Dark Stars - Complete Trilogy, page 49
part #0 of Dark Stars Series
The disruptor wave continued to rip into my extended self as the leading edge of the wave passed by our location and we were left in the center of the affected zone. But, the shell held—a tiny sanctuary surrounding by nothingness.
I was slipping. I couldn’t hold it for any longer.
The disruptor wave began to dissipate, a gravity well formed at the detonation site. The shuttle’s engines were ineffective within the shell, and our bubble was yanked toward the black maw that had opened at the epicenter. The shell had proven successful in keeping us safe, but we’d need the ship’s engines if we wanted to avoid getting sucked into the black pit.
“Drop the shield!” I ordered while keeping my own magic active.
“We’ll—”
“Just do it!” I cut Maris off.
The shell collapsed in its previous form, but I redoubled my efforts to maintain the structural integrity of the shuttle.
The backward pull of the shuttle ceased as the engines were freed from the shell. Slowly, we began accelerating away from the detonation site.
Even as we pulled away, the ruins of the alien ship and everything else in the vicinity were condensing onto a singular point. In a sudden burst, a secondary wave fanned out from the epicenter, this one re-condensing rather than breaking apart. I quickly shifted my spell to counteract its effects and keep us from smooshing.
I wasn’t fast enough. The shuttle shook as its frame twisted and cracked. The engines cut out, leaving us traveling forward on inertia at a slow spin.
The remaining disruptor wave collapsed. It was over.
I released the telekinetic shield and dropped to my knees, panting.
“Elle!” Kaiden couched down next to me and placed a hand on my back.
“I’m okay,” I gasped, wishing I could rip off my helmet and get some fresh air. “Just gimme a sec.”
“What was that you did?” Toran asked.
“Elle, maybe it’s time you said something,” Kaiden whispered to me.
“Okay, confession: I have some sort of telekinesis-style magic,” I revealed, slipping my sword into its scabbard.
“That’s…” Maris faded out.
I nodded. “I don’t understand how it works. I just… knew what I had to do.”
Toran and Maris stared at me with raised eyebrows.
“Well, thank you,” Toran said at last.
I staggered to my feet with Kaiden’s help. By the time I was upright, I realized that the artificial gravity was starting to fail, and I was lifting slightly off the deck. “Unfortunately, now we’re trapped here with no escape.”
“There must be an emergency signal,” Toran stated.
“Right, yes.” Kaiden glided back to the front control panel. Only a handful of items were illuminated on the backup battery power. He activated the emergency transponder.
“The commander wouldn’t have jumped too far away,” I said, hoping that wasn’t just wishful thinking.
Maris wrapped her arms around herself. “How long do we have?”
“We have backup oxygen and power for the suits,” Toran replied. “We’ll be able to make it at least sixteen hours, maybe more.”
I prayed to the stars we wouldn’t have to wait that long.
Despite my best wishes, the hours dragged on. I spent the first two hours telling myself that the Evangiel would be there any second. By the end of the fourth hour, I was beginning to doubt we’d ever be rescued.
“They should have picked up our distress signal by now, right?” Maris asked.
“Yeah, I’d think so,” I agreed.
“Maybe they’re out of range, or…” Kaiden faded out.
“Or what?” I pressed.
“Or they have no intention of returning to this place,” Toran completed for him.
I swallowed. “Why wouldn’t they, though? I mean, we activated the beacon—that means our ship wasn’t destroyed and we made it through.”
“That’s a straightforward explanation, yes,” Toran agreed.
I frowned. “What else would it be?”
“That the enemy found a way to mimic our signals and is trying to lure them back into another trap.”
My heart sank. “Oh.” I paused. “Can’t we have a custom message saying it’s us?”
“I don’t know enough about these emergency systems to do that,” Kaiden said. “They’ll need to authenticate once they send a scout vessel back to check the scene.”
“So, we have to keep waiting,” I concluded.
