“Hi,” he said.
Holly smiled and tipped her chin. “You enjoying the trip so far?”
“It’s amazing. I haven’t traveled much like this.”
“You haven’t?” Holly asked, surprised. “And what brings you to traveling now?”
“This thing.” He pursed his lips and jerked his chin up and out, as though to indicate the ship.
“And what is this thing?”
“Ah, wouldn’t you like to know.” He smiled playfully.
“I’d love that, in fact. I’d love to know what’s so important that Xadrian is sending me so far into the deepest reaches.”
“And I’d love nothing more than to tell you, Holly Drake. But then I’d have to kill you.” He winked.
She allowed herself a halfhearted laugh. “You know, in my opinion that’s never a very funny joke.”
“Yeah, I can see how that’s how you’d feel. Well, I’m sorry I said it,” he shrugged. “It was all in good fun. Right? But the truth is that I can’t tell you. I suspect Xadrian will be able to tell you eventually.”
Holly detected that being circumspect was going to get her nowhere, and while she’d already begun to dig in without really playing it safe, she decided that she’d just jump all the way in with both feet. “I don’t love that we’re out here, exposed like this. The sooner I know what’s on the line, the better I’ll feel about putting my crew and Trip’s crew in danger. What is it you do for a living, Jamie?”
“I’m a doctor.”
“What kind of doctor?”
He sat forward suddenly and stretched, avoiding her gaze. “This has taken a lot out of me. I think I’m going to snag a some Z’s. Keep us safe, Holly. I hear you have a perfect record at that.” He finished stretching and headed off the bridge.
She caught a few glances from her crew that indicated they’d been listening. Holly suspected they felt as frustrated as she did about how well the conversation went. Holly telegraphed a message with her eyes to Charly and Shiro that she wanted them to tail Jamie.
Before they could even rise from their seats, Holly suddenly lurched to the side and grabbed the armrests of her chair. Luckily she’d strapped in—that always seemed like a good idea when she was flying, in space or moon-side.
The jolting continued. Readings flashed on the holo-displays and notifications dinged from the consoles.
“What’s happening?” one of the crew members asked, a young human male with a boyish face. “Captain Taurus?”
“Checking the readings now, Iain Grant,” Trip shouted.
Panic slithered just beneath the calm of the spell Odeon had been casting on her with his song. Her throat started to respond, filling with a tight knot of fear that made swallowing difficult. She couldn’t breathe.
“The aetherways have shifted completely, and suddenly. Without warning,” Iain said. “We’re not even in a path at the moment.”
“That can only be one thing,” Trip said. “A behemoth.”
14
The behemoths and leviathans of space fed on the subtle aetheric energies connecting planetary bodies, moons, and stars. They were an unseen force that held space together, and while it wasn’t the scientific explanation so many people had been looking for, it worked. The tools had never been available to see them, until the Centau showed humans how to do it.
The leviathans were massive worm-shaped creatures that undulated through space, digging holes between solar systems and galaxies, making pathways for others to follow. They were like gophers in a pasture or other such rodents. Only they were the size of massive carrier ships and could take one on easily and win.
Meanwhile, the behemoths were more like space dragons, with long arms to wrap around a ship and disable its electrical systems. They too fed on the aetheric energy as well as plasma and other as yet unclassified energies that flowed through space and the space between.
Both space monsters were forces to be reckoned with, and so neither was the sort a ship full of planet-dwellers wanted to encounter.
“Does it have us yet?” The boyish crew-member asked, his face a mask of fear.
“No, take it easy, Marlon,” Iain said. “We’re going to get through this in one piece.”
“Then why are we shaking?” The boy asked.
“The Olavia Apollo is correcting for slipping out of the aetherway,” Trip said. She punched at the holo-display. She studied the response on the display as colors and Centau words flashed at her. “The behemoth is ahead of us. In our path. Waiting. Helmsman Tanika, cut engines, reverse thrust.” Trip said to the the other crewmember—a female human. Trip usually did most of this alone, relying on her ship to function as the rest of the crew. But that was for short jaunts between moons, she’d told Holly just before taking off.
