Sightless: The Survivors Series #2

by Jason Letts

  “As sad as it is to say, for one moment when the Earth was lost, it made me glad because everyone who was left knew how I felt. It was a thought of extreme selfishness, but it’s helped me empathize more. I have more of a sense of common cause and am trying to help as best I can,” she said.

  “I know you are,” he said.

  “I wish I was smarter. We could use it.”

  It dawned on Loris that although she remained composed, telling her story was a kind of confession, a way to reach out. The last time he tried to hug her she’d screamed, but this time she set her face against his chest and pressed her hand into his back. When they let go, she appeared embarrassed and muttered some promises about finding out more before scampering off.

  That left Loris alone in the monitoring room.

  “Loris.”

  The voice in his head was that of the boy’s, and it reminded him of the foolishness of thinking he was ever alone. Resigning himself not to get any more sleep, he instead went to the medical wing to see what he had to say. Loris found him in bed with the blankets wrapped tight over his body. All he needed was a bedtime story.

  “What is it?” Loris asked.

  “The answer you’re looking for is out there.”

  “Enough riddles,” Loris said. “I don’t have time to guess what you mean.”

  “What you don’t have is time to waste until the Detonans come for you. We are not as far away from them as it seems. You want to know about the invisible being and you want to defeat the Detonans before they can wipe you out. One solution will address both problems.”

  The youthful voice had a seductive touch of innocence to it, but by now Loris knew how misleading and inaccurate it could be.

  “And why should I even believe you? The last time you told me anything it was that some of the Novans were still alive. Almost all of them were there and it almost sunk the mission!”

  “That was the best answer I could give.”

  “It was a terrible answer,” Loris snapped back. He’d treated the boy as if he were infallible, but after being bitten so many times his respect had eroded completely.

  “Then don’t believe me, but believe your own eyes. You have seen dark matter before, even if you didn’t realize it. Surely by now it must’ve occurred to you that the runes on the probes are not written on the surface but contained within. The Detonans understood as much. They even found a way to dissect the probes.”

  The lack of trust Loris felt was so deep that he almost couldn’t hear the words in his own head.

  “What good is that? We don’t have a probe to dissect, and none seem to be appearing around the dark matter planet,” Loris said.

  “Defy your species’ propensity for obstinacy and heed my message. There are probe grafts on Detonus that can be obtained if you let me show you the way. I can’t discern the thoughts of the beings around us, but I feel a great energy. It’s the sense of a presence you’ve felt as well. It could be our only chance against the Detonans.”

  Loris remembered that they’d located the window leading inside Detonus and could get there in a matter of hours. He certainly wasn’t eager to go through it and find out what was happening on the other side.

  “I’ll think about it and let you know if we need that,” Loris said.

  He turned to go, but the boy’s voice pounded in his head at a high intensity, without any of its youthfulness or calm. The boy’s shouting compromised Loris’s ability to stand, sending him staggering against the floor.

  “Have I failed you so badly that you’d deny my help when I’m the only one who could save you? If this is not done now, you will not get another chance. Trynton Quade is preparing to betray you. You knew it was coming and that time is almost at hand. When it happens, it can either be your undoing or propel you to victory, but that victory can’t come alone.”

  It was a relief when the voice stopped echoing in his cranium. He looked over at the boy, whose eyes appeared to burn. He didn’t doubt that Quade had a mind of his own and some deviant plans up his sleeve, but it hadn’t struck him that it would blow up in his face right when they needed to unite against the Detonans.

  “What are the Detonans going to do?” Loris asked, getting back to his feet.

  “Let’s find out.”

  As much as Loris would’ve liked to have had Quade apprehended on the spot, he knew it wasn’t likely to end well or garner much support if his charge stemmed from something resembling the thought police. He had no choice but to wait for Quade to do something, and the idea was to be in perfect position to catch him when he did and minimize any damage or delays.

  After everything that happened with Iotache and the fight against the Detonans, he hadn’t dreamed infighting with his own people would happen again. Loris thought back to some of the things Quade had said on the Incubator during Brina’s scenes. He’d expressed a Machiavellian view, but with so many alien threats it didn’t make sense to Loris why anyone would attempt to go rogue.

  Sensitive concerns like this required people he could trust, and Loris woke up Panic to keep an eye on things while he was gone. The plan was for her to conjure a reason to get Quade back on the Magellan where he could be watched. A hardware issue seemed like it would require a fix that couldn’t be performed from where he was. Panic didn’t like that Loris would be departing for an indeterminate amount of time, but Loris had succumbed to the idea that they needed an advantage in the coming fight.

  Right around when his shift would’ve started, Loris was climbing in to a shuttle with the boy, who seemed pleased to be moving around outside of his room. There wasn’t much communication between them, and Loris still held something of a grudge, but all the boy needed to do was point the way.

  Leaving the station behind, the shuttle headed directly to the window connecting their current location with the Detonan underground. They’d had little time to gather supplies beyond basic gear, space suits in case the atmosphere had changed yet again, and some rappel-assist ropes that would help them quickly get to the surface.

