“New route is discouraged,” the navigator protested. “Volcanoes on Yulia release high concentrations of bromine chloride, which could damage—”
“Override.”
The rattling of the cockpit got louder. The ship stopped swerving, locked the route in, and started a nosedive into the volcano’s mouth. The tracker closed the gap. It was a bet Hyleesh was willing to make. Those little machines were resilient and virtually indestructible, but they had limits, too.
The bridge windows darkened as they got covered in ashes.
“Pull out of current route in thirty seconds,” Hyleesh ordered.
“Calculating,” the navigator replied. “In twenty-eight seconds the ship will be too far deep—”
“Override.”
He swallowed hard and watched the tracker on the screen, now only a few hundred feet from the stern of the Orion.
Twenty more seconds. Eighteen. Lights started flashing on the console.
“Temperature reaching maximum tolerance,” the navigator said. The Orion screeched deep from its engine. “Temperature over maximum tolerance.”
Ten seconds. Hyleesh patted the console. You can do this, baby. I know you can.
Five.
Four.
The rattling got louder. Then the ship swerved back up, the g’s greying Hyleesh’s vision. He fought to keep his eyes open, his knuckles white at the controls. The pixels in the 3D screen flickered and for a moment he lost the connection. His eyes strayed back to the bridge windows, tears of condensation etching through the layer of soot.
Then the image came back, the ship’s avatar fast shooting out of the volcano’s mouth.
“Where’s the tracker?” Hyleesh mumbled. He tried to draw a deep breath, his lungs squashed by the pounding g’s. He couldn’t hear Argos anymore—the dog would’ve likely passed out by now.
“Tracker not found,” the navigator replied. “Metal residues detected around the volcano’s mouth.”
Hyleesh exhaled a sigh of relief and grinned. “Excellent. There’s your tracker. Too dumb to change its course in time.” He slowed the acceleration by two g’s.
“Hey buddy, how you doing?” he called to Argos. Five more minutes and he’d be able to unstrap from his seat and attend to the poor lad.
“Reroute to outer space,” he ordered.
“Request denied.”
“What? Why?”
“Not enough fuel to break Yulia’s gravitational field.”
Hyleesh set the ship back into cruise and slumped in his seat. He could always land and search for fuel on Yulia. With all the stranded ships he’d seen around Sunan’s spaceport he was sure to find one with a still intact tank. But that would take—how much longer? Two hours if he acted quickly. Plenty of time for Zika’s troops to find him.
“New alert detected,” the navigator chimed in, interrupting his train of thought.
“What now?”
He saw it on the screen before the computer replied. He tapped open a new window and selected the Orion’s tail view.
Forget two hours. They were here now, already visible on the horizon.
Tinted in orange by the setting sun, a row of five shiny objects glimmered above the clouds.
Stingrays.
Five fast approaching Stingrays and not enough fuel to break out of Yulia’s grav field.
“Damn it.” Hyleesh rapped his fingers on the console and considered his options. A tracker was a piece of cake compared to a fleet of five Stingrays.
“What do you say, Argos?” he called. “Any tricks up your sleeve against Stingrays?”
Dogs don’t have sleeves.
The console bleeped. “Incoming message. Source: YX3RTZ.”
Hyleesh recognized the code. “Play message,” he said.
Zika’s voice came into the cockpit loud and clear. “Why, hello, Captain Weber.” A chuckle. “My men kept saying you were dead. But I knew better. I recognize talent when I see it. Too bad it’s all wasted on you. Sooner or later the rabbit has to come out of his hole. So, what do you say? Shall we settle this argument civilly? The Kraal reassures me it’s your last chance.”
The Kraal, the Royal Commander in Chief. The word must’ve reached Hyleesh’s father too at this point. He wondered what he was thinking, betrayed by his own son.
No. He betrayed me. No turning back now.
It was the last resort. But he had no other choice.
He pressed a button.
“Recording message,” the computer said.
Hyleesh leaned into the mic. “Charming to hear your voice, General Zika,” he said. “Always puts me in a good mood. Would love to have more time to chat with such a refined being as you are, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand half the things I’d have to say. Like, why there cannot be any Quarium on a planet like Yulia. But by now I’m sure you’ve seen the evidence yourself. Too bad, isn’t it? Because you see, you just wasted thirty thousand tons of Quarium to destroy a planet that, alas, has none. And now you’re going to have to wait another twelve months before you can make enough pulse propulsion bombs to destroy your next target. That’s sort of ironic, isn’t it? Well, let me help you out and send some your way.”
Hyleesh released the recording button. “Send now.”
He gripped the impulse lever and then tapped the weapon console.
“How much recoil do we need to exit the grav field?” he asked.
“Calculating. At our current altitude of sixty thousand feet, the Orion would need an escape velocity of seventy thousand miles per second.”
Hyleesh smiled. “That’s plenty. Reroute to outer space.” He pulled the impulse lever and tapped on his screen. A whir echoed from the back of the ship.
“We are currently en route,” the navigator chimed in. “Are you sure you want to open the cargo bay?”
He sent a last look at the images streaming from the tail view. “Positive.”
By now Zika would’ve received his response. The Stingrays were closer, their unmistakable silhouettes framed by a blood red sun.
“Here we go, baby,” he said, confirming the last order. “With love from your favorite captain.”
The cargo bay door opened. He watched it from the indoor camera, then switched back to the tail view. The missile dropped and then, as soon as its propeller fired, picked up speed and aimed toward the Stingrays.
Hyleesh watched. “Damn, it doesn’t have a tracker,” he realized. And then a smile surfaced his lips. It don’t need no tracker.
Sure enough, as soon as the Stingrays saw the incoming object, a row of artillery barrels flipped up along their wide-span wings.
Hyleesh’s smile evaporated. “Shit.”
He pulled the impulse lever all the way down. He wanted them to fire, he just didn’t want to be near by when they did.
“Not enough fuel to—”
“Override!” he yelled, then slumped back and let the acceleration wave do the rest.
The explosion came seconds later.
They shot it, he barely had time to think before the cloud of energy engulfed the ship. The digits on the accelerometer spiked to eight, then ten g’s, and after that he barely had the strength to mumble, “Keep. Trajectory.” Before everything went black.
A yelp. Then another one. He opened his eyes. The cockpit was bathed in a dim, milky light. Everything was quiet. Except for the yelp.
“Damn!”
He flipped the lights on and checked his coordinates. The 3D screen reassembled above the dashboard. Yulia was but a small dot in a sea of stars.