loose with the full power of her rear thrusters.
'We're moving!' she shouted over the roar of her own engines, engines normally reserved only for in- atmosphere flight. There was no sensation of movement, but Alex clearly heard the scrape of ice along her hull, and winced, knowing that without a long stint in dry dock, Tia would look worse than Hank's old trampfreighter.
Suddenly, they were free.
Tia killed the engines and engaged full null-gee drive, hovering just above the surface of the snow in eerie silence.
'CenSec got the first ship; the other one jumped them. It looks pretty even,' Tia said shortly, as Alex heard the whine of the landing gear being dropped again. 'So far, no one has noticed us. Are you braced?'
'Go for it,' he replied. 'Is there anything I can do?'
'Hold on,' she said shortly.
She shot skyward, going for altitude. She knew the capabilities of her hull better than Alex did; he was going to leave this in her hands. The hill they wanted was less than a kilometer away, when they'd gotten high enough, Tia nosed over and dove for it. She aimed straight for the crest, as if it were a target and she a projectile.
Sudden fear clutched at his throat, his heart going a million beats per second. She can't mean to ram. Alex froze, his hands clutching the armrests.
At the last minute, Tia rolled her nose up, hitting the crest of the hill with her landing gear instead of her nose.
The shriek and crunch of agonized metal told Alex that they were not going to make port anywhere but a space station now. The impact rammed him back into his chair, the lights flickered and went out, and crash systems deployed, cushioning him from worse shock. Even so, he blacked out for a moment.
When he came to again, the lights were back on, and Tia hovered, tilted slightly askew, above the alien city.
Below and to their right was what was left of the roofless building, now buried beneath a pile of ice, earth, and rock.
'Are you all right?' he managed, though it hurt to move his jaw.
'Space-worthy,' she said, and there was no mistaking the shakiness in her voice. 'Barely. I'll be as leaky as a sieve in anything but the main cabin and the passenger section, though. And I don't know about my drives, hang on, we're being hailed.'
The screen flickered and filled with the image of Neil, with Chria Chance in the background. 'AH One-Oh- Three-Three, is that you? I assume you had a good reason for playing 'chicken' with a mountain?'
'It's us,' Alex replied, feeling all of his energy drain out as his adrenaline level dropped. 'There's another one of your playmates under that rockpile.'
'Ah.' Neil said nothing more, simply nodded. 'All's well then. Can you come up to us?'
'We aren't going to be making any landings,' Tia pointed out. 'But I don't know about the state of our drives.'
Chria leaned over her partner's shoulder. 'I wouldn't trust them if I were you,' she said. 'But if you get up here, we can take you in tow and hold you in orbit until one of the transports shows up. Then you ride home in their bay.'
'It's a deal,' Alex told her, then, with a lift of an eyebrow, 'I didn't know you could do that'
'There's a lot you don't know,' she told him. 'Is that all right with you, Tia?'
'At this point, just about anything would be all right with me,' she replied. 'We're on the way.'
Tia was still a little dizzy from the call she'd gotten from the Institute. When you're refitted, we'd like you to take the first Team into what we think is the EsKay homeworld. You and Alexander have the most experience, in situations where plague is a possibility, of any other courier on contract to us. It had only made sense; to this day no one knew what had paralyzed her. She had a vested interest in making sure the team stayed healthy, and an even bigger one in helping to find the bug.
Of course, they knew that. And they knew she would never buy out her contract until this assignment was over. Blackmail? Assuredly. But it was a form of blackmail she could live with.
