His arms were long, too, which meant that: one, he could take Vin down in a slap-boxing match, and two, he could just brush the metal wrench with the tips of his fingers.
He eased it into his palm, sprang up, and went to work on the grav beam core—ratcheting, tightening, realigning. His hands moved carefully; the trick was to focus on all the things he could control. Vin’s insane flying, the rusty ship two seconds away from falling apart, the cameras that crept up on him everywhere he went—all of that fell squarely into the realm of the things he couldn’t control.
The Revolutionary jerked left again. Steadying himself, Aly planted his feet and worked quickly, ignoring the daisy that lowered to get a look at his face. It was always waiting to zoom in on “thoughtful” moments that the producers could use as B-roll and insert anywhere. Aly almost swatted it away again, but he caught his reflection in the lens—and the nick in his eyebrow that girls were always asking about on the holoforums. Even into the second season, he was still not used to the fame. He’d been the kind of kid who studied physics diagrams for hours, not the guy pulling pretty girls. It didn’t help that Aly was so dark. But now, for some reason, folks seemed to think he looked all right—describing his skin like it was kape or chocolate or an expensive type of wood. If he was being honest, it annoyed Aly—you never heard Kalusians compared to food. But it was better than catching taejis about it.
He reached for the daisy. “Sorry, little guy. I need to borrow something,” he said. It tried to flutter out of his grasp, but his reach was long, and he snatched it up effortlessly. “Easy, easy . . .”
He unscrewed its lens while the mini propellers still spun. When he got the lens free, the daisy shot up and fled toward the doorway. Aly jammed the lens into the core, adjusted the angle, and powered it on. There was a high-pitched whirl as the grav beam charged up. The sweetest sound, like a chorus of loyal subjects chanting his name.
“I am the god of grav beams!” he called into his cube.
“Great. Now come be the god of copilots and help me lock down this choirtoi of a target.”
“On it!” Aly ducked through the short doorway and scrambled up the access ladder. Across the catwalk and down the corridor, he ran toward the bridge as fast as he could in point-three gravity. He’d never gotten used to the buoyancy. He’d been shuffled between refugee camps from one Wray Town to the next—his past was mostly a blurry series of evacuations—and even though he’d never had a home to call his own, he’d always had gravity.
But up here, he half ran, half swam. At the next corner, Aly grabbed a makeshift handhold, swinging around the turn and launching himself forward. He’d set up dozens of shortcuts in the same way: broken poles and useless metal components all soldered to the inner hull. He and Vin scaled them like monkey bars.
The door to the bridge slid open, and there was Vincent, standing over the ship’s console as he bore down on the throttle. He flew the Revolutionary like he was playing a video game, which was to say: recklessly. But he was a good pilot. A dozen cameras hovered around him in a semicircle, positioned at different angles and distances. He was a second-wave Kalusian and looked it, with light eyes and fair skin that turned golden when he tanned.
“Just in time!” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve never seen this model. It’s unscannable, but the navigation equipment must be top-notch. I’ve lost it twice already.” Half the daisies turned in Aly’s direction, like a flock of ugly birds.
He took his seat at the helm. “What do you mean, ‘unscannable’?”
“I can’t get a read on it.” Vin tapped the screen on his console. “It’s invisible on all the nav equipment.”
Aly touched his finger to his cube and magnified his vision. “It almost looks like it’s made of . . . wood?” It wasn’t impossible. Modified organic material could be used for all kinds of things in deep space. But not a lot of people had the tech. The UniForce definitely didn’t. “It’s kind of weird.”
“Weird,” Vin agreed, with an edge in his voice.
“Did it respond to your hail?”
“Yeah, with some sort of code. I got your boy working on it now.” Vin gestured to Pavel. The droid’s eyelights pulsed—or rather the two soft blue lights where his eyes would be if he were human pulsed.
“Twenty percent through my language database,” Pavel announced.
Vin wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt—the only indication that he was stressed. “See if you can lock the grav beam on at this distance?” he said.
A chase scene, Aly realized. High-speed chases weren’t as common as people thought, since 90 percent of ships would stop when hailed by the UniForce. But the producers had told them that the viewers loved chase scenes, which was a way of saying make them happen. Sometimes they even hired merchant crafts to go rogue, just to fill in footage of the Revolutionary wheeling through space in hot pursuit.