Captain Jan A’Mungo’s forehead glistened with sweat as her brown eyes shifted over the displays on her pilot console.

“Jan, your ‘fro is drooping. You’re not worried are you?”

“That’s ‘Captain’ to you while we’re on the bridge, Pete. Husband or not I’ll write you up.”

“Hey!” Jack Ender, weapons master and general illicit cargo mover intervened. “The damn Patrol is on our butts. Can we save the marital squabbles for another time?”

The comm system crackled with static then broadcast its message. “Cargo ship Epona. This is Captain Bartholomew Ho of the Galactic Patrol ship GUS Orion. We have you on our scanners. Surrender now and your sentence will be reduced to life in the Gehenna penal colony.”

Jan punched console icons and made sure she was on the opposite side of Nodens 5, ducking the cargo ship into the planet’s cloud cover.

From his seat at weapons, Jack Ender craned his head around to stare at his Captain. “Uhh, Captain, we’re in the atmo.”

“I know,” she snapped. “Would you prefer to be in the Orion’s tractor beams?”

“Jan, we have a hold full of weapons for the rebellion. Why are we on the planet?” Her husband, Pete Ostrander, had six screens of data showing both atmospheric conditions of Nodens 5 and the echos of the Orion’s scanner signals.

“Are you piloting this boat or am I?” Jan snapped. Her ship was too small to fight the battleship hovering outside the atmosphere of the fifth planet in the Nodens system. It’s engines were too weak to outrun the other ship. She didn’t have a lot of options. “Find me a way off of this rock and away from that battleship.”

“We could just stay on the opposite side of the planet.” Jack had all of his weapons on standby and it wasn’t much. The weapons system had two missles in the launch bay and two more on the rack. The laser beams were ready but the charging mechanism would take too long to recharge if he overused the lasers against a battleship. His blaster was on his belt, he never went anywhere without it, but it would be useless if the battleship held the Epona in a tractor beam.

“As long as the Orion doesn’t deploy a couple of shuttles to the Lagrange points.” Jan used her jumpsuit sleeve to wipe her forehead. “Any other ideas?”

“I heard Gehenna isn’t that bad. We could surrender. Live a life of bliss with farm animals and heavy labor,” Pete mused from his chair on the opposite side of the bridge from Jack.

Both Jan and Jack snorted. “You, milking cows?” Jan hiccupped as she laughed. “That’ll be the day. Any other ideas?”

Pete studied the three screens showing the planet. One screen had atmospheric data. “What’s the classification of this rock?”

Jan tapped a symbol on her touch screen. “Ummm. It’s dang close to Earth normal. Why?”

“Can you sneak us around to the sunset line?”

She studied the screen. The Orion was moving slowly to the planetary east. “Yeah, why?”

“Well,” Pete rubbed the three day old beard on his chin. “We may be able to use plasma bubbles to escape.”

Both Jan and Jack swiveled their chairs around to stare at him.

“It’s old school, I give you that.”

“What do you mean?” Jan loved her husband but his interest in old technology drove her crazy.

“Look, keep us at the equator. Around sunset naturally occurring plasma bubbles will form in the atmosphere. We can use that to escape.”

“What are you talking about?” Jack grew up on a space station and had spent all of his ten years since his eighteenth birthday on spaceships.

“It’s electrons. Plasma is just positively charged atmosphere. The ions form a cloud of sorts, lighter than the surrounding atmosphere then it rises, like a bubble in boiling water, to the top of the atmosphere.”

“What’s that got to do with us?” Jan wasn’t putting the picture together at all. She just needed to escape from the Orion and get the cargo to the waiting rebellion.

“A plasma bubble deflects signals.” Pete grinned at his partners.

Jan took a moment to process that information. “As in their scans can’t see us?”

Pete nodded.

“How do we find one of these bubbles?”

He shook his head. “We don’t. We make one. Big enough for us to hide in the middle and hold it until the Orion moves off.”

“How do you do that?”

“I can use the ship systems to generate a magnetic shield in a spherical grid around the ship. I’ll stream ions inside the grid. That forms the bubble. If we work it right, we can modulate the edges to make it look natural and drift the bubble along the planetary sunset line at the upper edge of the atmosphere until the Orion leaves or we can sneak off.” He leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head.

“No way.” Jack snorted and turned back to his console.

Pete’s hands flew down from his head as he sat forward in his chair. “Yes, way. It can be done.”

Jan closed her eyes. If she lost the ship to the Orion, all of the weapons would be lost and her crew would end up on Gehenna. She took a deep breath. “Yeah, do it.”

She and Jack watched, nerves stretched tight as violin strings, as Pete tapped console keys. “It’s done. Just drift us westward.”

Jan set the controls to hover and depended on atmospheric winds to carry the ship along. She didn’t want to leave any engine trail. It took eighteen hours. The tiny crew cheered as Jan’s screen showed the Orion heading back out into space.

“Secure that magnetic field,” she ordered. “We have a cargo to deliver.”

The End

968 Words

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