United as One (Lorien Legacies #7)(84)

“Now!” Adam barks.

The warship rattles as Malcolm and Five begin discharging the auxiliary guns. The effect is like a cluster of fifty Mog blasters going off at the same time. Five fires wildly, his breathing sharp and excited, while Malcolm takes his time and tracks his targets methodically. It only takes one shot to bring down a Skimmer, but there’s a whole hell of a lot of them.

I notice that some of the Skimmers careening towards us drop out of the air without even being hit. Each time before it happens a silver glow illuminates the Skimmer and then it drops like a rock . . . because it is a rock. That’s John out there, invisible, flying, using his stone-vision to play defense.

“Closer!” I shout over my shoulder, gathering the winds again.

“On it,” Adam replies. “Rex, how are those shields?”

Rex hurriedly pounds away at a keyboard. When he answers, he sounds terrified. “I . . . I’m sorry; I can’t get the power to reroute. I’m a navigator; this isn’t my area of expertise.”

“You sabotaging us, loser?” Nine snarls.

“No!” Rex replies. “I swear, I need another minute or two—”

“Let me try!” Sam says, wiping sweat off his forehead. “All power to shields!”

Our warship’s siren stops blaring.

The guns stop firing.

And we start to fall out of the sky.

“Tell me you didn’t just shut off another ship!” Lexa cries.

“Uh, I—,” Sam starts to respond.

“All power to shields,” Rex repeats, then louder, like we’re doomed. “All power to shields means we can’t fly!”

“I can fix it,” Sam says. He looks at Adam.

“Restore power to the engines,” Adam says with forced calm. “Start there, Sam.”

“Power to the engines!” Sam yells.

Nothing changes. Sam repeats himself, but the ship either isn’t listening or Sam’s Legacy isn’t working. Behind me, I can hear Rex hitting his console furiously.

We’re falling.

My feet actually lift off the floor of the bridge. Marina grabs on to me, and Nine grabs on to her. Thanks to his antigravity Legacy, his feet never leave the floor. I keep the storm churning, even as we start to nose-dive towards the Anubis.

“Come on, you Mogadorian hunk of junk!” Sam yells. “Engines on! Give me something!”

“Wait,” Adam says, looking out the window at what I’m seeing. “It’s okay. We’re okay.”

A streak of vivid red energy shears towards us from the Anubis’s main cannon. Our shields flare to life, and this time I can feel some of the heat bleeding through. The window in front of me, thick as bricks, begins to crack.

“Shields held!” Rex reports. “Barely.”

“I think you saved our asses, Sammy,” Nine says. “For a few minutes anyway.”

“We’re still falling, you fools,” adds Five.

“Good,” says Adam. “We’re going to ram them. Six?”

“Yeah?”

“I need everything you’ve got. Bring them down.”

We plummet towards the Anubis. I concentrate. A Skimmer collides with our hull, explodes, and a small fire bursts to life in one corner of the bridge. I can actually feel wind hissing in through the cracks in front of me as we pick up speed.

That’s my wind out there.

Closer and closer we get. Falling.

I raise my hands anew, churning them into the empty air. One tornado, another. Freezing rain that Marina bolsters with gigantic chunks of ice. All this I shove down towards the Anubis, the entire weight of the sky, ripping off metal panels and breaking apart their blasters.

I see energy gathering in their main cannon. The red glow is like a bull’s-eye. It’s like threading a needle, but I command a bolt of lightning right through it. There’s a flash, an electric shriek, and the cannon explodes in a halo of fire. When the main cannon blows, it takes a huge chunk of the ship with it. Small explosions burst to life all across the warship.

The Anubis teeters.

“Keep going!” Rex yells. “You could knock out their systems!”

I send lightning through the cockpit, right through the windows where I’d be standing if I was on that deck instead of this one. Push my wind in there, tear it up, turn it inside out. I see Mog bodies sucked out into the night, swallowed up by my tornado.

We’re going to crash. Force field to force field. I don’t know what the hell happens then.

Nine has a hand around my waist, another around Marina. He keeps us steady, his own feet stuck to the floor.

“You know, if I’m going to die, there could be worse positions. . . .”

I wish I had the energy to slap him. All my anger, years and years of suffering and fear, I pour it into this storm. The swirling vortex is strong enough that trees from the mountainside are ripped up and ignite against the Anubis’s force field.

Until one of them doesn’t.

“Their shields are down!” Rex yells.

“You must have blown them out,” Adam yells to me. “Keep going! Brace yourselves!”

We ram into the Anubis. Our own force field collapses part of their hull with an electric scream and grinding of metal that makes my bones vibrate. More fires start on the bridge, consoles sparking and exploding from the impact, and Marina breaks away from Nine to put them out with splashes of ice.