Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (76 page)

A plasma stream erupted out of the shadow of the moon a microsecond after the frigate became targetable, giving her no time to return fire before shifting course. As she pulled upward in a tight arc and raced belly-up a sliver above the surface of the moon, she saw the enemy vessel bank away in the opposite direction and disappear once more.
Damn, this captain’s good.

She fell into the protection of the curving lunar surface and the plasma beam sliced away less than four meters above her. Her comm immediately burst to life with updates from her squadmates.

Charlie:  Impact confirmed, aft starboard quadrant. Engine damage unclear.

Excellent. In taking the lead position and providing a target, she had given her other pilots the opportunity to launch several shots. It had been a fruitful first move. Now the game began in earnest.

Alpha:  Pursue and evade.

She did not rejoin her squadron as they gave chase. Instead she increased her dampener field to full strength and allowed her ship to continue on its current arc around the moon. She looked ‘up’ to see a pale lime surface of Picrite basalt racing by. Pockmarks which were tiny from afar now loomed large to cleave into the lunar face. The still tacking frigate grew closer.

Her whisper virtual screens displayed all the data she needed regarding the enemy vessel, her squadron and her ship. They spread across the entirety of her vision to paint a landscape as real to her as the physical one beyond them.

She smiled as Beta scored another hit on the enemy ship’s broadside, only to mutter a curse when he failed to avoid the frigate’s plasma beam. Beta had always been brave and reckless in equal measure; it made him a great pilot but would probably shorten his lifespan.

Not today though. He ejected safely and barring disaster should be unharmed. His ship, not so much. She imagined him weaving a tapestry of curses back aboard the
Catania
.

Pachis received the ‘all clear’ on the orbital array from the frigate captains and initiated the planetary offensive. Assuming there were no similarly heroic, insane soldiers planet-side, it should be a bloodless affair.

He might have sent one of the frigates to assist in removing the Alliance ship, but he did not. She assumed this meant he trusted her implicitly to do her job and handle the problem. He should.

The enemy ship was very near now. They were on a collision course, though the Alliance captain did not know it. In the unlikely event she registered on his sensors, he would be fully engaged in his game of cat and mouse with the remainder of her squadron and miss her until it was too late. But she wouldn’t show up. Not until…

…now. She disengaged the dampener field and soared away from the lunar surface, still inverted, she and her ship one seamless avatar.

Target. Lock. Fire.

The white-blue hot plasma of the frigate’s impulse engine filled her viewport, washing out her whispers until they darkened to contrast against the bright background. She flew forty meters behind her target as her weapons seared into the core. The hyper-light honeycombed metamaterial of her hull was capable of withstanding the heat…for twenty-six seconds. It would take half those seconds to single-handedly destroy the sizeable impulse engine.

In contrast to most battles, there were no enemy fighters to come to the frigate’s aid. As she moved in lockstep with the ship when it shifted away and tried to evade her squadmates, she had to wonder what Alliance asshole was moronic enough to send a single frigate to defend an entire world.

The whisper on her far right began to flash warnings as the heat threshold of the hull neared. Another three seconds…2…1…. The glow of the engine shifted from pale blue to fiery orange as the chain reaction began. She had six seconds before the disabling overload erupted.

Alpha:  Evac safe distance.

She spun 270° and raced away from the moon toward the stars.

Klaxons blared through the bridge of the
Juno
, the bugle tones crashing into one another in a discordant concerto of impending death.

“Hull breach mid-starboard Deck 2, damage to environmental systems!”

“Evacuate and seal it off—”

“Primary shields at 14%!”

Malcolm continued to hang on to the railing as the ship shuddered and lurched beneath him. At least he had progressed beyond scrambling for his chair and stood on the deck like a proper shipman. Mostly. “Billoughy, got anything left?”

“Sir, we’re about to—shit! One of the fighters slipped around and is firing on the impulse engine!”

Damn, this squadron leader’s good.

With no support they could not elude the fighter; however fast they might be able to maneuver, it would be faster. If they spent their precious remaining seconds
trying
to evade the rear fighter, they became a sitting duck for the other fighters to rip through their meager remaining shields.

“Billoughy: engage the sLume drive now. Weapons: fire everything you’ve got at any and every target until it engages.”

“Yes, sir. Destination?”

The floor beneath Malcolm convulsed as the impulse engine exploded. A heavy breath fell silently beneath the violent clamor of alarms. He had done all he could. He wouldn’t sacrifice his men on the altar of pride. But for the sLume drive, the ship was now a derelict. He only hoped the core hull managed to hold together long enough for a rescue. He readied the distress signal.

“Anywhere but here.”

4

SIYANE

P
ORTAL
P
RIME,
U
NCHARTED
S
PACE

“
W
HY AREN’T THEY
chasing us?”

Caleb dropped one hand on her armrest and the other on the dash and leaned in to study the HUD screens alongside her. If he was still struggling to regain his bearings, he concealed it well. “Are you sure? None of them?”

“The scanners are pinging with all their strength, but nothing is showing up. I don’t think they followed us through the…whatever it is shielding the planet. Which makes no sense.”

“Perhaps they veered off when we disappeared—they
really
aren’t chasing us?”

