“I studied the medic course after I was sold from my sisters. And piloting became a necessity.” JC hates remembering her last days at Eir Basilica.
“Don’t fence. I know you have secrets about this crew, and not from scanning us.”
“Amye, you hold just as many secrets.”
“William shouldn’t be doing this. He’s not ready,” Amye closes the door to the cupboard, leaning her forehead against the door. “Couldn’t you just put a thought into his head? Make him see how bad this will go.”
“Even if I wanted to—no.”
“He’s the first man in my adult life to not pursue me to my bedroom…I don’t want him to die.”
“I don’t want him to die either.” JC steps out the door. “I’m going to preflight my Mecat. You have a few minutes before we jump. Tell Reynard how you feel.”
Scott slaps the berth door. “We got a minute until launch.”
Amye has no idea how long she has been lost in her thoughts of her captain.
“You were against this mission.”
“My time would be better served repairing the Dragon, but I won’t miss a chance to kill Mokarran. You get killed and I go back undercover, I miss my chance to kill more,” Scott orders. “Prepare to launch.”
“I’m not the one who needs to be prepared.”
DROPSHIP OR JUMPSHIPS are tubular spacecraft with massive thrusters on each end and little armor plating. The crazy pilots calculate hyperspace jumps within the planet’s atmosphere and use the thrusters to stop. In those seconds, they eject all Mecats before blasting out of the atmosphere for the rejump into hyperspace maneuvers, possibly stranding them as molecules in an interdimensional space.
Mark runs his preflight check again. “You didn’t have to buy the most expensive Mecat on the lot.”
Reynard defends his choice. “I didn’t buy it for the price. I bought it for the armor rating.”
“I’m not too impressed with the drive system. It needs to be run outright to loosen her up.”
Something Scott warned him in choosing to move forward with this mission.
“We’re a large heavily armored target unlike the small craft your telepath bought,” Mark says.
“She felt comfortable in it.”
“She has no armor. She’ll need to stay behind us. Function as cleanup and eliminate any ground troops on the field.”
“Ground troops? In a tank battle?” Reynard questions.
“Sabotage teams attempt to damage leg joints with rocket launchers, others provide medical relief and recovery for those lucky few pilots who eject.”
“Ground forces weren’t covered in the simulations.”
“They don’t want you thinking about stepping on people or even the structural damage done to buildings in urban areas. When buildings collapse from the vibration given off by the Mecats, civilians die.”
“Explains why so much combat takes place in open fields.”
Reynard defers to the cadet’s experience. “The dropship dumps us outside the capital city?”
“The less fuel cells we burn, the better. We’ll need the energy for the plasma cannons once we unrack our missiles. Use the projectile cannons last on damaged craft with broken armor.”
“Missiles, plasma, projectile. Got it.” Reynard rechecks all power levels in the energy weapons. “No air support for many dropships.”
“Not even those privately owned by Lances.” Mark reruns his preflight checklist. “Those ships are their lifeline to get off-world.”
Reynard’s never thought to ask: “What happens if the Lance is employed by the losing side?”
“They don’t get paid. They may not be able to afford to jump off-world. Depends on the terms of surrender. Most victors let the Mercs leave unscathed. Never know when you need to employ them, and if you slaughter a losing group of mercs, it doesn’t create good relations. I’ve heard of losing mercenaries being employed to secure the soldiers of the losing side.”
“Mercs are loyal to credits, not congress.”
Mark asks, “Commander, you have a reason you want to pilot a Mecat? You’d do just as well piloting the Dragon.”
“If I’m anything, I’m now a soldier. Maybe not the jump-in-the-trench-and-march-twenty-miles kind, but I won’t push papers. I’ve no stomach for assassinations through a rifle scope. I want to meet my enemy head on.”
The seatbelt harness presses into Reynard’s chest. The artificial gravity of the jumpship shift to the gravity of the planet as the Mecat falls out of the launch bay. The shoulder straps dig into his skin as the Mecat’s thrusters fire. No simulation has prepared him for this. Gravity shifts again, and he fights with his stomach to keep his last meal down as well as keep his moistening hands on the joystick controllers. With it being his first drop, he knows he’d crash. Mark will keep the craft in flight; all he has to do is point and shoot.
The craft accelerates, burying him in his cushioned seat.
Everything moves so swiftly Reynard has no idea what to do. His brain wants him to halt the craft. Slow down. Figure out what to do next. Worse, since Mark pilots, he has no control over the vehicle.
Shrapnel from missiles pelts the metal hide of the vehicle. Mark keeps them a moving target. They have to stay moving in the air.
Mokarran attempt to destroy them before the surface landing.
A wounded Mecat crashing could still function as strategic emplacements doing just as much damage as a missile. A pilot could still release his payload in a last-ditch moment to wound the enemy and assist his Lance. Mecat power cores will level half a city block.
They must be demolished in the air and pulverized to nothing before the pieces hit the ground.
Battle Analyst Computers chirp as targets fill the screen. Reynard flips up the trigger guard on his joystick and twists. Crosshairs light up on the holographic display hovering before his canopy windshield. Now he targets and fires.
“Wait ’til we get lower!” Mark screams. “The recoil will slow my descent.”
Despite all his reading about piloting a Mecat, so much seems to have been left out of his training. Reynard won’t question the expertise of the cadet. The kid
