Red Sky: Chapter 46
I looked down at the control board of the hover. It was a manual drive. I had never driven a manual before, never even been in one. Not in my implanted memories, not in my real ones. I had been so concerned with all of my other preparations, it never occurred to me that I would have to drive the hover myself. I glanced at the open garage door waiting for six angry guards to appear with lances in hand, then back at the controls, my eyes glazing over.
Everything had gone so smoothly after I left Goodwell. I filled up the knapsack with paste. My card activated the garage door and I didn’t even need that card to fire the jets of the hover. But now I was trying to figure out a control board that felt like a calculus problem. There were eleven buttons with different symbols. Plus a lever. I had to fight off the urge to shout my destination into the panel like I would have done back on Earth. Instead, I banged my fist into the side door in frustration. This didn’t solve my problem.
I took another look at the mysterious eleven and started systematically examining them. If the guards could drive one of these things, then I could, too. I found a button with a triangle on it and moved the lever while holding the button down. The hover stayed in place. I tried the button next to the triangle. The hover shifted violently knocking me off-balance. I was making progress. I tried that same button again and was more subtle with the lever this time. The hover started to move backwards. Slowly, I guided it out of its parking space, careful not to collide with its neighbors.
I tested the other buttons. They began to make sense. I was solving the calculus problem, learning the hover’s language, and I was doing it fast enough to beat the guards. Maybe there were implanted memories in my brain where I was an expert hover driver, suddenly I knew what all of those buttons meant.
The hover bolted out of the hanger at top speed, skimming across the surface of the moon with ease. Its nose tilted upwards. The hover rose and kept rising, flying higher than I had ever seen a hover fly, straight into the clouds on a course for the heavens.
The patrol cruiser appeared as if magically birthed from the red tail of one of those clouds. The head emerged with two lasers for eyes. The lasers aimed at my poor little hover. The rest of the nimble cruiser broke from the cloud and maneuvered around my ship with ease using the hover’s clumsiness to trap it against the sky. My heart pounded in fear, that heart which Goodwell said wasn’t mine. The lasers on the cruiser powered up and locked on to its target. I remembered Com’s story of the flytrap and the tractoring. It wouldn’t take much to bring the hover back to the Shoebox. It would take even less to obliterate it. There were no shields to stop the canon blast, one shot and the hover would be pieces of a hover.
The patrol cruiser waited. Maybe it needed to get approval before firing. Maybe the hover could escape before the cruiser made its decision. But it was an unfair race. The hover sprinting at top speed while the cruiser kept up with a light jog. The hover couldn't escape. There would be no escape. It was only a matter of time before those lasers fired.
The red sky lit up as a blast rippled through the clouds, white light flooding my eyes. Heaven would be reached in another way.