"We've got contact," Vel called out from her sensor station, her voice tight with concern. "There's a UNSC patrol, it's bearing two-seven-mark-four. They're running a search pattern about fifty kilometers from our intended approach vector."
Nathan leaned forward in the command chair, studying the tactical display. "How many?"
"Looks like four signatures. Titan Frames, moving in formation." Vel's fingers danced across her controls, refining the sensor data. "At their current speed, they're about two hours out from Mining Station B-33."
"That's cutting it pretty damn close," Nathan muttered. "If we bring the Meridian into orbit to deploy Naomi, there's a good chance the patrol would spot us, what are our options?"
"We could wait for them to move off," Ilson suggested from his position at the Frame monitoring station. "Come back in six hours when they're clear."
"Unfortunately that's not gunna work," Kessler said from her communications post. "I'm picking up increased chatter on UNSC channels. Looks like they're expanding search patterns throughout the system. In six hours, there might be twice as many patrols."
Nathan stared at the display, feeling the weight of command settling on his shoulders. Every option seemed to carry unacceptable risks.
"Hey, what about a high-altitude drop?" Kessler asked suddenly.
"What do you mean?"
"Like an atmospheric entry. We could deploy Naomi from orbit, then she uses the boosters to control her descent. No need to bring the Meridian into the lower atmosphere where the patrols can spot us."
The bridge fell silent as everyone considered the implications. Slade, who had been quietly reviewing technical specifications, looked up from his console.
"The G-forces alone would kill a human pilot," he said. "And the heat from atmospheric friction..."
"Good thing I'm not human," Naomi's voice came through the speakers with something that might have been amusement.
Nathan turned toward the main display where Naomi's avatar had appeared. "You think you can handle atmospheric entry in a Titan Frame?"
"The Frame's designed for it, just not with a biological pilot inside. I don't have to worry about G-force tolerance or heat stress." Her expression grew thoughtful. "The bigger challenge will be energy management. I need to conserve enough power for the mission and potential emergency docking."
"Emergency docking?" Nathan asked.
"It's a worst case scenario," Slade explained. "If shit goes wrong planetside, we'd have to attempt a mid-air recovery. It's... not a maneuver designed for human pilots."
"But theoretically possible for me," Naomi added. "Though I'd prefer not to test it."
Nathan looked around the bridge at his crew. They all seemed to be holding their breath, waiting for his decision. The patrol was still closing in, but this window might be their only chance.
"All right," he said finally. "We do the drop. Prep Skybolt for atmospheric entry."
An hour later, Nathan stood in the Frame bay watching as Slade and Boomer made final adjustments to Ilson's Titan Frame. The massive machine hung in the launch cradle, its modified systems gleaming under the bay's work lights. Without its weapon systems, Skybolt looked almost naked, but the additional boosters mounted on its back gave it an aggressive, predatory appearance.
"Frame integrity is green across the board," Slade reported, climbing down from the maintenance gantry. "Boosters are charged and ready. Heat shielding is rated for atmospheric entry, though it's going to be damn close."
"How close?" Nathan asked.
"Close enough that if she were human, she'd be well done," Slade replied bluntly.
Nathan activated his comm unit. "Naomi, final systems check."
"All green up here," came her voice through the speakers. "I'm synchronized with Skybolt's systems. Ready for deployment on your mark."
Nathan took a deep breath. "Bridge, this is Nathan. Begin launch sequence."
The bay's massive doors began to iris open, revealing the curve of Acer below. The planet looked deceptively peaceful from orbit, brown and tan continents broken by the occasional glint of cities or mining installations.
"Launch in ten seconds," Vel's voice announced over the comm. "Five... four... three... two... mark."
The launch cradle released, and Skybolt dropped into the void.
Naomi noted the transition from artificial gravity to freefall as a moment of perfect silence. For a few seconds, Skybolt floated in the space between the Meridian and Acer's atmosphere, suspended between two worlds. Then gravity began to assert itself, and she fell toward the planet below.
The first wisps of atmosphere produced only a faint warming in the Frame's sensors, but as she descended deeper, the friction began to build. Orange flames licked around Skybolt's limbs as she hit the thermosphere, the Frame's heat shielding flaring to brilliant life. Any human pilot would have been unconscious by now from the G-forces, but Naomi experienced it all with crystal clarity.
And it was beautiful.
