Then she closed her eyes as the dark fullness of space closed around her.
***
Will Stroud hammered his way into the airlock of the wrecked corsair.
“Jesus!” he said, kicking in the door to the cockpit. He had to kick it with all his might.
He looked around at the darkened panels.
“Never seen anything like this,” he said. He carried a tablet on his belt. He unhooked it and began to tally up the damage.
From what he’d seen so far, this sucker was a total loss.
Once the flight navigation lost power, that was usually enough.
He walked through the ship, noting the garbage and food on the floor.
“Carpet cleaning: two thousand.”
He opened the pantry just for giggles. There was a single can of tuna.
He reached for it, but then stopped.
He was hungry… but not that hungry.
Rocket fire boomed, and he heard rushing fire and an engine roaring to life.
Through the window, the rescue ship was leaving to take Keltie home.
Will laughed to himself.
“She was one smart woman,” he said.
He walked to the engine room, scribbling on his tablet.
He had just wrapped his hand around the doorknob when his radio went off.
“Will, how does she look?” Beauregard asked.
“Better call the wrecker ship,” Will said. “She’s not looking good.”
He opened the door.
His radio beeped again.
“Sorry to do this to you, but the commander needs to talk to you. About the Argus attack on the base.”
“Right now?”
“Affirmative,” Beauregard said. “He’s trying to connect some dots with Keltie’s story, though I don’t think it’s going to work out.”
“I’ll be right there.”
He stared into the dark engine room and shook his head.
This could wait.
He left.
***
The black mass floated out of the engine room and explored the shadowed hallways.
It drifted over the trash on the floor, past the living quarters, into the empty salon.
It entered the airlock.
There was no one.
It floated out into the sunlight. Through its many, many eyes, everything was a shade of blood.
It saw the pod-shaped base, and men walking around it.
And then it sniffed.
The scent entered it, diffusing through its entire body.
The cloud shook and swirled around itself ravenously.
Carbon dioxide.
It absorbed the gas molecules, its eyes bulging as the gas bubbles nourished it.
It followed the trail of gas.
Upward.
Toward another, bigger rescue ship blasting into the sky.
The cloud flew fast and furious, gobbling up the air.
It roared.
The rescue ship neared the edge of the atmosphere.
The black cloud reached the ship’s thrusters just before exit, and they sucked it in.
The cloud made a greedy sound, gobbling and licking and absorbing and devouring every bit of gas and oxygen it could.
Chapter 19
The ride to the star base was quiet.
The crew didn’t talk to her aside from offering her food and water.
They were nice, but not as nice as Grayson.
She asked if she could sit on the bridge, and the skipper politely agreed.
She drank black tea and watched as the ship jumped into hyperspace. Something about flying at lightspeed always intrigued her—the purple swirling was like art in real time.
The flight mechanic tapped his instrument panel. “What the?”
“What’s wrong?” the skipper asked.
“There’s something wrong with the fuel levels.” He pointed to a screen with a green bar graph that blinked rapidly. “It’s decreasing faster than it should.”
The skipper frowned. He radioed the rescue officer, who was deep in the belly of the ship.
“Can you go and check out the engine room? We’re seeing some strange activity there.”
“On my way.”
Keltie joined the men at the panel.
“I’m starting to think I’m bad luck,” she said.
“Luckily this is a short trip,” the skipper said. “Don’t worry, Miss Sheffield.”
“Don’t worry,” Keltie repeated. “I said that on the way to Kepler.”
The skipper sat down at his flight panel. The green lights of the panel illuminated his face.
“We’re a couple of minutes away from star base. We’ll straighten it out there.”
He pressed a button. “Aswan to Starbase. We’re experiencing some technical difficulty.”
The radio beeped. “Okay. We’ll make space in the engineer’s bay. Travel safely.”
The lights flickered.
Keltie’s stomach knotted.
The flight mechanic opened his radio line to the rescue officer. “What’s going on down there?”
No answer.
“Can you hear me?” the flight mechanic asked.
Keltie stood. “It’s happening again.”
“What?” the skipper asked.
“I don’t know, but this is the same thing that happened to me after I left Kepler. It’s how I got stranded.”
The flight mechanic jogged across the bridge. “I’m going to the engine room. Something’s not right.”
Keltie set her coffee down. Her hands jittered, and she couldn’t tell if it was the coffee or fear.
Would she ever get home?
Chapter 20
Grayson walked out of the base with a duffel bag over his shoulder. Everything he’d owned in the last three years of active duty was in the bag.
The sunlight on Provenance was bright today, and the blue, cloudy skies would have been peaceful on any other day.
In his other hand, he held a letter.
Certificate of Discharge
After all he’d been through, this was a hell of a way to go out.
The door to the base opened and Will ran out, panting.
“Glad I caught you,” Will said. They shook hands and hugged.
