United as One (Lorien Legacies #7)(58)

“I haven’t exactly mastered this,” he says while Adam and I look on.

“You’re doing fine,” I reply. “Shit. Better than fine.”

After a few minutes’ work, John has a spiked boulder of ice with a fuel core.

“You’re going to chuck that at them,” I observe.

John nods. “You want to help me out? Could use the extra telekinetic force.” When I nod, John turns towards Adam and the Chim?rae. “This probably won’t get them all, but it should shake them up. When you hear the explosion, come in hot.”

“You got it,” Adam responds, arming a blaster he picked up in the docking bay.

John takes my hand, then floats the ice-covered fuel tank in front of us so we can both rest a hand on it. We turn invisible, disappearing the tank along with us, and edge around the corner. My hand starts to get numb, but the temperature doesn’t seem to bother John.

There are blaster burns all over the walls from John’s earlier skirmish with this entrenched bunch of Mogs. At the end of the hallway, over a hundred vatborn are crowded up and down a short staircase shoulder to shoulder. The air in between us and them is hazy with particles. Their blasters are leveled, ready to fire, but all they see is empty hallway.

That changes when John and I send the ice ball speeding towards them. It turns visible as soon as it leaves our touch and must look like a boulder appearing from thin air. We shoved it into the Mogs, crushing the first of them. Then we swipe it from side to side, impaling a bunch more on the spikes.

The Mogs recover from the surprise quickly and begin firing at our icy weapon. They blow off the spikes and begin chipping away at it. Some of them start to look confident.

But then one of them shoots into the center and detonates the fuel tank.

The resulting explosion knocks me off my feet. John falls to the side, banging his shoulder against the wall, but keeps his balance. My ears ring. The hallway is filled with choking black smoke, at least until I conjure up some wind to blow that bad air towards the Mogadorian bridge. As Adam helps me to my feet, I see BK and Dust charge down the hall, pouncing on the few stragglers that survived the explosion.

“That worked better than expected,” Adam says.

“Ow. No shit,” I reply.

From the bridge, we can hear shouts in Mogadorian. These aren’t battle cries. These are screams of desperation, and they’re being responded to by a cold female voice that I’d recognize anywhere.

Phiri Dun-Ra. Someone, probably the ship’s captain, has Phiri Dun-Ra on the communicator.

“What’re they saying?” John asks Adam as we gather ourselves and march towards the bridge.

Adam strains to listen. Small fires, piles of ash and chunks of rapidly melting ice litter the staircase. We ascend cautiously.

“The commander, he’s reporting that his ship is under attack. He’s begging for reinforcements. He wants to speak with Beloved Leader,” Adam translates.

“Are reinforcements coming?” John asks.

Adam shakes his head. “She’s blaming the commander. Telling him he shouldn’t have left his posting in Chicago. Says this is punishment for his lack of faith, that he’s not worthy of command.”

I snort. “Give us a little credit, Phiri. Come on.”

We stride onto the bridge like we own this warship because, frankly, we do. There’s a domed-glass ceiling that sweeps down to the floor, so we can see a wide vista of Niagara Falls. There are a dozen little stations with attached chairs, each of these occupied by a Mogadorian tasked with flying the warship rather than fighting. The commander, dressed in a severe black-and-red uniform that’s covered in more ornaments than anyone else, stands in front of a holographic display that’s currently broadcasting an image of Phiri Dun-Ra’s ugly face. She actually sees us enter the room before any of the other Mogs and, without another word to the commander, cuts off her signal.

“Guess she didn’t want to chat,” I say.

Most of the Mogs immediately leap away from their stations and bring blasters to bear on us. I rip the guns out of their hands with my telekinesis, and John impales each of them with a javelin of ice. These are trueborn Mogs, not the endless vatborn, and so they don’t disintegrate quite so quickly as the others. In fact, some of them only melt away partially, leaving behind half-formed corpses.

The commander, wild-eyed, in a gesture that he must know is futile, draws a sword like the one Adam’s father used to carry around and screams at us.

“You’ll never take my ship—!”

Before he can even finish his sentence, a burst of Mogadorian blaster fire takes the commander’s head off. We all spin towards a young Mog holding a blaster, his face a mixture of relief and resignation. John raises his hand to dispatch this last-surviving trueborn with an icicle.

“No!” Adam shouts, and stomps on the floor.

A seismic wave causes the entire warship to lurch, and the floor where Adam slammed his foot down crumples like tinfoil. John is actually knocked off his feet, but only for a moment. He uses his flight Legacy to float upright, looking bewildered as he stares at Adam.

“Don’t—don’t kill him,” Adam says.

The Mog in question, probably about our age and well built, his dark hair cut short, tosses aside his blaster and falls to his knees in front of us.

“My name is Rexicus Saturnus,” the Mog says, although I’ve got a feeling Adam already knows this. “And I am at your mercy.”