They made it in time. Just barely. The freighter had met up with the Scorchspace warship, but the exchange hadn’t happened yet.

Those people could still be saved.

“Alright, this is it!” Zamm said, his voice filled with relief and excitement. “We have a fight on our hands!”

“We do,” Saketa replied.

She had been preparing, during the final leap, followed by the approach to the planet. Her body was a fine-tuned weapon, her wounds from the pirate fight mostly healed, and she could do no more for either. So she had worked to sharpen her mind. To fully embody the warrior focus. Now it was about to be put to the test.

“They’re upper atmosphere,” Lesi pointed out from the cockpit doorway. “The only reason to do that is to have a planetside meeting.”

“Yes,” her brother replied. “I’ll have something to do after all. Saketa: You get the ship and I get the surface. Does that sound like a good trade or what?”

“It sounds ideal for our respective strengths,” she told him. “I will go to the bridge and seek to force a general surrender. I will contact you from there if I can. I will probably have to Shift onto the Scorchspacer vessel as well, but perhaps they will have the sense to flee.”

“We’ll see, we’ll see,” Zamm said.

He was fully decked out in his riding suit, armed with the Twins, and his bike was fully repaired, recharged and resupplied. All that remained was his helmet, waiting for him on the bike itself. Saketa had her sword and companion blade, and her focus. That was all she needed.

“Contact me as well,” Lesi said. “Once you have the time, and something to actually report. Let me know if my idiot brother gets himself killed.”

“Oh, I’ll be doing the killing,” he told her. “Don’t you worry.”

His face was dark as he took them in a straight line towards the freighter, keeping it between them and the Scorchspace vessel.

“Scum, all of them,” he growled. “Let’s see how you like it.”

They had done all the preparations already; discussed their separate roles and mulled over potential scenarios once they’d exit leap. This was one of them, and so what followed was simply silence, as the minutes and seconds counted down.

Also counting down was the estimated range for the freighter’s various guns. Closer and closer they came, to potential fire from weapons the little Ranger ship could not carry. Until…

“I will be ready in moments,” Saketa told the siblings.

She readied the sword, and her Shift. She held the freighter’s bridge in her mind, and reached for power.

“Good luck,” Lesi told her.

“Kill them real hard,” Zamm said.

“In three,” Saketa said. “Two. One.”

And she vanished from the cockpit.

Zamm had seen it often enough now to not be taken aback by the sheer weirdness of it. And having a battle on his hands was a wonderful source of focus. So the moment she was gone he wrenched the controls to the side, turning them away from the potential for gunfire. A quick, practised finger-flick set them on an automated course, and he leapt from his seat. Lesi replaced him in the pilot’s chair, and he didn’t spare her a look or a word as he made his way to the back of the ship. He didn’t need her worries right now. He needed to do the job.

He closed the little hangar’s airlock behind them, put his helmet on, and sealed it against the collar of his suit. He got on the bike, fired up the engine, and was greeted with lights and visor readouts that confirmed everything was in working order. He sent a signal that sucked all the air out, and then one that opened the ramp.

“Don’t be TOO brave,” Lesi told him via the helmet’s comm.

He ignored her, and slapped the Tripe Star emblem on his suit, as the surface of Undu-Plas filled his view.

Lesi had gotten around to fixing his drop-shield. And so Zamm Blaze activated his thrusters and launched himself into an Akkian Ranger Drop.

# # #

Saketa found herself wrenched.

It felt like searing heat, like a twisting of her flesh, and a flash of pain in her very mind. All during one single moment, where she existed in nothing, between places, before her own mangled Shift forced her back out into the real world.

It wasn’t the freighter’s bridge that she emerged into, with a gasp, a stumble, and a confused brain. It was a poorly lit place of grimy metal in every direction, where no one had bothered to install sound insulation, and everything rattled and buzzed and hissed with the ship’s overall functions.

A fierce battle-cry was her warning, before a hulking figure charged at her with a large axe.

Saketa sensed death coming. She was being attacked from three directions, and parrying one would get her killed twice over. So she gambled everything on her confused awareness, and her warrior’s instincts, and threw her body after both.

She ducked and wove, under swinging blades and past large, fast bodies. The circle of death closed, but she just barely made it out first.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

And then the three of them turned. In addition to the axe, one had a sword, and the third had two shorter blades. And they came at her, with no hesitation or thought of defence; just a manic desire to see her dead.

They were Muan Ragers, and Saketa knew she was in great danger.

She retreated, over the ring of runes on the floor, the cause of the disrupted Shift, and still it was only instinct that kept her alive as she fended off attacks. Her mind hadn’t recovered, and her powers were disrupted. They had done far more than draw that one circle. They were blocking energies from properly passing through the ship.

There was plenty of space to move around it, but not much to do with it. There were no pillars for her to go around, no stairs to go up or down, and nothing for her to use as a weapon. The Ragers kept pressing her, and let out their growls, snorts and screams as they did so, keeping their characteristic fury going.

It made them deadly, but it also made them sloppy. As Saketa somewhat recovered her wits, she spotted a gap in their attack, as the one with the sword messed up a swing. She seized on it, and dove for him. He met her with an attack rather than a defence, which whiffed at nothing as she pulled off a feint and got past him.

The axe barely missed her head, and she sprinted across this gloomy hold. A quick look back showed her the men coming for her, as well as just how close they had been to trapping her up against a wall.

