Spinner shields were nearly invincible, if you remembered to trigger them in time. The gravity disperser let the ship stop almost instantly and make turns that would break necks in most other cases. Vakar knew how it worked, and he’d explained it to Eva once, but that was back when she still spent her downtime between jobs drinking away her spare creds.
Vakar. The thought of him burned her blood faster than booze. Suck it up, girl, she told herself. No time for piss breaks. You have a ship to find.
“What’s the red button for?” Eva asked.
“Escape bubble,” Mari replied. “Don’t touch it.”
Eva rolled her eyes. “Do I look like someone who randomly presses buttons for no good reason?”
“Te conozco, mascarita.” Mari sat with her hands folded in her lap, her legs primly crossed at the ankles, like she had since they were kids in school. “This is still a terrible plan, for the record,” she said.
“You could have stayed behind,” Eva said.
“And you could make better life choices,” Mari replied. “Maybe that’s how Glorious keeps finding you, he just follows the trail of bad decisions.”
Eva ignored that comment and flew off after the bulk of the fighters, who she assumed were all heading for the city where La Sirena Negra was stuck. Within a few moments, a pair of gmaargit ships dropped in front of her, flanking another Conelian fighter and promptly shooting it down. They were almost pretty, their rear assemblies like flowers just beginning to bloom. If flower petals were made of metal, that is.
“All right, cannon, let’s see what you’ve got,” Eva muttered. The trigger was a simple button on the front of the control stick, so she aimed the ship and fired.
The giant laser was . . . slow. She resisted the urge to count how long it took before the damn thing finally loosed a bolt of sizzling green light that completely failed to hit the enemy. It did tear a huge chunk out of a mountain, which Eva hoped hadn’t been occupied, and the debris at least managed to hit one of the ships and send it careening into the ground.
“This thing is useless,” Eva muttered.
“I prefer to run than fight,” Mari said. “But if I have to fight, I want to hit hard.”
Eva resisted the urge to roll her eyes at that logic. If it was going to take that long for every single shot, she’d need to make them count. She tracked the other ship, watching its movements for a few seconds, then aimed at where she thought it would end up, given how it was dodging. She nicked the edge of one of its tail fins, which had the unfortunate side effect of making it spin toward her like a sawblade.
Eva yanked the controls back and the gravity disperser kicked in, the ship shooting up at nearly a right angle straight into the sky. Mari shrieked. Collision avoided, but now she was heading for the clouds, which were currently dropping more of Glorious’s fighters like glittering snowflakes of death.
She fired at them as often as she could, each time holding her breath as the huge cannon recharged. Their blasts were more frequent, but thankfully the ship dodged well enough, even if it was limping along at what felt like the speed of sound.
“What are you doing?” Mari yelped. “They’re going to blast us to pieces. Get down into the canyons.”
“I don’t know them well enough,” Eva retorted. “I’m as likely to hit a wall as I am to avoid fire.”
Mari cringed. “Fine. Use the spinner shield, then.”
Spinning sounded good to her. Not. But given how slow this ship was, it was probably the safest option. Taking a deep breath, she pushed the button.
Sure enough, the ship spun in a tight circle, with the gravity disperser somehow making it feel like her stomach was in the same place the whole time. Eva got an incredibly strong urge to pee. Mari gagged.
But outside the ship, a shimmering green shield sprang up, deflecting fire from a few of the enemies who had broken off from the main force to go after her. By the time the cannon was primed to spit lasers again, the shield had vanished.
Eva yanked the ship to a stop to let two enemies crash into each other, exploding in a shower of purple fire. Then she hit the spinner button again and accelerated once the shield was up.
“This is worse than I remember,” Mari muttered.
Eva risked a glance back at her sister. Mari was gripping the sides of the seat, her eyes scrunched closed.
The Conelian defenders continued their hit-and-run maneuvers, popping out of the canyons long enough to take down a couple of fighters before hiding again. Some enemy ships followed them in, whether that did them any good or just made for a lot of shiny debris. For her part, Eva stuck close to the ground, moving inexorably closer to Conelia City in the wake of the faster fleet.
