Thouraya AbdurRahman, SpaceCorps Officer 1st Class, slipped the veil from in front of her face and tossed it in the storage bin under her seat as she watched the sparks spit across her screen, extinguished almost instantly in the vacuum.
"Bismillah," she said softly to herself. In the name of God. No matter how many patrols she had taken out, Thouraya could never bring herself to finish the formula: Ir Rahman, Ir Rahim. The Compassionate, the Merciful. Death, even the death of a Kheelee, seemed far too brutal for that.
"Inna illahi wa inna ilaihi rajiun." She whispered again, a prayer for the souls of her late enemies. To Allah we belong and to Him do we return. Surely the Kheelia too would face The Maker after death. Her squad mates would laugh at her, call her a sentimental fool. She could almost see Raheema Hariana's irreverent smirk. "Our job is to kill the bastard pigs!" she would crow. "Let the ayatollahs worry about their damn souls."
With a glance at her sensor screens, confirming that the pair had been a solitary patrol, Thouraya turned her attention back toward the Kheelia mothership. She had been ready to take the last of her image arrays when the patrol had surprised her. It was only luck that she had been hidden from their sensors by a small asteroid. Luck and the grace of God.
Thouraya chewed at her lip. The patrols routinely used separate channels to speak with each other and to maintain contact with the mother ship. The question was, had the main communication lines been open? If her luck held, she had a few minutes before the mothership would know something had gone wrong with the patrol. But if the lines had been open, the mother ship already knew she was here and was scrambling her pilots even now. Did she have enough time to get the images she wanted before the fighters came after her? Or should she slip away into the asteroid belt and wait for another opportunity? She had only seconds to decide.
"Damn," she cursed silently. More bad luck than good, that patrol. But she really didn't want to wait the long, slow hours that it would take to reposition herself. It had been a long, hard mission -- thirty three days out from SpaceStation, sixteen tense weeks of dodging fighters, slipping in and out of the asteroids of the Kuiper Belt in a deadly, slow-motion ballet of hide and seek. It was the longest she had ever been out. And she was tired, every inch of her. Her neck ached and her legs throbbed from the inactivity that came from five months on a small ship. Her skin itched and her eyes burned from long days in an atmosphere humidified only to the bare minimum needed to ensure survival. And it would be at least another three weeks before she could have an actual shower again, breathe moist air, eat real food, see walls painted a color other than gunmetal gray, and have a leisurely conversation with a real person. Sponge baths, ration bars and computer companionship simply weren't cutting it anymore. She wanted to go home. Badly.
Cursing again, she hit the button to start the imaging routine. If the ship hadn't already known she was there, it did now. Every burst of radar, or any other wave, to capture an image was an alarm bell to the Kheelia. That was the devil in the design. If she wanted to see them, they were going to be able to see her.
