Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11), стр. 23
A moment later, Fendra walked smoothly over to them, pointed to the sled attached to the hull, and then made a fist indicating she was good to go. Jason nodded and gestured for Lucky to take his place. They each held on to the ungainly machine while Jason sent the command for it to detach from the hull. As soon as it cleared, it automatically fired compressed air jets to get them clear of the gunship and line them up with the preplanned approach to one of the battleships.
He fought off a wave of vertigo and the panic that hit him when he saw the Phoenix slowly drift down and away from them, quickly swallowed up by the inky blackness around them. People really had no idea just how unfathomably dark space really was until they got out of a ship and experienced it in the gaps between the stars. Jason couldn’t even see the front of the sled he was currently hanging on to, and it was barely a meter in front of him.
"How's everyone doing?" he asked, his voice transmitted to his teammates through the sled.
"I guess now is a bad time to admit that these deep space EVA ops terrify me," Fendra said.
"Really? I think they're sort of fun," Jason said. "Relaxing."
"You're apparently as sick in the head as Mok seems to think," Fendra muttered.
After they'd been adrift for twenty minutes or so, the sled fired the two ionic jets that were mounted on outriggers to either side of them, accelerating them smoothly along now that they were well clear of the Phoenix. They needed just a bit more relative velocity so they could make smooth course corrections as they closed in on the target. Jason just hoped Fendra was as tough as she seemed because the deceleration and landing promised to be nothing short of brutal.
"Wake up, Captain."
"I am awake!"
"You've been snoring over the channel for the last four and half hours," Fendra said.
"We're approaching our first decel maneuver," Lucky said.
"I’m ready," Jason said, double checking his safety tether and commanding the armor to lock his arms out stiff.
A minute later, the jets on the outrigger pylons rotated around began firing short bursts to start shedding off speed. He watched on his helmet's HUD as the computers calculated their rate of closure, time to intercept, and what their relative velocity will be at the time of capture. If the jets were able to keep scrubbing off their forward velocity, the impact when the grapples fired might not be as bad as he initially feared.
It was sometime later when a boxed reticle appeared in his field of view, and he saw a small speck against the brightly lit gas clouds of the nebula edge. As they plodded along, the speck took shape, and his armor's limited optics were able to zoom in and show him the dark outline of Luex-class battleship, named after an Imperial admiral who had been dead for nearly a hundred years. Luex had the distinction of commanding in the last major battle the Eshquarians had fought when they liberated five planets from the fledgling Saabror Protectorate.
"There's something spooky about a starship without engines or running lights going," Jason said over the open channel.
"Agreed," Fendra said.
It seemed like from one moment to the next the ship went from being a misshapen blotch on his optics to a monolith looming out of the darkness. His multispectral optics were able to make out some detail, but the ship had been powered down so long that the hull was a uniform cold that made it nearly impossible for the thermal sensors to differentiate between surfaces. Since they were parked in interstellar space, there wasn't even the energy from a local star to warm the alloy.
Despite how far humans had come technologically, much of their brain had evolved millions of years ago and sometimes wasn't suited for the tasks being asked of it. The distances and speeds involved in the maneuver were far greater than anything Jason's visual cortex and stereo-optic eyes were designed for, so by the time he could actually detect they were closing on the ship, they were already at such close range that he had little time to react before the sled fired the grappling anchors and began a violent braking maneuver to slow them as much as possible before they grabbed.
In the blink of an eye, he went from thinking the ship was hours away to watching the hull rush by beneath him. The mag-anchors at the ends of the flexible, nano-chain cables slammed into the hull and locked while the ionic jets shook the sled mightily at full power. When they ran out of line, the flexible cables stretched and absorbed as much of their kinetic energy as possible before rebounding and yanking them the other way so violently that Jason's vision grayed out around the edges. He commanded his gauntlets to lock onto the handles in case he passed out, not wanting to trust the safety tether with his life.
They were bounced around twice more, each rebound less energetic than the one that preceded it, until the sled drifted lazily in space near the leviathan, the arresting cables slack. Lucky checked on his biological charges, and then commanded the winches to begin retracting the cables, drawing them down onto the hull.
"Let's never do this again," Jason groaned. Everything hurt, and his armor was flashing a couple amber alarms telling him that the stunt had screwed up the calibration on his spatial orientation system. "Fendra? You dead?"
"I'd like to be." The voice over the com sounded strained.
"The g-loading of the arresting maneuver was well within the accepted limits of your species, Fendra," Lucky said.
"What about mine?" Jason asked.
"Technically, you could have been killed. However, Doc assured me your bio-enhancements