Ezra's First

Part 9

The next time when they jumped, they weren't greeted with the normal backdrop of space. Dark, silent, speckled with stars.

This time, they were greeted with a massive planet at the nose of their ship. They had jumped in too close and where now ploughing through the upper atmosphere of a planet.

The ship buckled and shuddered as Ezra struggled to get the thrusters to match their new atmosphere. The ship heaved and turned throwing the two pilots around in their chairs. Daniel had lost consciousness and Ezra was fighting his own battle to keep present. The ship detected their condition and flooded their systems with adrenalin.

Daniel came conscious about the same time the thrusters successfully fired and Ezra began to get the ship under control.

"You alive there buddy?"

"Ye.. ye..yeah just a brief outage, you know."

"Sure do, can you start scanning the planets topography, look for a place we can land.

"We staying?"

"More like hiding. We can't outrun them, but we have about eight minutes before they show up and this planet seems to be one giant storm."

At the moment, all they could see was a massive ocean and he hoped this wasn't some water world as that would throw that idea out of the window.

"Bank east!" Daniel yelled and sent new coordinates to his console.

Ezra adjusted the controls to the new heading and went full burn. He checked the clock and their pursuers were expected to arrive in the next seven minutes. The bonus would be that they also would slam into the side of the planet. The navigation system had warned that this system had 'pedantic' jump points but that normally just meant that a gas giant was in the wrong spot and the jump point got moved another fifty thousand kilometres, not that an actual planet would be in the exact jump spot. Though the data on this system was collected by an automated probe, what could they have known.

Ezra spotted a dense mountainous valley and made a beeline for it, he began scanning visually as well as with the onboard lidar for a good spot to hunker down. He didn't want to delay them any more than they had to, but if they still had twelve more systems to travel through before hitting friendly space and he wasn't confident he could keep out running them.

"They've arrived!" Daniel announced as three jump signatures showed up in planets atmosphere. No doubt they were experiencing the same troubles.

Ezra saw the opportunity he was looking for and slammed the ship into a dive, he cut the main thrusters and started using the ships air foils to shed their speed. They swooped into the valley, barely missing the tops of the trees with the ships rear and then Ezra hooked a right and swung the ship under a rock canopy using the passive thrusters to bring the ship to an instantaneous stop and then he landed.

But the work wasn't done just yet. Ezra leapt from his console and headed towards the door.

"You activate the heat sink, I'll get the coverings." He yelled at Daniel, who went about draining every last shred of heat from the ship into their heat sink. It would have to be ejected in a direction, but as Ezra had pointed out, the sky was lit up with random heat signatures from the constant storm, and flying heat sink will probably help their disguise.

Ezra sprinted out of the cockpit, through the galley and living area and into the cargo bay, which was already looking like a disaster zone thanks to their work extracting the missiles, but after some of the damage they had sustained it was looking pretty worse for wear.

The ramp was already deployed, and he could hear the ships camouflage unfolding. Not everything on the ship was high tech, the ship carried massive fabric sheets of camouflage and while their default deployment would do an alright job, Ezra needed to go put the finishing touches on it.

He rushed down the ramp and onto the alien soil, without so much of a care that he might very well be the first even human to have walked on this planet. It was raining heavily and the storm overhead could be felt rumbling in his chest. His suit chimed up to give him an accurate reading on the planets atmosphere where they currently where, the good news was that if his suit was compromised he wouldn't immediately die, the atmosphere sufficient levels of oxygen.

He circled the perimeter of the ship pulling straight the fabric, in one spot it had gotten ripped, presumably from the fire they had sustained but it was not a big enough issue to warrant a fix job.

"Heat sink firing" Daniel announced over their radio and Ezra watched as a small turret at the rear of the ship above the engines, orientated itself to fire out into the valley and with a satisfying thud jettisoned their heat sink. It flew a few kilometres before Ezra lost sight of it.

"Powering down all systems."

With the heat sink sorted it was now safe for Ezra to climb on top of the ship. The ship had numerous holds for one to use and Ezra quickly scaled the ship.

The top of the ship looked worse than the underside. Impact marks from the fire they had received lined the top and while the hull looked dented Ezra knew it was holding. The unexpected burn through this planet's atmosphere hadn't done the ships paint job any favours either but that was immaterial.

Ezra straightened out the fabric on the roof, due to the damage it needed more care and attention than the underside and a few times Ezra nearly fell off trying to wrangle it.

"I think I have good news." Daniel commented over the wireless.

"I can't be certain without the primary sensors powered up, but using the historical sensor data and our passive suite, I think one of the Preshk ships crashed on entry."

"That is good news if true. Heading in soon."

"It also appears as if the other ships immediately exited the atmosphere, even if they do come back to scan for us we'll be ice cold by then."

"Ship, Set Orange Alert" Ezra ordered.

It was at that moment, Ezra felt himself slow down, the adrenaline and the panic no longer propelling him forward and he started to actually feel how tired he was.