“No.” Alex tried not to allow the scene outside the viewport to distract her. Survival first, suspiciously pleasant-looking mystery planet later. “But the lead ships were seconds behind us. They hadn’t the time to veer off. So…where are they?”

“Did they break apart in the atmosphere?”

Considering how close the
Siyane
had come to breaking apart, a valid question. “Not unless they disintegrated, because there’s no debris on the radar either. I suppose if they took a different trajectory the debris might be too far away to detect, but it’s doubtful. The ships wouldn’t have entered mid-death spiral like we did. They should have been able to traverse it without difficulty.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. Those squid should be here trying to fry us.”

“Agreed. Still, the fact this planet is invisible from the outside strikes me as a greater mystery. We solve that one, and I bet we figure out this one as well.”

“Fair point.” The tumble through the atmosphere had left her with a throbbing headache as her brain struggled to reorient its contents to their proper positions. “I’ll keep scanning for pursuers, but until they show up we hunt for a power source—a strong one. Generating a planet-sized shield will require enormous energy.”

His hand alighted upon her jaw and urged it toward him. She relented and found his eyes boring into hers, concern swirling to darken his irises. “Are you okay? That was some fairly intense flying back there, to put it mildly. Maybe we ought to find a safe place to land and catch our breath.”

She scoffed. “Nah, I’m good. Spectacular even…which might be a slight exaggeration. But I’m intensely curious, and not at all ready to relax.”

He sighed in concession. “You win. Let’s go investigate.”

“You got it.” She straightened her posture and directed her attention ahead, though the radar display remained firmly in the corner of her vision.

The grassland grew increasingly sandy and soon transitioned into rolling dunes. “We’re coming up on a shoreline.”

They left the dunes behind and began flying over a body of water. At first glimpse it resembled an average ocean, the surface buffeted by wind and regular wave patterns lapping toward shore. The water gleamed a surprisingly pale teal, but she’d seen waters of similar color on Scythia and Fionava.

Yet as the ocean presumably grew deeper, as oceans were prone to do, the hue didn’t darken. On the contrary, it lightened. “Is the water glowing?”

“It’s hard to tell….” Caleb blinked several times. “I’m not picking up anything unusual on other spectrum bands. But it does appear almost luminescent.” Abruptly he moved back and out of her peripheral vision. “How long would you say we’ve been here?”

She shrugged, her attention fully on the strange body of water. “Twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five? Why?”

“My eVi says it’s been almost an hour.”

“No, it can’t….” She checked her own time and scowled. “I didn’t note the time when we arrived, had a few other things on my mind.” Her focus now inward, she watched seconds tick by at alarming speed. Two…two and a half times the normal rate.

“That is enough!” She leapt out of the cockpit chair, leaving the autopilot to continue cruising them above the ocean while she rushed to the data center. “What the
d’yavol
is up with this place? Are you telling me we’re losing time?”

“I don’t know.” She noted the tension in his voice and had the fleeting thought,
at least something unnerves him
.

At the control panel she set diagnostics running on several internal systems. The results matched her eVi’s information…yet insisted nothing was wrong. Time moved forward under the same rules it always had, and the ship seemed perfectly fine with it.

She was certain the seconds were passing more rapidly than they should, yet she couldn’t sense it. Nothing felt odd. She moved, breathed and talked normally. Or thought she did.

“The cloaking shield must be some kind of crocked quantum field…or maybe it was the portal. I didn’t think to check the passage of
time
while we were flying. This whole space could be off-kilter.”

She gestured away the diagnostic tests in frustration. “I seriously do not like this, Caleb. You realize what it means?”

He tread a deliberate yet circular path around the cabin. “Every perceived minute we’re here is more than two minutes at home. By the time we return….”

“Everyone could be dead?”

“I hope not. But…the situation may be worse than we expect.”

She spun toward the cockpit, instantly a whirl of motion. “We need to go back. We can’t waste time here while people are being slaughtered.”

He grabbed her by the shoulders as she passed him, impeding her advancement. “We don’t have anything to go back with. We return now and we’re as helpless to defeat the invasion as we were when we left.”

“But—”

“No ‘buts.’ I admit this development…complicates matters and is more than a little disconcerting, but it doesn’t change the reality. As things stand now there’s nothing we can do back home except get arrested and imprisoned, which I deeply want to avoid.” The graveled rasp in his voice told her meant it. “But we can do something here. We can solve the mystery.”

Her head shook violently. She pulled away to rush through the cabin. Her steps were agitated and mostly directionless, but she couldn’t manage to stop. “Right. Figure this place out. Find the aliens. So we need to pinpoint the source then—”

His arms wound around her waist from behind and spun her to face him, holding her steady in his grasp. “Alex, you’re panicking. You need to calm down.”

Blood drummed in her ears; adrenaline coursed through her veins, driving her to move. To
act
. Her hands trembled against his chest. Time vanished out from beneath her feet, one accelerating second at a time.

But because she trusted him, she worked to concentrate her focus on him and him alone.

His expression and his touch calmed her in their reassurance, though he was unable to entirely mask his own troubled thoughts weighing down the set of his mouth. “If we want to help everyone, we…we can’t obsess over what may be happening on the other side of the portal right now. A couple of extra days will be worth it if they mean we find answers. But rushing means we’ll make a mistake, and making a mistake in this peculiar, alien place will get us killed. So focus on solving the mystery.”