And she spun. Over and over again. Each time, the disperser compensated to make her feel like she wasn’t moving at all, but she could still track the motion through the front display. Gradually, a queasiness grew as the disconnect between her body and her eyes was repeated. She fired another shot, clenching her teeth as it connected, trying to let the savage glee drive away the nausea.
“I take it back,” Mari said, her voice strained.
“Take what back?” Eva asked.
“The spinner shield is terrible and I hate it. Don’t ever use it again.”
Eva burped with her mouth closed. “We can do this. Remember our first time in zero G?”
Mari groaned. “Dad thought it would be hilarious to surprise us. He acted like it was going to be the most fun thing ever.”
“He even made us clean up our own barf afterward. But the point is . . .” Eva sucked in a breath, exhaling slowly. “The point is, we both agree that he was an asshole.”
“And you’re sure you want to save him?” Mari asked.
“No,” Eva said. “But I definitely want to kick him off my ship. Picture the look on his face when I show up and tell him to pack his shit and leave.”
Mari gave a dry laugh. “Make him clean up first.”
Eva hit the green button, swallowing spit as they spun again.
The outskirts of Conelia City appeared beneath them, blending into the environment so seamlessly that she almost missed the transition. Unlike the rocky area where they’d landed before, this was fertile farmland, buildings nestled among rows of crops or even underneath them.
At least they would have been, if most of them weren’t on fire.
“Mierda de mono,” she muttered. “This is Omicron all over again.”
The fires sent up screens of smoke that interfered with visuals, ironically helping ease some of the nausea from all the spinning. Debris flew into the air with every enemy crash or stray shot, sometimes settling onto the kinetic barrier for a few moments before the shield dropped again and it fell to the ground.
Space was so much cleaner. Mostly. She couldn’t wait to get back.
They arrived at a clearing that used to be the center of the city and was now a series of charred craters. Above them, enemy ships swarmed like angry wasps wearing sharp metal skirts and shooting red lasers. And at the apex, Glorious’s fathership, at least five stories tall, hovering in the air above the wreckage like an eight-pointed star with a red core, which Eva realized was a huge cannon when it blasted them head-on.
If the shields hadn’t been up, they would have been deep-fried. As it was, the force of the hit knocked them to the ground, their ship skipping along the surface like a rock on a pond. Eva banged the shield button like a bongo, spin-hopping until she finally regained control and brought the flight to an abrupt halt. More gmaargit fighters poured out, and she considered that maybe, just maybe, Mari had been right, that they should have stayed where they were in the first place and waited for this to blow over.
She also considered that Glorious was on that ship, and with that thought came a beautiful, terrible idea.
Eva flew them to a spot behind one of the remaining intact buildings. “Hey, Mari, you okay?” she asked.
“I almost died, so no?” Mari replied. Her face was red as a ripe
pitanga. “We need to get away from that fathership before it fires on us again.”
“Or, hear me out . . . Maybe it has a weakness? An exhaust port we could bomb or something? So the whole thing would go boom?”
“Que rayo . . . No! We are not attacking that monstrosity!”
Eva grinned at Mari over her shoulder. “Come on, think about it. This is our chance to—”
“No. Absolutely not. You’re insane.”
“I’m being totally rational. We take down Glorious, we not only save my ship and Min and Dad, we save a whole city. No more bounty on me, no more gmaarg chasing me all over the universe. It’s perfect.”
Mari started to unhook her restraints. “That’s it. Salpica. I’m getting us out of here.”
Before she could move, a gmaargit fighter found them and chased them out of hiding. Eva spun again, and Mari stumbled back into the seat with her hands covering her mouth. The fathership’s enormous eye of a laser opened, the iris glowing like the core of a star. This time Eva got them out of the way before it fired, but that meant bouncing off the smaller fighter behind them and careening hard in the opposite direction.
