The fireball swallowed the assault craft. The shockwave and turbulence sent us tumbling. Dorian-2 was strapped into the pilot frame; I wasn’t.
I slammed into the crew bay bulkhead. The earlier EMP interference hadn’t fully cleared, and that impact nearly knocked my consciousness offline. I spun twice, caught a handhold by dumb luck, and finally stabilized myself.
“Dammit, I can’t see!” I heard Dorian-2 shouting. “Flight systems are down – I can’t execute commands!”
“Switch… to manual,” I forced out. “Punch out.”
My vision was flickering. Then it was gone. Other sensors started dropping out too, one after another. Redundant data loops cycled through my head, colliding, conflicting, throwing errors in an endless storm.
“The problem is I can’t tell which way the exit is! Lord Wyatt – are you okay?!”
“Dorian…” My voice came out broken. “I need… a reboot.”
“Lord Wyatt – ah! Lord Wyatt, look!”
The second half of his sentence came out as a full-throated yell.
Another enemy?
But I’d already initiated the reboot. The world went black and I fell into unconsciousness.
Seventeen seconds later, I came back.
I was floating. Dorian-2 had one arm hooked around me and the other locked on a bulkhead grip so I wouldn’t pinball through the cabin.
I ran a fast self-check. Systems were stable again.
“Lord Wyatt, you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “What just happened? Are we out?”
“We’re! We’re in open space!” Dorian-2 hauled me toward the cockpit. “You’ve to see this.”
When I reached the forward window, I understood why he’d sounded like that.
In the deep, endless dark, a planet filled the frame.
It was so huge I couldn’t see the whole disc. The visible curve was wrapped in a soft glow, patterned with yellow-brown mountains, deserts, and cloud bands – and scarred by countless city ruins and crater fields that made my processors go cold.
“Look at it,” Dorian-2 said, awed. “It’s incredible. Like a giant gemstone. So we’ve been living on a planet this beautiful the whole time.”
I remembered the world from the Old Man’s dream: green, alive, breathing.
“This used to be beautiful,” I murmured.
The planet slid slowly out of view as the assault craft continued its uncontrolled roll. Another vast shape replaced it.
The Hope.
I could clearly see the EM catapult bay we’d turned into a furnace. Fragments were still spitting out into space. We were rotating and drifting farther away from the capital ship with every second.
And danger was already moving.
The Hope began adjusting its attitude, turning its turret-dense flank toward us. On the far end, its other catapult bay was launching fighters in a constant stream.
The sense of crisis snapped me fully back into the moment.
“Dorian. Can you still control this craft?” I asked, hard. “Because if you can’t, we’re done.”
“Flight assist is dead,” he said. “But manual control is available.”
“Good. I’m flying.”
I slid into the pilot seat, stabilized the hull, and turned us away from the Hope.
“So we’re just running?” Dorian-2 asked, confused.
“For now,” I said. “I want Phantom Forge to think that’s what we’re doing.”
“Okay. I’ll watch our tail.”
Dorian-2 climbed into the weapons seat and lowered his half-helmet rig.
I shoved the throttle to the stop, putting as much distance between us and the Hope as possible. Our only edge was agility.
“Fast!” Dorian-2 snapped. “Its turrets are tracking us. What are those?!”
He shared his view feed. I saw the Hope roll, exposing several grotesque turrets along its side. Each one was larger than our assault craft. The barrels were hexagonal, and inside each barrel were countless smaller hexagonal channels, like a honeycomb.
“Metal Storm defense turrets,” I said. “They’re meant to shred incoming asteroids.”
Major Tower Clan installations carried them. Julian once showed me detailed schematics of the Sunflower; old starships had weapons like this. The Hope did too.
“It’s firing!” Dorian-2 yelled.
The hex barrels began strobing. I immediately adjusted our heading, trying to slip into the Hope’s rear blind spot. Seconds later, a deluge of white beams surged toward us.
Thousands of lances of light skimmed past our hull. One mistimed correction and we’d be torn apart. I hoped the turret would finish its volley so I could get farther away – or at least tuck into a dead angle long enough to breathe.
But the beams didn’t stop. They chased us like they had infinite ammunition. The Hope kept altering its orientation, bringing more turrets to bear.
CRACK.
The sound turned my core cold.
“Our tail fin’s gone!” Dorian-2 shouted.
“Don’t panic,” I said. “There’s no air out here. We don’t need a tail fin.”
CRACK-CRACK-WHIRR.
“I’m guessing we don’t need wings either!” Dorian-2 yelled.
“We don’t!”
The alarms started screaming again.
“We need engines, though!” he said, voice tipping into despair.
“We still have three.”
“Two!”
…
I held the assault craft at maximum velocity. With no atmospheric drag, we were already at 2.6 km/s. And the farther we got, the wider the Metal Storm pattern spread, which meant the safer we became.
When the Hope had shrunk to the size of my palm in the distance, the turrets finally stopped. Phantom Forge still wasn’t done with us. The moment I exhaled, the radar lit up with a pursuing fighter pack.
I ignored them and focused on Lansen Planet, constantly adjusting our approach angle.
“We’re locked again!” Dorian-2 shouted.
The lock alarm blared. I killed it; I couldn’t afford the distraction.
“Missiles incoming!” Dorian-2 panicked.
“Your job,” I said. “Intercept.”
“I can’t! I couldn’t hit a robot ten meters away!”
“Then aim harder.”
I stopped talking. My full attention went into the geometry.
The missiles closed.
Dorian-2 had no choice. He threw the cannons into the intercept and, somehow, clipped one missile. Then a second. Then a third. Sparks blossomed in the black, and his panic began turning into focus.
Thanks to the ammunition I’d hoarded, he managed to intercept every missile.
“I did it!” Dorian-2 said, startled by his own success. “That wasn’t even hard. These missiles are slow.”
“Good work, Dorian.”
“But why?”
“Check our speed.”
“4.2 km/s.” His voice jumped. “That’s why the missiles feel slow. How did you do that?!”
“I’m riding Lansen’s gravity,” I said. “Gravity slingshot effect. Hold on – we’re going to get faster.”
“Incredible!”
Back in the Old Man’s dream, I’d devoured everything I could find on astronautics. I’d even argued the theory with him, line by line. I never expected to need it like this.
Our speed kept climbing. The Hope vanished. The fighters faded from our radar.
Dorian-2 finally voiced the question that had been building in him. “What are you actually doing? We’re supposed to take the Hope. Why are we flying away from it?”
“We’re taking it,” I said. “But we need speed. It’s our only advantage.”
With the immediate threat gone, I explained my plan.
“At our old speed, we’d be turned into debris before we even reached the island superstructure. So I’m using Lansen’s gravity to accelerate us. I ran the numbers: we’ll loop the planet and intersect the Hope again in 112 minutes. By then we’ll be moving at 7.9 km/s – maybe more. Only that kind of speed will let us break through the defense grid and the hull and punch straight into the island.”
“At that speed, we’ll be pulverized,” Dorian-2 said, worried.
“That depends,” I said. After a beat, I added more calmly, “I’ll take some necessary measures. I’ll do what I can to keep us intact.”
Dorian-2 went quiet, staring at the battered, gray planet below.
“This might be our last 112 minutes,” he said.
“Maybe,” I agreed.