Saving Mars (29 page)

The messages ceased, finally, and for a full five blissful minutes, Jessamyn enjoyed peace as she flew onward. But then she saw a small approaching craft on her starboard side. Moments later, its twin appeared on her port side. Both sported flashy Central African Air Control logos. The pilot in the craft to her left tapped a headset as he contacted her by audio, ordering her to return to her logged route or face immediate penalties. She took a few sharp turns, curious how determined her escorts were to stick with her.

Maddeningly determined, she observed, scowling.

Her refusal to cooperate earned her an additional escort as well—a third craft dropped into position just ahead of her.

“
Holy Ares
,” she swore, throwing the ship into a steep climb designed to make accompanying her craft less convenient. She managed to shake off her starboard and port escorts, but the one that had dropped down in front of her looped over backward and tailed her with a disturbing resolve. She received several additional messages, which became increasingly threatening and promised
aerial intervention
, whatever that might mean.

And then the craft that had dogged her for an annoyingly intense three minutes was simply gone. Gone, too, were the threatening messages. Jess turned her craft back toward Skye. Relieved, she spent the next several minutes trying to figure out if she could use anything aboard her ship as a means of communicating with Wallace and Crusty, so as to let them know the Galleon had better be ready to lift off.

Unfortunately, Jess had never paid much attention to her brother’s attempts to teach her more than rudimentary communications skills aboard ships back home. The Terran ship’s communications system baffled her, absorbing more of her attention than turned out to be good under the circumstances: Jess had company again.

When the four ships representing “aerial intervention” showed as blips on Jessamyn’s radar, she felt resolve like a cool band encircling her core.

“Intervene
this
,” she murmured, hurtling her ship through a series of drops and turns that her nav-screen warned her were
inadvisable at current speed.
The stiff language of the message brought a grin to Jessamyn’s mouth.

“Inadvisable?” she said aloud. “Really? You want to see inadvisable?” She examined her nav-com and punched out a string of commands. Ethan’s lesson on disabling safety protocols had been something Jess
had
paid careful attention to. Grinning at her success, Jess pulled the ship into another steep climb, then looped over into a winding corkscrew. The extra g’s felt
good
, she thought to herself as she checked onscreen to see who was still with her. It took a moment to locate her own screen-blip, blinking bright blue like the blips of her pursuers. She thought of how her brother would have designed a more practical screen display with differently colored blips.

But as she watched three of them flying rings around one another, she felt a surge of hope. They appeared confused as well. Maybe she could lose them while they played a game of
Who’s Who
.

Her hope proved short-lived. The four ships quickly regrouped and once more gained in their pursuit. Her ship had to be emitting a signature of some kind. Jessamyn wished she’d paid more attention to what her brother had tried to teach her about vessel tracking.

A new message crackled over the ship’s audio. “Alpha-zero-niner, you are under detainment protocol. You will be fired upon if you continue to resist contact and communication.”

A quick glance at her dashboard told Jess she had no weapons of her own to return fire. She felt her skin flush warm with indignation.

“I did
not
,” she growled, “Come all this way—” here she broke off to dive into a narrow valley—“Just to get shot out of the sky!”

She attempted a move she used all the time back on Mars, weaving back and forth within the confines of the channel. Only here, nothing about flying felt quite like what she expected. “
Holy Ares!
” she shouted, pulling left from a too-near canyon wall. Earth-air was so
thick,
and her craft didn’t respond as she expected.

The ship tailing her was far less fortunate than she.

A fluttering on the nav-screen caught Jessamyn’s eye: one of the blue blips disappeared, and from a rear view screen, she saw the disintegrating craft paving a trail like a comet. She gasped.
Now you’re in trouble
, she thought. She scrutinized the valley walls—could she use them as weapons to destroy the other three ships? A missile exploding against a wall just to starboard cut short her analysis.

Jess threw hurried glances across screens and windows. Her ship appeared unharmed but there was a red blip now tailing her ship.
Another missile
, observed a cool part of her mind. Automatically, she banked left and up, then dove down again, narrowly missing a sudden rise in the floor of the valley.

