Starshine: Aurora Rising Book One (69 page)

What appeared next was of a nightmare. An impossibility. An evil blackness—harsh, bleak, cold metal surely made of the void itself.

It continued to grow in the sky, and soon veins of blood slashed the blackness like the war paint of ancient primitives.

Even as the breadth and length of the blooded darkness grew ever greater, another materialized alongside it. Then another. Soon a dozen phantasms—devils of Hades come to life—blanketed the sky, blotting out the sun and turning morning to dusk.

Seraphina stood to balance unsteadily atop the magnetic resistance. What horror might this be? She only rarely accessed the so-called ‘exanet,’ but she did not believe even the most powerful governments possessed ships such as these.

Gaiae was a peaceful planet. Its residents strived ever to be in harmony with all living creatures, with the land and the air and the stars. What sin against nature could possibly have brought such devils down upon them?

Then the bellies of the beasts wrent apart, and all legions spewed forth. Creatures born of the bowels of Tartarus, their arms counted greater than those of Mahākālī and writhed madly around blazing crimson eyes—a cyclopean blood-gorged eye for each creature in the legion army.

Their multitudes descended from the sky, and at last she screamed.

73

SIYANE

M
ETIS
N
EBULA

T
HEY APPROACHED
M
ETIS AS QUIETLY
and furtively as the
Siyane
permitted. Their route was circuitous, winding around the Nebula until their trajectory was nearly opposite of before.

All her instincts screamed at her to hurry, to get there faster and to generally
get on with it
. Yet along about the time her fingers stretched out to hover above the controls, Caleb’s hand found its way to her shoulder or the curve of her jaw. She wouldn’t have expected him to be the calm one…though if she pondered it she had to concede he had often been the patient one.

When the golden-blue wisps of Metis’ outer bands at last surrounded them, she initiated the sLume drive a final time. One final run for the core at maximum speed, as swift as any human could travel across the stars.

They would drop out of superluminal 0.1 AU from the portal’s location but still within the thickest of the towering pillars of gas and dust. The instant the sLume drive idled the dampener field would kick in. She had paid a princely sum for a barely legal power allocation optimizer, and now the dampener field could operate at full strength without them being forced to freeze.

Still the trip took hours upon hours. As many hours as it had taken when they had previously made the journey, in fact. Unlike the prior journey, however, this night they spent together.

They passed the hours as couples facing the unknown yet temporarily powerless to influence their fate do: they made love as if it were the first time, murmured secrets to one another in the darkness, slept for a bit, and made love as if it were the last time.

Then there was no space left to travel and their fate returned to their hands.

They returned to the cockpit as the sLume drive idled and the scene beyond the viewport sharpened into clarity. The ship hovered in luminous, dense fog; as it did not actually travel forward under separate propulsion while inside the superluminal bubble, on exiting it the ship was already at rest.

Instantly she was a flurry of activity, confirming the dampener field had engaged, beginning scans for threats or any movement whatsoever in the area and attuning the spectrum analyzer across all bands.

The flare from the pulsar leapt to life on the spectrum display. The gamma beam pulsed in a regular, rapid spin. She filtered it out—and immediately frowned. “It’s gone.”

“Everything?”

Her head shook minutely. “The gamma radiation, the local one whose source we weren’t able to pinpoint. The terahertz radiation, too.”

He leaned closer to stare at the spectrum display with her. “But not the TLF.”

“But not the TLF.” She blew out a long, slow breath. “Okay. Nothing to do but find out why.” She started the impulse engine.

The nebular clouds soon began to thin, then abruptly evaporate as before. Yet in stark and rather disturbing contrast to before, the clouds evaporated to reveal only the void.

The ships were gone.
And so was the portal.

Neither of them spoke. They simply regarded the empty blackness in stunned disbelief. She had prepared herself for a number of scenarios. None of those scenarios involved the portal being
gone
.

Because that was impossible.

He dropped his elbows to his knees with a heavy sigh. “So, new plan then.”

“No. The portal is there.”

His attention shifted from the viewport to her. His voice held calm conviction—and trust, she thought. “Okay. Why?”

