She looked up at the windshield and saw a glowing hole growing in the nose of the aerial. Orbital particle beam flashed in her head. A craft in orbit had locked onto their aerial’s signal and punched a hole in its engine with a subatomic particle disruptor, frying all the onboard electronics. The aerial was dead. It just didn’t know it yet.
Matias jerked upright in his seat.
She pulled the lever, initiating crash protocols. Their harnesses clicked in unison.
They had about five seconds of acceleration left. If the OPB hit them again, they were dead.
She pulled the stick right, turning the aerial’s back to the storm to catch the wind.
“You’ve got this,” Matias said.
He said it like he had no doubt she would land.
Ramona squeezed the last push from the engines to angle the craft for an optimal glide.
The world vanished. There was only the aerial, the wind, and the forest below, rushing at them at breakneck speed, and she floated in the middle of it, attuned to the shaking craft as if it were an aching limb.
A tangle of orange stranglers flared directly ahead. The strangler trunks were mostly hollow. They would break, dissipating some of their speed. She steered for the orange clump.
The forest yawned at her.
With a metal screech, the aerial plowed into the trees.
“Brace!” Matias barked.
The cabin shook, jerking their seats side to side, as if some prehistoric deity were pounding on it with a giant hammer. Branches snapped, scraping against the windshield; then suddenly they were through. Ramona saw the forest floor and tried to pull up on pure instinct, but the stick was useless. The inert heap of metal and plastic that used to be their aerial collided with the ground and plowed through the roots and soil, heading straight for a huge evaner tree.
She jerked her seco shields up on pure instinct.
The aerial grazed the colossal trunk. The impact spun them. They hurtled left and stopped, wedged against another tree.
The seat whispered, deflating.
We’ve survived.
The red force field in front of her was too dark. She glanced right. Matias had thrust his left arm out, adding one of his shields to her own. He’d tried to protect her from the impact.
Their gazes met. He pulled his seco back into his arms and clicked his harness open. “The OPB.”
She released her harness and leaped out of her seat. They scrambled to the cargo hold, grabbing what they could. Matias charged the door, a seco blade spilling out of his right arm like blood. He slashed, once, twice, and the door fell aside. They sprinted away from the craft into the woods.
They were twenty meters away when a second OPB tore through the air in a blinding purple pulse and minced the aerial to pieces.
Matias pressed against the trunk of a big evaner. Ramona squeezed in next to him.
Two hundred meters away, a debris field at the end of a long furrow marked the spot where their aerial had exploded.
Subatomic particle disruptors capable of hitting a target on the ground from orbit were expensive and heavy. Most larger military vessels didn’t bother with them because at that range they didn’t pack enough power. They were precision weapons, deployed against small targets: satellites, beacons, underground bunkers. He’d never expected they would use them against an aerial.
“The Vandals?” she guessed.
“Yes. Unless Drewery bought himself an orbital defense patrol vessel of corsair class or higher.”
“That would be pushing it, even for him.”
Particle beams left no traces. They wouldn’t register on planetary defenses unless someone was in visual range, but the presence of a warship, even one with a diplomatic tag, would. To fire at them, the Vandal warship would have had to drop into low orbit. There was a limited amount of time before Orbital Traffic Control would make them move. The Vandals could stall for a bit, but eventually they would have to return to their designated traffic lane.
“I have no uplink,” Ramona murmured.
He tried his implant. Nothing. Perfect. Just perfect.
The first edge of the storm rolled across the sky toward them. Lightning flashed, snaking through the dark churning clouds in an electric burst of blue.
Right now, they had bigger problems than lack of signal. In a few minutes, the storm would break over their heads. It wouldn’t be a gentle rain; it would be the kind of deluge that made the gardens of Dahlia possible. The forest would do little to stop it. They had to find shelter.
Ramona dug in her bag and pulled out a rifle. “I think I saw a First Wave temple when we were flying.”
A temple . . . he recalled being small and standing next to his grandfather, holding his hand and looking up at a bright-blue bubble of precursor transparite caught in a web of silver filaments above their heads.
“Which way?” he asked.