Dogfight, Part II The Fall
Posted on Fri Sep 18th, 2026 @ 12:08am by Lieutenant Junior Grade T'lenn & Lieutenant JG Jason Williams III
Edited on on Fri Sep 18th, 2026 @ 2:25am
2,390 words; about a 12 minute read
Mission:
Peril at the Unification Accords
Location: The space around and between the two battling starships
Timeline: MD011, 1340 Hours
She felt it. She felt the spinning and lost of control, loss of Jason, and she lost herself as everything became a sudden fog. Osirin was saying something next to her, but she couldn't hear him. It didn't matter, the Romulans had blown up their own shuttle, the signal lost.
She stepped away from her console, and her legs buckled underneath her. Someone caught her, kept her from hitting the floor, but she didn't process who.
Jason, Where was he?
"Jason, find me," she cried, not realizing she'd spoken audibly, and a few around had heard her.
On the Bridge T'lenn stumbled, she looked over to the central command center stationed beside her. Transporters. If she could feel him, maybe she could find his coordinates. She'd heard of wilder rescues before, from partners who have been melded.
In the survival cocoon, Jason was currently unconscious, so he could not hear anything that was occurring around him, or even the telepathic call from the woman he loved. He was also completely unaware that he was speeding towards his death, with his pod on a collision course with an asteroid.
The explosion caught Taqqiq's eye before her sensor display reported it. Reaper's fighter disappeared in a brief albeit violent bloom of orange and red. Pieces of the starfighter's hull scattered outward on her tiny sensor output as the more drones flashed past the wreckage. For a moment she simply stared at the empty space where Jason Williams had been.
"Reaper?" she called over the comm.
Nothing responded except static.
She checked her tactical display again, then switched through the emergency channels. Nothing. Not even the automated distress beacon that is activated when a pilot ejects. Not even a friendly transponder.
"Reaper, respond."
A Romulan drone cut directly across her canopy and she rolled hard to port, bringing her nose around just long enough to fire. The phaser burst caught it cleanly and the tore the little machine apart.
"Goddammit."
"Ptarmigan!" Foxglove shouted. "You've got two on you!"
Taqqiq kicked the fighter sideways and the drones streaked past her, their disruptors flashing an eerie green across her canopy. She contorted her body and pulled up sharply, glancing back toward the debris field.
"Foxglove, form on me. I need cover."
"You got it."
Maria swung her fighter across Taqqiq's rear quarter and opened fire. The first drone broke apart. The second one came around beneath them and Foxglove followed it, firing again before it could bring its own weapons to bear.
Taqqiq was already calling Astrea.
"Astrea, this is Ptarmigan. Reaper's fighter has been destroyed. I have no contact with Lieutenant Williams and I'm not receiving an emergency transponder. I don't know if he ejected."
The response came through the static, clipped and hurried beneath the noise of her engines.
[Ptarmigan, Astrea. Stand by.] Taqqiq recognized the voice. It was JB Dorsainvil.
T'lenn's face blanched, the color draining from her face as she reached out for a console to get her bearings. She had let herself get emotionally involved with this human.
"Negative, Astrea. I need a search vector."
She looked across the debris scattered ahead of her. There were pieces of Jason's fighter everywhere, catching the light from Barisa's sun. A scorched fuel cell tumbled end over end and a section of his starboard wing was spinning away into the dark.
Then she saw something moving in the distance. It was almost too small to register against the asteroid field.
Taqqiq narrowed her eyes and switched sensors.
There it was: a tiny object moving between the larger rocks at a speed that made no sense until she understood what she was looking at.
"Foxglove, I've got him."
"What?"
"Reaper. I think I've got him... if he's still alive."
She pushed her throttle forward. The object resolved into an ejection cocoon, tumbling end over end as it crossed the distance toward a large asteroid. Jason had been thrown clear of his fighter with considerable velocity, and he was carrying it all with him.
"Astrea, I have a visual on Lieutenant Williams. He's ejected and heading toward the asteroid field. I estimated impact in less than thirty seconds."
A flicker of hope suddenly cause T'lenn's heartrate to beat faster and faster. She forced herself to remain composed, her expression stoic, all while feeling as though her heart couls explode from her thoracic region.
