“Penn!” Red, her voice ratcheted way up tight. “VID bandits, closing!”

And now Penn had visual ID, too: four black specks that grew from the size of mites to ball bearings, and then resolved into stippled disks, and now he could see their contrails. Come on, come on. Penn watched as his HUD tracked the incoming Sholagars, responding with automatic targeting information continuously updated for course and speed. His throat was dry, the stuffy air in his mask smelled like mildewed rubber and sweat slithered down the knobs of his spine. Come on, you gotta know I’m hot, you gotta see it; so come on, you bad boys, show me what you got. The disks growing larger and larger, Tsukude’s crazy sun dancing bright sparkles that bounced off the Sholagars’ hulls, turning their canopies a molten orange… larger and larger, and the four Sholagars screaming full-bore. A game of chicken: Penn had to break at the last possible second, praying like hell that the lead Drac would break first so he’d catch which way the lead Sholagar’s nose went, up or down. And that would work to Penn’s advantage because then he’d know where the sonuvabitch was headed and match him turn for turn until he maneuvered into the Drac’s killing zone.

Except… the Sholagars weren’t breaking. Would you look at how tight they are; they’re practically on top of each other; they’ve got to be inside each other’s wakes and in all that plasma that would… Penn gasped. Plasma in their wake! Oh, shit, shit! “Break, break, break!” Penn screamed—too late.

His collision alarms shrilled as the Sholagars rocketed through, cracking Penn’s flight wide open and dragging their real and best weapon: a roiling, churning cone of supercharged, ionized plasma.

Penn caught one brief glimpse of the lead Sholagar–a flash of red and black—before his Lucifer slammed into the vortex of plasma. His fighter lurched and bucked, skipping like a flat stone on a pond. He ricocheted off an instrument panel hard enough to send pain lancing into his skull. The taste of wet pennies filled his mouth, and he gagged against hot blood.

Then, a woman screaming, a long rope of sound abruptly cut as Red’s Lucifer, out of control, burst in an orange fireball. Penn barely had time to register that when his collision alarms shrilled again. Menace’s Lucifer closing too damn fast. Screaming, Penn yanked back on his stick, forcing his nose up, up, up ; his mind racing: Maybe I’ve outrun it, maybe the worst is over, maybe it’s still okay, maybe…

Then there were no more maybes. Turbulence roared in like a tidal wave, smacking his fighter’s belly, forcing him not up but over in an arcing loop, and then Penn was barreling straight down, nose-first, with the speed of a fighter kicked into overdrive. Out of control; he was out of control! Penn registered Menace dead ahead, the way Menace’s wings waggled, knew that Menace was battling his craft; saw the Republic blue of Menace’s helmet, then Menace’s black visor as he looked up and saw Penn.

“No!” Penn screamed, and then he went against all that was holy. Instead of easing off, he pushed his speed, kick-jumping and throttling up before jerking his fighter in a hard left, splitting air and breaking wide of Menace’s fighter by a hair’s breadth. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Menace careering past, Menace’s Lucifer twirling along its horizontal axis, out of control.

Then his alarms screamed again, and Penn’s heart banged into his throat. Frantic, he looked right, left, then faced front. There! Another Lucifer whirling right for him: Power.

Later, Penn would wonder why Power wasn’t spared. As Dash Four, her fighter was the farthest away, highest up. Theoretically, Power should’ve escaped the worst. Maybe, in those first few, critical seconds, she’d reversed hard, intending to bleed altitude and, in the confusion, lost sight of Penn. Or she’d gone into a spin and was just recovering, unaware of everyone else’s position. Or maybe it was just bad luck.

They did the only thing they could. They broke: Penn angling up, and Power dropping to a dive. They should’ve missed one another. But, somehow, they didn’t.

There was a violent lurch as Power clipped him, and Penn’s Lucifer porpoised: breaching then falling, smacking air, hard. Tethered in his harness, Penn flopped and bounced like a fly in a spider’s web. His vision swirled, the images zipping one after the other: a blur of aurora, then clouds, then the blackness of space directly ahead and the bright eyes of the distant, impersonal stars, then the orange flames of engines as the Sholagars shot themselves back into heaven.

Bucking, Penn’s Lucifer climbed once more then flipped, belly-up, and now he saw the dizzying curtain of the aurora again, only directly overhead because he was upside down, and Penn had time for one jagged thought: Please, God, don’t let the power cut out, don’t let…

The power cut out. His engines failed, and Penn tumbled out of the sky like an angel fallen from grace.

Now, gravity counted. Penn was accelerating, shedding altitude at breakneck speed, the air sheeting, howling over his canopy. Gravity swelled like a gathering storm, then broke, washing over him like a gigantic wave hammering the shore. Gray ate at the edges of his vision, and he was gasping, pulling for air, vaguely aware of the bladders of his G-suit filling. Then, something took over: a combination of training and instinct and maybe just good old self-preservation because Penn grunted, hard. Bore down with all his might, forcing blood into the empty vessels that nourished his brain. And then he could think again. Not a whole lot. Just a little. But it was enough.

Got to reach the recovery switch. Struggling against unconsciousness, he moved one leaden arm, but it was hard work and his arm was so damn heavy and he’d never been so tired and banged up and beat up in his life. His right arm lifted with agonizing slowness, his finger shoving through air thicker than molasses. For a fraction of a second, maybe less, he couldn’t remember why that stupid spin recovery switch was so damned important. His brain hitched over the problem. Airspeed’s zero… got to roll the ship… angle… down… got to angle down…

There was pressure against his right index finger; now, through his glove, he felt the bite of the switch, a sense of something giving. Then, a shudder ripped through the Lucifer’s frame, and there came a loud, throaty rumble.

Then he saw something beyond his canopy, something whizzing in a blue-and-silver blur, then it was gone, then it came again, then gone, then again, and…

“Penn!” A voice lasering his brain: Menace, right beside him, dropping with him, staying with him, trying to talk him back from the dead. “Penn, Penn, you’ve got power! Penn, damn it, answer me! You’ve got starboard engines, but you’ve rolled belly down, you’re spinning! Penn, throttle back, get your nose down, get it down, get it down!”

Control, get control! And now Penn remembered why getting his nose down was so damned important: because his airspeed was zero, his Lucifer spinning counterclockwise, belly to the ground. He wasn’t generating lift; there was no way for him to arrest his descent or break out of his spin unless he managed to cant his Lucifer and slew left into a controlled slide… but only if he went against instinct and notched his power down.

Penn fumbled, searching for the throttle. Got to do this just right, can’t let it cut out again. He forced himself to move slowly and deliberately, throttling back in increments. The Lucifer’s spin let up a little, and he dragged his fighter’s nose down ten degrees. Still not enough, but throttle back more and his engines might just cut out again.