Valor (The Emberling Book 4) by Daniel Young

Author:Daniel Young [Young, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Tate grabbed Taggart by the arm. “Get up! We have to get out of here!”

Erqi lay across the sphere’s controls, and Odo got out of his seat to help his brother up. Merrel, Wollett, and Yannik stood up and looked around them in stunned shock, but Qiao didn’t move. He groaned again and shut his eyes, but Taggart could see very well that Qiao wasn’t injured. He’d been in the safest place through the whole ordeal.

Claire bent over the controls that Erqi had just been working on. “The Sleepwalkers are coming back in. We gotta go.”

“Can you read anything inside the fortress?” Taggart asked.

“The rangefinders have been damaged.” She looked at the hatch above his head. “We can’t get out that way.”

“Hold tight. I’ll handle this.” Tate turned on his shoulder, brought his laser rifle to his shoulder, fired into the wall behind him, and started cutting his way through it. Taggart used his own rifle to speed up the process, and then Merrel came over to help them.

They carved a three-foot square in the side of the sphere, but they only wound up opening the vehicle into a solid concrete wall where the sphere had become embedded during the crash.

“What’s your next genius idea?” Wollett snarled.

Everyone ignored him. Claire went back over to the controls and started messing with them. Taggart didn’t check to see what she was doing.

Erqi had blood running down his face from hitting the controls. Odo steered his brother into his own chair and found some kind of first aid kit. Odo tried to patch up Erqi’s head, but Erqi slapped his hands away. Erqi tried to jump up and attack Odo, but his legs wouldn’t support him, and he flopped back into the chair.

Yannik took the kit away from Odo and started working on Erqi herself. Tate distracted Taggart by bumping his elbow. “Over here. Turn your lasers on that wall over there.”

He pointed to a different section of the sphere. “That’s right behind the guns,” Merrel pointed out. “You could blow us all up.”

“The plasma core is under the floor,” Tate told him. “We won’t hit it.”

“How do you know?” Taggart asked.

Tate traced his forefinger over the ceiling. “The gyroscope keeps the interior level no matter what the outer skin does. The plasma core moves with the interior, so it always stays in the same place no matter which direction the outer skin is going. The Sleepwalkers designed these spheres that way so the plasma core is less likely to get hit when the sphere is under fire.”

“You still haven’t explained how you know all this,” Merrel asked. “You aren’t a Sleepwalker.”

Tate laughed. “It’s my job to know how to blow up all their vessels. We’ve captured a few of these and studied them to find their vulnerabilities. You can’t blow them up by shooting them from the outside—not unless you cut through to the plasma core. Now come on. We can get out that way.”

He leveled his rifle at a different section of wall, but Claire interrupted.

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