I had scant seconds to appreciate the thought as we hurtled downward, the drones rushing up toward us with terrifying speed. At the last moment, Qole brought the nose of the Kaitan up and we were in the flood of drones, weaving in and out of them.
I ignored every screaming part of me that had been trained to stay well away from them, and focused on the task I had been given. “The Air Guard is right behind us,” I reported, “but they’re thoroughly confused. No one has yet been foolish enough to…Ah, never mind. They’re shooting.”
Sure enough, one of the starfighters decided to take a crack at us and hit a drone instead. In a flash, it was upon him, tearing into the aircraft. It had ripped its wings off as if it were a fly by the time another fighter came to the rescue. The new arrival unloaded a string of plasma torpedoes and blew the drone to bits before he registered the screeching order to stand down. But by then it was too late.
The drones reacted with escalating violence to any damage done to another, and in the space of seconds, we were passing through a maelstrom of fighters and drones engaged in a furious firefight. The image of the young guard that Eton had killed rose in my mind unbidden, and I wondered how many other people might die in this battle. I pushed the thought down, somewhere deep. Now was not the time.
Qole deftly threaded the Kaitan through the chaos, and for a moment we were in the clear, heading toward the Atrium. Plumes of dust were rising nearby, where drones were burrowing into the mountainside, churning up rocks and soil as they labored to reach the ancient shafts once again. They’d only keep at the task for as long as Telu kept hacking their signals and sending them refreshed orders to do so.
“I think we have a clear shot—” I was cut off when the Kaitan lurched and slewed, tossing us in our harnesses.
“Tractor beam,” Qole said grimly. “One just locked onto us.”
I hadn’t worried too much about those, not in this chaos. We’d been dealing with starfighters, not the big destroyers that were equipped with them, and the latter still had to be fast enough to catch you within a relatively close range. Which, apparently, they had been.
“Right, listen up.” Qole eyed the feed that showed us slowly drifting toward the hull of the giant, wedge-shaped ship that my family favored. To think there had been a time when the sight of destroyers had reassured me. “Eton, I want you to fill the air with every last bit of ammunition left in the mass driver. Give the tractor beam something to chew on. Basra, jettison everything in the hold and on my mark, divert all power outside of navigation to the engines.”
“Is that wise?” Basra asked. “If I do that, life support and gravity dampeners will go offline.”
Qole ignored him, her eyes hard, watching a feed of Eton firing at the destroyer. The flecks of mass filled the air, slowed, and then spun off along the beam. I knew I should have been focusing entirely on my duty to scan the info feeds, but I couldn’t help glancing up at her periodically. If pure determination were enough to break us free, there wouldn’t be a tractor beam in the galaxy that could hold us.
I looked back at the feeds. “Qole, fighters are incoming.” Tension crawled up my spine. I suddenly understood that following a leader was fine in concept, but trusting your life to the cryptic word of another person was nothing short of nerve-racking. How many of my family’s followers had felt the same tension as they followed Dracorte commands?
“Mark.” Qole gave the order, and the lights went out. The only thing that remained was the glow of the console and the blinding glare of the Kaitan’s engines on overdrive as she strained against the grip of the destroyer’s tractor beam. Debris began to tumble toward the port side of the ship as planetary gravity took over. No doubt our oxygen and heat were offline as well, but we were in Luvos’s atmosphere, and besides, before long, we wouldn’t need either of those things. Either we’d be dead or…
Slowly, agonizingly, we began to creep away. It was a victory of sorts, but in my heart I knew that would never be enough. Those starfighters were almost on us, and they would take us apart.
Qole wrenched the controls, and the Kaitan twisted in the grip of the destroyer. She wrenched again, and we thrashed like a caught fish. With the screech of tearing metal, the entire ship shuddered, something gave way, and we were free.
None of us cheered. I knew what Qole had just done: she had ripped a part of the Kaitan—a part of herself—clean off.
For a moment, we flew toward the spire, and then our momentum slowed. I realized the familiar rumble of the engines was gone. The Kaitan was all but dead in the air, and we were about to go into a free fall.
“Ancestors, let this work,” whispered Qole, her hands flying over the console in front of her. Then she grasped a lever I had never seen her use before and engaged it.
As the Kaitan fell through the sky between the spires of the citadel, I stared in awe as the boom used for Shadow fishing swept to a new position. From it, a shimmering metallic web unfurled, flapping in the air until it snapped tight.
The lights flicked back on in the bridge, artificial gravity returned, and the ship flitted into the latticework of the citadel.
I wanted to shake my head in disbelief, scream for joy. A solar sail. Virtually unused now, it had been the primary method of propulsion for the natives of Alaxak until traders had brought more advanced engines to the planet. Somehow, I’d forgotten about this bit of history that was now saving our lives.
“Telu, pick a drone for me,” Qole instructed. “Same as we did with that asteroid our first season together.”
Telu sounded uncertain. “We had Arjan to make the call when we should…”
“You get the drone, I’ll make the move. It’s time to end this.” Blackness crept into Qole’s eyes as she spoke, and I felt the pressure in the cabin change.
The Kaitan Heritage swept through the spires of the citadel, pursued by starfighters from every direction. Photon blasts sliced through structural work, and plasma missiles left scorched holes in the citadel itself as the Air Guard threw everything it had in an attempt to stop us.
Not one hit landed.
Climbing, spinning, diving, Qole made the Kaitan dance like a kite in the wind. Hurtling impossibly close to the structures around us, we spiraled down through a honeycomb of supports in a stomach-churning drop that I was certain would make me throw up over the dash.
“Drone bearing zero, thirty-one, twenty-eight,” Telu announced.
Starfighters scattered in every direction as a massive mining drone dove straight for the root of the mountain. It passed them, and from their vantage, the Kaitan must have vanished.