The World Forgot (18 page)

“A ship this advanced, and they use it like an ordinary junker?” Ducky asks. Then a troubling expression washes over his face. “The bricks can't blow up once they're loaded,” he says. “Right?”

I don't bother answering, because I think we both realize how dead we're all about to be. The Governor's men—who, in my very brief encounter with them, didn't strike me as overly careful about their work—have done a really, really shitty job of installing the new system into our ship. Try as I might, I can't get the rear repulsors to light up on my board.

Bust out the label maker and mark us
BONED
.

“Bok Choy, are you there?” I say, patching into an open channel on the comm.

“I'm here, Elvie,” comes his voice. It is weak and shaky. “The clamps are disabled. You should be able to start the takeoff sequence.”

“That's the thing,” I tell him. “I can't. The back repulsors are offline. I'm not going to be able to get her off the deck.”

“Can't we just start up the engine and slide out?” Ducky asks.

“With a half ton of explosive ozone in the hold?” I say. “We'll light up like a Girl Scout campfire before we've moved half a meter.”

“So, that's a no, then.”

“Elvie!” Cole screams from behind me, racing through the gauntlet of Brittas. “There's more of them coming. We need to get out of here!”

“What do I do?” I ask Bok Choy into the comm.

There's nothing but silence on the other end for several seconds.

“Bok Choy?” I repeat, growing more and more frantic. “What do I do?”

After what feels like a century, I hear Bok. He exhales a long, drawn-out sigh, one that sounds almost like relief.

“Bring up your ramp,” he tells me.

“What?” I reply. I must've misheard. “How will you—”

“Bring it up,” he interrupts. “Set your ignition cycle on standby and put all of your power into the aft dampeners.”

“But why . . .” But I know why. I stop asking questions and start following instructions. Behind me I can hear the ramp rising.

“Elvie?” Ducky asks.

I ignore him. “Do you want me to tell her?” I ask Bok Choy.

There's another slight pause.

“Thank you,” he answers.

Outside in the hangar the red alert lights begin strobing just as the launch siren rings.

“What are you doing?” Chloe says as she barges into the cockpit. “Lower the ramp. Now!”

“Sit down and hold on tight,” I tell her, finishing the preparations Bok Choy gave me.

“Did you hear what I said?” she shrieks, her voice shrill.

“I heard you.”

“What's happening?” Marnie asks as she enters, stepping up next to Ducky.

“Bok Choy is decompressing the hangar,” I say. “Strap yourself down if you value your unbroken bones. Cole, go help the Brittas.”

“What?”
Chloe screams. “
No, no, no.
Lower the ramp. I said, lower the ramp. We're going to get him.”

“Please sit down, Chloe,” I tell her as calmly as I can.

In response Chloe raises her gun and points it at my head. “Lower that ramp,” she instructs me again.

I stand up slowly and turn to face her. “Marnie,” I say, and without another word Marnie slides into the pilot's chair and resumes where I left off.

“Open that ramp right now,” Chloe says, tears streaking her cheeks, “or I'll kill you.”

“Chloe,” I say.
Calm, Elvie. Your baby's crying. Channel your calm.
“He has to do this. For you.”

“I swear I'll shoot you right now,” Chloe says, but her gun shakes in her hands. “You know I will.”

“Chloe,” I say one last time. Then I knock the gun from her trembling hands, and it crashes to the floor. Chloe takes a swing at me, which I deflect—but her second strike catches me right on the nose. I grab hold of her wrists and push her backward. Chloe falls hard into a chair behind the pilot's seat, me on top of her. She pulls me toward her, and I smack my mouth on the back of the chair, cutting the inside of my upper lip against my teeth.

But I don't let go.

“I'll kill you!” she wails.

I wrap my arms around her tightly, linking my hands together behind the seat.

“He wanted me to tell you.”

“I'll
kill
you!” She is nothing but sobs now.

I close my eyes and squeeze my daughter as tightly as I can, swaddling her like in those first few weeks before I lost her.

“I love you,” I tell her.

She kicks, scratches, bites, sobs. Still I hang on.

The main hangar door slides open, exposing the hangar to the vacuum of space. The ship shakes violently and rolls, shuddering each time a loose piece of wreckage slams into us as it is blown out into space.

