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It needed to end. Now.
“Message received,” Computer said.
“Discard,” I said. The last thing I needed was to hear angry words from the Changeling command.
Alice charged up the weapons systems and opened fire, striking those firing on us.
I made a bee-line for the generator, still concealed behind the main hangar buildings.
Heavy-duty cannons unfurled along the embankments, locking on to us and opening fire.
Our ship shuddered as it took heavy fire. I swerved the worst of it but one round in ten was enough to down us within minutes.
A round blew through the screen and melted the metal over my shoulder, searing red-hot holes in the hull.
I ground my teeth and shifted direction before turning a corner.
Finally, we had a visual of it. The holographic bubble generator. It had the appearance of a small local library. The one place no one in a party town would ever want to visit.
“The library!” I said. “Fire at the library!”
“What about the cannons?” Alice bellowed.
“We’ll never take them all down!” I yelled. “The library! That’s our goal!”
Once destroyed, all the illusions around the town would fail. The humans would see the town for what it really was.
A trap.
Alice aimed every available weapon at the holographic bubble generator.
I strafed left to right to avoid the worst of the alien gunfire but it was only a short term strategy. Their plasma bolts burned through my ship like a hot knife through butter.
The console flashed red with warning signals. I slapped it off. I didn’t need to know about something I couldn’t do anything about.
“Come on, baby,” I muttered to the ship. “You can do this. Just a little further.”
The ship shuddered hard. The left wing engine exploded as it took a direct hit from one of the pulse cannons. It burst into flames.
Silent Shadow dropped on that side. We leaned over, lopsided, and continued barreling forward, shooting at the generator.
Were we having any effect? It was hard to tell. It was only when—
And then it happened.
The library’s fake front shifted, turning pixelated, like a corrupt file on a computer hard drive.
“What’s happening?” Alice said. “What’s going on?”
“It’s working!” I yelled. “Just keep firing!”
Right now, the same thing would be happening all over town. Storefronts would warp, revealing the hard grey shells beneath. A flatpack town mass-produced in a distant factory.
We took another shot—this time to the engine on the opposite wing. We dropped, barely able to clear the ground. But we kept going, kept floating forward, drawing nearer to the colony’s defense turrets.
The Changelings always won. It was a universal rule of the galaxy. They always got their way.
But maybe not today. Maybe today, it would be a small victory for the peace-loving species.
