He didn’t go so far as to express his doubts about me as a pilot, but it was there, all right.
“Too bad, then, that I have neither,” I replied lightly.
To my surprise, he snorted a laugh as he strapped himself in.
“Chart us a course from that spot through the belt to Givnia,” I told him, and fired the engines.
The swamp was reluctant to let us go. The silt at the bottom of the lake bogged down our landing struts, but the repulsors managed, finally, to break us free. The murky water streamed off theStardrifter’ssides as we rose to just above the trees.
And then I started to fly.
My love of flying had led to me often sneaking off in our landhopper to go joyriding over the fields and forests around Winnipeg. So I did have experience hugging the ground.
Only it had never been at night in the middle of a storm…
As Rhodes sat rigid in the navigator’s seat, and Xandros loomed behind us, I kept one eye on the holographic image the navcube showed me, and the other on the treetops, while I reached for my new inner talent.
It saved us three times in the first minute, showing me the odd, lone monstrous tree that stuck up above the canopy just in time for me to avoid a collision The navcube detected them, but wasn’t fast enough to call the alert.
I was peripherally aware of Xandros standing with arms crossed,his big body anchored by his toe talons and the cloak rucked up as he braced his wings against the wall. He swayed with the ship’s movements, and only his twitching tail betrayed his uneasiness. But what I sensed from him was warmth and the desire to help me succeed, rather than doubt.
The manner in which Rhodes clenched his fingers around the arm rests indicated nothing but the latter. He’d cut slits in his cloak so that his wings arched over him, as though they could carry him away in time if we crashed.
Then the navcube lit up with green dots. Green? That usually represented a friendly, not a foe.
“It is reading them as the same energy signature as our power core,” Rhodes said. “We will show up the same to them, so long as they do not get a visual.”
“Even then, they might assumeStardrifteris a captured and retrofitted ship for the Nirzks,” Xandros stated.
“Once we are free from the planet, yes. There are a lot of these old Drakonian starhoppers around. Here, they will be looking for us,” growled Rhodes.
“Well, we’ll just have to make sure they don’t get a visual, then,” I said, and dodged a rock outcropping that extended above the canopy.
“Did you see that, or did you sense it?” Rhodes asked through gritted teeth.
“Does it matter?” I responded.
“No,” he admitted.
I ducked a tree, and his fingers whitened on the armrests as his wings twitched. My lips quirked. And I dodged another, with a little more swerve than was strictly required.
His dark eyes flicked my way. “Are you taking pleasure in this?”
“Yes, actually.”
He arched a brow and peeled hands off the armrests to apply himself to the navigation monitor in front of him, tapping away as I ducked and swerved. After a few moments, he said in Drakonian, “I know of a route that will get us to Givnia before Brentoq’s battleship.The most direct course is through this nebula. They will avoid it.” Then he added in English, “Did you understand?”
“Yes.” I had, actually. My command of Drakonian had improved radically since I screwed his brothers. Perhaps I’d absorbed it along with…
Focus, Jaz.The chaos of gas and radiation inside some nebulae meant that they were often avoided. In the battleship’s case, it would wreak an unacceptable level of havoc with their systems. “Our shields are compromised,” I reminded him. “We should be avoiding it too.”
Instead of answering, Rhodes opened a channel to Yani. “Can you focus the remaining shields as a radiation screen?”
“Why?” She drawled the word.
“We need to take a shortcut through a nebula,” I stated as I dodged a clump of massive trees.
“Through a nebula.” It was a statement filled with astonishment. “With a damaged shield actuator.” A long pause, and then she said, “I might be able to channel some power from the core to them. Itwillfry the actuator. Whether it will hold long enough is anyone’s guess.”
