Page 55 of Reformation
“I’ll come after you! I’m not letting youdothis, do you understand me?” Jack’s voice was filled with rising desperation, the sort of tone people took when they realized they didn’t have the upper hand anymore.
“Why does he even want you?” Ten asked. Ze meant it genuinely too. “He hasn’t spent more than ten minutes in your company since we got on board.”
“Games. Just games.” Cody shook his head a little. “Ten seconds; you ready?”
Ten smirked despite the rapid acceleration of hir heartbeat. “As ready as I can be going into a largely untested experimental flight with no fallbacks.”
“I knew you were having fun.”
“Cody!Cody! Don’t!”
Five … four … three … two … one …
The airlock opened, their thruster fired, and the hoverbike tumbled into space.
Chapter thirty-one
Jonah
It felt odd to be watching a battle from so far away. The scope Jonah had pulled out from a cabinet wasn’t great—it could get through the atmospheric pollution, but the ships were still too far away to get a real bead on them. All he could make out clearly were the streams of light, light firing through space from one cluster of ships to another. Lights in the dark, each bright beam carrying death and destruction with it.
“What the hell is happening?” he muttered to himself.
That Pandora was under attack, well—he already knew that, having been a casualty. But who specifically was doing the attacking? And who were they fighting?
It had to be Alliance forces of some kind, there was no other fleet out there to bring this kind of firepower. That meant politics had gotten involved, which meant Garrett’s hand was in this somehow. Probably propelling whoever had come in the colony’s defense, given how the president felt about the coloniesthese days, especially ones under the aegis of whomever he considered his “rivals.”
Garrett had mustered a fleet and sent them out to protect Pandora. Of course, he had. Jonah smiled for a second before pushing the thought of his husband away. Garrett had to be fucking frantic, and just thinking about it would be enough to push Jonah over the edge if he wasn’t careful. He couldn’t dwell on what his husband was going through right now, and he couldn’t bear to think about Cody, or worse, Lacey, so he stared at the sky and let the distant violence quietly fill his mind.
It was almost meditative, in a horrible way. So much so that he barely noticed one of those bursts of light getting bigger. Definitely brighter. So bright that—
Jonah pulled the scope away from his eye and watched, transfixed, as what looked like an escape pod hurtled through the atmosphere, limned in fire. The farther it descended, the brighter the fire became, until all of a sudden, some sort of threshold was passed, and the blaze went out in less than a second. Jonah tried to track the pod then, but it was too dark out, and he lost it to the roiling clouds in moments. He didn’t have time to wonder about its fate, though; seconds later, another pod began glowing in the sky, then another, until the stars themselves were overshadowed by the terrible beauty of a hundred human meteors hurtling through the darkness, each one lighting its own path.
They covered the sky from horizon to horizon, spread out so far that he had no hope of keeping track of them all. A few seemed on track to come down fairly close to him, though. Those ones he managed to follow in the darkness, watching but morehearingthe moment their chutes opened, the ancient method of slowing their speed boosted by antigrav units.
Two of them drifted down into the water, and Jonah pursed his lips and prayed that whoever was in those pods had the senseto keep their antigrav going as long as they could, to help keep the pods on the surface of the angry sea. The water was tough to navigate with a fully functional ship; it would be hell on those awkward, egg-shaped pods.
A gentle movement caught his attention, and Jonah turned to watch one of those pods float down no more than a kilometer away from him, hitting the ground with acrunchhe could hear even though the landing had been relatively calm.
He shuffled around to his knees and bit his lip. He could go and investigate it. He probablyshould; it would be good to gather some intelligence, and maybe whoever was in the pod could tell him something about what was happening up there.
On the other hand, it was entirely possible that whoever was in that pod was an enemy fighter. If Jonah went to spy on them and got caught or followed back to the bunker, then he’d be giving them Lacey. That was the last thing he wanted.
In the end his curiosity won; he had to know more. He could be quiet, bring the scope, and watch from a distance until he was sure it was a friend instead of an enemy. If it was a friend, he could offer his own aid, poor as it was. And if it was an enemy, well … he could avoid them. Come back to the bunker and lock himself in and hope they didn’t look around too hard.
Yeah.Thatsounded like agreatplan. What could possibly go wrong?
Wonderful, now he was hearing Garrett in his head. He must be goin’ crazy. “You don’t get a say when you’re not here, darlin’,” he whispered before getting to his feet. He was going to check it out. He’d be careful.
A kilometer in the dark was hard going even though it was a lot easier without the rain making every step a peril. Jonah used his light as little as possible, moving slowly and mostly stopping himself from stumbling. He pulled himself over sharp-edged knolls and finally hunkered down in a crevice about a hundredyards out, reconfiguring the scope for close distance and lifting it to his eyes.
The pod’s paint was charred from its entry, making identifying it by its markings impossible. The hatch was open, but he couldn’t see anyone moving around, no evidence that anyone had emerged from it yet. Were they disoriented? Maybe even injured? He couldn’t know without moving closer, and he wasn’t going to do that until he had a better idea of what was happening here. Despite the way it tugged at his impatience, Jonah settled in and waited for whoever was in the pod to reveal himself.
In the end, it ended up beingherself. A young woman eventually emerged from the hatch, moving slowly and groaning loud enough for him to hear over the wind. She was moving like a hundred-year-old natural; right, she’d probably been banged up good inside that little thing even if she’d strapped in. He watched her rub her left shoulder with her right hand, wincing before letting it go, then touching her ear as though she was speaking into a comm. Amilitarycomm unit, in fact. And even in the dark, Jonah could see the insignia on her shoulder.
This girl was Alliance. A lieutenant, it looked like; a young one.
He moved before he’d made a conscious decision, stepping out of the rocks and onto the small shelf where the pod had lodged. The girl looked his way instantly, tension filling her frame. “Who’s there?” she shouted. “Who are you?”
