None of them ever thought they would see the inside of a rail cannon. The deck and repair crew had pointed one of the planetary cannons so it was aimed over the surface of the island. To everyone inside the Needle it looked like their trajectory would take them between two of the largest buildings.
A near miss at that speed has to have repercussions. Oz found himself thinking. “How long are they taking the shield down for?” He asked over the sound of the capacitor coils humming at the base of the cannon. The electromagnetic field was building up all around the long cylindrical ship.
“A little less than a quarter second. More than enough time to get through at the speed we'll be moving,” Ayan replied as she checked the inertial dampeners using her command and control unit. It was tied into the ship with well insulated wires, so there would be no chance that any jamming or wireless signals could interfere. “The dampeners are all ready,” she told Minh, who sat ahead of her at the main flight controls.
“Are you sure that's enough time?” Oz asked.
Jason chuckled and shook his head.
“The math is solid, it's more than enough,” Ayan answered.
“You know, I used to watch a cartoon with a monkey and a panda. The panda loaded the monkey into a cannon once, and until now I thought that cartoon was hilarious,” Minh said just loudly enough for everyone inside the small craft to hear. “That episode isn't quite so funny now.”
“I'm guessing it didn't end well for the monkey?” Jason asked.
“Monkey all over the place.”
“You know, I think of it more like sky luge. We're all lined up in a relatively thin shell, have one pilot, and the only thing we have for control are brakes,” Jason commented, knowing he was only making Oz more nervous. “Biiiiig flaming breaks.” He was so frightened he was about to start shaking as well, but torturing Oz made him feel better somehow.
“It's not too late to do this the hard way, you know, with refurbished tanks and soldiers and the biggest guns we can find,” Oz offered.
“It is too late, the cannon's fully charged, count down is down to fifteen seconds, oops, fourteen, thirteen…” Minh teased as he took a firm grip on the controls.
Everyone braced themselves, the sound of the inertial dampeners whining at their highest setting and the rail cannon building an intense magnetic field around them filled the small cabin. Before anyone but Minh was ready they launched. Even with the intense inertial control field inside the cabin, everyone was pressed into the backs of their steel frame seats. Their vacsuits protected their hearing from the sonic boom that erupted as they erupted from the barrel.
Then there was relative silence. The sound of air moving over the sleek pointed shell and the hum of the inertial dampeners running were almost soothing. The night sky above was filled with stars, and a strange, momentary serenity settled over the four of them.
The needle flipped upside down, all the crew members but Minh-Chu watched the city below go by in a dizzying blur. They missed some of the taller rooftops by what seemed only meters. “Pull up!” Oz called from the rear seat.
“No one likes a back seat driver!” Minh replied through clenched teeth. “Deceleration thrusters in three! Two! One!”
Ayan pulled two levers above her head hard and the afterburners from the Warpig fired, filling the forward view with thick smoke and flame. Everyone was slammed into their restraints as the ship began decelerating from its incredible speed. Minh expertly guided the path of the tiny speeding ship between the two largest buildings. Transparesteel windows broke free of their fastenings, parts of the structures were torn apart and scattered across several city blocks of the city below as the fireball passed.
“Oh God,” Jason whimpered.
“Don't worry, we're on course,” Ayan called over her shoulder, not sounding nearly as sure as Jason and Oz would have liked.
The thunderous sound of the large afterburners mounted on the front end of the ship increased in pitch and the inertial dampeners whined even louder as they struggled to compensate for the gravitational forces being exerted on them. “We've hit the loose pack fuel! I don't see the landing zone yet!” Minh yelled.
“It's coming up, right on the other side of the spaceport,” Ayan answered.
“It better be, or they pointed us in the wrong direction!”
The large spaceport passed underneath just then, they had slowed enough so it wasn't just a large, round grey blur, but a more well detailed complex of landing bays, debarkation and embarkation ramps. Half a second later they were over an extensive sugar cane field.
“Should we be upside down?” Asked an alarmed Oz.
“Hold on, we're hitting!” Minh warned as he flipped three switches in sequence. As he hit the third the needle was engulfed by flame as the last of the fuel in the afterburners was expended in a massive burst. Something exploded inside the cockpit, showering them with sparks the instant before they hit the ground.
The vessel dug into the earth and all light turned to darkness as the ship careened through the field filled with green sugar cane stalks, leaving a trial of deeply turned black soil in its path. The night was alive with the sounds of violent explosions and the rumble of the ship coming to a halt seconds after impact.
The four of them hung upside down in their restraints, each of them checking for injuries. Despite the sounds and explosions, the impact had been very mild for the passengers. “I'm all right,” Oz said in the relative silence.
