“Missile?” Jace leaned to the side, trying to see around the edge of the viewscreen. But a flash of plasma left a streak through his vision, and for a few seconds, he couldn’t see anything. He rubbed his eyes with one hand.

Focus on getting to the surface, he told himself. That’s all you need to do. One step at a time.

Jace pulled the control yoke side-to-side, but the blips of orange light on the scanner followed them. They were missiles, and they were tracking him. The Wrath rolled and dived and climbed, but the orange specks followed his every move.

“Keep up the evasion!” Lessa said. Right at the entrance to the cockpit, she pulled up on a handle embedded in the floor. A panel lifted up and away, revealing a tube below. A thin, rusted ladder led down to a chamber that could barely be called a room—she wouldn’t fit into it without keeping the hatch open. There was a window barely larger than a dinner plate, facing downward. He didn’t know how she was supposed to see anything, until a small screen lit up with a panoramic video feed. She gripped the turret’s controls, then yelped, “Watch where you’re going!”

He swerved around a clump of discarded armour plating, then took the Wrath on an erratic course around the edge of the battle, throwing it up and down and sideways. The missiles matched the starship’s every movement. They were getting closer…

“What are you going to do about them?” Jace asked. He hoped he didn’t sound nervous, but it was hard not to.

When Lessa flipped the trigger guard away from the controls, a holographic targeting reticle appeared on the screen. A little nudge to the left, and the turret swivelled to face the rear. A nudge to the right, and it swung back.

“They’re clumped together,” she said. “If we can hit one, they’ll all explode!”

“I’ll line them up behind us,” Jace said. He deactivated the shields, earning them a temporary burst of speed, then held their course straight.

“I see them!” Lessa spun the turret to the rear. Jace glanced over his shoulder. The video-feed showed a cluster of lights headed towards them. He couldn’t see exactly where they were, but it didn’t sound like Lessa would need to be that accurate. Once the reticle was aligned, she clamped her finger down on the trigger. However, instead of firing a shot, a puff of dust coughed back into the cabin.

“Uh…Lessa?” Jace asked. “Was that supposed to happen?”

“Did you connect the power coupling?” Kinfild yelled from the engine room. He shovelled coal and pulled levers, and didn’t spare a glance back towards the front of the starship.

“Power coupling?” Jace waved his hand in front of his face, pushing the dust away before he choked on it. The lights, the missiles, were drawing closer.

“In front of the copilot’s seat!” Kinfild shouted. “A thick, red wire! You will need to feed it with pure Aes; the gunnery plasma shells are old and will need a kick to warm up!”

Jace glanced around, searching for any sign of the coupling. He saw nothing high up, and nothing on the control panel. Beneath the copilot’s seat, however, there was something that might have been a power coupling. Two metal nozzles were clamped onto clumps of wires thicker than his fist.

He tried lifting a hand off the control yoke so he could lean over and reach it, but his arms weren’t long enough. Instead, he stretched a leg out and, with the tip of his foot, pushed the nozzles together. A spark ran through the wires, and a puff of steam shot out of the wall. He nearly flinched away.

“You have an electric current, good! Now push Aes into it too! Make sure to only touch the blue wires—for Aes—otherwise you’ll shock yourself!”

Jace grunted, then pushed a pin into the side of the yoke. It locked in place. He leaned out of the seat, then pressed his fingers against the biggest blue wire in the clump and pushed Aes out of his hand like he was fuelling the Vault Core.

[Warning: Aes loss limited to three units for your advancement safety] a sheet of golden dust provided.

“Do you need more?” Jace yelled.

“That works!” Lessa called back. She clamped her finger down on the trigger again, and the turret let loose a burst of plasma. Brass casings fell from a slot in the wall and clattered onto the tiny plate-sized viewscreen.

Jace’s head whipped forward and back. He wanted to catch both views—ahead, and out the turret—even as he contorted himself to connect the power coupling.

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

Lessa didn’t release the trigger until an explosion of purple plasma-Aes filled the screen, unnervingly close. Through the burst of light, a Koedor-Terginian starfighter chased after them. It split the smoke, wingtip cannons blazing with magenta light.

Jace reactivated the shields as quickly as he could. The salvo of plasma disintegrated against the shield, but he didn’t know how much longer they would last.

“There’s a starfighter off our port quarter!” Kinfild called. “At least try to hit it!”

“We see it!” Jace and Lessa yelled back in unison.

