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Around them, the ship was dark; all electrical currents snuffed out.
‘Where’s Faron?’ Kage called out as his HUD night vision lit up.
‘Who fokkin cares?’ Riv said. ‘Let’s get out of this tin can before it explodes.’
Kage took a final sweeping look at the bridge, where the Rinnax clones lay on the floor and slumped over the nav, either dead or unconscious, at least for another few hours.
‘Brother, move,’ Kainan called out from the corridor.
Kage tore after his Sable brothers. They took off, launching into flight as the floor and roof of the rotating, falling ship changed positions ever so often.
Debris, unsecured items and bodies launched at them as they skirted through the stricken ship. They dodged the fracas and glided swiftly until they reached an exterior hull wall, tracking along it until they found a hole torn apart by one of the exploding pods.
‘Going to be interesting getting out of here,’ Xion said as he peered at the whirling view outside that got closer to the lunar surface by the second.
Let me help,said Mirage.On my count, jump.
She called it and moments later, the four Riders all leapt from The Haiku, barely missing a malfunctioning missile launch tube. Mirage took control of their flight suits and whisked them away from danger. She pulled them high up into the atmosphere, where they hovered for a few moments, watching as the remains of the Eptá class raider poetically landed in a deep ravine of silver regolith, creating a captivating wave of shimmering sand across the plains.
Faron
The Rhesian braced himself against the cold as he emerged from his downed ship’s hull. His HUD flickered and sputtered under the glare of an Edenite night, which was a storm of starlight and frigid wind. He paused, steadying himself against the inhospitable conditions.
He took a few unsteady steps, then turned to look at The Haiku. It lay there, a wreck of its former glory. The Edenites had destroyed it with their boarding pods and explosions - it looked like it’d suffered through a hundred-year war.
Faron felt beaten down and weary. Yet he was alive, somehow. His shimmer suit, despite saving his life, had sustained extensive damage in the fall, with tears in the fabric and broken electrics giving off minor shocks.
He tried to focus on the telemetry the HUD was giving out. Faron could just make out the alarms and warnings blaring in his ear, interrupting his concentration as he took a moment to assess the shit-uation.
His ship was down. His fellow clones were gone, confirmed by a series of flat life signs and lifeless bodies scattered in the regolith around him. He felt a hollow pain, for he’d never lost so many of his own in one day. But, no matter, if he could return to Enia, he’d replicate himself again, rebuilding his family once more.
His only saving grace was that The Haiku’s missiles were still in a hover, in a daisy chain formation over the two locations he’d set. His clone had set the trajectory for the missiles but had not hit the detonation button.
He tried to send them a command to unleash their payload but the signal seemed to go nowhere.
‘Damnation!’
His suit’s HUD had limited proximity. He needed to get near those missiles to set them off.
With a howl of rage, Faron pushed himself out from under the shadow of his ship and shuffled towards the ravine’s edge.
He looked up at the regolith, groaning. There was no way he could navigate the sandy peaks at such steep angles.
If only his suit had flight thrusters.
Then he remembered the Galician merchant who’d sold him the suit had mentioned it had airborne capabilities. Eagerly, he fiddled with his malfunctioning HUD until he found the menu for the suit’s flight mode.
He grinned. Finally, something was going his way today.
With a small jump, he launched into the air. He tensed as the suit wobbled during take off, adjusting the arc of his trajectory to soar high above Eden II’s wild plains. Even though his progress was slow, he calculated he’d reach Skylab in under 40 minutes.
Kage
Notus I shimmered before the airborne Riders, appearing as if it had been summoned from a trans-dimensional rift like a mythical beast.
The four men flew straight into its rear hangar and floated onto the floor.
Kage immediately retracted his helmet.I need to get to Skylab. Now.
