Cosmic Thunder (Sentinels Saga Book 3)

by Linn Schwab

  Karen still didn’t seem to accept what he was saying. “But they still fired missiles at us,” she argued.

  “And those missiles missed us, didn’t they,” Peter said. “Believe it or not, it actually makes sense to me, Karen. There’s a perfectly logical explanation. The commander of that ship knew she couldn’t keep our existence a secret. Her superiors would’ve gone through the ship’s mission recorders, and any tampering with the video files would’ve been detected. The best she could do was to alter the ship’s position readings, and just hope that nobody picked up on it. That’s something that could easily be overlooked unless someone is specifically searching for it.”

  Karen exhaled deeply and appeared to relax. “So, do you think it’s safe for us to return to the station?”

  “No,” Peter said. “I wouldn’t do that. Someone may eventually discover the truth. Is it possible to reposition the station from here?”

  Megan looked up at him and nodded. “Yes,” she confirmed. “But it’s gonna take a while. Probably several days at least.”

  “Very well,” Karen said, “then you’d better get started. You’ll find a pre–‌approved list of alternate coordinates stored in the station’s positioning directory. Send it to the site at the top of the list. Also, we’ll need an estimate of how long the move will take.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “Just a minute,” Peter said before she touched the controls again. “Before you begin, I’d like to have a closer look at that destroyer. Can you back the image up to where it made its turn?”

  Megan reversed the playback and slowed its progress as the maneuver approached. When the starboard side of the ship came into view, Peter instructed her to freeze the image.

  “Right there,” he said, pointing just below the ship’s windows. “See if you can zoom in a little closer.”

  “What are you hoping to find?” Karen asked him.

  “This could change everything,” he said. “Someone just showed us an act of mercy. I want to know what ship that is.”

  Karen looked at the screen again as Megan zoomed in on the enemy ship’s name. “The Cricket?” she said, sounding slightly amused. “That’s an interesting name for a warship, isn’t it?”

  “Actually, it’s fairly typical for them,” Peter said. “Many of their ships seem to be named after animals. Or plants, or birds, or other forms of life. I’ve often wondered if those names aren’t meant to taunt us — to remind us of mistakes we made in the past.”

  “To what mistakes are you referring?” Karen asked.

  Peter now remembered she’d never been to Earth. Her knowledge of its history was somewhat limited. “Mistakes that resulted in the loss of species,” he explained. “Many of which no longer exist on Earth. We ruined their habitats and drove them to extinction, despite repeated warnings that our actions were killing them. And now we’re being forced to fire on ships that bear the names of creatures we so carelessly destroyed. I can’t say for sure it’s what the enemy intended ... but it’s difficult not to see the symbolism in it.”

  PRESENCE 076

  In the fog between waking thought and dream, a girl’s likeness appeared in Christy’s mind. The face seemed vaguely familiar to her. It was the likeness of someone she’d seen on Volaris. But who? She couldn’t put a name to the face. She sensed that the girl was in her thoughts now because her subconscious was trying to tell her something. There was something significant about this person. What could it be? The answer eluded her. The uncertainty in her mind threatened to wake her as she struggled to determine the girl’s identity. Where had she seen her? What was she wearing? Had she said anything that might be of importance? No, she didn’t say anything, Christy recalled. That much she was certain of. But how could she be so certain of that? The answer came to her in a heartbeat: She didn’t say anything because she was dead!

  The revelation jarred Christy to a state of full alertness. She sat up in her bed, anxious and trembling, and fought to catch her breath as she peered through the darkness. The mysterious face now had an identity. It belonged to a member of Delia’s crew.

  Still jittery from the vision and wracked with uncertainty, Christy stumbled to Robin’s bedside and attempted to wake her. Moments later the two of them were standing in the hangar, looking in through the window of the cold storage room at four wooden coffins laid out on a benchtop.

  “I saw her, Robin,” Christy insisted. “You have to believe me. I know it was her.”

