The three of them stared at Aur-Six’s robotic corpse for a moment. Kinfild’s mouth popped open, but he didn’t say anything.

“We can repair him, can’t we?” Jace asked.

Shaking her head, Lessa said, “The fungal computer would decay. You might repair him, but he wouldn’t be the same.”

Jace took Kinfild’s silence as a confirmation of the explanation. But now wasn’t the time to mourn. “If we don’t get out of here, we’ll all die,” he said. “Do we have enough coals left?”

Lessa turned around and pulled open the coal bunker. A layer of the small, iridescent clumps still remained.

“You will need to fly the Wrath,” instructed Kinfild softly. “Both of you.” He sighed, pushed the kyborg’s body aside, then picked up a shovel. “I will get the engines running. I need you two to get us away.”

Jace and Lessa nodded. They ran back through the ship. First, they sealed the cabinet they had climbed up through—the door made an almost-airtight seal, but Jace applied an extra coat of crack sealant (the Wrath had a canister stored just below the seat as well) over any potential cracks to make sure. He and Lessa exchanged a shrug. Then, he whispered, “That connection tube between us and them didn’t look attached to well. We could probably rip through it.”

“I knocked the ladder away.” She spoke confidently, but her voice was quivering. “We’re good to go.”

There was nothing more they could do. The engines whirred and chugged, and the deck began to vibrate. Jace and Lessa ran back to the cockpit. “Can you fly it?” he asked.

“I’ve never tried,” she said.

“I have about a half-hour of experience, in total,” he said. “Which—”

“Take the pilot seat, already!” she hissed.

Jace leapt into the pilot’s seat, and Lessa took the copilot’s. They both pulled on crash harnesses.

“Disengage the magnetic locks!” Kinfild called from the engine room. “The blue switch! In front of—”

“I see it,” Lessa said. She reached out and flicked a lever. Something thudded below, and the starship lifted off the hull of the battleship. Jace took the controls. He pulled up on the yoke. The engines strained, letting out a series of high pitched whines as they struggled to break free of the larger cruiser’s grasp. He shunted the engine strength to its highest setting, and the thrusters surged—it shouldn’t have been this hard to overpower the rubber tube, but the cabin lights darkened with the power that it drew. It wasn’t enough.

“Jace!” Lessa hissed, pointing at a screen on the console.

He glared at the screen, at the oversaturated schematic of the vessel. A light blinked at the rear—something was embedded in the engine block. A tow cable, he suspected, to keep the ship from escaping. He cut the thrusters and repellers, and the Wrath fell back on its landing gear.

“Turn our particle restrainer off!” Kinfild shouted.

“Excuse me?” Jace scanned the array of blinking lights, but there were too many switches.

“That orange one, and the green one!” Lessa pointed at a set of switches on the wall beside him. Jace flicked them both. The ship began to rock violently, thudding back and forth with each stroke of the engine. The thrusters blasted, screaming and wailing. Jace gripped the control yoke as tight as he could, but every time he tried to resist the ship’s pull, he overcorrected. The Wrath swayed.

“Jace, look out!” Lessa pointed up ahead. One of the casemate turrets in the battleship’s upper hull swivelled towards them. A blast of magenta light blasted out of the cannon, along with an enormous puff of smoke. Jace ripped the yoke to the left, and the streak of plasma only grazed the Wrath’s upper hull. A batch of warning lights flickered to life and alarms warbled.

A series of crashes and thuds rang through the ship, and finally, a metallic twang. The harpoon cable snapped, and the Wrath flew free.

They skimmed barely ten feet above the hull of the battleship. Jace hauled the yoke back towards himself. The Wrath pulled up above the command bridge of the larger starship. Once he had a clear view of open, empty space, he pushed them down again.

A volley of magenta plasma traced their path, but most blasts dissipated before they reached the Wrath, and the ones that did hit barely left a scratch at such a distance. After a single burst, they stopped firing.

“They’re loading solid shells!” Lessa said.

“What?”

“Plasma can’t travel as far, so they’re using solid ammunition!”

“We’ll lose them in the asteroid belt,” Jace said, recalling the band of floating stones that had floated near Nine’s orbit. It would be perfect to hide in.

“Do not crash my starship!” Kinfild scolded. “You aren’t careful at the best of times, and certainly not good at avoiding asteroids!”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Lessa leaned out of her seat. “They’re scrambling starfighters!”

“Into the asteroid field, then,” Jace said. He kept his target in sight—the thick ring of rocky debris orbiting the system’s star. Bullets and flak from the Koedor-Terginian fleet whizzed past the viewscreen, but none were accurate enough to do any damage. That didn’t stop more scarlet lights from blaring across the console and dashboard.

“Jace, shields!” Lessa shouted. Small pebbles pelted the viewscreen. He flipped the lever to activate them—not enough that they would cause the Wrath to slow significantly or draw too much power, but enough to protect the vessel from the small impacts.

Then, he focussed entirely on swerving around the largest asteroids and planetoids. Some were large enough to be moons and some were barely larger than the Wrath. It didn’t matter. Just one misstep, and they would dash the Wrath to pieces. Jace pushed the yoke up and down, then left and right, then up again.

A flash of magenta plasma raced overhead and scraped the surface of a larger planetoid. Lessa hissed, “Jace, I think—”

“I see them!” he replied.

