Then M-Bot clipped the side of the hangar doorway as he was steering us out.
“Oops!” he said, and started turning the ship, as if to inspect what he’d done.
“No!” I said. “You’ll slam the tail into the wall. Keep going forward!”
“Right, right,” he said, wobbling the ship as it moved slowly out of the hangar. Directly toward…
“M-Bot!” I said. “Trees!”
“Ah yes. Trees. Hmm…”
We jerked to a halt, then floated upward, then jerked forward again as he moved us over them.
“You know,” he said, “this isn’t going as well as I thought it would.”
“Ya think?” I said, trying to look back at the hangar. “You might want to move faster…”
I couldn’t make out much, but I was pretty sure the blue glow was increasing in the hangar behind us. I could only imagine that Dllllizzzz and Shiver, seeing the awkward flying, had decided I might not be difficult prey.
The ship wobbled as he got us up over the trees.
“M-Bot!” I said.
“Hey,” he snapped, “I think I’m doing pretty well. Didn’t you crash into the mess hall on your first day?”
“A holographic mess hall,” I said.
“Well, I haven’t crashed into any mess halls. Look, I’m a computer program—do you know how hard it is for someone like me to do something that isn’t explicitly in my programming?”
“No.”
“It’s impossible,” M-Bot said. “That’s how hard it is. And I’m doing it anyway.”
“You flew the drone just fine.”
“I borrowed the drone’s hard-coded flight instructions from its rudimentary firmware. I don’t have that anymore!”
A starfighter darted out of the hangar, and another one followed. Two blips appeared on our proximity sensors.
“Oh,” M-Bot said. “They’re going to try to kill us, aren’t they?”
“Yup.”
“You wanna…”
I seized the control sphere and the throttle, then slammed on the overburn, kicking us into some real speed. We blasted away from the fragment with a roar that vibrated the cockpit. It took me by surprise. I’d been fighting in the vacuum of space too much recently; I hoped my atmospheric flight instincts weren’t rusty. Starships were built to minimize the difference, but in a firefight you lived or died based on tiny mistakes.
The thing was, I didn’t want to get into a firefight. Shiver and Dllllizzzz seemed like good people. I was willing to steal one of their ships, but I wasn’t about to shoot them dead. Not unless they forced my hand.
First we’d see if they could keep up.
I swooped across the neighboring fragment—which was flowing with waterfalls that ran over the sides and vanished into infinity. My tails followed and immediately opened fire. Scud. I’d hoped maybe they’d be hesitant to kill me. I fell into evasive zigzags by rote, then dove over the side of the fragment, parallel to the falling water. My stomach tried to crawl out through my esophagus, and a moment later the ship’s GravCaps were overwhelmed and I was slammed by g-forces, and nearly hit a red-out.
I pulled up, gritting my teeth. “These GravCaps are terrible.”
“No surprise there,” M-Bot replied. “Not only is it a civilian craft, it’s so old it’s practically an antique.”
“Your original ship was two hundred years old.”
“And three hundred years ahead of its time,” he said. “This thing was outdated when they made it. It was a fast production-line model made cheaply.”
“Delightful.”
“Indeed!” Shots trailed us. “Um, don’t look at the shield.”
“It’s bad?”
“It’s mostly there to help in minor collisions. It can take maybe two hits from a destructor.” Another shot almost struck us. “Uh…wow. Spensa, is this what it feels like to be freaked out? I think it is what it feels like to be freaked out. Oh, how wonderful! I hate it!”
The destructor fire was blue rather than the red I was used to, but that was probably because it was from a different technological line. I dodged back upward, but one of the shots hit, making the invisible shield around my ship crackle.
The low-shield warning started blinking on the control panel. Yeah, low shields after a single shot? I guess that was what I got for flying a consumer-grade ship. And my top speed in atmosphere appeared to be terrible—the ship was rattling like the caverns did during debris falls.