The Foundry
by Ophelia Everfall
Content Warning: High Intensity, Violence, Sex, Lots of Bad Commas
Part Two | Rebuilt; Refound; Reclaimed
Part Four | Unmasked; Unbound; Unleashed
This is a story about flipping spaceships—making mistakes—and dismantling patriarchal hierarchy violently.
Here’s the penultimate spaceship flip from my novel The Foundry.
She’d seen her shot as they grew so near each other, and having obsessed quite thoroughly over the very thing Echo and Rory had been not-so-secretly competing over — Chloe knew this her chance.
Cutting throttle; on full-float in highest immediacy. Hardline’s tailfin would throw its rudder right, veering the craft’s nose that same direction, while its bearing remained unchanged on drift. She’d engage throttle from her dual drive cores, burning its upper chambers at one-eighth from the front, and its lower row on-full from the rear, proving the needed overbearance which would take the craft into an upward arc at its off kilter angle. That moment she’d hit a ninety-degree incline, Chloe disengaged her core, flipped her nosecone back into itself, burned top-facing thrusters on its rear to throw its rotation backward, before collapsing her right wing up and in — burning those outer most, rear-facing core chambers she’d mounted beneath the left wing — feathering the upward facing thrusters mottled along its length for the needed downforce. At that perfect moment she’d disengage everything, blasting thrusters straight out of her lower right hull’s frame to cut the spin, adding a touch of downforce on the rear to even her out — straightening the rudder, unfolding everything in perfect time — before hard lining straight ahead.
Chloe had beat them all, but only for now.