As the fighter blasted past the Luna Wrath, Lessa turned the turret, holographic reticle chasing just behind the small starship. It was too fast, and each of her shots flew harmlessly into the void.

But the fighter wasn’t done with them. “It’s turning back!” Jace called.

“I see it!” Lessa turned the turret forwards. “Stay straight.”

A pair of plasma blasts pummeled the shields. The Wrath protested, but Jace held the yoke tight.

Lessa clamped her finger down on the trigger. Bolts of plasma raced out from beneath the cockpit, and they struck the starfighter. It exploded, and Jace swerved around the ball of smoke and fire. As the Wrath took the tight turn, steaming casings flew out of the small turret room and bounced across the floor. One struck his hand, and he hissed in pain.

Kinfild didn’t warn them about the next threat. Multiple enemies had broken off to face them, and Lessa fired without restraint or pause. Only a few of the shots hit, but when they did, their foes exploded into brilliant plumes of flame.

Jace navigated the starship around the rubble and metal flotsam. Something thudded against the stern, and the ship rocked. The shields flickered, then a hexagonal pattern rippled across the viewscreen and faded completely. Jace smelled smoke rolling through the cabin, and instead of whining, the turret clicked.

“I’m out of shots!” Lessa said. “I got the fighters, but I’m empty!”

“Strap yourself down!” Kinfild called. “It’s going to be a rough landing, no matter what Jace does!”

“What do you mean ‘rough’?” Jace exclaimed.

“The good news is that they will probably think they’ve hit us and won’t waste any more shots!” Kinfild called. “The bad news is that they did hit us. Stabilizing repellers are out. Can you make it back to Fedar City? The thegn’s palace will be your best bet for finding unlaunched starships!”

“We’ll do our best!” Lessa replied. “Shouldn’t be too hard to find! I’ve read about this place in holocomics! It’s one of the oldest continuously populated cities—”

“Not the time, Lessa!” Jace hissed.

The Luna Wrath plummeted through the atmosphere, trailing dust and smoke behind it. Jace tried to peer through the viewscreen, but as usual, a bowl of snarling flame cupped around it. He couldn’t see anything.

“Do we still have directional control?” Lessa inquired.

“I—” Jace pulled back on the yoke. The freighter responded, slowly and slightly. “We do.” When he squinted, he could see through the fire, and he caught glimpses of the surface. They flew over a plateau of cracked rock and sand, the scar that ran across the planet’s equator. Fedar City would be somewhere along it.

As the Wrath levelled out, the flames disappeared. Jace doubted he could hold them up forever, but they had a while to go before they crashed. Lessa directed him with her finger, and the starship paved an exacting path through the atmosphere.

“Try to put us down somewhere close to the palace,” Lessa said.

Jace raised his eyebrows. “I’ll worry about that when we see the city!”

As the last flickers of flame dissipated, Jace spotted a line of darkness waiting on the horizon: the city of Fedar, surely. Pillars of smoke rose from it kilometers into the sky.

“I wish I could have seen it a thousand years ago…” Lessa breathed. “It would have been so beautiful.”

Now, nothing glistened. Nothing looked new. Aqueducts and irrigation systems let plants grow wherever the city desired, and despite the desert around it, vines hung off every awning, and weed-infested gardens grew on every terrace and rooftop.

He craned his neck to see the streets—flashes of plasma raced back and forth in the rubble. From this height, he couldn’t see the individual combatants, but the dark hordes charging through the streets couldn’t have been anything but kobolds.

“We’re getting close to the thegn’s palace!”

The Wrath shook, then began to dip dangerously close to the curved roof of a tower. Jace pushed down on the joystick, dropping down into the corridor of buildings. It would hide them from any patrolling starfighters, and they needed to get closer to the ground.

They approached a massive marble plaza—a different plaza, not the library plaza. Towers cast shade over the expanse’s edges, but it was miles wide. There was no cover for the kobolds, nor for the defending Starrealm yellowcoats.

Kobolds poured toward a sandstone behemoth at the far edge of the plaza—the palace. They were approaching the main entrance this time, not the library side.

He needed a place to land. Or…to put the starship down, at least.

The main palace entryway. An arched, open-air vestibule waited before the palace’s gates, and it was large enough to fit the Luna Wrath four times across it and eight times its height.

“You’re… landing there?” Lessa exclaimed.

“I don’t see anywhere better. You?”

“No…”

“Then we’re landing there.”