For a moment, nothing happened. Emily felt her left eye twitch as she held her breath and stared at the red activation button. Maybe it’s broken? She raised her hand to push it again, harder this time.

  Before her hand could descend, Emily had the odd, uncomfortable sensation of something within her helmet squeezing against her head. There was a pinprick against the base of her skull.

  Then she could feel herself screaming—could hear her friends’ screams, too, though they suddenly seemed impossibly inconsequential. She had the lurching sense of falling backward, as if she were drunkenly tumbling into the deep end of a swimming pool, thrashing instead of swimming, coughing and choking as she inhaled huge amounts of acid-like water. Her body spasmed, her eyes rolled upward, and her screams contracted into a gurgling whimper at the back of her throat.

  There was something else there, oh no, oh please no, in her mind, in her blood, in her screaming chest. The shadow of a huge, green presence shifted at the edge of her fading consciousness, watching Emily with a mixture of curiosity and pity. She tried to lift up a hand, but only felt her nails clench deeper through the gloves of her suit.

  Help me! she tried to scream. The thought rattled in her mind like a pair of glass dice thrown against concrete, shattering, and then reforming. The presence shifted again.

  A blast of sound echoed around her, as if a foghorn had gone off within the cockpit. Then she was being pulled up by the scruff of her brain, out of the darkness, to be tossed on the dry land of reality like a half-drowned puppy.

  Her senses slowly returned as she pulled air into her starving lungs. She flexed one hand, then the other in the bright green light of the cockpit. She was alive. And more.

  Emily scanned her eyes across the glittering rows of toggles, switches and buttons that surrounded her. Everything suddenly made sense now, as intuitive as could be: of course that toggle was for a plasma shunt, that switch for a manual missile re-load. She applied an ounce of pressure with her right foot and felt a subtle shift in the dragon’s weight. It was just like walking.

  She was so absorbed in the wonder of this newfound knowledge that it took her a moment to refocus on the HUDs in front of her. The large one was blank, but the four below it—

  “Michelle…!” Emily cried, leaning toward the red-tinged HUD, as if she could somehow grasp her friend through it. It was at first difficult to tell against the glow of Michelle’s cockpit and her uniform, but blood was smeared across her friend’s face, dripping down her chin.

  “I’m fine!” Michelle hoarsely yelled back. She pinched her nose, and then glared at her bloody, withdrawn hand. “Just a damn nosebleed.”

  In the white-rimmed HUD beside Michelle, Ansel was pale, eyes wide, his face sheened with sweat. He held up a thumbs-up rather than respond as Emily glanced at him. That just left—

  “Oh god, Lachlan! Michiko, what’s wrong with him? Help him!”

  Lachlan looked like he was in the midst of a seizure: his head was tilted backward, and his arms were jerking across his chest. A gurgling sound escaped his mouth, along with a trickle of white foam.

  Michiko looked nearly as pale as Ansel as she shook her head. “There’s nothing we can do. He’s in Blue Dragon’s hands now.” As Michiko finished speaking, Lachlan’s head rolled forward, chin against his chest, arms slumped against his side, drool and foam dripping from his mouth.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Michiko made a swiping gesture in the air, followed by several taps. “He’s alive,” she whispered, the relief palpable in her voice as she stared at something beyond the periphery of her own HUD. “Blue Dragon’s auto-launch will get him to space. Hopefully he’ll have recovered by then.”

  At the words “auto-launch”, Emily felt her dragon quiver, followed by a cascade of color along the transparent buttons that lined the ceiling of the cockpit. Emily pushed her foot down against her stirrup-pedal and tentatively pulled back on her right joystick. Nothing. Michiko nodded through the HUD, as if she could sense her fellow pilots testing their newfound understanding of the mechs’ mechanics.

  “You understand now. Well done. To be honest, I’m relieved that only one of you had a bad reaction to your first interface.”

  Emily could see Ansel and Michelle both open their mouths and then clamp them shut. There was no use arguing about what entailed a “bad reaction” at this point.

