“No,” I say, taking him by the shoulders. “I know you care, Adam. I know it’ll kill you to do it. But you also know that I’m right. That stopping Setrákus Ra is more important than . . . than anything. If worse comes to worst, you’ll pull that trigger.”
Adam holds my gaze for a few seconds, then looks away. He steps back so that my hands fall off his shoulders.
“Okay, John,” he says simply.
“Okay.”
I don’t actually need him to help me with the airlock.
Alone, I pass through the warship’s ravaged docking bay, open up the exit and fly into the night. Wilderness passes by beneath me, peaceful and untouched. The wind plucks at my clothes, cool against the sweat on my back.
The mountain rises up before me. Dark purple in the night. Waiting for me.
I go invisible.
The Anubis hovers over the mountain, an insectoid guardian. Its metallic hull reflects the moonlight. Searchlights from the warship’s underbelly comb the side of the mountain, the cleared space around the cavern entrance, the sparse woods beyond. They’re expecting us. The Anubis does a slow circle around the mountain’s peak, prowling just like it did in New York City.
This time, I’m not running away.
From my back pocket, I produce my satellite phone. I dial the number programmed in for Lawson. Two simple words.
“Open fire.”
I don’t listen for a response. I know what happens next. Soon, all around the world, counterattacks will begin.
I drop the phone. Let it smash down in the woods a few miles down. I won’t need it anymore. No more talking, no more politics.
I reach out to Six telepathically.
The Anubis is over the mountain. Get ready.
I glance back in the direction I came from. Our warship is too far off to see, but the storm clouds aren’t. Thick and dark, they blot out the stars, ruining what was a perfectly clear night sky. Lightning shivers through them, the wind picks up and I can hear hailstones falling in the distance. They roll towards me, towards the Anubis.
It’ll be a storm like the Mogadorians have never seen.
We’re coming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“GAIN SOME ALTITUDE, REX,” ADAM SAYS. “I want to swoop down from above them. That good for you, Six?”
“Yeah,” I reply distractedly. “Got it covered.”
I stand right in front of the enormous windows on our warship’s bridge, my hands raised in the air, fingers twisting. I can see reflections of the others in the glass, but I’m more focused on what’s outside. I pull at the indelible threads of atmosphere that only I can sense and caress the wind into doing my bidding. If it wasn’t for the thick sheet of glass in front of me, I could reach out and touch the roiling clouds that I’ve created.
A storm. A bigger storm than I’ve ever managed. Over the years, I’ve mostly relied on lightning strikes, high winds, sudden surges of cloud cover—quick effects. Not much can stand against Mother Nature for long. I’ve never really needed to build and sustain a massive storm front before.
Well, Katarina used to say, discovery is born of desperation.
“Visibility is really bad,” Rex calls to Adam.
“It’s okay,” Adam replies. Ella stands next to him, her eyes rolled back in her head, seeing everything that John sees. “We know where we’re going, and our target’s hard to miss. Keep us climbing.”
I have surrounded our warship with storm clouds and fog. Lightning strikes sizzle right in front of us and sting my eyes with their brightness. Our ship is big, but my storm front is bigger. It stretches nearly a mile wide and up, up, like a tidal wave crawling through the sky. Adam has triggered a scrambling device for radar so, between that and the static from the lightning, we should be wreaking havoc on the Anubis’s sensors. They’ll definitely know that we’re coming, but they won’t know where exactly in the storm we’re hiding. Not until it’s too late.
Marina stands at my side. She’s ready to enhance my storm with chunks of ice when needed. For now, she wipes some sweat from my forehead.
“You’re doing great, Six,” she says.
It isn’t until I try to smile at her and hear my teeth chatter that I realize I’m shaking.
Press on. Grow the storm. Bigger and bigger.
The winds howl outside, audible even in here. Thunder rumbles.
“Imagine the looks on their faces,” Five comments from his spot at one of the weapons panels. “They’re probably shitting their pants.”
