“The remaining crews need only make it past those they’ve defeated, without being shot down. This is a feat of piloting alone, so weapons are prohibited. The finish line is the far side of the lake. You will notice, however, a strange song if you… just… listen,” Cybil led the audience, floating on bleacher platforms around him. Quiet overtook them, until a whisper of an operatic note arose from the lake. A long string of slithering light shimmered deep beneath its surface “Ah, what a beautiful sound. An Olympia tradition, the singing dirgesnake. She’s here to take care of those who fall in this challenge. Any crew to reach the other side of the lake with their ship intact receives a bonus.” Cybil gave the defeated a moment to load, cock, and otherwise ready their weapons, before he cried out, “Begin!”
“Take us home, G,” Rey patted the back of his captain’s chair.
She jerked the navigation bars down. The Dreamweaver dropped a few feet under the ram of Daniel’s ship. He zipped ahead, the Terra Eagle quick to follow. Crews of the defeated unleashed a barrage of thermal and force cannon blasts to bar them. It rattled the Reverie lake, from the c
rystal towers down to its rosy waters, but Galia couldn’t afford to look. She had her own onslaught to deal with. A particle missile arced out in a spiral of smoke from the tower closest to them. She flipped the Dreamweaver in an identical spiral, to set it off course. The missile crashed into one of the crystal towers, instead. Its burst of blue smoke brought down a rain of violet shards to the ghostly lake.
“More on our left! I don’t think the crews are all together!” Deidra told her, when she noticed a small contingent taking aim.
“Hang tight! We’re diving!” Galia shouted. The Dreamweaver plummeted under arcs of thermal mortars. Their hot bursts lit the sky orange over them. Galia took them down low enough for the hull to skim the waters. The dirgesnake’s song rose up through the Dreamweaver’s frame and the hairs on its crew’s necks. Galia took them back up, only to be blindsided by a blur of motion. It set the Dreamweaver off course a few feet. “What the hell… is that the Terra Eagle?”
“Sure is!” Rey piped back. Galia shook her head and cocked the helm to the side, to bash them back.
“She fell back just to screw us over?” she said.
“Wait!” Rey called out. He saw something on his weapon’s analysis monitor that Galia couldn’t. “She fell back to block us from enemy fire.”
“What?” Deidra blurted. After everything… she’s still trying to protect me?
“You heard me!” Rey shouted back, “She’s the only thing between us and an absolute firestorm right now.”
“We’ll thank her later,” said Galia, “For now, hold on to your assholes!” She jammed back the throttle.
“G, hol-”
Rey couldn’t say it fast enough. The Dreamweaver’s jets couldn’t flare fast enough. The Terra Eagle was more than a durable ship, but even she couldn’t withstand the slice of a laser long-blade. The Eagle dropped away. Galia turned her head in a slowed distortion of time. She saw Corelia, out on the edge of her crystal tower. She saw the scorching red laser fire over her ship. The Dreamweaver launched ahead at the same time the laser blade sliced down. It screeched ahead across the lake without the back third of it, which had been cloven off. The Dreamweaver’s jet disks and rear cabins plunged to the depths of the dirgesnake. The rest of it skittered back and forth across the air, between heavy blasts from the Hammer. Galia, Rey and Deidra arced ahead and down, for the glowing lake.
“Critical damage sustained!” the Dreamweaver’s AI announced.
“We have any reserve jets left?” Galia screamed back. She clutched the trembling navigation bars, but they wouldn’t obey. They tilted down against their captain’s wishes.
“Analytic systems down!” the Dreamweaver said between siren whines.
“Looks like… five,” Deidra counted with a manual test on a terminal in the back of the bridge.
“It’s enough to make it, if we don’t take another hit,” Galia muttered.
“Unlikely,” said Rey. Galia’s hands loosened around the helm. She breathed deeply the congested, smoky air of the Dreamweaver one last time.
“Sorry old girl,” Galia said, and let go of the navigation bars. “Let’s get to the pods. It’s our only chance to get through this.”
Rey and Deidra followed their captain from the bridge down a twisting network of staircases. Heavy shells ripped through the hull, followed by spurts of fire and sparks. The crew shielded their heads until they reached the very bottom of the Dreamweaver. It let out on a steel grid over eight tubular chutes.
“Jump in and try not to get sick. They’ll deploy automatically,” Galia told Deidra. She nodded. The two stepped off their ledges, down into cushioned tubes. The pressure switched from their feet to their backs as the tubes went horizontal and slid into their escape pods. Galia listened for the third thunk and click. But one of their trio hadn’t jumped.
“Rey!” Galia called back up her chute, “The hell do you think you’re doing?” But, for the second time that day, Rey had seen something she couldn’t. He saw rosy water surge up into the lower end of the sinking Dreamweaver. He saw shells and thermal rays rip through the steel walls around him. Their ship was down, and the Hammer hadn’t relented. They wouldn’t, until the last trace of the Dreamweaver’s crew had been incinerated, escape pods included.
“Captains and their ships and all,” Rey called back down to Galia, “You know how it’s supposed to go down. The Dreamweaver was mine, you know.”
Rey hesitated for a brief moment, contemplating what he was about to do before he bid his captain farewell. “Win this for all of us!”
“Reymond, don’t you da-”
Rey never heard the rest of what Galia had to say. Her pod shot out from the underside of the Dreamweaver, into the waters of the Reverie Lake. Deidra’s was quick to follow. The controls popped out, into their hands.
“It… it rides like a hoverbike…” Galia murmured to Deidra over radio, water streaming down each of her cheeks, “Follow the lights... of the ships... above water. Don’t surface until… we get to the end.” Deidra nodded between sniffles of her own.
“A-a-alright.”