  “Where on the planet are the probe fragments?” Loris asked midway through their uneventful flight.

  “Not far.”

  Loris felt like he was beginning to better understand unhelpful answers like these. Compared to the scope of the universe, nothing was that far away.

  The slow shuttle made the trip take even longer than it should’ve, but it was the only vessel they had that could fit through a window seemingly designed for probes. Loris spent most of the trip staring out at space and wondering about the things around them that he couldn’t see.

  A patch of space ahead had a different color than everything around it. Triangular in shape, it seemed to grow lighter with the dawn on Detonus. They were approaching their destination.

  Designed for transit in space, the shuttle didn’t have enough lift to keep it airborne against a planet’s gravitational force. Loris brought it to a halt before the edge of the plane, close enough to see details of the rocky chasm leading up to the surface. Maneuvering into position, Loris pushed forward at an angle in an attempt to lodge the shuttle on the cavern’s rocky ledge.

  The nose breached the plane and immediately started to dip. The boy almost fell out of his seat as the vessel jostled and came to rest, its tail end on the opposite side of the galaxy.

  A quick scan told him the oxygen atmosphere was still intact, but habit and basic Unified training told him never to enter an unoccupied planet without his space suit fully on. Infrared scanners were negative. No life was present at the surface, at least nearby.

  They exited a door on the port side and jumped onto hard ground. Lights from the shuttle illuminated the chamber, including the passage they’d cut when tunneling here before. The boy followed along as Loris ascended the slope and ducked through the hole in the wall. He switched on a light in his suit to help with the uneven ground and came to the bottom of their previous digging point.

  Finding their gear and portable lift exactly
as they’d left it, Loris was able to call down the line’s platform and leave his ropes stowed in his pack. Grabbing hold tight and with the boy’s arms around his neck, he sped toward the surface.

  Panic had made him promise to turn around at the first sign of danger, but what constituted a first sign quickly became a gray area. As he stepped onto the surface’s bare stone, the digging equipment and skiff transport remained exactly as they’d left them. The planet was lifeless except for a few mossy patches.

  One look into the sky told him a different story. While night receded, there was enough of it to make every light in the sky stand out. Countless glimmering points moved about in space, so many that it seemed like the Detonans’ orbiting infrastructure hadn’t been impaired at all by his assault.

  “They’ve recovered so much,” Loris gasped. Whether they’d done so by replicating members of their species with incubators was unclear. It made Loris feel dwarfed by how little they’d accomplished in all the time since Earth’s destruction.

  The boy did not share Loris’s sense of concern.

  “They are still poorly equipped to handle oxygen-rich atmospheres. Their own planet continues to be off limits to them. The fragments were cut in a facility toward the gamma station you destroyed.”

  Loris took another look at all of the activity going on in the sky, remembering how the Detonans bombed the boy’s planet. Cruising on a skiff across the surface would catch someone’s attention sooner or later. The narrowness of the window might be the only thing that would allow them to get away without retribution.

  “Get on,” Loris said, wiping dust away from the skiff’s controls and firing up the engine. The vehicle came to lift, rocking harshly as it hovered above the ground.

  They crossed over the mouth of the chasm, past rocky stretches, over a lake, and through the streets of a desolate city.

  “The probes have always been of interest to me,” the boy said. “I had believed this was partly how the Detonans manufactured them before I was born. It wasn’t until you had your own encounter with the dark matter beings that I realized the Detonans, too, had been trying to determine what the probes were showing them.”

  Loris continued pushing the vehicle to the limit, approaching the industrial zone, surrounding the gamma ray’s destroyed antenna and damaged tower. Some of the automated containers were in motion around the area. Loris watched a shipment lift off from a platform and head toward space. With any luck the surface activity would provide enough cover to get the job done.

  The boy pointed to a gated wall down an adjacent stretch of road, and Loris took the cue to fly over it and park on the other side next to a windowless building two-stories high. Like the rest of the structure, the door was made of reinforced clay and practically melted as soon as a torch was set to it. The Detonans’ dominance in the galaxy never required them to spare a thought for security. It took minutes to get inside.

  The warehouse would make a dream chop shop. There were lasers, torches, and enough cutting equipment to fell a forest in a day. A long tube in the back that extended beyond the ends of the building suggested a particle accelerator. Unlike everywhere else he’d seen on the way, there were no suffocated Detonans around. Despite the heavy equipment, Loris still thought it was the wrong building because there was no probe anywhere to be seen.

  That’s when Loris spotted thin panels in a series of slots along the wall. He anxiously rushed over and began pulling at the panels, which were about a meter in diameter. Yanking one out, he held it up and looked through it. It further shaded the room, and Loris couldn’t be sure if he was imagining indistinct green waves.

  “This is what we came for, whether or not it does anything. Let’s get going,” he said, stuffing a handful of the panels under his arm and turning for the door.

  To his surprise, the boy was on the floor in a meditative state.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Loris grumbled.