Acer spread out beneath her like a vast canvas painted in shades of brown and gold. The mining operations were both impressive and heartbreaking, enormous excavators, each the size of a city block, crawled across the landscape like mechanical dinosaurs, stripping away layers of rock and soil to reach the precious metals beneath. Behind them, they left wounds that would take millennia to heal.
This was what the war was really about, Naomi realized. Not freedom or ideology, but resources.
She adjusted her descent vector, using the Frame's limited maneuvering thrusters to guide herself toward Mining Station B-33. The facility appeared as a cluster of industrial buildings and equipment yards carved into a canyon wall, connected to the larger mining complex by a network of transport tubes and conveyor systems.
At fifteen thousand feet, she fired the main boosters for the first time, feeling the massive thrust as it slowed her descent. The deceleration would have liquefied a human pilot, but Naomi simply adjusted her approach angle and prepared for landing.
At five hundred feet, she cut the boosters and activated the Frame's jump jets for final approach control. Skybolt touched down on the rocky ground outside Mining Station B-33 with surprising grace, the impact absorbed by the Frame's sophisticated shock systems.
"Touchdown confirmed, I made it guys." she transmitted to the Meridian. "Beginning mission parameters."
"Awesome job Naomi," Nathan's voice came back, slightly distorted by atmospheric interference. "Let's see what else you can do."
Naomi moved Skybolt toward the mining station's communications array, a towering structure of dishes and transmission equipment that served the entire complex. According to their intelligence, the facility had been abandoned for maintenance two weeks ago, making it perfect for their deception.
She plugged directly into the communications system, bypassing the normal controls to access the emergency broadcast protocols. Within minutes, she had crafted and transmitted a convincing distress signal, a medical emergency requiring immediate UNSC assistance, complete with authentic emergency codes pulled from her vast database.
Now came the waiting.
"Signal transmitted," she reported to the Meridian. "Emergency beacon is active. How long until—"
Her sensors detected movement on the horizon, four contacts moving fast across the desert terrain. But these weren't the sleek forms of military Titan Frames. They were blocky, improvised machines that looked like they'd been cobbled together from mining equipment and scrap metal.
"Contact," she transmitted. "Four unknown Frames approaching from the northeast. They don't match UNSC configurations."
"Well, what do they look like?" Nathan's voice carried a note of concern.
Naomi zoomed in on the approaching machines. They were built on standard Frame chassis, but their armor plating was clearly makeshift, sheets of industrial steel welded together in overlapping patterns. Some still bore faded UNSC logos, obviously salvaged from mining operations. Their weapons were improvised as well: plasma cutters mounted like rifles, industrial drill arms converted to close-combat weapons, and what looked like a launcher designed to fire mining charges.
"Colonist Frames," she reported. "Armed with mining equipment. They've seen me and they're not stopping to talk."
The lead Frame raised what had once been a plasma cutter and fired a burst in her direction. The superheated gas beam scorched the ground where Skybolt had been standing moments before.
"They think I'm UNSC," Naomi transmitted, already moving to evade the incoming fire. "Engaging evasive maneuvers."
What followed was a deadly game of cat and mouse across the rocky terrain outside the mining station. The colonist Frames were slower than Skybolt, but they knew the terrain and worked together with the coordination of people who'd been fighting together for years. They tried to box her in, using crossfire and terrain features to limit her movement options.
But Naomi was faster than any human pilot, able to process multiple threat vectors simultaneously and respond with inhuman precision. A mining charge exploded where Skybolt had been a split second before, showering the Frame with molten rock. Naomi twisted through the debris cloud, servos screaming as she pulled a 12-G turn that would have turned human bones to powder. Plasma fire from two directions converged on her position, missing by centimeters as she threaded between the beams like a needle through burning silk. To the colonists, it must have looked like the UNSC had finally deployed an ace pilot of their own.
"How long until Phantom arrives?" she asked, leaping over a cluster of mining equipment to avoid a demolition charge.
"Vel's tracking a new contact approaching fast from the south," Nathan's voice replied. "ETA... wait. Something's wrong."
Naomi's sensors began to register interference, a familiar pattern of electromagnetic distortion that made her digital consciousness recoil in recognition.
"Chaff cloud," she transmitted, her voice tight with sudden urgency. "Phantom's here."
The interference intensified, turning her long-range sensors into useless static.
Communications with the Meridian became sporadic, cutting in and out as the chaff scales interfered with transmission frequencies.
"Meridian... can you... location..." she tried to transmit, but only fragments were getting through.