  Robin scrutinized the coffin with Wendy’s name on it. “Wendy’s dead,” she insisted. “You must’ve seen someone else who looks like her.”

  Christy shook her head. “I saw her face. She was looking straight at me. She was standing right in front of me, holding her arms out like this.” She held her arms out toward Robin as if to embrace her. “She couldn’t have been more than three steps away from me.”

  Robin continued to stare at the coffin as if searching for an explanation.

  “What if she’s not dead?” Christy argued. “I mean ... not completely. What if part of her is still...” Her voice trailed off as she paused to swallow. She glanced around herself in unease. “Still...”

  “Christy,” Robin interrupted, “I’ve been inside one of those boxes. There’s no way she could have gotten out on her own. All of the latches are on the outside.”

  Christy stared through the window again, still wavering with uncertainty.

  “Please, Christy,” Robin said, grasping her by the wrists. “I don’t want to go in there.”

  After probing the depths of her own fortitude, Christy lowered her head in acquiescence. “Neither do I,” she reluctantly admitted. She heard a deep sigh of relief from her friend.

  “Maybe,” Robin started after a moment, then paused as if she was still thinking something through. “Maybe there’s something else we can try.” She pulled Christy a few steps away from the window. “How long ago did you see her?”

  “A few nights ago,” Christy said, thinking back.

  “Show me where.”

  She nodded and led Robin back upstairs to the corridor just outside their room. “It was right here,” she said, standing near the doorway. “I was standing right here, and she was right in front of me.”

  Robin’s eyes glanced up and scanned the ceiling overhead until they seemed to focus on a small red light.

  “What’s that?” Christy asked.

  “Security camera. If Wendy was here, it should’ve seen her too. Come on,” Robin said, pulling Christy along with her, “there’s an intercom panel at the next intersection.”

  When the two of them reached the intercom panel, Robin began searching for camera feeds on its display. “There,” she said, after scrolling through a list for a moment. “That’s the one we were just standing under.” The picture showed only an empty corridor, clearly visible even though the lighting was nil. She reached for a control that displayed the time and date, and set the image to run in reverse for a while. Seconds later, she and Christy appeared on the screen, performing their earlier actions in reverse.

  “What day did you see her?” Robin asked.

  Christy reached for the screen and keyed in the date, then used a dial to scroll forward through the recording. Daytime hours elapsed on the counter. The corridor dimmed to evening light levels. Christy continued to run the image forward until she saw herself step into the corridor. “Here it is,” she said to Robin. She saw the image of herself react to a sound, then turn to the left and stare at empty space.

  A sense of confusion overtook her. She placed a finger on the screen right in front of her image. “She was standing right there!” she explained to Robin. “She was so close I could almost reach out and touch her!”

  Robin frowned and laid a consoling hand on Christy’s shoulder. “I don’t see anything,” she said. “You must have just imagined it.”

  Christy stopped the image and stared at it in silence, as if waiting for Wendy to suddenly appear.

 
“You did say you were seeing things,” Robin reminded her. “People dying. People screaming.”

  “But this was different,” Christy argued. “My eyes were open.”

  “Whatever you saw didn’t show up on the camera. Maybe tomorrow we’ll think of something else we can try.” She yawned and started walking back to the room. “I’m going back to sleep. If you see her again, make sure you wake me up. If both of us see her, then we’ll know she’s there for sure.”

  As Robin headed back to her bunk, Christy kept her eyes fixed on the screen while attempting to recall the event in her mind. She was standing right in front of me. I know she was. I can see it my mind like it happened just now. While she fretted over whether her mind had deceived her, the recording began to move forward again, without any input from the panel controls. Some kind of automatic restart? she wondered, surprised that the playback had resumed on its own. Seconds later she saw Mindy step into frame and grasp her by the shoulders to spin her around.