Two starfighters shot past, maneuverable and fast—if his experience escaping Maehn was any indicator, these starfighters outclassed the Wrath in every way. Except, perhaps, durability. He doubted their shields could absorb a strike from any significant asteroid.

The starfighters charged straight towards the Wrath. They fired another volley, and he raised the shield strength at the expense of speed. The plasma dissipated against the forward energy shields.

“Lessa, where is the ship’s waste kept?” Jace asked. If they couldn’t see, they couldn’t dodge asteroids.

“Storage tanks, usually!” Her eyes widened, but she must have understood the plan. She said, “Don’t worry about waste. The void intakes are clogged from all this debris! Just empty them, and you’ll get a puff of dust!”

“The handle to your left!” Kinfild provided from the engine room.

Jace gripped the handle, then pulled it. A clunk ran through the Wrath’s hull, and miniature nebulae of dust and debris choked out on either side of the cockpit. The starfighters passed through them.

He wasn’t certain of the starfighters’ fate until he circled around a lumpy moon. He spotted flotsam and sparks and the last gimmers of an explosion—one of their pursuers had collided with a battleship-sized orb, and the other had been torn to pieces in a patch of smaller but deadly rocks.

They couldn’t linger. They needed to head deeper into the belt. He swerved side to side, pulling on the control yoke hard enough to make his arms ache. If he hadn’t maxxed-out the limit of his strength shard allocation before, then he had now—his arms already felt like the shards had bolstered them a little.

Only when their surroundings were so thick that he couldn’t see the system’s star was he satisfied. “Kinfild, kill the thrusters!” The thrusters stopped chugging, and he glanced at Lessa. “How do we slow down?”

“Repeller-brakes should do the trick,” she said. “I’ll handle it.”

“I'm going to try to land on that.” He lifted one hand off the yoke and pointed at a bluish-gray planetoid in front of them.

“We need to match its spin.” Lessa tapped a button on the control panel once, then twice, then a third time. With each tap, the Wrath slowed down.

Jace guided the starship closer. He flipped the switch that Kinfild had used to lower the landing gear, but he doubted the planetoid’s gravity was enough to hold them in place. Its surface, however, was shiny and metallic. He activated the magnetic clamps, then set the shields to full power.

After a brief exhale, he released the yoke. He sat in the seat, staring forward, motionless. His mind felt like a sluggish engine, still struggling to chew through what he had just done. But soon, Kinfild called them both back to the cargo hold. He had activated the holographic map, which now showed an image of a star system—and Jace guessed it was the Celacor System.

“We’re here.” The Wielder pointed to a blinking light far away from the star. “It looks like most of the Koedor-Terginian fleet and kobolds are heading towards Eight, the most populous planet of the system.” He pointed at a planet just to the Galactic South of the belt. “They will destroy it. We don’t have enough time. Even if we could muster Lady Fairynor’s fleet, the planet will be destroyed before she arrives.”

“You said there were local defenders, right?” Jace paced around the edge of the table. “Is there anything we can do to give them more time?”

“We need to destroy the battleship that contains the kobold queen-core,” Kinfild provided. “If what you gathered from the library was correct, then kobolds require a constant feed of shadow-aspect Aes. They are a hive, and they are all part of one enormous Aes system. We destroy the queen-core, and we will ‘deactivate’ every kobold in the hive. They will cease to function.”

And Jace had a subquest—to destroy the core. It’d award plenty of Aes.

“They don’t feed?” Lessa asked.

“They enjoy eating flesh and drinking blood, and it sustains their physical bodies, but they are tortured, dark beasts, and their spiritual half seems like it would crumble without the queen-core. They would collapse, incapable of movement. The ground defenses would win immediately. Lady Fairynor’s fleet would clean up the enemy starships.”

“Wait, wait—” Lessa said. “I don’t understand. I…I think I missed something.”

They quickly recounted the agreement they had made with Lady Fairynor, and explained their current change in plans.

“But we can’t be in two places at once,” Lessa said. “And the Wrath doesn’t have enough firepower to take on a battleship.”

“We’d just be a gnat pestering a tarkor,” Kinfild replied. “No. The local defenders of Eight will have starships of their own with much greater firepower. But they don’t know about the queen-core, and they don’t have arcane cores to sense its influence.”

“If you drop Lessa and I off on Eight, you could take the Wrath and warn Lady Fairynor,” Jace suggested. “And we—Lessa and I—could use a different starship to take down the queen-core.”

Lessa walked around to the other side of the holographic projection. “We would need a new labourer kyborg for Kinfild.”

“Nothing will replace Aur-Six,” Kinfild snapped.

“Do you want to summon Lady Fairynor’s Fleet or not?”

Kinfild sighed, then nodded.

It was settled, then. Jace began to step back from the holographic table, but Kinfild said, “Wait.”

Jace tilted his head.

“It is likely that we will face Elder Stenol on Eight,” the Wielder said. “He will be there. Are you ready? You must survive the encounter.”

There was nothing Jace could do but shrug.

“I will set our course and keep the furnace hot. We have forty-five minutes until we arrive at Eight. I suggest you prepare as best as you can. You likely have enough Aes to form a Foundation Pillar and host a second card. Give me ten minutes to get everything ready, then I’ll teach you the process, should you desire.”

Jace grinned. “Oh, I desire.”