The Navigator by Pittacus Lore Read Free Book Online Page B

she’s pulled up on one of the cockpit monitors.
    “There,” she says. “It’s a desert.”
    “So, lots of sand?” I ask. It takes a few seconds for me to understand what this means since deserts weren’t exactly abundant on Lorien.
    “Right. And more importantly, it’s largely uninhabited, so we won’t have to explain where we came from to a bunch of bystanders. We’d be able to set the ship down and journey a day or so to a major metropolitan area—a city called Cairo.”
    I bring up the coordinates on a navigational panel.
    “It looks like that’s doable,” I say. “Tell Crayton he needs to strap down with Ella. When we enter Earth’s atmosphere, things will start to get bumpy.”
    The three of us remain quiet as we start our final approach to the planet. Even Ella is silent, as if she realizes that this is important. I keep my eyes locked on the instrument panels, monitoring the increasing heatoutside as we shoot through the atmospheric bubble.
    “This isn’t so bad,” Crayton finally whispers. “At least there’s not a fleet of ships hovering around—”
    The ship begins to shake violently, shutting him up.
    “Is everything—,” Zophie starts.
    “We’re fine.” I keep my eyes moving back and forth between the instruments and the quickly approaching surface of the planet in front of us. The ship continues to jostle back and forth, as if it’s trying to tear itself apart in the sky. But it holds together as we sail headfirst towards a golden expanse of land.
    A readout from one of the monitors beeps. It’s time to deploy our reentry measures: a dozen outboard thrusters that will rapidly slow our descent until we’re hovering above the sand.
    “Hold on!” I shout, and flip the switch.
    Only, nothing happens.
    I hit the switch again. And then again. Still, there’s no response.
    “Shit!” I mutter. My heart and brain begin to race. “Shit, shit, shit.”
    “What is it?” Crayton asks.
    “The reentry thrusters aren’t working.”
    We’re traveling too fast. We have practically no fuel. There’s no way we can eject ourselves at this velocity. Alarms and warnings start to go off around the cockpit. I tap on the controls until I’m given a readoutthat helps explain what’s going on—we never properly rebuilt the thrusters during the restoration. I’ve got two front thrusters I can engage, but it’s a one-time deal, and they’ll only change the direction of our much-too-rapid descent slightly.
    We’re going to crash.
    Somewhere behind me the Chimærae shriek and Ella cries as the cockpit instruments make terrible whining noises that seem to say “It’s too late; you’re dead.”
    I try to remain calm, going over options in my head. There’s nothing we can do—not even a reentry parachute we can deploy.
    And then, suddenly, an image comes to me. Zane. His favorite way to scare me after he developed flight was to race towards the ground until I was screaming for him to slow down, to stop, always sure he was going to end up crashing into the lawn or street. He’d wait until the last conceivable second and then finally pull up, shooting past me horizontally. A tornado in the form of a little boy.
    “Everybody get ready,” I say. “I’m going to try something.”
    I hear them shout things at me, but I don’t listen. I have to be completely focused. We’re getting closer and closer to Earth, but I wait. I have only one chance at this. We have only one chance.
    The sand is almost upon us now. Zophie screams.Crayton wraps his arms around Ella.
    I punch the front thrusters.
    We straighten out for a split second, until we’re parallel to the earth. That’s when I blow the last of our fuel in one hard boost straight ahead. It works—by some miracle, we don’t crash. Not exactly. The surface of the desert is a blur as we skim across it. We start spinning. I’m sure that at any moment the ship is going to break in half and send us spilling out, our bodies breaking against the