“We’ve been through a lot,” Will said. “Too much to fall out of touch.”
“Never,” Grayson said.
“What are you going to do next?” Will asked.
Grayson glanced up at the skies. “Maybe go back home, see if my job is still waiting.”
“Hell, if that chick was still here, you should’ve asked her out,” Will said. “She was asking for you while you were going through discharge.”
“What are you talking about?” Grayson asked.
“Come on, man. It was obvious. You were all over each other like Arguses on a dead carcass.”
Grayson looked at Will blankly.
“Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration.”
Grayson glanced at the broken corsair and thought of Keltie.
“Nah. She’s not my type,” he said.
Will took him by the shoulder.
“You’re lying. Listen: here’s what you do. You get in your ship, you fly out to the star base for a drink or two. Jetty’s has a two-for-one special. If you leave now, you’ll ‘coincidentally’ run into her. And then, if nothing happens, call me up and tell me I’m a wrong SOB. But if I don’t hear from you…”
Grayson pushed Will’s hand away. “It’s been good, Will. We’ll keep in touch.”
Will frowned. “Hey, you’re not listening, man!”
Will followed Grayson to the parking lot, where several rows of private passenger spaceships gleamed in the sun.
“When you spend all your time in space, Gray, you get used to being lonely. But it doesn’t have to be that way,” Will said.
Grayson laughed.
Will shrugged. “I know I say some crazy stuff from time to time, but—”
“All right,” Will said. “but if you go gray-haired before finding a date, you better not blame it on me.”
“I’m happy,” Grayson said. “Right now, I just need to be alone.”
Grayson climbed the ladder into his Atomos. It was a blue, small ship designed for speed, faster than even a corsair. It resembled a manta ray, with a single yellow gravity ring rotating inside the center of the ship. A fighter jet-style cockpit formed a glass, gabled peak at the top middle.
Will waved as he slid the airlock door shut.
In the cramped hallway, Grayson crouched and dropped off his duffel bag in his room—a glorified closet with a bench-like bed and a blackout curtain over the porthole.
Then he climbed the wooden ladder into the cockpit.
The ship fired up easily, faster than the rescue ships he was accustomed to.
He looked at the base one more time.
He’d given six years of duty to this place.
It was a great six years.
And now a new chapter was beginning.
Too bad he didn’t know what it was.
He hit the auto-exit button and the ship rocketed into the sky, leaving Will far behind.
***
Will cupped his hands to his eyes as Grayson’s ship sailed into the north.
“Star base is the other way,” he said, slumping his shoulders.
Grayson really was going back home.
That Keltie girl would have been good for him.
But oh well. Who was he to second guess his friend’s wishes? Will wanted whatever made Grayson happy.
He turned for the broken corsair, remembering he needed to finish his estimate of the damages.
As he walked up the bay door, a sonic boom drew his eyes to the sky.
Grayson’s ship had changed direction. It zoomed back over the base and up into space.
Toward the star base.
Will pumped his fists and whooped.
Chapter 21
“Gentlemen, can you hear me? Come in.”
Keltie stood by as the skipper radioed the rescue officer and the flight mechanic for the third time.
“They’re not responding,” the skipper said.
From the bridge, Keltie could see the star base, a diamond-shaped gray structure floating in space with several gravity rings spinning around it. Far, far in the distance, the bright star, Regina VII, blazed in the dark.
A long, covered space dock extended from the star base, and many spaceships were tethered to it, bobbing in the vacuum.
The skipper steered the rescue ship toward a turtle-shaped bay connected to the base.
“You’re clear for landing,” a voice on the radio said. “How are your technical issues?”
“I’m going to need some boots in the airlock when I land,” the skipper said. “My flight mechanic and my rescue officer went to the engine room and they haven’t reported back.”
“I’ll have three men waiting for you at Dock X.”
A large door on the turtle-shaped bay opened, and the skipper steered for it, easing the ship into a landing position.
Hundreds of military-grade spaceships rested inside the bay. Mechanical arms repaired and welded their bodies, sparks flying into the air. Men in uniform walked about, pausing for a moment to watch as metal arms grabbed the rescue ship from the airlock and pulled it into the dock.
Just as advertised, three men with handcoils were waiting on Dock X.
The skipper docked the ship, and the men pressed several buttons on a control panel, shooting ropes with magnets onto the ship’s hull, mooring it in place. The skipper activated the airlock, and the men ran onboard.
The skipper and Keltie met them shortly after.
“Keltie, why don’t you let us handle this?” the skipper asked, unhooking his handcoil from his belt.
Keltie walked into the giant airway, full of military ships. They floated atop each other, crammed into the bay to save space. The long, metal-grille dock extended for yards.
Above, another rescue ship floated into the bay’s airlock. It activated its engines and blasted off into space.
