The Dark Side of the Moon. Jeramey Kraatz

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      “Evasive manoeuvres!” Hot Dog shouted as the ships sped closer.

      Benny paused for only a second before twisting his flight yoke to the left, remembering some of the basic skills Hot Dog had taught him and the rest of the Moon Platoon in her piloting crash course. His Space Runner veered, dropping towards the dark crater below.

      Moments later, the five alien ships were upon them; the same type that had come out of the mother ship during the asteroid storm. Their hulls were shaped like jagged arrowheads shooting through space, made out of some deep purple mineral. The backs of the crafts were capped with gleaming silver devices, as though some kind of metallic claw had latched on to the ships.

      “They must have some sort of cloaks up,” Jasmine said. “They’re not on my radar. I can’t get a target lock.”

      Benny glanced at his instrument panel, but only their four Space Runners showed as blips on the holographic screens.

      “If they attack,” Hot Dog said, “keep weaving. Just make sure we don’t hit each—”

      She stopped as ice-blue bolts of energy rained down around them.

      Benny swerved, narrowly avoiding one of the blasts. He’d been hit by one of these before, and the result had been a total loss of control over his vehicle. All Space Runners were equipped with moderately strong antigravity shields, but from what he could tell they didn’t offer all that much protection from whatever advanced weaponry the aliens had.

      “I’m monitoring the situation!” Pinky’s voice filled his car. “I’m calling more of the Moon Platoon to the garage for backup, but their ETA is twenty minutes at least.”

      “There’s no time,” Benny said. “Keep everyone else safe at the Taj. Be on high alert. We don’t know how many of these things are out here.”

      “Benny …” She paused. “Please be careful.”

      He pushed his flight yoke forward and dived towards the Moon’s surface, two ships in pursuit. “Yeah. Sure thing.”

      “All those foster families were right,” Jasmine squeaked through the comms. “I should have played flight sims and video games instead of studying so much!”

      Above Benny, his friends were fighting. Hot Dog and Drue were by far the most adept at manoeuvring, their Space Runners spinning and darting around the alien vessels as they shot the lasers mounted to the fronts of their cars. But Jasmine was holding her own, too. She’d flown well away from the others and was sniping from a distance with precise shots. One of them hit the rear of a ship, causing the metal on the back to explode in an eruption of sparks.

      “Oh my gosh,” she said, her voice full of astonishment. “I hit one!”

      “Woo-hoo!” Drue shouted. “Nice shot, Jazz!”

      “Looks like the backs of their ships are their weak spots,” Hot Dog added. “We know where to aim. Take ’em down!”

      “I hope I didn’t injure the thing inside,” Jasmine said.

      “Uhhh,” Drue groaned into the comms. “Not exactly what I’d be worried about right now.”

      “Our goal isn’t to hurt them,” Benny said.

      “Sure, but I don’t think these dudes are trying to be very careful when it comes to my own safety.”

      Benny watched the damaged alien ship fly up into outer space – hopefully retreating. That was one down. At least they weren’t technically outnumbered now – even if two ships were still gaining on him.

      He clenched his jaw as his Space Runner jetted towards the ground, the dark surface of the Moon filling his windshield. Alarms began to go off throughout the cabin as he got closer. When he was within just a few metres of smashing into the lunar crust, he pulled back on the flight yoke and levelled out. He shot across the crater floor, pushing his car’s hyperdrive as hard as he could as he twisted the flight yoke back and forth, avoiding enemy fire. For a split second he wished he were in something with wheels – he wasn’t doing badly in the flying car, but he definitely would have felt more at home on the ground, in a buggy or something he was more familiar with. In the rearview and side mirrors, he watched the alien ships loop around each other, trading shots at him, before finally one of the crafts took position above the other, the two of them lining up directly behind him.

      “Not good, not good, not good,” he muttered to himself as sweat began to bead on his forehead. Suddenly, a barrage of red lights flashed on the windshield. He was about to hit the crater wall.

      “Ahhh!” he shouted as he wrenched the yoke to the left just in time, until he was flying sideways, following the curve of the wall and dodging sharp outcroppings of rock. The two alien ships followed suit, firing their energy blasts. The cavern wall below him exploded with each missed attack, spraying debris and dust up all around Benny’s Space Runner.

      He tightened his grip on the flight yoke as he struggled to make out the terrain in front of him, and, for a flash, he remembered a day he hadn’t thought of in a long time. A few years before, his caravan had raced across the Drylands trying to outrun an approaching sandstorm. Benny’s grandmother and brothers were in the RV, but his father was behind driving a truck full of gear at the time and had let Benny ride with him, buckling him into the passenger seat and covering his mouth with a bandana in an attempt to spare him from getting a mouth full of sand. It had seemed to Benny like they’d flown across the dunes at the speed of light, the two of them bringing up the rear of the group as they tried to reach an abandoned farm with a working well they’d planned on camping at for a while. They’d almost got there, too – Benny could see the huge, rusty barns just a few miles away – but in the last stretch the wind picked up, blowing sand across their path until Benny couldn’t make out the other vehicles and trailers that had been in front of them. His father hit the brakes, and in seconds they had stopped.

      “Standard procedure,” his dad had said. “Nothing good’d come from driving in a storm like this.”

      The sound of the storm was so loud around them that Benny could hardly hear him.

      “But so close?” Benny had said.

      His dad had just shaken his head and pulled off his own bandana now that he was sure the sand engulfing the truck wasn’t going to get in too badly.

      “What if we went over a cliff? What if we ran into someone from the caravan?” he’d asked as he slid his seat back and put his boots up on the dashboard. “Nah, we’ll wait it out. There’s no GPS or stars to help us through something like this, and it’s too easy to get lost when you can’t see where you’re going. Only a fool would try.”

      Benny couldn’t say that he’d always been able to see exactly where he was going the last few days, but the memory did give him an idea.

      He aimed his Space Runner’s laser as low as it could go and began blasting the crater wall beneath him, gouging a deep trench into the rock and sending clouds of debris floating into the paths of the ships behind him. He had just СКАЧАТЬ