As if it wasn’t dicey already.

  My stomach lodged in my throat as Matt threw the ship into a punishing dive, plunging back down toward Portus. While the orbital assault ships held back instead of chasing us, the drones did their best to remain tight on our six, fearlessly matching the suicidal dive.

  “Tighten your stomach muscles,” Matt ordered, prepping us for even heavier Gs. He banked again, the turn tighter than before while pulling back on the stick and cutting the throttle. Head Case’s superstructure groaned, rattled and popped, the entire ship shuddering as it struggled to meet Matt’s demands. Keeping my stomach tight to force blood back up into my brain, I white-knuckled the co-pilot seat, hoping I would make it out of this maneuver without losing my lunch. And without blacking out.

  Nevertheless, as the city loomed in the forward viewport, a black ring closed in on my vision. The tallest spires seemed so close, I felt like I could reach out to touch them as we swung in a tight arc around two of the supertall towers. Making a one-eighty, with the buildings as our anchor, our altitude dwindled to a mere two hundred feet. Finally, we came about along one of the wide avenues, parallel to the ground and still moving way too fast. The sensor grid showed the drones refused to risk the maneuver. They shot past overhead, making a gentler, safer turn that took them deeper into the city.

  The tunnel leading to the spaceport garage sprang up suddenly like a sandworm, its black maw ready to swallow us whole. I cringed, anticipating the jarring crunch of metal as we slammed into its rim. Levi concurred, triggering both collision and velocity warnings that echoed across the flight deck. I tensed even more, pressing myself back in my seat as we closed on the black hole. There was no way Head Case would fit, and if it did, there would be only inches to spare. I could only hope the sensors were accurate. Any robot-horses or carriages coming up from the garage would be crushed.

  At what seemed like the absolute last second, Matt spun Head Case fully around, punching the mains back to full blast as our thrust reversed. We entered the tunnel backwards! Shields sparked as we knifed through the narrow opening, skipping off the walls without creating a full-scale impact.

  "Hell yeah, nice flying!" Tyler whooped. The lights of the underground garage blurred past us. The few seconds it took to slow enough to land felt like hours, until Matt extended the landing skids, which dug into the asphalt, leaving us skidding to a final, grateful stop.

  That Matt had calculated the entire descent ahead of time left me in awe. That he’d enacted his flight path without crashing awed me further still. He didn’t need a boon from the Warden. He was already the best damn pilot I’d ever seen, video game or otherwise.

  “All right, Captain,” Matt said, voice calm as if we’d just finished a ride on a lazy river. “We’re down safe, but we're not out of this yet. You’re up.”

  “Are you trying to make me hurl before I can activate the sigils?” Ben replied.

  “Did it work?”

  “Almost. You have two minutes to get off this ride. I left the RFD mag-locked to the command station. Don’t leave home without it.”

  “Copy that. We’re on our way out the door. Hopefully, those drones won’t have the programming to try to fly into the tunnel.”

  “Hopefully, they think we crashed and burned,” Tyler said.

  Matt jumped out of the pilot seat. “Katzuo, let’s move. Red, you need to ditch the combat armor.”

  “Figured as much,” she replied, already working on removing the bulkier outer layer. A week ago, she would have been red-faced and stiff as starch to strip down to her underlay in front of us, especially Matt. Now it seemed second-nature.

  “What about protection, Boss?” Tyler asked.

  “I stowed your sidearms in the Hunter’s foot storage locker,” Matt answered. “We’ll grab them on the way out.”

  “Copy that.”

  I stood on shaky legs, exhausted from the physical and emotional roller-coaster of the last hour. Matt didn’t give me a chance to recover at all.

  “Leo, you have the flight deck,” he said, pausing momentarily at the command station to grab the RFD before rushing toward the exit, Tyler right behind him.

  “Copy that, Boss,” Leo replied, still in his armor. Ally had finished removing hers and trailed behind Tee, leaving me in their wake. “Better hurry, Noah,” Leo warned.