Eva cursed silently, then cursed again out loud because what the hell, she didn’t care if Mari heard her. “I don’t suppose you have any weapons besides the cannon?”
“Eva, come the fuck on,” Mari said. “I didn’t pull you out of that freezer to have you get us both vaporized.”
“Like the poem says, mija, it ends in fire or ice,” Eva said. “And fire’s looking like good odds right now.”
She angled to the left, and the fathership followed her movement, as if it knew she was the one Glorious wanted. Ships flung themselves at her like flies at a windshield, and she had to stop so often she thought she’d never make it anywhere.
“Please, Eva,” Mari said, voice strained. “We’re not equipped for this. We don’t have a plan. How about you let the Conelians handle it; they have the appropriate weapons and training to—”
“Or how about I fly inside and pop that thing open like a giant piñata?” Eva snapped.
There was no reply for a moment.
“I should have left you in cryo,” Mari finally said. “At least when you were frozen in a box, you couldn’t get anyone killed.”
“We’re still alive,” Eva said.
“Qué suerte.”
Eva zipped sideways, then back down, spinning for good measure and firing off a shot with her cannon. “Those ships are coming from somewhere, which means there’s at least one opening, which means we can get in. Worst case, we do limited recon and fly right back out. Best case, we can hit something that brings Glorious down for good.”
“Worst case, we get blown to pieces before we get inside!”
The huge laser eye rotated toward her again, and Eva barely dragged the ship out of the way by shooting straight up. She hit the spin button as she did, more debris landing on the shield like a curtain of dust.
“Come on, Mari,” Eva said. “Help me find the hangar bay door.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Mari replied.
“Why not?”
“Because if I open my eyes, I’m going to throw up.”
Some fucking spy, Eva thought. She must do all the ground missions.
Her last maneuver had put them high in the sky, looking down at the mess below. Conelian fighters chased gmaarg around destroyed buildings as the fathership drifted serenely through, its giant laser tearing through stone and metal like they were paper. But the door, where was the door . . .
She saw it—or them, because two of the points on the massive star shape had doors, one with gmaargit ships flying in and the other sending new ones out.
“Gotcha, cabrón,” Eva said. Now, how to get in?
Stop flying like this is La Sirena Negra, she told herself sternly. Drop it like it’s hot, woman.
She pushed the ship into a nosedive. Just before hitting the ground, she yanked it to a stop and shot forward between the lower spokes of the fathership. It tried to fire but the angle was all wrong, and she was out the back side before it could turn to track her.
With a twitch of the joystick, she flipped the ship upside down, her hair hanging normally instead of falling up because of the gravity disperser. Behind her, Mari gave a long, low moan punctuated by the muffled burp of her suppressing vomit.
Eva came in at an angle from above, skimming the surface of the ship’s pointed arm. She’d have to time it carefully.
“Come on,” she muttered. “Few more seconds . . .”
The door appeared below her and she braked, her stomach heaving, then dropped down inside.
She wasn’t sure what she had expected to find, but it turned out to be a vast, nearly empty space like a creepy bubble nest. Each bubble was a gmaargit fighter waiting to be deployed, and she took some comfort in the fact that there were only a few hundred more left. A thousand at most. Maybe two.
Yeah, okay, that wasn’t comforting at all.
Up through the center ran a giant pylon, channeling the energy to the big fuck-off laser that was ruining everyone’s cycle. It thrummed like the galaxy’s biggest bass speaker about to drop the beat.
“That looks like a good thing to shoot,” Eva said.
“Eva, oh my god,” Mari whispered. “You hit that, you’re going to trigger an explosive wave that will tear this ship to pieces, shield or no shield.”
“I can get us out in time.”
“Can you?”
Eva squinted and wagged her head. “Yeah?”
Mari hissed out a breath. At least she didn’t sound nauseated anymore.
The gmaarg had noticed them and were deploying fighters, which she ignored with a final gut-wrenching, shield-raising spin. She waited for the fathership’s laser to charge, a bolt of energy racing up the pylon like lightning.