  He set the panels against one of the machines and hoisted the boy up over one shoulder. He was heavier than he looked. It was cumbersome getting the alien and the panels out of the building, but climbing onto the skiff and trying to steer was even worse. It had little in the way of storage room and nothing for restraints, forcing Loris to place the body across his lap and press the panels on top with his elbows as he gripped the controls.

  A broad smile came to Loris’s face as he sailed back toward the chasm. He couldn’t go a minute between glancing up at the activity in space and uttering a spiteful laugh. Stole these panels right out from under their noses. The prospect of bringing them back and getting a good look at the ghost ship hanging around the Magellan almost had him salivating.

  The boy might’ve been right. This could be the beginning of a turnaround in their fight against the Detonans.

  They were still the only ones in sight when they arrived at the pit, and rushing off of the skiff turned out to be too much to pull off smoothly. The boy spilled out and collapsed against the rock, waking him up and forcing a deep groan from his throat.

  “Clumsy fool. Did you think I was daydreaming? They’re working on some kind of special weapon but I couldn’t find out what it is. I’ve been trying to figure it out, and this was my best chance.”

  As Loris helped him to his feet, hearing of a weapon made him take one more look at the sky to see what he was talking about. It was fully daylight now. The space lights were drowned out by the sun and any chance of seeing something being built was gone. It did, however, make seeing the drones flying down from above easier.

  A yank pulled the boy onto the line’s descending platform, and Loris laughed again at the Detonans’ vain response as they dropped below the surface. His smug feeling of satisfaction remained as they squeezed through the tunnel and guided the panels across the cracked wall to the window’s chamber.

  On the inside, within sight of the perched shuttle, a humming noise hit his ears. He looked up to see the drones flying straight down the chasm toward them. Any trace of humor vanished.

  “Hurry up and get on. Now!” Loris said, though internally he wondered if getting on the defenseless craft was even a good idea.

  When the boy didn’t move fast enough to negotiate the gap between the rock and the shuttle’s doorway, Loris had no choice but to shove him in. Nearly losing one of the panels in the process, Loris hopped in and swiveled around to take his seat. The engine was warm and began causing vibrations that helped ease the shuttle back off of the rock through the window, but it gave Loris plenty of time to see at least a dozen black ships swarming toward him.

  It would take the Magellan and the Cortes hours to reach him. He was floating in empty space with nowhere to hide. It started to seem like he’d finally bitten off more than he could chew.

  After a moment of panic, Loris’s wits returned to him. The drones were starting to fire through the window, forcing him to push the crawling shuttle into gear. He didn’t go far, just over the top and around the window to the other side, where he hoped he could hide.

  From that opposite side, there was a clear view of empty space in the area. All of a sudden the drones appeared one after another right in front of him. They rushed forward and then halted, having lost their target. A moment later they began separating and searching the area, intent on finding him.

  Loris reached for the console in order to power off the shuttle, trying to think of anything that could help, but he decided against it and grabbed one of the panels instead. Holding it in front of his face as he looked through the windshield, it did nothing to change what he saw in space.

  But then green shapes started appearing, so much like the runes on the probe. It left him speechless that he could discern dozens if not nearly one hundred massive vessels and space stations in the area. The dark matter planet Riki had hypothesized about was there, too, but there was also an enormous structure around it, like the outline of a cube around a ball. How something could be built to fit around a planet mystified him.

  Lori
s didn’t have much time to stargaze. He continued to look around, finding that the panel allowed him to see objects straight through the exterior of the shuttle. As it happened, a large vessel that dwarfed even the Incubator was passing overhead on its way toward the planet.

  “Make yourself useful and hold this up,” Loris said to the boy, passing off the panel and hitting the thrusters.

  He’d barely budged an inch before the drones caught sight of him and resumed pursuit. But Loris had a hunch things would work out in his favor. The shuttle had just enough juice to allow Loris to dodge a few incoming shots before looping behind something resembling a large fin extending from the bottom of the dark matter ship.

  The first drone in the chase crashed directly against him, causing the others to scatter in disarray. It was a satisfying moment of triumph for Loris, who pumped his fists in the air, but even the drones quickly discovered a flaw in his genius strategy.

  Although they couldn’t see the impediment as he could, they could detect when something blocked their fire. They intelligently used their plasma shots to learn the shape of the fin, and the hiding shuttle’s movements gave away its speed and direction. As soon as the drones started to peel around the sides, Loris bolted for the far side of the ship with an eye on getting up above the top.

  He quickly found that the drones were further limiting their liability by perfectly mirroring his flight path, a simple feat considering his pedestrian speed. A sinking feeling grew in Loris’s stomach as his options dwindled. The shuttle’s nose rose around the far end of the dark matter ship, and he curved around another fin in time to avoid more plasma from the drones.

  The large fish they were swimming around had countless extensions and outcroppings to fly around, but no amount of weaving would keep the drones from closing the gap. One in particular led the chase and therefore was in position to be more heavy handed with the trigger than the rest. It took another corner fast and popped up right behind Loris only to be blasted to bits.

  “What happened?” Loris asked as the fighter vanished from his scanners. It had poked the giant one too many times and been obliterated.