And the woman he’d married, that everyone called Doc, had spoken of doing the impossible many times, if others were to be believed. Now he remembered one of her more famous—infamous?—sayings.
“The impossible just takes longer,” he said and smiled.
The flyer rocked suddenly, viciously. It was more than just a dubious engine and Tim hit the deck, though he was on his feet almost immediately, grabbing onto the back of the seat they’d wanted him to sit in, using it to steady himself.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
No one answered. It appeared that the only one strapped in on the flyer was the pilot. The big alien and the smaller alien were both scrambling to get up off the deck. The weight of their, well, weight, was making this almost impossible.
Tim thought about helping them, but they took another hit, and this drove it out of his mind. At their rate, the already unstable integrity of the flyer wouldn’t last.
He waited for a moment of relative smooth progress and scrambled to the pilot’s side.
“You’ve got to put down,” he said.
“No!” This from the big alien, who had managed to roll over onto his stomach, but might be regretting it. It appeared to concentrate all of his mass in a way that made his arms and legs flail rather than provide thrust.
There was a copilot seat and Tim dropped into it, spiking into the flyer’s systems without trying to hide his intrusion this time. It wasn’t a smooth transition, unlike their days as robots, but it was a flyer and even if the parts looked different, they did much the same things as ships he was familiar with.
He wrenched control away from the pilot, sighted a clear space and brought the flyer to a jolting, sliding stop that only lightly bumped a ship remnant.
“We will be killed!” The big man yelled.
“A good reason to get out of here,” Tim said. He pulled the bigger man, then the smaller man, to their feet and went to the hatch.
“It won’t open…”
It opened. When Tim or any of his crewmates, full or partial cyborg, took over a ship, it was thoroughly taken over.
He sprinted down the hatch, not waiting for it to completely lower and dove for cover behind the damaged remains of a smaller craft of some kind.
The others waddled down the ramp, as a row of incoming shots tracked toward the flyer.
“For…” Tim wished he were more familiar with human curse words. He felt the lack as he jumped up, yanked one after the other into cover and dropped down himself, just before the flyer exploded.
During his interface with the ship, he’d managed to download some data, but probably not enough.
He watched as their attacker flew by overhead and wondered if they’d come back for another try.
“We should move,” he said. He never liked giving an enemy another chance at a shot at him.
He had to yank them upright again. They were heavy and he’d have failed without his cybernetics. The pilot, Tim noticed, looked impressed.
“This way,” that pilot said now and began leading them between the jumbled piles of debris. He couldn’t see the Q’uy ship now, but he thought he knew what direction it was. But was that knowledge useful? He wasn’t sure. If it couldn’t fly…
Tim thought he also still knew the way back to the shuttle, but surety would not be possible until he tried and succeeded. Or failed.
He pushed failure out of his mind. He couldn’t fail. He had to get back.
“Do you know who attacked?” he asked. He walked beside the pilot, aware of the puffing and panting behind them.
The pilot glanced over his shoulder, then said in a lowered voice, “It’s probably Xenmar. This was his depot until Valza took it…over.”
Took it from him, Tim guessed. He glanced around. Why would anyone fight over this place?
“I need to get back to my ship,” Tim said.
A shadow passed over the surface of the piles of ship parts, and they ducked into cover. Valsa and his side kick weren’t quite as fast and were spotted, if the tracery of shots that spurred them into actual speed were any indication.
