Read The Corsair Uprising #1: The Azure Key Page 10

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  There had been radio silence for thirty minutes as the scout ship began its approach to the planet. The sleek alien vessel trailed them closely, monitoring them the whole way. He wondered how powerful their scanners were and what they’d found out about them. Even most Earth ships had better scanners than their small scout craft. In that moment, the alien technology’s only bounds were the limits of Liam’s imagination.

  A holographic map rose out of Liam’s control panel showing a gridded chart of the planet’s surface. A location blinked in a small yellow dot, growing in size as they approached. Liam turned to Saturn who gazed back, confused.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said.

  “These things can control our ship?” Ju-Long asked.

  The aliens hadn’t adjusted their course for them, leading Liam to believe they couldn’t control all of the ship’s systems. It was still frightening that they could manipulate them as much as they had. Liam took the joystick and moved the ship to the new heading.

  “Saturn, where is that on the surface?”

  Saturn put her hand inside the hologram and spun it toward her, zooming in and examining it closely. “It looks like a spaceport near the water. There are strips of sand on the surface lined with hundreds of vessels.”

  “Why would they take us to the heart of their colony?” Liam asked.

  “They must have scanned us,” Ju-Long replied sarcastically. “Three humans with an inferior ship won’t stand much chance against whatever they’ve got on the surface.”

  He was right. Their weapon systems consisted of low-powered mining lasers that were incapable of penetrating the first vessel’s armor. Their own ship was susceptible to the mining lasers, meaning whatever the aliens had would no doubt be far more effective against them. In the conventional sense of the word, they were hosed.

  They descended into the upper layer of the atmosphere, the air pressure beginning to push against their vessel, heating up the visible exterior portions of the ship until they glowed orange. Gravity began to return to the cockpit, forcing Liam’s feet to hit the floor. He quickly found his seat and strapped in.

  “Ju-Long, take the jump seat by the console,” Liam yelled over the increasing noise in the cabin.

  Ju-Long flipped down a small seat and pulled straps over his shoulders, attaching them to a strap that he secured around his waist. The gravity was increasing now and Liam began to feel the G forces working against him. In a minute, they passed into a lower level of the atmosphere, where Liam leveled out the scout ship, using the increased surface area and backward thrusters to slow their descent. At thirty-thousand meters he noticed a problem.

  A red light flashed on the console along with a warning tone. A holographic image of their ship appeared where the map once was, showing the starboard wing in a flashing red color. The graphic representation of the wing was detailed enough to show individual panels. The panel they’d fixed on the bottom buckled, slowly tearing until it flew off. The heat from their descent was having an effect on the internal wiring in the wing.

  A burst of heat blew the top panel off, revealing a hole in it a half meter wide. The wiring inside the wing was fried and the hole began to widen as they went down. At ten thousand meters the wing was holding on by a single support beam. At five thousand, it snapped, sending them veering off course. Liam turned the joystick hard trying to steady the scout ship. He fired thrusters in the left wing, leveling them out to some extent.

  The ground was fast approaching and the landscape began to come into view. What looked like a vast desert from far away was actually bustling with life. Around the water Liam saw a glut of purple foliage, climbing high into the air. The sky was filled with strange winged creatures neither avian nor reptilian, but something in between.

  A hundred monolithic spires shot out of the ground around the water, metallic and sleek like the alien craft. Apart from a few hills in the distance, the ground was very flat and dry, even cracked in some places. The majority of the population seemed to live in much smaller buildings around the spires, creating in effect a hundred small cities in concentric circles, connected at the edges by an imaginary line.

  Two thousand meters. They could clearly see the spaceport now, several kilometers of hardened sand approaching fast. Liam fired the remaining thrusters to slow their descent, but without the starboard wing they were ineffective in slowing themselves to a safe landing speed. One segment of the landing gear was stored in their right wing. Without it, their landing was going to be bumpy. Without slowing to a safe approach speed, Liam wouldn’t be able to land the craft vertically. Instead, he’d have to try to skid to a stop.

  Five hundred meters. Two hundred fifty. One hundred.

  “Hang on!” Liam shouted over the countless alarms blazing throughout the cockpit.

  Liam pulled up hard, firing the thrusters at full blast, trying to give them a better angle on the descent, but the landing gear was still crushed under the weight of their ship. The nose hit the sand first and skidded along, throwing up dust and dirt over the cockpit windows and obstructing their view. Liam couldn’t see where they were as he tried to keep the vessel straight, though in reality it was far out of his control. They skidded three hundred meters before they came to a halt. When they stopped, the sand trickled off the cockpit’s window and Liam saw they were among a particularly dense conglomeration of starships, each more different than the last in shapes that would baffle most humans. He wondered how some of them even flew.

  The alarms continued to sound as the dust cloud continued to dissipate around them, the cabin still a mess of flashing red light. Liam turned off the console, the holographic images and control lights fading to black. The hum of the ion engine slowed to a halt and the cockpit was left in silence, deafening to Liam’s ears after so much commotion. Liam looked around the cabin and asked, “Is everyone still in one piece?”

  Ju-Long’s legs were shaking and he held onto his restraining straps with white knuckles. “Tā mā de,” he yelled, repeating the Chinese curse softer under his breath as he checked over his body for injuries.

  Saturn breathed heavily, bracing herself on the console. Her forehead was lined with sweat, beads falling down her face and soaking into her grey jumpsuit. She shot Liam an angry look and said, “That’s the last time you drive.”