Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (74 page)

“Maybe they’re not hiding. Maybe they’re simply…farther. Let’s find out.” She reengaged propulsion and accelerated until they attained a steady eighty-five percent cruising speed. No reason to overtax the impulse engine on the off chance the laws of physics weren’t
exactly
the same here.

In the pervasive darkness there was no visual perception of movement, and only the subtle
purr
of the engine argued otherwise. It was rather disconcerting, so she sought solace in monitoring the portal in the rearcam. For the time being the sight of it shrinking in the distance did at least convey a sense of motion.

Then it vanished, and the void truly was absolute.

“Dammit!” She killed the thrusters entirely before confirming the gamma wave was still transmitting. It took considerable effort to resist the powerful urge to whirl the ship around and bolt for where the portal had been. To flee this suffocating
emptiness
.

Instead she slumped in her chair, arms flopping weakly to drape over the armrests. Her instruments would have been able to keep a lock on the portal long after it had passed from visual sight. But now….

“Must be a distance limit on the signal to keep it open.
Dammit.
”

Caleb had stood to pace behind the cockpit. In the wake of their discovery of the alien armada she had quickly deduced he did his best thinking while roving. Had it been only weeks ago? It felt like a lifetime had transpired since they had uncovered the terrifying secret at the heart of Metis.

“Can we use the TLF as a guidance mechanism? A sort of beacon?”

“So long as we don’t lose track of which way is forward and which is back. The key is going to be…” she swiveled to the dash, magnified one of the HUD screens and began inputting commands “…I’m setting the navigation system to record our relative movements. It will create a mapping of our path, in essence. If all else fails we can retrace our steps.”

“Will it work?”

“It’ll work.” Instructions completed, she sank back to stare out into the yawning abyss once more.

It was a bleak panorama. Forbidding. Oppressive. She yearned for stars to light the way, to shepherd and inspire her. But there were none.

In lieu of stars she reached behind her, somehow knowing his hand would soon be in hers, warm and comforting. Solid.
Real
.

On finding what she sought, she sucked in a deep breath and continued on.

They had been flying for what felt like hours when the first blips emerged on the long-range scanner.

Bored to tears and craving reassurance life remained possible in this desolate wasteland, she was curled up in Caleb’s lap when the alert sounded. In
her
chair in his lap, on account of it being larger and more comfy and all.

She leapt up and magnified the USAR data while motioning him out of the chair impatiently.

“What do we have?”

“Looks like—” More blips materialized on the scanner. Then more…and it occurred to her she didn’t technically have a plan for this particular scenario. “We found them.”

She yanked the ship sixty degrees starboard and pushed the impulse engine to its limit. The inertial dampeners prevented them from being thrown to the floor, but she engaged the safety harness in her chair, as did he.

“Let’s see if…” what was now a veritable sea of increasingly larger red dots shifted on the screen “…hell. They can track us. Worse, they
are
tracking us.”

“Their dimension, their rules. Can you outrun them?”

She checked the numbers beneath the display tracking the vessels to see how rapidly they were approaching. “No.”

“Can you beat them back to the portal?”

She swerved one more time to confirm and watched in dismay as they tracked her course yet again. “Not a chance. They’ll be on us in minutes.”

“What can I do to help?”

She magnified the longest-range scans of the region. She wanted to FTL. At superluminal speeds she’d outrun them, or at a minimum they wouldn’t—surely couldn’t—be able to track her. But she had no sense of how large or small this space may be or what might even happen if she initiated a warp bubble.

“Alex?”

“You can
shut up
and let me think.”

“Right.”

The tightness in his voice jarred her. She softened her own tone. “Sorry. Just…hang on.”

In the corner of her eye she noted the muscles in his jaw twitching. “Okay.”

The last time she had been in a firefight she had been shooting at
him
. The irony would have been amusing if not—

—the first of the blips came in range of the visual scanner. It was one of the insectile tentacled vessels from the alien armada.

“We’re being chased by an army of squid. And goddamn are they fast squid.”

Her gaze raced across every display, every sensor, every reading…but perceiving no answers, it fell to the oblivion outside the viewport. They couldn’t run; the ships were almost upon them. They certainly couldn’t fend off what now constituted a solid one hundred pursuers.

She thought Caleb might have said her name, but it was background radiation accompanying the hum in her ears and the symphony in her head—a song of quantum mechanics and trajectory calculations and astroscience physics and
where to go, where to go, where to….

With a long sweep of her hand the entire HUD vanished. At the end of the gesture her wrist flicked and the lights in the cabin shut off. The inside of the ship was now as featureless as the landscape outside it.

She engaged the autopilot, unfastened her harness, stood and stepped up to the viewport. Her eyes closed.

Moya milaya, do not be afraid of the dark, for there is always light within it struggling to shine through. Be fearless, and you will see it.

She reopened her eyes, and the world outside was no longer cast in charred ebony. More of a dull charcoal now really, except…there. An
absence
within the emptiness. Hollow. An echo of the space around it.

She fell back in the chair, re-latching the harness with one hand while disengaging the autopilot with the other and pulling the ship up in a long arc before veering another twelve degrees starboard. Once the harness was engaged she reactivated the HUD and the lights.

“What do you see?”

Anyone other than him would have quizzed her when she shut everything off, or questioned her sanity. But he had recognized she needed the silence and held his inquiry until now.

