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Having completed her morale-boosting tour of the fleet, Maya returned to Excalibur and took her seat on the bridge.

"Status report." Maya said briskly.

"Largely unchanged ma'am." Kayla replied. "The Xian ship is still maneuvering in a search pattern." Molly explained. "No indication they have detected us as yet." "Tactical situation...could be better...but we have re-filtered sufficient fuel to maneuver...and have sufficient viable munitions to handle a single Xian Dreadnought." Callie replied, the pain of her pregnancy evident in her voice despite her best effforts to conceal it. "Understood." Maya said. "if'n yer hurtin that much y'need t' rest. go t' yer cabin Ah'll git Chloe t' cover fer ya."

"Thats...not necessary, Admiral." Callie replied. "I can handle it."

"Why take the chance?" Erika asked. "I'd take the offer and rest if I was that far along."

"S' complicated." Maya said. "Kuvasz pride....independant nature stuff."

"respectfully Admiral it wont be as hard on me." Callie said. "I don't have megacolon, so my uterine horns have more room to expand."

.........................................................

After delivering Tom Jr to the CSS Lee, Tom took off again, and joined up with Sarah and the rest of the combat patrol who'd just finished topping off their fuel from a tanker Excalibur had deployed. Sarah explained the situation, commenting on how the Xians were about to get a nasty surprise from the minefield they'd jst finished seeding, and then the waiting game began.

The Xians' own combat patrol circled about the long pointed Xian dreadnought, in a sensor duel, trying to locate Maya's fleet before being detected themselves. Fortunately they weren't having much luck....until the Xian Dreadnought wandered into the minefield.

....................

Xian Dreadnought bridge (In Xian)

"Still nothing on sensors, sir." an officer reported. "A few anomalous power readings, but nothing large enough to be the mercenary fleet."

"Keep scanning." the captain ordered. "Helmsman, ahead one quarter sub-light, lets scan the next sector."

The ship shook violently from a sudden explosion against the hull. Alarms blared in response.

"All stop!" the captian yelled

"Hull breeches on decks 41 and 42 sir." the tactical officer said.

"Emergency bulkheads!" the captain shouted. "What the fuck hit us."

"several small metallic objects sir." the sensors officer said. "hundreds of them, all around us."

"Type?" the captain asked.

"Mines, sir." the sensors officer said. "anti-matter warheads."

"Shields!, Hull plating!" the captain shouted.

"Shields are up." the tactical officer said. "Hull plating is at 90% but considering we're missing a chunk of it its to be expected."

"Combat patrol reports possible sensor contact of enemy fighters." the comm officer announced.

"Launch all fighters." the captain ordered. "sensors go to full active scan, lets find that fucking bitch before she finds us." "Yes sir" came the replies.

.........................................

"Ok team, time to earn our pay!" Sarah announced the instant the mine exploded. "Everybody lock a bandit, lets light em up!" She pushed the throttles to full afterburner, speeding after the lead Xian pilot.

One by one, Tom and the other pilots followed suit.

"Excalibur, Gunner." Sarah said on comms. "We're engaging the enemy." "Acknowledged Gunner, good huntin'." Maya replied.

.............................................................

"All main engines idling normally." Kayla announced.

"Maintain station keeplin, lets let them come t' us." Maya said. "Red alert, shields up, arm weapons, an' polarize the hull."

"Done ma'am." Callie replied. "We're ready."

.......

Excalibur Brig

"Guard!" the mining foreman shouted as the battle klaxxon blared. "Guard! Me need speak with Admiral Maya!"

The frst few times, the guard ignored him, but after the seventh time, she approached the cell, and asked what the prisoner wanted. "battle...weakness." he said. "Me only speak to Maya."

The guard took out her communicator and called the bridge, then attenuated the forcefield in a small circle and passed the communicator through the still locked bars. "Here, you can talk to her on this."

"Maya?" the Xian glubbed into the communicator.

"Ah'm here what is it, Dick Head?" Maya replied.

"The ship...target ventral midline. Main deuterium tanks. shields thinest there cause fighter bay doors."

"Why help us?" Maya asked.

"Me live among you for months, you not bad people." the Xian replied. "Propaganda wrong you people not evil you just misguided you not worship us."

"good t' know. Ah'll git ya extra rations when its over." Maya said.

"Karen's Special? That was delicious." the Xian said.

"Ah'll see what Ah kin do." Maya replied. "Bridge out."

The comm ended, and the Xian passed the communicator back to the guard who then resealed the forcefield and continued her rounds.

...........................

Tom took position as Sarah's wingman, as they sped into the fray. Sarah engaged the lead enemy fighter head-on, and in doing so forced the enemy's combat patrol to break formation, making themselves targets for Tom, Rena, Melody, and the others.

