"Just a little farther! Hold on!"
Strange's roar rang through the violently shaking cabin, hoarse, yet driving into everyone's eardrums like a nail.
His sole remaining arm, his left, clung desperately to the handrail on the cabin wall, his azure Visor fixed on what lay ahead.
Beyond the viewport, the enormous, scarred orbital Star Fortress had never looked so clear, or so far away.
Its towering steel silhouette filled their entire field of vision, like a burning, broken, yet still unbowed lighthouse in the black void.
Around the Star Fortress, dense arrays of Autocannon turrets slowly turned, their muzzles glowing faintly as they charged, locking onto the three black enemy craft clinging to their tail like death-dealing wraiths.
The outline of the escape passage's gate lay straight ahead, like a slowly closing maw that led to survival.
They were close.
Strange's heart hammered in his chest, beating in time with the damaged engines' wail.
Just a little farther.
But at that instant, with hope within reach—
"Warning! Multiple high-speed targets! Behind us, stable locks!" In the pilot's seat, the pilot's voice was taut as a string about to snap.
The tactical screen before him had been completely engulfed by glaring red rings.
At the edge of the Star Fortress's air-defense perimeter, the three black enemy craft suddenly accelerated forward as though in defiance, eerie light flashing beneath their fuselages again.
Several slender, lethal tracking missiles, identical to those that had shot down the Thunderbolt fighters earlier, slipped silently from their racks, trailing cold blue wakes. They traced elegant arcs of death through the void, chilling to the marrow, and lunged at the Thunderhawk!
They deftly threaded through the Star Fortress's hastily deployed curtain of intercepting fire, their purpose clear: to end this escape once and for all.
"No countermeasures left!