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As Adam says this, a couple of the small scout ships come into view, gliding towards the landing zone.
“Great,” I say. “Get ready for a fight.”
“Not necessarily,” Adam replies. His fingers hover, poised over a red button on the control panel.
The two ships zoom closer. I put my hand on the back of Adam’s neck, ready to make us invisible at a moment’s notice. But just as the Skimmers are about to reach the docking bay, Adam hits the button. Two heavy blast doors snap closed like steel jaws right in front of the Skimmers, sealing off the landing zone. The Skimmers never have a chance to change course. There’s a jolt as both ships slam into the side of the much larger warship. Adam and I rock back and forth from the force. I can hear the ships explode on impact, and a thin tongue of fire manages to slip in between the thick blast doors.
“That should keep them out for a while,” Adam says. He throws a few more switches on the control panel to lock the blast doors in place.
“Nicely done,” I say. “Now we only have to worry about the couple thousand Mogs we’re trapped in here with.”
As if on cue, the ship-side door to the docking bay swings open. I immediately turn my blaster in that direction, finger half depressing the trigger.
“Easy, it’s just me,” John says.
John strides into the room, BK and Dust right on his heels looking monstrous. The two Chimærae stand guard at the door, teeth bared, ready in case any Mogs followed John through the ship. John’s breathing pretty heavily, and he’s literally smoking. His shirt has caught on fire in places, and there are blaster burns on his shoulders, arms, chest and legs. He doesn’t even seem to notice. Adam and I exchange a look.
“John, are you—?” I shake my head, feeling like it’s moronic to ask if he’s okay. “You’re hurt.”
John pauses in front of the rack of Mogadorian weaponry. He looks down at himself, like he hadn’t even noticed.
“Oh yeah,” he says. He starts running his hands over the wounds he can see on his arms, using his healing Legacy to mend them, then pauses. He squints for a moment, and the injuries across his body all simultaneously begin to close.
“Whoa, that’s new,” I say.
“Yeah,” John replies, looking a little surprised himself. There’s a distance in his eyes, like he’s still coming down from the adrenaline of the battle. “Everything seems . . . easier since I began really using my Ximic.”
Adam creeps over to the door to check the hallway. He makes a point of scratching behind Dust’s ears when he does, which makes a sandpaper noise thanks to Dust’s bestial form. Dust’s massive tail thumps on the metal floor.
“Easier,” Adam repeats, noting John’s condition. “Did you . . . did you already kill them all?”
John crouches down in front of the weapons rack. He shoves aside blasters and battery packs, searching for something.
“No. There are a lot of them,” he says simply. “I’m regrouping. So are they. They won’t survive another round.”
“What’re you looking for?” I ask.
“Grenades or anything explosive,” he says. “Something I can throw at them.”
“There’s some fuel cans there,” I point out.
John looks over at the tanks used to refill the Skimmers. He hoists one with his telekinesis. “That’s perfect. I think.” He glances at Adam. “The ship can sustain one of these exploding, right?”
Adam purses his lips. “Probably. I wouldn’t want to fly it into outer space afterwards, but it should handle Earth’s atmosphere fine.”
“Great,” John replies. He looks over at the box filled with cloaking devices. “You guys doing good?”
“Almost finished,” I say.
Just then Dust lets out a low growl, and Adam ducks out of the doorway. BK arches his back and gets low, ready to pounce. From where I’m standing, I can hear the airlock door just outside the docking bay open.
“Got some coming in,” Adam whispers.
“They think I’m hurt,” John says, and rolls his eyes. “Figured they’d send a few to get the drop on me.”
John strides right into the doorway and, a second later when it opens, unleashes a beam of rippling silver energy from his eyes. I run to his side in time to see a dozen or so Mogs with blasters, all of them now turned to stone, crowding the hallway outside the door. John raises his hand, and the air gets cold. A barrage of railroad-spike-sized icicles fly from his palm, disintegrating the stone Mogadorians.
“You learned that one too, huh?”
“Some Legacies are clicking into place easier than others.”
With the Mogs dispatched, John turns to me. It’s like he just swatted a fly.
“I’m about to take the bridge,” he says. “I could use your help.”
Moments later, we’re following John through the segmented halls of the warship. It looks like a war zone in here. I have to cover my mouth and nose with the crook of my arm on account of how much Mogadorian ash is in the air, not to mention the acrid black smoke that pours from one section where it looks like an inferno erupted.
“You did all this?” I ask.
John nods. He brought one of the fuel tanks with him, carrying it along with his telekinesis.
“What do you need that for?” I ask, nodding to the tank. “Seems like your Lumen was working pretty well.”
He flexes his hands in answer. I notice that his skin is bright pink, like he just soaked his hands in hot water. Apparently, that didn’t heal with the rest of his wounds.
“Might have overdone it with the fire,” John says thoughtfully. “Fried some nerve endings or something.”
“So I guess you still have some limits.”
“Apparently.” John frowns at the thought. “Anyway, there’s a bunch of them barricaded in front of the bridge. It’s a bottleneck. I went toe-to-toe with them for as long as I could. Decided I needed to get creative.”
“Kill smarter, not harder,” I say dryly.
It’s just a short walk through more debris and carnage to the hallway that leads to the bridge. John stops us short with a raised hand, not letting us go around the corner.
“Figure they’re shooting anything that moves at this point,” John says.
“Logical strategy,” Adam replies.
John turns his gaze towards the fuel tank, and the air in the passageway gets cold. Slowly, a shell of ice begins to form around the metallic keg until the canister isn’t even visible anymore. When the frozen wrecking ball is complete, John forms sharp icicles across its surface. Some of these crack and break off, and John has to redo the work.
“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? C
ould use the extra telekinetic force.” When I nod, John turns towards Adam and the Chimærae. “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.
