Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games by Marion G. Harmon Page B

and spun us again until the attitude lines showed we were coming in belly-down. Feeling the atmosphere start to grab, I held our attitude until our building velocity did it for me. In interest of keeping the lifter’s weight down, only the bottom of its hull came with a thick heat shield—and even if we weren’t going to come down hot this time, belly-down reentry was safest.
     
    A climbing whistle softly vibrated through the cabin, the first wisps of atmosphere contesting our intrusion. “We’re riding on rails now, people,” Shell sang out. “Prepare for spin and breaking in five minutes, give or take a few counts. Next stop—” She cut out, vanished , along with the virtual map and positioning lines I was following.
     
    ----
     
    “Hope? What’s happening?” Ozma closed her book and looked up, and I realized she’d been wearing Seeing Specs so she could see Shell and her virtual screens.
     
    “Shell? Shell?” No answer in my head. Shell wouldn’t leave . That was stating the obvious. Okay, something had broken our link, a quantum-entanglement interdiction field or something, like the one around Guantanamo Bay. All the way up here? Still being obvious. “Shell’s gone, and I’m blind.”
     
    Jacky started unbuckling, looking around the cabin. “What about the internal controls?”
     
    “Stay in your seat, there are no internal flight controls. Watchman uses a VR rig when he flies inside, and it’s back at the Dome.”
     
    “Can you land us without it?” Ozma asked with the same urgency she’d use to ask if tea would be served on time.
     
    “No.” I started unlocking myself from the flight frame. “We’re in free-fall, which means when I start pushing I won’t know which direction down is. I won’t know when and how hard to push, and even using the windows I could fly us into the ocean. I’d survive.” I didn’t have to say “ you wouldn’t .”
     
    “Okay…so what do we do?” Jacky sounded nearly as calm as Ozma. I wasn’t panicking, but only because there was a way out. It killed the mission, but we’d go home.
     
    “I need to go outside to land us, and we don’t have a pressure-lock. If I pop the hatch we’re going to depressurize and start tumbling, and our radar-profile is going to spike. Which means a getting a crowbar or a missile.”
     
    “So we can’t stay. Got it.” Jacky started unbuckling again.
     
    “No. I’m aborting the flight.” I’d reached the single control box in the cabin, the one with the big red handle. “When I pull the emergency release, the transponder turns on, the radio starts screaming SOS, and we grow parachutes the instant the flight computer says we’re low enough.”
     
    Hopefully we weren’t already in Japan’s airspace.
     
    “Stop!” Ozma actually yelled over the rising vibration and howl. “Jacky, how long can you remain mist?”
     
    “Up to half an hour. Why?”
     
    “Get what you need. Hope, you’re leaving. We’re leaving with you.”
     
    They unbuckled and moved fast—all the Sentinels and Young Sentinels had received zero-gee training. I grabbed my sword and sheathed it while Jacky grabbed her guns and Ozma retrieved her wand-baton. Clutching it and her magic box, she yelled a string of nonsense-words and turned into a green crystal jar.
     
    “Okay, she can come,” Jacky said.
     
    “You think?” I picked Ozma up and popped her lid, trying not to think about it. “Get in .” When Jacky turned herself into mist she also lost a lot of her mass (otherwise the transition from solid to gas would have made her transformations explosive ). The remaining mist that was Jacky could compress into the jar, and did, leaving me with a sealed Ozma-jar of Jacky and an empty cabin.
     
    Our baggage wouldn’t survive the trip. But then again, I wasn’t going to let go of Ozma with one hand just to take anything else with us.
     
    How much time? Less than five minutes, but since we hadn’t eaten a missile yet there