Jubilee reaches for her headset and pulls it back on with shaking hands. “Base, this is eight-one-nine. We are unarmed—tell your fighters to stand down.”
“Captain,” says the voice on the radio, “is that you?”
“Commander,” Jubilee replies. Her face has gone ashy in the planet’s glow, and I recall what she told me about her last encounter with the base commander. That Jubilee watched something take over her mind, right there in her office. “Yes, this is Lee Chase.”
“Captain, we don’t want any further bloodshed.” The commander’s voice crackles and blurs with static, the interference from Avon’s atmosphere wreaking havoc with the signal from the base. “I don’t believe you have criminal intentions. Surrender now and be escorted back to base, and we can talk.”
Jubilee’s eyes are on mine, her face unreadable except for the depth of mixed emotions there.
I know what she’s asking. If she goes back, I’ll be arrested. I trust you, I mouth silently. I know what this second chance means to her. I know what it would mean to me, if my people offered me a way back.
“Surrender now,” the commander says again, “and give up the rebel you’ve been harboring. He will be taken into custody, but he will not be executed without a fair trial. We can still discuss this, Captain.”
Jubilee doesn’t hesitate any longer. She reaches up and pulls the headset off like it’s burned her. She shakes her head, slamming her palm down on the communications kill switch. “That’s not Commander Towers,” she says, closing her eyes. “It’s not real, what they’re offering.”
I look out, finding the stars again, knowing I might not get to see them again in this lifetime.
Jubilee’s eyes are on the scanner, watching the five ships flying in formation, approaching us from behind. “Flynn?” she says, dragging my attention back away from the endless panorama outside the viewport.
“Yes?”
She curls her hands around the controls, taking a deep breath. “Put your harness back on.”
She’s having the drowning dream again. She gasps and gasps, but all she breathes is darkness, rushing into her lungs like water, hollowing her out, leaving her empty. She tries to scream, but the vacuum of space is quiet, and still, and black….
Until a gentle, greenish light makes her open her eyes. The green-eyed boy is there, and he reaches out to take her hand and pull her close—and suddenly, she can breathe the darkness. Like the underwater dreams she had as a child, the girl can feel the darkness in her lungs, but it hurts her no more than air does.
He speaks, and though she can’t hear him, the vibrations of his voice travel through their joined hands and she can understand him anyway. “Trust what you feel,” he says.
THE DASHBOARD LIGHTS UP with warnings, alarms screaming at me from overhead; I’m coming in too hot, my angle through the atmosphere dangerously close to free fall. But that’s what I’m counting on. The ships in pursuit are fighters, and there’s no way for a simple transport shuttle to outmaneuver them in open space. So I’m going to have to out-dare them.
The viewport shields slam closed as we hit the mesosphere, shielding us from the white-hot temperatures generated by our descent. The second we hit the denser air the whole shuttle starts shaking, its lockers and seats not designed for this kind of stress. I can hear the empty harnesses behind me clanging and slamming against each other.
The shaking of the shuttle threatens to wrench the controls from my hands, and I clench my fists around them as tightly as I can. My harness is cutting into me as momentum crushes us down against our seats, making my whole body ache. I wish I could check on Flynn; this would be enough to make a seasoned veteran start praying to any gods who’d listen, and it’s Flynn’s first time up. But I can’t, because if I make one wrong move, if I misjudge this maneuver, the shuttle will break apart and we’ll both be dead in an instant.
Without the viewport, I’m forced to rely on the digital imaging screen on the dash. I’m looking for the lines to shift, indicating we’ve reached the cloud layer; I’ve never been so glad to be on Avon, where there are clouds everywhere. The clouds are where I’m going to lose our pursuers.
The second we’re in, I jerk back on the stick. The shuttle screams a protest, and I’m slammed down into my seat so hard by the g-forces that my vision blurs, my peripheral sight going dark. I struggle for air, easing up on the stick enough that I can breathe. With any luck, the fighters, unable to track us in the clouds, have zoomed right on past toward Avon’s surface. We level out, my vision returning and my temples pounding with light-headedness, and I immediately roll off to the right until I’m headed east. No rebels out there, no military patrols; only the island where Flynn’s secret facility used to be. That’s where I’m aiming.
My ears recover, and I can hear rapid, panicked breathing; when I try to speak, I realize I’m the one hyperventilating. I shoot a quick glance over at the copilot’s seat.
“Flynn? You alive?”
He doesn’t answer immediately, and when I take another look, he’s got his head pressed back against the seat and both hands gripping the armrests, white-knuckled. “I hope not,” he gasps, closing his eyes more tightly.
The laugh that escapes my lips is only a little hysterical. “We’re not down yet,” I warn him. “And we can’t land at the base.”
“Can you land this thing in the swamp?” he manages, voice choked.
“More or less,” I reply through gritted teeth, trying not to let him hear my own fear. A trained pilot could do it. But I’m a combat specialist, and this…no one trained me for this.
We stay in the clouds for a while, the turbulence throwing us around nearly as badly as the descent did. I can’t see any sign of the fighters on my screens, but that’s because Avon’s atmosphere makes the scans almost useless in the air. The same thing I’m counting on to hide us will keep me from knowing if we’re still being pursued.
I keep my eyes on the topographic map scrolling by on the left side of the dash until I start to see familiar patterns. I shift our course to take us wide of the military base, making for the island to the east instead, the one place I know there’s some solid ground to retreat to. I can’t land on the island itself; without a paved landing pad I need soft ground to avoid a crash. But I can set the shuttle down in the swamp a few klicks away, and we can abandon the ship and make for the island before the military shows up at the crash site.
It’s not my most graceful landing ever. The ship ends up at a slant, the landing pads half submerged on one side. I want to see if Flynn’s okay, but I can’t make myself let go of the controls. I can’t take my eyes from the instruments. In the end, Flynn has to unbuckle and come get me, wrapping his hands around mine.
“Jubilee—we’re down. We’re here, we’re fine. You can let go.” He pulls my hands away, massaging life back into the whitened knuckles.
I wrench my eyes from the screens. “Are you okay?”
He nods, though I can see his face is bone-white in the gloom of the cabin. “Just don’t make me leave the ground again any time soon.”
Together we stumble toward the back of the shuttle, and I hit the door control. The gangway comes down at an angle sharp enough that its hydraulics can’t compensate, making it rattle when it splashes into the water. The shuttle groans as it continues to settle into the swamp’s thick muck, confirming that we’re never taking off in this thing again. I close my eyes, letting the damp, swampy air caress my face. Night has barely fallen, only a tiny bit of light left on the horizon to mark the last remnants of day.