by Elin Wyn
“If I don’t, then the Thagzars are sure to notice us!” he declared, and with a stomp of what Jeline could only assume was the main control to the engine, another rumble went through the ship and nearly jerked them both out of their seats.
Sinking her nails into the armrest’s blue fabric, Jeline licked her dry lips and considered her next move. She could always ask – well, at this point, demand – that Kogav trade places with her. And yet, with the way that he’d been acting since he first sat himself down behind the controls, she was certain that her request would only backfire and start another fight. And Kogav needed direction more than a crewmate to argue with.
“Kogav,” she swallowed thickly. “That red dot is—”
Beeeeep!
At the sound of the pod’s screeching alarm again, Jeline impossibly gripped her seat tighter and looked at Kogav.
As dependable as he’d seemed back on Peshdushdar, the man was breaking out into a cold sweat, and restlessly bouncing his foot where it rested on the floor pedal. He was bad at piloting, and he knew it.
Well, after working with the novice Sherre for the past few months, Jeline knew how to deal with an overwhelmed crewmember. First things first, she needed to set an example and stop playing the bickering backseat driver.
Straightening up, Jeline put on a brave face and extended an arm to touch Kogav’s shoulder. “You can do this,” she said, forcing a smile. “You have done this a dozen times,” she half-guessed, half-hoped.
“A hundred,” Kogav muttered.
Jeline highly doubted that.
“Exactly,” she nodded anyway. “You’re smarter than the Thagzars. You’re—” she stopped as another vibration seemed to pass through the ship; one that Jeline was far too familiar with to try and persuade herself that it was anything but.
The Thagzars had opened fire on them, and one of their shots had just come very, very close.
“Fuck,” Kogav hissed. Fiddling with the controls, he changed the holographic displays to pick up the signature of the Thagzar firearms and ping them up on the screen.
To Jeline’s horror, five more missiles were headed straight for them. “Hold on!” Kogav roared.
Jeline didn’t even have time to scream before he grabbed the controls and sent them into a barrel-roll. Squeezing herself into her chair as she tried to stay grounded, Jeline’s red hair fell over her face as they flipped; somersaulting through space as the Thagzar shots just barely passed them by.
“Damn those snakes, they’re gaining!” Kogav growled as he jerked the controls and straightened the ship out. Jeline had to take a moment to catch her breath, but her eyes never left the screen.
The dot was closer now. She spared a glance at the readings – foreign, but still familiar enough in structure for her to understand their situation clearly. “He’s going to catch us,” she said evenly.
Kogav clicked his tongue, his arms bulging as his whole body tensed. “Not if I can—”
“Will they kill us?” she asked plainly, her voice confident as her legs trembled.
Her question seemed to shake Kogav out of his macho mindset, and he blinked at the screen, his purple eyes flashing. “There are a number of things they could do to us,” he said slowly, his white fangs catching the light of the screen as they brushed over his bottom lip. “Killing us would be merciful, in their book.”
That was all Jeline needed to hear. “Move,” she said.
Kogav furrowed his brow, but didn’t look away from the screen as he narrowly avoided another attack. “What, now? Where do you think—”
“I’m saying,” Jeline growled, “Give me the controls!”
For a moment Kogav froze, and Jeline couldn’t help but wonder if she’d just made an enemy out of her ally.
But then, all too suddenly, he was grinning. It was a dumbfounded look, one that Jeline honestly wasn’t really sure of how to read.
“Sorry,” he shook his head, and with two taps of his left leg, the pedal under his right foot disappeared, only to pop up beside Jeline. “Forgot I had a pilot onboard for a second there.”
Jeline frowned. “What’re—”
“Here,” he said, and – in a moment that Jeline could only explain as brilliant Eiztar engineering – she watched as Kogav flipped a switch and literally slid the controls over to her side. “Madam pilot,” he winked with a mock salute.
Jeline didn’t have time to be relieved, not with the Thagzar ship still firing at them, and she quickly leaned over her seat to reach the controls and give that odd pedal on the floor a good stomp.