“Me too, not a scratch,” Jason replied.
“I'm okay, don't ever want to do anything like that again, but I'm okay,” Ayan said quietly.
“I think I peed a little,” Minh said as he reached to something between his feet and pulled it sharply. “Thank God for indoor plumbing.” A loud pop filled the air and a bottom plate just in front of his seat flipped outward so he could push himself out through the bottom of the ship.
“We really were supposed to land upside down?” Jason said in astonishment.
“That explains why the exit hatches are set up in the bottom of the craft,” Oz agreed as he pulled his own handle. “Didn't make much sense before but I was afraid to ask.”
“It was the only way. The transparesteel we scrounged up was the strongest metal on this thing, so we had to make it the impact side,” Ayan explained.
“Sort of counter intuitive.” Minh said as he helped Oz out of the craft. The gravity from the inertial dampeners still pointed to the bottom of the vehicle, so it was easy for them to get through the bottom hatch to the waist, but then the gravity from the planet had hold of them, trying to push the majority of their bodies back inside.
After Oz finished extracting himself from the craft he moved on to help Jason, whose legs were fully out of the ship's egress hatch. Minh helped Ayan and when they were all out, they pulled the plate of metal on the back of the ship away, revealing the packs each of them were to carry along with long coats for all but Ayan, who preferred her longer poncho. All their extra clothing was made with a higher density than their vacsuits, providing extra armour while sharing the same capabilities.
“You know, I've never worn the finished version of a cloaksuit before,” Ayan mentioned.
“I have, they're amazing. They don't do much for us in this field unless we stay between the rows though,” Jason commented as he finished putting his long coat on over his slim, long equipment pack. He checked his sidearm and the nanoblade they'd have to use instead if they wanted to remain undetectable.
“When did you get to wear one?” Oz asked as he secured his heavy rifle across his chest.
“On a couple little runs for Fleet Intelligence, maybe once the Triton gets here I'll fill you in and bust open a couple Freeground secrets.”
“What blew when we hit by the way?” Asked Minh.
“One of the inertial dampeners, I expected at least one of the four I installed to go,” Ayan answered nonchalantly.
“How many redundant dampeners did we have?”
“One, we needed at least three to come down without a scratch.”
“Well, looking at what's left of the ship, anyone might think that there were no survivors,” Oz said, looking at the beat up hull. One of the afterburners had been ripped off, left behind in the field somewhere along the scar they had made on the rows of sugar cane. The other looked like a torn and crushed up box of metal, half torn from the main body of the ship. The vessel itself was dented in several places where the transparesteel joined the main body.
“It's almost too bad we have to use it as a trap,” Ayan said as she activated her cloaksuit. She disappeared from sight completely, even her footfalls were silent and invisible, covered and wiped away by compensation systems built into her boots.
Everyone else followed her example, the display in their vacsuit visors made up for the darkness of night and showed an outline of each of the cloaksuit users. They would no longer communicate audibly, instead their messages would be sent via millisecond laser pulses outside of the normally visible spectrum of light. Secrecy and stealth still demanded that they keep such traffic down to an absolute minimum, especially since a great number, if not the majority of their opponents were machines that could see more of the colour spectrum than an average human.
Oz took up point as they heard a machine start in the distance and rustle the sugar cane stalks. They made their way at a slow jog down one of the rows leading to the broadcast center in the middle of the field. It was marked clearly by several focusing dishes and burst transmitters, all pointed at the stars like wide white concave eyes surrounded by long antennae like multicoloured rods.
Behind them several objects were making their way to their ship and once they had put a kilometre between them and the craft, Oz slowed to a stop. When he turned around his targeting system outlined a large machine and several smaller ones. Two were identified as automated security, one was some kind of technical assistant and there were several small maintenance bots.
“What do you think the big one is?” he heard Minh ask over their point to point network.
“Some kind of harvester,” Ayan answered. “They had them on the Freeground colony, or at least something that kinda looked like it.”
“Will the charges take it out?” Oz asked.
“Just barely, unless there's some solid fuel left in the afterburner. I'm blowing it,” Ayan said as she pointed her index finger at the hull of the ship.
As soon as her signal was received the Needle exploded, filling the air with concussive sound, lighting up the field and the sky with blue and yellow light and sending a wave through the green rows of sugar cane.
“Guess there was some fuel left,” Minh chuckled.
Oz scanned the ground for movement for several seconds and paid close attention to the sensors in his suit just in case there was some energy left in one of the robots that had gone to investigate the crash. “We got 'em, time to move on.”