“I am unsure of the reference, Lily. How can I help?” Tor asked.
“You can’t. Apologies. I was talking to myself again.”
“Of course.”
I grinned. Those two words were rapidly becoming my favorite bit of comic relief. I understood why Divi, his normal Starfighter partner, hadn’t ordered him to stop saying it.
“How much longer?” I felt like the child in the back of the car asking ‘when will we get there?’ every few minutes.
“Three minutes.”
“What?”
“Five minutes, fifty-four seconds.”
“Damn it! Tor! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You asked me not to speak of it until we had arrived.”
Good Lord. “Well, this is close enough. Shut all this shit down and give me visuals.”
“Of course.”
Games disappeared and my screens activated. My view had changed dramatically.
Xenon’s moon was clearly visible, the size of a tea cup saucer directly ahead. Behind that, filling nearly my entire screen was the planet Xenon itself.
“How far away is that moon?” I could see it, but with my sensors and comms off, I had no nav grid or point of reference other than the video coming directly from the Titan’s exterior cameras to my monitor. “Do we have enough booster fuel to reach it?”
“If my calculations are correct, negative. We are well beyond booster range, even at full capacity.”
Well, that wasn’t good news, but that is what I’d been told by Mia in the briefing. She’s said this moon was a lot bigger than Earth’s, and Xenon, larger still.
In space, the size of things seemed oddly irrelevant. Everything was so massive as to be beyond true comprehension. The place was huge. I could see it, but there was no way in hell I would be able to get there.
“What if we just kept going? Could I make it? Use my boosters to land?”
“My external shielding is not designed to survive the plasma burn that would result from entering the planet’s atmosphere.”
“What about the moon?”
“Our current trajectory would not intersect with the moon’s orbit.”
Okay. So, no, no, no and fuck no. We were out here with nowhere to go if this cruiser destruction plan didn’t work out.
“Where is the Cruiser? Have you found it?”
“Of course.”
“Show me.” The command was wasted as Tor had shifted and magnified the nav grid as well as created a green targeting lock on an object that looked about the size of my thumbnail on the monitor. But it was growing rapidly. I watched in silence, trying to see the shape I was expecting, the ship I’d been shown in the mission briefings.
We moved closer. Closer. Until something unlike anything I’d seen before in the training filled half my screen.
“We will impact the enemy ship in two minutes.”
Impact was the right word. I’d been worried about missing, but the ship was almost as big as Xenon’s moon. “That doesn’t look like the Cruiser I saw earlier.”
“Correct. That is not a Xandraxian Cruiser.”