Void Star (9 page)

     "It's just like he said," Rayph said.

     Nothing was shown on their monitors, and those things reached far beyond whatever the space event was. It was like the darkness really wasn't there, and yet what had been there was gone. Readings on planets and stars vanished.

     Rayph shook his boss out of it. "We have to get to the ship."

     "In eighteen thousand years, we have never had to order a Protocol 3."

     Rayph was pulling him down to their ship. "What is a Protocol 3?"

     Finally, his supervisor relented and started following him down. "Evacuate the planet."

Chapter 8

     Trevor couldn't take his eyes of the radar display; the moon-sized blips grew closer. Sensors indicated the giant battleships were closing in on the planet, sweeping it for signs of them. They were both screening it from the other side of the world, working their way toward the
Wrath
.

     Sweat had either accumulated from the heat generated by the cockpit equipment or from blind fear. It didn't really matter what the cause though. Things were tense. Either way, Trev did his best to clear the moisture off with his sleeve.

     Nathan pulled up on the stick so they'd miss a collision with a stream of Florian ships. They were flying out like scared minnows down a creek. Docking stations were bursting open with countless spacecrafts. Those on approach into the planet were turning around.

     "What is going on?" Kaida asked from the backseat. "Are they leaving because of the Ruverans?"

     "No. It's worse." Nathan set his radio headset down and turned on the intercom speakers.

     "Attention…attention…Protocol 3 Warning is in effect." The prerecorded message played over and over again. Nathan flicked it to guard frequency. "It's an evacuation order."

     Kaida still didn't understand. Florian Ecaths weren't afraid of Ruvera.

     "Where to now?" Trevor asked, keeping his focus on the mission at hand.

     Nathan joined the flurry of ships escaping the planet, unfazed. "I don't care. Wag it for now."

     Trev shrugged. "All right." He punched in a random point and locked it in. The ship calculated the best route to get there. When it gave him numbers, he typed them into the flight computer. "Destination set."

     The
Wrath
tore through the atmosphere. Thousands of ships were all around them from horizon to horizon along with them, scrambling in different directions. They exited the thermosphere and hit space. Nathan dialed up the force drive.

     "What is that?" the radio crackled.

     "I've never…" came another.

     The guard frequency erupted with fearful calls.

     Trevor couldn’t figure out what they were all looking at.  It couldn’t be the Ruverans.

     The flight crew kept looking forward, their attention focused between the two planets they were going to light-jump through, when they saw something on the back video. Nathan hit a switch and enlarged the view.

     Flora was alight with ships taking off and bursting into light speed. The Breakers were closing in on the
Wrath
; one of them was opening its fighter ports. But behind them, something else was happening. The energy ribbon they had traveled through was…changing. The end that ran toward the Milky Way galaxy had shadows screaming through it toward them. Beyond the infected energy ribbon was a mass of darkness that no words could describe. It was a living mass of moving shadows.

     "We need to move," Trevor said in the quiet.

     Nathan turned the back screen off. The transition between the two engine modes was nearing completion.

     Trevor tried his best to put it out of his mind and help fly the ship. The radio crackled with worsening accounts, and the radar was showing the impossible. Everything the “anomaly” hit…disappeared.

     One of the Breakers blew past them at light speed, its captain smart enough to get out. The fighters from the other were on top of them now.

     Nathan reengaged regular flight to dogfight away from them. Watching the darkness coming had cost them a clean escape.  He pulled the stick around into clumps of other ships. The fighters came from all directions, and a large band blocked them jumping.

     "What are you doing? Don't worry about them. We need to get out of here." Trevor saw the mass of disappearing blips getting closer. The darkness was fast.

     A wild look passed across Nathan's face. "We have to have a clear jump." He flipped his guns on and broke toward the ships blocking their way.

     Trevor was now more afraid of his uncle than the Ruverans.

