Repeat: Adrift Homeless 1x00 "A MIsguided Effort"

ADRIFT: HOMELESS
Season One: “Rebirth”

ACT ONE
“The Second Rebellion”

1x00 “A Misguided Effort”

Released on http://www.patreon.com/99geek September 30 2016

There was a shudder as their small gunship lifted off, and a computer screen in front of Tameka blinked out. It was the altitude gauge, and they were going to need it. She smacked it, and the screen sputtered to life again. The ship was already falling apart, and they had only just left the ground. She wasn’t sure if the ship would hold together, and she was the one who redesigned it.

“You know Meka,” Tameka’s darker skinned best friend Jack said from the seat beside her. “Manual gauges don’t short out.”

“Yes,” Tameka humoured him, “but manual gauges can’t be programmed with an alternative mode upon leaving the atmosphere.” The Blazkor gunships hadn’t originally been designed for space flight. They had been used during the first rebellion, when she was still just a young kid. They had become symbolic of Blazkor might back then, sporting two massive machine gun turrets, one above and one below, that were able to track multiple opponents at once.

Sure the gunship had almost no maneuverability, resembling little more than a flying brick from a distance, but this brick came with two long multi-directional turbine thrusters on either side and was able to fly at slow but steady speeds or hover in place to maintain fire on ground targets. There was a time a fleet of Blazkor gunships was a sight that invoked terror as they descended upon their targets without mercy. But that was a time long past, and there were no nations left to fight alongside Blazkor in this rebellion.

Hymalious City, the largest nation now on the planet, was once named capitol after the first rebellion cost more lives than anyone cared to remember. What followed were two generations of Hymalious City growing into their very own superpower, and enveloping every surrounding nation until they had successfully taken over the whole world without firing a single bullet. That was until they came to the countries of Blazkor and Iptsil.

It was Tameka’s mother who led the defense, wielding fleets of the same Blazkor gunships that Tameka led a squadron of now. They tore up armies and cities, able to fly in for maximum carnage, and then away before the arrival of reinforcements. But for all their victories, Iptsil still fell and Blazkor was pushed back until they were up against a wall. A figurative wall that resembled more a large expansive desert.

Tameka, studied in both physics and engineering, had a love of guns and weapon design. She had in fact been in charge of the refit for the gunships, which included her newly designed railgun turrets. Before, in the Mark I’s,  they were fast shooting, low impact machine gun turrets great for chewing up personnel but less effective against heavily-armoured vehicles.  Her new guns worked with electromagnetically charged projectiles capable of reaching a very high level of kinetic energy.

It was like the difference between dropping a rock at terminal velocity and an asteroid at speeds far faster. Sure they fired at a slower rate, and had a far slower turning radius, but they would be far more effective where the fleet was headed. Tameka had also thickened the hull armour platings to counteract the vacuum of space, and replaced all the internal equipment with digital readouts and higher powered computer cores. And that was just the tip of the iceberg for what she’d had to accomplish in such a short time with only a crew of twenty. Tameka was pretty sure she’d been responsible for an easy eighty percent of the twelve refitted gunships they were now launching. What else did she expect from being on the losing side of a rebellion?

“You okay?” Jack asked, leaning over to put his hand on hers with concern. She supposed she must have been a little vacant behind the eyes. She squeezed his hand, and wondered if her father’s skin had been as dark as his. Her mother was light brown, and Tameka landed somewhere in the middle. She’d never known her father, only short descriptions of him that her mother threw out carelessly when she was drunk.

Seeing Jack’s worried look, she remembered how now might not have been the best time to get lost in thoughts about her heritage. “You with me right now?” Jack asked her.

She gave him a smile, and patted him on the shoulder so he’d focus back on where he was going. After all, as pilot, the ship was in his hands. “I was just thinking about mom’s briefing,” she told him, not completely lying. She could still hear her mom’s voice in her head, as she got out of her chair to wander the cockpit.

They had no further to go. They only had one city left, on the very boundary of the deep desert, with Hymalious City forces outposted on all sides. The enemy had overwhelming odds, and still their forces did not advance.

Instead her mother had received reports from her scouts and spies that the reigning superpower was reorganizing forces into a new project. It was something in deep space, something big, and something that definitely involved their military. Spaceflight was a popular theory among scientists on Rommeria, but no one had ever the funds they’d needed to actually make any sort of expedition beyond their atmosphere.

