ship towed it along behind with the glowing red-orange rope of the light-lance.
“That was a little close, Spin,” Kimmalyn said in my ear. “Even for you. But . . . I guess it wasn’t a trap?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice as I breathed in and out. Still, my hands were steady as I slowed us to a stop, hovering on my acclivity ring. I carefully lowered the alien ship to the ground, then disengaged the light-lance and landed.
I waited—my cockpit open, feeling the breeze on my sweaty face—as Kimmalyn landed nearby. Cobb said he was sending a force of ground troops to handle the Krell captive, but didn’t order me to stay back. So I climbed out and dropped down off the wing, my feet thumping on the dusty blue-grey landscape of Detritus. From down here, the defensive platforms and rubble belt of the lowest shell were just vague, distant patterns in the sky.
The alien ship was roughly the same size as M-Bot, so larger than our standard fighters. That meant it might be a long-range vessel, with more storage and room than a short-range fighter. It had a large cockpit set into the center of a circular fuselage, with wide arced wings and a destructor emplacement under each one. The ship also had a light-lance turret under its fuselage, in roughly the same place as M-Bot’s. I hadn’t seen those on any Krell fighters.
It was a combat fighter, obviously. The left wing bore a large blackened gap and scorch marks where the ship had been shot, and it had been ripped almost completely free in the descent.
Unfamiliar alien writing marked one side of the fuselage. Whatever I thought I’d sensed from the cockpit was gone now, and I felt a rising fear. The alien must be dead.
Unwilling to wait for Kimmalyn, I hauled myself up onto the alien ship’s right wing—it was still warm from the descent, but cool enough to touch—and the ship tipped beneath my weight, reminding me it wasn’t sitting on landing struts. I held on and climbed over to the canopy.
There, through the glass, I got my first up-close look at an alien. I had been expecting to find something similar to the crablike creatures I’d seen in the cockpits of Krell ships.
Shock moved through me, and my breath caught as I was confronted by something entirely different. What I saw instead was a humanoid woman.
8
She was both hauntingly familiar and strikingly alien, all at once. She had pale violet skin, stark-white hair, and bonelike white growths on her cheeks, underlining her eyes. Despite her alien features though, she had an obvious female shape beneath a snug flight jacket. She almost could have been one of us.
I was surprised—I hadn’t realized there were aliens out there that looked so . . . human. I had always imagined that most of them would be like the Krell, creatures that were so strange they seemed to have more in common with rocks than humans.
I found myself staring at that elfin face, entranced, until I noticed the broken control panel and the blackened scorch marks on the left side of her stomach, which was wet with something darker than human blood. The panel had obviously exploded, and part had impaled her.
I scrambled to search for a manual cockpit release, but it wasn’t where I expected to find it. That made sense—this was alien engineering. Still, it defied reason that there wouldn’t be some kind of release on the outside of the ship. I felt around the canopy, searching for a latch, as Kimmalyn climbed up beside me. She gasped upon seeing the alien woman.
“Saints and stars,” she whispered, touching the canopy glass. “She’s beautiful. Almost . . . almost like a devil from one of the old stories . . .”
“She’s wounded,” I said. “Help me find—”
I cut off as I found it, right at the back of the canopy—a small panel that, when I threw it open, revealed a handle. I yanked it outward, and the canopy let out a hiss as it unsealed.
“Spensa, this is stupid,” Kimmalyn said. “We don’t know what kind of gases she breathes. And we could expose ourselves to alien bacteria or . . . or I don’t know. There are a hundred reasons not to open that.”
She was right. The air that came out did smell distinctly odd. Floral, but also acrid, scents that didn’t go together in my experience. But it didn’t seem to hurt me as I scrambled