Dead World [Sunsinger Chronicles Book 3]

by Michelle Levigne

  “But sometimes things happen that you just can't control, right?”

  “True, but if you unravel the trail of what happened before and after, you find out what caused it.”

  “I know.”

  She nodded, her gaze flickering over all the screens. Nothing had really changed since she left to get dressed.

  “What made you ask about a fourth time?”

  “Well, this is our fourth test. I thought maybe there was ... the text says cliches get started when things happen in patterns. Does something happen a lot with the fourth try at something?”

  “There usually isn't a fourth try because, as the saying goes, the third is the charm. Understand? You succeed with the third try, so why keep trying?”

  “Does Captain Gilmore know that?”

  “No one knows what the military mind knows—or chooses to ignore.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “What are you trying to do, predict how this test will turn out?”

  “Well ... not really. I guess.” Bain glanced down at the little reading screen, and decided he wouldn't be able to get much more studying done. “We didn't really succeed last time, did we?”

  “That depends on what you call success. We learned a good piece about the Mashrami, and the shields worked so well that they thought we were an asteroid.”

  “A big, tasty asteroid.” Bain still felt a chill at the idea of being torn apart by magnetic beams so that the Mashrami ship could absorb the energy created by the destruction.

  “True.” Lin chuckled.

  “The Mashrami has changed course,” Ganfer announced, neatly inserting his words when Lin paused to take a breath.

  “Toward us?” She leaned forward in her chair, and plied the control board. Three more screens on the far wall lit with data.

  “No. It is slowing and holding to a four degree shift.”

  “Holding?” Lin actually paused and looked up at the sensor dome in the middle of the ceiling. “What do you mean, holding?”

  “If they continue at the angle they travel now, within two hours they will be completely turned around and heading back the way they came.”

  “That doesn't make sense,” Bain said.

  “No.” Lin shook her head hard enough her single braid whipped up in the air and slapped the back of her head. “It doesn't.”

  “Why is it doing that, then? Should I turn on the other sensors?” He reached for the controls. “They're not paying any attention to us.”

  “No.” Lin whipped out her arm and pressed her hand over his. “It could be a trap.”

  Bain felt something cold slink through his body. What if Lin hadn't been so quick, or he had managed to turn on the sensors? What if that was exactly what the Mashrami were doing—pretending to leave to trick them into revealing themselves?

  “Ganfer, if we aim the aggressive sensor beams in every direction except the Mashrami, would they sense it?” Lin asked, after ten long seconds of silence.

  “Only if the beams bounced back to the Mashrami, and they backtracked the angle. By then, we would be out of their flight or weapons path,” the ship-brain said.

  “Go ahead, Bain. Everywhere but at the Mashrami.” She released his hand, and turned back to her own work.

  Bain's hands shook as he programmed the commands into the ship, and re-activated eighty percent of the aggressive sensors.

  The alarms went off when he brought the rear sensors up to full power. Bain flinched, expecting to hear Ganfer announce the Mashrami had changed course again and doubled their speed and were bearing down directly on Sunsinger. The ship-brain said nothing. The lights dimmed everywhere on the bridge except the overhead lighting surrounding the control station.

  “Now that's interesting,” Lin muttered. She glanced back and forth between four different screens while her hands flew over the control panel, pressing buttons, adjusting power, and playing with the thrusters. Bain didn't know how she could handle everything without even looking.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A power flux on a galactic scale.”

  “Huh?”

  “Here.” She took one hand off an array of green and purple switches to tap a long column of constantly shifting figures on the screen between them. “Move the decimal over ten places. Tell me what makes that kind of energy?”

  “Nova?” The word forced itself out between Bain's lips. He hadn't wanted to say it.

  “Close. The energy wave is in a pattern that goes around our passive sensors. It could have been sneaking up on us for the last two hours, and we never would have sensed it.” She stopped, biting her bottom lip as her fingers slipped and seemed to tie themselves into knots. Lin shook her hands out like another woman would shake a rug, and went back to her rapid finger-dance across the panel.