Through the growing electromagnetic storm, a new contact appeared on her short-range sensors. This one moved with the fluid grace Nathan's team had described, Phantom, sliding through the terrain like liquid death.
The colonist Frames, unable to see through their own sensors, had stopped their attack and were falling back toward defensive positions. They knew what the chaff cloud meant.
Naomi turned Skybolt and ran.
What followed was unlike anything she'd experienced. Phantom's initial pursuit seemed almost leisurely, it took wide turns around obstacles when direct routes would have been faster, fired warning shots that came nowhere near Skybolt, even paused occasionally as if studying her movements. It was playing with her, testing her capabilities like a cat with a wounded mouse.
But as the chase continued and Naomi demonstrated reflexes beyond any human pilot, threading through gaps no biological consciousness could have calculated, executing maneuvers that would have killed an organic brain, Phantom's behavior shifted dramatically.
The warning shots became kill shots, barely missing Skybolt's center mass. The leisurely pursuit became a relentless hunt, cutting off escape routes with surgical precision. Whatever intelligence controlled Phantom had recognized her as something unprecedented, and it was no longer holding back.
Naomi pushed Skybolt to its limits, using every canyon wall and rock formation to break line of sight and disrupt Phantom's pursuit. The landscape blurred past as they raced through the desert canyons at speeds that would have killed any biological pilot. She managed to transmit a single set of coordinates before her communications cut out entirely, her location, in case everything went wrong.
The canyon she was racing through began to narrow, the walls rising higher on both sides. Ahead, she could see where the passage ended in a sheer cliff face that dropped into a massive open-pit mine. She was running out of room to run.
Behind her, Phantom was closing fast. In desperation, she spun Skybolt around to face her pursuer, hoping to buy a few more seconds by forcing it to slow down for close combat.
That's when Phantom surprised her.
Instead of the plasma blade she expected, Phantom's right arm began to transform. The elegant weapon mount split open with a sound like tearing metal, components flowing like liquid mercury as panels slid apart and mechanisms reconfigured themselves with alien precision. Energy began to build in the emerging cannon's core, casting deadly purple light across the canyon walls as what had been a melee weapon became something else entirely, a sleek energy cannon that hummed with lethal potential.
"Oh you've got guns now, that's new," Naomi muttered, diving to the side just as Phantom fired.
The laser beam scorched past Skybolt's shoulder, close enough that the heat bloom registered on her sensors. But the shot clipped one of her booster assemblies, sending sparks and debris flying as the thruster array went offline.
Naomi felt a moment of actual panic as she calculated her new limitations. With only one booster operational, any attempt at emergency docking with the Meridian would be a one-shot affair. Miss, and Skybolt would fall back to the planet's surface and be destroyed.
Through the canyon walls above, she saw something coming through Skybolt's optical sensors. The Meridian was descending through the clouds, its massive bulk splitting the atmosphere like a steel mountain falling from heaven. The sight was awe-inspiring, nearly two kilometers of military engineering dropping from the sky with the grace of a dancer, its stealth plating flickering as it shed the adaptive camouflage that had kept it hidden.
"Now or never," she transmitted on all frequencies, hoping someone aboard the Meridian could hear her through the interference.
She fired her remaining booster at maximum thrust, rocketing upward from the canyon floor in a desperate gambit. Phantom's second shot missed by mere meters as Skybolt climbed toward the descending ship.
The Meridian's Frame bay was open, waiting for her. But the approach angle was all wrong, the relative velocities too high, the margin for error nonexistent. She had one chance to match the ship's descent and dock with the recovery system.
As she climbed through the thin air toward the massive vessel above, Naomi calculated trajectories and approach vectors with desperate precision. Below, Phantom had stopped its pursuit, probably realizing that even it couldn't match this kind of maneuver.
The Meridian grew larger as she approached, its Frame bay gaping like the mouth of some mechanical whale. Recovery arms extended to catch her, but she had to hit the approach corridor exactly right.
Fifty meters. Thirty. Twenty.
Naomi fired her remaining thrusters in one final burst, adjusting her trajectory for what she hoped would be a successful docking. The math was perfect in her digital mind, but physics had a way of introducing variables that even AI couldn't predict.
Ten meters.
Five.
Skybolt's remaining thruster coughed, sputtered, then died completely. She was flying ballistic now, a 15-ton projectile with no way to adjust course. The Meridian's recovery bay rushed toward her like the mouth of a hungry god.
Then something gave way with a grinding shriek of metal.