And so we did. We remained silent for the next half hour, both to conserve oxygen and because we had nothing to say. In the next several hours, we’d either be rescued or suffocate. All things considered, it was one of the bleaker moments in my life.
I stayed closed to Kaiden, hating that our EVA suits prevented us from being able to seek comfort from closer contact. As I stared out the front viewport, I rested my helmet on Kaiden’s shoulder. My eyes had glazed over after looking out into the nothingness for so long, but then a point of light caught my attention.
I sat upright. “Hey, what’s that?”
The others roused, following my sightline.
Kaiden squinted. “Can’t tell from here.” He propelled himself across the bridge in the zero-g to the front control panel. “Stars, it’s a Hegemony ship!” he cheered.
My ear comm crackled. “Shuttle 2, do you copy?” a male voice asked.
“Yes, we’re here!” I replied. “All four members of the Dark Sentinel team accounted for.”
“Thank the stars!” the man said with an audible smile. “The commander and rest of the crew will be thrilled to hear it. We’re on our way to grab you, hang tight.”
The rescue shuttle maneuvered to us and extended an umbilical from their airlock to allow us safe passage out our side hatch. I’d never been quite so happy to be back in artificial gravity and to be able to remove my helmet.
As it turned out, the Evangiel had jumped back to wait several hundred kilometers away while the rescue craft went searching for us and to look for any evidence of the alien ship or anomaly. The shuttle would have been deployed sooner, but Colren had called for backup in the event the disruptor hadn’t destroyed the anomaly. Waiting near the Evangiel were two dozen of the Hegemony’s warships poised for action.
“Okay, so they came prepared,” I said as I looked over the fleet.
“Glad they weren’t needed this time,” Kaiden replied.
“But this isn’t over yet.”
Our rescue craft entered the Evangiel’s hangar and came to rest in a decontamination tent. True to form, Tami, dressed in her hazsuit, was the first to meet us as we exited.
“I’m so happy to see you’re okay!” she greeted.
I smiled. “It’ll take more than an interdimensional bomb to get rid of us.”
She laughed. “I have no idea how you did it, and I’m sure you have quite a story to tell. The commander is waiting for you; I’ll have to get the inside scoop later.”
“And you’ll have it,” I assured her.
“But first,” she pointed to booths at the end of a tunnel leading from the tent, “decontamination, sorry.”
I looked down at my EVA suit that had been immersed in the innards of the alien ship. “No complaints here.”
We endured the uncomfortable chemical scrub and emerged from our respective stalls to find clean, custom-sized shipsuits waiting for us. I always hated walking around the ship in just the base layer, but I’d grown rather attached to my outfit and would rather the garments get cleaned rather than have new ones made; even if the style was identical, it just wasn’t the same.
Once we were dressed in the white suits, Kaiden pulled me aside and wrapped me in a tight hug. I gladly hugged him back.
“We did it,” he murmured into my hair.
“Yeah, but what in the stars are we up against?” I asked, pulling away. “Did you see that thing in the chamber?”
He paled. “Yeah, I did. Just a flash of red eyes and more limbs than I could count. It didn’t look friendly.”
I took his hands. “Whatever it was, we’ll face it together.”
Kaiden leaned in and gave me a kiss. The unpleasant associations that had tainted our intimacy since the reset had now faded into the background. Once again, it was just the two of us sharing a special moment. For that instant, my worries and fears melted away.
Toran cleared his throat. “Anytime…”
We parted. “Right,” I said, flashing a happy smile at Kaiden.
Our party left the hangar and took the lift to Central Command. Applause greeted us as soon as the bridge door opened, led by Commander Colren.
He beamed at us from the center of the room. “I don’t know how you survived the disruptor, but thank you for seeing the mission through. Welcome back.”
Anger rose in me, hearing his casual words. He’d left us to die. An apology didn’t cut it.
“What happened to resetting if something went wrong?” Maris snapped. I was happy for her to say it so I didn’t have to.
