Right. Okay. I could handle this. I steered up over the edge of it and wiped the sweat from my hands. That maneuver had let Hesho get behind me again, unfortunately. He started firing, and I barely dodged.
It was time to see if I could exploit his muscle memory. I started a routine maneuvering sequence, one I’d drilled into him and the others as I’d trained them outside the delver maze. A warm-up meant to teach good fundamentals.
Hesho fell in behind me as I moved, and his disruptor shots trailed off. Yes, I thought. You know this routine. You flew it with me dozens of times.
“Why did he stop?” Chet asked.
I didn’t respond, continuing the motion. Hesho inched forward, and I let him fall almost into my wingmate position. I’d been intending to break out of this maneuver unexpectedly and throw him off, maybe earning me a breather to reignite my shield. But this seemed to be triggering a memory in him.
Together we soared over the new fragment, no longer fighting. No longer worried about other ships—as we were getting increasingly distant from the others, who were staying away from the debris. I continued the motions. I could almost feel Hesho’s longing, his thoughts stretching toward mine…
Then my mind went cold. It was like I’d been doused by a bucket of ice water. I pulled my ship back to be even with his, then glanced toward his cockpit. It was tinted dark, which prevented me from making out any of his features.
It wasn’t dark enough, however, to obscure the two powerful white spots that were shining deep within the cockpit where Hesho’s eyes would have been. The delvers had taken him.
Hesho broke out of our two-person formation, then flared his boosters and barreled away from me.
“Oh, scrud,” Chet said.
“Spensa?” M-Bot said. “What’s wrong?”
“Let her fly, AI,” Chet said as I fell into pace behind Hesho. “Something is very wrong.”
“What?” M-Bot asked.
“The delvers,” I said. “They…took him. His eyes are glowing white.”
Chet cursed softly. “I’d hoped we would be safe from such direct intervention in a group. We must be too spread out on this battlefield.”
I stayed on Hesho’s tail as he looped around and flew through the center of the large debris field of hanging buildings. The remaining fighters on both sides had moved to the perimeter, as it had gone from dangerous to insane to fly here, with chunks spinning and colliding like an asteroid field.
Two buildings smashed together ahead of us, spraying shards of glass like rain—and as I flew through it they snapped against my hull and canopy, reminding me that I’d never found a chance to reignite my shield.
Why did the delver want to fly through this? In the past, they’d chased me. Now this one wanted me to chase it?
Well, I was game. It wanted to see how good I was? Let it watch. I expertly trailed Hesho-delver. We darted down through the narrowing crack between a chunk of rock and a free-flying factory, then flew underneath the still-crumbling fragments. That took us through a stream of falling water that was spraying from a building above.
Was this the delver actually flying? No…these maneuvers were familiar. Somehow it was leaning on Hesho’s skills. Well, I was going to rise to its test. We soared between crashing pieces of rock, down alongside a falling roadway, through sprays of debris that clattered against my canopy.
Everything else faded, and I absently muted other comm chatter. Nothing mattered but me and the chase.
The delver tried increasingly difficult moves to get me to trip up. Soon I was sweating—my attention tight like a narrow scanner band. Just me, that ship, and the immediate terrain.
Hesho-delver miscalculated on a light-lance pivot and slammed into a big chunk of stone, side first. His shield fuzzed, briefly visible as it absorbed the brunt of the impact. I grinned as I took the turn without a problem. Another hit like that, and he’d…
He’d…be dead.
My focus shattered like glass. I was suddenly aware not merely of my immediate surroundings—the cockpit, my sweaty hands on the controls, Chet breathing heavily in the copilot seat, the beeping proximity sensor—but the battlefield as a whole. Falling rock, crumbling buildings, hanging acclivity stone chunks.
It wasn’t just a series of obstacles anymore. It was a death trap. And this wasn’t some contest to see how good I was.
My stunned recovery took a moment, during which we came dangerously close to hitting a piece of a falling building.
“Spensa?” M-Bot said. “The rest of the fighting has paused. Most of the ships on both sides have been locked up, but there are fifteen remaining functional fighters on the enemy side, while our side has twelve, including Gremm and Peg. But everyone has agreed to a cessation for now, as the battlefield is too dangerous. They want to make sure everyone locked up gets pulled out to safety before resuming.”