<Just be there.> Rick pushed onward.
* * *
Rick was immediately grateful he’d taken the opportunity to recharge the cold gas thruster tanks. He’d burned a lot of pressure to catch up, and more to attempt to match speed. He’d crashed into one ship at high speed; he didn’t want to go it again.
When he was within a kilometer, he realized he could control his fall with arms and legs! There was enough of the gas giant’s atmosphere to provide minimal aerodynamic control. He’d been skydiving several times while with Mickey Finn, though never into a gas giant. He wasn’t sure if anyone had skydived into a gas giant. Yay me, history!
He could feel his temperature beginning to fall. Even though this gas giant was ‘hot’ on the surface of its atmosphere, hot was a relative term. It was 173 Kelvin at the surface, which was 100 below Celsius. Now as he plummeted into the ever-thickening clouds, it was 162 and falling.
“If it ain’t one thing, it’s the other,” he said.
A second later, his radar pinged a nearby target. His target, the base fragment, had been shedding house-sized pieces ever since he’d closed with it. Luckily for him, those pieces were from the sides, and he’d been coming in down the middle. He looked at the radar signal. It was Vestoon. Rick heaved a sigh. He’d been afraid the Wrogul would choose self-preservation over helping.
He noticed as he approached that the fragment was falling toward the strange black storm. He hoped he wouldn’t get to see what it was made of up close. The starship was just behind Rick as he fell onto the battleship hull, using his jets at the last to come in for a landing. There was some gravity now, which was alarming. Gas giants had ferocious gravity wells. If they fell too far, not even a fusion torch could get them out.
Despite some gravity to hold him, he still used magnetic grapples to help him walk. He’d scanned the hull in detail as he approached and had already found a spot. It wasn’t an airlock, but he didn’t have time to look for one. Using his arm lasers, he cut through the exposed hull section. No explosion of atmosphere came out as he cut through, so the interior was in vacuum.
<I have docked at an airlock 200 meters away. Note my weapons fire.>
Rick looked around and saw a laser flash. <Got it,> he said, and dropped inside.
<Rick…crackle…hear me?>
<You’re breaking up,> Rick replied. Must be the hull density.
<hiss…of ship…crackle…rising…snap…why they’re here.>
<Say again,> he said as he cut through another wall. This room had an airtight door, which he was able to quickly open. On the other side was another airtight door. He locked the first behind him and found an atmosphere spill. It worked, and when he opened the second, he was back in breathable atmosphere. He had to be getting close. The radio gave a single pop but didn’t produce any words he could understand. Rick didn’t have time to ponder; he needed to find Sato as fast as he could. The first corner he turned, he came to blood and bodies everywhere.
“Bingo.” It took him a moment of examining all the dead opSha before he found Sato, next to another door. Rick moved quickly but carefully. In the growing atmosphere, the floor was treacherous with buckets of blood and guts. Sato had done a real number on them. But as he got closer, Rick could see they’d done a number on him, too. The man was torn up, lying next to a dead Flatar.
He scanned around to be sure a fucking Tortantula wasn’t lurking. When he didn’t find one, he knelt next to the still form. He concentrated and cycled through all his vision types. There was a dim EM field, and his skin temp was down to 35 Celsius. If he was dead, he wasn’t very dead.
“God, he looks like he went through a meat grinder.” Rick felt the man’s neck, which had another gash in it. He was wasting his time, but after a second, he found a faint pulse! “One tough mother,” Rick said, and popped his thigh access hatch. Along with some basic survival items was a nanite dispenser.
“You should be glad you’re unconscious,” he said as he spun the dial to ‘Major Trauma,’ put it against Sato’s chest, and hit the button. A tiny needle punched through the skin and into the chest cavity, releasing a storm of nanites. A moment later, Sato’s back arched, and his mouth fell open in a silent scream. A full second later, he fell limp back to the floor.
“Hopefully that stabilized you,” he said, and scooped him into his arms. Turning, he headed back the way he’d come. The internal navigation system in his pinplants was working fine. He headed in that direction. He’d only taken a few steps when the decks shuddered crazily. “Oh, shit.” He tried to run, without much success. Another jolt sent him sprawling on the bloody floor.
Rick got Sato back up and resumed his course. He couldn’t do anything else. It was either try, or die, and he wasn’t the kind to give up. After all, how many marines had come back from the dead?
Another shudder, but this one was strange. It felt like the falling ship fragment had suddenly stabilized its fall. Then the gravity slowly increased. Not in a frightening way, but in a steady pace you’d only associate with intentional action. Could the fragment have a drive? He couldn’t think of any way Dakkar could do much of anything to affect the fragment. Vestoon was simply far too small to pull it off.
Whatever was happening, he still needed to get off the thing. He pushed on in the direction Dakkar had signaled from. After another minute, he came
