“I’ve racked up nearly fifteen thousand hours since then, love.”
“Whattaya live in the cockpit?”
“Ten, twelve hours a day, nearly every day.”
“You ever get bored?”
“Nope, flying is the best thing around, far as I can tell.”
“What about your pal there?” Jessica asked, pointing toward Loki who was manning the controls while Josh took a break. “How did you two end up flying together?”
Josh removed his helmet, setting it on the bench next to him. “Well, to be honest, I had a hard time keeping copilots. Seems most folk don’t care much for my stick style, if you get my meaning,” he said, scratching his scraggly mound of dirty blond hair.
“They think you’re too reckless, or something?”
“No, nothing like that. They just kept getting sick, tossin’ up all over the place. The inertial dampeners in the harvester ain’t worth a damn. Jeez, I was spending an hour after every flight just cleaning up the cockpit.”
Jessica shook her head. “You’re just a bit off, aren’t you?”
“That’s what Loki keeps telling me.”
“How long have you been flying with him?”
“Don’t rightly know, maybe six months, maybe more. What about you, then?” Josh asked, trying to change the subject. “Did they train you to be so tough in that Academy of yours?”
“Sort of. I was hoping to be a covert operative.”
“What’s a covert operative do?”
“They drop you on some alien world, where you try to blend in, gather intelligence on the enemy, maybe even conduct raids and such.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“Apparently, no more dangerous than flying with you. At least according to Vlad.”
Josh nodded. “Ah, the chief. He seems a good bloke.”
“Yeah, he’s all right. Pretty dependable in a firefight. That’s for sure.”
“Told us a lot about Earth and all the other night. Interesting stuff.” Josh looked over at Tug and Jalea, who were sitting at the far aft end of the compartment, talking amongst themselves in their own language. “What about those two?” Josh asked, his voice a bit more subdued. “He’s not exactly what I expected, for a terrorist that is. She is, but he’s not.”
“What makes you think they’re terrorists? Aren’t the Ta’Akar worse?”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of the Ta’Akar, not by a long shot. That Caius fella, he’s got a few loose ones upstairs, you know. But some of the stuff you hear about, the things the Karuzari have done. Well, it don’t seem much different, really. Just on a smaller scale is all.”
“So you don’t think they’re in the right?”
“Oh, they’re in the right. Gettin’ rid of the Ta’Akar would be the best thing to ever happen to this part of the galaxy. Just don’t know that they’re goin’ about it in the best way. That’s all.”
“How so?”
“It’s like they’re on the outside, trying to get in by beating at the wall with hammers and chisels and the like. They need to find an easy way in, and then clean house all at once. Get it over and done with. Everyone knows you can’t fight a guerrilla war forever. Sooner or later, you’re gonna run out of guerrillas.”
“Ten minutes out, Josh,” Loki called over his shoulder from the cockpit.
“Enough philosophizing,” Josh said with a grin. He reached for his helmet, donning it on his way forward.
“Hell, this ain’t nothing,” Josh proclaimed as he took his seat in the cockpit. “You could fly a planet between these rocks.”
“It’s an asteroid belt, Josh, not a ring system,” Loki teased.
“You find our rock yet?” Josh asked, ignoring his remark.
“If we come starboard about thirty and down a bit, she should be dead ahead. Gonna have to brake pretty hard to keep from smacking into her, though.”
“I believe that’s how we always do it,” Josh bragged.
“What, the braking hard or the smacking into her?”
“Always with the negativity, Loki.” Josh fired the maneuvering thrusters as he applied power to the main propulsion system, changing their vector as he brought the ship onto its new heading.
“Standard braking maneuver, I assume?”
“Yup,” Josh said as he prepared his ship for the next maneuver. He looked up and saw that the asteroid was fast filling the windows. “Pitching up.” He pulled the nose of the ship up and fired the main landing thrusters. Second only to the main drive in raw thrust, it was the fastest way he knew to slow a ship down in a hurry. He could’ve approached at a lower velocity, but then that would just leave him visible to any ships nearby even longer.
“You know, you didn’t have to come in this fast,” Jessica commented.
“Just trying to be covert,” he responded.
A few minutes later, the shuttle matched the asteroids velocity on its orbital path around its parent star, leaving the shuttle holding a position only a few hundred meters away. Josh pitched the nose back down to take a look.
“Aw,” he exclaimed with disappointment, “we’ve gotta be at least a hundred meters away.” He turned to look at Loki. “Did you pad the reading again?”
“Shut up. I’m trying to find the entrance.”
“It will be on the underside,” Tug explained, stepping up behind them. “You’ll see a deep crack. Go down into the crack, and you’ll see the entrance on the port side. There is an overhang that conceals it from above. You can only see it from within the crack.”
“Cool. Now we’re flying into a crack?” Josh stated as he pitched the nose down slightly and applied forward thrust.
The asteroid slid up and over them as they slowly approached.
“Aurora, Shuttle One,” Loki called. “We’re at the asteroid and moving in. We’ll be losing comms any moment now.”
“Copy that. Good luck,” the Aurora’s comm-officer called back. His voice was already sounding tinny and broken, as their signal degraded.
“Activating terrain scanners,” Loki reported. “Recording all scan data.”
“Throw some extra light on it, will ya,” Josh asked.
Loki reached up above his left shoulder to the overhead side panel. Running his finger along a row of rocker switches, he found the right one and clicked it on.
Outside the shuttle, several banks of exterior lights burst to life, washing the surface of the asteroid above them in bright, white daylight.
“Dang. Scary looking rock, ain’t it?” Josh commented.
“You’re going to have to flip over,” Tug said, “so you can hover using your thrusters. The asteroid may not be that big, but it is big enough to have some gravity.”
“Really?” Josh said using a mock-idiot voice. “It’s got gravity?” As quickly as he had turned it on, he turned his mock voice back off again. “Thanks Pops. I think we’ve got this one.”
“The gravity will change as you travel deeper into the heart of the asteroid,” Tug continued, ignoring their sarcasm.
“Yeah, we understand. Just take your seat, okay,” Loki said. He knew that if he didn’t get the old rebel leader off their backs, Josh was going to get them in trouble with another smart remark.
Tug resigned himself to the fact that his life was in the hands of these two young pilots, both of which he highly doubted had ever flown under such conditions. But he had learned many decades ago that his destiny was not always in his own hands.
“Is that going to be a problem for the Aurora?” Jessica asked Tug as he took a seat across from her. “The gravity, I mean.”
“Once we are inside and the facility is powered up, there are compensation mechanisms built into the crack
