Chapter 1

Ben was startled awake, a loud horn blaring in his ear.

"Alert!" the speakers announced piercingly. "Three seconds until crash!"

He reached for the controls as quickly as he could, punching up a position and status report onto the main display. As all the crash avoidance indicators were glowing green, he breathed a sigh of relief, activating his communications return channel.

"Not very damned funny," he murmured. "What if I had reflexively jerked the controls and taken the ship out of autopilot, huh? Then I could have really crashed, damn you."

For a few seconds, there was nothing but laughter playing back over the speakers in the small cockpit. Finally, the source of the laughter began talking.

"Oh come on, Ensign," the comm. officer replied, suppressing her laughter. "Just a harmless joke... you shouldn't have been sleeping on the job again anyway. Besides, you're at five thousand meters... unless you're the worst pilot I've ever met, there's no way you're going to crash one of the most sophisticated fighters in the history of the Navy from that height."

Ben rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, shaking his head at the idea that an officer would resort to such a childish prank. He tapped a series of buttons near his arm, a thermos of hot tea rapidly materializing in front of his hand.

Taking a few sips to calm his nerves, Ben breathed another sigh of relief. It was every pilot's worst nightmare to have the alarms in his fighter start going off when he was unprepared.

"You will pay for that, Lieutenant. Just wait until I catch you sleeping during the night shift again..."

"Now, now, now," Lieutenant Morrison said in a teasing voice, "we really shouldn't be talking to our superiors like that, should we Powell?"

Ben smirked. "You may be a higher ranking officer than me, but that doesn't make you a superior one. There is a difference."

"Fly-boys," Lieutenant Morrison groaned.

Ben just smiled, taking a few more sips of his tea. "Hey, this fly-boy is busting his ass to keep you ground personnel alive. Try to show some gratitude... at any given moment, I may have to fight off a fleet of Liodammians to save all of you sorry excuses for soldiers."

Rebecca Morrison could not restrain the snort of disbelief that burst its way out of her lungs. "A fleet of Liodammians? Yeah... that's likely to happen. On a military controlled world... fifty light-years from the front line... with the entirety of the Third Fleet surrounding the planet? Sure. Keep dreaming, fly-boy."

Ben was about to fire back another quip, when a beep from his sensor system caught his attention. "Rebecca, hold on. Possible contact."

He frowned. He was on a standard high-altitude patrol, searching for any enemy craft that might have slipped past the blockade and managed to land somewhere on the planet. Generally, this was cake work in the extreme. It was impossible for anything smaller than a Super-Battleship to penetrate the Third Fleet's net of defenses.

"Contact status and designation?" Lieutenant Morrison asked, now all business.

Checking a few of the energy readouts, Ben frowned again. It read as a shielded source of energy, with sensor dampening fields active. It was sheer luck that he had detected whatever it was that he had detected.

"Status: unknown, but presumed hostile," Ben announced. "Declaring Code Three battle status. It might be nothing more than a stray research vehicle from the fleet, but I have to make sure first. Designating contact Sierra three."

"Understood," Rebecca replied quickly, "Code Three battle status is confirmed. You have permission to investigate contact Sierra three, but do not engage: I repeat, Ben, do not engage."

"Roger," Ben confirmed. "Going in to take a closer look."

Ben took the fighter off autopilot, grabbing onto the flight stick. With the slightest of twitches on the stick, the fighter soared downwards, closing in on the unknown contact.

"Contact appears to be on planetary surface," Ben informed headquarters, "but I am still unable to gather any real specifics on it. However, based on the power readings, I would have to presume it is some sort of ground installation. I doubt any vessel big enough to generate this kind of energy field would be able to sneak past our forces. HQ, is there anything operating in this area that I need to know of?"