I tried to peer around the corner of the windscreen to spot the Lythion, and saw once more the bigger alien ship.
It was aglow with unearthly light, which ran over and along it, to gather at the front of it.
The light formed into a ball which launched itself at ferocious speed right at the Lythion.
“Watch out, Lyssa!” I cried, my hand splaying on the screen, as if I could reach out and stop the thing.
The Lythion jigged. I can’t describe it better than that. Lyssa was the ship, after all. She could duck and sidestep the way humans could.
The ball of greenish red fire passed over the top of the Lythion.
The mother ship fired a ball at us, too. I saw it coming, like a nemesis bearing down upon us.
“Shit! Dalton!”
He did almost the same thing as Lyssa. He jigged, using the shuttle’s atmospheric maneuvering jets to drop us vertically “down”.
The fireball passed over our heads. I watched with sick fascination as it struck the Ige Ibas…and passed straight through it. A ring of fire on the fuselage the size of the ball framed a view of the planet beyond, the rocky surface now bathed in dawn light.
“Lyssa, fire back!” I screamed. “Rail guns! Everything!”
The two guns on the top of the Lythion opened up, raining fire upon the alien ship.
One gun tracked sideways and I saw small balls of flame flare up, then extinguish as vacuum put out the flames. Lyssa was swatting at the little flyers, too.
That gave me a better idea of the true size of the mother ship. It was enormous.
“Coming in hot and hard,” Lyssa warned. “Dalton, stay very still.”
Dalton slapped the dashboard, shutting everything down, then fired the maneuvering jets for a second, to bring us to a complete standstill.
Through the screen, over our heads, the Ige Ibas burned from the inside out.
The mother ship was turning to face us once more, but as it lined us up in its sights, the Lythion rose up between us, its flank facing us. Lyssa had the freight ramp down, and the inside of the freight bay yawned.
“She isn’t…” I breathed.
“I think, yeah, she is,” Dalton said. “This is going to be tight,” he added.
“The shuttle won’t fit!”
“It will and she knows that, or she wouldn’t try it,” Dalton said calmly.
Both rail guns had swung around and were firing almost continuously at the mother ship on the other side of the Lythion. I watched the brilliant twin streams of deathly energy trace their way across the blackness and wanted to cheer.
Then the Lythion loomed up over us and I lost sight of the rail guns and saw that the landing bay was swallowing us up like that long-ago ancient whale had once swallowed ships whole.
I bent to peer through the very far corner of the shuttle screen, for we were being sucked into the landing bay sideways. I spotted the ramp closing and, beyond that, the motion of stars through the sky as Lyssa got the Lythion moving even before the ramp properly shut.
Dalton put the shuttle down on the floor of the bay with a slight thud and shut the engines down.
The silence was thick, broken only by everyone breathing very hard.
“Now, will you for fuck’s sake stay still so I can get this?” Fiori demanded, tugging at my arm.
I lifted up my arm and looked at it. Blood was everywhere, and more of it oozed through the two centimeter trough that had been gouged out of my upper arm. “Damn, I’m really bleeding,” I muttered. “I thought it was the vacuum making me faint.”
—12—
The Lythion had a medical bay that Fiori announced as adequate, while Lyssa hovered to one side, wearing the white tunic that announced she was in medical mode.
Fiori sat Ophir on the first table and put a blanket around his shoulders, while Dalton put me on the second table and lifted a finger up toward my nose. “And stay there until she seals you up,” he warned me.
“Take the suit off her,” Fiori said, her tone distant, as she peered at the concierge panel which was already spitting out data on Ophir’s and my vitals, for the tables scanned continuously. As she studied the panel, she peeled off her environment suit, her hands moving with experienced ease.
I struggled to unseal my suit, but my arm was pretty much useless. Dalton glanced at Lyssa. “Help me.”
Together, they peeled the cumbersome suit off me, then Dalton shrugged out of his own.
Lyssa placed a sterile pad against my arm to mop up the blood, and held it there.
“We’re away, yes?” I asked her.
Lyssa grimaced. “At crawling pace, yes. I didn’t dare wait to build up speed for the jump. I jumped as soon as we had enough momentum, so we might be in the hole a bit longer than usual.”
“I’ll take that over having one of those fire balls rip through the center of us,” I told her, and shivered.
“Core temperature is down,” Fiori said over her shoulder. “Shock and blood loss. We can fix that in a minute but bring the bed’s temperature up a few degrees in the meantime.”
“Just get on with it, doc,” I said as evenly as I could. “I need to figure out what happens next and get moving.”
“What happens next is you sleep,” Fiori said, coming over to the table.
“Not on your nelly.”
“Yes.”
I glared at her. “We’ve got fucking aliens on our tail!”
“They can’t track us through the hole,” Lyssa pointed out with infuriating logic.
“We have to tell someone about this!”
“We will,” Dalton assured me. He put his hand on my good arm. I shrugged it off, but it was too late. The ruse had worked. I’d turned my head away from Fiori. The injection into the side of my neck stung, then warmth spread from my neck, moving down and up.
“Damn it…” I muttered as I
