“Thanks for coming with me, buddy,” Lucien said. Brak’s presence made this look more like official police business, and less like the chief of security for Fallside abandoning his duty in the middle of a crisis.
“It is nothing to mention,” Brak growled, and bared his dagger-sharp black teeth in a fearsome grimace that was probably meant to be a brotherly smile.
They’d been friends forever, since long before Astralis had left New Earth, and the Etherian Empire, since before they could even count to ten. Well, at least before Lucien could; Gors grew up a lot faster than humans. Their relationship had oscillated from Lucien acting like the big brother, to Brak doing so, and back again until their respective levels of maturity had more or less equalized and they’d graduated together as Paragons and peers.
Soon after that, Lucien had decided to join Astralis’s mission to the cosmic horizon. Brak had followed him with the plan to change his mind, but when that plan failed, the Gor had decided to join Astralis’s mission, too, supposedly for the adventure, but Lucien suspected otherwise. Brak had fallen back into their old pattern. He was being the big brother again.
Lucien glanced at the timer on his ARCs, counting down until gravity switched off all over Astralis.
Thirty seconds until the picturesque surface level became a nightmare. There were fail-safes in place to prevent gravity from ever failing. It was supposed to be impossible. More than ninety percent of the ship’s reactors would have to go offline before the gravity did, and even then it would have remained at a fraction of normal strength.
But this wasn’t some kind of unforeseen systems failure. Chief Councilor Ellis and Admiral Stavos were shutting off the ship’s gravity intentionally—pre-emptively, they said. Before something worse happens.
It was hard to imagine something worse. What they were about to do was unconscionable. Lucien gazed fixedly out the side window of the hover, watching the scenery roll by beneath them...
Then the timer hit zero, and the hover bucked under them. Lucien’s guts twisted, but didn’t surge up into his throat as he’d expected. The hover’s grav lifts were now an unbalanced force, sending it rocketing up and pushing him down into his seat.
The driver program detected the problem and negated their vertical thrust, but they sailed on with their momentum until Lucien heard the dorsal maneuvering jets firing to push them back down. The contents of Lucien’s stomach surged, and his seat restraints dug into his shoulders, holding him down. Acid burned in the back of his throat and he grimaced with distaste.
“We are experiencing a gravity malfunction. Please make sure your seat buckles are securely fastened,” the driver program said.
Unused seat belts floated up to eye level with Lucien before the buckles reached the end of their slack and bounced back down. Simultaneously, thousands of individual strands of his hair went through the same vertical whiplash effect.
But outside nothing appeared to be happening. Astralis wasn’t in motion like his hover was, at least not changing motion, so there was nothing to knock anything loose from its initial state of rest relative to the rest of the ship.
Lake water stayed in lake beds. Trees remained rooted. Parked hover cars still sat on their landing pads.
Lucien breathed a sigh of relief.
Then a sudden flash of light dazzled his eyes, and he winced against the glare. Had Astralis just jumped again? But no, that couldn’t be. They couldn’t jump out while running on reserve power...
A titanic boom, rumbled through the sky, stealing his attention.
Thunder? Lucien wondered, as he peered up at the cloudless blue sky over Fallside. As he watched, the sky shivered; then it caved in, and fire gushed out between tumbling chunks of molten orange metal. The debris fell like meteors, each the size of a house or building. A gaping black hole appeared in the clear blue sky. Smoke swirled inside that opening, and molten debris plummeted.
The shock wave hit next. A blast of heat knocked the hover sideways, and Lucien’s seat restraints dug into his chest and shoulders with terrifying force. Alarms screamed in the cockpit, and the driver program issued a banal warning: “We are experiencing turbulence, please make sure your seat buckles are securely fastened.”
“What is happening?” Brak shook his skull-shaped head, his gaunt cheeks slack and black teeth bared in a quizzical sneer.
Wind roared, buffeting their hover car with stifling heat. Lucien blinked as rivers of sweat ran into his eyes. Wake up. He thought. This couldn’t be real.
