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“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.
The Anubis flips, end over end.
It’s going down.
A tower of orange fire explodes in the air as the Anubis smashes into the force field around the mountain base, bounces off and crashes to the ground. It pinwheels through the woods, shearing through, breaking apart, leaving a massive trench in the earth.
“Thrusters!” Adam yells. “Sam, get me back thrusters.”
“Ship! Engage thrusters!” Nothing happens. “Damn it!”
“Ella, I’m trying to imagine how these look. . . .”
That’s it. The same trick we used at Niagara Falls.
“Done,” Ella says immediately. “Over to you, Sam.”
“Ah . . . thrusters! Ship, give me back thrusters!”
It works. The ship actually listens.
We level off. We don’t crash. The seesawing in my stomach calms.
And the storm outside parts, revealing nothing but flaming wreckage below.
Everyone on the bridge cheers. Marin
a hugs me. So does Nine. I elbow him in the stomach.
It’s not over yet.
I turn to look out through our cracked window. We’re hovering over the mountain now, a few hundred yards from its force field. The entire area is illuminated by the trails of fire left by the Anubis. I see them down there, piling out of the cavernous entrance to the base. A horde of Mogadorians, their blasters pointed up at our ship.
Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think those assholes look scared.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I TRY NOT TO STARE TOO LONG AT THE FIERY swath of destruction created by the crashed Anubis. There’s still work to be done, but the sight of the warship broken into pieces on the mountainside gives me an undeniable thrill.
Still invisible, I fly underneath one of the Skimmers that survived the titanic clash of the two warships. Quickly, I unleash a torrent of ice that freezes the engines. The small ship drops like a rock, right towards the steadily gathering crowd of Mog vatborn outside the base entrance.
For a moment, the sky is clear. I’ve taken care of all the Skimmers that weren’t destroyed by our warship.
There’s an explosion to my right. The Mogs down below aren’t happy. They’re taking potshots with their blasters, and others are letting loose with what look like bazookas. Nothing penetrates the shields of our warship.
They aren’t prepared for this kind of attack. Why would they be? Their base’s force field, not to mention their regular energy weapons, are enough to repulse anything the humans could throw at them.
Overconfidence gets you dead.
I fly behind the safety of our warship’s force field and back on board the ship. The others are waiting for me in the docking bay.
I’m soaked from the rain and bleeding from my neck. The stitches pulled while I was out there using my stone-vision to knock down Skimmers, all while darting around lances of energy from the Anubis and getting thrown about by Six’s wind gusts.
Six looks almost as rough as me. Her hair is a tangled mess, like she was in the windstorm, sweaty and matted to her face.
