like cold metal, flipped over, and jumped back to my feet. To find myself standing in the middle of small capsule we had found. It had scooped us up and darted off into the void, I was not sure why.
Even worse, I was not sure who was driving it.
But that was less of a problem than the line of rapidly diminishing fey on the cliffside. There were at least twenty of them, shooting bolts of some kind of energy at us out of what looked like spears. One of the bolts hit a stalactite and shattered it in a blinding explosion of sharp-edged pieces.
They did not hit us, though.
Because our small craft suddenly dove.
Fast.
“What the fuck!” Ray screeched. “What the fuck did you do?”
I didn’t answer, because I was clinging to the floor in front of the small doorway, trying not to fall out as we abruptly plummeted what felt like thirty stories through the enormous cavern. And because I didn’t know. All I knew was that I wanted it to stop!
It did so—quite abruptly. Ray and I hit the underside of the roof, then fell back against the floor. It was very hard.
“Oh,” Ray whimpered. “Oh, God. Oh, God, I think I broke.”
“Broke what?”
“Everything.”
I felt similarly, but the fey had vessels, too, and they would undoubtedly follow us. I rolled to my hands and knees and peered outside the door. But all I saw was darkness.
I switched to night vision, and made out a forest of massive stalactites daggering down from above, the smallest of which was as tall as a redwood, and the largest may as well have been an inverted mountain. I looked down, and still could not see the bottom of the chasm, but there were a few places where a stalagmite had shot up high enough to connect with a stalactite, forming giant pillars in the darkness.
Comparatively, we looked like a gnat next to an elephant, or maybe a mammoth, because the chamber had a very lost world feel to it.
No, not a lost world, I thought.
Just an alien one.
“The damned fey!” That was Ray, struggling back to his feet and grabbing the central pole for balance. That did not help as it rotated when he touched it, slinging him about.
And when it moved, so did we.
The entire little craft spun like a top, throwing me into the door frame and almost outside. It stopped after a moment, leaving me dizzy and Ray clinging to the floor as if waiting for the next shock to the system. But I did not think that this one had been random.
I noticed some small flanges sticking out of the central pole. I staggered over and grabbed one and pushed it very slightly to the right. The capsule turned right. I pushed it down, and the capsule went forward a few yards. Huh.
“Ray,” I began. “I think—”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” he said, jumping up and staring at something past my shoulder. “I’ll drive. You do something about them!”
I did not know what he meant, but then I turned around to see another stalactite detonate in front of us. It was a huge one, and watching it crack and slowly slide away was like observing a glacier calve. Fully half of it dropped off, disappearing into the darkness below.
It concerned me how long it took before I heard it hit down.
But by then, we were already speeding ahead, with Ray cursing and staring at something else, this time above us. I followed his gaze and saw what appeared to be fireworks, but which I realized after a second were more exploding stalactites. The fey were coming, dodging the huge impediments and simply blowing the smaller out of the way with their energy weapons.
“Dorina!” Ray said urgently.
“I’m still thinking.”
At least there was only one ship, not two. Perhaps the other was waiting at the cliffside, to make sure that we didn’t double back? It seemed plausible, which meant that we might only have to deal with one.
“Think faster!” Ray yelled, staring around. “How do we close the damned windows?”
I assumed he meant the shutters, but I didn’t know. What I did know was that a fey was leaning off the side of his capsule, targeting us with one of those energy spears. I threw the wrench, hoping for the best but not expecting much. Hitting a moving target when you are also moving is not easy.
But a second later, he was picked off and went sailing into the gloom.
The others