thinking. The bombs falling all around us were a testament to just how wrong she had been. Even though I was running for my life, a quiet sense of defeat tinged with sadness settled deep within me. I was only nineteen. There was so much I wanted to see, so much I still had to do.
No!
I wasn’t going to bow out like this. I needed to fight, not run. But how could I when the enemy were cowardly kilometres above us where our weapons couldn’t touch them?
What we all needed now was a miracle.
5
‘Ready, Aidan?’
‘This is the worst idea in the history of bad ideas.’
‘Aidan, I don’t have time for this. Are you ready?’ I said with impatience.
‘I should be the one to go into the Mazon engine core, not you.’
‘And we both know why you can’t,’ I replied.
He wasn’t happy, but there was nothing either of us could do about that. If I went into the Mazon core, there was a minuscule chance I’d succeed. In there, Aidan stood no chance at all.
A moment’s silence. My brother looked at me, a strange expression on his face. ‘Don’t die, Olivia.’
‘Not part of my plan,’ I tried to assure him. ‘You don’t get rid of me that easily. Think of this as—’
‘Please. Not another film reference failure,’ Aidan begged.
He turned towards the console, but not before I deciphered his expression. He was scared. Actually scared. That shook me. I went over to him and hugged him from behind, around his neck, which he accepted for a couple of seconds before pulling away.
‘Get off. Are you nuts? Oh wait, we’ve already established that you are!’
I smiled, though it didn’t last long. ‘Aidan, if something happens to me, do your best to rescue the people on the planet. OK?’
‘You want me to rescue the ones who’ll have brought about your death?’ he said, aghast.
‘Aidan, this is my choice. My decision. It’s the right thing to do. So promise me you’ll do what you can to save all those on the planet surface.’
‘I promise I’ll try. But that’s all I promise.’ Before I could reply, he added, ‘Vee, on my mark.’
I crouched down, my protection suit in place, the visor of my helmet down. This was insane. The chances of this working were—
‘Three. Two. One.
Mark.
’
A shrill whistle, an intense dragging sensation, and less than a second later I was on the Mazon ship. I had to close my eyes for a moment against the intense, blinding light. Even with my visor down, it felt like my retinas had been seared. I adjusted the light input of my visor to a more comfortable level. The urge to throw up was overpowering. That’s why I hated this kind of transfer, but luckily I’d done it before so I knew what to expect. Even so, my mouth filled with saliva and I had to keep rapidly swallowing or I would’ve puked in my helmet. The heat in the core was almost unbearable, even wearing my protection suit and there wasn’t a thing I could do about that. Sweat was already dripping from my forehead and my skin felt like I was standing inside an erupting volcano.
With no time to waste, I looked around. The engine core of this massive Mazon ship was cylindrical in shape and about four metres in diameter, covering at least four levels, each roughly three metres or a storey high. Each level contained a narrow metal gantry, in the shape of a cross, to get from one side to the other, with what looked like fine metal cargo nets fixed vertically to the walls at regular intervals to allow access from one level to the next. From the look of the gantry I was standing on, it hadn’t been used since the ship was first built. In this core, energy was a tangible thing, stinging my skin in spite of the suit I wore.
Ten.
I scanned the huge engine core all around. I had two more levels above me and one below. And beneath the lowest level was the reactor. Instant death. There wasn’t a protection suit in the universe that could protect me from that if I fell into it.
Nine.
There they were. The core