They took off immediately.
“Oh my—!” Jeline gasped, surprised at the vast difference between Kogav’s pod and her own. It was like someone had taken the outdated system of contact-control from the previous generation and merged it together with the newest ability of trans-touch, miraculously creating a seamless hodgepodge of flexible command and strict control.
Not to mention, the natural layout of all the bells and whistles promoted a level of ease that Jeline had never encountered before, especially with speed removed and placed on the ground for an idle foot to stimulate rather than an already busy hand.
In short, it was the best damn thing that Jeline had ever flown.
“You got it okay?” Kogav asked anxiously as he eyed the screen. The red dot was getting impossibly closer. “Need me to show you anything?” She could tell by his voice that he was already rethinking his choice to hand her the controls.
“Oh, no,” Jeline said, smiling in spite of herself. “I’ve got it handled, trust me.”
Kogav looked like he wanted to say something – maybe show her the ropes anyway – but Jeline didn’t have the time to give him the chance.
Flexing her fingers out over the sensors, she let up on the floor pedal, only to flick her hands to the right and apply an ounce of pressure with her foot.
Jeline laughed as the pod didn’t jerk or hum awkwardly like when Kogav had been piloting it, but rather zipped across the holomap like a knife slicing through butter.
Excited and elated, Jeline tested the limits until she had eased the pedal down flat against the floor and swept them away in a zigzagged mad dash from the Thagzar ship.
If only she’d had this sort of control when they’d been in that meteor storm! It had all happened so fast, and she’d been moving far too slowly to properly pilot the ship out of there. In the end, Captain Taryn had taken over, and sent Jeline away to cower inside a pod. But oh, if she’d had the Eiztar controls! Jeline was certain that she would’ve gotten them out of there then.
“Jeline,” Kogav beamed, his smile wide as he braced himself against his chair. “This is amazing! You are—”
A sudden crash on their left had the alarm blaring again. Jeline quickly set them straight again, but the holomap was going haywire as it sent flashes of planets and star systems across the screen that Jeline had never seen before.
“How did they catch up to us?!” Jeline hissed, trying to get everything under control.
“They must’ve used their warp,” Kogav growled. “They think they can catch us with a little boost. Well, we’ll just have to use ours!” he said, reaching for the controls.
But Jeline stopped him with an arm. “Wait,” she said, her mind racing as she watched the red dot slow on the small section of the screen that was still functioning properly. “Why did it stop?”
“Ha!” Kogav smirked. “What a waste of a warp. They’ll never catch up to us now – quick! Use ours!” he pointed.
“There’s only enough for one shot?” Jeline asked, still nudging Kogav’s hand away as she tried to set some distance between them and the Thagzar ship.
“That’s all that there’s room for in a pod,” Kogav snapped. “Now hit—”
“Wait,” Jeline shook her head. “Look.”
There, in the corner, were two more red dots moving down the screen toward them.
“Reinforcements,” Kogav growled. “We have to go now, before they use their warp!”
“Wait,” Jeline shook her head, eyeing the sporadic glitches of the map. There was one that she recognized; one she’d seen just before she’d locked herself in a pod. “I’ve got an idea.”
Kogav
Kogav couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Jump what?”
“Jump gates,” Jeline repeated, her eyebrows furrowed as she tried to type in a new set of coordinates on the holomap.
Problem was, the flickering screen wasn’t exactly cooperating with her. “I’m telling you, it’s perfectly safe. Those gates are what got us into your star system, and that was after jumping through a bunch of others. Trust me, we’ll go through and then turn right back around to jump here again.”
“Let’s say you’re right,” Kogav said doubtfully. “We use these ‘gates’ you humans found, and everything goes as planned. What makes you think the Thagzars won’t just follow us right back through again?”
“Because,” Jeline said, swatting a lock of red hair away from her eyes. “Even if they do know how to use the jump gates, they won’t be able to follow us for long; we’ll still have a warp boost, and they won’t.”
