Living in Freefall (Living on the Run Book 1) by Ben Patterson

eyed, Riley gripped his seat. His knuckles turned
white. The carrier launch bay was barely twenty feet high and fifty feet wide,
little room to maneuver when screaming headlong at 500 miles per.
    The Talons caught up to her just as she entered. In his rear
viewer, Riley saw a couple clumsy pilots crash into the bay’s mouth.
    “Everybody in?” Ericca asked under her breath. She brought Viper over to one side of the bay, ran tight near one wall, then pulled away hard to
make the sharpest five hundred miles per hour turn ever, inside the launch bay
giving her no room whatsoever to screw up. “Everybody out,” she whispered.
    Riley’s stomach clenched as she headed back toward the
opening straight at the incoming Talons. Lighting up all four cannons, he fired
straight ahead to clear the way out.
    Frantic to evade his guns, the Talons veered but, inside the
launch bay, they had no place to go. Most painted the walls with their ships.
The bay exploded. Flames like a dragon’s breath devoured the remaining Talon
fighters, and chased Viper all the way out.
    “Cripes, sis! You think you got them mad yet?”
    “If you think shoving a stick into a hornet’s nest is a bad
idea, just wait.”
    Riley glanced at his rear monitor. Fresh Talons poured in
force from the carrier’s second bay. “You didn’t just shove a stick in, sis.
You walked up to their nest and beat the daylights out of it.”
    “Gee, little brother, do you think we should git, before we
get stung?”
    “Yes, please.”
    “Blast it! And right when I’m starting to have fun.”
    “Starting?!” Riley drew a hand firmly down his face. “Look
here. I got two bits of good news I think you’ll like.”
    “Yeah?”
    Riley caught her image on his monitor and met her hard eyes
with his own. “Yeah. For starters, I managed to hold down my lunch.”
    Ericca chuckled. “Ooh, nice. I'm glad to hear that. And
number two?”
    “I believe I have their navigation system figured out.”
    “Great! How does it work?” Ericca headed out and away to
give them some leeway, a little room to talk. She wasn’t finished with these
Talon jockeys yet. Maybe Riley could give her something with which to hurt them
even more than she already had.
    “They use sub-harmonic Ion variants to clear the static.”
    “Okay? So what’s that to us?”
    “Every time we give a neutron burst, it blinds them for a
second. They see us only in segmented snippets, a kind of jerky frame-by-frame,
poorly-made movie. It prevents them from getting a lock, so when they fire,
their aim is if -ish, and erratic. Only by sheer luck will they hit us at
all.”
    “Good job, Archer. I have an idea.”
    Ouch! She couched those four simple words in a catty tone he
recognized . . . and feared . Had anyone else said, ‘I have an
idea,’ Riley would have simply listened with half an ear. But whenever those
four, seemingly simple words slipped past Ericca’s lips he knew the rules of
the game would change completely, but to what he couldn’t even begin to
guess. Yet, he knew one thing was certain; this would no longer be a game of cat
and mouse . It’d become something else entirely.
    He remembered her once saying, “I have an idea,” when she
was only twelve, and there, near Los Dabaron, the Confederation’s 5th fleet met
its end. But at the time she had the help of rebel forces, and Major
Richardson’s commandoes.
    A year or so later, she again said, “I have an idea.” And
the Confederation 14th fleet wound up as only so much twisted and burned metal.
That day she had tricked the Confeds into a confrontation with a pirate fleet
twice their number. Riley— with nerves frayed to the edges —had walked
away from that mess much in need of a long vacation. There were periods
when his sister could be quite insane—scary insane. And days when she was even
worse.
    But she wasn’t always that violent. Take for instance the
time when they had to deal with pirates. After much experimentation Rachel