like this, and that handsome face is all business.
“Stabilizers deployed,” he reports.
“Doesn’t feel like it!” Cat shouts as the whole craft shudders again, shaking like we’re on a bumpy road. If that road was a screamingly steep descent that ended in a drop off a cliff.
Maker’s bits, we’re going to die.
“I’m telling you, they’re deployed!” Ty reports again as Zila manages to grab her chair and throw herself into it, one hand smacking the harness button so the straps snake over her shoulders and into place.
“There are atmo pockets everywhere,” Cat growls. We hit another bout of turbulence, and there’s an insistent buzzing at my wrists as my exosuit tries to warn me to stop switching gravity levels so fast it can’t keep up.
“Pursuit?” Ty asks as blue sky whirls past the front screen, and we’re treated to a snatch of the continent below for an instant. It’s a lot closer than it was before.
“Not yet!” she shouts above the proximity alarms and interdiction warnings. “Stand by with the APU, we’ll be dead-stick if the fuel gets any—”
It happens before she finishes the sentence. The power flickers and vanishes, every light across the board going black, the sirens and warnings all around us dying in a breath. And now we really know what life’s like without the stabilizers.
Ty’s lips are moving silently as he fires up the auxiliary power unit, and despite his stony pretty-boy facade, I think I hear Kal whisper something as well. My wrists have stopped vibrating their protests, my exosuit finally happy that I’m in consistent gravity, but it’s pinned-to-my-seat-by-an-uncontrolled-descent gravity. And it might be the last kind my suit ever compensates for.
Everyone’s silent, every face mirroring the same kind of grim. Nobody willing to do the slightest thing that might distract Cat and Ty from their work.
“APU engaged,” our Alpha reports. “Spooling up.”
“Confirmed,” Cat says as the lights on the dashboard flicker back to life. “APU at one hundred percent, mark.”
And now we have a clock. The Longbow’s too damaged to run her engines, too sick to power herself home, but the auxiliary power unit will give us a few moments of minor assist. Enough that our pilot will have basic instrumentation, a steering boost.
Enough, just maybe—if you’re Zero—to do this.
“Touchdown one-fifteen seconds!” she reports, and I want to close my eyes, I want to appeal to my Maker, I want to haul up my faith front and center and demand some kind of payback for all those years of devotion so far.
But it doesn’t work like that, and anyway, I can’t close my eyes. The horizon flickers into view again, and I see rolling blue-green ocean, a coastline, the mirror gleam of a river as it rushes by.
“Auxiliary power at seventy percent,” Ty reports, low and tense. He’s done everything he can now, and like the rest of us, he’s watching his Ace as she tries to wrestle the Longbow into a controlled descent.
“Touchdown sixty seconds,” she replies.
Will the power last until we reach the ground?
Or cut out a few seconds before?
I tear my gaze away from the view to look around at my squad. Auri looks like she’s trying not to throw up, and Kal’s watching her, violet eyes full of concern. Zila’s got her head tilted slightly to the side like she’s calculating our current odds of survival and needs to concentrate on carrying the one. Scarlett’s watching Cat, her lips silently moving, though I doubt it’s a prayer.
“Auxiliary down to forty percent,” our Alpha reports, soft now.
“Forty-five seconds to touchdown.”
I can see the trees now, blue-green leaves swaying as the wind travels across their tops like a wave. They ripple like water, and in my head the Longbow’s a pebble, tossed out to skip across their surface, bouncing over and over.
“Fifteen seconds.”
“Thirteen percent.”
“If I may venture an opinion—”
Seven voices scream at once. “Silent mode!”
“All crew brace!” Cat shouts, not even blinking now, her whole body thrown into the effort of wrestling the ship toward a long strip of pale beach and dark stone ahead of us.
The Longbow screams as we whip across the rocks with a staccato series of crashes, gouging our hull as we pass.
Nobody’s counting now, but the numbers are dropping in my head.
Seven. Six. Five.
All the lights on the control panel go out, and Cat curses, pushing the yoke away with trembling arms.
Four. Three. Two.
We slam into the sand, lift off again, crash down, then skid uncontrollably. The whole ship’s shaking so hard I can barely breathe, the