"Too close for missiles, switching to autocannons." Sarah called out as she centered the reticule on her hud with the tailsection of the enemy fighter she chased. The enemy fighter banked hard, looped and climbed, evading most of the autocannon rounds, and trying to gain ground. No matter what he did however, Sarah was right on his tail, pulling off brutal tight high-g turns and vertical climbs which would have been retina-destroying to Xian or human pilots as she took pot-shots at the Xian letting her foe know there was no shaking her. The Xian had do be close to blacking out from such maneuvers but he wasn't letting up.

Tom caught another Xian fighter trying to slip in behind Sarah, and quickly lined up the shot. "Target locked, fox-2" Tom called out on comms, touching off a missile to deal with the enemy fighter. A moment later the missile struck the winged phallic shaped craft dead center of its engine exhaust and the fighter exploded in a brillian ball of fire. "Scratch one" Tom announced triumphantly.

Tom looked around for another target, and then his mood took a dive. He saw a massive squadron of enemy fighters headed their way, and the fighters being deployed from Excalibur, Lee, and Jackson would not arrive for another minute. 60 seconds in the heat of combat, trying to evade that many fighters, might as well have been an eternity.

Sarah nailed her target at that instant, and gave the order to use their jump drives to evade the oncoming swarm by jumping back towards Excalibur to join up with the rest of the fleet. The rest of the squadron acknowledged the order, then they all paired off and executed the jump. A few of the Xian fighters made the jump as well, and were quickly cut down my the massive friendly squadron, and grapeshot from Excalibur, Lee, and Jackson's point defense autocannons, but not before one of them got a lucky shot off.

"I'm hit." Sarah announced. "Excalibur, Gunner, fire in engine one, fire suppression engaged. its under control but engine two is running hot."

"Come on home, Gunner." Maya replied. "Grab a spare an; git back in the fight."

"Negative Excalibur, insufficient power for safe return." Sarah replied. "I cant match your speed. I'm going to set down on the planet and attempt repairs."

"That atmosphere's toxic." Maya replied.

"There's an EVA suit in my emergency supplies, and I can take shelter in the cockpit between repairs to conserve suit air. Contact again once I'm down, Gunner out."

"Tom, go with 'er." Maya ordered.

"Yes ma'am." Tom replied, taking position beside Sarah's damaged fighter, to escort her to the planet.

They evaded the dueling fighters, and munitions exchanged by the starships, making for the planet as fast as sarah's damaged fighter would allow. They made orbit without incident, and began their descent.

"Gunner you're leaking fuel, cut your fuel pumps." Tom informed Sarah. "You're going to have to set down unpowered."

"Copy." Sarah replied. "fuel off, that stop it?"

"Yeah you're good." Tom replied. "You still got RCS control?"

"Affirmitive." Sarah replied.

"Good, pitch up 2 degrees, you're too steep." Tom said, accelerating to keep up as Sarah's fighter plunged into the toxic atmosphere.

Sarah corrected her glidepath, keeping a close eye on the auxiliary power battery levels as her shields began to deplete them quickly under the strain of repelling the heat of atmospheric entry. Halfway through the thermosphere she had to cut the shields completely and rely on the heat resistant skin of her fighter to do the job.

"Thats it for shields." Sarah said on comms. Cant use any more power, not and be sure of ignition."

"Copy." Tom said. "What about life support?"

"Emergency reserve is full so I'm good there." Sarah replied. The heat of atmospheric entry interfered with their comm signal so bad they could hardly hear eachother through the static, then just as suddenly the heat died out. they were through the thermosphere...but there was nothing to see but thick clouds.

Below the clouds of sulphur dioxide was a heavy fog, largely obscuring an uninviting rough craggy surface, with jagged pillars of stone juttig out at odd angles. Expensive gemstone formations, rubies, diamonds, emralds, sapphires, larger than any formations either of them had ever seen.

Sarah worked the manual hydraulic pump to extend the landing gear and deploy the flaps as she searched for a strip flat enough to touch down.

The particulates in the atmosphere was playing havok with Tom's systems, collecting on the turbine intake blades, and restricting airflow. as such his engines ran rich, and were losing power. "Gunner I'm losing power." Tom said. "If I stay much longer I wont have the smash to reach escape velocity."

"Bug out." Sarah replied. "I see a flat clearing ahead, sensors cant get a solid read on it in all this muck, but it appears to be solid quartz."

"Roger that." Tom said. "I'll let Excalibur know your current heading."

With that, he pushed the throttles up to full afterburner, made one last pass over the area Sarah was headed, and climbed hard for orbit.

