Now! I thought, drawing just close enough to the alien ship. I launched my light-lance and speared it right between its twin boosters.
“Use cockpit rotation!” I screamed, pulling up—switching on my acclivity ring to counter the planet’s gravity—and bracing myself as I frantically leveled off my dive.
Blackness crept across my vision as all the blood rushed to my feet, the g-forces now pointing down. M-Bot rotated my seat in an attempt to compensate—the human body is far better at taking forces straight back than it is at taking them downward.
The cockpit trembled as I slowed our descent. Scud . . . I hoped the g-forces didn’t scramble the pilot. They nearly scrambled me. My vision blacked out completely for a few seconds, and my pressure suit constricted around my waist and legs, trying to force the blood back up into my brain.
As my vision returned I found myself trembling, my face sweaty and cold, a rushing sound in my ears. The ship slowed—mercifully—to a steady Mag-1. My cockpit seat rotated back as I pulled out of the dive completely.
I glanced over my shoulder to Doomslug, who was fluting in an annoyed tone from where she’d been pressed against the wall. Did not having bones make this harder or easier for her? Either way, we both seemed to have weathered the moment.
I glanced out to see the ground speeding along below. We were maybe four or five hundred feet up. I still had the other ship though—my own ship towed it along behind with the glowing red-orange rope of the light-lance.
“That was a little close, Spin,” Kimmalyn said in my ear. “Even for you. But . . . I guess it wasn’t a trap?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice as I breathed in and out. Still, my hands were steady as I slowed us to a stop, hovering on my acclivity ring. I carefully lowered the alien ship to the ground, then disengaged the light-lance and landed.
I waited—my cockpit open, feeling the breeze on my sweaty face—as Kimmalyn landed nearby. Cobb said he was sending a force of ground troops to handle the Krell captive, but didn’t order me to stay back. So I climbed out and dropped down off the wing, my feet thumping on the dusty blue-grey landscape of Detritus. From down here, the defensive platforms and rubble belt of the lowest shell were just vague, distant patterns in the sky.
The alien ship was roughly the same size as M-Bot, so larger than our standard fighters. That meant it might be a long-range vessel, with more storage and room than a short-range fighter. It had a large cockpit set into the center of a circular fuselage, with wide arced wings and a destructor emplacement under each one. The ship also had a light-lance turret under its fuselage, in roughly the same place as M-Bot’s. I hadn’t seen those on any Krell fighters.
It was a combat fighter, obviously. The left wing bore a large blackened gap and scorch marks where the ship had been shot, and it had been ripped almost completely free in the descent.
Unfamiliar alien writing marked one side of the fuselage. Whatever I thought I’d sensed from the cockpit was gone now, and I felt a rising fear. The alien must be dead.
Unwilling to wait for Kimmalyn, I hauled myself up onto the alien ship’s right wing—it was still warm from the descent, but cool enough to touch—and the ship tipped beneath my weight, reminding me it wasn’t sitting on landing struts. I held on and climbed over to the canopy.
There, through the glass, I got my first up-close look at an alien. I had been expecting to find something similar to the crablike creatures I’d seen in the cockpits of Krell ships.
Shock moved through me, and my breath caught as I was confronted by something entirely different. What I saw instead was a humanoid woman.
8
She was both hauntingly familiar and strikingly alien, all at once. She had pale violet skin, stark-white hair, and bonelike white growths on her cheeks, underlining her eyes. Despite her alien features though, she had an obvious female shape beneath a snug flight jacket. She almost could have been one of us.
I was surprised—I hadn’t realized there were aliens out there that looked so . . . human. I had always imagined that most of them would be like the Krell, creatures that were so strange they seemed to have more in common with rocks than humans.
I found myself staring at that elfin face, entranced, until I noticed the broken control panel and the blackened scorch marks on the left side of her stomach, which was wet with something darker than human blood. The panel had obviously exploded, and part had impaled her.
I scrambled to search for a manual cockpit release, but it wasn’t where I expected to find it. That made sense—this was alien engineering. Still, it defied reason that there wouldn’t be some kind of release on the outside of the ship. I felt around the canopy, searching for a latch, as Kimmalyn climbed up beside me. She gasped upon seeing the alien woman.
“Saints and stars,” she whispered, touching the canopy glass. “She’s beautiful. Almost . . . almost like a devil from one of the old stories . . .”
“She’s wounded,” I said. “Help me find—”
I cut off as I found it, right at the back of the canopy—a small panel that, when I threw it open, revealed a handle. I yanked it outward, and the canopy let out a hiss as it unsealed.
“Spensa, this is stupid,” Kimmalyn said. “We don’t know what kind of gases she breathes. And we could expose ourselves to alien bacteria or . . . or I don’t know. There are a hundred reasons not to open that.”
She was right. The air that came out did smell distinctly odd. Floral, but also acrid, scents that didn’t go together in my experience. But it didn’t seem to hurt me as I scrambled over and—not knowing what else to do—reached in to feel at the alien woman’s neck for a pulse.
I felt one. Soft, irregular—though who knew if that was actually normal for her.
Suddenly the woman’s eyes fluttered open, and I froze, meeting her violet eyes. I was shocked by how eerily human they were.
She spoke in a quiet voice, alien words with consonants I couldn’t distinguish. Graceful, ephemeral, like the sounds of air rustling pages. It seemed oddly familiar.
“I don’t understand,” I said as she spoke again. “I . . .”
Scud. That dark liquid on her lips had to be blood. I scrambled to pull the emergency bandage from the cargo pocket on my leg. “Hang on!” I said, though Kimmalyn got hers out first and forced it into my hands.
I climbed farther into the cockpit, bracing myself against the broken control panel, and pressed the bandage against the woman’s side. “Help is coming,” I said. “They’re sending . . .”
“Human,” the woman said.
I froze. The word was in English. She seemed to notice my reaction, then tapped a small pin on her collar. When she spoke again in her airy language, the device translated.
“A real human,” she said, then smiled, blood trailing down the side of her lip. “So it’s true. You still exist.”
“Just hang on,” I said, trying to stanch the blood at her side.
She lifted her arm, trembling, and touched my face. Her fingers were covered in blood and felt wet on my cheek. Kimmalyn breathed out a small prayer, but I clung there—half in, half out of the cockpit—meeting the alien woman’s eyes.
“We were allies once,” she said. “They say that you were monsters. But I thought . . . nothing can be more monstrous than they are . . . And if anyone can fight . . . it would be the ones they locked away . . . the terror that once nearly defeated them . . .”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I opened myself up—I searched for you for so long. And only now did I finally hear you, calling out. Don’t trust . . . their lies. Don’t trust . . . their false peace.”
“Who?” I said. What she was saying was too vague. “Where?”