“Shut up,” Nine replies automatically.
The edge of my storm reaches the Anubis. At first, the clouds break across their force field, keeping the air within one hundred yards of their ship completely clear.
“Do we know if weather will breach their shields?” Sam asks.
“Let’s find out,” Adam says. “Pour it on, Six.”
In my mind, I take hold of a lightning bolt. Just a small one, a probe, and sling it against the Anubis’s force field. The streak of electricity bends, turned back by the Mogadorian technology.
“Doesn’t seem like it penetrated,” Rex reports, sounding anxious.
“No, it doesn’t matter,” I reply through gritted teeth. “We’re close enough now. I don’t need to break their force field. I can go around.”
I let the dark clouds and swells of fog coalesce around the Anubis, hiding us, blinding them beyond the range of their force field. Then, maintaining that, I start over. My left hand twirls above me, spinning the wind, building it up, creating pressure. This time, the storm gathers within their shields.
“The air . . . ,” I say. “The air belongs to me.”
The wind outside the Anubis screams, the pressure drops. The wind swirls into a vortex, its velocity as fast as I can make it, fast enough to uproot trees and tear off weapon arrays, so fast that I’m starting to get a little dizzy. The vortex splits, then splits again. Three small funnels on top of the dark metal hull of the warship, shearing away at its armor, knocking it out of its orderly hover. Three tornados to shove this bastard to the ground. I send in some rain as well, and, next to me, Marina presses her hands to the glass. She freezes the water as it lands on the Anubis, adding weight, hopefully jamming up important functions.
“It’s retreating!” Rex yells. “The Anubis is retreating!”
“That’s not a good thing,” Adam replies. “Six needs to be able to create weather inside their force field’s perimeter to knock down their systems.”
“Keep me . . . unh. Keep me close,” I grunt.
The farther the Anubis edges away from our hiding spot in the clouds, the harder it is for me to maintain control of the weather around it. The strain is immense, each weather pattern pulling at a part of me, requiring my attention. To keep our camouflage up along with the attack on the Anubis, I need us to be within a few hundred yards of each other.
From the corner of my eye, something bright red explodes in the air outside our ship. A second later, it happens again. Like fireworks going off.
“They’re shooting at us!” Sam yells.
“They’re blind-firing,” Adam replies calmly. “Steady, they can’t see—”
Explosion. The entire floor bucks, our ship vibrating. We’ve been hit. For a moment, the entire world is colored red. It’s our own warship’s shield activating in response to being struck by the Anubis’s energy blast, the impact illuminating the force field outside. It effectively highlights our location for the Mogadorians.
“They see us!” yells Rex. “Locking on . . .”
“Brace yourselves!” Adam screams.
The next impact is worse. It’s a sustained torrent of energy that rocks our ship. I crash into Marina, and we both fall to the floor. Everyone else holds on to their station for dear life. A siren begins blaring inside the warship, the same one that went off before when we were the ones doing the attacking.
“Shields are down to forty-eight percent!” Rex says.
“Forty-what???
? Sam exclaims. “I thought these force fields were impenetrable!”
“Impenetrable to your weapons,” Adam snaps as he begins hurriedly tapping buttons on the command console. “They’re recharging their main cannon. I don’t know if we’ll survive another hit.”
Nine scrambles over and helps Marina and me back to our feet. My head hurts, and I realize there’s a small cut on my forehead. For a moment, my concentration was lost, and that’s all it took. My storms have begun to dissipate. Worse yet, below us, the Anubis is moving out of range of my Legacies.
“Hurry up and hailstorm their asses!” Nine yells at me.
I press my hands to the glass. “Get me close!”
“Help me, Rex,” Adam says. “Divert all unnecessary systems to power the shields. Bring us around so we can get a clear shot at them with our cannon.”
Rex leaps up from his navigation console, and Lexa sits down where he was. Working the levers, she keeps us floating above the Anubis, brings us steadily closer.
