Page 16 of Thruster (Hunted Relics #9)
“What are you doing? Are you haywire?” I shout at Holo. “You just launched her in an untested pod!”
“She’s safer in that than she is with us! Go distract them!” Holo tightens his straps, and I know what he’s planning.
“No. No! You’re not going on a suicide mission!” I say, clinging to a nearby truss as wind tears through the ship.
“There’s only one way to take down a ship like that,” he says like he knows what it is. I don’t.
“Enlighten me.”
"That's a Poison Arrow." Holo fires with the remaining gun at the passing vessel. It's an evil-looking Solcruean fighter. "They were building them back when I was a BloodCypher with Diesel. We thought we destroyed all of them! Clearly, we didn't!"
So this is a suicide mission out of guilt. “I’m not letting you go down alone because of some missed target.”
“If we hadn’t missed one, it wouldn’t be here now, ripping us to shreds!”
“You don’t know that. They could’ve made more!”
A plume of fire scorches the nose of our ship from a frontal assault that plinks down the port side and stops. Holo draws a gun and looks back at me with shining, pained eyes. "I'm sorry, Thruster. This is a debt only I can pay."
Holo fires at me. The punch from his gun throws me out of the hole in the ship.
"Holo!" My engines ignite on instinct. I reverse my course toward him.
He chases Poison Arrow, which banks for him in a game of what I think Kelta called Chicken. I redline after him, check on Kelta to see her crashing into the desert tumbleweeds, then punch through the cabin, break Holo’s seat free of its mounts, and launch us through the ship. It blooms in a fiery cloud as we slam into a hillside.
I scramble to check on my friend. He isn’t built quite like me, and I fear I have damaged him immensely. “Holo?”
He groans and sits up in the hole. “Why, Thruster?”
“Because I can’t stand losing another Brother to these bastards. Nothing any of us did or didn’t do was because we didn’t try. The Solcrue put us in this bind. We are too few, so if there is a way out, take it. Survive. Get revenge later.”
Holo is significantly damaged. I can see it in the way he moves and hear the pain in his tight breaths. “Go get her before they do.”
I sigh, feeling like Holo doesn’t want to live and there’s nothing I can do to change his mind. When I turn to leave, my engines won’t ignite. I shake hard, trying to free them of dirt. One pops and whirs to life in my ankle, but that’s not enough.
Holo climbs out of his harness. “There’s a tunnel close by. We can get to her that way.”
We hustle through the grassy lowlands not far from the brushy edge of the desert to the tunnel. Holo lags, so I slip under his arm and help him. "You have to hit me, knock the dirt and sand out of my engines, so I can fly to Kelta's position. They're choking."
Holo stops near the entrance to the tunnel. He doesn't hesitate as he turns and rears back for a punch. I open every engine and cave to his force. It's a harder hit than I expected. There's fury in his eyes.
He wanted to die.
I took that from him.
I stagger back and feel my engines sputter, trying to restart. "I'm sorry, Brother. I'm not ready to lose another friend. Maybe that's selfish of me."
Holo’s gaze softens, then fills with fear. “Thruster!”
My body lifts off of the ground without my engines. A pulsating rumble hovers behind me. “Holo?”
He grabs my hand and wedges his feet under a boulder. “Hang on, Thruster! I won’t let go!”
I feel everything in my body stretch by the power of some invisible force. Looking up, I find Poison Arrow floating over me, a large metal panel beneath it. “Holo, let me go!”
He catches me in his other hand. “No! You didn’t give up on me. I’m not giving up on you!”
I study the determination on his face and know he's committed. "It's magnetized and many times our size! Either it gets me, or it gets both of us. Let. Me. Go."
Holo strains and cries out as his wrists dislocate.
"Holo—" My ultro races as I glance up at my fate. "It's not going to stop. Please don't destroy yourself for me, or saving you from yourself will have been for nothing."
Holo shakes his head in denial, and I think back to Diesel talking of Holo losing his mind during their BloodCypher stage. Holo was not mentally strong enough for the suit. They inducted him because Diesel needed him to become the machine they needed him to be.
I grab my rifle, fight the magnetic pull, and point it at him. “Save Kelta. Take good care of her.”
Holo grimaces and cries out as his knees and ankles split.
“It’s okay. I’ve had a taste of heaven.” I use the muzzle of my rifle to add a bit of pressure to Holo’s grip, and it finally slips.
I’m promptly sucked up into the sky, where I plant heavily against a magnetic panel. My rifle clangs against the ship’s belly beside me. Holo hugs the boulder and doesn’t join me, for which I’m grateful.
Poison Arrow hovers away from him. I watch the dunes pass and tilt as we bank away from the desert. The planet shrinks, and we head toward the stars. Kelta stands beside her crumpled pod, braids drifting in the breeze of the ship’s engines.
I already miss her wild beauty and the powerful way she touched me. I hang on to the memories as the atmosphere vanishes and the cold darkness of space greets me, for they are my only source of heat up here.