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Crashlander: God Help Us
Posted By: A Halo Fan...natic<mikeandrewp@gmail.com>
Date: 9 July 2007, 3:12 am
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UNSC Longsword 2A-47, or the God Help Us, dropped towards the planet below. The view was breathtaking. Looking out the starboard screens, the stars shone out against the hard blackness of space like diamonds on black velvet, punctuated occasionally by brilliant blue and purple explosions and jets of orange light as spacecraft annihilated each other in blazes of death and glory. Out the port viewscreens the planet lay like a great jewel, the brilliant blues and greens and whites of an Earth-like world.
Pilot (fighter/support, second class) Ryan Evans sat at his console and glanced at the viewscreens intently. His face was tense as he watched the nav displays, watching for any deviation from the predetermined course. Sweat beaded down his dark face - dark, not from birth, but from the damaging radiation that not even the best shields could keep out. His face and hands were almost as dark as an African's, but the rest of him was a Nordic pale.
Unconsciously, he reached for a cigarette before jerking his hand back. He'd run out several hours ago. It's been years since I chain smoked like this, he thought, If I don't watch it, I'll get emphysema. He grinned at that. Nowadays, emphysema meant a weekend in the hospital while the nanobots crawled through your lungs - scarcely the troublesome disease it used to be.
Lieutenant Walker glanced at the radar display and whistled. "Damn. She's still on our tail."
The pilot nodded. There was nothing to say.
Lieutenant Richard Walker was a tall, hard faced man, with blue eyes and brown hair. He looked like something off an enlistment poster. He was handsome, strong, and well known. He was also the son of one of the richest men in the galaxy, William Walker. Evans' opinion of the Walkers was low. He thought them stuck up and stupid, and he felt that no Walker should be in command of any spaceship, let alone one he was flying in.
Evans looked at the radar himself. The enemy ship was still there, and it was traveling in a lower, faster orbit than they were. The bastard, he thought bitterly, he's playing with us. They were well within range of the Seraph's weapons, but it wasn't attacking. If they tried to return to the engagement, his lower orbit would take him past them with plenty of time to shoot them down. If they tried to enter the planet's atmosphere, they'd cross right through his trajectory, allowing him to do whatever he wanted to them.
The Seraph had followed them when they tried to disengage from the main battle, and was now doggedly pursuing as they fell into orbit around the world below, Epsilon Eridani IV. The God Help Us had taken hits, and was now sending out its cry of maidéz, but the carrier ship, UNSC CS Danmark, was now hidden behind the curve of the planet.
The GHU had 800 km/s of delta-V left, enough to take them down to the surface of E-Eridani IV, but not enough to bring them back up again. It was also enough to take them back to the main engagement, but the ship's two main armaments, a large ruby laser and a good sized mass driver, had been damaged soon after the GHU was deployed. The ship still had two of its original six missiles, and four loaded ball bearing launchers - shit throwers, as they were called amongst most personnel - but not enough to put up a serious toe-to-toe fight with a Seraph.
But none of that mattered if they couldn't get the engine working right.
Walker seemed to share his thoughts. "Specialist MacHardy, report."
People always expected a brogue when they heard the GHU's third crewmember's name, and they were always disappointed. He had a classic Scots-Irish face, but though he was born on New Ireland his family had emigrated when he was only a child. Despite this, he still enjoyed scotch much more than anyone else Evans had ever known. He stuck his head out of an access hatch and saluted. "Yes sir," he said without a trace of accent, "The engine's mostly working again - she won't cut out on us as long as we don't push her too hard. I had to cannibalize the food recycler for parts, and I had to jerry-rig a fuel feed controller out of -"
"Will it work?"
Mac seemed taken aback at his monologue being interrupted, but he nodded. "Yes sir, she'll work. Just don't push her at more than point nine gees."
"Thank you, Specialist." The lieutenant sat down at his console, as MacHardy grabbed more tools from his toolbox and retreated back into the innards of the ship.
Walker watched the screens and traced their trajectories, then pulled up the calculator function on his terminal. Evans stifled a grunt of disgust. Anyone who couldn't do a basic orbital intersection in their head shouldn't be flying anything bigger than a pusher tug. To calm himself, he did a couple of orbital mechanics problems in his head, nasty empiricals guaranteed to keep most people up at night, then did a couple of trapezoidal Riemann sums for practice.
"Well, crew, we've got ten minutes before he pulls along side," Walker said, several minutes after Evans had already finished his estimation. Eight minutes now. "There's nothing for it. About-face and deploy remaining missiles."
Evans nodded. "About-face, aye," he said, and touched the controls. The ventral attitude jet spouted flame and the spacecraft turned until it faced backward in its trajectory - ass-backward, as pilot jargon went.
"Fire missiles three and four."
"Firing," Evans said as he pressed the fire controls for the missiles. The ship lurched in recoil as the rockets ignited, spraying fire into their launching beds, and then into vacuum. Not that it would do any good.
Ten, nine, eight, Evans thought in his head.
The missiles were two hard, white points of light in the viewscreens. They were dropping towards the Seraph, closing, closing...
When he reached two, the external viewscreens flared brilliant violet-white for an instant before the polarizers darkened them. Walker swore vehemently. When he was through, Evans spoke contemptuously: "They just shot down our missiles. Sir."
"I'm aware of that, Pilot Evans." The lieutenant's face was a stiff mask of anger, and perhaps a bit of fear - the missiles were the last of their main armament, and at this relative velocity the ball bearings wouldn't do more than bounce off the Seraph's hull.
Well, I guess we're screwed, then, Evans thought sardonically. Too bad Regina said no. He smiled at the memory of his last date - or what passed for a date on board an active carrier ship. She'd had a nice face, but she'd turned down his offer to meet in the paint locker. Too bad.
Suddenly an idea occured to him. "Decelerate."
Walker turned to him, looking like he'd just been told to juggle a pair of live squid. "What?"
"Decelerate. If we decelerate quickly enough we'll drop past too quickly for them to react. Afterwards we'll be in a lower orbit, allowing us to pull ahead. Also, we can use the shit throwers to distract him - by the time our orbit intersects theirs the difference in velocity will be enough for them to do some good."
Walker looked thoughtful, then spoke skeptically: "What happens after that? They'll just spear us with a particle beam."
Evans grinned. "No they won't. Their beams will be busy with the ball bearings. While they're occupied we keep decelerating. Eventually we'll be in a synergistic orbit. We'll land near a population center so we can refuel, then lift back off and join the engagement."
The engineer popped out of a hatch next to them. It used to scare Evans half to death when MacHardy did that, but he'd gotten used to it. "It won't work. You'd have to accelerate at more than two gee - I wouldn't take this girl past point nine if you want to be able to lift off again."
The pilot shook his head. "I don't know about you, but I don't want to be a sitting duck. I'd rather risk damage to the engine than be boarded by the Covenant."
They both looked to Lietenant Walker. He shrugged, and nodded to Evans. "You're right. I don't want to be tortured and killed. We're goin' down."
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