“Here they come,” Five growls.
From my vantage point, I see the Anubis open up, and a swarm of flies explode forth from its side. Skimmers. The little ships pour from the Anubis and streak through the night sky towards us. With their cloaking devices still equipped, this armada will pass right through our force field and take easy potshots at our warship.
“Weapons ready!” Adam yells at Malcolm and Five, who immediately key in to their stations. “Don’t bother shooting until they’ve cleared the shield radius of the Anubis.”
“How will we know—?” Malcolm starts to ask, a sweat ring visible around his neck.
“Now!” Adam barks.
The warship rattles as Malcolm and Five begin discharging the auxiliary guns. The effect is like a cluster of fifty Mog blasters going off at the same time. Five fires wildly, his breathing sharp and excited, while Malcolm takes his time and tracks his targets methodically. It only takes one shot to bring down a Skimmer, but there’s a whole hell of a lot of them.
I notice that some of the Skimmers careening towards us drop out of the air without even being hit. Each time before it happens a silver glow illuminates the Skimmer and then it drops like a rock . . . because it is a rock. That’s John out there, invisible, flying, using his stone-vision to play defense.
“Closer!” I shout over my shoulder, gathering the winds again.
“On it,” Adam replies. “Rex, how are those shields?”
Rex hurriedly pounds away at a keyboard. When he answers, he sounds terrified. “I . . . I’m sorry; I can’t get the power to reroute. I’m a navigator; this isn’t my area of expertise.”
“You sabotaging us, loser?” Nine snarls.
“No!” Rex replies. “I swear, I need another minute or two—”
“Let me try!” Sam says, wiping sweat off his forehead. “All power to shields!”
Our warship’s siren stops blaring.
The guns stop firing.
And we start to fall out of the sky.
“Tell me you didn’t just shut off another ship!” Lexa cries.
“Uh, I—,” Sam starts to respond.
“All power to shields,” Rex repeats, then louder, like we’re doomed. “All power to shields means we can’t fly!”
“I can fix it,” Sam says. He looks at Adam.
“Restore power to the engines,” Adam says with forced calm. “Start there, Sam.”
“Power to the engines!” Sam yells.
Nothing changes. Sam repeats himself, but the ship either isn’t listening or Sam’s Legacy isn’t working. Behind me, I can hear Rex hitting his console furiously.
We’re falling.
My feet actually lift off the floor of the bridge. Marina grabs on to me, and Nine grabs on to her. Thanks to his antigravity Legacy, his feet never leave the floor. I keep the storm churning, even as we start to nose-dive towards the Anubis.
“Come on, you Mogadorian hunk of junk!” Sam yells. “Engines on! Give me something!”
“Wait,” Adam says, looking out the window at what I’m seeing. “It’s okay. We’re okay.”
A streak of vivid red energy shears towards us from the Anubis’s main cannon. Our shields flare to life, and this time I can feel some of the heat bleeding through. The window in front of me, thick as bricks, begins to crack.
“Shields held!” Rex reports. “Barely.”
“I think you saved our asses, Sammy,” Nine says. “For a few minutes anyway.”
“We’re still falling, you fools,” adds Five.
“Good,” says Adam. “We’re going to ram them. Six?”
“Yeah?”
“I need everything you’ve got. Bring them down.”
We plummet towards the Anubis. I concentrate. A Skimmer collides with our hull, explodes, and a small fire bursts to life in one corner of the bridge. I can actually feel wind hissing in through the cracks in front of me as we pick up speed.
That’s my wind out there.
Closer and closer we get. Falling.
I raise my hands anew, churning them into the empty air. One tornado, another. Freezing rain that Marina bolsters with gigantic chunks of ice. All this I shove down towards the Anubis, the entire weight of the sky, ripping off metal panels and breaking apart their blasters.