That didn’t mean Tameka didn’t have ideas how it could be done, ideas she’d put into practice at her mother’s order. It had been a tall order, but Tameka spent the better of a month preparing the twelve remaining gunships from a fleet of once hundreds, upgrading their engines and installing life support systems among uncountable improvements. She programmed the very operating systems that controlled each and every subroutine. The fleet of ships were truly all her babies.

And one of her babies wasn’t flying right. She was watching the small squadron behind their ship on a computer screen from over the shoulder of one of her gunners. The ship seated four: A pilot, a co-pilot, and two gunners behind on either side. The cockpit was rectangular, expanding back quite a ways and leaving a lot of room for weapons, cargo, or troops. Most of that space now was taken up by a large, but very necessary, fuel tank. The weapons consoles were against opposite sides, and it was over one that she leaned to spot the struggling ship in the woman’s display.

“The right engine is burning inconsistently,” she told the woman in front of her, pointlessly. Dinah, Tameka was pretty sure the woman’s name was. They’d gone to school together, but Dinah had never really left an impression on Tameka, and based on the woman’s current expression Meka was pretty sure Dinah had no opinion of her either. She left her old classmate’s side without a word to grab the radio back at her co-pilot’s chair. “Blackflight seven, this is Blackflight leader,” she said into the mic, “you’re putting too much coolant into your right engine.”

“It’s a little sluggish,” the pilot of Blackflight seven said back. Tameka couldn’t remember the names of everyone in their squadron, though it sounded like seven’s pilot was a woman. “But the readout shows mixture strength at fourteen percent.”

“The readout must be off by like thirty degrees,” Tameka insisted. “You’re gonna have to compensate for a faulty readout, I’m sorry.”

Jack shared another worried look with Tameka. She didn’t think she’d ever seen this many worried looks from him before, and they’d known each other since childhood. “We gonna even make it into space?” he asked her, understandably.

“Absolutely,” she lied, not nearly as confident as she was trying to let on. The desert was wooshing past as they continued to accelerate, dirt passing into a blur. They would have to reach escape velocity to leave the atmosphere, and that meant going fast. The hope was to pick up some speed staying low through the deep desert. It was one airspace not under constant surveillance by Hymalious city forces.

“A lot of this territory hasn’t been seen by human eyes in centuries,” Tameka commented to her friend.

“Or in other words,” Jack said, proceeding to mock Tameka. “Oh look! Sand.”

“There really doesn’t seem to be a whole lot else here,” Tameka agreed with her friend.

Jack glanced over his instruments and something caught his eye. “I’m picking up a reading about ten clicks from here,” he said, his hands working furiously across the panel. “Oh wait,” he added, “It’s just sand.”

“Alright,” Tameka surrendered, “I get it. There’s nothing in the deep desert.” She pulled a keyboard out from her dashboard and switched to the command prompt interface. She loaded a map of the planet, and patched in the GPS data to track their progress through the deep desert. It was hard to type with the ship shuddering from the speed, the hull buffeted by the planet’s heavy, dry atmosphere.

“At our current rate of acceleration we’re gonna run out of desert in about twenty minutes,” She warned Jack, pleased at least by the improved acceleration of their engines. She pulled up the diagnostics chart and double checked that the temperature was holding at safe levels. The hard part was next.

“You ready to do this?” Jack asked, checking the speedometer. Tameka knew why he was so excited. They were pushing the improved engines to max, and hitting almost a thousand kilometers an hour. It was far faster than usual; unmodified gunships generally averaged four hundred kilometers an hour. Six hundred was the record. Until now. Her ships had to be installed with an improved power source for the guns, and she had the excess energy of the atomic core powering the engines. The fuel tank in the back was actually mostly filled with coolant keeping the whole thing from blowing up.

It was a desperate jury-rigging, but the times were never more desperate. If Hymalious City really had a secret weapon in space capable of wiping out an entire city with the push of a button, there was nothing anyone would be able to do to stop them.

“Do it,” she told Jack, signalling the okay order to the rest of the squadron. Jack pointed the ship into the sky and they began their ascent. The engines were still only powerful enough to get them into low Rommeria orbit. After that, the atomic core would also power the plasma thrusters, secondary engines that would replace the primary ones as soon as they hit vacuum.