“
Hermes
!” she shouted, correcting for the rising ground as the missile exploded on impact beside her. Jessamyn felt a flapping kind of panic building inside her belly: she didn’t know how to fly on Earth. The strange atmosphere, so much thicker than that of Mars, made it impossible for her to pilot with precision.

The narrow valley spilled into a vast plain and Jessamyn felt exposed. Chill fingers played through her abdomen and up her spine.
How am I supposed to fly on this planet
? she asked herself. And then she found her ship climbing, climbing, climbing, as a part of her that didn’t rely on thought took over.

“
Of course
,” she whispered, “
Of course
.”

She needed
less air
. If she stopped hugging the planet’s surface, she could find that part of the sky where she could manage her craft with ease. She soared into the thinner air of the upper atmosphere.

“Just like back home,” she said softly. “Now we’ll see who knows how to fly.” A smile crept across her face. It had been no accident she’d chosen a craft with orbiting capability. Running a hand over her gut, she murmured, “You knew.”

Her unexpected climb had bought her a few precious moments and she used these to scan her dashboard, looking for a way to render inoperative the signal her ship transmitted to the pursuing vessels. Finding something called an
emergency beacon locator
, she attempted to disable it, holding her breath to see if they’d lost her signal. But three trailing blips on her screen told her they still knew
exactly
where she was.

She fired a forward thruster, squinting as the g-force slammed her against her restraint harness. A missile flared past her, curving in a slow arc as it adjusted for her sudden change in direction. Using a combination of her jet engines and rocket thrust, she rolled into an elongated corkscrew.
Hades
, but it felt good to be free of those extra millibars of atmospheric pressure.

One of her pursuers snuck in close and tight, nearly matching her maneuvers. She fired a port thruster and dove in time to see a flash of bright light—the craft that had followed her exploded as the missile struck it instead of her.

“Wings and rudders don’t work quite the same in thin atmo, do they?” Jess murmured. She’d yet to see anyone fly in a way that suggested they knew how to use rocket-thrust to advantage up here. Did their ships even have it? She needed to find out. Using bursts from her forward thrusters to slow herself, she allowed the nearest ship to close on her. Then she looped back in a tight circle to position herself behind the other ship.

“Harder to fire on me if I’m hunter instead of prey, huh?” She examined her enemy’s ship. And then she grinned: it was clear their vessels ran on jet engines only. She had an incalculable advantage.

“And I know how to use it!” she shouted firing both rear thrusters.

Just then the second pursuer passed across the back of her ship. She sucked in a quick breath—his mistake was more than she could have hoped for. The pursuer was caught unawares in her jet wash, spinning flat, in a jerking motion that smoothed out until it reminded Jessamyn of a child’s toy, spinning across the floor. She felt a moment’s pity—it wasn’t a spin she’d want to try to recover from. The pilot would likely pass out long before impact. A sudden rush of hope replaced pity: only one pursuer remained. She liked those odds.

The real question now was whether or not she could lure her pursuer to follow her into a
higher
orbit. She suspected the answer would be
yes
as she aimed her craft toward the heavens. A bright necklace of satellites glinted and sparked above her. She fired her rear thrust rocket and watched as the satellites seemed to pull her forward.

Onscreen, she saw the remaining ship veer drunkenly toward her. “Jet engines don’t like it up here, do they?” she muttered. An alarm flashed across her nav-screen.
Warning: insufficient oxygen. Jet-engine failure in twelve-point-five seconds on these coordinates. Warning: correct course immediately. Warning—
Jess slapped the cautionary screen to black and smiled as she hurtled into the deep.

The other ship fired at her again and Jess had to use her rockets to veer off her intended course. The missile sailed past her, unable to correct itself effectively in the thinning air. She waited for her jets to notice they had no oxygen.

“Come on, come on, come on,” she said, urging her engines to cut. But what if Terrans had different technology? What if jet engines didn’t die here, even without oxygen? The enemy ship was gaining on her once more. Would it fire? Would it break off pursuit?

The ship sent another missile hurtling toward her vessel and she burned her starboard rocket, hating how it aimed her ship back toward Earth and oxygen. But it happened anyway: her first engine flamed out and then her second followed suit. Jess held her breath watching the pursuing ship. And there it was: she saw a last gasping flare as her enemy’s engines darkened. The pursuing ship glided out and away from Earth on a trajectory into the stars. Her gamble had worked. That ship was not changing course.

