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Captain Brink said, “Doesn’t matter!”
Out of the front windows that wrapped halfway around the oval interior, Zeke saw the horrifying specter of another ship—a smaller ship, but still plenty big—barreling down headlong against the Clementine.
“They’ll pull up,” Mr. Guise murmured. “They’ll have to pull up. ” Parks yelled, “They aren’t pulling up!”
“We’re out of time!” the captain shouted.
“What about evasive maneuvers?” Parks asked with a note of mockery.
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“I can’t get the goddamned thrusters to—” The captain quit explaining himself and slammed his elbow on a switch as big as his fists.
The Clementine bolted upright like a nervous deer, pitching its contents and crew backward, and sideways, and up; but the impact wasn’t altogether averted. The second ship clipped it soundly, and there was a terrible squeal of metal and ripping fabric as the great machines grazed one another in midair. Zeke thought his teeth were going to vibrate out of his gums, but they miraculously stayed in place. And in a few seconds, the ship righted and seemed on the verge of escape.
“We’re up!” declared the captain. “Up—do you see them? Where’d they go?”
All eyes were plastered on the windshield, scrying every corner for a sign of their attackers. Parks said, “I don’t see them. ”
Mr. Guise griped, “Well, we couldn’t have just lost them. ”
Parks breathed in slow, steady gulps and said, “It’s a smaller ship they’re chasing us with. Maybe they shouldn’t have hit us. Maybe their boat couldn’t take the damage. ”
Zeke’s ice-white knuckles refused to unlock from the belt, but he craned his head to see out the window, and he held his own breath because no amount of calming talk could keep it steady. He’d never been much of a praying kid, and his mother hadn’t been much of a churchgoing woman, but he prayed hard that wherever that other ship had gone, it wasn’t coming back.
But the sound of Parks saying, “No, no, no, no, no!” did not reassure him.
“Where?”
“Down!”
“Where? I don’t see them!” the captain argued.
And then another righteous crash rocked the ship and sent it teetering through the air. Zeke’s belt broke and his body dropped to the floor, then rolled to the wall and back down to the middle of the deck again. He scrambled and struggled to crawl forward. Given the inertia of the ship’s sway, the first thing he could snag was the vault-style wheel on the cargo hold door. He tangled himself in it as deeply as he could.
Somewhere below, a plate of steel was stretching and splitting, and rivets were flying loose as hard and fast as bullets. Somewhere to the side, a thruster was spitting and hissing, making sounds that no working thruster ought to.
Somewhere in front of them, the Blight was smudging the landscape—and it took Zeke a moment to realize that he could see the Blight directly in front of him because the ship was fully facing down, soaring toward a collision with whatever was underneath the pea-soup air. “We’re going to crash!” he shrieked, but no one heard him.
The swelling back-and-forth of the crew’s conversation occupied them all, and not even the boy’s screams could distract them. “Left thruster!”
“Disabled, or stuck, or… I don’t know! I can’t find the stabilizer pad!”
“This idiot bird might not have one. Right thrust, air brakes. Jesus Christ, if we don’t pull up soon, we’re never pulling up at all. ”
“They’re coming back for another round!”
“Are they crazy? They’ll kill us all if they drive us to ground!”
“I’m not sure they care—”
“Try that pedal—no, that other one! Kick it, and hold it back—”
“It’s not working!”
“We’re coming up on—”
“Not fast enough!”