The skipper and the three men formed a circle, talking to each other in hushed tones. Then they disappeared into the belly of the ship.
She didn’t want to know what was in that engine room.
But at the same time, she didn’t want to leave. She’d come this far, and if she could find out what had been causing all of her troubles, she wanted to know.
Several minutes passed.
Then, coil shots.
Zzzt.
Zzzt.
Zzzt! Zzzt! Zzzt!
Then a roar that made her scream in response.
She knew the roar. She would never stop dreaming about it.
She ducked as a black mass bulleted out of the ship and swirled around the bay.
“What the hell—”
The skipper ran onto the dock, pushed her aside and fired.
Zzzt! Zzzt!
The mass roared again. Its multiple eyes bulged as it circled the dock.
The skipper smashed an alarm panel. Red lights and sirens went off.
“Looks like you brought a souvenir home with you,” the skipper said.
“What happened to the others?” Keltie asked.
“Dead,” the skipper said.
Keltie’s hands went to her mouth.
The skipper fired again. The shot went straight through the mass as if it were nothing.
The black mass stopped in the air. It was staring at her. The eyes churned in its center, as if it were trying to recognize her.
The skipper jumped in front of her and fired his coil again. “Get out of here, Keltie!”
She ran, as coil shots broke out from all over the bay. Everyone was shooting at it. The creature screamed and circled the bay like a stranded bat.
Ahead lay a pair of glass, automatic doors. They parted for her and she broke into a multi-level rest stop. It looked like a shopping mall, with storefronts lining criss-crossing walkways. The walkways were decorated with wreaths and Christmas lights.
She darted past a group of people chatting in a café, and she shouted “Run!”
The people continued sipping their drinks, looking at her strangely. Then they heard the coil shots from the bay and broke into a frantic run.
She made her way through the star base, fear and screams following her.
More coil shots.
Roaring.
She looked behind her.
The mass was following her.
It had flown out of the military bay and was threading between the walkways.
Civilians took out their handcoils and fired, but the shots didn’t affect the cloud.
The creature screamed and zoomed for her.
She remembered fighting the creatures back on Kepler.
Suddenly she was back in the cockpit of the corsair, speeding away from the giant wall of black creatures.
Sonic boom…
The corsairs had all activated their thrusters at the same time, flying faster than the speed of sound. And the wall had recoiled.
She blinked the flashback away.
“Sound,” she said. “They hate sound!”
She stopped next to a glass storefront with bright purple letters: La Ronn Books Direct. A bookstore with a patio and chairs.
She grabbed one of the metal chairs and slammed it into the storefront window, shattering it.
The creature flew backward, shrieking.
“It worked,” Keltie said, incredulously.
A black man in a tam cap, tweed sport coat and a purple bow tie rushed out of the store.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.
“Sorry!” Keltie said.
“Are you at least going to buy something?”
The creature recovered from the shock and flew toward her again.
The man’s eyes
widened. “Oh, sh—”
The alien crashed into him, knocking him down.
Keltie dashed away.
Ahead, a group of soldiers stood on a walkway above, motioning to her.
“Get to the airlock!” they cried, pointing behind them.
The star base curved upon itself, and she found herself running toward another ship bay—this one appeared to be for private passenger ships.
The soldiers fired their coils at the creature.
“Your guns don’t work!” she screamed. “Stop wasting bullets!”
The soldiers scratched their heads, trying to figure out what to do. The alien slammed into them, knocking them off the walkway.
She neared the bay.
The creature gained on her.
Glass sliding doors to the bay opened and she ran into the docks. Several men motioned to her.
They were standing next to the star base’s airlock.
She understood.
They were going to trap it in the airlock.
The alien roared and inched closer to her, and then a clanging sound made it recoil.
A man stood on top of a spaceship, with a crowbar.
All around the dock, citizens banged the sides of their spaceships, and the alien screamed in pain. The metal ringing drove it crazy, and it changed directions frantically.
Keltie backed toward the airlock, watching the alien carefully.
She stopped next to a fire extinguisher.
Fire.
No, fire didn’t work.
But…
Carbon dioxide. It was attracted to carbon dioxide.
She unhooked the extinguisher from the wall and ran to the airlock.
“What are you doing?” a woman asked.
“Trust me,” she said. “This will work. Open the airlock.”
The creature circled the rafters. Soon the clanging stopped and it regained its strength, pulsing angrily.
“Do it!” Keltie shouted.
The woman opened the airlock. The large gray door lumbered open.
Keltie swiped a handcoil from a nearby man’s belt.
“Hey, what’re you—”
Keltie threw the extinguisher into the air and shot it several times with the handcoil.
Zzzt! Whoosh! Boom!
The extinguisher took off like a rocket, sailing into the airlock. It bounced several times across the floor, and smoke and foam leaked out.
Phantom Planet (Galaxy Mavericks Book 2) Page 9