Upon returning to Excalibur, Tom saw his fighter was a real mess. particulates from the planet's atmosphere had built up all over his fighter, and the engines were so mucked up he was amazed they'd still been running when he landed.

Tom let Maya know what happened, and she ordered him to get a fresh ship and rejoin the fighter mission. All the while Excalibur traded blows with the Xian battleship. The battle was going well, but still it hindered recovery efforts. ..................................

Sarah fought to keep her fighter stable, sacrificing airspeed for altitude to glide over the jagged crystalline rocks toward the flat clearing in the distance. The closer she got to the ground, she began to notice a trail. broken crystal formations spattered with turbine oil and hydraulic fluid, and scattered bits of debris. She felt a knot in her stomach at the prospect that brought. That she might not be alone here. Sensor readings were spotty at best, but what little data she had indicated the other craft was Xian. Was it possible the pilot survived? She wondered. Could he have made an emergency landing like she was about to do? and more importantly, if so, was anything salvageable from his ship? These questions weighed heavily on her mind.

The clearing was coming up fast, and Sarah worked quickly adjusting her trajectory to avoid the slick trail left by the other fighter. At this distance, sensors confirmed the flat surface was quartz, and combined with a reading of the planet's gravity, which was twice that of Excalibur standard, or roughly 2.5x that of Earth, she adjusted the inertial dampers to compensate, then hit the deceleration jets to slow down just before her wheels made contact with the slick flat surface. She felt a bump as her fighter touched down briefly, bounced back into the air, and touched down again. This time her fighter remained grounded, and she began to apply the landing brakes, gently at first, so as to avoid skidding out of control. It was like landing on ice, the smooth surface offering little grip for the landing gear, and with no cable for the arresting hook to catch, it took a good two minutes to bring her fighter to a stop.

Sarah locked the landing brakes, and tried one more time to scan the area. The Xian fighter was visible on sensors now, about half a mile from where she landed. She made a note to hike over and check it out after surveying the damage to her fighter, then tried the Comms again, boosting the signal to maximum. "Excalibur, Gunner, come in." *Static* "Excalibur, Gunner, come in, over" she tried again. *static* "CSS Lee, Gunner, come in, over" *Static* "CSS Jackson, Gunner, do you read?" Still nothing but static. Ok scratch that. Sarah thought to herself. She switched to a frequency commonly used by Xians, and tried again "Unidentified Xian pilot, this is Gunner of the Avenging Aces We can either fight it out here, or help eachother get off this rock. Once we make escape velocity all bets are off." Again she got only static, so Sarah assumed either the Dick Head was dead, or out of range.

Sarah shut down everything but life-support, comms, and her emergency beacon, and switched comms to low power mode, all in an effort to conserve battery power. She had a week's worth of oxygen in her fighter, plus 24 hours in her EVA suit, but she only had 26 hours of battery power. before power levels would be too low to start the engines. She would have to repair the damaged engine and stop the fuel leak before then, or she'd be forced to risk starting the one good engine to recharge the batteries in spite of the leak. To make matters worse, the leak had severely depleted her fuel reserves. If she stopped the leak, she could only idle the good engine for 2 hours, one full charge in the batteries, and still have enough fuel to reach escape velocity.

Sarah ran over everything in her mind as she unstrapped herself, and set about unzipping her flightsuit. It was slow work, but once she had the tight fitting suit off, she got the EVA suit from her emergency kit, unpacked it, and proceeded to put it on. Sarah checked and re-checked the suit's pressure seals, collected har sidearm, and hit the canopy release. The thick fog severely hampered visibility, but nonetheless, Sarah climbed down from her fighter, and grabbed a toolbox from the emergency supplies compartment in the fuselage, then began to survey the damage.

Right away she noticed the damaged engine was a lost cause. The turbine blades were bent and large pieces were missing. The other engine looked fine, but she'd have to pull open the access compartments to trace down the fuel leak. With that done, she checked her sidearm again, then set off on the half mile hike to the Xian ship. It was slow going. She felt like she weighed a ton in the high gravity, and the weight of the EVA suit didn't help. In spite of her intense physical training regimen, she quickly found herself winded, panting heavily, and aching for a rest. Worst of all, breathing so heavily used up more oxygen, which she needed to conserve.

When she finally made it to the Xian ship, she found it largely undamaged. The pilot was dead from the poison atmosphere, due to a pair of autocannon holes through the metal of the cockpit behind the canopy seals. Sarah reasoned she could use her toolkit's portable acetylene torch to weld patches over those if she had to, then set about extricating the alien corpse from the cockpit, and checking over the main systems. She scanned the instrument panel and HUD with her suit's external camera, and the UT software that Molly developed in her suit translated the alien writing into Canid, and displayed it on her helmet's HUD.