“The same reason we’re here.”

“The TLF signal is still being generated from somewhere.”

“Correct. Now the question is….” With her left hand she strafed until the ship was positioned exactly perpendicular to the direction the wave propagated. She focused the spectrum analyzer sensors in on a point in space and took two snapshots. Then she threw both measurements to a waveform screen.

A wondrous breath fell from her lips as she sank into the chair. She was looking at a phase shift across the portal.

When measured given the precise point where the portal had floated as the origin, the TLF wave exhibited a 4.65° phase difference in each direction. On its own it didn’t tell her anything about the nature or breadth of the realm within the portal, as any number of cycles could have occurred inside—but it
did
tell her there existed a realm within the portal.

Caleb’s eyes narrowed at the screen for a moment before he shook his head and chuckled wryly. “And space falls back into alignment with the rules of the universe. The portal
is
there.”

“Told you.” She gave him a teasing if weighty smirk. “Now we just need to trigger it.”

“Which you’ve already determined how to do.”

The smirk softened to a smile. “Harmonics.”

He glanced at the row of screens and back to her. “The gamma radiation was a harmonic of the TLF, wasn’t it?”

“It was, though the frequency disparity was tremendous. I think the gamma frequency was an activation code. It kept the portal open while our alien friends traversed it and shut off once they no longer needed it. But I can mimic it.”

His gaze met hers, and the look in his eyes sent her stomach into somersaults and a delightful tingle rushing along her skin. She wanted nothing more in the world than to wind her fingers in his hair and pull him close and ask him if he might tell her what the look in his eyes meant.

Instead she swallowed and focused on the HUD. Her fingertips danced on a holographic panel to her left as she built the gamma wave. Once it was prepped she maneuvered the ship so it lined up directly on the invisible point which represented the center of the former portal.

“Here goes nothing….” She sucked in a deep breath and turned on the signal.

From nothingness burst forth a perfect circle of obsidian metal. Luminescent pale gold plasma filled the ring as it expanded in diameter. In two seconds it had attained its previous size and a halo of roiling clouds had billowed over its edges.

“Well that’s not something you see every day.” She nodded mutely in agreement.

After the explosion of energy which had propelled the ring outward vanished, a stilled silence seemed to engulf the landscape. The vertical pool of plasma undulated as peacefully as the surface of a pond on a quiet spring dawn. Even the churning clouds appeared to settle into a soothing rhythm. Other than the portal itself, there was no evidence of technology, of an alien force or any force at all.

The TLF wave continued to pulse—steady, deliberate and strong, as though it were the very heartbeat of the universe—from the exact center of the ring.

Like the dulcet tones of a siren it called to her, singing a promise of answers beneath the tranquil waters. Waters which happened to be composed of an unknown breed of plasma and ‘lapped’ vertically while suspended within a ring of unknown material and origin in the void of space.

Caleb’s presence beside her during the trip had been a comfort and a wonderful indulgence. But now it wasn’t close enough, for him or her. He pushed out of his chair to kneel in front of her and draw her into a slow, languorous kiss.

He drew back a mere centimeter, his voice a whisper upon her lips. “You realize we could die, simply by going through.”

She closed the centimeter to claim another kiss, lingering an eternal second beyond when it might have ended. She breathed in…breathed
him
in. “I do. But if we don’t go, maybe everyone dies. And even if I don’t particularly
like
most of everyone, I find I don’t want that on my conscience.”

He nodded against her. “Nor do I. So we go together—but only if you’re sure.”

She smiled—a tiny little smile—and bravely rolled her eyes as she straightened up and settled into the chair. “I’m sure. It’ll be an adventure. New sights, new wonders, new discoveries. It’s what I live for. You too, right?”

“Absolutely.” He returned to his chair, kicked his feet up on the dash and crossed his ankles. “Lead on. Show me this supposed ‘adventure.’”

“You got it.”

His hand reached over and wrapped around hers as she gunned the impulse engine to full power and accelerated into the portal.

TO BE CONTINUED

IN BOOK TWO OF
AURORA RISING

VERTIGO

COMING THIS WINTER

Author’s Note

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STARSHINE
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