I wasn’t sure how long it would take. Roger said anywhere from one minute to an hour. I left it to run as I turned my attention back to Cordelia.
“Okay, Cordelia. Can you move?”
“I…I think so. Wait, are you talking from the flying robot? Are you…are you with Cindy?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“Listen to me. Does this thing have lifeboats?”
“The lifeboats will take me to the surface of the planet. The people down there will kill me.”
“Your chances there are better than they are up here. You betterget moving. This whole ship is going down. As long as you’re moving to the lifeboat, nobody is going to hurt you. Do you understand?”
She cried as she crawled from the room, trailing blood.
I moved to the UAV control, taking stock of what I could see. I set it to guard all the entrances to the bridge. I pulled up the ship’s map. The ship was basically shaped like a giant rectangle, and the crew lived in a tiny sliver that was underneath where the printers, repair, and mech storage all stood. The human section had gravity that was the opposite of the gravity in the rest of the ship, so the crew and the mechs were standing feet to feet, and I didn’t pretend to understand how that worked.
I moved to the main control panel on the bridge and tried to make sense of all the controls and dials. Nothing was labeled. I heard and felt an explosion. This was Earthside, from the bar. There was shouting loud enough to be heard through my helmet. I was about to hit pass-through when a voice boomed across thePinnacle’s bridge on a loudspeaker.
“Who is that controlling the scout unit in my bridge?” a voice asked.
Eli Opel. He was still alive.
Chapter 50
“Oh, hi, Eli,” I said. I waved the grasping hand of Trixie 2. “Where you at, buddy?”
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but it ends now.”
“Oh, yeah?” I called out. “Because it seems like I’m standing in your bridge, and you’re not.” I moved to a different control panel, the one that looked like it did the most stuff. I grabbed a controller and pushed it. “What does this do?” I asked. A loud rumble filled the ship.
“Stop that, you idiot!” Opel called.
I sent out an order to the remaining UAVs and Lorraine, who was keeping an eye on the mech still going apeshit in the printing room.Find the source of this voice.
I pressed a random button. A view screen flipped on, showing a top-down view of the solar system. It was the star, then the first planet—named Pequeño Burro, followed by New Sonora, and then the two gas giants Berto and Ernesto. I clicked the button again, and the view zoomed in on New Sonora. The icon of the gate floated on the screen not too far from our location. Multiple items marked “Debris field” also appeared, along with four dots presumably indicating the Moderators. There were also multiple yellow dots indicating their spy satellites.
One Moderator appeared to be guarding the gate back to Earth. The other three were zipping around orbit. All three appeared to be on their way back toward thePinnacle, which was worrying, as we couldn’t control them even if we did take over the giant ship. Roger had said he believed all four Moderators were being controlled remotely from a Republic navy carrier on the other side of the gate.
I moved to a different panel and turned a switch. An error message demanding a password from the captain popped up.
“Hey, Eli,” I called as I moved through the bridge just randomly hitting buttons and switches, “which one of these is the self-destruct? Do ships really have one of those like they do in the movies?”
But before he could answer, I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my left shoulder. I quickly hit pass-through, and I emerged to chaos. My arm was going numb. I was suddenly grabbed, and I was being dragged away from my drum kit. I was already outside. We were running from the back of the barn. Multiple arms held me, and I was quickly moving through a field as I faced backward, watching our retreat. Smoke from the burn barrels we had seeded around the fields and our escape route was everywhere.
“What’s happening?” I called.
“There’re ten of them,” Axel shouted.
“We need those honeybees back online,” came Lulu’s voice. “Ollie, if what you’re doing is not working, we need to run!”
A stream of red was forming along my left shoulder. It felt like I’d been hit with a sledgehammer.
“Ollie’s been shot!” Sam yelled. “We need to get him out of here!”
I blinked, the meaning of the words dripping onto me.
I’ve been shot.I looked down at my shoulder. I was wearing armor, but whatever it was had still broken through. My left shoulder was just a mess of red.