I see energy gathering in their main cannon. The red glow is like a bull’s-eye. It’s like threading a needle, but I command a bolt of lightning right through it. There’s a flash, an electric shriek, and the cannon explodes in a halo of fire. When the main cannon blows, it takes a huge chunk of the ship with it. Small explosions burst to life all across the warship.
The Anubis teeters.
“Keep going!” Rex yells. “You could knock out their systems!”
I send lightning through the cockpit, right through the windows where I’d be standing if I was on that deck instead of this one. Push my wind in there, tear it up, turn it inside out. I see Mog bodies sucked out into the night, swallowed up by my tornado.
We’re going to crash. Force field to force field. I don’t know what the hell happens then.
Nine has a hand around my waist, another around Marina. He keeps us steady, his own feet stuck to the floor.
“You know, if I’m going to die, there could be worse positions. . . .”
I wish I had the energy to slap him. All my anger, years and years of suffering and fear, I pour it into this storm. The swirling vortex is strong enough that trees from the mountainside are ripped up and ignite against the Anubis’s force field.
Until one of them doesn’t.
“Their shields are down!” Rex yells.
“You must have blown them out,” Adam yells to me. “Keep going! Brace yourselves!”
We ram into the Anubis. Our own force field collapses part of their hull with an electric scream and grinding of metal that makes my bones vibrate. More fires start on the bridge, consoles sparking and exploding from the impact, and Marina breaks away from Nine to put them out with splashes of ice.
The Anubis flips, end over end.
It’s going down.
A tower of orange fire explodes in the air as the Anubis smashes into the force field around the mountain base, bounces off and crashes to the ground. It pinwheels through the woods, shearing through, breaking apart, leaving a massive trench in the earth.
“Thrusters!” Adam yells. “Sam, get me back thrusters.”
“Ship! Engage thrusters!” Nothing happens. “Damn it!”
“Ella, I’m trying to imagine how these look. . . .”
That’s it. The same trick we used at Niagara Falls.
“Done,” Ella says immediately. “Over to you, Sam.”
“Ah . . . thrusters! Ship, give me back thrusters!”
It works. The ship actually listens.
We level off. We don’t crash. The seesawing in my stomach calms.
And the storm outside parts, revealing nothing but flaming wreckage below.
Everyone on the bridge cheers. Marin
a hugs me. So does Nine. I elbow him in the stomach.
It’s not over yet.
I turn to look out through our cracked window. We’re hovering over the mountain now, a few hundred yards from its force field. The entire area is illuminated by the trails of fire left by the Anubis. I see them down there, piling out of the cavernous entrance to the base. A horde of Mogadorians, their blasters pointed up at our ship.
Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think those assholes look scared.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I TRY NOT TO STARE TOO LONG AT THE FIERY swath of destruction created by the crashed Anubis. There’s still work to be done, but the sight of the warship broken into pieces on the mountainside gives me an undeniable thrill.
Still invisible, I fly underneath one of the Skimmers that survived the titanic clash of the two warships. Quickly, I unleash a torrent of ice that freezes the engines. The small ship drops like a rock, right towards the steadily gathering crowd of Mog vatborn outside the base entrance.
For a moment, the sky is clear. I’ve taken care of all the Skimmers that weren’t destroyed by our warship.
There’s an explosion to my right. The Mogs down below aren’t happy. They’re taking potshots with their blasters, and others are letting loose with what look like bazookas. Nothing penetrates the shields of our warship.
They aren’t prepared for this kind of attack. Why would they be? Their base’s force field, not to mention their regular energy weapons, are enough to repulse anything the humans could throw at them.
Overconfidence gets you dead.
I fly behind the safety of our warship’s force field and back on board the ship. The others are waiting for me in the docking bay.
I’m soaked from the rain and bleeding from my neck. The stitches pulled while I was out there using my stone-vision to knock down Skimmers, all while darting around lances of energy from the Anubis and getting thrown about by Six’s wind gusts.
Six looks almost as rough as me. Her hair is a tangled mess, like she was in the windstorm, sweaty and matted to her face.