“So you want to get us all the way to these ‘gates,’” Kogav frowned. “Jump through one, jump back, and warp away in the hopes that the Thagzars don’t follow?”
“No,” Jeline huffed a sigh, and pressed down on the floor pedal. “I want to get there, jump, and warp a jump back. If we’re lucky, the other two Thagzars will waste their warp from here to there and won’t even see which gate we jump back through.”
“And we want to leave them to run amuck in some poor alien’s neck of the solar system because…?” Kogav asked.
“Don’t worry,” Jeline waved him off, accidentally sending the ship down in a sudden dip because of the sensitive controls.
Flicking her hand back up and over, she righted the pod and finally set the ship on a path following the new set of coordinates. “We’ve been in that area before, and not just me and my crew,” she said. “Weapons ships and other scout ships have explored the star system, and none of us found any sign of life. So, nothing for the Thagzars to destroy.”
Kogav could definitely see the advantage in shaking the Thagzar ships off their tail, especially since their pod wasn’t exactly equipped with any sort of offensive defenses.
And Jeline was right: even if they used their warp now, there was still a chance that the Thagzars would keep tracking them, or that the two new ships would catch up with their own warp. “I’m still worried it’ll take too long. They’re already catching up,” he said. “Maybe we should—”
“Kogav,” Jeline said sternly, and looked over at him. Kogav noticed that her fingers didn’t stop moving over the controls, and he couldn’t help but envy her ability to keep them just out of range of the Thagzar weapons-lock.
She was an exceptional pilot; a better one than even Zaddik, maybe. “It’ll work,” she promised, her wide eyes clear of doubt and fear as she fixed him with a warrior’s stare.
He certainly hoped so.
Jeline seemed to take his silence as agreement and nodded to herself. “It isn’t far,” she added after a moment.
“Well, that’s one bit of good news,” Kogav crossed his arms. “Okay,” he grunted. “Take us to your gates.”
Being the sole engineer on his crew, Kogav almost always found himself working in the docking bay within the ship’s underbelly, or on the thrusters themselves. Rarely was he ever needed on the main bridge, especially near where Zaddik manned the controls and Dojan navigated the holomap.
And honestly, their stations seemed so boring, he never really paid much attention to their big screens and flashing reports anyway.
Yet now, sitting on the edge of his seat with his eyes on Jeline’s screen, he couldn’t think of anything more enthralling. Especially not with that new smell in the air; like the crisp afternoon right before a sandstorm.
“Ten clicks away,” Jeline reported, just narrowly avoiding another attack. The Thagzars had been firing erratically at them for the past twenty clicks now, and Kogav couldn’t help but grin at their panicked display. Jeline, however, was taking the whole situation a bit more seriously.
“So,” Kogav said in an effort to break the tense silence. “How does this work?”
“Sorry?” Jeline snapped, her attention on the screen.
“You know,” he said with a small frown. “Is this thing going to suck us in like a black hole, or…?”
“Does it matter?” Jeline asked absently. “We’re just going to fly into the heart of it, anyway.”
For some reason, that didn’t make him feel better. “Oh, trust me,” he muttered gruffly. “It matters.”
“Eight clicks away,” Jeline chimed in, and Kogav had to wonder if the woman had a death wish.
“So?” he said again.
“Mhm?” Jeline hummed in question, her lips pressed together in concentration.
“The gates,” he said loudly. That seemed to snap her out of it.
“Sorry,” she shook her head. “They’re distracting, you know,” she shrugged at the screen, and flashed him a nervous grin.
That small smile did things to his chest, and he frowned as he cleared his throat. “They’re portals, right? I mean, how do they work?”
“I guess you could call it a portal,” Jeline said slowly. “We don’t really know how they do what they do, or why they appeared for that matter—”
“You’re joking, right?” Kogav cut her off. “Why don’t I feel like you’re joking?”