Holly watched and listened, feeling the fear slip over the surface of the bubble of calm Odeon’s song created inside her. She knew that she should be more worried than she was behaving, but she couldn’t grab ahold of the panic. It eluded her. Reason screamed at her to run, but where? There was nowhere to run on a ship in space.
“We have to get around it, somehow,” Iain said, looking up at Trip. They stared at each other, as Trip’s Centau aloof nature quavered. Holly could almost see it shimmer and ebb, like a reflection on water.
“Yes, we do. I see no way around it, though, Iain Grant. What can we do but go toward it? The aetherway is likely intact on the other side of it. This one has placed itself here to feed on the energies, and possibly to catch prey. It’s a clever one.” An unmistakeable awe came through in Trip’s voice.
“Prey?” Shiro asked.
Holly glanced at him. He seemed unfazed by what was happening.
Trip unstrapped from her chair and stood up, stretching. “Us, Shiro Oahu. The behemoths experience time differently from us, as far as I’ve gathered. What feels like years or months to us is a small span of time. This one has probably been waiting for months to catch a group of traveling humans like us, but doesn’t see the passage of time that way. It perhaps feels like only a day to the behemoth.”
“So we’re trapped? Correct me if I’m wrong, guys, but space is three dimensional, right?” Charly said, also seeming quite calm despite the straits they’d found themselves in. “Can’t we just go around it?”
“Forward thrust, stay steady,” Trip said to the helmsman. “Yes, Charly Stout, we can go around it. But without the aetheric energy helping, that will add at least half a day to our journey, perhaps even more. I would need my navigator, Iain Grant, to plot a new course, and before we have that, we’d be running in a potentially askew direction until we corrected. You see, it’s just not the best way.”
“Then what options do we have left?” Holly asked. “Go toward it, hope it doesn’t snag us, and catch the other end of the aetherway?”
Trip laughed. “You live on the sharp edge of danger, Holly Drake.”
“How much further to the behemoth?” Holly asked. She wasn’t feeling brave, she was simply feeling nothing. But they needed to make a damn decision rather than sit in space waiting to make a decision.
Trip glanced at her display and read something. “Oh shit,” she said, only moments before the ship began to jolt.
“Shouldn’t the artificial gravity correct for that?” Charly shouted, laughing.
“What’s happening?” Holly shouted.
“The behemoth made our decision for us and seems to have detected the ship,” Trip said. “Forward thrust, helmsman, forward thrust!”
“Are you saying it has us?” Holly asked, the panic frothing and boiling over the calm Odeon had been casting over her.
“That is precisely what I’m saying, Holly Drake,” Trip called.
“Iain, has the frequency modulator been running?” Holly asked, grappling for a way to help them out of the situation.
“Yes. It’s been engaged the entire time, just for this. Silent running. I don’t agree with it—“
“That’s because you’re
ex-military. But we have it for non-smuggling reasons,” Holly said.
“The silent running doesn’t matter when we’re using an aetherway and there’s a space monster,” Trip said, jumping in. “They have a keen sense of what’s happening in the aether. They see it moving through our engines—being sucked in and expelled, slightly hotter. Even with silent running.”
“Would have been nice to know before we got ourselves into this situation,” Holly said.
“It’s attached to us,” Trip said, looking at her readings on the holo display. “Arms wrapped around us.”
A chorus of cursing went up around the bridge. Holly was aware of her crew, but her mind was focused on the issues. Odeon hadn’t let go, his song still passed through her, and that was working for now, because she needed to think of a way out of the problem. But maybe the song interfered. Fear. Adrenalin. They worked like keys to open locks. And when she kept them at bay, her senses were that much slower.