“Hold on!” Marnie shouts.

When I feel my stomach go into my throat, I know we're upside down. We're off the deck and spinning like a top toward the door. I slide back and forth, my grip tight on the chair, pressed against Chloe. There's so much turbulence that I don't initially understand that the high-pitched sound in my ear is my daughter. I can feel her arms clutching my back, and I squeeze her even closer as we continue spinning toward the void.

“I love you,” I tell her again. Soft in her ear. “I love you.”

Chapter Eleven

Wherein It Becomes Clear That our Heroine's Freshman Guidance Counselor Was Totally Wrong about Playing Video Games Not Counting as a “Life Skill”

“We're na' clear yet!” Marnie screams. The ship has stopped spinning, and I can feel the engines kicking into full burn. We haven't exploded or anything, so I count that as a plus.

Chloe pushes me away from her. Her face is streaked and her eyes are red and raw. But right this second I can't worry about consoling her on the loss of her would-be love.

Right now they're trying to shoot us out of the sky.

The ship shudders with a
crack!
and Marnie veers sharply to one side, trying to avoid the next volley from whoever or whatever is behind us. As we come about, I can see one ship out of the corner of the front viewport bearing down on us.

“Just one ship? I'm insulted.”

Marnie coughs and points to the tactical display.

“Oh,” I say. “Four ships. Well that's . . . more like it?”

“Hold on,” Marnie barks. “They're lookin' to cut us off!”

The only sounds that follow are the engines straining and the Brittas moaning. Then another
crack!
—this one harder than before.

“What are they hitting us with?” Ducky screams. His eyes are darting around the copilot console, the confidence he had only a few moments ago now lost in the panic of an actual spaceship chase.

“Ducky, move it,” I command. Ducky bolts out of his seat like it's covered in spiders, and I slide in and bring up the environmental scanners.

“Looks like they're using some sort of particle cannons,” I say. “Assuming I'm reading this right.”

“Well, what do
we
have?” Ducky asks.

“This isn't a combat ship,” I reply.

“What? I thought this was an Almiri attack ship. Where are the phasors? The photon torpedoes?”

“We stole a shuttle, Duck, not the
Millennium Falcon
.”

“I'm very scared right now, so I'm going to overlook your franchise conflation. This time.”

“Elvie, can ye get our stealth field up?” Marnie asks me. “I dunnae if we'll be completely invisible to whatever sensors they've got, but we might be able to lose 'em.”

“No go,” I say. “The shield is still charging. Apparently our fancy new ozone system is leeching energy from the same cells, so it can't . . .”

“Elvs?” Cole asks as I trail off. “What is it?”

“Marnie,” I say slowly, “I need you to straighten out.”

“They'll have a clear shot lined up if we do that!” she screeches in response.

“Just do it. And get ready to break when I say.”

Marnie straightens out our course, although there's a stream of what are obviously Scottish obscenities escaping from under her breath as she does so.

“I sure hope you know what you're doing, Elvs,” Cole says.

“Me too. This is my first space battle.”

“Two of 'em on our six,” Marnie tells us. “Three thousand meters. . . . Fifteen hundred meters. . . . They're locked on!”

I slap the release button on our new shipment of ozone bricks. The clumsy gears grind and groan, but thankfully within seconds the display reads
Payload deployed
.

“Break now!” I cry.

Marnie pulls up on the controls, pushing us all back hard into our seats. A split second later the ship shudders more violently than ever before.

“They're hitting us again!” Ducky shouts.

“No,” Marnie says. She glances from the tactical display over to me. The look on her face can only be described as dumbfounded respect. “Tha' wasn't us. It was them. Two ships destroyed.”

“What happened?” Ducky asks. “Are they crashing into each other or something?”

“At these speeds,” Marnie tells him, “the impact of a few hundred bricks a ozone was enough to blow 'em to kingdom come.”

“To be fair,” I say, trying not to gloat in the middle of the crisis. “I thought at best it would distract or disable them.”

“There are still two more of them out there,” Chloe chimes in from her seat behind us. It's the first time she's spoken since takeoff, and her voice is so low and even that I get a chill up my spine. “Unless you think they'll fall for that again, I think this bucket is out of tricks.”

