Jeannie Holmes - The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance

When she woke up, four hours later, ready for another morphine shot, he had a plan. It was reckless, insane – complete suicide.

In other words, the perfect fit for a legendary smuggler and a legendary hero.

“Okay, explain that to me again?” She thought she must have heard wrong, because the idea was insanity.

“We’re going forward with the mission. You’ll fly and I’ll navigate. Then we’ll land, hijack a ship capable of handling the wormhole, and go home. Easy-peasy.”

She took the cloth off her forehead and flicked her eyelids over the milky orbs. It made her wince.

“Somehow in that plan did you think how to get around the fact that I’m blind ?! Are you insane, Miflin?”

“Not insane at all. In fact, it’s the perfect defense.” He pushed back the chair, scraping it across the patterned metal. “They’ve thrown all their eggs into one basket. They’re planning that this weapon is the be-all and end-all. Don’t you see, Elle? They’re presuming that the beam was all they needed. They didn’t send any follow-up ships because they didn’t think they had to.” He wished she could see his excitement.

“That’s our in . They presume a blind pilot can’t fly.”

“And they’d be right, Rand. I can’t fly.”

He nodded his head and took her hand in a tight grip. “No, but see – you can. Maybe only you. It’s paint-by-numbers, all over again. I’ll give you the numbers, you paint the picture. Like an instrument landing.”

She held up a hand, trying to raise her body to a sitting position. Confusion was mixed with alarm on her face. “Wait. You want me to pilot the ship by listening to your navigation commands?”

“Why not? You said yourself . . . you think in numbers. The commands go from your eyes to your hands.

Why not from your ears to your hands? But you’ll have to trust me. Have to trust that I’ll give you good data. I will. I swear I will, on the blood of everyone on Earth who’s fought and died.”

She mulled it over for long minutes and then finally responded. “Blind precision flying through surface defenses, and in dogfights? You’re crazy.”

“Yeah. I am. So are you. Smuggling kids through a blockade, fire fights in an asteroid field. We’re both certifiable.” She tipped her head, acknowledging the truth, so he pressed on. “Face facts, Tyler. We’re dead anyway. The oxygen scrubbers will only last a week without servicing. We have food and water for two days, three with recycling. There’s no way back if the transport captain is one of the bad guys. But if we pull it off – wow. We save the planet. We buy time for the resistence to prepare.”

“And we send a message,” she said after a pause, her neck muscles tightening, her face focused as though she could see him through the fog. “We can bring the war to you . We can find you, attack you.

Maybe they even think we have a countermeasure to their superweapon. They probably don’t have enough data on Earthlings anyway.”

Rand found himself smiling when she smiled. Reckless, talented, gorgeous – with or without blue eyes. “I could fall in love with you, you know.”

She reached out a hand. He took it. “If we survive this, I just may let you.”

Elle sat in the cockpit, face shield down, meaningless. It hurt like fire, but she’d felt worse. She closed her eyes, which was redundant, but it helped her focus. She imagined the panel in front of her. She reached out and toggled a switch. The left thruster fired up on low. Damn. It should have been the right one, on high. She concentrated, tried to dredge up the flight here, through the asteroids – concentrating on the numbers on the display while her hands went to practiced spots.

“Give me coordinates, Rand. Any coordinates.”

“It might help if we weren’t still attached to the asteroid.”

She let out a harsh breath, tried not to swear like her grandfather. “Just do it, please. I need to see if we can do this before I discover I can’t get back here.”

“Okay, then. Good point. Let’s go with . . .” He started typing hard. “197.824, left pitch 8.7, arc length

14.3.”

“Skip the pitch and arc. The order of the numbers will tell me what they are. Just stick with initials for direction: 197.824, L 8.7, A 14.3. So . . . let’s try this.” She let the numbers fill her mind, let them flow through her to, as Miflin said, “paint the picture”. The stick moved without her meaning to. The ship lurched, strained against the anchor. “Was that a real coordinate?”

“Yep, our first one,” he said with far too much satisfaction in his voice. “Give ’er hell, Captain Tyler.

Sir.”

She smiled and pulled the anchor release. It didn’t retract the anchor. It severed the connection at the ship. She felt the shudder as the ship eased away from the asteroid. She answered Rand’s question before he asked it. “Less weight. We’ll be able to maneuver quicker without it.”

He tapped her shoulder lightly and she turned her head. “The rock’s spinning again. We should probably get out of here.”

One nod and she felt her hands dance over the controls. The thrusters reversed and she pulled up on the stick sharply. They tumbled and she felt the ship respond to the outcropping passing by the hull. “Tell me where to go next.”

He did. Coordinate after coordinate, she stared where the screen would be and the numbers appeared in her mind as though her eyes were seeing them. He abbreviated easily after a few minutes. “184.2, L 87, A 14.2; 184, L 6, A. 9; 1922, L 13.3, A 12.” She let her hands move, and soon it was as though she could see – at least as well as she normally could through the blast shield.

“Entering the planet’s atmosphere. Remain on this course. Keep the nose steady. I’ll let you know when you can let go.”

She hated atmospheres. The stick vibrated wildly. Heat began to radiate through the cockpit. It would pass, but it made the blisters on her face sting, burn, made her skin melt and crackle even through the shields. “Damn it, Miflin. It hurts. I can’t concentrate.”

Rand reached back and put a hand on her shoulder. “Keep it steady, Elle. Just a few more minutes.

We’re nearly through. Don’t let go. I can’t do this for you. This is yours.”

She wanted to let go. To put her hand to her face to shield her wounds from the heat. “I can’t keep this up.”

“You can. Trust me. Just another minute.”

Did she trust him? Could she? “What’s in this for you?” The drugs were wearing off and her eyeballs were swelling again. Her lids wouldn’t close over them. She feared if she forced them, they wouldn’t go up again. She needed distraction. “Tell me.”

There was a long pause. It felt like forever as her face and hands crackled and crisped. “At first, it was the rush. I’ve always been an adrenaline junkie. Then it was the money. People who want to move things without suspicion will pay nearly anything. I tried the ‘straight and narrow’ route. Had a steady job with low pay and no future. Drove me nuts. So, you’re right. I was for sale to the highest bidder.”

Close now. She could feel the shaking lessen, but now was the most dangerous part. If they hit the stratosphere wrong, or the concentration of gases was too different from Earth, she could ricochet off, and they’d tumble and break up. Rand tightened his hand on her shoulder. His wrist was probably cramping from the angle. She asked him. “What changed?”

“There’s always a line. A line you can’t cross. To me, the line was kids. Who knew? Someone paid me to drive a freighter. I was told to ignore noises in the back. But I couldn’t. They’d sealed them in without enough air holes. I broke it open. Not a one was more than ten. I didn’t know where they were supposed to end up, and I didn’t care. I dropped off the grid with them. Took them to the Mars colony’s orphanage. I knew a group of nuns there who would care for them. A day later I joined the resistance.”