  Lin was afraid.

  Bain knew she would never admit it while the crisis lasted. She might admit it; make a joke of it in a month or two when they were safely down on a planet, far away from the Mashrami and any stellar phenomena.

  “It's a good thing the Mashrami started acting weird, huh?” he ventured.

  “Thank Fi'in. They're probably trying to make a run for it, with their tails between their legs. And so should we. Engines up and ready to go.”

  “Do Mashrami have tails and legs?” He started pounding at the controls.

  Lin giggled. It was a short, high-pitched sound. She glanced at him for half a second and shook her head before going back to work. Bain hoped he had helped her. Even a little release of tension would help.

  “Engines ready in forty-five seconds,” Ganfer announced. “The energy flux will be on us in twenty-four minutes and eighteen seconds if Sunsinger does not increase speed.”

  “By all means, increase!” Lin continued plying the board and reading all the data spilling across multiple screens. “At this point in the game ... Full sensors, Bain. Tell me everything you can find out about that tidal wave coming after us.”

  Tidal wave? Bain worked on the sensors, and bit his lip to keep silent. Lin certainly didn't need stupid questions, just remarks that would help her relax.

  The solar wind was also called the solar current. He supposed a solar tidal wave was appropriate.

  “Tsunami,” Ganfer said. “If we were on a planet, the wave would reach far inland and drown us.”

  “Thank you so much for that cheerful bit of news,” Lin said, from between clenched teeth.

  “Engines up.”

  “Go!” She swept her hand across the controls.

  Gravity slammed Bain back into his chair. He strained forward against the suffocating force, trying to continue his work. Lin shouted something, but he couldn't hear her voice over the thunder of his pulse and the screaming roar of the engines in his ears.

  The lights in the ship flickered. Bain held his breath, saying a silent prayer the energy wouldn't die in the ship. If they lost lights, would they lose heat and air?

  Please, Fi'in, don't let Ganfer get hurt. Bain tried to lift a hand to his shirt pocket, to ensure the data disk was still there.

  Red emergency lights took over. Bain jumped when the regular lights died, in that moment of blackness lit only by the colored lights of the multitudes of buttons and switches and dials on the control board. Then everything went red. All their clothes turned black, except the white patches in Lin's shirt.

  Gravity pressed hard against Bain's body, then twisted. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists and tried to resist. Through the roaring of his pulse in his ears, he heard the ship protest. Panels groaned and scraped against each other. Weld points and airtight seals strained.

  A loud bang and a sudden shift of pressure in his head and lungs wrenched a shout from Bain. He opened his eyes, expecting to see the emergency hatch in the bridge had popped open.

  “Your ears!” Lin shouted, above the shrieks of alarms and the metallic protests of the ship.

  Bain nodded, and even that bit of resistance to twisting gravity hurt. His ears? It took a moment to unders
tand. His ears had simply adjusted to the shifting air pressure in the cabin.

  “It's almost on us!”

  “What?” He strained to sit forward and look at the screens. Would they make any more sense than they had a few minutes ago? Bain felt incredibly, uselessly stupid, despite all his high grades in his tests.

  “The highest pressure point of the wave is almost on us.” Lin managed a grin, stretched thin on her face with all the force that still welded them to their seats and flung the ship through space. “We've just been riding the force wave ahead of it.”

  Just? Bain closed his eyes and clenched his hands around the edge of his chair.

  Please, Fi'in—I'm scared. He didn't know what else to say.

  The world turned inside out and upside down. Bain tried to open his eyes, and the pressure twisting through the bridge glued his lids shut. He couldn't breathe. Gravity smashed him flat into the chair, and tried to press him through the fabric and padding, through the frame and out the other side, like a sieve.

  He couldn't hear—not the dying roar of the ship, not even his own breathing and the terrified thuds of his heart. He couldn't feel his hands digging into the cushion.