Unless the pilot started firing missiles, thought Jess, looking at his problem as if it were her own to solve. She felt a part of her brain whispering:
Fire them, idiot! Fire them!
She didn’t actually want the drifting ship back on her trail, but she hated knowing the vessel would’ve made it back to Earth if she’d been piloting it. She murmured a prayer for the doomed pilot, and then, sighing, Jessamyn fired her thrusters in a series of burns that directed her Earthward. Maybe seeing what she’d done with her thrust rockets would give the other pilot the idea to try the missiles. But she wasn’t sticking around to find out.

“I’ve got my own planet to save,” she said aloud.

Slowing her re-entry into the lower atmo with repeated rocket burns, Jessamyn was nonetheless relieved when her engines restarted. Landing without them, with Earth’s heavy gravity, wasn’t something she wanted to experience. As she crossed the Terran north pole and aimed for the Isle of Skye, she realized she had a small decision to make. Should she bring her craft to a landing beside Wallace’s cottage or beside the Galleon?

Cursing her inability to figure out how to contact either Wallace or Crusty, she decided to try the cottage first. Crusty might well have decided to hunker down and await her at the Red Galleon, but she had to speak with Brian Wallace. It was possible someone would trace the Marsian crew or their vehicle back to the Isle of Skye. She owed Brian Wallace a warning; it was what Harpreet would have done.

Her landing disturbed more ash than she’d expected, reminding her why Wallace had located his dwelling those few kilometers away from the storage barn. Holding her shirt over her mouth and nose, she approached the front door, an apology for the ash—now floating like snow—on her lips. As she knocked, she remembered Wallace’s preference for shoes-off and was attempting to slip out of her footgear when the door flew open.

“Ye’re back, then!” said Brian Wallace. He frowned, looking past Jessamyn for the others.

“It’s only me,” she said. She explained the events of the last two days with detachment—things that might have happened to someone else. Concluding, she asked where Crusty was.

“Aboard the Red Galleon,” replied Wallace, “Fretting that he’ll have to fly back alone. I told him ye’d make it back. But ye say that ye fought off a detainment squadron to get here?”

Jess nodded.

“Ye’ll have disabled the beacon for the craft before landing her here, then?” said Wallace, looking nervously to the sky.

Jessamyn inhaled in alarm.
She’d forgotten about the tracking device
!

Wallace groaned. “Damned good thing I transferred the tellurium off-island yesterday,” he muttered, shaking his head. Then, placing his hands on his hips, he took a deep breath. “We’ll be having company shortly, lass. There’s not a moment to waste. Quick now, get aboard that Mars vessel and get yerself off-planet!”

Jess nodded and turned for the stolen ship she’d abandoned moments ago.

“No,” called Wallace. “Leave that beaconed ship for me, if ye please. Here.” He grabbed a hovercart from beside the cottage. “These are swift.” Wallace hollered after her, “Ye’ve given me a right fast escape ship, for which I thank ye!”

Jess hopped aboard the hovercart, swerving alongside her Terran friend. “But, what about the beacon?”

Wallace grinned. “I know how to disable a beacon, lass. Now get out of here! I’ll contact Crusty to begin pre-launch!”

Jess pointed the hovercart in the direction of the Red Galleon. Only the topmost section was visible, but the sight made her sit a little taller, throw her shoulders back. The Galleon was a beautiful ship and it would be a honor to fly her again.

She pushed Wallace’s tiny cart as fast as it would go. The ride was exhilarating, if jolting, and it made her think of piggy-back rides on her father’s back. She let slip a brief giggle as the cart jounced along the curve of a low hill. But what she saw over the rise extinguished all laughter.

A small puff of ash drifted in the air from a recently landed craft. Three figures dressed in vivid red armor jumped from the vessel and aimed weapons at her. She swerved, nearly flinging herself to the ground. Grasping the sides of her small carrier, she hurtled forward. She could see the Galleon, gleaming, beckoning. She heard the slightest of rumbling shudders—Crusty had gotten Wallace’s message and was commencing the pre-launch sequence. She would make it—she had to!