But she didn’t want to let go of the song for fear that doing so would cause her to go into full freakout mode. She could feel the images and faded memories of what happened all those years ago floating at the fringe of her conscious. The cracked hull. The leviathan outside the ship, its primal, otherworldly call beckoning to its distant cousins lightyears away. Bodies being sucked out into space. The inhuman screeches of the humans and Yasoan as they were dragged away from oxygen and safety. Those memories hovered in her mind, nearby, waiting to overpower her. Would they win if Odeon’s song faded?
“What about singing to it?” Holly suddenly asked, turning to look at Odeon.
“You mean my song?” he asked in the sing-song voice he used when he was singing, but trying to speak with her.
“Yes, could you use it to reach the behemoth? Calm it. Tell it to let us go?”
“Worth a try,” Iain said. “Never heard of that.”
“Nor have I,” Trip said.
“There’s a first time for everything,” Shiro said. His voice was laced with fear as well as a thread of some kind of attempt at levity. “I say we should try it.”
Soon they’d made their way to a position in the Olavia Apollo where a vent opened to the exterior of the ship. Odeon would be able to slip his hand out through the vent and touch the body of the behemoth, attempting to sing it into a calm state.
“This is just completely outrageous.” Charly stood beside Holly, one hand holding onto Odeon. In case he somehow got sucked through the tiny opening out into space.
“I know,” Holly said, finding the smallest bit of humor in the fact that they thought he might get sucked out through that tiny hole. “He’s not going to get pulled out into space.”
“But no one has ever touched a behemoth.” Charly grabbed hold of his leg, at Holly’s bidding.
“At least not to our knowledge.”
“What if it does something to him? Like, like what if it carries some weird parasite that attaches to him, and he unwittingly takes it back to our civilization and it spreads among us and ends up eating our brains out and killing all of us?”
Holly nearly choked. “Ok, now you have me second-guessing this idea.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Odeon said.
“Yes, as if that would happen,” Shiro contributed. “The part about killing all of us. I’m sure a few people would survive. And carry on.
“That’s reassuring, Shiro. Ok, Odeon,” Holly said as he prepared to slip his hand through the vent and out to touch the body of the giant of space. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes, I’m very sure, Holly Drake,” he said, his voice still full of the song tones.
“Then go ahead. We’re ready.”
“Sending my hand through now.”
They listened and heard the sounds of a vacuum seal opening. Odeon made an almost involuntary sound, as though he were holding back the vomit. He breathed, loudly, then raised his song louder than he ever had before. Holly felt the spell on herself grow. She realized suddenly that she was smiling and perhaps dazing a little. It was bliss.
“It’s not letting go,” Odeon said after a few minutes. He continued singing. “Still holding on tight.”
Holly was in no state to direct him.
“Quit then. No sense holding onto the monster longer than you have to,” Charly said.
Odeon obliged. They let go of his legs, and he came back into the ship. No one spoke, except for Odeon, who continued to sing softly to Holly.
Back on the bridge, they relayed what had happened. Trip gave them an update on the conditions of the ship, which weren’t promising, with a behemoth wrapped around them. “It’s sucking us dry. We will start to see hull breeches and damage to our life support systems. Its vamping our energy. We need to get away from it, somehow.”
It seemed to be working more on a slow attack that bled them, rather than what Holly had seen before, with the frenzied dismantling of the zeppelin by the leviathan years ago.
The tremors that passed through the ship were now coming more frequently. Holly had experienced several moments of panic that seemed to overpower Odeon’s song, and now she realized that she was numb to her fate. What more could they do against such a formidable power? It held their ship tight, refused to let go, and without better weapons, they couldn’t do anything.
“Can we shoot it?” she asked, grasping for straws.
“That just makes them madder,” Trip said. “Besides, with it so close, I can’t even target the beast.”
“Hello? What’s happening? The ship hasn’t stopped shaking for about thirty minutes. Is that normal?” Jamie stood just inside the bridge’s hatch.
“It’s not normal. We’re in the loving embrace of a behemoth,” Trip said, turning her back on the passenger. Maybe she blamed him? Holly was beginning to look for a way to deal with the grief of what was occurring.
