Several long, nerve-wracking moments went by before Minna let out an excited 'Got it!', and the side of the shuttle slid open. She dashed into the shuttle and slipped into one of the chairs at the front. I was able to get enough of a view of the inside of the shuttle to notice there were only four passenger chairs behind the pilot seat.
I hoped that wouldn't be a problem for whoever ended up having to stand up.
Minna looked over the controls while the rest of the Kymari ran inside. She frowned and looked over her shoulder, glancing from one guard to the next, then nodded when she saw they were all inside. She tapped one of the controls and the side of the shuttle slid closed... then a second later lights came on inside the shuttle, followed by a hissing sound that began echoing around us.
"We have air now, but I need a minute to figure these controls out. This doesn't look like I expected it to." She reached for the bracelet at her arm and tapped part of it, causing the shimmering field to vanish around her. "Kilpin, can you hold Nate for me? I'll need my hands free, and I don't think I have time to untangle him right now."
She passed the handle to the older guard. He took the baton and kept his hands well away from the net, letting me dangle aimlessly in the air... for which I was actually grateful. I was not happy about being trapped and tangled up in the net, and my instincts were urging me to lash out at anything I could sink my claws into. I didn't want to think about a stranger touching me with how worked up I was becoming, even somebody I was more or less used to. Even if they were trying to help me.
The horrid chemical scent was finally gone, though. Or at least, it was incredibly faint now. That was at least one upside to the situation. The numbness was also starting to wear off now that I wasn't constantly bumping into that energy field. I began to get feeling back in my legs and wings, and I squirmed enough to get my head between the strands of the net. It took a few more wiggles and squirms before I managed to get my mouth around one of the strings, and then I began gnawing on it.
It didn't accomplish anything, but it made me feel a lot better.
Ivy's voice returned before I had made any headway on the netting. Worry was obvious in her tone. "The Kymari are talking about firing on the freighter! It's making a break for it; they don't want to risk hurting you but they don't want to risk them getting away while you're still on board. I'm not sure how much longer Trenil will be able to delay them. Have you made it off the ship yet?"
I grimaced at Ivy's warning. "We found an alien shuttle; ours was too far away. Minna's trying to get it started now." I spun in the net to try and get a better look at Minna. She was still studying the controls. From the frown on her face, I didn't think she was having much luck. "It's not going well. I don't think she understands which controls are what."
Minna glanced away from the controls to look back at Morton. "Any change on the jamming?" The Kymari fiddled with his wrist for a moment while Minna watched with a hopeful expression, but he finally shook his head. Minna grimaced and looked back at the controls again.
"What type of shuttle is it? Can you show me what the controls look like?"
"Minna used the word 'Kergarian', if that means anything." I sent Ivy my memory of the outside view of the shuttle, then sent her my view of the controls.
She was quiet for a second before she responded in a voice full of suspicion. "...Nate, why is everything upside down?"
I sighed and gnawed harder at the ropes causing me to dangle limply in the air. "Can we talk about that later? Kind of in the middle of something here."
"Right." Ivy's tone went back to one of seriousness and worry. "I passed that on to Trenil. He's trying to find something; I'll let you know if he does."
The mindlink went quiet.
I watched as Minna continued studying the controls. The entire shuttle was quiet. I could tell the other Kymari were all nervous by the posture of their bodies - well, except for Minna's father - but none of them said anything. I was quiet too, even as I kept gnawing on the net. Nobody wanted to distract Minna.
She reached towards one of the controls and hovered over it. I heard her mumbling and tried to perk my ear tufts to make out her words. "This would... no, wait, it would be over here, wouldn't it?" She hesitated, then reached to the other side of the console and tapped a similar button.
The lights inside the shuttle went dark.
"Oops. That wasn't right." Minna flinched and immediately tapped the control again. The lights came back on, and she stared at the controls again.
One of the younger guards closed his eyes and brought his hand up to rub at his head. He mumbled to himself, and I thought I caught something about 'bring your children to work day'. The other guards all looked at him with frowns of varying degrees of disapproval. The look from Minna's father was the most severe. "She will get it. She's good at this."
I noticed Minna flinch ever so slightly and frowned. She was worried - something about the controls was confusing her, and she wasn't sure what they meant.
"Anything?" I reached back out to Ivy.
"Maybe. Trenil can't find an exact match for those controls; he thinks the aliens must have modified it away from the standard designs. Probably stuff to help them with smuggling. He thinks he found the base layout though; see if this helps."
Ivy sent me an image of a Kymari laptop screen. The black-and-white sketch on it looked vaguely like the controls at the front of the ship, but there were a few things on the drawing that this shuttle didn't have, and there were a lot of extra controls that didn't show up on the picture.
Strange symbols covered the image, with lines drawn to the various controls. I had no idea what they meant, and hoped I wouldn't garble them. It was simple enough to send an image of something I was seeing through the mindlink, even if I didn't know what it meant, or even a picture of a few symbols like the ones Ivy had relayed to me months back. But sending a memory of so many words I couldn't understand, especially of words I had never seen myself... that could get iffy.
Like a horrible game of telephone, where a message was passed from person to person and had become something completely different by the time it got to the end.
I tried to burn the complicated image into my head for a few more seconds, doing my best to make sure the strange symbols would look the same as they had when I had received them, then I sent the image to Minna.