Just as the force of the shock wave was abating, the hover lurched upward again, pinning them in their seats. So much for zero-G, Lucien thought. He had yet to experience more than a moment of it.
“Driver, what’s going on?” Lucien demanded. “Why are we ascending?”
“We are experiencing turbulence, please do not be alarmed.”
Lucien scowled at the unhelpful answer, and turned to look out the side window of the hover, hoping he’d be able to see for himself. He did, but he still couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
The chunks of debris tumbling to the ground had slowed and were now reversing their course, flying back up into the sky. Trees, water, dirt, rocks, houses, hover cars, and everything else gradually followed, lifting off and swirling in circles below the gaping hole in the sky.
An inverted tornado. Lucien watched as it gathered strength, quickly darkening into a black funnel. The oily tip snaked up and touched the hole in the sky, where it remained.
“No!” Lucien slapped the window with his palms as hard as he could, vainly hoping that the stinging pain would wake him up.
But the chaos only amplified, quickly reaching clear across Fallside. Wind roared deafeningly around the hover once more, and writhing tentacles of water snaked up from lakes and rivers; waterfalls pouring from Hubble Mountain inverted their course, falling up into the spinning vortex in the sky.
The hover shuddered and the engines moaned as the driver program tried to compensate. It was like wading to shore against the backwash of a tidal wave, except the ocean they were being carried into was cold hard vacuum.
Hover cars were atmospheric vehicles, not spacecraft. If they got sucked out, they’d be dead within seconds.
Lucien fumbled with his seat restraints, hands shaking as he unbuckled.
“Death comes for usss,” Brak hissed.
“Death can go frek itself!” Lucien replied as he broke free of his restraints. He jumped up and grabbed the bottom of the bench seat facing theirs. Folding it to either side and folding the seat back down into that space, he revealed a narrow passage leading into the cockpit.
Lucien crawled through. It was cramped inside the cockpit, built for one rather than two to maintain the patrol hover’s speedy, aerodynamic profile.
He managed to wrestle himself into place, legs in their slots, feet resting over rudder pedals. Reaching around he unfolded the back of the pilot’s chair, blocking the passage behind him once more. All patrol model hover cars had space for a human pilot in addition to the nine seats in the back—six for officers, three for detainees.
Lucien deactivated the autopilot and grabbed the flight yoke. He slammed the flight yoke down and pushed the throttle up past the stops into overdrive. The hover shook like a leaf, and the thrusters screamed, but the range to Hubble Mountain began dropping steadily.
Thunk! A rock bounced off the nose of the hover. Then a handful of pebbles and leaves skittered across the windshield, followed by a curling column of water, invisible until the last second. It splashed over them, slapping the hover with a noisy bang. Collision alert warnings screamed belatedly. Another rock hit, this time slamming into the canopy and drawing a spider’s web of fractures in the glass.
Lucien grimaced and activated a sensor overlay to shade and highlight the debris. Fuzzy red clouds of dirt appeared; larger specks for pebbles and rocks; a writhing red tentacle of water...
A spinning boulder the size of a house sailed up in front of him, and the c
ockpit turned solid red. Lucien jerked the yoke to starboard and rolled in the same direction. A collision alert screamed, and Lucien fired the grav lifts at full strength.
They bounced off the boulder with a brief crushing sensation, and then the rest of Astralis snapped into focus once more. Lucien breathed a sigh of relief—
But it caught in his throat. The inverted pyramid of the Academy was cracking away from its perch atop Hubble Mountain. A shattered rain of glinting blue glass fell from its walls.
Lucien felt a flash of satisfaction as the symbol of his wife’s abandonment was ripped away. Then he remembered that there were thousands of people inside that building, and all of them were about to suffocate in the dark. He grimaced and dove for the base of Hubble Mountain, heading straight for Shelter Twelve.
Debris continued to assault the car on the way down, but the effects were milder closer to the surface. The shelter’s garage doors swept up in front of him, and Lucien fired the grav lifts to halt his momentum, followed by a steady blast from the dorsal jets to keep the car hovering in front of the entrance.
