The viciousness of the tone had me shooting him a glance. Although he refused to look at me, his jaw was clenched so tight that muscles were jumping in his cheek.
“I agree,” I said. “But it is just one of the reasons I can’t go back.”I cast another look at the navcube, and sucked in a breath. Four of the dots had all but caught up, and they were spreading out. “They’re trying to line us up for an EMF containment field.”
His mouth pulled even tighter. “Shut down power to everything except that one engine.”
My fingers danced over the array of switches and buttons. The lights on the small bridge dimmed, and then went out. The ship was oddly quiet without the internal machinery running. But Zyair managed to coax more speed out of our laboring engine as we entered Ssanue’s atmosphere with the Nirzk ships hot on our tail.
Desperate to reach the cloud cover, Zyair pushed the ship into a dive.
“Shifting to sublight power,” he said through gritted teeth as he flicked more switches.
TheStardriftershook, and the engine sounds altered. Coming in with so little braking or flying power and almost no shields meantStardrifter’souter hull would heat up. It was designed to take that, but the damage from the phaser had compromised its strength. If severe enough, it could cause us to break up in the atmosphere.
Zyair had chosen to push our luck with a quick re-entry, and I didn’t blame him. If we’d tried to ease in, the Nirzk ships would catch us.
I swallowed as more red lights lit on the dash, but I silenced the alarms. Then the viewscreen went dark with swirling vapor.
We were entering the storm.
The moment we disappeared inside it, Zyair banked us hard left. He didn’t ease up on the throttle one bit as theStardrifterquaked with the force of the winds—far stronger than anything Earth could contrive. Lightning flashed and hail pounded against the ship’s hull.
I swallowed and kept my eyes on the instruments that still functioned. The electricity within the storm was wreaking havoc with most of them.
Frustrated, I banged on the radar screen, which had dissolvedinto static. Even the navcube had succumbed and shut down. “I have no idea where the Nirzk ships are.”
“Exceptional,” Zyair muttered. “We cannot see them, so they cannot see us.”
He had a point.
“Any idea of the storm’s parameters?” he asked.
Thank goodness I’d been paying attention and hadn’t been still sitting on his vibrating shaft. “Before we shut down, the gages estimated it extended over most of this continent.”
Zyair grunted and banked again. The next few minutes were a hodgepodge of high velocity maneuvers that gave me a measure of gratitude for not just having eaten. It was much easier to pilot such a thing, than be the audience for it.
“Shaftz, bro,” Xandros complained over the comm. “I am going to disgorge my chocolate chip cookies. Land already!”
“Working on it,” Zyair muttered.
“Where’d the chocolate chip cookies come from?” I demanded.
“Galley cupboard,” Xandros confessed. “Hidden behind the kale chips.”
“Next time, I do the flying,” Rhodes stated, bringing us back to the task at hand.
Zyair snorted a tense laugh. “When we go on a sightseeing cruise, then you can fly.” He pushed down on the column, and theStardrifterobediently dove.
We were pointed almost straight down. “The altimeter isn’t working,” I yelped.
“The cloud cover should give way in time,” Zyair said through clenched teeth.
“‘Should’ is not reassuring!” My hands clamped around the armrests while my mind frantically searched my memory—were there mountains on this continent?
Suddenly, the clouds thinned, and we could see. Zyair yanked back on the column and the thrusters at the same time, leaning forward to fire the repulsorlifts.
It wasn’t a maneuver for the faint of heart. And not one I would have tried with a compromised ship. TheStardrifterscreamed.
Or at least, something did. Maybe it was someone…