Colren shifted on his feet. “We first had to see if the anomaly was sealed.”
He needn’t say more. That was the mission: to stop the alien invasion. Losing us would be a setback, but it would have been a worthwhile sacrifice to ensure that the alien fleet didn’t make it through the anomaly. If he had reset in an attempt to save us, our efforts may not have been successful on another go around. We needed to take any victory we could, in part or full. Casualties along the way were to be expected.
Kaiden and Toran nodded with understanding, but Maris only scoffed and tossed her head in response.
“Elle has been holding out on us,” Toran said. “She has telekinetic magic, apparently.”
Colren’s eyes widened and he tilted his head questioningly.
I blushed. “I’m still trying to figure out what I can do with it.”
“Whatever the methods, you’ve demonstrated once again that you were exactly the team we’ve needed,” the commander replied. “I can’t express enough how difficult it was to give the departure order without you. But, the data you were able to transmit was too valuable. We had to make sure it got to the capital.”
Kaiden came to attention. “What did the interface equipment pick up?”
“A series of codes and signals,” Colren explained. “When we compared it to the other data we’ve gathered, we were able to confirm that alien tech uses the crystalline network’s reset ability to restructure physical reality within a crystal’s zone. There must have been a crystal inside that anomaly. But, we captured the origin point of the signal, and we believe it will lead us to the location of the alien’s homeworld.”
“That’s… wow,” I murmured.
“The anomaly—or hidden crystal… was it destroyed?” Kaiden asked.
“The rescue crew picked up none of the usual readings we had detected before. It’s gone, or at least dormant,” the commander said.
The others grinned.
“That’s excellent news,” Toran said.
“Elle, come on, this was a big win today,” Kaiden said when he saw I wasn’t smiling.
“Was it?” I shook my head. “Yeah, we prevented this invasion, but they’ll try again. I’m certain of it.”
“It bought us time,” Toran said.
“But how much? We don’t know how that spatial anomaly was formed in the first place,” I continued. “For all we know, they could have already opened another one somewhere else, only now we have no idea where.”
Colren nodded. “That’s why we need to end this while we can still get the upper hand. We’ve confirmed that we have an effective weapon against them.”
“That’s true.” I finally allowed myself to revel in our temporary victory. “And now we know where to hit them so they’ll never come back.”
This is the end of Dark Stars Book 2
THE STORY CONTINUES IN MASTERS OF FATE…
MASTERS OF FATE
DARK STARS: BOOK 3
1
Practice combat wasn’t the same as a real fight, and I had a thirst for battle.
As I twisted and flipped around the mock battlefield with my three friends, I couldn’t help but wish that we were on a world fighting creatures born from the Darkness rather than attacking rocks on an uninhabited planet.
Envisioning a shadowcat in my mind, I lunged to the side while swinging my sword in what would be a decapitating blow. I landed lightly on my feet then spun around to spot my next target.
“Nice move,” Kaiden complimented.
I grinned back, still poised for action. “I can’t wait to take them out for real.”
The planet Commander Colren had selected for our exercises was one of the least interesting places from our travels to date. Rather, it was beautiful—impressive mountain peaks and expansive forests—but it wasn’t… magical. I craved for the intensity of the crystals on Crystallis or the hum of the Darkness signal in the background. To be on a purely ordinary world felt like a part of me was missing.
Toran sighed, heaving his broad shoulders. He lowered his fists. “If our attacks are focused on individual creatures, we’re going about the war all wrong.”
“That’s true. Any word on the larger strategy?” asked Kaiden, bringing his staff to a resting position on the ground.
Toran shook his bald head. “My conversations have been about the technical nature of the Darkness and the potential form of the aliens. We haven’t gotten far enough to know how to take them out for good.”
