left.
“Holy—!” Kogav cried out in the seat next to her.
“Oh,” Jeline breathed.
“What?” Kogav jerked his eyes away to look at her. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
It was. But unlike the shoddy black holograms that ships always represented the gates as, this was a circular mass of rolling light; a thunderstorm in a mirror, hovering just before them as it silently churned in place.
Still, there was something off about it that even Jeline could recognize.
“We can’t go through that,” she shook her head.
“What?!” Kogav sputtered. “But you said—”
“See the green flickering around it?” she pointed, remembering what Willovitch had said. “It’s highly unstable.”
“Then get us to another one!” Kogav urged. “There is another one, right? I mean, you said there were three—”
Boom!
The ship shuddered as something collided with them from behind. Jeline was immediately reminded of the meteor show and wondered if she’d fallen right into the middle of another one. If they had, they wouldn’t survive without the proper readings. She reached for the controls.
“Shit!” Kogav cursed, flinching as a flash of purple light flew past them. “They caught up. Jeline, get us out of here!”
As another three purple shots just barely whizzed by them, Jeline gritted her teeth and swiped a hand over the controls. “Forward it is, then,” she muttered under her breath.
With a stomp of the floor pedal and another quick sweep of her hand, the pod shot forward into the gate.
“No!” Kogav yelped. “Not that—”
He cut himself off as they dove, head-first, into it, and practically threw himself against the console separating them to fling his arms out and block Jeline from the window. His movement caught her off-guard, and she had to grab one of his wrists to make him get out of the way so that she could get a good look outside.
The gate was beautiful, in a deadly sort of way. The light it was emitting seemed to roll like sands of stardust as it tumbled in upon itself, and Jeline found herself wishing that she could bottle some of it up, if only to show Sherre later. And yet, as they moved closer, the sickly green halo flickering around the gate’s edges stripped Jeline of her wonder.
The green and the gate were obviously clashing, as if one was trying to infect the other.
“Shitshitshit,” Kogav chanted beside her, his arms still splayed out like a shield before her as the pod made contact with the gate. Immediately, Jeline felt the familiar jolt of jumping as a thousand sparks shot up and down her arms, and she watched as the green flickered like lightning while the gate seemed to invert in on itself from where their ship was pushing through.
“It’s not a gate!” Kogav yelled. “It’s a black hole!”
But Jeline knew better. “It functions like one!” she yelled back, straining to be heard over the sudden clicks echoing all around them. Jumps were usually silent, so it made her uneasy to hear the ship reacting to it. “Just hang on!”
Sure enough, once they were halfway through the gate jumped them forward, and in the blink of an eye they had been shot out the other side.
“Are you okay?” Kogav asked, finally removing his hands to brace himself on the console and look her over.
“I’m fine,” Jeline grumbled, not wasting a moment as she flicked the screen back up and tapped on the floor pedal. And a good thing, too – almost as soon as they shot off in the other direction, the holomap pinged as three red dots appeared on the screen one right after the other.
“What’re you doing?” Kogav frowned. “Isn’t this where we were supposed to turn around and go back through?”
“Just,” Jeline sighed, exasperated from his incessant nagging. “Give me a second!”
That made him pause, and he finally stopped crowding her to move back and sit patiently in his own seat. Well, maybe not patiently, but—
“Look out!”
They’d finally done it: the two newest Thagzar ships after them had turned on their warp, and they were catching up fast.
“Hang on,” Jeline warned, watching the red dots. If their warp capabilities were anything like Earth’s, then they wouldn’t be able to turn during a warp.
She waited until the last possible moment.
“Jeline!” Kogav yelled.
“There!” she hissed, yanking the controls to the left as they flipped out of the way, spiraling down as the holomap showed the red dots flying right over them. “Yes, yes, yes,” Jeline breathed, whirling them around to face the gates again.
As the dots slowed on the map, she bit the bullet