“Embrace?” Jamie said.
“We’re stuck. A behemoth was waiting for a ship to grab onto and steal energy from.”
“You mean a monster has us?”
“Yeah, that’s what we mean,” Charly said, sounding irate.
“What have you already done to get loose, so that I don’t duplicate my efforts,” Jamie asked.
Holly bristled at him inserting himself into the situation, but told him anyway. She needed to pretend that everything was normal for a moment.
“But you have a signal modulator? And it’s on the outside of the ship?” Jamie asked.
“Yes, a lot of good it’s done us. Our contact told us it would mask us from the behemoth,” Holly said.
“The controls for it are inside the ship?”
“Yes,” Holly said.
“I have an idea,” Jamie said. “If we overload the power on the signal modulator, we can send an electrical jolt through the device. Because it’s on the outside of the ship, there’s a chance it’ll hit the beast. Perhaps it’ll let us go when that happens.”
Holly pursed her lips, and nodded. “I have no reason to argue you on this, go for it. But ask Trip first. It’s her ship.” She was ready to put this experience behind her, get it done, and stop thinking about it.
And maybe, just maybe, feel safe from the monster.
Jamie moved to stand beside Trip—who agreed to his suggestion—and directed her on what to do. As he explained it, Holly waited, her breath held, her heart pounding. So far this encounter had been much easier than the time the leviathan attacked back when she was still married to Graf.
Holly overheard Jamie telling Trip that if it worked, they’d definitely want to put as much distance between them and the creature as fast as they could. Trip agreed and told her helmsman to be on standby, while also making sure that Iain had their course still mapped and that it hadn’t changed.
The ship jerked hard, throwing Holly to one side. Trip shouted for all power to the engines. Holly fell into her seat and strapped in.
Thank Ixion.
15
They didn’t quite shake the behemoth e
ven after it let go. The external view screen on the bridge showed the beast—colored like a brilliant nebula in green, gold, and red with iridescent scales and six sets of legs, one pair of them on its wings—as it chased them along the aetherway.
Holly’s eyes widened. Despite Odeon’s song of calm, she felt dizzy with awe and fear. She’d seen a leviathan, but never a behemoth. Trip was forced to fire on it more using her meager weapons—“I mean,” she said, sounding defensive, “the fact is that these are nothing compared to the behemoth. The space giants are much stronger and usually require a whole battery of weapons to defeat them.”
Nevertheless, the electrical shock and assault from the weapons staved the beast off a bit, and by the time they passed the gas giant Ananse half-way between Ixion and Shakti, the monster was far behind them.
The remainder of the journey, Holly slept several watches, and then observed their approach of the Shakti and the base via the forward cameras on the view screen on the bridge.
She overheard Trip’s communication with the Shakti Station. Traffic control demanded identification before they were allowed to dock, to which Trip also directed them to their signal—“See that? We’re covered.” The transponder Holly had purchased from Macav ID’d them as friendly to the Shakti Station. She sighed, laughing softly. What had they done all that work for if Trip still had to point it out to them?
“Military types,” Iain said under his breath as she stood near him on the bridge. “They really never change.”
“So much comfort in that, though, right?” Holly teased.
“No,” he growled, his expression suddenly haunted. He shrugged. “Maybe.”
Trip worked it out with the station, and they were given the green light to dock and land on pad 32. As they approached, Holly held onto Odeon’s arm, watching the base against the backdrop of Shakti, which was even larger than Ixion. Iain directed their course into the hangar. Holly studied him for a moment, appreciating his deft fingers, working along the console. His hands were weathered. But his fingers were lithe and sculpted in such a way that she ached to feel them gliding over her body again. The trip was over, now. They’d arrived safe, and her thoughts were free to roam wherever they wanted without the looming knowledge that she was only seconds away from annihilation.
The Colossus Collection : A Space Opera Adventure (Books 1-7 + Bonus Material) Page 95
