“Rojka, go, I can’t survive that jump!” Melody shouted. They obviously weren’t going to be using the ladder down.
	“Trust me, Envoy,” he told her.
	Then his strong, saurian legs tensed. They had to be hundreds of feet above the desert.
	“No, wait!”
	Rojka leapt out into the hot void.
	They hit something a second later with a metallic bang. Melody opened her eyes and saw that Rojka held on to the bay door of a Phantom dropship with one hand, and her waist with another. He pulled her into the vessel’s open bay while it drew away from the mesa’s rock wall.
	Rojka’s fighters were jumping out of the hole for the ground below, some of them finding purchase on the same dropship. Others fell toward the ground, hitting it in an explosion of dust and leaping into a run. More of his own soldiers awaited in a small assortment of ground vehicles a hundred meters from the mesa’s base.