From Darkness

[l3wt]

ARLAND

In orbit above Planet Hamburg, just beyond the horizon and out of sight of the steadily approaching Idus Martii, James sat in the nearly completely empty cargo hold of Lisa's newly acquired gunboat, the Emerald Venture, and waited.

He had gone over his equipment about thirty times now already, and he was growing sick of the waiting. Suit, check. Gravchute unit, check. Thruster unit, check. Oxygen, check. It was an intimidating prospect, this thing he was about to do - dropping onto a moving ship from low orbit. It seemed insane, even.

But James had steadily learned over the course of his career that what people deemed insane or impossible was more often than not just hard, and all you had to do to accomplish any task was to break it down into smaller, less difficult tasks. Then the hard became outright manageable.

But regardless of this mindset, when he looked at the task in its entirety again, he still could not help but agree that, yes, this was a little crazy.

Oh well.

He stood up, pulling the cybernetic suit's face mask down over his head, watching the haptic display wink into life, and hearing the low hiss as the material knit together to create an airtight seal.

"Lisa, depressurize the cargo bay and open the bay doors when you're ready. JADE, start the timer and the guidance system."

Lisa came over the comm. "Got them on my scanners - right on cue. We're getting lined up now."

A few seconds passed, then she spoke again. "Okay, depressurizing in three, two, one..."

The bay doors opened as the pressurized air hissed out. "Drop in thirty!"

Those remaining thirty seconds felt like an eternity as he stood there on the edge, a compact automatic rifle strapped across his chest, chute on his back, and stared down at the gray-and-white brilliance of the world stretching out beneath him.

The only thing he could really hear was the sound of his own breath and heartbeat, drumming out a steady rhythm as he now, just in case everything went straight to hell, slowly made peace with his mistakes, desires, and memories.

"I'll see you on the ground."

One way or another.

"Go!" she shouted, as they reached the point of optimal trajectory. Quietly, a moment later, she added, "Good luck..."

When he timer reached zero, he stepped off the ramp - tranquil, and without a thought.

The only thing left to do now, as the whiteness below came closer, was to follow the guidance grid in front of his eyes. This little stroke of genius was constantly updated with scans of the cargo ship's current course, performed by the Emerald Venture. A few microadjustments with the thruster unit and he had stopped the tumbling that he'd been on the verge of seguing into.

Then he simply kept falling like this for a good long while. The dreamlike quality of silence was, however, soon replaced with the howling of the wind just outside his mask, as the sky became bluer around him.

"20 seconds to visual contact," chimed in a smooth female voice. JADE's, he remembered. It broke him out of his trance-like state.

He noticed, thankfully, that the AI had seen fit to intervene and do several more thruster adjustments, reducing his speed somewhat. If this was even slightly off, he knew, he'd either miss the ship entirely or crash into its hull at terminal velocity.

Then, he saw it in the distance, the engine flare of the Idus Martii, unaware of the lone soul falling in to intercept it. She was making good speed, some detached part of James' mind noted. And even now that she was a pinprick in the distance this was to be considered final approach.

"Activate chute in five," JADE calmly intoned.

The chute, despite the name, did not actually affect gravity in any real way, but rather functioned as a set of powerful repulsors trailing behind the user when activated, allowing for a great deal more control and deceleration than otherwise possible with traditional parachutes - something the Bretonian mercenary now falling at terminal velocity on an intercept trajectory with a moving ship was immensely grateful for.

As he was yanked back by the chute, maneuvered himself into position, and the ship rapidly grew in size beneath him, James was beyond noticing the fact that he was muttering several colourful swearwords to himself just before he hit the release and fell onto the top of the Gull's spinal structure just a little too fast.

In retrospect, he was incredibly lucky to be alive. A second earlier and his ribs would likely have been pushed through his heart and lungs, killing him instantly. As it stood, the suit had protected him sufficiently for him to suffer only a very minor concussion and a few cracked ribs.

This was good enough, in his book. He'd nearly blacked out, but he was back again now, and the suit could keep him functioning and effective until the job was done - administering painkillers and lightening the pressure on the damaged bones.

He grit his teeth as he clutched the hull panel he'd latched on to a little tighter, eventually managing to drag the rest of his body on top of the ship. Now, he had to crawl over to one of the auxiliary airlocks - he'd remembered the location of each and every one of them when he'd studied the blueprints.

His rifle was gone, he noticed now. The impact must have knocked it loose, sent it flying with the wind. He still had his handgun and entry devices, but this was a setback.

In the end, it didn't matter, he could either go inside or he could get off without a chute, and that was hardly a choice. He slapped one of the entry explosives onto the airlock hatch, and looked away as it melted its way through the metal of the airlock. Then he repeated the procedure for the next. It was a rather ingenious little device that he'd cobbled together from the munitions he had stolen with Lisa on their last excursion, a tandem-EMP/thermite-based bomb that burned hot enough to force its way through even ship-grade alloy.

When he finally stood within the ship, breathing raggedly and fairly certain he could taste blood in his mouth, he drew his handgun, the same one he'd used as an officer of the Armed Forces. Then, he commed Lisa.

"I'm in, I'm in the ship! Notify Wayfarer, and give me a waypoint marker to the mainframe! This looks like, ah, the upper deck maintenance room, I can see equipment and EVA suits up here."

Lisa piped back in. "Copy. Are... are you okay? Your vitals have gone a bit... off."

Regardless, she threw him a waypoint of the ship's mainframe from his location, based on their blueprints of the ship. She also commed Wayfarer with an update.

"I'm fine, just a hard landing. I'm en route, they've probably noticed something's wrong, now."

James grinned wolfishly behind bloodied teeth, fixed a suppressor to his pistol, then began moving.