She saw a way out; a narrow, steep flight of stairs, and went up three steps at a time. Five of those steps brought her up into a hallway with a grated floor, and so she heard the men before she saw them.

They weren’t Muans; just crew. But they were armed with blades, and after a moment of shock at the sight of her, their personal dice roll of fight, flight or freeze landed on flight. Saketa lunged before they could actually act on it, and plunged her sword through one’s shoulder. The other one got so far as to actually raise his blade, before Saketa impaled his arm. Both dropped their weapons, and Saketa caught one before it hit the floor.

As her victims screamed, she turned on her heel and threw the blade. It wasn’t balanced for the task, but the range was short and her toss was strong. As the first of the three Muans emerged from down below, it flew at him point-first.

He caught it, and threw it back. Saketa batted the weapon aside. The thought occurred to make her stand here, in the corridor where their numbers counted for less. But she heard the shouts of more crewmembers, reacting to the fighting and to the screams of their two comrades.

The Ragers were coming, and there was no more time for thinking. She opted to turn and run, down the dark corridor, into the unknown.

# # #

The drop-shield did its job.

Half of it was shaped like an actual shield that was fixed to the front of the bike, and the other half was fixed to the underside, hooked up to the physical shield.

As he did atmospheric entry at near-meteoric speed, the gizmo reacted to the movement and the friction, channelling it into an energy shield that kept both him and the bike from burning up.

The white-blue of the shield mixed with the white-yellow of the flames, completely blocking his view. He was a couple of arm-lengths away from a searing annihilation, and he loved it. This was what a Ranger did. This was what made them legends. He might die this day, but it would be a good death, for good reasons.

His visor readouts filled in for an actual view, counting factors like altitude, atmospheric pressure, axis, heat, and distance to his programmed target, all of which was changing by the millisecond. His heart was thundering, and he loved it.

He left the mesosphere and entered the stratosphere. There were no clouds, and he couldn’t have seen them anyway. His world was fire and speed, and he loved it.

Zamm’s reflexes were primed against sudden fire, coming from the ground or the sky, ready to weave and take advantage of his small size and agility in comparison to usual artillery targets. And as he entered the troposphere, it happened.

It might have been automated; a reaction to an object coming in their way at extreme speeds. Or the freighter might have noticed the Ranger ship and called things in. It didn’t matter. What mattered were the blasts.

Zamm went random, swerving all about, as his visor informed him of the shots and explosions that were missing him. He couldn’t actually hear or see any of it. He just dodged it, as the visor also warned him to start deceleration.

He held off, past the recommended point, as the gunfire petered out in reaction to the ever-sharper angle. Then he hit it, and even with the suit and the shield, his organs and vascular system did not care for the pressure. But they could damn well keep quiet, because he had a battle to wage.

He came down about a kilometre away from the meeting site. As he slowed and slowed, still aimed directly at the ground, the friction subsided and he could see. He saw a harsh desert dotted with rocks, not unlike the plain where the original raid had taken place. And he swooped.

The bike levelled out, in an organ-crunching arc that ended with him flying level a few metres above the ground. He was still going at near top-speeds, and with a flick of a button the shield fell away from the front. It took the generator with it, and both bounced on the ground, hopefully to be recovered once all of this was over. A slight rise blocked his direct view of the meeting, but the radar guided his way.

“Foot control.”

He drew both Twins and went around the rocky obstruction.

The two ships were parked some distance apart, and a cargo container had been removed from the raider ship and placed a quarter of the distance between. The anti-air gun was set up by the Scorchspace vessel. It was small for its purpose, but still several metres high and in no way capable of aiming at ground-level. The container hadn’t been opened yet, and so its occupants weren’t out in the open. The two factions of scum were, though, divided into several little groups.

All in all, it was a near-ideal killing field for a Ranger. And the fight was on.

He fired both guns into the nearest group, going more for rate of fire than accuracy. Still, his bolts did cut down several men, and the rest threw themselves to the ground, in lieu of any nearby cover.

The speed he’d built up took him around the meeting field in a moment, and out of sight. Going a full circle would have drawn gunfire towards the container, so instead he did a quick, nasty U-turn and blasted back, not quite parallel to the way he’d come. A couple of incoming shots melted and exploded exposed rock that poked out of the sands, but they’d been blind-firing towards the sound of his engine.

This time Zamm held his arms out and spread fire wildly every which way. They weren’t tightly packed enough for him to land many hits that way, but the point was to spread panic. The Scorchspacers reacted far more swiftly than their raider chums, and held their composure better.

Still, it had only been seconds, and he was out of sight again in a moment. Then he went around more rock and was out of sight again.

He holstered both Twins, switched back to hand-control, and pushed that one button on the bike. The bulky little anti-air gun emerged from its compartment, and he drew it and fired into the air. The missile flew above the meeting field and exploded.

There was nothing up there for it to hurt, but it was another source of confusion and fear for his enemies, another source of chaos and disruption, and a moment later he emerged back into view.

He opened up with the twin front guns. They were suited for destroying moderately armoured vehicles, and though some of his targets were suited up, it was in no way enough. The streams of plasma scythed down one entire group in a moment, and almost wiped out a second. Some shots followed him, but aimed where he had been, rather than where he was going.

One breath later he was out of sight again, and turned back around. He knew this couldn’t last. They would recover their wits before he could break them completely. So he had to kill as many as he could before that happened.

He buzzed back out, at a different spot, a different angle, a different height above the ground, and kept on shooting. And already they were shooting back with some discipline.