Minna stopped moving in the middle of reaching for a control. Her face was pointed away from me so I couldn't make out her expression, but she had stiffened slightly in the chair.
That at least meant the image had reached her. Whether or not it helped...
She stayed still like that for a few more seconds, then she began moving. "This shuttle has a lot of modifications. I think it has a cloaking field, and it may even have weapons." She reached towards the center of the console and began tapping at the controls with sudden confidence.
The sound of an engine powering up began to hum through the shuttle. The guard that had muttered earlier seemed surprised, and Minna's father gained a hint of pride in his expression, but all of the Kymari relaxed.
"They're shooting! Nate, you have to get off the ship now!!" Ivy's voice was full of panic.
"Who's shooting?!" It didn't feel like anything was happening. If the Kymari had started shooting the freighter, we would probably feel something, even through the shuttle... wouldn't we?
"The freighter! It has weapons to fight off pirates! They're shooting at us! The Kymari are about to fire ba-"
I lost track of what Ivy was saying as everything shuddered violently around us.
"It is time for us to go." Minna's father spoke with a calmness that somehow conveyed more urgency than a panicked tone would have done.
"The engine needs some time to warm up before we can get much power out of it." Minna tapped some more buttons.
The shuttle shook again.
"We don't have much time. Some power is better than staying here."
"Agreed. Hold on." Minna fastened the chair's straps around her while the other Kymari hurriedly followed. Minna's father had passed on a chair, and he moved to stand near the back of the shuttle before bracing himself against a wall.
Minna began tapping more controls. The shuttle shuddered, and through the view in the front I saw it begin to slowly rise off the floor of the docking bay. Things began flashing on the console as the shuttle turned and began to move towards open space, and I caught sight of a frown on the side of Minna's face I could see. "Wait, that's not right..."
A sudden pressure pushed me backwards, and I fell against Kilpin. The shuttle accelerated and shot into space. Through the window at the front I could make out glimpses of the freighter, along with the two Kymari ships in the distance.
Hundreds of bright lights were zipping between the three ships. Weapons fire.
A bright beam of light stabbed out from one of the Kymari vessels and dug into the freighter, impacting an area near the extreme edge. The image of that brilliant beam of light burning through the sky and vaporizing the distant ruins of a city flashed into my memory. I shivered and tried to pull away from it just on instinct.
"Ivy, we just left the freighter. I don't know what happened to the pilot who flew us to it, but the rest of us are clear."
"Got it. Trenil's trying to find your tracker; he'll let the other Kymari know you're clear."
The shuttle continued to fly onwards as the weapons continued to fill the space around us. I started to relax until Minna began punching furiously at the controls. "I don't have control! A lot of systems just came on all by themselves when I started the launch sequence."
Minna's father tried to move towards the front of the shuttle, but there was still a lot of force pushing us towards the back. "What kind of systems?"
Minna paused long enough to study a screen off to the side of the console. "It looks like some kind of autopilot that wants to take us down to the planet. The cloak is definitely on; the gravity systems are trying to work but there's just not enough power getting to them yet. There's a targeting system that's scanning everything around us but I don't think we're firing at anybody. I'm not even sure what kind of weapons this shuttle would have."
"Nothing heavy enough to punch through the armor on our ships. Don't worry about that." Her father turned back towards Morton. "Are we past the jamming?"
Morton had already been tapping at the controls on his wrist. He shook his head and kept tapping them.
"I think the cloaking field is acting as a jammer. I don't know if we'll be able to communicate as long as that's running." Minna started punching at the console again. Nothing seemed to happen, aside from more lights on the console flashing on.
The view outside the window spun and we were all pushed towards one side as the shuttle banked. It took it a second to settle, and when it did I saw the Earth hovering before us. We were still over the night side, but the planet seemed to have a soft glow about it even still. The clouds, the oceans, the continents... all of them gleamed before us.
It was beautiful.
"Minna..." There was a note of concern in the voice of Minna's father.
"I see it! It's not letting me do anything..." Minna began to pound on the console in frustration. I looked away from the sight of Earth to see what the Kymari were worried about, and saw a stream of weapon fire shooting up from the freighter. It was a rapid series of short blasts of energy, climbing up from the freighter and arcing towards one of the Kymari vessels. I wasn't sure that it was accomplishing much - the Kymari ship seemed to be doing just fine, from what I could tell - but it still looked incredibly dangerous.
And our shuttle seemed to be flying right towards it.
Minna continued hammering various controls as we barreled towards it... then she shook her head. "I can't stop us! Brace positions!"
The Kymari gripped their seats and shifted to a position I recognized from the many times a flight attendant had demonstrated on an airplane trip. Kilpin grabbed me and curled around me, shielding me with his body. I started to hiss at being grabbed by him... then a loud noise went through the entire shuttle.
Lightning seemed to race through the walls of the ship, arcing around and zapping anything it could reach. Scorch marks appeared wherever the electricity struck. The view through the window jerked and began to spin, and my stomach lurched as I felt the world spin violently.
I had the briefest half-second to notice scorch marks appearing on the walls of the shuttle, and saw one of the guards jerk and slump in his seat as the electricity zapped him... then a jolt of searing white-hot pain went through me.
A roaring sound filled my ears as everything went white.
I struggled for the briefest of seconds to fight back against it... but my body simply couldn't handle whatever had just happened to it. The searing white pain faded as everything went black.