Neighbors by Brian Whiting

Author:Brian Whiting [Whiting, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2018-08-27T06:00:00+00:00

* * *

Alex quickly typed Fena a message.

How did you end up on this ship,

anyway?

During the emergency liftoff, when

the Nuboko took off from the

Complex, I was not onboard yet.

The Seraph was still in the bay, so I

boarded it instead.

Fena carefully used the tiny stylus in her bulky gloves to adjust the

power settings and rotational angles of the drive disks. The emergency craft

slipped out of the cargo bay as though the Seraph had simply left something behind. She wondered how her family was doing, then she thought

about Stacy.

Following carefully-plotted coordinates and velocities, she flung her

craft towards the enemy fleet. She had to wait several minutes before she

had to do anything, and Jerome’s face appeared in the corner of the laptop.

“What makes you think you’re going to survive this?” His tone was

sour; he was pissed off.

“So far, they only can attack us by boarding. This ship is too small and

fast to board with a pod. It’s fine! I’ve got to go.” She shut down the chat.

The emergency craft had no windows, so she had to rely on the very

limited sensor data the ship provided her to navigate. Once she managed

to link the sensor data from the Seraph, she felt much more confident.

Now she had a 3D representation of the fleet on her laptop. She fine-tuned

the course to fling her across the path of one of the carriers and down the

center of the fleet itself. She had four minutes left.

She opened the craft’s doors; they burst open as the escaping air left the

craft in just short of an instant. She would have been flung out into space

herself, but she was buckled securely into her chair. She released herself

from the chair and moved towards the large box. Easing off a small clamp,

she pushed the large box out of the craft with her legs.

She sat back down in the chair and buckled herself in. One minute

left. She tapped the automated flight sequence button she had already

programmed. The ship high-G maneuvered as Fena was tossed against

her straps.

Her ship silently passed the nose of the Zorn carrier, far too close for

her comfort. Several destroyers passed beneath her, as though they didn’t

145

care that she was there. Her craft made another hard turn to send her straight down the middle of the fleet.

She eyed the two battleships on the right of her screen, one each above

and below her. Her laptop screen went red, and she panicked as the stylus

hit the wrong part of the screen. She lost precious seconds figuring out

what the warning was for.

Impact alert!

She put the craft in manual flight and made a series of angle adjust-

ments and power bursts to move the craft out of the way of the incom-

ing object.

Her eyes widened as she realized it was not object, but objects. The sen-

sors were giving her confusing information, and she couldn’t rely on it to

navigate away from the incoming unknowns.

“I need windows!” she shouted into her headgear.

An idea occurred to her. She plotted a new course on her screen, much

like ‘connect the dots.’ The computer gave an error message.

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