  I exhaled the last of my exhaustion and rushed after them, barely slipping through the flight deck doors before they slid closed.

  We’d made it back to the ground, but we were far from out of the woods.

  CHAPTER 4

  We hurried down to the hangar, the tension in my stomach growing with each step. So much had happened in such a short time I expected to be hit with a nervous breakdown at any moment. Only the embarrassment of collapsing into a mumbling heap on the deck held insanity in check.

  Matt led the way, with determination in each stride. Ally looked uneasy but resolute, while Tee seemed downright giddy. I envied his apparent eagerness to jump back into the fray.

  We circled the Hunter's hulking form where it remained kneeling on the deck. Matt popped a hidden compartment on the mech's left shin. He withdrew our sidearms from padded racks within, passing them out.

  "Here. Let's hope we don't need to use these."

  I accepted my pistol with reluctant familiarity, checking its charge level before securing the holster around my right leg. The others did the same.

  "Ready to do this?" Matt asked, meeting each of our eyes in turn as we voiced confirmation. "All right then. Stay together. Here we go."

  He tapped the control to open the smaller hangar door. It whisked aside, revealing the torches aligned on either side of the tunnel. Some of them were missing, ripped off their moorings by Head Case’s tight fit. I mused at the idea of the Cacitrum government trying to send Ben a bill while the ramp extended to the asphalt, which also showed plenty of damage from our crash-landing. We hurried down to the pavement. Immediately, the ramp retracted, the door sealing shut behind us.

  We gathered around Matt as he activated the RFD, tapping its touchscreen a few times to give us a camera feed from Deck Five. "There's Ben," he said.

  We all leaned in closer to get a better look. Ben stood with his arms raised atop an ornate circular platform etched with sigils, its outer perimeter lined by dozens of monitors that appeared to offer a three-hundred-sixty-degree view out of the ship. Intense golden light from the sigils on the platform outlined his body, casting his determined features in sharp relief. At the front of the deck, Ixy hovered on her web, legs shifting from one strand to another and playing it as if it were a violin. The notes she produced flooded the immediate area with ethereal music, alien yet strangely familiar.

  “Matt, are you clear?” Meg asked over the comms.

  “We’re clear,” he replied. “Let her rip.”

  Meg nodded to Ben, who nodded back, mouthing something before slowly lowering his hands. The glow of the platform intensified, and the ship quickly began compressing in on itself.

  "Wow, look at her shrink!" Ally gaped as Head Case dwindled. Within seconds she had diminished to the size of a golf ball, though everything looked the same through the feed from Deck Five. With an intricate flourish, Ixy went still, her web reverberating for a moment before falling silent. Ben’s hands finished their arc, and the glow of the sigibellum faded away.

  Matt crossed the intervening distance in a few long strides and snatched the toy-sized ship out of midair. Peering over his shoulder, I noted tiny winking lights within the hangar, all systems operational despite the radical downsizing.

  “All systems are nominal,” Meg reported. The way she squeaked like a mouse through the comms reminded me of Tyler’s earlier joke. “Everything held up well, and the reactor is in good shape. I don’t anticipate any problems reversing the process.”

  “Ben, are you okay?” Matt asked.

  Ben remained standing in the center of the sigibellum. A sheen of sweat glistened off his exposed skin, and his shirt looked like it was soaked through. But he nodded. “I need to rest, but at least I’m still conscious.”

  ‘We’ll take it from here,” Matt said, gently tucking the tiny starship within an inner pocket of his long coat. His attention shifted down the tunnel to where the torches along the route were flickering on, indicating someone was on their way up from the spaceport. “Perfect timing. Block the road.” He pulled his blaster and moved to the center of the roadway. Ally joined him on the right while Tyler and I blocked the left side. The hum of drones passing overhead echoed down the tunnel from the surface.