“Why do you think you haven’t run into humans before?” Jeline shrugged. “We’re still exploring; still testing them out. And, as far as we can tell, we’re the first ones to come this far.”
Kogav blinked at her. He was certain now, and it wasn’t just Jeline: all humans had a death wish.
“Five clicks,” Jeline read. “Any more questions?”
Kogav squinted at the screen. “We should see it by now,” he said, scanning the holomap for what, he wasn’t really quite sure. “Shouldn’t we?”
“Our ship was set up with alerts specific to jump gates,” Jeline said, flicking the ship to the side as the Thagzars shot another round at them. “Sherre, our navigator, could pinpoint exactly where they were whenever we got close to a new set.”
“Set?” Kogav repeated. “As in, more than one?”
“We’re about to come upon three,” Jeline nodded.
Kogav opened his mouth to say something – anything – about how suicidal she was being, but he couldn’t think of anything that would properly articulate how completely demented she was acting. So, in the end, all he managed was a croaking sound from the back of his throat.
Jeline cocked her head and gave him a funny look. “Are you okay?”
Honestly? Kogav really didn’t know. Not that he normally functioned on being ‘okay,’ anyway; he’d been faking shallow happiness for so long that he couldn’t even tell the difference anymore. Still, sitting in the passenger seat next to a human pilot with her eye on a deathtrap as their only means of escape certainly didn’t sound okay.
And the occasional smells native to his planet weren’t exactly helping him stay sane, either.
“I’m fine,” he sighed. It wouldn’t do to complain now, not when the Thagzars had set up a snake-seven military flight formation behind them. It was fight or flight, and even Kogav knew when to stand down from an unbeatable opponent.
Jeline fixed him with an odd stare for a moment, and asked, “You don’t depend on others much, do you?”
An odd question. “No,” he admitted gravely, absently scratching his wrist and the ink hidden underneath his leather brace there. “I suppose I don’t.”
Jeline
Jeline didn’t know what Kogav’s problem was. Not that she really had the time to sit him down and figure it out; not with three alien enemy ships on their tail.
“Two clicks,” she read aloud, but frowned as she glanced around the empty holomap. Sh
e still couldn’t see the jump gates. “Where the fuck are they?” she hissed.
Kogav, nervous wreck that he was, couldn’t seem to hold himself back from worrying out loud. “So you can’t see them either.”
It wasn’t a question.
“I already told you,” she ground out, trying to keep her cool while piloting the pod. “You probably just don’t have the technology.”
Kogav didn’t reply, but then, he didn’t have to. He’d already made his opinion of Jeline’s plan quite clear, and – though she’d explained how it was going to save their asses plenty of times already – it wasn’t a favorable one.
“One click,” Jeline announced. Still no sign of the gates. And yet, the holomap had no problem highlighting the Thagzars closing in…
“We can’t slow down,” Kogav spoke up. “The snakes—”
“I know,” Jeline cut him off. “We aren’t stopping.”
Keeping a hand steady to hover over the controls so she could continue dodging the Thagzar’s lazy attacks, Jeline studied the control panel and hit the only sensible button among the multitude that could do what she needed.
“No!” Kogav yelled, jumping towards her. Luckily, his belt held him back. “Jeline, don’t!”
For a moment, Jeline thought that maybe she had set off the warp by accident, but then the sudden hum from behind the screen settled her heart.
“Again, I know,” she growled. “But if I can’t see anything, then we’re dead anyway!”
As the artificial glow of the controls dimmed, the screen seemed to shut off and fold up, tucking itself away against the wall to reveal a clear fragile window where it had once stood.
Jeline wanted to sigh at the sight. After all, it’d been so long since she’d gotten a good look at anything other than a holomap or a coordinate display.
“We’re dead,” Kogav said blandly, dumbfounded as he looked, too. “You’ve killed us.”
“If you’re worried about the meteor storm my crew and I ran into, don’t be,” Jeline shook her head. “Your pod hasn’t reported anything in the vicinity, so—”
