The Endless Sky

by Adam P. Knave

  The Endless Sky

  Adam P. Knave

  The Endless Sky

  Adam P. Knave

  ISBN: 978-1-926946-07-8

  Ebook edition.

  This book is also available in trade paperback format.

  ©2018 Adam P. Knave, all rights reserved.

  Published in Canada by Creative Guy Publishing

  Victoria, BC, Canada

  Cover art ©2018 Dylan Todd

  Thanks to:

  Lauren for her edits, as always.

  The flight attendant who had a pen when the moment was desperate.

  And to J, D, D, L & P.

  CHAPTER 1

  GRAVITY PULLED THE SHIP toward the planet, hungrily, a toddler with a new favorite toy. Stress fractures erupted along the hull, the squat emergency cruiser barely built for slow planetary incursions. The engineers, in their wisdom, assumed no one would be dumb enough to throw themselves into a planet’s gravity well with no attempt to slow themselves down.

  “Bee, so help me, if you crash another ship...” Mud said, slapping at his safety harness’s release. He grabbed the side of his chair tightly, using all the strength he had to pull himself to standing.

  “I’m not going to crash,” Bee insisted. It hurt to talk, the forces pushing her into her chair making it hard to breathe, to see, to work the controls of the cruiser.

  “You’re going to crash,” Mud said. “Again.”

  “You keep talking shit like this and I’ll crash on purpose, I swear.”

  Mud threw himself toward the side of the ship, grabbing at the wall and using it to inch his way back toward the engine compartment. If Bee was wrong, when she cut the engines in to slow them, everything would blow at once. Mud wasn’t sure what he could do to stop that. Honestly, he felt pretty sure nothing could stop it, but trying remained high on his list.

  “Sure, blame me. Just flatten out the arc so when you cut the engines...”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Bee said. She knew she could pull the landing off, assuming the ship held. Proud of the work she’d done to the engine overhauling it, she could list the new specs off the top of her head. She’d just never had to field test them. “If your work on the superstructure holds, that is.”

  “It won’t,” Mud said, looking over the indicators for the engine. “That’s what I’ve been saying. Even if the engines don’t blow, we won’t have a hull to sit in once you fire them up. Not the way you plan to.”

  Bee cursed under her breath. There wasn’t time to redo the plan. Hell, she reminded herself, there hadn’t been time to make a plan, not really. Once again, the Insertion Team worked too fast, something Bee pointed out every debrief. No one disagreed with her, but they also provided no good solution. When your job description consists solely of “Go fix things when they get really ugly,” no one ever finds an abundance of planning time just sitting at the edges.

  “So, Captain,” Bee said, accenting the title harshly, “I have a status update.”

  “We’re gonna crash?”

  “Oh, you already got the update? My bad. Now strap down and brace for it—I can aim at the beach and bounce us safely.”

  Mud gave the engine readouts one last look and started clawing his way back to his seat. “Official report will blame me?”

  “Mud. Sir,” Bee said, wishing she could roll her eyes without them feeling like they would escape her head, “that might be because it’s your fault.”

  “Just leave us something to get back out of atmo with, will you?” Mud fell heavily into his chair, struggling to get his harness back on. He wished he could see and briefly considered flipping the windshield screens to open, knowing that all he would see were flames as the air around them burnt. Instead he ran the scenario in his head with what new data he could muster. A beach crash put them a solid three miles from target. The beach itself sat ringed by a small glade of trees, but they’d be painfully obvious coming in, what with currently imitating a fireball and soon a small bomb going off as they hit, so the utter lack of cover to the tree line became a giant hurdle.

  “Can you bounce us off the water on our way in?” he asked. His head hurt from the gravity pressing in on them. Technically their ship had internal gravity dampers, much like his GravPack. Which, he thought, they could’ve used, if the packs hadn’t been sitting at their target site instead. The ship’s internal gravity dampers were weak to begin with, the cruiser not built for this sort of work—plus Bee’d rerouted about half their power to use as a forward shield, hoping it would help keep the ship intact.

  It left them both in a painful place, pinned by gravity. Their organs squished and shifted, joints cracking under the stress. Mud’s eyes felt ready to pop any second. The Hurkz, Mud’s race, hated this sort of pressure. Their skin kept extra moisture, and their eyes were almost three times the size of a human’s. A landing like this left him feeling like a wrung-out sponge. Not that Bee felt much better. Humans, after all, weren’t exactly designed with high-gravity maneuvers in mind either.

