Page 12 of Sixth
Chapter 4
THE FIRSTexplosion didn’t soundreal.
It was too high, too sharp, like glass being pulled apart instead of breaking. The ship lurched hard enough to whip Emmy sideways, her harness biting into her abdomen and shoulders as sparks burst from the upper conduit. Every light along the control board went crimson at once, alarms stacking until the cockpit sounded like a furious choir.
“Apex!” she shouted, but he was already moving—steady, silent, infuriatingly calm while the world came apart aroundthem.
His hands flew across the flight board, each motion exact, clean, deadly efficient, as though he could muscle order back into a universe intent on unraveling.
The ship bucked again. Astreak of blue light scissored across the forward screen, and then another.
“Voss,” she gasped. “He found us!”
“Drones,” Apex corrected, his voice like carved stone. “Four pursuit units. Core, run defensive projection.”
Core, the ship’s AI answered in its calm, disembodied tone:“Defensive projection initiated. Calculating evasive trajectories. Pursuit drones locking on vector three-five.”
Another impact hammered the hull. Emmy’s vision went white. When it cleared, the view ahead was a storm of fire, blue, green, and something that shimmered like living light. For a disorienting instant she thought it was weapons fire, then realized the blaze came from below, anearby planet’s upper atmosphere catching their descent.
They were entering the world’s first veil, skimming through the outer layers of burning air that shimmered around it. The ship spun end over end until Apex slammed both palms against the stabilizer control. Gravity seized her stomach and flung it sideways. She heard herself cryout.
“Hold on,” he commanded. Hard and clipped. No mercy.
They slammed into another invisible wall. Warning tones howled. Smoke curled from beneath the console in a dark, snaking coil that smelled like burned metal and acid. Apex yanked the manual override and threw power to auxiliary. The lights dropped from harsh white to bruisedblue.
The ship’s AI spoke in its calm, disembodied tone:“Warning: atmospheric frequency matches Vettian resonance. This world hears you.”
Apex froze for half a heartbeat, eyes flicking to the readout. The violet in them darkened to amethyst. “Repeat that.”
“This world hears you,”Core said again.“Entering upper atmosphere. Energy field interference escalating.Impact trajectory… unsustainable.Recommend emergency descent burn. Repeat: this world hears you.”
“Descent burn accepted,” Apex said, and his voice went lower, colder, as if he’d banked his focus and will into fuel. “Angle two-seven. Bleed speed through the gradients.”
Emmy clutched the edges of her seat and searched for the gradients—those narrow seams of darker shadow inside the dark that most pilots missed. Seams that opened like knife-cuts in thesky.
A drone zipped past the port, close enough to throw sparks across their hull. The Valenmark at Apex’s wrist flared bright, so bright the light printed against her vision. Heat pulsed through Emmy’s own mark in reply, asudden burn that made her gasp. Not pain exactly. More like pressure. As if the planet had reached inside the ship and touched them both atonce.
“Core,” Apex said. “Countermeasures on my mark. Do not fire until I say.”
“Acknowledged.”
The ship tilted. Emmy experienced every degree of it, each shift tightening the webbing across her ribs. She forced herself to breathe through it, to keep her voice steady. “Tell me what you need.”
“Right hand thruster status,” he said. “Now.”
She scanned the board. Numbers jumped, jittery with interference. “Fifty-three percent and dropping. You’ve got a heat spike in the cascade.”
“Reroute coolant from environmental,” he said. “We can breathe hot.”
She swallowed the taste of fear and did it. Heat bloomed in the cockpit, adamp mass that made her skin slick inside her clothes. Another drone clipped their flank. The ship jolted sideways. Metal screamed deep in the bones of thehull.
“Countermeasures—now,” Apex said.
“Deploying.”
The Core flung a burst of chaff into the path of the drones. The screen filled with a cloud of glittering fragments that looked almost beautiful before the first drone hit and went up in a white-blue flare. The second veered. The third and fourth lanced straight through—relentless, precise.
Apex angled into it. “We do not run,” he said. “We slide.”
