“Co, turrets,” Natalya ordered.

“Done,” Co said, firing at the air-to-air blasters. But she did little more than make sparks on the metal monsters chasing Chimera around the port.

“No, no, the trackers!” Natalya said, pointing to a series of half-spheres and antennae on top of the turrets.

Co nodded, took a bead on the tiny, distant target, and fired a cannon-slug, shattering the dishes and sending the antennae tumbling to the ground.

“Lower the gangplank!” Natalya ordered into her communicator and started running away from the incoming ship.

“You like to flirt, don’t you,” Augustus laughed.

“Just slow him as much as you can.”

“Is this a good idea?” Co asked as Chimera tilted out of the sky and hugged the spaceport’s roof. Solar panels erupted beneath the low-flying ship as the gangplank sparked against the metal roof.

“It will be if you can make it inside!” Natalya countered, sprinting in front of the decelerating Chimera.

When the ship neared them, Augustus tilted the nose up. This slowed the ship just enough that Natalya could match its speed and leap onto the narrow gangplank, hooking an arm around the support pole to keep her steady. Co jumped right behind her, leaping too far and grabbing hold of the gangplank. Her robotic arm squeezed a dent in the metal platform as she held on.

“We’re in!” Natalya said, helping Co into the airlock.

Augustus was already accelerating, rocketing into the sky as the air-to-air blaster backups switched on and chased Chimera across the atmosphere.

No shield barred their path, but as the gangplank closed behind her, Natalya saw a burning chunk of what looked like the engine of a capital ship burning through the atmosphere.

They weren’t free yet.

The refugees nearly panicked when they saw Co and Natalya emerge from the airlock.

“Make way!” Natalya shouted as she ran through the crowded cargo bay. Several of the refugees clutched broken legs or bleeding heads, the result of so many people packed together during tight atmospheric maneuvers.

Co literally shoved her way clear, breaking a refugee’s arm in the process. The rest of the civilians fled from her path a moment later.

Natalya chose to ignore Co’s overzealous aide and tapped her hand against the biometrically locked cargo bay door. The aperture hatch slid open, and as Natalya stepped through she saw a cloaked refugee with a cross-shaped staff sheathed on his back bend down to offer comfort to the man whose arm Co had broken. He had curly, black hair, and his cloak couldn’t hide his thick arms.

The ship shuddered, banishing Natalya’s curiosity for this strangely armed refugee. Natalya told Co to, “Get the weapons up,” as she sealed the cargo bay and ran for the bridge.

Past the oval-hatched medical bay, galley, and crew quarters she ran, arriving at the Z-shaped staircase that led up to the bridge or down to the engine room. Natalya felt the pressure of gravity holding her boots to the deck give out for a moment as Chimera left Puqi’s atmosphere. In the second or so it took for the artificial gravity to kick in, she leapt up, grabbing hold of the railing at the top of the stairs as physics tried to make her regret her seven meter jump.

She swept a leg over the railing and shook her head clear, running for the wide bridge. Co had made the leap on her own, her leg enhancements bending a railing, again, as she beat Natalya to the bridge.

“Augustus, get us out of here!” Natalya shouted, spotting Augustus at the helm.

The bridge was square-shaped and covered in consoles. The walls themselves were viewscreens, meant to imitate windows but capable of showing Chimera’s readouts. The center, pilot’s console was U-shaped, Augustus sitting in a padded leather seat and holding the stainless steel and polished black walnut wood wheel. His thick hands wrapped around the comically small wheel that interacted with the ship’s automatic controls to maneuver the ship.

Augustus barely fit in the wheelhouse, his long legs pressed against the manipulator pedals and his hands bigger than the controls. As he moved his fingers and legs with precise, quick motions to guide the shaking vessel, his fine red, silk shirt revealed no signs of sweat. His golden bead-covered dreadlocks shook like wind chimes as he turned toward Natalya, his pearly white-toothed smile shining in stark contrast to his ebony skin.

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“I got him warmed up for you if you want to finish him off,” Augustus said, his voice booming in the bridge.

“Auggie, hull!” Natalya shouted, pointing at the viewscreens.

They’d just passed through Puqi’s magnetic field, a glowing green sliding away like they’d broken the surface of a terrific ocean. As the green gave way to the twinkling black of space, the explosion-blossoming wreckage of a decompressing hull came tumbling toward them.

“Why you gotta take me down a notch, Tally?” Augustus said, grinning as his giant hands turned the tiny wheel. He dodged the debris and emerged around it like a sparrow sling-shotting off a speeding transport.

The battle came into full view on the radiation static-laden viewscreens. Three Gaozu capital ships, triangular and symmetrical, with enormous cannon underneath, blazed away with rockets and blasts big as Chimera at the Changyu fleet, where two equally big, cylindrical capital ships returned fire.

“The snakes and the fishes are really at it,” Augustus said, smiling at his shorthand term for the two sides.