“And out of bricks,” I say. A shot across the bow jolts us, and I wince. “At least we're less likely to explode if they hit us square in the ass.”

As if on cue, another shot rocks us. I scan the navigation charts. “Marnie, take us to these coordinates,” I say, tapping the screen to bring up the course I want and sliding the screen over to her display.

Marnie looks at the screen like I just sent her a mash note asking if I “like-like” her. “Elvie, there's not a chance in bloody hell we'll survive a run through that,” she says.

“Through what?” Cole asks.

“There's a lane filled with derelict stations, ships, and other space junk,” I explain. “A lot of clutter, but it's the shortest path out of the Rust Belt headed back to Earth.”

“It's called the Gauntlet,” Marnie says. “And they call it that fer a reason. It'd be suicide.”

Another blast smacks into us.

“We're losing hull integrity,” I say. “We don't have time to debate this, Marnie. With any luck they won't bother to follow us in there.”

“We fly in there, and they won't need to,” Marnie replies, on the verge of yelling now. “We'll be smashed to smithereens!”

There's a bright white flash in the viewport, coming from behind us. The ship swings around, and I see what remains of the space station, combusting like a giant goldfish at high altitude.

“Holy Moses,” Ducky gasps. “Did they just blow up the entire station?”

“Take us into that run now!” I shout at Marnie.

“Elvie, I cannae fly us through all that,” Marnie says. “I'm no fighter pilot. I've flown maybe two transports in me whole life.”

“Give me the controls,” I say. Marnie obliges, with only a “Saints preserve us” as she slides the flight protocols to my console.

As soon as I have control, I turn us toward the Gauntlet, keeping the Devastator ships on the display in the corner of my eye.

“They're closing in fast,” Ducky says.

I put the engines into full burn and use the thrusters to zigzag us jarringly around. “Time to put those hundreds of hours of
Jetman
to good use,” I say.

Our readout shows several energy blasts coming from the Devastators, but none of them land. The only casualty of my daredevil piloting is Ducky's stomach. Squeals of disgust shower down from the Brittas. It's all doing wonders for my concentration.

“Marnie's right,” Chloe says, staring at the heads-up. “You'll never be able to clear all that.” And it's true that our path is filled with more junk than a Macydale Black Friday sale. As we enter, I manage to avoid several large hunks of disintegrating hull fragments, only to collide with several smaller floaters, which scrape and scratch as they drag along the top of the ship.

“You ever fly something like this?” Cole says. And it takes me a second to realize he's asking our
daughter
.

“Cole, she's, like, a month and a half old or something,” I point out.

“I think I can figure it out,” Chloe replies. She takes the other pilot's seat from Marnie, who follows Ducky's barf trail to the main hold, presumably to care for her weak-stomached paramour. Or perhaps to smack all the Brittas into silence—either one would be fine by me.

“I'll focus on steering,” I tell Chloe. “I need you to fire the thrusters when I say. Got it?”

“Stop telling me what to do,” Chloe snaps.

“Chloe,” I say, forgoing an eye roll only because I need to focus on the field in front of us. “I know you're going through a major growth spurt and everything, but now is a poor time for teenage sass.”

“You're not the boss of me!”

“Actually,” I say, “that's
precisely
—”

It's Cole who breaks in. “You've got this, Chloe,” he says calmly. “I know you can do it.”

“I can do it,” she repeats.

Despite my best efforts to outmaneuver the Devastators, their ships are too fast for our little shuttle. The only weakness that I can see is that they don't bank well. However, given enough open space, they can easily correct for any overshots, making up the distance in a matter of nanoseconds. Up ahead the junk is clearing somewhat, offering us a safer path, but it also means fewer obstacles for the Devastators to work around. And soon I see the reason for the sparse debris field—an old L.O.C., similar class to the
Echidna
, maybe slightly bigger. Years of bouncing around in the debris field has punched several enormous holes through the hull, leaving it a massive floating skeleton.

“What are you doing?” Chloe asks as I turn us onto an intercept course. “There's a clear path directly to port!”