  “The dragons are now following their launch sequences,” Michiko continued. Miss Yama was on her lap now, peering at the screen in front of her with excited interest. “Manual controls are turned off. Believe me, you don’t want any mistakes during this part. Primary displays are activating. Just… try to relax.”

  Try to relax? Emily didn’t like the sound of that. However, before she could dwell on what was surely yet another understatement, her cockpit’s primary HUD turned on, the faces of her four co-pilots shrinking beneath it. Emily could briefly see the cavern, even more huge even than she had guessed, along with her four fellow dragons in the distance. Then her mech shuddered, a heavier jerk this time. Emily felt her stomach drop, and the HUD dissolved into watery darkness. They were going down?

  She had the sensation of pivoting, as the mech rotated itself into a horizontal position, its giant railgun pulled tight across its chest. There was a teeth-rattling rumble, and then Emily was pushed backward into the glove-like seat as the dragon’s engines opened up.

  The sensation reminded her of their elevator descent to Pink Dragon, but amplified a hundredfold. Twin beams from Green Dragon' s eyes cut through the darkness ahead, illuminating a vast tunnel bored through solid rock that blurred past on either side. Emily couldn't fathom how they were maintaining such velocity underwater.

  The edges of the underground, underwater tunnel suddenly ended, and Emily could make out a distant glow of light, the sun shining through the ocean far overhead. She wondered what would happen if they ran into a school of dolphins, or a whale. It wouldn’t have slowed them down at all, she realized— a small thud and a red mist probably would have been the only sign that anything had gotten in their way.

  She glanced between the primary HUD and Lachlan. He was moving now, and she heard a slight groan escape his lips as his eyelids fluttered open. Emily was about to call out his name when she was slammed back into her seat once again, harder this time, as Green Dragon’s thrusters truly ignited.

  Five titanic geysers erupted skyward as the dragons punched through the surface in perfect formation, hauling millions of gallons of seawater with them as their atmospheric thrusters ignited, boiling the sea behind them. For a fleeting instant, Emily was blinded by the afternoon sky; then the primary HUD darkened, adjusting itself to her own retinas’ contractions.

  Emily’s vision began to tunnel as the acceleration crushed her into the seat. She felt her suit squeeze around her, pushing blood back into her brain. There was another pinching sensation at the back of her skull, and her vision became crystal clear again; clear to watch the clouds rushing up to meet them, then shredded apart in their wake. Clear enough to watch the sky deepen from navy to violet to the blackness of high orbit.

  “Altitude threshold approaching,” Michiko said, voice absurdly calm. “Prepare for orbital transition.”

  The teeth-rattling roar of her mech’s engines shifted to a softer, resonant hum, and the acceleration eased enough for Emily’s mouth to hang open. The stars. Emily could see them so clearly now, not just the brightest ones that managed to shimmer through Earth’s atmosphere, but millions of them, strewn like diamonds across space. Green Dragon pivoted, and the HUD revealed the curvature of the earth beneath them.

  Michiko's voice cut through the comms. "Lachlan, status report. Are you functional?" On the HUD, Emily’s watched as Lachlan wiped foam from his chin with the back of a trembling hand, his pupils still dilated. He swallowed hard. "I think so," he managed, voice raspy and uncertain. "Feels like someone put my brain through a blender, but I can move again."

  “Good,” Michiko answered, flipping several switches to one side, “because our intercept course with Queen Nebulon’s armada has been calculated, and we don’t have much time.” Michiko paused, and took a deep breath. Goosebumps rippled across Emily's skin as she anticipated the iconic phrase she'd mouthed along with her favorite show countless times before.

  “Dragons,” Michiko said softly, her voice catching. “Ignite stellar drives.”

  Without thinking, Emily flipped three switches overhead, then leaned forward in her seat, feet pressing hard against the pedal-stirrups.

  Five suns flared to life, and the dragons surged forward into the void.