  We didn’t wait long for the carriage to arrive. The robot driver shouted for us to move aside, relenting when Matt put an energy blast into the seat beside it. Finding no path around us, the driver brought the carriage to a stop before it hit Matt.

  "Um, hi?" Tyler pointed his rocket fist at the robot driver. It regarded us passively, awaiting direction. Why should it care that we were hijacking it?

  "Up you go," Matt directed as he bodily lifted Ally into the cabin. She flushed but didn’t protest. Tyler scrambled up behind her. I boarded last, pausing at the doorway to hunt for a spot. The carriage wasn’t empty. A pair of aliens resembling humans, only hairless with bony protrusions on their heads and arms, sat on the opposite bench from Tee and Ally, their arms around one another, the woman’s leg draping the man’s. Her lipstick was thick on his lips and face.

  “Uh, sorry to interrupt,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true. “We just need a ride downtown. Tee, shove over.”

  The amorous couple stared at us but didn’t speak, tempered by Alyssa’s blaster pointed at them.

  "Halt!"

  No sooner had I squished in beside Tee than I shoved my head out of the open door, looking toward the shout. A dozen black and white police bots had entered the tunnel, rifles swinging toward us. Matt skipped the carriage, disappearing overhead to join the driver up top.

  "Hiya!" I heard him shout. The robo-horse snorted and charged forward, veering up the access tunnel toward the bots.

  “Obstacle detected,” our robot driver said. “Avoidance impossible. Whoa!”

  The robot-horse responded to the driver, slowing to stop for the police bots.

  “A little help,” Matt called down to us.

  “I’ve got this,” Tyler said, shifting from the center of the seat to join the couple on the other side. “Hiiii,” he said to them with his mischievous grin. “Want to see something cool?” He held up his hand, which transformed from flesh and blood to heavy metal within a couple of seconds. It was actually very cool to watch.

  The woman didn’t think so. She shrieked softly, pushing herself further onto the man’s lap, their arms going around each other. Tee chuckled at them as he pushed the door open and, clinging to the carriage by his left hand, leaned out of the open door. “Rocket punch!” He shouted.

  I watched his right fist launch and curve into the police bot blocking our path. The impact knocked the bot sideways into the one beside it. Both machines tumbled to the pavement, opening the lane up for our carriage.

  “Obstacle removed,” our driver said. “Hiya!”

  We stampeded past the other police bots, and I nearly took Tyler’s fist on the chin as it flew back through my open door on its way back to Tee. He held his wrist out just in time for the appendage to snap, whirr and twirl back in place.

  “What are you?” The man in the back with us asked.

  “I’m freaking awesome, that’s what I am,” Tee replied, still grinning.

  I peered past the couple through the tiny rear window, watching wide eyed as a couple of lucky shots from the police bots narrowly missed our carriage. We blew out of the tunnel and merged with other traffic before the drones could circle back around. I held my breath until they shot overhead once more, failing to recognize us among the rest of the herd.

  I blew out a tense breath and let my head fall back against the upholstered seat. "That was too close. It’d be nice if we could catch a break now and then.”

  “I don’t think that’s how this works,” Tyler mused. “We probably need to level up for the difficulty to seem more balanced.”

  "Or maybe this galaxy just sucks." Alyssa slumped in her seat, looking sick.

  “You three okay down there?” Matt called out.

  “We’re fine,” I replied.

  “Fine?” Tee said. “Are you kidding? Did you see what I did back there? Maybe the Warden isn’t such a bad guy after all.”

  “He’s trying to kill us,” I reminded him.

  “Yeeeaaahhh…but that’s only right now, and if his efforts fail, he might give us another boon for defeating the attempt and being entertaining as hell.”

  “You’re enjoying this a little too much.”

  “So sue me. Remember whose idea it was to go to the farm.”

  Our attention shifted back to Alyssa when she opened the door and upchucked, spilling her guts all over the road. I turned away, settling back and closing my eyes, fighting my own rising nausea.

