✅ Project SETI Trilogy

Chapter Two - Part XXX: Last Chance

          Temet was still manually piloting the ship to the best of her abilities, but it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to keep a level head. There were now six smaller Daxut vessels in pursuit, and they were cautiously firing on them in an attempt to incapacitate the ship enough to recapture Temet, Nova and Novala alive. So far, Temet had managed to simultaneously maintain maximum speed and avoid the weapons fire, but she knew she needed to install the energy cell to lose them completely.

          "I won't be able to out-maneuver them for much longer," Temet said shakily. "We—we need to turn around and make landfall."

          "Why, just so they can surround us on the ground instead?" Novala retorted impatiently. "We can't allow them that chance."

          The Daxut clicked her beak several times in a row. "If we stop, we have less than a minute before they surround us."

          Novala growled softly in frustration. "Is that enough time to put this thing in place?" He reached over to the fabric rucksack Temet had loaded the energy cell into and took it out. He held it on his lap and turned it over to inspect the new grooves she'd soldered into it earlier.

          "If—if I pulled the emergency shutdown for the engine, it'll only take ten seconds to stop moving as opposed to forty-ish," Temet replied after giving it a bit of thought, "but then someone would still need to climb down the rings and attach this to the energy core in the innermost ring, then climb back out again..."

          She trailed off when the heads-up display warned her of the next round of incoming weapons fire. She veered off to the left, then violently dipped down several hundred feet, and finally, she swung off to the right.

          "Can you lose them, even a little more? Buy us just that much more time?" Novala asked. Over the sounds of the piloting console and Temet herself, he could hear Nova speaking, and then he heard Gabriel's voice too, and he allowed himself a sigh of relief at that.

          Temet opened her mouth to reply, but all that came out was a near-imperceptible shriek as one of the Daxut vessels in pursuit came at them from the side and shot off three sizable missiles one right after the other. She brought the ship to a sudden halt to avoid them.

          "Damn it," Novala swore. "You need to lose them, now!"

          "I'm fucking trying!" Temet exclaimed.

         "Try harder!"

         She made a sharp turn to the left, and the stormy atmosphere of a gargantuan gaseous planet filled the view of the windowed hull. It glowed in varying shades of sickly olive green, and flashes of lightning could be seen branching through the thick clouds that covered the entire star.

         "I—uh... I think I have an idea," Temet said as she swerved further toward the uninhabitable planet. "If we hit the gravity field of this planet just right... when we kill the engine, it should still propel us a bit further. Then I'll go down to the energy core and slip this on, and I should still have enough time to climb out before they..."

          "Can you hit the gravity field just right...?" Novala cautiously asked. He carefully put the modified energy cell back in the rucksack and looked around the cockpit. He found what he was looking for tucked behind a clear panel labeled 'communicators'.

          Temet hesitated. "I—I think so."

          "Well, it's gonna have to do," Novala stood up and decisively threw the energy cell on his back, then closed the distance between him and the spare communicators in a single bound. He took one out and turned it on, and it paired to the ship by default.