There’s a sound like a phone ringing. Terrible answers, which is probably a mistake. I don’t know why you’d try to talk to someone who is trying to kill you. It’s not like they’re going to have some valuable perspectives.
“This is it!? One fighter from the entire Essence fleet?”
The captain of the other ship is mocking Terrible. Being a real dick about it, too. Terrible doesn’t reply. He just listens, as the taunting voice continues.
“Your king is fleeing, your armies are destroyed, your empire is crumbling. And now he sends you, a lackey, to try to save his scales? Oh, how the Essence have fallen. After we have shot your ship into a million pieces, we will hunt them down and we will destroy them too. Your entire species will be wiped out within the solar cycle.”
Terrible still says nothing. He presses another button. The ship swings hard to the left and a big bright pulse of light emanates from it. I don’t understand the weaponry of this shuttle, but I see what it does to the ship that big bright bubble hits. It fucking obliterates it.
One moment it was there, the next it is just fucking gone.
“Wooo! Yeah! Get fucked!” I burst from the locker, fists pumping, a massive smile on my face. “That was awesome! That guy would be so embarrassed if he had any idea what had just happened to him.”
Terrible swings around, his expression absolutely priceless. He’s so surprised to see me I think he would have shit himself if he was a human.
“What are you doing here! You should be in the king’s vessel, headed to safety!”
“I’m not going to let you just go off and get killed, idiot.”
He is furious, but there is quite obviously no time to deal with me right now. There is only one of him, but there’s plenty of enemies to fight. There’s already another ship locked on, firing bursts of whatever it is they’re trying to kill us with.
“Strap yourself into that seat,” he growls. “This is going to get violent.”
“Hell yeah, it is.”
“You should not sound so happy about that,” he snarls. “We may both meet our deaths, and you are treating this like…”
“You're not going to die alone,” I tell him. “That’s what I’m treating this like. We’re together to the end. Ride or die, bitch.”
Terrible shakes his head, but I can see a hint of a smile on his face. He never smiles, but he’s definitely letting his emotions show now. At least, with a slight fractional, quarter inch twist of his lips, which is about as good as it gets with this rock-faced demon dragon from another world.
Over the next ten or twelve minutes, there’s a lot of fighting. The ship swirls around, head over heels, rolling and twisting, and darting back and forth. I’m on a rollercoaster for my life, one that’s firing balls of bright destruction at all the ships trying to kill us. There’s a lot of them and only one of us, but that doesn’t matter when Terrible is as skilled as he is.
I’m kind of surprised. He always seemed like an organizational type. He was always bossing me around. I never realized he was a stone cold warrior, an ace pilot, and the bravest guy I ever knew.
I don’t regret sneaking onto this ship in the slightest. It’s worth the risk of death to see him this way in his proper element, outside the narrow confines of ship business.
“You’re so fucking good at this!”
And then it all goes wrong. All the motion stops. We’re suddenly hanging in space, not zooming around with great alacrity. Terrible tries to operate the controls, but they’re as useful as the controls on one of those coin operated rides they have outside laundromats sometimes.
“What’s happening?”
“They have the ship locked between two opposing forces, which disengage the mechanical and transport functions of the engine, and which can move us at their will.”
“Like a tractor beam.”
“If you want to put it that way, yes.” He looks over at me. “We’ve been captured.”
“Stand by for transport, prisoners.”
This captain is less of a talker. That doesn’t give me any kind of confidence. You have to watch the quiet ones. And this one is clearly smarter than the first one, who managed to get himself wiped out.
SCHLOOP!
One moment we are inside the shuttle. The next, we are the sole inhabitants of a dark, gross prison cell.
I look at Terrible. “Now what?”
He looks back at me, his eyes glowing with a multitude of colors in the darkness.
“Now we survive.”
There’s an awkward silence. I wonder if I should be afraid, but I’m not sensing immediate danger.
“Are you angry at me for coming?”
“Of course. I wanted you to be safe. I wanted you to be one less thing to worry about.”
“You never told me you cared that much.”