  “I think we lost them,” Matt said, climbing down to the carriage on my side just in time to witness Ally heaving up the tail-end of her stomach contents. “Hello,” he greeted the two aliens opposite us. “You don’t happen to have a handkerchief or a tissue, do you?”

  The woman picked up her purse, opened it, and retrieved an embroidered cloth, holding it out to him.

  “Not me,” Matt said, pointing to Ally.

  When the alien woman held the cloth out to her, she glanced at Matt before swiping it and sitting back down as she closed the door and turned away from us, looking like she might die of embarrassment.

  Matt wisely ignored her. “Once we get downtown, we’ll hop off where the action is and blend in with the other tourists. As long as we keep our heads down, we should be able to avoid attention.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  The drones passed overhead a few more times before we reached the city. The carriage turned onto a wider thoroughfare teeming with activity. Everything moved sluggishly, impeded by heavy foot and carriage traffic. When we stopped in the middle of the jam, Matt motioned for us to disembark, hopping off first.

  “Sorry again for the interruption,” I said to the couple before joining him.

  “You may now resume your regularly scheduled sexual activity,” Tyler added, bouncing his eyebrows at the pair before hopping off.

  “You’re impossible,” Ally said, climbing down behind him.

  “If I’m going to die, I might as well die amusing myself,” he responded.

  “This way,” Matt said, leading us deeper into the crowds. It wasn’t long before I was openly gawking in response to the sheer variety of beings crowding the area. Even after witnessing the diversity at the spaceport, the sheer number of distinct ILFs openly roaming the Portus streets amazed me.

  "I wish I had my phone so I could start a compendium,” Tyler commented, likewise drinking in the sights. He spread his hands ahead of him like a banner. “Fantastic ILFs and Where to Find Them.” He recoiled suddenly from the stomach-churning scents wafting from a row of restaurants. The smells reminded me of gym socks, wet dog, and garlic combined.

  My amusement faded when Matt led us directly toward a black and white robot officer standing at one of the street corners.

  CHAPTER 5

  My pulse started racing as Matt approached the police bot. What the hell was he thinking? I placed my hand on top of my sidearm, just in case.

  “Excuse me, officer,” he said to the bot, whose oblong, featureless head swiveled in his direction.

  “The Warden’s greetings to you, visitor,” it replied. “How may I be of service?”

  “Can you provide directions to the nearest pawn shop?"

  LEDs flashed across the robot officer’s forehead to indicate it was processing the request. Then it extended a hand toward a narrow side street between two high towers. “You will remain on that street for the next twelve blocks. Then you will turn left. You will locate a brokerage two blocks down on the right.”

  Matt grinned engagingly. “Thanks for the assist!” He guided us in the direction it had pointed.

  “Why are we looking for a pawn shop, of all things?” I wondered aloud.

  “Because we’re broke, which isn’t conducive to success. I plan to exchange my blaster for whatever passes for cash around here.“

  “I hope they take guns,” Tyler said. “Because I’m not giving up the rocket fist for anything.”

  I laughed despite feeling uneasy. Bartering weapons for money seemed like an unnecessary risk given our already precarious situation. But Matt likely knew what he was doing. I had to trust his experience and expertise to see us through.

  With the crowds, it took us nearly thirty minutes to make the trek across town. We wound up on a decidedly less beaten path outside the normal range of average tourists and in the domain of visitors seeking a greater level of vice. The pawn shop we were seeking occupied a storefront at the base of what appeared to be an abandoned apartment building. It was sandwiched between a small casino and a windowless steel face with a holographic sign advertising it as Warexia’s Finest.

  “Finest what?” Ally asked, casting a sidelong glare at the bright hologram.

  “I doubt anything in this neighborhood is the finest of anything,” I replied.

  “Come on, Red,” Tyler said. “You should know what no windows means.”

  “Gross. Maybe it’s different in another galaxy.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I’ll take care of the transaction,” Matt said. "You guys hang tight out here."