     The ship turned toward Flora, and Kaida covered her mouth when she saw the darkness hit the planet. As it contacted the surface of the planet, it surrounded it like a closing mouth until the jaws completely closed. Not stopping for a moment, the arms of darkness continued off in spires, enveloping hundreds of ships in its wake.

     "He's right. We have to go!" she cried. "Light-jump through them."

     Trevor saw the blip for the Breaker completely vanish. When he looked up, he only saw oncoming blackness where it had been.

     The fighters had disengaged from them and were making a run for it, while other ships were taken into the mass.

     Trevor knew they were going to die if he didn't act. In one motion, he took flight control from his uncle, who was still wildly fighting them and then pulled the circuit breaker killing Nathan's side of the jet so he couldn't take control back.

     He aimed the ship as best he could toward blank space, as missiles streamed at them.

     Ships were sucked in right behind them as the darkness came for them.  For a moment everything seemed like it was about to hit.

     Without another thought, Trevor hit the jump switch on his uncle's side. Outside the ship, a spire of seething, hungering blackness reached out to swallow them too. Just as it licked the back, the craft shot off at light speed and disappeared.  The darkness did manage to absorb the rouge missiles and Ruveran ships and anything else that hadn’t escaped in time as it continued its path of destruction.

Chapter 9

     Stars went by in a flash. Hearts stopped in their chests. Breaths were held in waiting to be released from lungs. The universe looked like it had stopped. Then—

     The aft right side of the
Wrath
exploded.

     The blinding speed-of-light travel slammed off, and they sped forward on momentum only. Before Trevor could figure out what to do next, he saw his uncle had control of the ship again and was looking at him like his murder wouldn't suffice.

     "Don't ever do that again," Nathan hissed. "I didn't see we were clear."

     Trevor felt stupid; he had thought he was going to get a "thank-you" in there, but no. "I just saved us."

     "You just blew the force drive."

     Kaida wanted to put her two cents in but realized that would only make the situation worse. Instead, she busied herself breaking into the ship's emergency systems.

     Smoke detectors were lighting up one at a time throughout avionics.

     "Make yourself useful," Nathan spat.

     Trevor got up off his seat. "C'mon, Booster."

     The two of them ran off to fight the fire, footsteps and wheels clumping down the metal stairs.

     Kaida sat there, too overwhelmed to do anything. She had just witnessed the impossible—an entity made of darkness. There was no scientific approach to explain it. Though they were able to light-jump, it wouldn't buy them much time, twelve hours at most. Instead of worrying further, she finished up what she was doing.

     A rumble sounded from the left side of the ship.

     "What the—?" Nathan was looking over his displays. "We just lost our emergency beacon."

     Kaida closed her display and sat quietly.

     Meanwhile, Trevor and Boost were putting out the sporadic fires. Most of the wiring from the force drive engines had overheated. As soon as they hit the electric fires with suppressant, they died off. He hit the avionic fans on so that the remaining smoke would dissipate.  The shelves of wiring were largely intact but thoroughly burned through.

     On their way back to the cockpit, Trev saw Daphkalian staring out at him from their holding cell.

     The cell itself had been retained from the old design of the ship and had come in handy a few times. The design was pretty old school, with its crisscrossing metal bars. The only thing "new" about it was the electric locks that were fully engaged with steel rods. Daph wasn't going anywhere.

     "You have no idea what's going on, do you?" Daphkalian laughed. "Your uncle hasn't told you?"

     Trevor laughed himself. There was no other way to react to the man. "No, we've gone over the plan. We're ejecting you into space in a few. We're just trying to find the right thing for you to wear for the occasion."

     "Jokes won't help you." Daphkalian shook his head. "Your uncle knows what I know. I wonder why he hasn't let you in on it. He knows what the darkness is."  He paused.  “He knows about you.”