“Remember you have to disengage the atmospheric jets before leaving the atmosphere,” She warned her friend. She would seal the primary engines not equipped to handle a vacuum, and Jack would then activate the secondary thrusters. They couldn’t be turned on until the ship was safely far enough above the planet because the excess plasma ejected by their engines burned so hot it would ignite the soup of invisible gases that made up their atmosphere. But if he waited too long before hitting the thrusters, they’d plummet back to Rommeria. Their timing for each move would have to be perfect.

Oh, and synchronized with eleven other pilots.

Tameka was pressed hard against the back of her seat as they gained altitude, and the force of gravity pulled on each of them in turn. It was enough to push the wind from her lungs, and she grabbed at her armrest.

“You okay?” Jack asked her, and she caught him glancing at her out of the corner of his eye while he fought to maintain control.

The gunner Dinah called out something from the back. “She can't choke it,” Tameka’s old classmate said. “She never even completed basic training.” Tameka wondered if that was a dig on her post-secondary education. Dinah, like most students in Tameka’s class, had gone on to military training after high school. Tameka was the only one who pursued an education in science and engineering at a foreign school. When she finally returned home everyone had been a little different. Harder and colder, the only one who had seemed to hold onto any vestige of themselves was Jack.

“She’ll be fine,” Jack said, in support of Tameka. She was glad he did too, as her breath still hadn’t quite returned yet. “Meka is the strongest person I know.”

She could feel the blood rushing from her head and her vision was getting woozy, but still she reached out with everything she could to read the altitude gauge. “We’re at thirty kilometers and climbing,” she told Jack quietly, only starting to find her voice again with laborious effort.

The ship shuddered from an air current, or any number of other possible factors, and Meka held the armrest of her chair tightly. It was certainly exhilarating, and on any given day Tameka enjoyed a little exhilaration. She could even feel a slight smile form in the corner of her mouth, enjoying the challenge. But Dinah was probably right. She shouldn’t have come. She wasn’t qualified. She wasn’t trained in military operations, and yet still her mother had put her in charge. It was her first command, and Tameka was honoured for it. Her mother had never shown her so much confidence before. But who knew more about gunships, now, than her? If some system went wrong and malfunctioned, who else would have any hope in fixing it? Only she knew exactly what her ships were capable of.

The ship shuddered again, and Tameka’s stomach lurched. It occurred to her, only now, that if anything went wrong on this mission chances were likely that they would all be dead before she could do much of anything.

“This is just like Death Spiral,” Dinah called out with a holler, bringing the focus again to Tameka’s lack of training. The Death Spiral was an infamous rollercoaster run by the Blazkor Military Academy known for buckling the knees of even the most hardened recruit. Their militia wasn’t separated into air, sea, and land. Their soldiers were trained for any circumstance, and put through an endless series of drills even after active deployment.

“Fifty kilometers up,” She updated her crew. They would have to be close to two hundred kilometers above sand level before they could even think of engaging the plasma drive.

“I should have brought a book,” Tameka barely heard Jack mutter and she laughed. She couldn’t possibly imagine reading a book in this kind of turbulence, not even that picture book about the giant red mouse. She reached out her hand, and Jack grabbed it, controlling the gunship with only his left.

They were really going to do it. They were going to make it into space, stop the construction of an evil superweapon, and save all of man and womankind. Not too bad for a day’s work, but Tameka always knew she was meant for greatness. Her mother was the leader of the only remaining rebellious force on Rommeria. On top of that she had the highest IQ of anyone born in Blazkor in over a generation.

They were at a hundred and twenty kilometers up now. The key would be to try and settle into a low orbit, pick up speed in a slingshot around the planet, and then break at escape velocity over Hymalious city, past the large space bridge that extended from the planet’s capitol into the vacuum.

She nodded to Jack and he released her hand to change their angle of ascent. “I could try to guesstimate this by sight,” he joked with her, “but a little of that magic Meka math might help get this right.”

It was hard for her to think as she was shook like a martini, but she appreciated that Jack was trying to distract her with a task. She did some quick math in her head, substituting in their practical altitude. “Aim for twenty-two degrees over the horizon.”

“You’re the boss,” Jack said, following her command.

