Dust in the Wind

I swung the pod around and jammed the throttle forward. As I did I heard an alarm blaring. "That's not a good sound, is it? Doesn't sound like a good sound!" I yelled over the alarm.

Allura hit a button and the ear-bleeding siren went to half volume. "It has a lock on us," she explained.

"What does?"

"An Altean torpedo-mine," Allura said. "It waits for a target like a mine, then tracks it like a torpedo." She keyed up something else on her panel. "At our current speed it will catch up to us in less than three dobashes."

It's never good when the thing chasing you is faster than you are. "Shouldn't it, like, know this is an Altean ship?"

"It's probably been floating here for ten thousand years. The computer may have degraded."

"Yeah… not enough apparently." I frowned. "What can you tell me about this thing?"

"It is powered by a fragment of a Balmeran crystal," Allura said, her voice sounding mostly calm but still a little off. "It is faster and more maneuverable than this vessel and will not cease its pursuit until it detonates or depletes its crystal."

"OK, how long 'till it's out of crystal juice?"

"Several deca-phebes."

I frowned. "So not the answer I was looking for." I glanced over at Allura, then at the sensor map. I couldn't read everything on it, but the red thing moving towards the blue thing made it pretty clear what was going on.

I turned the pod sharply to the right, and saw that torpedo adjusted its path to match ours almost instantly. The thing was fast. "I'm really wishing I had Red right now."

"Or that booster Pidge developed."

"The one Keith blew up?" I shook my head. I didn't have time to bash on Keith. I pointed to a group of dust and rock to our right. "What if we skim one of those asteroids? Try to lose it in a trench or something?"

Allura hesitated for a tick, then input a command into the sensors. "The radiation around the asteroids is substantial. It might impede the torpedo's tracking, but it could affect our systems." She looked over at me. "Assuming we don't hit an asteroid first."

"Yeah," I replied, already turning the pod towards the one of the larger space rocks. "I'm going to head toward that canyon on the top of it."

The canyon was huge, I forced the pod into a steep dive so that the asteroid's gravity would help us accelerate.

"Are you sure you can pull out in time?" Allura asked with concern.

"Never been a problem," I assured her.

The bottom of the canyon was rocketing towards us, and I started to bring the pod up. We leveled out just above the rocks in a maneuver that would have made Shiro proud. I exhaled, and I think for the first time I realized just how nervous I'd been. I'd been trying so hard to look confident to Allura I'd pretty much fooled myself too.

"It's still following us," Allura reported. I felt my stomach contort in a way that had nothing to do with the crazy maneuver I'd just pulled off. My whole chest felt tense. If that hadn't been enough to fool it…

"I thought you said the radiation would interfere with it?"

"I said it might," Allura snapped at me. "The levels aren't high enough."

Even though I'd slept through most of my geology classes and Galaxy Garrison, I remembered a little bit about radiation. "The radioactive stuff's in the rocks, isn't it?"

"Yes," Allura confirmed. She glanced down. "Thirty ticks."

"What if we could kick up a cloud of the stuff, like get it between us and the torpedo?"

"It would increase the interference," Allura said. "But how—" She cut off in mid-sentence, and from the look on her face I could tell she realized what I was thinking.

"On Earth we have an expression: so dumb it just might work."

Allura said nothing, but I saw her nod out of the corner of my eye.

"Hold on."

I rolled the shuttle pod to the right and eased it closer to the surface of the asteroid. Even being as gentle as I could the impact felt terrible and sounded worse. The right engine scraped across jagged rocks, grinding them into a dust that trailed behind us. I tried to hold pod straight, but the controls were not designed for flying with one engine dragging along the ground.

There was a load groan followed by a lot of nasty looking sparks and flickering lights, and I heard at least two other alarms sound. My guess was something important had fallen off, but I didn't really have time to figure out what. I could tell by how the pod was flying the right engine was putting out less thrust. If I kept going the left engine would force us harder against the asteroid.

"That's going to need to be enough dust," I told Allura. I jammed the controls to the left and brought the pod around to face away from the asteroid. "Is it following us?"

Before Allura could answer, the pod rocked like it had been hit by a giant hammer. Metal groaned, electrical stuff sparked, and most of the lights went out. I could smell smoke and heard some kind of fire extinguisher go off in the back of the pod.

My ears were still ringing when I heard Allura say, "It worked!"

I shook my head, trying to clear the hazy feeling I had. "You mean it didn't hit us?"

"A torpedo mine would vaporize a pod," Allura said. "It must have impacted the surface of the asteroid."

For a second I was completely still, my mind trying to process what had just happened. Then my sweaty hands let go of the controls and I slumped down in my chair. I closed my eyes. I felt like a massive weight had been lifted off my chest.

Then I opened my eyes and looked across the few working display panels.

Well… it could be worse…

A/N: I did a little less proofing on this chapter than usual so apologies for any typos! As always, thank you for taking the time to read, and any and all feedback is sincerely appreciated!