“Are you ever going to figure it out?” I asked, realizing only after I’d spoken that it sounded whiny. But, in the days following our engagement with the alien ship at the anomaly, Toran and the other scientists had concluded that the signal’s origin wasn’t nearly as clear as they’d once believed. It was coming from a specific location, and they knew where that place was, but there didn’t appear to be anything there.
“It’s a complex situation. There are forces here beyond our current understanding,” Toran replied.
Maris tightened the ponytail holding back her dark hair. “Because it’s magic.”
“Just because we don’t yet understand it, that doesn’t make it magic,” he retorted. “Frankly, some theories the Hegemony’s science team has presented are pretty exciting.”
“Because they’re magic,” Maris insisted.
“No, just higher dimensional sp…” I faded out, not remembering the term Toran had used yesterday.
“Hyperdimensional entities manifesting in our plane,” Toran corrected. “But that’s only one hypothesis. They just as easily could be beings that have learned to control matter using whatever mechanism the crystals use for resets.”
“Regardless of what they are, we need to figure out how to stop them,” Kaiden stated.
Torn inclined his head. “Which is what we’re trying to do. But, it’s difficult when we don’t rightly know what they’re after.”
“I still say it’s matter—or dark matter,” I posited. “All of the worlds infected by the Darkness were hollowed out.”
“I still don’t believe that’s the case,” Toran countered.
“Then what—” I was cut off by a chirp in my ear from the embedded comm.
“Dark Sentinel team, return to the Evangiel,” Colren instructed.
“Is everything okay, Commander?” Kaiden asked.
“New information. Meet in the conference room,” he replied, then cut the commlink.
I looked to my friends. “Good information or bad information?”
“That tone didn’t sound good,” Maris observed.
Kaiden let out a deep breath. “Looks like you may soon get your wish for a proper fight after all, Elle.”
“We’ll see what the commander has to say.” Really, it wasn’t that I desired to be at the center of the conflict, it was that I hoped for an end to the madness that had been our lives for the past several weeks. I wanted to put a face to the enemy who’d forced me away from my family and made so many people suffer at the hands of their planet-killing weapon. I didn’t want to confront them because of bloodlust—rather, I wanted to end the war so we could return to our loved ones and once again have control over our own lives. Though my future path was now unclear, not having the threat of an alien invasion hanging over my head would certainly make matters easier.
The four of us hiked back to our shuttle in a grassy field two hundred meters from our practice area. My chest was tight with eager anticipation to hear Colren’s news. The commander had been strangely silent in the four days since our near-death encounter with the alien ship, so I looked forward to a face-to-face meeting to assess his current frame of mind. I could only imagine he was as anxious for the conflict to be over as I was—maybe even more so, having been in the thick of it for a longer time. However, he was our connection to the rest of the Hegemony, so I wanted to make sure he was still on our side. After all, he’d already left us to die once, when he jumped the Evangiel without us.
After a brief shuttle ride, we docked in the hangar and made our way to Central Command on the upper deck of the Evangiel. Colren rose from his seat at the center of the bridge and motioned us toward the glass-walled conference room.
“How was practice?” the commander asked as we took our typical seats.
“Good,” Kaiden replied.
I nodded. “We feel prepared, if that’s what you mean.”
“It was,” Colren said. “So, there shouldn’t be any issue with carrying out our new orders.”
Toran’s brow knit. “The Hegemony has made a decision?”
Colren nodded. “We’ve been ordered to mount an investigation of the world where the alien signal is originating. Since nothing is showing up on long-range scans, we have no option other than to get closer.”
My stomach flipped as I thought back to the last time we’d gone to an alien-controlled world to investigate the Darkness. I hadn’t experienced it in this timeline, but my memories from the previous-future had become clearer with time. The multiple independent timelines with their own sequences of events wove through my mind; I couldn’t tell quite how many resets we’d been through, but there were at least three clear versions of events where we hadn’t stopped the alien fleet. In those timelines, worlds infected by the Darkness had proved almost deadly. I could only imagine a journey to their central hub would be the most dangerous of all.