     "See ya around." Trevor waved the big man off. Was that the plan? Cause distrust among the crew so he could escape? This wasn't the Old West. Oddly though, something did stick. He thought about the way his uncle had acted when the darkness was coming. There was still something about it that stuck out. He just couldn't see it yet.  And there was no way Nathan knew about his…secret.

     He and Boost dropped back down into the passenger compartment and wound their way back toward the front. As they did, Nathan shouted over PA. "Ruveran ship inbound."

     Trev passed the top step and buckled himself back down. "Fire's out."

     "Good, because we have other problems." Nathan pointed to the giant blip that had reappeared on their radar.

     The radio started crackling again. "Captain Sutherland, this is Commander Argum of
Breaker IX
. After what we have both witnessed, we do not want to lose another ship, yours or ours. We just want the data pad, and then you may go. Believe it or not, our intention is to use what's on the pad to stop that anomaly."

     Nathan scoffed.

     Trevor knew his uncle would never agree to anything with Ruvera. Nathan was battling them every day somewhere in his mind. They had taken away his life, his family, and his world, and all the training he had ever received was geared to fight them. He would rather sacrifice his life to help kill as many as he could, than to submit to them. Usually, Trevor was all right with fighting Ruvera, but after the bloodlust Nathan had just displayed, he wasn't so sure anymore. It was like after years of running from the fight, he was ready to reengage them, killing others like himself and Kaida to get his revenge.

     "What's that?" Nathan nodded toward a white-and-blue mass they were floating toward—or, more accurately, was floating at them.

     Trevor looked it up on the star map. "Marked as a hybrid-type planet named Frosterrene. By all accounts, it's a giant ball of ice flying through space with its own gravitational pull and thin atmosphere. It's experiencing a massive blizzard, planetwide."

     "That's where we're going then."

     Trev wanted to object, but his uncle seemed to be himself again, back in calm control. "We're not going to be able to escape that way."

     "I'm not trying to escape."

     Kaida just sat back and watched Boost roll out of the cockpit. He must recognize the next part of the plan already.

     Nathan paused at his controls and looked out over at the giant speeding ball of ice. "Here we go."

     The
Wrath
lurched forward again, spinning toward the spinning planet.

     The radio crackled at the first sign of movement away from the Breaker. It was the Ruveran female commander. "Captain, I heard you were a reasonable man. Sorry to see that's untrue."

     The Breaker port doors fired open by the thousands. The sleek little jets pinged out and engaged on the their Tiger-37. Automatic countermeasures fired off as the fighters' weapons volleyed at them.

     Kaida peeked at the back ship camera to see open space fill with their fighters. They were still a long way off, but the missiles coming at them were closing in fast. She turned it back off.

     "Boost, use the wall," Nathan called over.

     Trevor hated the wall, and for a good reason.

     Boost fired it, and behind them, a force-field emitter brought up a large, solid barrier. Like its name, the force field grew into a large wall in space. The forward series of weapons from the fighters hit it. The force of the impact engulfed the missiles that impacted plus the incoming weapons still coming up from behind them. The power of all of it created a type of cosmic explosion that detonated everything at the middle of it, and then the force of it reached their ship.

     The tidal wave hit the
Wrath
, and they rode it into the atmosphere of Frosterrene. Snow and ice hit them and formed across the glass. The temperature inside the cockpit immediately dropped as they flew into the planet's atmosphere.

     Gusts of strong wind carrying sleet were blowing them all over the place. Nathan grasped the yoke, utilized all his training for crash landings, and aimed his craft.

     Trevor watched gratefully as the second large grouping of missiles died in the atmosphere, probably falling to the ground as icicles. He held on tight as the ship felt like it was coming apart, and down they went.

     Nathan kept the ship aimed between two glaciers. There appeared to be soft powder running between them. It also looked like a landing strip. The rest of the terrain was covered in jagged, sharp ice towers.

     Trevor ran through a quick before-landing check just as they struck the tops of the ice pinnacles. Shards of ice careened toward them.