HAWK

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: CACHE (4/5)

Captain Mack wasted no time in grabbing the thruster and urging it forwards. The ship shuddered and groaned, but it didn't move; it was like it was tied down to the floor. He bunched up his face like an old leather bag.

'C'mon you piece of--'

'Stop!' Kas shouted. 'You're going to damage it!'

'No I'm not...'

The captain continued to tease the throttle forwards as if all the ship needed was a bit more power, but the odd and unhealthy noises bleeding from the walls made it sound like the ship was in pain. Kas looked out of the viewport and saw a growing number of engineers staring right back at her with their mouths wide open.

'Can they see us?' she asked.

'Who?' Mack followed Kas's eyeline out of the ship and saw some of the engineers pointing and shouting. The rest of them had locked eyes cautiously on the ship and were spreading out like it was a wild and dangerous animal. In the distance, Kas saw a blur of movement and realised a panther was sprinting at full pace towards the ship.

And another.

And another.

They were coming from every direction.

'Get out of the chair!' she shouted, and before either of them knew it, Kas had grabbed Captain Mack by his fatigues, lifted him out of the seat and thrust him out of the way.

'Hey!' he complained, but by the time he'd regained his footing Kas was already sitting in his place and wrapping her fingers around the control column.

'Worm, help me out here!' Worm screwed up her face as she scanned the control panel and locked eyes on a glowing square of yellow light on the ceiling directly above Kas's head. She thrust her arm out and pointed to it, and Kas looked up and punched it.

The ship lifted off the ground like a half-inflated balloon, climbing slowly into the air but stopping only twenty feet above the ground. Kas jerked the control column desperately and the ship responded by spinning in a slow circle. The dozen-or-so engineers that had surrounded the ship were blown clean of their feet by the gale of hot wind that was swept across their paths. Most of them flew thirty-feet across the hangar and rolled another twenty - but they were still luckier than the poor few who were knocked down by panthers.

All of the bio-mechs in the hangar - that's well over a hundred - had hurtled towards the fleeing ship like rabid beasts after a kill, and anyone unlucky enough to be caught in their paths was trampled down like crispy autumn leaves. The F-88 was still spinning twenty feet above the ground when the panthers started leaping. They soared upwards and covered the distance with no effort at all... but their landings weren't so easy. Thanks to the angular shape of the craft, the first few panthers struggled to find purchase and swiftly plummeted back down to the ground in a shower of orange sparks. The next few did manage to land on the hull briefly, but the constant spinning quickly cast them out to join the rest. That didn't stop them from trying though. More and more panthers leapt up onto the ship at a faster and faster rate until it was hard to see anything but a mass of silver metal cats swarming all over it. The F-88 had been doing well to stay airborne, but the relentless bombardment of panthers raining down on top of it was gradually working to bring it home.

The engineers watched from afar with their jaws unhooked as the panthers slammed into the floor in a chorus of metal screams, only to get back up and try again.

Inside the ship, Kas was not doing too well. She was huddled uselessly over the F-88's control column keeping it in a spin while Worm did everything she could think of to get the ship fully airborne. Kas didn't want to say it, but it was looking to her as though Swanne's ship was not quite as ready as the chief engineer had let on.

Why didn't we take one of the Wraiths...?

The shower of panthers cascading over the viewport was doing little to calm anyone's nerves. Worm slammed her palm on a random touchpad and a Holo-HUD displaying a model of the F-88 materialised on Kas's right. Nice, but not what she needed. She was losing hope fast when a familiar voice returned like an angel.

'I have finished downloading,' Astrid said. Her voice was no longer coming from the WASP mask but from the walls. 'What's happening?'

'Astrid!' Captain Mack shouted. 'We can't fly this damn ship! Get us out of here!'

'That's because you're not in flight mode. Let go of the controls.'

Kas released the control column and the ship stopped spinning. The panthers found it easier to land and the ship started to lose height more rapidly. Kas was fighting the temptation to grab the control column again when an electric crackling sound reverberated around the ship and made the floor vibrate. When the walls of the cockpit started to stretch, her eyes immediately went to the Holo-HUD and widened.

The ship was transforming in mid-air.

Two slim wings were unfurling from the sides of its body while the tail split open and revealed a lone thruster. Suddenly, it no longer looked like a floating tank but a streamlined racer.

'Oh hell,' Captain Mack said. Kas followed his gaze out of the viewport and saw a single huge silver panther bounding towards the ship from afar.

Kymeira...

Even from several hundred meters away, its green eyes were as bright as supernovas. Governor Swanne was coming for them.

'Get us out of here, Astrid,' Kas said.

The F-88 raised its nose and began soaring upwards. Kas never looked away from Kymeira who had jumped onto the body of a grounded Wraith and started bounding across an entire row of them to give her extra height. The rest of the panthers were still leaping, but now less and less were landing. Soon, the ship was too high for them to reach, and with a gentle tilt of the F-88's wings, the few remaining panthers still clinging to its surface fell away like breadcrumbs. The last one to try was Kymeira, propelling herself from the back of a nearby Wraith with such power that for a moment Kas thought it could fly.

It couldn't.

With scrambling claws, it reached for the F-88 but fell just short. A metal roar filled the air as it fell out of sight.

'Good work, Astrid!' Captain Mack yelled. 'Now get us outta here!'

'Yes, Captain,' Astrid replied. Kas saw the thruster lever move by itself on the control panel as the ship accelerated towards the huge cavity in the ceiling.