Empress of a Thousand Skies(9)
He reached for the daisy. “Sorry, little guy. I need to borrow something,” he said. It tried to flutter out of his grasp, but his reach was long, and he snatched it up effortlessly. “Easy, easy . . .”
He unscrewed its lens while the mini propellers still spun. When he got the lens free, the daisy shot up and fled toward the doorway. Aly jammed the lens into the core, adjusted the angle, and powered it on. There was a high-pitched whirl as the grav beam charged up. The sweetest sound, like a chorus of loyal subjects chanting his name.
“I am the god of grav beams!” he called into his cube.
“Great. Now come be the god of copilots and help me lock down this choirtoi of a target.”
“On it!” Aly ducked through the short doorway and scrambled up the access ladder. Across the catwalk and down the corridor, he ran toward the bridge as fast as he could in point-three gravity. He’d never gotten used to the buoyancy. He’d been shuffled between refugee camps from one Wray Town to the next—his past was mostly a blurry series of evacuations—and even though he’d never had a home to call his own, he’d always had gravity.
But up here, he half ran, half swam. At the next corner, Aly grabbed a makeshift handhold, swinging around the turn and launching himself forward. He’d set up dozens of shortcuts in the same way: broken poles and useless metal components all soldered to the inner hull. He and Vin scaled them like monkey bars.
The door to the bridge slid open, and there was Vincent, standing over the ship’s console as he bore down on the throttle. He flew the Revolutionary like he was playing a video game, which was to say: recklessly. But he was a good pilot. A dozen cameras hovered around him in a semicircle, positioned at different angles and distances. He was a second-wave Kalusian and looked it, with light eyes and fair skin that turned golden when he tanned.
“Just in time!” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve never seen this model. It’s unscannable, but the navigation equipment must be top-notch. I’ve lost it twice already.” Half the daisies turned in Aly’s direction, like a flock of ugly birds.
He took his seat at the helm. “What do you mean, ‘unscannable’?”
“I can’t get a read on it.” Vin tapped the screen on his console. “It’s invisible on all the nav equipment.”
Aly touched his finger to his cube and magnified his vision. “It almost looks like it’s made of . . . wood?” It wasn’t impossible. Modified organic material could be used for all kinds of things in deep space. But not a lot of people had the tech. The UniForce definitely didn’t. “It’s kind of weird.”
“Weird,” Vin agreed, with an edge in his voice.
“Did it respond to your hail?”
“Yeah, with some sort of code. I got your boy working on it now.” Vin gestured to Pavel. The droid’s eyelights pulsed—or rather the two soft blue lights where his eyes would be if he were human pulsed.
“Twenty percent through my language database,” Pavel announced.
Vin wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt—the only indication that he was stressed. “See if you can lock the grav beam on at this distance?” he said.
A chase scene, Aly realized. High-speed chases weren’t as common as people thought, since 90 percent of ships would stop when hailed by the UniForce. But the producers had told them that the viewers loved chase scenes, which was a way of saying make them happen. Sometimes they even hired merchant crafts to go rogue, just to fill in footage of the Revolutionary wheeling through space in hot pursuit.
Aly slid his chair toward the console and locked on the first try, but the pilot pulled up hard and shook them off.
“You’re losing your edge, Alyosha. Whatever it takes,” Vin said. His blue eyes were wide and clear, and Aly expected him to cock his eyebrow at the daisies like he always did when he was hamming it up. But he didn’t.
“Keep her still and I’ll take care of my end.” But they tried a dozen more times, and the ship outmaneuvered them every time. In the distance they saw the planet Fontis, known for its lushness, with the ocean that supposedly glowed at night. From where they were, the planet was swirls of blues and greens.
Vin cursed. “You gotta be kidding me.”
Pavel piped up. “Treaties dictate no military personnel—”
“We know the treaty, P,” Aly said. Everyone did. The Great War had started off as a beef between Kalu and Fontis thousands of years old, but eventually it engulfed all of their colonies and allies, including Wraeta. It had officially ended nine years ago when the late Emperor Ta’an had signed the Urnew Treaty, when Aly was eight or nine. Each side was supposed to play nice now, try not to invade each other, that sort of thing. Once that ship broke Fontis’s atmosphere, it would be essentially claiming sanctuary. And since they were in a military craft, they wouldn’t be allowed to follow.
“Aly, what are our odds?”
He eyed the daisies that hovered nearby. “We’d need to boost our velocity, so if I turned on the thrusters and we burned like hell ’til we closed in, we might be able to grav beam them back.”
“Do it, then.” Vin’s in-it-to-win-it vibe was convincing. Was he making a show for the daisies, or did he really want that vessel? Aly guessed it didn’t really matter either way. He tried not to argue with him in front of the cameras. People already thought Wraetans were loud and picked fights. He wasn’t going to add fuel to that fire.