The distress signal reached the pilot shortly before his break.
-Damn. Someone fighting in uneven fights again? They'll never learn.
He tracked the source of the signal and sighed. D-6. He was rather reluctant, but SWAT forces are supposed to venture through hard zones. The large ship complied with the command and activated the cruise engines, shaking the whole cockpit.
He travelled through the field trying to get a better location of the signal. Rock after rock, he went even further.
Until he found what he was looking for. A tiny Liberator, which appeared badly damaged and with no life support and pod ejected. The pod was not far away, standing still in the cold space. The fighter headed in direction to the pod, while the pilot was scanning for life signs. Minimal. He quickly tractored the pod in and started the cruise engines. This place gave him creeps.
The warning klaxon blaring in her ears, she groaned and strained not to black out from the g-forces crushing her back into her seat as she pulled back hard on the flight stick, whipping the nose of her Liberator in a near-180 and hit the afterburner, trying to shake the rapidly closing missile...
Creaking metal and a sudden jolt partially brought Carina back to consciousness. Her surroundings were a dull red blur, and she couldn't be sure which way she was oriented. Weakly she tried to sit up, but she could barely manage to shift. Something was holding her firmly in place. Was she even lying down? Sitting?
Pulses of energy screamed across her field of vision, inches from the duraglass canopy, the polarized ions making her hair stand up on the back of her neckn even within the cockpit. She banked and burned hard again, weaving the best she could in the hailstorm of incoming fire.
Where was she? She could hear her breath echoing through some mechanical apparatus, and something was clasped onto her face. Her oxygen mask... it was her mask. The shattered visage before her... was her helmet's faceplate cracked? Smashed? She became aware of a warm liquid trickling down the side of her head, pooling around her neck. Her vision cleared barely enough to make out the dull metallic interior of her cockpit... no, her escape pod. Had she been fragged?
She swore in Spanish as she watched her shots be harmlessly absorbed into the shields of the frigate that had opened fire on her. Another siren blared. Another hard bank. Then deafening white.
A low-frequency hum vibrated her surroundings, and she became aware she was moving, being steadily towed somewhere. With every bit of effort she could muster, she tried to reach the transmit button on her stick, but with another sudden jolt, all went black again.
- The hell with your landing procedures, this is a SWAT vessel and I have an emergency !
The large craft simply landed. After all the smoke cleared out, two medics rushed up towards the craft. Young, fresh, probably untrained. One of them was chewing a gum and had quite the zit on his neck. The escape pod was in a really, really bad condition. Took the rookies a while to open it and get the officer on a stretcher.
"Female officer", the SWAT operative thought.
He kept looking after her as the two medics rushed the stretcher to the ICU.
The officer stood like this for a while and decided to check the life pod. Pretty much all the electronics were gone, hull was badly damaged, life support just failed - it was a wreck. He noticed the patrol ship's ID number and quickly went to check into the database. Quickly found. Carina Valencia. He forwarded a message to her direct supervisors and colleagues about the incident, looked back , just to see the pod was being cleared from the spacecraft pad and sighed. He went back to his ship, started the engines and queued to leave Denver.
The comms light blinked on Frost's Liberator as he prepared to undock from Police Plaza. "Incoming mail," Frost said to himself "This better not be orders to fly to Houston".
Having pressed a few keys, the message popped up on the main display. SWAT encryption.
Frost typed in the access code and viewed the message.
"Recruit Officer Carina Valencia injured in line of duty, ship destroyed at Colorado D-6, Pod recovered. Officer is at Denver Police Medical facility."
D-6? D-6 was the middle of the Silverton asteroid field. "Gods damnit! How many times do we have to shout at these recruits to avoid leaving open space without backup?"
Opening up a comms link to Illinois flight control, Frost registered a change. "Looks like I'm going to be swinging by Denver, another recruit's busted themselves up, let the precinct know I'm coming"
Frost hit the dock release button and punched the throttle.
Tal sat in the Sunbucks cafe on Fort Bush, typing up a police report to submit some time next week. As if on cue, a notification appeared as soon as he finished typing up the last of his report. "Oh, how convenient," he thought to himself, "I wonder what it is." Upon opening the message, he was greeted with a large, almost warning like message stating that a fellow officer was downed in Colorado. Knowing that Carina was a recruit, Tal promptly got up, packed up his belongings, and started for his ship.