Dinah whispered something to the other gunner that sounded like “Gods save us” but Tameka ignored the woman best she could. She’d done her homework, and there was no one better qualified than her to make these calls. She couldn’t let her old classmate try to drag her down. A second guess could mean life or death.

The skies were as clear as could be, but there was rarely a cloud in the skies over Rommeria. It didn’t rain all that often. Tameka could see for kilometers in any direction, and could still look down and spot the sandy surface. It was very far down. They were nearing three hundred kilometers up. “This should be far enough.”

“Alright,” Jack said, reaching over to a switch on the dashboard. “Disengaging atmospheric jets,” he pulled the throttle back with his other hand and then flipped the switch on the dashboard. “Done. Now I’m gonna power on the plasma drive.”

“I’m gonna give you a little extra power from the weapons,” Tameka told her friend, making it so on her computer panel. “I wanna make sure the jumpstart holds. Now doesn’t seem like the right time for performance issues.”

“You’re telling me,” Jack agreed with her. He lifted the glass case back on the secondary yoke beside his seat. Grabbing it with one hand, and holding the pilot stick in the other, he squeezed the trigger on the plasma drive. Tameka could feel it roar to life at their backs, pushing them into their seat again.

Jack started laughing, though it wasn’t immediately apparent to Tameka why. “The power on this thing,” he cooed.

Tameka breathed a sigh of relief. “The drive has stabilized. We’ve got thrust.”

“I can’t believe it worked,” she could hear Dinah comment from the back. “Now we’ll see if the guns work half as well as that just did.”

“I assure you,” Tameka said behind her at Dinah, “the hard part is behind us. Guns happen to be my specialty. I have a lot more faith in them than I did us making it to this point. And frankly far more faith than I have in my gunners. Instead of worrying about if the guns will work, how bout just worrying about your job?” This woman was starting to get on her nerves, and she didn’t even remember sharing any classes with her. There must have been at least one, but Meka couldn’t think of it. “Trust me,” she then repeated, “the hard part is behind us.”

She pulled blankets from a compartment. “Though you might want to wear these,” she told them sheepishly. “It could get a little cold in here.”

She handed a thick comforter sized quilt to Jack who looked at it in concern before slinging it around his shoulders. “How cold we talking about?” he asked her.

“Don’t worry about it,” She insisted, passing blankets behind her. “I’m sure the insulation will help a lot.”

“Alright, take a look. That’s the space bridge,” Jack said, pointing to something in the distance in front of them.

“Hymalious city,” Tameka said quietly as they drew closer. It was a large metropolis with towering sandy brown skyscrapers and dusty roads. The further the buildings were from the center, the smaller they were. Even now they were flying over municipals of huts and other run down low income real estate properties.

“Won’t they see us?” Dinah asked from the back, as if she’d found a hole in Tameka’s plan. “Or am I stepping outside my job again?”

“They don’t actively track every object this high up,” Tameka explained impatiently. “Even if they happen to spot us with a randomized check, we’ll be long out of range before they can scramble fighters.”

*     *

“All squadrons launch,” John said into his headset, as his fighter plane lurched into motion and launched him from the Rebirth into deep space. “I repeat. Squadrons one and two are a go.”

The swirling nebula that surrounded their solar system was beautiful. Every time he launched it was like a shock, a little heart attack that only got ever so slightly easier each time. He had to focus. There was no time for spacegazing, or taking in the beauty of their Moonstar up close. “This is squadron leader, initiating roll call.”

“Two shows all green,” a woman’s voice said into the radio. It was Sara, John’s co-pilot for years. “Every day the life support feeds me oxygen okay, I’m calling it a win.”

“Three with no problems on my screen,” A gruff voice spoke. That was Stevie Oxfrey. Better known as Ox. He was older, a veteran pilot from before John’s time. But John knew the man could fly circles around most the rest of them. Not him of course, but most of the others. “Not that I feel any safer.” He hadn’t yet adapted to their change in scenery. Flying over Rommeria didn’t feel quite the same in zero G.

The rest of their squad went through roll call, joining in formation behind him as they did so. “Our mission,” he told them through the radio “is to scout multiple self-propelled unidentified flying objects on an intercept course with project Rebirth.”

Sara’s voice came in through the radio. “Unidentified bogeys flying in space?” she asked for clarification. “I thought we were the only ones who could do that.”