Taqqiq glanced at her flight computer. He was going too fast and he was going to crash into that rock with such force that there might not be anything left of him.
[Ptarmigan, do you have his emergency beacon?] came Lieutenant Dorsainvil's voice.
"Negative."
That was strange. She should have been able to see it. The cocoon was close enough now that sensors ought to have been shouting about it, but Taqqiq didn't have the time to wonder why.
"Foxglove, stay with me. Keep those things off my tail."
Maria's fighter slid alongside hers and she motioned through her canopy to Taqqiq.
"Go get him."
Taqqiq increased thrust. Her starfighter strained against the acceleration as the asteroid grew larger and scarier in front of her. She matched the cocoon's vector, then adjusted again, trying to put herself alongside its trajectory. The numbers were changing too quickly--the asteroid's own movement along with the mass of Jason's cocoon was proving impossible.
Her onboard computer began to wail about her distance.
She could see him but he was barely moving. Or perhaps that was only how it looked.
The ejection cocoon tumbled through the darkness, its small attitude thrusters firing intermittently--and in vain. From this distance, Taqqiq could see the flashes of them against the rock they were coming up on.
"Come on, Reaper," she murmured. "Stay with me."
A drone came in from below.
Foxglove saw it first.
"Break right!"
Maria opened fire and the drone veered away, its disruptor bolts narrowly missing Taqqiq's starfighter.
"Go!" Foxglove shouted. "I've got you."
Taqqiq kept her eyes on the cocoon. The asteroid now filled her entire display not to mention three-quarters of her forward vision, only growing larger with every passing second. She pushed her engines even harder.
"Reaper, this is Ptarmigan. If you can hear me, hold on."
No answer.
The fighter surged forward until the cocoon's velocity was a match to her fighter. For a few seconds, they were almost flying together, Taqqiq's starfighter screaming toward the same piece of space rock.
Behind them, Foxglove twisted through the drones and fired again.
"Ptarmigan, Tuilax is coming in."
Taqqiq didn't look back--her focus was completely on Reaper.
Porix's voice broke through the inter-squadron channel, calm and breathless at the same time.
"Third Squadron, I've got three more drones on the deck. We'll clear them and join you."
Taqqiq finally had the cocoon centered in her display but Jason was still moving toward the asteroid.
When Taqqiq's fighter got close enough, Jason's damaged pod computer finally clicked over and recognized the friendly identification signal that her fighter's computer had been sending out. Slowly, it started to alter it's course to intercept the fighter.
"It looks like his guidance system has reinitiated," Taqqiq reported, still pushing ever closer to the asteroid.
Foxglove tore apart another Romulan drone and was suddenly cutting across to join her squadron leader. "Ptarmigan, he can alter course and slow himself down but he's still going to pancake on that rock."
"I know," Taqqiq replied over the comm. "I need you tight on my wing if we're going to have any hope in tractoring him away so he doesn't collide."
"Roger that, Ptarmigan. Coming around to six-seven-zero mark one-four-eight."
Foxglove's starfighter made another impossible cut to port, the G-forces slamming Maria back and to her starboard side. It took several seconds for her to recover but she was now closing on Ptarmigan.
"Jason's computer has slowed him a bit," Taqqiq noted. "But not enough. Adjust your tractor beam to fifteen-percent of normal."
"Fifteen?! That won't be enough!"
Taqqiq was already keying in the settings into her starfighter's computer. "Maria, we want Reaper alive and in one piece. Not just a bag of body parts."
"Copy that, Ptarmigan."
Inside, Taqqiq wasn't entirely convinced the combined tractor beams from both hers and Foxglove's fighters would be enough to prevent Jason from slamming violently into the asteroid. She needed a backup.
"Astrea, Ptarmigan. Foxglove and I are moving to intercept Lieutenant Williams's pod--we're hoping we can use our tractor beams to alter his course from the danger posed by the asteroid. I'm not certain it will be enough."
