn it! They decided to be clever." She lunched flares and spinners. The monitor near her left knee that displayed the rear-facing camera feed showed the Klingon craft tilt and break off at the onrush of fire and unknown objects.

Disruptors flashed. Treetops caught fire. The river exploded and hissed steam.

"Dammit, they've got us boxed in," Keyla swore.

"We need altitude," Owosekun said. "But we've got no lateral clearing. If we pull up right now we'll be right in front of their guns."

Keyla felt sweat crawl like insects behind her ears and down her the neck of her uniform.

Think, dammit, think! What did she know about House of Hak'karrl ships? They liked presentation. Their birds-of-prey had biomass skin grafted and cloned from the dead flesh of their enemies. They were very maneuverable in space…

Everything's maneuverable in space, dumbass! What about those big batwings in atmosphere?

They sucked.

"Everyone strap in! I've got a plan!"

"We're secure back here!"

"What are you going to do?" Owosekun asked.

"You're going to hate it," Keyla said, then throttled down and cracked the stick and stomped the pedals simultaneously.

The gunship rolled up and over in a lazy barrel roll. Disruptor bolts flared through the windscreen, but Keyla knew the Klingon was out of position and moving too fast to get target lock on the gunship, it's big wings bleeding energy and maneuverability. The gunship's corkscrew path took it above the Klingon at the moment their trajectory overtook the gunship.

It was too fast for the human eye to process the image and send it to the brain, but not for the Orbis Industries NL-8 Cortical-Linked Occular Implant that currently resided in Keyla's skull, and she was pulling the trigger on the chin-mounted photon grenade-launcher before she even knew what she was seeing.

A fan of glowing orbs reached out for the Klingon craft.

Lightning. Thunder. The sky exploded.

25

Acting Captain's Log: Stardate 1029.17—Christopher Pike Reporting.

We have returned to Noviani Five and recovered our science team. Thankfully, none of them were injured following the hostile assault by Noviani forces. We discovered that the Noviani government had been overthrown and a military junta—propped up by House of Hak'karrl-installed in its place. The Discovery was successful in running off a House Hak'karrl warship and Chancellor L'Rell has dispatched an attack wing to eliminate the House Hak'karrl threat from the Noviani system. How they will deal with the Noviani as collaborators with an enemy of Empire, is, unfortunately, an internal Klingon matter, and Starfleet had ordered us not intervene.

In the meantime, the reports from the science team have been, well, entertaining is one word. Unorthodox is another.

"So, you gonna do it?" Detmer asked as she opened her bag of red, stringy candy. "You gonna take what's-her-name, brace-face, up on her offer?"

"Commander Nhan," Owosekun said pointedly from her seat beside Detmer.

"Right, her."

Linus shook his head. "It's very flattering, but in my heart I'll always be a scientist, not a security officer."

"Plus you survived the mission," Ensign Maki said from his seat beside Linus, "so that's a disqualifier right there."

Everyone laughed. Maki plucked a kernel of popcorn out of the communal bowl on the table they sat around in a rough semi-circle and tossed it in the air. Linus let it hit the apex of its ascent before flicking his tongue and catching it in mid-air.

The room applauded.

"That's amazing!" Nilsson said.

"That's five-for-five," Osnullus pointed out.

"You mammals don't know what you're missing," Linus said, chewing the popcorn kernel.

"I have thoughts about the tongue," Detmer said.

"No!" Owosekun admonished her. "You will stop talking right there." Detmer gave her a shrug: what's the problem?

"My mandibles are pretty cool too," Osnullus said.

The screen flickered as the movie loaded and they all faced it.

"What's this one called, again?" Nilsson asked.

"I Come in Peace," Maki answered. "Alternate title is Dark Angel. I think I Come on Peace has abetter ring to it."

"I bet he doesn't come in peace," Detmer observed.

"If he did, Dolph Lundgren wouldn't have to blow up half the city fighting him," Maki said.

"Is that the lead?" Nilsson asked. "Any relation to the Nobel Prize winner?"

"Same guy," Maki explained. "After he retired from Hollywood, he formed the Lundgren-Lundberg Research Institute and helped develop artificial gravity."

"Is that before he became Prime Minister of Sweden?" Owosekun asked.

"Yeah. Before."

The movie started and they watched an extra-terrestrial criminal decimate a drug gang in a maelstrom of gunfire, explosions, and destruction.

"This is so cool," Detmer said.

"It really is," Nilsson responded.

Linus grabbed more popcorn with his tongue.