Once there, we snuck around, relieved to find no one present. It wasn’t surprising as the Kryptids had no plans of flying the ship anytime soon. Although maintenance was performed on a regular basis, it didn’t require a permanent staff assigned to it.
Taking the lift up, we stopped right inside the bridge. I made a beeline towards the navigation board while my companions secured the room. They made quick work of locking all accesses in case anyone attempted to stop us before the drugs had taken full effect.
Holding off on firing the engines, I reconfigured the ship’s stealth shield signature using one of the advanced algorithms of the Vanguard. However, if decrypted, that specific one would not put our troops in jeopardy. Shuria jumped on the Science Officer’s station to start uploading a series of subroutines that would help her block any hacking attempts from the General’s minions to regain control of the Queen’s ship. Varnog busied himself powering up our weapons and transferring the power from those we wouldn’t use to our defense shields.
A quick glance at the time indicated we were already twelve minutes late on our ideal schedule. By now, the rebels had already evacuated the base and were headed to our rendezvous point off-planet with Reaper and the rest of our support unit. Although they were no doubt worried, we had accounted for a thirty-minute buffer during which they would wait for us as unexpected delays were likely. If they were currently safe, they would wait for us for another eighteen minutes.
Should we fail to communicate with them by then, they would assume our mission a failure and head directly to our safe base. The psychic dampening field all around the Palace prevented us from reaching them beyond its walls. Assuming all went well in the next few minutes, we would let them know we were on our way as soon as we’d taken off.
“Everyone ready?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied both my companions.
“We need to move,” Shuria said in a tense voice. “Judging by the feed of the surveillance cameras outside the Queen’s Quarters, the guards barring its access have noticed something’s wrong. Right now, they seem to think there’s merely a door malfunction, but it’s only a matter of minutes before they raise the alarm. Get us off now.”
She didn’t need to ask twice. I fired up the engines while she activated the emergency opening of the launch ramp of the Queen’s vessel. As soon as she did, an internal alarm blared, which the Mimic quickly silenced. Thankfully, they had constructed the system in a way to only alert the people within the Queen’s Quarters that the ship was leaving. It didn’t alert the rest of the Palace as it was meant to provide an escape in case of a massive invasion. It would only give us a very short window, aided by the dampening field which would prevent quick communication between the Kryptids.
To my pleasant surprise, the ship didn’t struggle to uproot itself from its mooring. Who knew how long it had been sitting in this position? Thankfully, it shot straight out, gaining speed much faster than I had anticipated—which suited me just fine. The entire district seemed to hold its breath for a few seconds before all hell broke loose. In a creepy dejà vu, Bombardier Beetles started coming out of the woodwork.
To my relief, they didn’t attempt to shoot us down with their lightning bolts. Instead, they did something I had never seen before, and that utterly freaked me out. They couldn’t see us, or at least so I presumed thanks to our stealth shield. Those strange horns on top of their heads sparked with electricity like they had in the Dream Walk training I had performed with Varnog. However, they didn’t electrify the light projectile that had grown from their backs in the simulation. This time, lightning beams flowed from each horn towards the next Beetle on either side of them. Their beams connected until they formed a complete circle on a large radius around the Queen’s Palace District.
My stomach dropped, and a sense of dread washed over me as I realized what was about to happen.
“ALL POWER TO SHIELDS!” I shouted to both my companions, knowing that we would never clear the blast radius before the Beetles activated it.
Tilting the vessel up, I weaved my way around the connecting bridges to gain as much altitude as possible. But within seconds, a blinding light rose from the ground, electric sparks filling the blast radius and racing after us like a hungry swarm. If it hit us—or rather when it did—should the shield not hold, the EMP blast would fry our systems, and we would drop helplessly to the ground.
They naturally didn’t want to kill the Queen—in this instance two Queens. Should we lose both our navigation and propulsion systems, the liveship would automatically deploy wing-like sails to glide down to the surface. Either way, this meant we’d be fucked.
The blast struck the rear of the vessel. It savagely battered our shields. For a moment, I held my breath as the numbers plummeted, wondering if they would collapse altogether. When they slowed down around 20%, blinked for a few seconds, and then began climbing a little, I could have wept in relief. But we would not survive a second hit. My only hope was that, like with a standard EMP system, the creatures would require a bit of time to recharge their ability. This blast had clearly taken far more from them than when they merely electrified light spheres.
Sadly, the electromagnetic pulse hitting us had for sure revealed our position by creating a visual disruption. Even though our stealth shield had held, the enemy had a general idea of where we were, and they made the most of it. A series of hatches opened all over the city, some in the towers of the buildings, others directly in the ground as if the Queen’s Palace District had suddenly been punctured full of holes. Every single one of them regurgitated an endless flow of what I had dreaded the most. A throng of Spitters swarmed the area, darkening the sky.
I had already dived down and veered right back towards the Palace instead of up and away as they no doubt expected someone attempting to flee would. The Spitters not only rushed towards the general location where I had been and where they assumed I’d be heading, they also began spitting the virulent acid for which they were well known and that had earned them their name. Their goal was to reveal the Queen’s ship, even if it meant crashing into it in a suicide mission.
These Spitters were tiny organic vessels even smaller than the Firefly we had flown here in. Grown from organic tissue and enhanced with Bombardier Beetle DNA, those two-men vessels were able to spit a fiery acid over a fifty-meter range. They weren’t particularly hard to defeat but did an insane amount of damage when attacking in large numbers. Their incredibly high speed made them a nightmare to shoot down, and their basic artificial intelligence allowed them to fly unmanned to execute simple orders.
Our only hope of making it out of here was for me to somehow manage to weave a path out and around the District in the opposite direction from our initial plan.
“Contact Lekla and Reaper,” I said in a tensed voice. “Tell them to go. If we manage to make it out, we might be coming in hot and cannot risk exposing the others.”
“Understood,” Shuria said.
“Are there any other smaller vessels within the ship,” Varnog asked, his fingers flying over the control panel, shutting down all non-essential systems to boost our shields.
“Yes, but not one powerful enough to leave the planet, and not one with warp capability,” Shuria said. “This is do or die.”