The Gaozu ship at the center had a fang-like bow and a cannon bigger than anything else in the fray. Natalya recognized it: the Progenitor.

The battle raged all around them, one-man fighters and tiny drones that were little more than rocket launchers swarming about Puqi’s low orbit as the shielding of mid-sized craft sparkled with electromagnetic intensity. Ships jockeyed for position and dodged fire in all directions, but the battle centered on Progenitor, right in front of Chimera.

A large hole in the closest, arrowhead-like Gaozu ship spewed glistening chunks of debris. This was where the enormous hull Chimera had nearly collided with had come from, and in the seconds since, all manner of hellfire raged inside the capital ship’s wound.

“Straight at the hole, Auggie!” Natalya ordered.

“I suppose foreplay’s over,” Augustus said, and shoved the wheel forward.

Chimera swirled through the path of dogfighting spacecraft as the crippled capital ship came apart in a crunching decompression. Building-sized debris cascaded through the battlefield.

Natalya rushed to Chimera’s unoccupied communications console, turning off all channels. There were three more seats on the bridge without an occupant: two for engineering that controlled the shields and the opal-plant, and a navigation console. Co stood at weapons, the only other manned seat, running her fingers up and down the touchscreen controls.

“Debris port-side,” Natalya ordered, a burst of Chimera’s oversized cannon tearing the chunk of capital ship hull to harmless pieces.

“Frigate closing starboard!” Natalya shouted. Augustus dodged the craft. “Beneath the capital ship!”

“Shields probably won’t—” Augustus said.

“I’ll take care of the shields.”

Natalya ran to the engineering console, diverting power from the weapons systems to orient the shields.

The Changyu frigate turned its weapons on Chimera as it passed. Augustus dove underneath the shredded Gaozu capital ship, so the frigate’s rocket volley blasted against the already disintegrating hull.

Chimera emerged on the other side. What appeared to be the bridge of the ruined capital ship tumbled through space in front of them.

“Light fire dead ahead, Co,” Natalya commanded.

“That won’t break a capital ship bridge,” Co countered.

“We’re not breaking, we’re pushing. Now fire!”

Cannon-slugs streamed out of Chimera’s wings and ricocheted uselessly off the tumbling bridge. Spherical bursts of fire encircled both ships as oxygen bled out of the capital ship debris and ignited. Tiny starlights of explosions encircled Chimera, along with massive chunks of titanium hull, making Natalya’s ship look like just another chunk of debris.

As rockets and blasts turned the space between Puqi and its three moons into a hailstorm of metal, Chimera sped its way underneath Progenitor. A Changyu capital ship burst apart, its wings, twice as big as Chimera, erupting and colliding with the bridge Augustus was pushing. All at once, empty space opened before Natalya’s eyes.

“Punching in!” Natalya said, entering a course into the navigation console. “Go!”

“Who’s your daddy!” Augustus declared, engaging the opalescents and thrusting Chimera across the stars.

When the glistening lights of a billion types of radiation glowed against the viewscreens, even more beautiful for the relief they brought, Natalya double-checked their course before exhaling slow and deep.

Augustus reached beneath his silk shirt to a cigar-shaped vaporizer held on a golden chain. He took a thick, sensuous inhalation and blew quickly dissipating mist into the bridge.

“Was it good for you too?” he asked.

“How long to The Moon, Natalya?” Ptolemy asked over the bridge loudspeakers.

Natalya checked the long-range scanners, only making half sense of the numbers before her. They would arrive in three hours, maybe more, maybe less. Instead of answering the man’s question, she said, “Good job, Auggie. Co, diagnostic,” and turned to the bridge’s open hatch.

“I think she needs to collect payment from our guests first, Natalya,” Ptolemy interjected.

Natalya tried to keep her fury in check as she descended the steps one at a time. Turning from the angular parts of the ship down the long corridor and finally arriving at the hexagonal, box-like compartment near the ship’s middle, she opened the carbon steel, circular hatch without knocking.

A holographic display, projected from an upside-down pyramid-shaped tip in the center of the ceiling, cast blue and red shadows throughout the room. A holographic image of Puqi, and the battle still raging in its orbit, dominated Ptolemy’s white-walled quarters. The exploding capital ships were tiny in their orbit above the planet, streaking fighters nothing more than dots of light.

Ptolemy stepped through the hologram. His perfectly-cut hair sliced the holographic image of the planet and his angular face caught the glow of the oceans. The sides of his pointed, thin beard connected at hard angles just in front of the planet’s moons. His brown and green eyes passed through the sparkling battle. His skin was copper, and his hair was black. His tie matched his eyes. Neither the tie nor the immaculate suit he wore showed any crease or line, every hair on his body as straight and pressed as the clothes he wore.

“You look upset,” Ptolemy said, his voice like the sound of a deeply-chiming crystal.