Aboard the Astrea, Maxun was watching the scene unfold, as Remy commanded the overall attack. He sent a command to the ship's transporter teams, to see if anyone could get a lock on the pilot's escape pods. He was told that the velocity of the pod was causing the system issues in capturing him. He opened a commchannel to the pilots. "Ptarmigan, if you can reduce Lieutenant Williams' pod velocity by half, our transporters will be able to lock on!"
"Understood, Astrea."
Taqqiq was beginning to feel the gravitational pull from the asteroid as her fighter approached. A quick glance at her accelerometer display told her exactly what she needed to know.
"Foxglove, if we're going to slow Reaper at all, we need to decrease our velocity to twenty-six kilometers per second."
Maria checked her own instruments and began a slight deceleration.
"Twenty-six-point-two, Ptarmigan."
"That will have to do." Taqqiq could now see Jason's form clearly over the nose of her fighter. "On my mark, we're going to come around to heading one-eight-two mark one-one-four. Concentrate your tractor beam directly on the center of the pod itself. If we screw this up, it'll be fragments of Jason crashing into that asteroid."
Maria felt a twinge of anticipatory fear but immediately pushed it down.
"Copy that, Squadron Leader."
Ptarmigan could easily glance to her starboard side and see Foxglove less than a half-kilometer away at her four o'clock but slightly lower. Dead ahead of her and still shooting toward the asteroid that now loomed larger than ever before them, was Jason's pod. If all went according to plan, both she and Maria would lock onto the pod with their tractor beams in tandem, push away at a near one-hundred-and-twenty degree angle, and slow Jason just enough for Astrea to beam him to safety.
If not, well... Taqqiq didn't want to think about it.
"Alright, Foxglove... MARK!!"
In a maneuver that would have appeared ridiculously dangerous in any other circumstance, green-hued lights reached out from the ventral sections of their starfighters and made contact with the pod. In less than a second, both fighters made a sharp change in direction, nearly reversing course.
Taqqiq's helmet smashed against the cockpit cap hard as she was thrown to port. The one-hundred-twenty degree maneuver caused her to feel a strain like she'd never experienced before. Her harness felt like it was about to snap her collarbone and shoulders. She blew-out and beared-down using the Valsalva Maneuver while deliberately sucking on the oxygen her mask provided.
Three seconds had passed.
Jason's pod seemed to take the drag hard, like a wild bronco resisting a cowherder's lasso.
Four seconds.
Neither she--nor Maria--spoke. They couldn't. It was all they could do just to stay conscious and continue breathing.
Five seconds.
Every muscle in Taqqiq's body cried-out at once as the gravitational forces pushed her to brink of unconsciousness. And then there was a slow, gradual settling of gravity. Her harness began to go looser, her breathing became easier and she began to notice the blood coursing through her body was now equalizing.
She tried to speak. "Astrea, Ptarmigan. Tell me you have him..."
As soon as she asked the question, the pods vanished in the familiar swirling of lights associated with Starfleet transporters. A few beats after that, and the reply came over her comms.
T'lenn had heard the uneasiness in Taqqiq's voice as she checked on Jason's status. Perhaps T'lenn wasn't the only one emotionally attached.
"We've got him! Great work, Ptarmigan, Foxglove! He unconscious and banged up, but he's alive!"
T'lenn steeled herself, closing her eyes for a brief moment before walking back to the science station as if nothing had happened.
Just then, a new voice could be heard over the comms. It was the ship's Executive Officer. "All starfighters, this is Commander Spello. The Romulan drones have been destroyed and we are not picking up any other hostile in the area, return to base, and great job out there, people!"
Taqqiq breathed a sigh of relief. Her squad had successfully engaged the drones and had saved a life. All in all, not a bad way to cap-off a busy afternoon.
"Alright, Third Squad. You heard the XO. Let's make for home."
~OFF~
Commander Maxun Spello
First Officer
USS Astrea
Lieutenant JG T'lenn
Science Officer
USS Astrea
(NPC of Remy Johansen)
Lieutenant JG Jason Williams III
Squadron Leader
USS Astrea
(NPC of Maxun Spello)
Lieutenant JG Taqqiq Allooloo
Leader, Fighter Squadron 3
USS Astrea
(NPC of JB Dorsainvil)
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