John immediately dismissed her confusion. “Reserve judgement until we have visual confirmation,” he said, figuring it just as likely to be nothing as it was to be anything. All this was new to them. None of the instruments they’d been installing on the base worked half the way they were supposed to. This was easily just a false positive. There certainly wasn’t anything on his screens yet. Then again, he was stuck with a planet based sensor that wasn’t much use in the directionlessness of space.

Their fighters had been modified for deep space with far stronger armour plating, and integrated life support systems that kept oxygen and temperature perfectly level. Other than that, the G32 Endermans (Named after famous engineer Thomas Enderman) had a fairly rudimentary cockpit, and that hadn’t changed one bit. There were wires running through the cockpit to all the different systems of the snubfighter, and that had been like that before the modifications were ever tacked on top. The Enderman was like an atmospheric fighter that never stopped evolving. Next it would be adapted to swim in the water or some such, a most useless modification when their planet didn’t have any deep bodies of water.

They were orbiting the moon; the project they were set with defending was placed on the far side so that it would not be spotted in the night sky over Rommeria. Not even with a telescope. They would have to get to the other side of the moon to intercept whatever it was out here in the dark with them.

“Maybe it’s one of Dennis’ boogiemen,” Sara suggested over the radio. A few weeks ago John’s fourth pilot in his squadron had insisted on seeing something moving out there during a patrol. It didn’t come up on any of their sensors, local or long range. He insisted that as he approached it, it had lit up and burst away into the swirling gases of the nebula that surrounds their solar system, immediately disappearing.

“It was real,” Dennis insisted to them through the comms. “I didn’t make it up.”

“Like when you told Ox that you’d slept with me?” Sara asked him back.

“That was fresh out of flight school eleven years ago,” Dennis insisted. “Are you never gonna let that one go?”

“We all know here,” Sara continued, “the only person in this squadron that comes close to meeting my standards is One.” John smiled, but chose not to weigh in on the conversation. Acknowledging any attraction with anyone in his squadron would be beyond inappropriate. “Let it be known I’m not a slut.”

“Just a brown noser then,” Ox said, with a gruff laugh.

Sara’s mic clicked. “You’re just jealous cause you’re fat n’ old.”

“What was that?” Ox asked, the third fighter in John’s squadron breaking formation to troll behind John’s co-pilot. “Slut.”

“Cut the chatter squadron one,” John chastised them. “Ox, get back in formation. We’re almost to the other side of Moonstar.” Moonstar was an affectionate name the people on Rommeria had for the moon, pretty much their replacement star at night. With the swirling nebula around their planet, the moon was the closest thing to a star in their night sky.

“She called me fat,” Ox complained, nonetheless obliging his superior officer.

“You’re all overweight losers,” John chided them gently. “Why do you keep fighting for Two’s affections? None of you are in her league.”

“Maybe Thalia,” Sara said.

“What?” spoke up a feminine voice. It was Seven, really One from squadron two.

“Seriously,” John said, needing to get his squadron in line. “The next person who breaks radio silence gets double patrols next week.

“What?” Thalia said through the radio again.

“You don’t count Seven,” Sara told Thalia. “You just go on being cute.” John supposed that didn’t count either.

“What?”

John thought he spotted the unidentified bogeys. He captured them on his targeting computer, which zoomed in with an external camera to give him a snapshot of the lead ship. They were definitely space faring crafts of some kind, but small. There was no way they could be flying Hymalious City colours. John knew intimately every ship in their fleet capable of space flight, and every contract on order.

“Those look like Blazkor gunships to you?” Sara asked over the comms.  If it were true, he had to commend their effort. He counted about eleven. Maybe twelve. It was still hard to see from that distance.

Ox’s voice rang through next. “I shot down plenty them things in the war.”

The first rebellion was before John’s time. “Remind me again,” he asked his squad. “What do the rebels arm those aerial gunships with?”

“Two three sixty degree rotating dot thirty machine gun turrets,” Ox reminded his squadron leader. “One above, and one below.”

That was what he thought. “They have to know those won’t penetrate our reinforced armour.”

There was a flash of light from one of the gunships, and the light seemed to streak across space, a brilliant beautiful white. When it hit one of the fighters in his squadron it went right through, like a hot knife through butter, and the fighter ripped apart in a fiery chaotic mess. John’s heart dropped. That had been Six, their newest recruit. He had only just met the kid’s parents.