He keyed the comms. “Shelter Twelve, this is Chief of Security Ortane, requesting emergency landing clearance. Please respond, over.”
Static hissed back at him over the comms. Something scraped by the hover car, pushing it out of line. Lucien compensated with both lateral and dorsal jets. A second later he caught a glimpse of a tree branch waving at him as it sailed by the port side of the cockpit.
“Shelter Twelve, I repeat this is Security Chief Ortane, requesting emergency landing clearance, Over!”
More static...
And then a reply slithered back: “I read you, Lucien. Please proceed.” That was not the voice of the shelter’s comm operator. The voice was androgynous and silky smooth, with an accent like nothing Lucien had ever heard before.
“Who is this?”
The static was back. In lieu of a reply, the garage doors began rumbling open.
Fear clawed at Lucien’s heart as he realized he must have just spoken with one of the aliens. They’d taken over the shelter. Lucien keyed the comms once more and switched channels to his station’s band. “Central, this is Sierra one zero, requesting backup at Shelter Twelve. Hostages taken. Over.”
Lucien throttled up and glided forward, fighting unpredictable gusts of air to keep them from slamming into the roof of the garage on the way in.
A reply came, but the comms crackled with a burst of interference that garbled the message.
“Say again, Central,” Lucien commed back.
Another crackle of interference came, but this time Lucien heard the message. “Sierra one zero, this is Central. Cannot comply, all units grounded due to hull breach. Do not engage. Marines en route ETA ten minutes. Over.”
“Negative, Central. Marines too slow. Sierra one zero responding.” Lucien switched channels to the inside of the patrol car before the dispatcher could reply. “Listen up, Brak: we’ve got a hostage situation in the shelter. No backup from Central, but Marines are on their way. ETA in ten. I can’t wait; my kids are in there, but you don’t have to follow me in, buddy.”
Brak replied, hissing into the comms, “You insssult my honor, Bud-dee. I follow you.”
“Copy that,” Lucien said as he set the hover down in the garage. The doors rumbled shut behind them with a resonant bang, sealing the shelter’s atmosphere against the raging vortex outside. Lucien unbuckled and popped the canopy open. The thin air rushed in, making his head spin. He stood up carefully and grabbed the rim of the canopy overhead to hold himself down while he climbed out of the cockpit. In zero-G every step threatened to launch him to the ceiling.
Using the rungs on the side of the cockpit, Lucien rotated his body until he was facing the aft of the hover car, where the equipment locker was located. Pushing off carefully, he sent himself drifting to the back of the car. He managed to stabilize his trajectory and keep himself on course by grabbing hold of intake vents and control surfaces along the way.
Hang on girls, Daddy’s coming...
Chapter 10
Astralis
“What do you mean Fallside is depressurizing?” Admiral Stavos demanded.
“It’s exposed to vacuum, sir,” the chief engineer, Lieutenant Ruso, said. “There was a massive detonation somewhere between decks twelve zero five and twelve fifteen soon after we turned off the gravity.”
Tyra listened to the exchange with growing horror from where she sat belted in at an auxiliary control station. Someone had snagged a pair of mag boots for her before they’d shut off the gravity, but she was in no rush to test them out. Her stomach was still adapting to zero-G, and she didn’t think walking around was going to help.
“Was the explosion caused by the faulty reactors?” Chief Councilor Ellis asked.
Admiral Stavos shook his head. “No, two or three reactors going critical wouldn’t cause that kind of damage. This was a bomb. They baited us and we fell for it—got us to turn off the gravity so their bomb would do maximum damage when it ripped open the sky.”
“Then turn the gravity back on!” Ellis said.
Stavos shook his head. “We can’t. Everything in the whole damn city is halfway into space already. We turn the gravity back on now and all of the debris goes plummeting to the ground, causing even more damage. Whatever went up must not come back down.”
General Graves waved to them from the holo table in the center of the command deck. “Admiral, you need to see this!”
