Down and Out – Part 2

Hi everyone!

As mentioned last week, this week I will be spending the majority of my time each evening editing the submission for the upcoming story contest whose deadline is the end of this month.  I’m almost assuredly not going to win, but it has become vital that I at least get my hat in the ring.   I am reaching the third year of my writing career, and it is about time that I take my career seriously.

I don’t wish to leave any of you hanging, however, so I’ll do my best to make sure that the posts keep coming as advertised.  The posts will be shorter than the established norm, but I feel better about things if I remain consistent with my content even if it is a bit truncated.

Excelsior!

Down and Out – Part 2

Yow’ce was as good as his word, and before Yara could do more than work up a nervous sweat underneath her hijab and wear a groove in her long distance scanner inputs with her repeated scans, the gigantic donut of Vel’ce’s tow-ship arrived.

The empty middle of the ring ship shimmered as Yara gave Vel’ce the necessary access codes to bypass her gravjammers, and with quiet certitude the ropes of her gravitic lashes began cocooning The Luck Dragon and Yara’s hastily attached battlesuit until they were nice and snug within the extended hyperdome web cast by Vel’ce’s ship.  With the ear-splitting scream no one ever heard in vacuum, the tow ship blasted back into the void between realities that the various races of the galaxy used to travel hither and thither.

Yara had a few hours to kill, so she took the time to actually unwind from the tense waiting she’d been forced to do after her mission had gone so far south.  She swore loudly as she showered, racking her memories of the mission to find where she’d made any mistakes.  Her battlesuit had come down exactly where it had needed to, equidistant to both high powered planet-side omnicoms the base had used.  A few rockets from her shoulder turrets had turned them into satisfyingly exploded slag.  Communications for the facility blacked out, she’d put her plan into motion, rolling into a combat sprint as she’d drawn the plascaster secured across the battlesuit’s back.

The supply depots she was hitting was covered in armored plating, but she was wielding thirty feet of angry plascaster and no one really plans around battlesuits when building non-military installations.  There weren’t more than twenty or thirty in private service across the whole of the Milky Way, so why waste the money on it?   She’d blown through stationary defense encampments with the same smooth precision of every other mission she’d been on.

Then, as she watched the assault once more in her mind’s eye under the soothing waters of her shower, she finally caught what she’d missed in the engagement.  There had been a whine, high pitched but familiar, as she’d been razing the first of the supply depots.  It was the sound of the internal engines of a battlesuit firing up.  Then there were just the explosions and her memory went hazy as it always did when she was fighting for her life.  She shook her head, trying to scrub away anger and self-recriminations as she attacked the tangled knots of her raven hair.

Later, dry and reasonably centered once more, she made her way down to the cargo bay to start pulling a full diagnostic of the damage her battlesuit had sustained.  It was pretty extensive, and a couple of times she couldn’t help but let loose a low whistle at her disgusting luck in having made it back into atmosphere.

Yow’ce was going to kill her.

The quiet thrumming of her ship as it plowed through hyper and the soft glow of the infodump were her only companions for the remainder of the journey.

To be continued…

Donutfully,

The Unsheathed Quill