“Fak me,” Sara swore over the radio.

Dennis’ voice came through next and he sounded panicked. “Those aren’t thirty cals, man.”

“Enough chatter squadron one,” John chastised again. “Let’s show squadron two why we’re the best of the best. Both squadrons break formation and evasive maneuvers.”

All the gunships were firing now, the first shot an obvious success for them. John’s squadron broke away from him, and they all ducked and weaved through the blinding white light ahead of them. One shaft of light came straight at John, and he ducked his fighter below it. He skimmed the Enderman along the shaft of light, and swung his wing at the last moment to avoid a second shaft.

It was almost like a dance, his fighters all closing the distance between them and their opponents with every volley of shots. John rolled around another shot, and got target lock confirmation from his targeting computer. Arming his missiles, he sandwiched his fighter between two shots, and let the missiles fly from his wings.

“Missiles launch,” he told his squadron, watching as the warheads streaked their way across the darkness to collide not with the ship he was aiming at, but one behind it. It erupted in a large fireball that quickly snuffed out in the vacuum of space and, though it wasn’t his target, he supposed that was good enough. They were keeping formation so tightly they were like one large target. They probably didn’t have the best maneuverability, but they certainly made up for it with swiveling turrets that could strike from any angle.

“We have to close the distance,” John told his squadron, threading like a needle through the web of burning white light and hitting his afterburners. “Release payloads, and then activate afterburners. We’ll swing past them and fly circles. Their turrets won’t be able to keep up.”

“Payloads away.”

“Payloads away.”

“Payloads away,” Sara’s voice came through. “Damn these shots are coming in fast.”

*

The Hymalious City G22 Endermans were coming in fast. Tameka didn’t know why she had thought they wouldn’t have any major defenses. It had been clear they were getting their materials into space through the space elevator, and she had assumed that all they’d have for defense would be stationary turrets. She had planned the attack on the assumption of surprise, and they were equipped to hit hard and fast, then disappear before the enemy could counterattack.

She’d strengthened the hull for the vacuum of space, but the tension on the metal was unimaginable. She had no way to condition test it in atmosphere, and she had a serious concern that it would buckle quickly under even light machine gun fire.

“We have to keep them back,” She yelled to her gunners, though it was already proving to be difficult. The fighters were almost right on top of them. They shouldn’t have gone with such a tight formation. Tactics that worked in atmosphere were different in space. She would have been better off spreading them out, but now was much too late for that.

“These turrets move too slow,” Dinah complained. “They keep dodging. They’re like flies I can’t swat.” One of the fighters soared straight over their cockpit, Jack just managing to avoid the fire of another by flying so close to that one. Dinah made a noise as she tried to swing her turret around to track the target behind them.

Tameka pulled Dinah’s view up on her main display. “No!” she yelled to the other woman, “Don’t shoot. You’ll hit one of ours.”

Dinah hesitated, but cursed Tameka. “I think I’m a better shot than that,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

As they argued, the fighter Dinah was tracking fired shots at the gunship behind them as it passed. The gunship tried to track the fighter and fire, but the fighter nimbly bobbed out of the way, the white streak of light searing through another gunship, and that ship imploded in a flash of fire immediately extinguished. The fighter continued to drift past the first gunship, but turned to fire on its broadside and the first ship imploded equally spectacularly and horrifically.

“Dammit,” Tameka said, bringing up the power distribution module on her computer. “I’m cutting weapons from the power grid and distributing everything I can to the engines.” She gave Jack a meaningful look. “I’m giving you all the juice I can. Use it.”

“You’re damned right I’m gonna,” Jack said, typing into the small keypad near his pilot yoke. “Plotting the fastest trajectory around the moon.” He squeezed the thruster trigger as tightly as he seemed capable, and their gunship jolted forward.

“You can’t do this,” came a complaint from the back. She could hear Dinah undoing her seat straps, and she immediately did the same. They both rose and met in the middle of the cockpit.

“You can’t leave them to die,” Dinah yelled at Tameka, horror painted on her face. It was turning red. “We don’t leave our own behind,” she insisted, looking down on Tameka. “That’s one of them rules you don’t get cause you’re not one of us.” Dinah pushed Tameka into the side of the ship just as the entire gunship rocked from evasive maneuvers.

