Chapter 41 #2
I jumped to my feet even as pain numbly lanced up my side.
"That settles it! Let's go!" I rushed through the ship as quickly as I could move.
The pain was very real, but it was like remembering pain rather than feeling it in the moment.
The fact that I was disassociated from any of the pain and my own body was a problem we could worry about later.
Lily stormed after me, half like she wanted to snag me and pin me down, half like she had no idea what to do with me. But thankfully, I was running. There was no way I could even walk with the amount of stimulants flowing through me.
When I was on the bridge in short order, I barked: "Take your positions." I turned to see who had followed me. Violet, Lily, and Melgara were with me. Meanwhile, Brick was missing. They must have sensed the question in my mind.
"Brick went straight to engineering," Melgara told me. She didn't take her pilot seat but instead slipped up behind me, scanning me while I sat in the captain's chair. Violet took weapons, and Lily sat down at her station. I didn't have time to assess what exactly she was pulling up on her screen.
"Aikari, controls back to the captain's chair on my mark. Ready?" I asked.
The AI hologram reappeared in front of me, her tails happily fluffing behind her. “You know, I just got installed here and all. I know that makes me the new girl…”
"Three, two, one, mark," I said, hands flexing before I grabbed the controls. We were going in reverse, and I needed to flip us around.
The move was not exactly the easiest maneuver, but I was ready for it. Smuggler piloting training actually had a number of maneuvers that I thought were ridiculous, but suddenly, those were coming in handy.
I cut engines except for a few minor thrusters to use to adjust the angle.
Tilting down and around, I shifted the ship into a 180-degree spin with the main engines off.
We swung around, and just before I hit the right bearing, I kicked the engines back into full blast, feeling it in the seat of my pants as the chair kicked my butt and threw us forward with enough G's that I was holding on to the controls to stay put.
"Good driving, Captain! That was better than I could do. Also, we only lost 5% of shielding with the wind shear." The AI cheered me on, becoming a smaller caricature of herself with a pair of pom-poms.
Now that we were in control of our flight, I needed to get a read on the situation high above us at the edge of the atmosphere.
The enemy battleship had stopped descending and instead was just hovering, staying right above us.
I knew that they were trying to get a bead on us and knock us out of the sky.
They’d aborted their reentry, which had bought us a little time.
I tapped the comms. "Please prepare for evasive maneuvering," I announced. And without giving them much time to prepare, because we simply didn't have it, I pulled tight on the controls, beginning to weave back and forth as we rose in the atmosphere.
We were closer to the planet, so our movement had a tighter angle, but that didn’t seem to matter with the larger ship able to match us despite the greater distance they had to travel.
"They're matching our heading," Lily announced. Meanwhile, Melgara pricked me with something.
"What was that?" I scowled.
"Are you the doctor or am I?" she asked.
"You are," I said, like it was obvious. "I just like to know what's going into me."
"Consider it a specially crafted cocktail just for you." She smiled.
"Well, then keep me going, Doc." It seemed the experiments had started.
Laser fire began to rain down from up above as I circled towards the atmosphere, which wasn't ideal for a few reasons. The biggest being that it was hard to get the necessary speed to pierce the atmosphere when the ship wasn’t moving in a straight line.
But I supposed that was going to be a problem for me in a few minutes.
Right now, they were clearly firing directly in front of me to prevent that very build-up I needed.
"Captain," Brick's voice crackled above my head.
"Good news only, Brick. Tell me you've got good news." I hit the comms.
"Everything's ship-shape down here. As much as I'd like to be an ass, they really did a good job getting the core back together. Its output is about eight percent better than where we left it," he reported.
"Good." I smiled at some positive news. "Now, do me a favor and run a diagnostic on all of our software. I want to make sure the second we clear the atmosphere, there's not some bug planted that shuts us down." I glanced at the AI floating with me on the bridge. "Can you help with that?"
"Can do, Captain." Aikari snapped a salute, still in her caricature form, and winked out of existence.
The ship shuddered as laser fire clipped the edge of our shields.
"Shields are at ninety-three percent," Lily warned.
"Let me know when we're at fifty," I said, knowing we'd get there eventually, and it wasn't going to make a difference in how I acted until we were much lower.
"Violet, if you've got a shot, return fire. Main cannons only." The twin gemini repeaters on the back of the ship were the only weapon that was going to cross this distance.
"Target acquired," Violet announced.
I waved a hand in her direction. "Fire when ready," I said and then winced as Melgara injected me with something else. As soon as the cannon fire finished, I went back to evasive maneuvers as the ship shuddered under a particularly jarring impact. At the same moment, I began to cough up blood.
"Doctor, you are supposed to save him." Lily scowled.
I frowned, turning back to the doctor. "Right. What did you inject me with again?"
"Let me do my job, and you can do yours, Captain.
" She spoke with enough attitude that I realized she wasn't in the mood to be answering any questions. She seemed annoyed that I’d just asked that one.
In fact, she didn't look to be much in the mood for anything.
"By the way, you're not dead yet," Melgara said, as if that was beyond expectations.
“Pip!” The little leviton flew into the room. I’d left him behind on the ship. While he was well-behaved, we hadn’t needed an unknown variable during the duel. “Pip!” He squealed again as he came to a stop by my side.
I glanced at my side, the grisly wound, and grimaced. "Make me a promise that I won't die before I get us out of this situation." I grinned at Melgara and leaned hard into the controls. “There are too many people here on the ship that I need to take responsibility for.”
There was no time for the banter. The ship shuddered every few moments as another blast came too close and threatened to shake us from our trajectory.
I wondered how Violet was doing. I checked on her to find her leaning over her controls, panting with a pained expression.
I grimaced. Okay, Violet was not a variable we could use at the moment.
But that was fine; we likely were not going to take out the battleship’s shields quickly anyway. They were just soaking up her volleys.
“Focus,” Melgara said, drawing my attention back to piloting.
“Or you could take those controls,” I teased Melgara, glancing over my shoulder, noting that she was frowning.
I was really not liking these negative reads from my doctor.
When a person was suffering from internal bleeding and trying to escape a battle, they wanted their doctor to tell them they were at their peak health.
"You've opened up several more of your bleeds. I’ve put some clotting agent into your system, but that’ll only slow your death down and potentially cause secondary issues," Melgara observed, and I pulled the ship back into a spinning ascent.
"Is there anything you can do, Lily?" I asked.
"About the bleeding?" she returned my concern.
"No, the battleship is far more concerning." I shook my head.
Lily seemed to disagree with my priorities. But we could settle that later.
"No, while we're in atmosphere, there's little chance I could launch any substantial mass and hit them. Maybe once we're in space, but even then, we'd have to get me into space and essentially get them to run into me."
I nodded, which seemed to have been too rough because Pip squeaked on my shoulder. "Anything you can do?" I asked, and he tilted his head before I smiled at the little leviton. "You're right. Looking cute is already enough."