“Good.”
“Lily! Damn it, female. Wait for me. It’s not safe.”
“Really? I had no idea.”
As if in direct response to my sarcasm, the nearest energy cannon fired a blast of blinding light in my direction. I jumped instinctively, Athena leaping over the blast like a deer clearing a fence. “Darius, I am heading for target bravo. It has been relocated into the canyon wall.”
“I see that. Lily, don’t go anywhere near there. I’ll take care of it. It’s too dangerous.”
“Too dangerous for who?” I asked.
Athena answered. “Titan Tycho believes approaching target bravo is too great a threat to us, Lily.”
“Why is that?”
I didn’t expect an answer, but I got one anyway and wished I hadn’t.
“Unknown. My calculations predict our success rate at seventeen percent higher than Titan Tycho’s on his current trajectory.”
Lordy. Now I had a talking calculator. What did Han Solo say? “Never tell me the odds.”
A cannon blast lit up my screen. Heat soaked the right side of my body as my Titan’s shields absorbed the hit. I had to dive and roll to evade a second attack. A third immediately followed, striking my Titan in the back and pushing me into a faster tumble. Damn it.
I skidded to a stop and hopped into a three-legged stance, weight on the balls of my feet, one hand down for balance, the other arm lifted, targeting systems locked on the nearest cannon.
I fired, the small missile screaming through the slight atmosphere until it exploded against the force field that surrounded the cannon.
Cursing, I fired again and shifted position as a neighboring cannon targeted and fired on my location.
“Lily! Get out of there!” Darius was practically screaming in my ear. I checked my maps. He was about fifteen seconds behind me, the next Titan right behind him and so on. Everyone was on the ground now. Running. Closing in.
“I’m fine.” My proverbial hair was probably singed, but all my sensors indicated Athena was good to go. I’d taken a lot more damage than this in our training simulations. A lot more.
I ran for the cliffside, using boosters to increase my speed. When I was close enough, I leaped onto the side of the rock, the Athena’s long claws extended from hands and feet. They pierced the soft, crumbling rock like diamond drill bits as I crawled up and up. And up.
Fifty meters. Eighty. A hundred meters. I could see the anchors that attached the base of the cannon to the rock above me, just out of reach.
I glanced below. The rest of the Titan teams had spread out and were attacking the previously mapped cannon positions. The two Titans assigned to the two additional cannons that had been unexpectedly relocated were making their own climbs.
And Darius in Tycho? He was climbing. Not fighting. Not helping the others. Not doing his bloody job.
Climbing. Behind me.
“Lily! Watch out!”