  Then through the sensation of flatness that spread his body across the universe, Bain heard Lin shriek. A fierce sound—no fear, no anger. It held a hint of her teasing growl, all threat and mischief. And it held triumph.

  The glue in his eyes parted. Bain wedged his eyes open, and was nearly blinded with the brightness of the red emergency lights. Through the bloody and black haze, he saw Lin sitting forward over the controls. She held onto the panel with one hand, and plied the buttons with the other.

  Bain tried to lift a hand to rub the sticky film from his eyes, and found he could lift his hand. He rubbed and looked harder. Lin was working the thruster controls.

  “What—” His voice sounded like he had swallowed gravel, scraping the vocal cords raw and leaving bits of stone embedded in them. His throat felt like shattered stone, too.

  “That wave left us tumbling like wood chips in a whirlpool,” Lin said, without looking at him. “I'm trying to straighten us out.”

  “It's over?”

  “The ride is over. Now we clean up and figure out what damage it did to us.”

  “Oh.” Bain sat still for another few seconds. Then tentatively, he tried to move. Gravity still pressed hard against his body, but it didn't try to press him flat.

  Clean up. Damage control. He had things to do. Bain tried to remember. His brain felt as smashed flat as his body.

  He grinned in surprised relief when he tried to sit forward to reach the control board and found he could. Bain touched buttons carefully, half-afraid some would blow up in sparks, and others would reveal information he didn't want to know. Bit by bit, Sunsinger went through its diagnostic program, and found all the places where the energy flux had twisted and pushed and pounded it, and damage had resulted.

  There were four places in the outer skin where the multiple seals had broken. First level emergency seals had worked without any problems; hardening foam sprayed into the compartments between the first and second levels of ‘skin’ and stopped the air pressure leaks before they could let out more than a few liters of air. No chain reaction of damage had resulted from that. Bain reported it to Lin, who still fought the thrusters to bring Sunsinger to level flight. She nodded and grinned, but said nothing.

  Five hoses for water and hydraulic controls had worked loose. The regulators on either side of those points immediately shut off the flow until someone—Bain knew who that was—could climb down inside the service tubes and fix them.

  “Be thankful we don't have a hold full of cargo or passengers,” Lin said. “Even with stasis chairs, there could have been a lot of injuries.”

  “We came through fine,” he protested.

  “The bridge is technically in the center of the ship, even if we're near the top. We didn't experience one tenth of the centrifugal force the rest of the ship did when we started spinning.” She tapped two more thruster controls, then waited, gaze locked on the display screen that showed her the ship's position. “Almost steady.” Lin and Bain shared a grin. “What else have you found?”

  “Well...” He hooked a thumb in the direction of her cabin. “I think something broke.” Bain sniffed loudly.

  Something soft and spicy scented the air. He knew it didn't come from his cabin or the galley. Bain made a mental note to get up soon and check the galley to see if anything had sprung open or been smashed there.

  “Oh, great.” Lin sniffed a few times, then shook her head. “That bottle of perfume cost me almost two whole debits.”

  Bain giggled and tried to muffle the sound. It turned into a snort. Two debits? It took ten debits to get a decent book disk.

  “If that's the worst damage we sustained.... “Lin's grin faded into weariness. “Fi'in was guarding us more than we ever deserved.”

  Two hours later, Sunsinger had stabilized enough that they could both unstrap their safety belts and move about the ship, cleaning up and fixing damage. Lin took care of the galley and the broken bottle of perfume in her cabin, and went down into the hold to examine the sprung and fixed seals, while Bain climbed into the access tubes to re-connect the hoses, and set the water and hydraulic lines back to normal function.

  Lin fixed dinner for them. It was nearly ready by the time Bain climbed out of the access tubes, and washed up.

  “We're three hours further along than if we had flown under full power,” Lin said, when he emerged from the sanitary.

  “Light speed?” He felt a little breathless at the thought of going the speed of light, even for a few seconds.

