Chapter 20: Esthi
I’m officially lost, trying to find the boundary between what feels risky and deadly. I can’t tell what’s a good idea and what’s a deadly idea.
Poppy powers up the ship as everyone else docks inside the BlazeStar for the portal jump. We’re going to rescue Titans just like she did during the jailbreak. I don’t want to leave them behind, including my sister, if she’s out there.
I climb out onto the hull as she races toward the stretch of downed Titans from EMPs. Opening the gravity beam array for docking to ships, I repair the charred regulator and replace the burnt wiring to the power cell. When I’m done, I close up the housing and hike back into the ship.
“You sure you can pick them all up with this tiny ship?” I ask.
“I brought a couple hundred Titans here,” Poppy says. “We crash-landed, but that’s beside the point. I can pick up a fraction of that with ease, no doubt. Your repairs going to hold?”
“Hope so.”
“Hope?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re such a human,” she mutters.
“Last I checked.”
“Armor, huh?” Poppy flies out across the dunes toward the crash sites and the EMP zone.
I shrug. “He’s the one thing I’ve always wanted in my life but never felt like I had.”
“A Titan?”
“Someone who wants to keep me safe instead of use and abuse me.” I clutch my harness as Poppy guides us through thelow hills for the first pick-up. “I dug him out of the sand, and he shielded me from CSP and Solcruean ground forces.”
“Every Titan should do that for you.”
I chuckle. “Doubt every one of them wants to mate with me afterwards. But it took time to get him upright on his own.”
She switches on the gravity beam, tunes it to metals, and skirts the desert floor, kicking up dust. “Probably true. We believe in one mate. When we find them, we know.”
I monitor the progress on her screen. “Do you have one?”
“Had someone of interest, once.” She’s pulled up a list of all the missing Titans and, as they’re collected, they blink twice then slide to a Recovered list.
“What happened?”
The Titans dangle limply from the vessel’s belly, held on by only threads of light. Poppy lifts us up and scans again. “Stayed behind to guard a critical vault on Earth.”
“Looks like it’s holding,” I say.
Earth, huh? Not Earth Minor?
“For now.”
“What’s in the vault?”
She shrugs. “No idea. But I respect him more for taking on such a solitary responsibility.”
Her radiant fingers fly over her screens as she adjusts our payload, tightens them against the belly, and taps the Charge button. Titans arch and begin to wake beneath us.
CyberPilots are unique in a lot of ways I have yet to fully discover, but I definitely respect her skills.
Poppy>>Local: One more pickup to do, boys. Stay still but ready.