  Mindy! she thought. She might have seen something! If she saw Wendy too, then I’ll know it was real! Determined to put this uncertainty behind her, she returned to the room and woke Mindy up, then quietly pulled her into the corridor.

  Her face expressing unease and reluctance, Mindy stood where Christy placed her and looked at her in silence. If she had any sense of what Christy was after, she tried very hard to keep it concealed.

  “Mindy,” Christy insisted, “that night you first took me down to the map room, did you see someone else in the corridor with me?”

  Mindy swallowed and shook her head, but it was clear that she was keeping something back. Christy sensed it and crossed her arms. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said, and suddenly it all made sense to her now. The vision of Wendy resurfaced in her mind — the faint luminescence, the wispy appearance, the movements that seemed too smooth to be natural. She looked at Mindy and cocked her head in a display of sudden realization. “Not some–‌one,” she said. “Some ... thing?”

  Mindy pursed her lips and tried to look away.

  “What are they, Mindy?” Christy pressed. “Ghosts?”

  She shook her head and said, “I don’t know.”

  Christy was rapidly losing her patience. She wanted an answer, but Mindy remained stubbornly evasive. “Why can’t anyone else see them?” she demanded. “Why don’t they show up on the station’s cameras? Why are we the only ones who seem to know about them?”

  Mindy turned her head aside and shared her own conclusion with Christy. “I think they only come to you when you’re ready.”

  “Ready for what?” Christy insisted, forcing Mindy to look at her again.

  “Ready to die,” Mindy answered her. She gazed into Christy’s eyes a moment longer, then left her standing alone in the corridor and quietly shuffled back to her bed.

  Ready to die, Christy pondered, and she realized Mindy might be right. She recalled the soothing smile on Wendy’s face, so comforting it would have been a challenge to resist, and the feeling that her suffering would come to an end if only she accepted the Sentinel’s embrace. Her mouth went dry as she looked along the shadows, and a sudden chill seemed to pass through her body. “I’m not ready!” she whimpered to the empty corridor, and scampered to the relative safety of her sleeping quarters.

  SUSPICIONS 077

  The lights came up all too early it seemed, and a familiar voice jarred the young battalion from sleep.

  “Attention, Sentinels,” Commander Eldridge announced, “safe access to the gun bays has finally been restored. We’ll resume our reassembly efforts as soon as you’ve finished your morning meals. Get your fitness drills done first, and I’ll meet up with you in the cafeteria afterward.” She spun about and walked brusquely back toward the corridor.

  The weary Sentinels groaned and rolled out of bed, many of them glancing at the clock with suspicion. The commander had definitely awakened them early, putting a damper on whatever traces of endearment she might have earned from them.

  “Doesn’t she ever sleep?” Phoebe whispered as the commander’s footsteps faded in the distance.

  Katrina lobbed a pillow at her in jest. “Commanders aren’t human, Phoebe,” she said. “Why would they ever need to sleep?”

  The comment drew silent stares from the others, causing her to wonder where her words had gone amiss. Caroline quietly walked over to her and sat down beside her on the edge of her bed. “Are you saying Commander Jeffries wasn’t human?” she asked.

  Regret swept over Katrina’s face. The gaffe was now apparent to her, the other girls’ sentiments easier to read. Though their feelings toward Commander Eldridge might border on indifference, Commander Jeffries had left a more favorable impression. “No,” she muttered, “I would never say that. Commander Jeffries was just as human as any of us.”

  Rising from their cots, the girls pulled on their dresses, yawning repeatedly while straining to limber up their muscles. As the others headed off for their morning fitness drills, Robin lingered in the corridor outside their room, her thoughts fixed on what Christy had told her earlier about seeing Wendy standing in the shadows. Was Mindy’s behavior in this same location related, or was it just a coincidence? And what about her own unnerving suspicion that someone had been secretly observing her before? Could there be some connection to the dead here? she wondered. Or was it just the cameras overhead that I was sensing? She looked up at one of the cameras on the ceiling, the same one that had failed to capture Wendy’s likeness, and decided there was one more thing she could try that might shed some light on what was going on. Deep within the shadowy bowels of the station was a room whose purpose was unclear to her — a room she knew could play tricks on her mind. Could that map room have something to do with all of this? She decided that Genevieve might have an explanation.

