Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray

Author:Claudia Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult Fiction / Action & Adventure / General *, Young Adult Fiction / Science Fiction / Space Opera *, Young Adult Fiction / Romance / General *
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2017-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

23

THE BLIND GATE SWIMS IN SPACE BEFORE THEM, A MISTY mirror to nowhere. Noemi knows Abel isn’t wrong about the math, but sometimes probabilities don’t feel like a question of math alone. They’re flinging this ship into the absolute unknown.

Of course, if they do anything else, capture is certain. This is the only choice.

At least the Queen and Charlie couldn’t catch up to them; neither of their ships can be put into overload again. Even knowing this, Noemi’s spent the entire voyage across the Cray system scanning the area around them, over and over, expecting to see an enemy ship at any second.

Now she braces her hands against the ops console as the Daedalus approaches the horizon of the Gate. Noemi feels the bizarre tug of gravity begin and shuts her eyes tight.

We’ll make it or we won’t, she thinks as the forces begin to pull at her. She tries to let go. To accept whatever comes.

When the strange sensations fade, she breathes out a sigh of relief, opens her eyes, and gasps in terror.

Asteroids and debris surround them, even denser than the minefield. And instead of black space, brilliant cloud-like color surrounds them like hallucinogenic fog. There’s too much light, not enough room to move. The ship could be crushed at any moment.

“Shields,” Abel says, but Noemi’s hands are already at the controls. Although the shields have already been raised, she’ll need to shift their strength from zone to zone, to make sure they have maximum protection from every potential collision. That requires calculations almost too swift for the human brain to handle.

She can do this. She knows that. But she needs to joke about it, or else the fear will make her hands shake, and that tremble alone could kill them. “You handled this pretty well yourself last time.”

Abel’s hands move across the pilot’s console at mech speed, almost a blur. “The mines were predictable. The asteroids are not. Piloting is therefore more difficult.”

On the viewscreen, hundreds of obstacles rotate around them at crazy angles and vectors, their sizes and speeds varying, every single one of them capable of smashing the Daedelus into space dust. Keeping her voice light, Noemi says, “Thought your super-superior brain could handle a few extra calculations.”

“Yes. However, I only have two hands. A slight design flaw.”

She laughs once. In the back of her mind, she registers the sarcasm, the joke, everything Abel’s said and done in the past hour that no mech should ever be able to do—but there’s no time to think about it. To concentrate on anything besides shifting their shield strength, so often and so fast that it’s as much instinct as calculation.

As Abel begins easing the ship into a less crowded area, Noemi dares to take a deeper breath—

—until she realizes they’re caught in a vector where three different asteroids of considerable size are coming at them at once. No matter which way Abel moves, they’re about to take a hit.

He sees it, too, of course. “I’m directing us toward the smallest one.

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