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“Here?” Garrett looked down at the miles of old fields speeding past him below. “This area is loaded with land mines, Joan. I’m not going to land the ship here.”
“And we’re not where we need to be,” Maxwell muttered quietly beside him, hunched over the navigation panel.
“Land the ship, Garrett. There’s a storm coming your way, and those winds are going to grab your ship and smash it like a toy,” Joan growled through the radio. “You need to get low.”
Maxwell leaned up and forward as far as the seat buckles would allow and peered out the windshield. “I don’t see anything.”
Garrett wound down the engines and started flipping the switches to pop the wing flaps, but his heart pounded, and a cold sweat broke out on his palms. He looked out over the flat expanse of field after field after field, but everything looked the same. “I don’t want to land here, Joan.”
“You’re not going to blow up, Garrett,” Joan snapped.
Garrett winced. “You don’t know that.”
Garrett popped the landing gear but hesitated to bring the ship down to the ground, skimming low over the surface. Past explosions echoed in Garrett’s ears, and he stared down at the land racing by with his heart in his throat. He couldn’t know. He couldn’t know that anywhere down there was safe. He couldn’t know that he’d picked the wrong spot until it was too late. No one ever knew.
“There.” Maxwell’s urgent voice cut through Garrett’s panicked thoughts, and Garrett pulled his eyes up to the horizon to see a huge, dense, yellow wall racing toward them. “It’s coming fast.”
“Now, Garrett!”
Garrett squeezed his eyes shut, killed the engine, and landed them hard on the ground directly below them. The strength of the impact jarred him in his seat, and they careened forward through the field. Then they stopped. And that was it.
Garrett’s breath left him in a whoosh of relief, and he scrambled to deploy extra landing gear to anchor them to the ground and pull in all the wings so they wouldn’t catch the wind.
“Good l—”
The rest of Joan’s words disappeared in a cloud of static as the wall of wind and gas slammed into them. The ship rocked but held steady, and Garrett switched off the now-useless communications panel. Nothing on this junker would get through the denseness of this storm except maybe the ancient short-range radar. The view out the windshield that moments ago had been endless fields was now a wall of sickly yellow.
“So this is one of the famous storms.” Maxwell slowly unbuckled himself and stood, his voice hushed but audible, with nothing but the drone of the wind outside to compete with it. “I’ve never seen one of them for myself before.”
“They’re nasty.” Garrett unstrapped himself as well and stood next to Maxwell to look out the thick glass. “But we’re in the safest place we can be. The ship is airtight, and what’s out there doesn’t seem to be as good as whatever the Klah’Eel used on us at Kaston.”
“Is it less effective?” Maxwell didn’t take his eyes off the swirling maelstrom.
“I don’t know.” Garrett shrugged. “But it doesn’t seem to get into as many places as the other stuff did, so it’s a little less dangerous.” He tossed his head to indicate the exterior of the ship. “Joan had every ship we bring down here fitted with sensors and collection devices so that we can bring back information for Sazahk without going out there. Not that I know what he’s doing with it all.”
“He’s trying to develop a binding agent.” Maxwell finally looked away from the storm and propped himself up on a part of the control panel not covered with buttons.
“To bind to the gas?” Garrett crossed his arms and leaned against the side of his chair, not ready to stop standing so soon after twelve hours of sitting.
At least this cockpit was much more comfortable and spacious than the ones in the tiny recon ship. It had enough room for two people to move around, and the chairs were large and swiveled a full three hundred and sixty degrees. “What’s he gonna put the binding agent on?”
“Turbines, apparently,” Maxwell explained and glanced back out at the gas and twisted his lips. “Small ones. He thinks if every home and building has one, then the occupants of each building will be safe, and eventually, over years, we’ll clean the atmosphere for good.”
Garrett imagined the sprawling metropolis of Ralscoln sprouting little wind turbines off every building and made a face. “That sounds expensive. How are we going to make all of those? How are we going to get the resources? How are we even going to find the money for that?”
“I don’t know.” Maxwell sighed. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
They both looked out the window for a few quiet minutes, Garrett feeling even more demoralized than before.
Eventually, Maxwell pulled his eyes from the angry yellow storm and then looked back at Garrett. “So what happens now?”
“Now nothing.” Garrett shrugged. “We wait until the storm passes.”
“How long does that take?”
“Hours, probably.” Garrett stooped down and pulled his pack from under his seat. “But who knows. I usually have a snack and take a nap, finally get some proper sleep.”
Maxwell huffed a laugh and leaned his head against the wall. “That actually doesn’t sound so bad.”
