Landfall

[STSF_Scooter 0]

Shuttlecraft Fleming

 

Nova AC swung into view as the shuttle cleared its last navigation point. The massive city portion of the planet glittered along the terminator, a million diamonds in the night. But that wasn't where Audraya was interested in. It was about thirty degrees west of the terminator, in a large belt of mixed farmland and forest that the Fleming's sensors showed an abandoned city/industrial center. Power readings were showing that it was occupied though. Audraya, though didn't see any of this. She was sacked out, having exhausted herself through the past two days of dealing what had happened.

 

A memory tickled the back of her mind, and became dream- of a large, muscular Orion with a predatory look on his face, and a lithe, Orion female looking far too much like Litasha, coming aboard the Audacious. It was as though looking through a child's eyes, like Audraya was a toddler. The Orion male was boasting about his "hunting" expeditions and his latest acquisition- a fair sized industrial complex that he was having his engineers convert into a multi-environment hunting preserve for the most elusive and challenging of sport: sentient beings. His female companion, however, had a disgusted look on her face. Morohtar, however, took over the memory and the last thing was sudden pain in her hair roots, and the two Orions moving down the corridor of the ship.

-=-=-=-

 

Having entered orbit on autopilot, and the alarm buzzer waking her, Audraya took the shuttle down. Diving steeply into the planet's atmosphere, mimicking a piece of space debris plummeting to the surface, she attempted to evade the sensor nets that kept poachers from stealing back what the Black Kris had already...acquired. The shuttle's sensors also showed that the Blood Prince had already gone to ground near the complex.

Touching down in a nearby forest, she moved quickly and as steathily as she could, all the fieldcraft taught to her by the Marines on Sherman's Planet. Her ardor was tamped down to a banked burn, and while she regretted coldcocking Crash and stealing the Fleming, Audraya did put some faith that the crew would find her. Of course, it helped that she'd set both the shuttle's distress beacon on discrete frequency hop that only Starfleet vessels would look for.

 

Her plan was, of course, rather simple: infiltrate the Maze, rescue Tifa and T'Aral, and get the hell out of Dodge, let the rest of the crew deal with Litasha. And in the event of their capture/recapture three bullets were already earmarked to prevent Morohtar from getting his grubby hands on any of them. A .45ACP round didn't leave a pretty corpse.

 

Sunset was coming, and with it her infiltration of the Maze.