“We’ve got one on us,” Jack called behind him. “You girls wanna bench this catfight till after we die?”

Tameka ignored him. Maybe Dinah’s face wasn’t red, maybe it was Tameka just seeing red. “What’s another one of these rules?” she asked, grabbing Dinah to stabilize herself as the ship rocked again. “Always complete the mission?” She swung Dinah around and smacked her into the other side of the gunship. “How can we do that if we’re dead?”

Dinah jabbed Tameka across the jaw. “You’re insane!” she roared at Tameka. “What is one ship gonna do against whatever’s behind that moon?”

Tameka tumbled, and grabbed at her jaw.

“Listen,” Dinah said, punching a button on the radio. Screams came through of panic, fear, and death. “Those are our people dying out there for you. That’s our entire fleet.”

Tameka was still rubbing her jaw, and was surprised to find Dinah offering her a hand. She didn’t take it. “The mission’s changed,” she told the woman, giving her a sour look as she got to her feet. They were both panting furiously.

“I lost that other fighter by the way,” Jack interrupted them. “If anyone cares.”

Tameka went to the radio and grabbed the mic. “This is Blackflight leader to squadron,” she called out to her people. “Any remaining forces, retreat! Try to lead their fighters towards Rommeria and away from us.” She wanted to say more but nothing came to mind. “Good luck.”

“You can't be okay with this,” Dinah said to Jack, immediately seeming to remember who she was talking to and turning instead to the other gunner. “Pulal! Tell her we have to go back.”

Tameka followed Dinah’s gaze, curious what Pulal thought. He turned his thin bronze face from one woman to the other. “I trust in Suma,” he said at last. Suma was her mother. “And I respect the chain of command.” He nodded at Tameka who couldn't help but smile. It was nice at least someone did. “Do what you need to do, you have my support.”

“And you have my support,” Jack offered unnecessarily. Dinah threw her hands in the air and took her seat. Tameka sat down as well, still rubbing her aching jaw. “You said the mission’s changed?” Jack asked her once she was again beside him.

“We can’t hope to carry out a seek-and-destroy mission on our own,” She explained to Jack, working through the problem out loud. “We have to think of what’s best for Blazkor. The most useful thing we can do is get a look at what they’re building and report home to mom.”

Tameka could feel the ship weave along with a sudden pull of gravity, and was shocked to find that they were speeding at dangerously close proximity to the moon. They had just dodged a rise in the canyon wall.

“Where in the nebulous hells are we?” Tameka yelled in surprise, grabbing to her seat as they dipped under a naturally forming bridge over the canyon. Ignorance, in this case, had been bliss.

“I did say I had to lose them,” Jack told her, getting so close to the surface of the moon that their engines kicked up dust. He was skimming them along the surface, likely to keep them away from any more distractions. They passed what looked like a radar dish.

“Wasn’t that…” Tameka started to say, her mind spinning.

“Some kind of radar dish,” Jack mused, clearly coming up with similar theories of his own. “Been seeing them every few kilometers, and think they make some kind of radar net. I’ve done everything I can to keep us below it.”

Jack wasn’t far off. “It’s not just the Moonstar,” Tameka expanded on his theory. She pulled up a map and tracked their trajectory, watching a replay of their external cameras to plot each radar tower on the map. “The net expands all the way to Rommeria. All of deep space in this quadrant. This is how they saw us coming.”

“If I’m right,” Jack said, pointing to the horizon. “It should be just over that.” She knew he was talking about the other side of the moon, and whatever weapon they had hidden there. Tameka prepped the external cameras again and confirmed they were still recording.

“Not to jeopardize the mission or anything,” Dinah said from the back seat, “but can we get gun control back or do you still need all that power for yourself?”

That was right, Tameka had pretty much forgotten that she had left the engines almost overheating. Thankfully Jack had been going easy on the trigger and the plasma turbines were already cooling.

“I’m returning fire control,” she told the two behind her. “Charge the cannons, just try not to shoot anything until I give the word.”

That was when she started to see it. It was tall, the top of it just peeking over the horizon as they drew in close. As it grew, it looked like a large black building rising up from the surface of the moon. It kept rising, getting higher and higher. The structure was massive, and then the bottom gave way from the horizon. Tameka realized it must have been quite a little distance away from the moon, being built in the shadow of the Moonstar safe from the prying eyes of people on Rommeria.