He launched as soon as he could, and sped off toward Denver.
A droning, monotone, steady beep was the first thing that she gradually became aware of as the gray, amorphous haze in her vision started to coalesce into something tangible. Faint, murmuring voices muffled through walls and doors could be vaguely heard, echoing down hard, sterile hallways. The gray blobs slowly began to form pristine white shapes. White walls. One window. A hard tile floor. Bed railings. Computer equipment all around her. One or two cream-colored metal lockers. She was propped up about thirty degrees at the waist.
She blinked, trying to clear the fog from her vision, and in doing so she felt the gauze wrappings around her temple and cranium. She lifted her arm to touch it, and noticed the wires and monitoring devices attached to her slender forearm, and pinched on her index finger. She looked around the room, down at her feet, felt her chest and waist. She was dressed in nothing more than a paper hospital gown, covered by the bedsheet. She lifted her left arm, noticing it was in a cast. She saw her fingers poking through the end. Seemed she was in one piece, and in a hospital. She wasn't sure how she got there, but right now it didn't much matter. She let her head fall back down onto the lumpy, cheap pillow and couldn't help laughing quietly to herself, even though doing so made her chest hurt and made it somewhat hard to breathe. She closed her eyes and sighed. Damn, what a rush. It was stupid, she knew, flying that far off the trade lane without backup and running her mouth off to two ships that, criminal or not, obviously outgunned her by at least three to one, but damn, what a rush.
The droning beep continued to pulse along with her heartbeat. For a moment she reflected on how something that sounded so dull and lifeless could signify something so life-affirming as a heartbeat. Funny thing, that. But it meant she was alive. And damn, did she ever feel that way, ironically, even if she was lying in a hospital taped together like a half-mummy.
Through the narrow slats of the blinds over the window across the room from her revealed two men talking. Not quite arguing, but she could tell that one of them wasn't in a terribly good mood. The balding one who had his hands defensively held up in front of him wore the white coat of a doctor. The other one was a uniformed LPI pilot, still in his flight suit, carrying his helmet under one arm and pointing firmly at the doctor with the other. Behind the two men, Carina could make out a familiar face sitting on a bench on the opposite wall. A fellow recruit, whose name she didn't remember. Younger guy, short dark hair. She'd been in one or two training classes with him, and she remembered he had a real problem keeping his eyes pointed above the neck. She cracked the knuckles on her good hand, rolling her shoulder a couple of times to be sure at least *that* fist would be mobile in case she felt like it would do some good.
The doctor glanced her way, then with a double-take seemed to notice that she was awake. He interrupted the police officer and pointed into the window. The LPI pilot turned and looked through, and she immediately recognized him.
"Ay, mierda," Carina thought to herself. It was Officer Frost. She dropped her head back into the pillow and sighed, rolling her eyes as she heard the door open, the clack of two pairs of boots marching in, followed by a third. She was going to get an earful over this.
Tal stood up, noticing Officer Frost move into the room. He slowly walked into the room, with the doctor shutting the door behind him. He stood there, blankly staring at Carina as she lay there, crippled in a hospital bed. He glanced at Frost, who seemed to be absorbing in the situation, patiently awaiting his remarks to Carina's actions. "This is going to be good," he thought, "I wonder what the punishment will be".
It was clear that Carina had taken a good bash in the explosion and she certainly looked worse for wear. Plastered limbs, dressings, scans on the computer showing some mildly mangled internals and tubes running to a canula in her arm.
"So. Recruit Valencia. How're you feeling?"
Frost was pissed that he'd have to pick up her work for a few days, but he wasn't mad at her. Recruits were there to learn, and sometimes learning involved losing 20 million credits or so's worth of Liberator.
Laughing to himself, Frost continued "Learn anything?"
Carina scooched up in her bed to sit up a little, hiding the wince of pain the best she could. "That it took two frigates way longer'n it should've to dust me," she quipped smugly, despite her situation, then gave her superior a wry grin. "And that you probably ain't here to bring me a get-well card."
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