“Well, at least we know you've got your nautical terms down,” I say. “I'd hate to think this was a wasted learning moment.”

“You're crazy,” Chloe says.

“Get used to it, sweetie. It's genetic.”

I pilot us directly into the wreckage of the cruiser's hull, hoping that its interior is as worm-eaten as the outer hull suggests.

The Devastators remain in pursuit.

“Stern thrusters now!” I shout. “Port! Stern! Port!”

Chloe follows each command instantly, lurching the ship to and fro as I thread the needle.

And then, suddenly, our path is blocked. I don't have time to call out for thrusters. There's an open gap to our right, and I put my whole body into the turn. We're all sideways in our seats like we're on an old-timey sci-fi television show. The bottom of the hull scraping against metal sounds like a million forks being drawn slowly across a million china plates. We clear the ship, just barely, and fly out into the clear. The ship shudders slightly.

Chloe looks at the tactical display. “They're toast,” she says. “Both hostiles are down.” She turns to me, her face stoic. “Nice flying. For a maniacal, heartless nut.”

“Nice copiloting,” I reply. And call me mature or something, because I only
think
the
for an immature, snotty brat
part. “Couldn't have done it without you,” I say instead. Something dangerously close to a smile nearly creeps across Chloe's face.

“Guys,” Cole says. “I hate to interrupt this touching mother-­daughter moment, but . . .”

Chloe looks at the tactical again.
“Rikslamma,”
she spits, in what I can only assume is the foulest of Jin'Kai epithets.

I don't need the tactical to summon my own swear words. Through the viewport approximately
eighty bajillion Devastator ships
come into focus, ranging from what look to be single-­pilot fighters to enormous juggernauts three times bigger than the largest orbital cruiser I've ever seen, forming a blockade between us and our home planet.

“Does it count that I got us
pretty
close
to not being dead?” I ask.

“It looks like they're already engaged,” Chloe says, eyes on the tactical. “I've got readings on two unique power signature types coming from that fleet.”

“Byron,” I say. “I didn't think the Almiri built that many ships.” Cole shrugs.

“They've spotted us,” Chloe cuts in. “Three bogeys are breaking off and are in pursuit.”

“Didn't we just play this tune?” I mutter. I come about and try to make a break for it, back into the belt, but these ships are bigger and faster than the ones that had been tasked primarily with taking out a defenseless space station.

“They're right on top of us!” Chloe shouts.

Which, actually, I'd already pretty much figured out, because now our ship is rocking under a constant barrage of fire. The tactical and heads-up displays go dead—and just like that we're flying blind.

“Port thrusters gone!” Chloe informs us. “Secondary engine offline!”

“This is it, then,” I say. I turn to her. “Chloe, I just want you to know that I love you and—”

“Cut the sap and look straight ahead!” Chloe screams, pointing. Through the viewport a ship is materializing right before my eyes. It's easily twenty times as big as us.

It's also awfully familiar.

Two large turrets on either side of the hull open up a barrage of fire, visible only as brief blue muzzle flashes. The shots fly right past us, clearly intended for someone else. I turn the ship as best I can to get clear of the cross fire, and as I do, we all get a view of the Devastator vessels exploding silently in the void. The comm crackles to life on the console.

“Elvie? Is that you, dearheart?”

“Daddy?” I screech. I'm sobbing and laughing at the same time, barely able to form words.

Beside me Chloe snorts.
“Daddy,”
she mutters.

I clear my throat. “Dad, don't tell me you're flying that thing?”

“Well, technically, your grandfather is,” my father replies. “And you have Oates to thank for the fireworks display. I suppose you could say I'm the resident science officer aboard.”

“Dad, I found Chloe. Olivia. Long story. But the Devastators are chasing us.”

“I know, dearheart, I know. The Almiri and Earth military forces are already engaged with the enemy.”

“The military?” I ask. Stunned murmurs pop up around me. (Well, except from the Britta Brigade—they're still busy complaining about Ducky's puke on their shoes.)

“A lot has happened while you've been away,” Dad tells me. “Crazy, world-altering stuff. Someone could write a doozy of a novel about it someday, perhaps. We can cover you out of the fire zone. I'm sending you coordinates now.”