Chapter 14:
The ship took fire. Jessica was jolted forward, away from Talon just as a wave of Gorlites spilled into the ship. Her weapons fired. Her eyes tracked the movements of the ones closest to her, and she came in low and fast, her weapons blasting and smoking.
She dropped an overheated blaster just as the grip began to smolder after a lucky shot from a Gorlite weapon hit that blaster, and nearly took her hand too.
Angry, and more than just a little frightened, she fought harder, snatching up a weapon someone else had dropped from their hand to the floor. Talon came into her line of vision as he used the butt of a weapon to crack open the skull of a Gorlite.
Jessica could not breathe. The enemy just kept coming, disgorging themselves from the ships surrounding Talon’s. Enemy fire kept rattling the ship, and she knew it was just a matter of time before the ship blew apart, killing them all.
Talon knew it too because he shouted, “We have to take this fight to the ground. We are one ship against way too many.”
Jessica called back, “I will cover you!”
She laid down a heavy burst of cover fire as Talon headed toward the controls. His body went taut with tension as he took over control of the ship, which was failing badly, and began to fly it back toward Old Earth.
The parasitic and repulsive race that they were fighting seemed intent on stopping them from making it to their destination. Talon managed to dodge out of the way of heavy fire from several ships that were firing upon them, but there were just too many ships and too many large bore weapons pointed in their direction.
Fire shot up along one side of their ship, and then hunks of metal blew away into outer space. Jessica, caught in a warp pull, had to grab onto the first thing she saw in an effort to keep from being sucked out of the ship.
The ship dipped and spun dangerously close to an enemy ship. One of the wings of Talon’s ship caught the side of one of those enemy ships, leaving a long tear along its side from which spilled that slimy ooze that presaged the presence of Gorlites.
The ones who had boarded the ship were mostly dead or dying and Jessica dispatched another with a brutal blast from the weapon that she had picked up to replace her destroyed one. She spotted Caleb on the floor writhing in pain, and she dashed towards him.
She went to her knees beside him, and her fingers probed at the bloody wound and his side. “I think you are going to live.”
Caleb, ever the joker, groaned out, “Maybe I’d be better off dying now. It doesn’t look like we are doing so well against them.”
Jessica said, “We are not. But when has that ever stopped us?”
Caleb said, “Never. I can stand up; can you help me to the med bay?”
Jessica helped him to his feet and then down the hallway. Quite a few of theirs had been wounded, some seriously. A few were dead. She marked their deaths with a silent nod toward their bodies and a growing rage in her heart.
This whole thing was unbearable. There had to be a way to stop this, but looking at the damage already done and weighing up the odds just made her heart go heavy, and her knees go weak and loose. Jessica was no coward, but that hard, practical streak within her could absolutely do the math on the chances of their survival and come up with about a zero-percent chance.
Once Caleb was at the med bay and being scanned, she ran back down the hallway toward the bridge. It was worse than she had feared. Talon was still flying, still headed for Old Earth, but it was clear that if they were going to land at all, it would be because they crashed.
Terror spiked along Jessica’s nerve endings as the ship began to spiral in a loose and looping pattern. She did not dare go to Talon’s side for fear of distracting him. Instead, she raced to a fallen crew member and helped them to their feet. The crew officer was merely dazed and a little confused but not injured, and Jessica strapped him into a nearby chair, hoping that would be enough to save his life when they crashed.
Talon was strapped in at the controls, and everyone else on the bridge was finding something to fasten themselves to. The air was thick with tension and a sort of grim certainty that this was it, this was how they died. Not in a heated battle, exactly, but close enough for those whose race and religion worshipped death by battle.
As the features of the planet got clearer and as the ship hurtled closer and closer to that surface, Jessica realized just how little she wanted to die. She wanted to live. She wanted to live and have a life with Talon.
She had no idea what kind of life they could have together, really. She just knew that she loved him and that he had the same love for her that she had for him. She just knew that they belonged together and that it would be a tragedy if they died this way, and so soon, without ever being able to enjoy the love that they had found with each other.
She railed at that impending death. She wanted to bargain with it but there was no bargaining with death, and she knew it. The grim specter of the end of her existence, and not just her death but the death of all of those aboard that ship, hung across her mind, blocking out all other thought.
Talon shouted, “I’m going to try to land before the ship simply rips itself apart! Everyone just hold on!”
Jessica stared at his back, thinking, “Hold me. I wish you could. I wish I could hold you and that you could hold me.”
Talon couldn’t hold her. He had his hands full just trying to hold the ship steady enough to get it out of that spin and into a position suitable for whatever type of landing they would be able to make.
The ship continued to plummet downward and so did her heart. Time stretched out, the seconds ticking by far too fast but taking an eternity at the same time. Jessica wanted to be brave. She wanted to keep her eyes open and to face death with courage and conviction, but as the planet’s surface came alarmingly close, she had to bite her lips together to hold back a scream, and her eyes squeezed shut despite her best efforts to keep them open.
A hard jolt made her teeth click down onto her tongue. The taste of her blood, coppery and rich, filled her mouth and left her feeling both sick and somehow alive. The smell of fire roasting both enemy flesh and metal made her hand come up and cup her nose and mouth.
Her breath blew warm against her palm, and a small trickle of blood came from her tongue and slid down the corner of her mouth. The ship jolted and bounced yet again, hewing sideways and then taking a hard spin. There was a thick crumpling sound followed by several long and loud bangs. The air burst of an explosion and the crackle of more flames hit the air, as did screams from somewhere nearby.