“Pew-pew,” she said, and fired.
The bright green laser scored a direct hit on the pylon with a noise like water hitting a hot pan. Eva didn’t wait to see what happened; the cannon would take too long to recharge for another shot anyway. She flipped the ship around, spinning as she did for extra torque, and raced for the exit. “Race” being a relative term, slow as her ship was.
“Come on, you tub of—”
Eva couldn’t finish her thought, because it was drowned out by a massive boom behind her, and then they were riding concussive force like a surfer on a tsunami. She spun continuously, because if the shields dropped, they were toast. She had one chance to get out, her mechanical heartbeat seeming to slow as she aimed the ship’s nose at the exit, that tiny exit, how had she even gotten through such a small door in the first place—
And then she was out, but she had nicked the edge, so the ship was twirling around, the controls all but useless in her hands, an alarm informing her calmly that something was on fire. She tried to spin her shields up but it wasn’t working, so all she could do was whirl sideways toward the ground like a badly aimed chakram, her stomach in her throat.
“Eject!” Mari shouted.
Eva pressed her eject button, waiting to be launched into the sky by whatever mechanism this particular ship used.
Nothing happened. To her, anyway.
The ship’s ceiling opened and Mari flew up and out, a shimmering bubble of force surrounding her. She disappeared almost instantly, and Eva had just enough time to hope Mari landed safely before she herself hit the ground.
The impact slammed Eva’s head into the seat so hard her teeth cracked and her vision blurred. Almost worse was the crunching and grinding as the ship slid along atop a sea of rubble. Bits of control system and interior paneling sheared off and bounced around the cockpit, hitting her face and arms and chest. With a sickening metal groan, part of the floor beneath her peeled back and more debris kicked up into the mess.
It felt like forever, but was probably only a few seconds, and then the ship finally stopped moving. An eerie silence rang in Eva’s ears, the fire alarm having given up on
the obviously unconcerned pilot. The fire itself, however, was burning merrily, smoke filling the room and suggesting that maybe she should get out before she got blown up like the gmaargit fathership.
Eva fought with her restraints, ultimately pulling out her vibroblade to cut herself free. She crawled over the side of her chair to avoid the jagged metal that had once been floor and staggered to the escape hatch, which ignored her commlink-sent orders to open. Coughing and sputtering, she hit the manual release button and hissed in frustration as the small door opened barely wide enough for her to squeeze through.
The ship was far enough off the ground that she had an unpleasant drop, poorly gauged because her vision was still slightly blurred. Her gravboots took some of the impact, but her knees and hips would be angry at her later.
Still, any crash you could walk away from . . .
Or limp, in this case, away from the ship in case it decided to explode. She had no idea where she was, or where Mari was, or where her own ship was, but she did know one thing: Glorious was gone. Finally.
The part of her mind that registered danger gave a brief, belated scream at the realization of what she’d done. She’d have nightmares later, but as usual, she couldn’t focus on that now. A chill passed through her, despite the relative warmth of the air. The trail of bodies left in her wake had grown a little longer. It had felt like victory when she was younger, like proof of her superiority and righteousness. Now it felt like ablation damage, like pieces of her were being chipped off and cast into the void of space, and all she could do was try to fix it and keep going and hope there wasn’t a hull breach.
A ping interrupted her sour thoughts. Mari. ((Location?))
Eva considered not answering, letting her sister think she was gone for at least a little while, but that would be cruel. She sent a location ping in reply.
((Stay put.))
Given that she was lost in an unfamiliar city, and a casual swipe at her forehead came away bloody, and the places her restraints had been were starting to ache and burn, sitting down sounded pretty good. Eva leaned back against part of a former building and summoned up her spacesuit’s isohelmet to filter out the smoke and dust. Above her, gmaargit ships fell from the sky like sparking cherry blossoms, lost without the fathership to guide them, and in the distance an alarm squealed at a register above her hearing until her teeth ached even more.
Chilling Effect_A Novel Page 26