Elaine was in the air, and she didn't remember how she'd gotten there.
She could recall the red flash, and the confusion on the faces of the approaching men. She even remembered one of them raising his blaster and shooting at Boss Hog. But after that, her mind was blank.
Boss Hog was hovering about twenty feet above the ground. Not much time could have passed, for people were running into the shipyards. Dust swirled around their feet and twisted into the sky. Ships were hurriedly lifting into the air, and speeding across the ground in all directions. The dust storm grew thicker and more violent. Elaine could see shapes whirling dimly within: rocks, sheets of metal, bodies. Then the dust hid everything.
Elaine waited. Indecision gnawed at her. Something had happened to the antigravity field Guybrush had described: that was obvious. The pressure differential between the internal atmosphere and the outside vacuum had sucked everything into the sky. Such a scale of destruction was difficult to comprehend.
The question was, where were Guybrush and Wally? Could they have survived somehow?
Even as she wondered this, the view before her was clearing. Nearly all of the air had dispersed, and the dust with it. Elaine's hands moved toward the controls, and she slowly moved Boss Hog over the remains of Exus-1.
The place looked like a tornado had hit it dead centre. Most of the houses were collapsed ruins, their roofs sucked into the sky. The vegetation had all been torn from the dirt.
And nothing moved.
Boss Hog slowly continued its search of the rubble below. Elaine couldn't see an intact building in any direction. It would be foolish to expect anyone to have survived-
A large cube of metal thumped into the ground not far from Boss Hog.
Elaine jumped back, startled. Was someone firing at them?
Another chunk of metal hit the ground, and another explanation occurred to her. The antigravity field might have been sabotaged, but Ganymede's natural gravity was still there. Once the initial impetus of the outrushing atmosphere had been nullified, all the debris would start to fall to the ground, starting with the closest, heaviest material.
Elaine recalled some of the things she'd seen whirling upward in the vertical tornado, and decided she didn't want to be around when they came back again. She flew out of there at a much greater velocity, and as she did so she realised she'd given up Guybrush and Wally for dead.
Once she'd gotten a small distance from Exus-1, she pointed the craft straight up and hit the accelerator. With the laggy antigravity of Boss Hog, the changing inertia pushed her back into the seat. It was an unfamiliar, but not unpleasant sensation. Elaine gave the engines more power.
As the moon slowly vanished behind her, Elaine considered what to do next. Head to Chora Luna, that was obvious. But who could have carried out the attack on Exus-1? Upchuck - this insane, destructive attack looked just like his handiwork.
An alarming thought occurred to her. If he's the one responsible, then he knew we were there. An entire settlement had been destroyed, just as a trap. How had he known they would be there?
Maybe you're not out of the trap yet-
She was distracted from these thoughts by a bleep from the radarscope. It showed about fifteen dots, closely concentrated, and behind them a much larger dot the radarscope rendered as a bright oval. The cluster of dots was arrowing directly on Boss Hog, moving quite a lot faster than walking pace.
Elaine remembered the people who'd escaped, how they'd hugged the ground as they sped away. Whereas she'd shot straight up. In a highly unusual pirate ship, the very one Upchuck was spending such effort on tracking down.
Elaine swallowed. Only one thing was in her favor: Upchuck's fleet was uncloaked. No doubt they'd expected to pick up a dead husk from the surface of the moon. This gave her a small amount of advance warning before they attacked, and she knew just how to use it.
She pressed the jury-rigged portal stone button.
A prompt flashed up on the onboard computer display.
'ENTER PASSWORD'.
Elaine stared at the display in disbelief. "You fuck!" she shouted.
Upchuck's fighters were spreading out now, coming at Boss Hog from both sides. Elaine gripped the flight yoke, and pictured Guybrush's face out in space, right in the target reticule of the lasers. She knew her last hope was gone, but at the moment she was too furious to be dismayed. She'd go down fighting every inch of the way...