  “Almost. I've had Ganfer transfer all the records over to the auxiliary recorder. Gil and his scientists are going to love this.”

  “What about the Mashrami?” Bain couldn't believe he had forgotten about the aliens during all this.

  “They're out there.” Lin turned to pull two cups of tea from the heater, and put them in the holding clips on the table. “They're sitting perfectly still, as far as I can tell. Once Ganfer is finished with his final diagnostic, he's going to run high-level scans on them, too.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “The Mashrami are twenty times bigger than us. I'm guessing they had twenty times the damage we did, just because there's so much more for that energy wave to push against and twist around. Straws survive hurricanes much more easily than trees.” She slid into her seat at the table. “I'm guessing they'll be so busy with their own damage control and clean-up, they wouldn't notice if we came alongside, and started cutting pieces out of the side of their ship.”

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  * * *

  Chapter Eleven

  An hour later, Bain and Lin were back at their places at the control panel, studying the data from the Mashrami ship.

  “See those stress lines?” Lin pointed at a computer simulation of the ship on the screen on the far wall.

  The Mashrami ship still looked like a sting-yam; a long, dark ovoid with bumps and protrusions instead of the expected landing struts and atmospheric vanes and air locks and sensor knobs.

  “Just from the look of them, I'm guessing the energy wave hit them broadsides. They didn't have the sense to put their tail or their nose to the leading edge of the force, and it grabbed them and tried to twist in twenty different directions. They're lucky they didn't get torn wide open.”

  “They're hurt bad. Even that ship we watched eat the asteroids didn't have this low an energy gradient.” Bain tapped his own controls, and shifted another screen of data from the far wall to the screen between him and Lin.

  “Bad,” she agreed. “We could probably land on them, and they wouldn't have the resources to notice us, much less respond.” Her voice sounded too thoughtful. Even though it lacked its usual mischief, Bain worried.

  “Lin, you're not going to—” He couldn't say anything more. A huge lump filled his throat, and he
had to swallow hard even to keep breathing.

  “Goodness, no!” She raised her eyes from the screen and chuckled. “It's tempting, but that's something I'll leave to Gil and his Rangers.”

  “Shouldn't we tell them?”

  “Another five minutes of data, and we'll send the burst. If anything can get through. Ganfer, how's the interference level out there?”

  “A contained burst will break through the electromagnetic interference,” the ship-brain said, “but two-way communication right now is impossible. Receivers on either end will need time to filter out the static before messages can be interpreted.”

  “More delays.” She shook her head. “Gil is going to love this when he finally sees it.”

  “Lin, where did that energy flux wave come from? We should have detected it coming at us days ago.”

  “I know.” She played a few switches, shifting the computer simulation to show a different angle of the Mashrami ship. More red stress lines appeared against the dark blue blob of the ship. “I have a theory. Well, other people's theories, too. This may just prove some of them right.”

  “And prove a great many of them wrong,” Ganfer added.

  “True. Have you ever wondered where Knaught Points come from, Bain?” She glanced at him, waiting until he shook his head. “Consider an energy burst of cosmic proportions. The intensity of the heat and radiation and the sheer speed is so great, normal time and space can't contain it. In a way, it becomes solid, becomes like a handful of spears thrown through the fabric of space. The spears punch holes through reality, through dimensions, into other galaxies. When the energy dissipates, the holes are left, connecting spots billions of kilometers apart without having to travel the space in between them.”

  “That's why we didn't detect the energy wave until it was almost on top of us, then. It leaped galaxies.” Bain nodded and smiled a little. It made sense. “There's a bunch of new Knaught Points back there somewhere?”

  “Probably. I don't know how safe they are, when they're this new.”

  “Can we go find out?”

  “Glutton for punishment, aren't you?” she said with a chuckle. “Honestly, Bain, I've had enough excitement to last me for a few days, at least. Let someone else get the glory for a change.”