The Xian ship had plenty of Deuterium to spare, and the engines looked to be in relatively good shape, but she'd have to repair the oil and hydraulic lines, and use empty pee bottles to transfer the oil and hydraulic fluid from her ship in order to salvage it. Still it would be simpler than trying to fix her own fighter. The bigger problem would be deactivating the IFF transmitter, and splicing in the one from her own fighter, and even then she'd need some sort of marking to identify herself visually. Fortunately she had the body of an Xian avalible, and could use his blood to paint "Gunner" on the ship in several places where it would be clearly visible. That done she collected the extra O2 bottles from the Xian's unused EVA suit, and started back for her fighter.

......................

Trapped in the minefield, the Xian ship was unable to maneuver, making them easy prey for Excalibur and the two earthships' weapons. Excalibur struck the final blow, when her massive 80" autocannons ripped through the ventral midsection, and detonated the Xian's Deuterium tanks.

The fighter mission was slow work however, the sheer number of fighters the Xians deployed had Maya's people outnumbered 5 to one, and that was before Maya pulled Tom, Melody, and Rena from the battle to begin search operations for Sarah. None of them were happy about leaving the battle, but their desire to bring Sarah home made up for that.

While the search party was refueling from a tanker, Hank, who May had finally released went to see Maya on the bridge.

"Admiral, I should be out there. Request permission to join the search." Hank said. "I know you need pilots to fight the Xians...but one pilot wont make much of a difference out there...whereas one more pilot could significantly increase our odds of finding Sarah in time."

"Granted, we don' leave our people bahind." Maya replied. "Gear up...an' watch yerself down there, Tom reported particulates in the atmosphere reekin havoc with his fighter."

"He also reported visibility is extremely poor." Molly said. "You will have to fly low and slow."

"And don't trust your sensors, use your eyes. to verify your readings." Agnes added. "I'd go with you, but I could need to take over for Callie at any moment."

"Go." Callie said. "I'm not due for another week. I can manage."

Reluctantly Agnes agreed, and she left with Hank to gear up, then they made their way to the fighter bay. By the time they were airborne, Tom's group had finished refueling, and the five of them took up formation, and headed for the planet.

They passed through the thermosphere without incident, and continued to descend toward sarah's last known position. "Keep it tight." Tom said. "Lets get down below this cloud layer."

"Set your shields to a rotating modulation, should help filter out the particulates." Rena added.

A round of acknowledgements, then, Melody remarked "I cant see shit in this fog."

"Me either." Agnes replied. "Sensors are blind too."

"That was to be expected." Rena informed.

"Steady." Tom said. "We need to get lower. visibility improves a little around 200 feet altitude."

"That's awfully low." Agnes said. "Wont have much altitude to maneuver."

"Cant be helped." Tom said. "Lets get low and slow, keep your airspeed 75kph above stall speed. any faster and we could fly right past her and not see anything."

Another round of acknowledgements, then "Excalibur, Tom, beginning search pattern, grid 1A."

"Ah'm barely readin ya." Maya replied.

"We'lll maintain comms as long as possible." Tom replied.

"Copy that. Jus' bring her home." Maya replied.

"At this altitude we have a little over an hour before particulate buildup becomes a problem even with the modified shields." Rena informed.

"Understood." Tom said., then, "Gunner, Tom, do you read."

*Garbled static*

Tom shifted through the frequencies, and tried again, this time on a higher bandwidth.

"Gunner here...go ahead..." came the reply. Her voice was garbled with static, almost incomprehensible, but it was her.

"Whats your position?" Tom asked.

"Unknown...sensors inoperative beyond 1/2 mile." Sarah replied.

"Whats your situation?"

"Ok for the moment." Sarah began. "One good engine, one totally shot, found an Xian fighter that may be salvageable. plenty of O2, I'm good for the moment....except I need to use the bathroom."

"The suits are designed for it." Tom replied. "I wont tell anyone."

"Its gross." Sarah replied.

"Its a normal function." Hank chimed in. "Dont tell her I told you, but Karen admited to doing it when she told me of the last time she wore one of those suits."

"Almost everyone has done it." Agnes said.

"Yeah." Rena agreed. "The suits have pee tubes and fecal collection hoses for a reason."

"Fine." Sarah relented. "Can you triangulate my comm signal?"

"Negative." Tom replied. "There's too much interference. not picking up the emergency beacon either."

"Scan for a clearing, flat solid quartz." Sarah said. Its huge but thats all I got to go on."

"Copy that." Tom said. "We'll keep searching."