“Then there’s still one left,” said Up, sounding grim.
“And we’re losing power.”
Taz swung herself out of the weapons array and peered
over his shoulder at the controls. He was right. With no
weapons, no shields, no power, the Arrow was failing. Soon
they would be dead in the water – dead in space.
“What do we do?” she said.
“Find a place to land her,” he replied, turning knobs,
testing buttons, trying to give the ship a little more juice.
Taz threw herself at the navigational controls. “We’re
closest to Graali’s fifth moon,” she said. “We’re practically
orbiting it now.”
Up looked over at the screen, and nodded. “We can make
it.”
With a last effort, the Arrow turned toward the moon,
small and orange and still. A sudden explosion rocked the
Arrow once more and Taz, who’d forgotten to belt herself in
again, flew across the cabin to land hard against the ship’s
wall.
Everything began to spin out of control.
It was bright, far too bright, after the constant semi-
darkness of space. Up raised his hand to shield his eyes as
he looked around the wreckage that had once been the
Arrow. He was lying amidst a pile of navigational rubble,
beneath a smashed viewscreen. The Graali system’s sun
streamed through what was left of the jagged glass. And he
was still breathing.
“Guess we have oxygen,” he said, coughing up some
dust. He carefully extracted himself from the remains of the
pilot’s chair and stood up, stretching each muscle in turn.
He was relatively unharmed. He’d been lucky.
“Taz!”
She lay very still, on the other side of the cabin, a shaft