Page 170 of The Last Hope
We all wait to see if they bought the lie. The only sound in the ship comes from Gem, who types quickly.
Static from the radio seeps in our vessel, signaling incoming communications.
“Nebuluscrew, please kindly exit your battlecraft. Over.”
“No fykking way,” Zimmer curses. “They canplease kindlyshove that directive up—”
“Got it!” Gem says.
“Engaging thrusters,” Padgett and I say in unison. We maneuver our joysticks and this time, the roar of the engines is accompanied by liftoff.
The pressure on the straps of my chair intensifies as we shoot up.
Gem shouts over the noise. “You’ll need to be at least twenty kilometers away before you can unleash artillery! It’s my best guess.”
Mykal pales at the wordguess.
“We’re currently ten kilometers.” I read the panels.
Stork can see them clearly from his vantage point as well. His eyes are trained down below at the tarmac, and his hand squeezes the joystick. He controls the interstellar artillery, and the heavy weaponry groans as he moves it into position.
Court continues to shout commands.
We fly higher and higher.
“Seventeen,” I call out so the others know. “Eighteen.”
As soon as we drop the explosives, we’re either going to be charred alive with theRomuluscadets or we’ll make it out unscathed.
There is only one certainty in all of this: Mykal, Court, and I are the only ones who can die today.
“Nineteen.” My pulse hammers. “Twenty.” I hold my breath.
Stork clicks a button on his joystick in fast succession.Click. Click. Click. Click.And the battlecraft shakes violently. Seconds pass before a glaring light breaches our windshield. Heat.
Gods, the heat nearly chokes me.
Explosives detonate on the tarmac, and I can only hear the blistering, all-consuming thunder. My senses are overpowered. Suffocating warmth cocoons me like I’m brewing from the inside out, and the battlecraft keeps pushing off from the blasts below. Flying away from Saltare-1.
Shooting faster and harder with explosions at our rear—at any second the fire and flames could engulf our vessel and send us backward.
I just keep focused on my job.
Forward. Up.
Don’t stop.
The water world falls behind us as we rise and rise.
And then, we breach the darkness of space. We speed away from the largest Saltare planet. It almost feels unreal. The sudden quiet outside.
Spots of light dance in my vision, and my ears ring shrilly.
Kinden flips a few switches on the comms panels. “I’m going to try and send a signal to theLucretzia.”
Stork calls out a radio frequency for the Knave Squadron. Nia, Barrett, and Arden are the ones meant to help us with the return passage.
We all work in silence. Holding our breaths, waiting to be chased by enemy starcrafts that survived the explosion, on the chance that we botched the plan. But the universe is dark and still, and Saltare-1 fades into the background, a speck in the distance.