“I may not be the science-y smart one here,” Jack said, “but does that look like a weapon to you, Meka?”

“No it doesn’t,” she told him. He was right. It looked like a massive skyscraper in space, rounded in the front with massive engines in the back. From where they were at, the thing looked like it must have been at least a quarter the size of the moon. Tameka zoomed in with the external camera, and could make out massive glass panels as well as rows of machine gun turrets. The massive ship was surrounded by an equally impressively large construction frame. Hundreds of little drones and construction vehicles circled the unimaginable project, and pieces were still being fitted into place as they watched.

“Can you get us out of here?” Tameka asked Jack, suddenly consciously aware of how vulnerable they were. Also how small and insignificant, but this wasn’t the time for that kind of thought.

“Without getting us noticed or killed?” Jack asked her. “You do remember that sensor net right?”

Of course she did. It wasn’t like this was her first mission in command or anything.

“I hate you,” Dinah told Tameka and her heart sank. This was the last thing she needed right now. “And you hate me.” Tameka had no idea where that came from. “But I have an idea if you’re willing to listen.”

Oh thank the gods and the Moonstar. “Alright,” Tameka said trying not to show her relief, “You’ve got my attention.”

Tameka allowed herself to be led to Dinah’s station. The gunner brought up on her console’s main display the map of the sensor net Tameka had put together just moments ago.

“I was going over that map you made,” Dinah told Tameka. Each radar dish on the map of the moon had lines extending from them creating a web around the space between the moon and the planet, bouncing off similar radar towers there.

“The ones in blue are the ones we know about,” Tameka told Dinah, “The ones in green are projected locations of the rest, based on the angle of the radar dishes in view and the most likely dispersal pattern that they were going for.” It all sounded complicated, but Tameka hadn’t figured it out on her own. She wasn’t a super genius; after all, the computer did most of the work.

“Yeah,” Dinah said in a hurry. “Okay. So I was looking at the map and figured,” she hit a button on her console, “if we take out these two towers here and here,” she pointed at the screen, “then well…” The towers she pointed at disappeared and the segments of the web that they held together faded.

“It’s a path out,” Tameka said in surprise.

“It’s a small window,” Dinah admitted.

“Are you getting this, Jack?” Tameka asked, sending Dinah’s updated map data to Jack’s station. “After we hit the first one, they’re going to know we’re here.” She sat back down beside him. “You’re going to have to plot the fastest course to the second dish, then straight up and into that hole in the web. It won’t be very large, but if they don’t catch us by the time we hit it we should be invisible.”

“The hole only goes so far,” Jack told her. “They’ll see us eventually.”

“But they won’t be able to catch up by then,” she told him. “Especially not if I transfer the power from weapons again.”

“Oh yay,” Dinah moaned in her seat. “Can’t wait.”

“I’ll do it right after we hit the second tower,” Tameka told them.

“The engines were really overheating last time,” Jack reminded her. “I don’t know if they can sustain full ignition that long.”

“We’ll burn them out then,” Tameka told him. “We push them and get as much speed from them as we can, then drift into Rommerian atmosphere and activate the atmospheric jets.”

“And they’ll be enough to slow us down,” Dinah said from the back of the gunship. “Right?”

“You can make it work,” Tameka said to Jack, confident in her friend. No one could fly a large blocky sluggish brick quite like her friend Jack.

“I could probably get us through that alive,” Jack admitted, with a nod, and then a shrug like it wasn’t a big deal. Tameka could tell he was trying to put on a brave face. They would have to make it home to tell her mother what they saw, or everything that happened today would have been for nothing. Her mother needed to know what Hymalious City was building out here in the shadow of the Moonstar.

She needed to know that this had all been a misguided effort.

And that's the prologue for this season of Adrift Homeless. I'll be releasing more chapters, catching you up by the time the new chapter comes out on the 31st. If you don't want to wait for the next chapter, you can always subscribe at patreon.com/99geek and get unlimited access to everything I've written in PDF format easily readable on your computer, tablet, or phone.  

There'll be a Geekly Weekly coming today at some point. I've just been really depressed, but more on that later. For now I hope you enjoyed the prologue. Next episode coming soon.