Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 7.7

"Hate to interrupt you," Layla said, "but Mustafa's ship is here! It was in the satellite all along!"

I hurried back to the cockpit. To be honest with you, I never believed this was going to go smoothly. I always knew Ay would find a way to mess with us at the last minute. But I'd have never thought that we'd overlook something so obvious.

"He dug himself a hole with nanotech, don't ask," Layla said. "Oh, and he got automated buddy-ships, too."

Suddenly, the navy blue screen in the cockpit glowed like wildfire. At the same moment, the Firefly's acceleration shot up to astronomical heights. I struggled to stay on my feet. It felt like a piece of lead phasing through my body; tangible enough for me to feel, intangible enough to permeate me from head to toe.

"And that's what happens when you let the real pilots fly!" Layla said before the acceleration made it impossible to speak.

A strain of thirty to forty gravities pushed me down. Tesla's segments slammed together and turned them into a black ball carried by pillar legs. How did they survive? Did they survive at all?

My blood vessels tightened and my lungs expanded, keeping the oxygen from escaping my brain. My singularity stone burned monopolium and gave nanobots energy for propelling red blood cells through my body.

A cloud of microbots supported Tesla.

I tried to say something, but I couldn't move my mouth nor my eyes to face my crewmembers.

Ay had no use for us anymore. He just had to kill us and the Heavyworlders and the Cipher was his. We had to fly as unpredictably as possible if we wanted to survive.

The acceleration stopped. I got lifted off my feet and saw the dead monitors before me. Layla lay lurched in her seat, Kira supported herself against her friend and Telsa floated encased in a waterbed of utility fog. The only light source left was a few glowing buttons. If not for my enhanced eyes, I might not even have recognized my remaining shipmates.

Tesla had it worst by far. The acceleration turned them into jelly. Only the floating forces of the microscopic robots kept up their bodily integrity.

"Lucas," Tesla transmitted. "Mustafa Ay fought the neutron star aliens, I saw it on the screen. They had a ship made of neutronium. He attacked it and then the neutronium exploded like a nuke!"

"Is his ship still working?" I asked.

As if to answer my question, the Firefly's board screens jumped back to life.

On it, we saw Starsnatcher with its invisibility cloaks off. Its appearance had changed. It had shed its ovoid hull, leaving only the gigantic ring that formed its backbone. The white ring encircled a purple vortex forming the reactionless drive Starsnatcher traversed the galaxy with. Gigantic magnetic loops contained it. The same magnetic fields held a silver sphere and moved it closer to a thickened ring section. That sphere was naturally the Cipher.

Our own ship advanced towards that sphere with all the force it could muster. The Firefly shot missiles, but Starsnatcher deflected them through utility fog shields. Our acceleration was in the ballpark of eight gees.

"He still has his plasma cannons?" I asked.

"Nope!" Layla answered. "Wasted too much ammo against the Heavyworlders! That's what happens without me as an advisor."

Another missile bashed into Starsnatcher's forcefields. By now, the ring-shaped ship was close enough to see its hull and how the missile's debris did not even scratch it.

"Nevermind," Layla said, "I think we just ran out of ammo, too."

"Then do a boarding action," Kira said. "Don't care how dangerous or hard it is, just send me home!"