Alvin Roy led the way down the hall. Sithandra was behind him, flying at a low hover, and I was covering our six o'clock. The space vessel's corridors were long—about as long as Terran city blocks. After trekking through three of them, we turned another corner and found a row of escape pods waiting along the wall to our right. Several were missing, but I knew we could account for at least two being taken by the crime lord and the mad scientist.
We all piled into the nearest pod and sealed the door behind us. Norman typed something into a control panel on the wall of the pod's interior and a moment later, whatever mechanism was holding us to the ship released and we dropped into space. He typed in another command and both propulsion jets attached to the civilian escape pod boosted us forward, putting some distance between us and the space vessel. And closing the distance between us and the fleeing HVTs. Audio kicked in when the timer reached T minus ten seconds.
An automated female voice counted down aloud, "Ten...Nine...Eight..."
We were making distance but we were still in the blast radius. We weren't gonna make it in time. The moment of truth came just seconds later.
I yelled, "Everybody hold on!"
"Three...Two...One..."
The funny thing about space explosions is that there is no sound. We can only see. And feel. The vessel's midsection exploded outwards in a brilliantly colorful flash of magnesium and fire and sent the two smoldering halves of the ship drifting slowly apart. We each braced ourselves as the shockwave finally reached us and knocked our pod off balance like a fish caught in the wake of a speedboat.
I nearly crushed the handhold I was gripping like an aluminum can in my fist. The escape pod shook and rumbled as we tumbled through space. Using his free hand, Alvin tapped another command on the screen of the control panel. The pod stabilized. The spastic shuddering ceased. We were only slightly off course now, stuck in a slightly rotating tilt like a spinning top toy in full spin. I could see clouds rushing past now. We were planet side, entering Mars's atmosphere.
Our pod was dropping fast—somewhere around seven miles a second. Again I found myself greeted with a bounty hunter's arrogance: boredom. I watched the flames lick off the sides of the pod with growing impatience. My boots needed to be on the ground already. After another few seconds I saw us coming in at an angle toward the highest mountain tops. Crude structures, cliffs, and dirt canyons were just coming into view on the vast expanse of landscape below.
My humility returned rather instantly when the pod nicked a mountain. I closed my eyes and held on as tight as I could while the pod rapidly flipped end over end.