CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
Laser bolts flashed past the cockpit at the speed of light, leaving behind faint glimmer-trails that flashed against Cloud’s HUD. Some of those laser bolts slammed into the shuttle, their superconcentrated beams piercing through the thick titanisteel as if it were nearly nonexistent, ripping and shredding into the framework of the shuttle.
The kinetic force that came from the gas tank’s explosion picked up Cloud as if he were no more than a rag doll and spun him out of the cockpit into the back of the shuttle, clearing the rows of chairs with his back and coming to a stop upside-down and backwards against the hard wall. The flame from the explosion rippled out the smoking holes of the Bodhran shuttle.
The shuttle began to go down.
Cloud collapsed off the wall onto his back, and despite the burn damage done to his exposed lower face, his armor had kept back most of the blast. He shoved himself up to his feet, grabbing at his gun – and then dropping again when he saw the barrel was fused shut from the fire blast.
He turned toward the cockpit, intending to see what he could do to help Crak –
But stopped. “Oh, no,” he whispered. “No.”
Frizzl’s limp body, smoke rising from the charred form, lay stretched out across the seats in a position that could not be done unless every bone in his body had been broken. Frizzl had been seated right beside the gas tank when it blew.
If Cloud had not known the Bodhran Slig by name, he would not have recognized the smoking hulk that remained.
“Oh, Odd, no,” he sobbed out. He reached out a finger to touch the body, just to make sure it was dead, and the body’s heat was searing from the fireball.
Crak staggered out of a storage closet, his face grim. “Poor fool,” he grunted upon sight of the scorched body, and then his face went even grimmer. “We’re gonna jump. Without parachutes.”
Cloud didn’t take the time to disagree. He could tell, just from how long they had been spiraling downward, that the ground could not be too far away. And anyway, he’d announced himself to the Sligs on the battlefield as the “Slig Commando Squad.”
Cloud staggered for the door. With one swing of his fist, he bashed open the lock and without a thought for his own safety he leapt out the door.
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