  Robin found the senior technician working beneath an instrument panel in the hangar. Repairs from the collision were still ongoing. The techs were all working on very little sleep, as evidenced by the look of fatigue in her eyes. “Genevieve, can I ask you something?” she said.

  The technician slid out from underneath the panel, rubbed her eyes and yawned, and looked up at Robin. “Captain Starling,” she replied without standing up, “what can I do for you today? Still wondering about that power junction?”

  Robin frowned and shook her head. “No, it’s not that,” she said. “Not exactly, anyway. There’s a room at the very bottom of the station. It works like a giant map or something. Do you know the one I’m talking about?”

  Genevieve answered her with a grin. “Been snooping around a bit, have you? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I know what you mean. The one with the big round window in the floor?”

  “Yeah,” Robin confirmed, “that’s the one. Can you tell me what its purpose is?”

  “As near as I can tell, it’s just an observation room. No one’s ever asked me about it before, though. It’s just been sitting there empty since I first arrived here.”

  “Is there any way to find out for sure?” Robin asked.

  Genevieve struggled to her feet and reached for her archive interface. “Let’s take a look, shall we.” Holding the interface out in front of her, she scrolled through a list of the station’s schematics, searching for anything that might prove useful. “Hmm,” she said, “that seems odd. There’s no description of that room’s function at all. It shows in the plans as just an open chamber with a very basic electrical layout.”

  “Does it have a room number?” Robin suggested.

  “Yes it does, but that’s all it gives me.” She cast a thoughtful look at Robin. “This does seem rather odd, doesn’t it? If that room serves a specific function, why isn’t it referenced here?”

  Robin bit her lip as she thought. “Maybe someone just forgot to add it to the list. What about the other stations?” she asked. “Is there any way we can check their schematics?”

  Genevieve briefly considered the suggestion, then shrugged and gave her a tentati
ve nod. “That’ll take a bit of doing, though, and I’m afraid I’m a little too busy at the moment. But I’m just as curious as you are, now. Tell you what, I’ll look into it a little further when I have some extra time. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything. In the meantime, though, you and your girls should be careful about venturing into the service corridors. There’s a lot of machinery on the lower levels. One wrong step and you could end up dead.”

  Robin nodded and thanked her for her help, then headed to the cafeteria to meet up with the rest of her battalion for breakfast. When she arrived she found them already seated, hungrily consuming their breakfast rations. Commander Eldridge and Janine were also in the room, poring over some data on an archive interface.

  After picking up a tray of rations, Robin joined her squad, squeezing herself in between Caroline and Phoebe as each of them spooned up the last of their food. She was pleased to see Chrissy and Katrina giggling together as they launched random tickle attacks on each other. The two of them appeared to have formed a close bond, despite the older girl’s initial objections to adding such a young member to the team. She’s winning everyone over, Robin realized, and found herself dwelling on a more somber notion: And perhaps displacing Sheri in the process. She decided not to let it trouble her, though. It was not as if Sheri would soon be forgotten.

  Just moments after Robin sat down to eat, Delia’s crew walked into the room and headed straight for the serving line. The Calypso had apparently returned for refueling, and her crew seemed keen on getting some hot food for a change, having grown weary of living on emergency rations. Upon seeing that her missing squad member was with them, Christy Allison jumped up from her seat and wrapped Tabitha in a firm embrace. Commander Eldridge stood up and approached Delia. “Captain Pomeroy,” she said, “a moment, please.”

  “Yes, Commander,” Delia replied. The two of them stepped away from the others to converse in relative privacy.