though now secured and locked for takeoff, it had properly melded back into the wall and all but disappeared from sight.
He cleared his throat. “Ah, well. Sometimes that’s better.”
Jeline opened her mouth to say something, but a rumble of the ship around them had her flattening herself back against her chair and giving him an accusing look. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Don’t worry,” Kogav chuckled, keeping a smile on his face as he played with the controls and steered the ship off the ground into a hover just above the sandy surface. “I told you, I know how to fly a pod.”
Truth be told, he wasn’t the most efficient (or safest) pilot in the Eiztar Alliance, but flying the one-engine aircraft had never been difficult for him.
“All right,” he muttered, more to himself than to Jeline. “Here we go!”
With a stomp that sent the foot pedal all the way to the floor, Kogav set the thrusters to max while simultaneously starting the pod’s take-off sequence.
Easing his foot off the pedal as they shot into the sky, he could feel the vial of Thagzar poison heavy in his pants pocket as he set the lab coordinates as their destination.
A final prompt from the controls was all he needed before he pumped the pedal as hard as he could and sent them into orbit.
Though a pilot he was not, Kogav knew the startup sequence to a pod just as well as anyone else; prided himself on it, actually.
And yet, with Jeline’s sharp eyes watching his every move and the thick scent of Draegon Teeth turning his muscles into a pool of tingling nerves, he found that he was having quite a hard time concentrating.
Not to mention, Jeline seemed to be having a negative reaction of her own.
“Are you all right?” Kogav asked, his attention dangerously wavering between the ship and Jeline as they approached Peshdushdar’s atmosphere.
“You’re not—I don’t,” she gasped out, furiously shaking her head. Finally, she muttered through clenched teeth, “I don’t want to tell you how to fly your ship, but this is too erratic a speed even for my pod!”
Apparently, this was not the way that human ships took off.
Kogav tried not to take it as a bad sign and pressed on, literally pinning the pedal down to the floor with his foot as he double-checked the readings on the screen.
Sure, maybe they were going a little faster than they should have, but Zaddik had always said he had a lead foot. At least, the one time they’d gone out on a field mission together, he had.
“We’re nearly there,” Kogav promised, and even though he knew that he had nothing to worry about, a chilling sensation was creeping up his neck. It was a feeling he knew but loathed; something he hadn’t felt since he was a boy, fresh to the Thagzar fighting pits.
Rolling his shoulders in an effort to ease the feeling, Kogav kept his sweaty hands on the controls and his eyes on the screen, doing his best to ignore the fact that the comforting smell of Draegon Teeth was gone.
Now, there was only the smell of pickled Necteen – a fickle herbal cure that never boded well.
With a terrible shudder, the ship groaned under their feet as the holomap flickered upon entry into space.
Kogav did what he knew to do to keep the ship stable, but even he could tell that something was wrong.
And the sudden cluster of red dots popping up in the screen’s top corner certainly didn’t make him feel any better.
“What’re those?” Jeline hissed through clenched teeth.
Kogav let up on the floor pedal and turned them in the other direction. “Thagzars,” he said shortly.
“Are they following us?” she asked quietly, leaning in toward the screen. “Do they see us? Are we running?”
“They haven’t detected us yet,” Kogav muttered, his mind on the controls.
“How can you be sure?” Jeline scoffed. “We’ve detected them—”
“Because we reverse-engineered their technology when we got our hands on it,” Kogav growled, his eyes darting around the map between the nearest space station and the red dots. They didn’t seem to be following them, at least not as a horde, but one dot was straying away from the group toward their general direction.
“We can pinpoint them, but with the new tech that we dumped into the systems we originally commandeered, they won’t have any luck locking onto us with the same trick.”
“Then why is that one getting closer?” Jeline pointed to the lone dot.
Kogav opened his mouth,