“Somewhere darker than black.”

A few adjustments and she coaxed another two percent out of the impulse engine, but their pursuers were still gaining on them. It was going to be
close
.

What
was going to be close? She was flying headlong into another black hole, and she couldn’t fathom what waited inside it.

It hardly mattered now. She had no other option.

The lead row of vessels fired, scarlet-hued lasers bursting out from flaming crimson cores. The writhing arms of the attacking ships ignited, lengthening to amplify the beams and direct them to their target.

In the instant before the beams impacted she flung the
Siyane
into a full spin, praying the rapid revolutions might cause the beams to lose tracking or simply cause them to miss.

Her stomach joined the
Siyane
in its spins as the inertial dampeners failed miserably to compensate for the speed of the revolutions. In the cabin ‘up’ and ‘down’ lost meaning.

“Jesus, Alex….”

A growl escaped through gritted teeth. “Just…hang…on….”

It took every iota of her concentration to keep the nose of the ship pointed toward what was a perfect eclipse of infinite blackness. The walls blurred away, along with everything else in her peripheral vision. She kept her focus directly ahead on the void within the void, for if her attention drifted a millimeter off-center she would be lost.

The ship shuddered in her grasp as a laser beam grazed off the lower hull. She ignored it to stay locked on the chasm racing toward her; yet as it consumed the viewport terror bubbled up into her throat.
Dad, I don’t think
—

—they breached the edge and plunged in—

—and were inexplicably careening through an atmosphere. Shadow became brilliant sulfur as light flared to life around them.

Utterly unprepared for light, of all things, she was temporarily blinded. She fought to pull out of the roll she had created while blinking furiously and begging her ocular implant to give her
something
before the atmospheric forces tore her beloved ship to pieces and them with it. “I can’t
see
.”

“I can, in infrared. Let me help you.”

Then he was beside her. One of his arms wound tightly around the armrest; the other curled over hers on the controls. She willed her grip relaxed and let her hand respond to his guiding touch.

It took a few seconds, but the spinning diminished to wild gyrations, then to mere turbulence. Down and up returned to their proper positions, and the bright halos overwhelming her vision began to fade.

“I…I’m okay. Mostly. Enough.”

He collapsed to the floor next to her chair. “Good job, baby.”

His voice sounded terribly weak, trembling from the effort of speaking. She didn’t understand how he had managed to get to her side, much less remain there without a harness,
much less
stay focused ahead and be her eyes. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and cradle him against her, but she still needed both hands.

The atmosphere did show signs of thinning, though. With a deep, steadying breath she transitioned to the pulse detonation engine for planetary flight and allowed her fingers to sink into his hair.

A moment later the haze coating the sky evaporated away.

“When you can, you’re going to want to look up….”

He steadied himself by resting one palm on her thigh and the other on the armrest, and rose to his knees. “I’ll be damned.”

“Possibly. But not today, I think.”

They flew high above savanna grassland. The sky was the deep cornflower blue of a sunny late afternoon on Earth…
exactly
the color of a sunny late afternoon on Earth.

Only there was no sun. Whatever was lighting this planet, it wasn’t a star.

2

GAIAE

I
NDEPENDENT
C
OLONY

B
REATHE OR DIE.

The acrid odor in the air burnt Seraphina’s nostrils with every breath, searing away filaments and delicate skin on its way to her lungs. She didn’t want to take another breath, dreading the pain it would bring. But it was that or die.

As if there was any choice other than death anymore.

She crawled through the singed remains of a grassy meadow in the darkness and tried not to think about how the odor had shifted over the course of the last hours, becoming less the scent of scorched flora and fauna and more the aroma of cooked, spoiling flesh. As soon as the thought crept into her mind she gagged, dry heaves welling up from her stomach and stalling her progress through the meadow. Her diaphragm spasmed, but there hadn’t been anything in her stomach to expunge for two days.

She blinked away hazy tears and tried to focus on the building in the distance. She needed water. The Retreat Center would have water.

The attack had been relentless and unforgiving. Her sheer stupidity had been the only thing that saved her from dying in the first hour; she had been in such a blind panic when she ran screaming that she ended up lost deep in the forest jungle beyond the pond. Exhausted, her skin scraped and welts bubbling up from brushes against numerous poisonous plants as she fled, she had finally collapsed to the ground—only to gape in horror as billowing mushrooms of flame erupted from the direction of the town center and the spaceport beyond.

Enormous void ships soared across the sky, plasma beams the color of arterial blood eighty meters in diameter burning the landscape in savage bursts.

Her parents had ensured she received a quality education, and she earned decent marks before leaving her family and school behind for Gaiae. She didn’t believe ships of such size and breadth should be able to hover within the atmosphere of a planet. Yet evidently she was incorrect.

Perhaps she had misunderstood the lessons. Or perhaps these ships did not obey the laws of the universe. They plainly did not obey any laws of nature.

Hundreds of the writhing tentacled creatures—she couldn’t convince herself to think of them as ‘ships,’ so malevolent was their appearance—prowled the landscape, eager to direct a blood-gorged eye of death on any living creature they found. She had survived these last days solely because the dense tangle of vines and trees of the forest proved a challenge for them. Even with their slithery form they were too large to fit through the small gaps in the weald.

But then one of the void ships had casually turned its attention to her forest, and the encroaching flames drove her steadily back toward town.