Both Admiral Stavos and Chief Councilor Ellis hurried over to the table.
Tyra’s thoughts went out to Lucien, and she mentally placed a call to reach him, but it just rang and rang...
That pushed her anxiety into overload, and she couldn’t sit still any longer. She unbuckled from her control station and followed Stavos and Graves, walking gingerly across the deck and trying not to make any sudden movements that might encourage the contents of her stomach to make a dash for freedom.
Tyra reached the table in time to see the general pointing to a group of about ten red dots surrounded by a few dozen green ones on a map of one of the ship’s lower decks. “They’re in the sub-levels,” Graves explained. Already down to sub four hundred. We shut down the elevators before they could get any further, but they’re still on the move, using the stairwells now.”
“On the move to where?” Admiral Stavos asked, while running a hand through his beard.
“Based on their proximity, and their consistent downward push...” Graves looked up from the holo table. “I’d say they’re on their way here, sir.”
Admiral Stavos straightened and turned to address his crew. “Lock down the bridge!”
“Aye, sir!” someone replied.
Klaxons blared and crimson lights flashed.
Turning back to the general, Stavos said, “Get as many squads down here as you can. We hold the bridge at all costs.”
“Yes, sir.”
Graves got on the comms to his men, barking out orders in his raspy voice.
Tyra turned in a slow circle, watching the frenzy of activity going on all around her. A Marine sergeant and a pair of bots ran from station to station with armfuls of equipment that she couldn’t quite make out in the dim light. Then one of the bots came clanking up to her and held out a plasma pistol with a belt and holster attached.
She hesitated.
“For your protection, ma’am,” the bot explained, its glowing red eyes insistent.
“Take it,” Ellis said as he accepted a matching pistol from another Marine bot and belted it on. “If they get through those doors, we’re going to need all the firepower we can get.”
Tyra reached for the weapon. The cold weight of it felt strange in her hands. She was a politician, not a soldier. What was she supposed to do with a gun? It had been so long since she’d trained to use a weapon that she’d probably have more luck using it as a bludgeon. Then again, from what she’d seen and heard of their weapons’ effectiveness against the
enemy, it probably wouldn’t matter anyway.
“How many of them have we killed?” Tyra asked.
Ellis stared blankly back, unable to answer.
General Graves looked up from the holo table, his eyes gleaming blackly. His features were all stark blue shadows in the light of the table, while his bristly dark hair blazed red in the flashing lights of the lock-down. “None yet, ma’am.”
Tyra did a double take. “None?”
“Every time we think we’ve put one down, it heals itself and comes back to life. All we’ve managed to do so far is slow them down.”
Tyra turned away in shock, her eyes drifting to the doors of the bridge. If these Faros were that hard to kill, then it wouldn’t matter how many Marines the general sent to defend the bridge. They’d never be able to hold it.
***
Astralis
Lucien opened the equipment locker at the back of the patrol car, clinging to the door like a life raft in a stormy sea. Brak stood effortlessly beside the engine cowling, already wearing his mag boots.
Lucien gazed into the locker, trying to decide what he’d need. Fortunately, this car had come fully equipped. Boxy black shield packs hung from racks. Matching flak jackets and plates of mirror-smooth refractive armor accompanied those, along with mag boots and helmets. Lucien took off his comfy shoes in favor of the over-sized metal boots and hurried to activate them. His boot soles hit the deck with a comforting clu-clunk, and Lucien released his death grip on the door.
Next he donned a flak jacket, followed by the refractive torso armor, and finally one of the shield packs. None of it seemed to weigh anything at all thanks to the zero-G environment, but when he tried leaning and twisting his torso, he felt the weight of the equipment resisting his movements. He grabbed a helmet and strapped it around his chin before selecting a weapon from the rack on the inside of the locker door.
Brak passed over the choices of armor—he was fresh off patrol and already wearing his own custom-fit flak jacket and shield pack, which he wore in reverse, over his broad chest.
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 31