  The ship rumbled less, and Mud could feel them leveling out, if still sliding around out of control. They’d hit low enough atmosphere, he knew from the feel, that Bee should be getting some control back. Still too fast to risk the engines, given the hull’s stress limits, but they weren’t a giant fireball anymore.

  No, now they were only a large hunk of metal making planetfall at explosive speeds. Possibly literally explosive speeds.

  “Bee, water bounce?” Mud asked again, worried she’d passed out.

  “Trying for it, but if I miss, we’re dead.”

  “If you hit the sand clean we’ll be dead a different way,” Mud said, wishing the conversation would stop so his gravity-sore jaw might rest.

  “No, I can...”

  “Bee, they’ll be waiting for us. Hit the water first, then bounce into the sand. Trust me.”

  Bee didn’t respond, concentrating instead on hitting the water at the right angle. A few degrees off and the ship would simply burst. Sand she could glide in on, counting on the silicate to wear down the ship, and slow it as well. Water, on the other hand, would—Bee smiled, or tried to, her face fighting the gesture. Muscles strained against gravity, but the smile eked out at the edges. Water would hit harder, but if she could hit the angle right, the resulting steam would work for them.

  Arcing down, falling out of control, the cruiser approached the ground far too fast. It turned, nosing up degree by degree, until it seemed to be gliding with possible purpose. Sentry towers on the ground continued to follow the descent, mobilizing a recovery team, then quickly adding a Force Squad to the mix when their view of the ship resolved to not be a bundle of debris. Yet. They watched the ship fall. A small emergency cruiser, no weapons, minimal crew capacity—the shape it looked to be in as it fell assured them there would be no takeoff later.

  “Impact in five...four...” Bee said, knowing Mud didn’t need the count down. He could see the instruments as easily as she could. Saying it, though, intoning the countdown, put it at a distance for her. She could shift her anxiety about hitting the mark to a simulation, a dry run where you made sure to say the right things and always knew you could feel good about protocol, even if you “died.”

  This wasn’t a simulation.

  The cruiser hit the water.

  Steam vomited upward, billowing thickly toward the beach, followed by the ship. The hull cracked and curled back as it cooled too quickly. The bounce itself took out a large section of metal, and the sand they skidded on after tore the rest of the bottom out of the ship.

  Sand, thrown high into the air, mixed with steam. Force Squad C watched, holding the recovery team back. Waiting.

  CHAPTER 2

  MUD AND BEE CROUCHED near the scorched, t
orn hull of the cruiser. The steam-and-sand mix caught the wind and dissipated—too quickly, Mud knew. His half-a-plan started to blow away with it. Knowing there would be a reception for them, but unsure of who or how many, left both Mud and Bee nervous. Their instruments couldn’t parse the data with precision, the ship too busy falling apart on entry. Mud had hoped to blind them and skirt whatever laid in wait, heading right for the trees. But that breeze rose faster than hoped, and so they crouched, considering their options.

  “We could just go right at them,” Mud said, whispering so softly Bee wouldn’t have heard him, even though she stood right next to him, if not for their comm units.

  “Outside of my sonic gun, and your Acadian blaster, what do we have to pull that off?” Bee asked, checking the charge on her gun. It’d last a while but not long enough, she knew.

  “Nothing, outside of general suit countermeasures.”

  “So let’s not die, then.”

  “Good call,” Mud said, and he pulled his Acadian blaster free of its holster. A gift from his father, an illegal blaster that could stun if dialed wide enough, and burn through most ship hulls when focused. He considered it and smiled, nudging Bee with an elbow. “I got this. Follow me exactly.”

  They moved into position, Mud in front, Bee directly behind him, one hand grabbing the back of his belt. The team practiced this sort of thing regularly enough for them to feel confident in it. At a dead run, eyes down, you didn’t want to lose the person you followed, not for a step, in case of mines. So you made a human chain, able to react to their lateral movements with something faking grace.

  Mud started to run, blaster held out in front of him, right toward the vanishing steam. Bee kept her eyes down, trusting that this new plan wasn’t the one they’d just discarded. It wasn’t. Quite.

  They still ran directly at Force Group C, who, of course, started to see the shapes resolve in the quickly dispersing steam. They raised weapons, ready to fire. Mud fired first, though, setting his Acadian blaster for wide dispersal, a flat beam about four feet across. He aimed it at the beach, striking sand.

  The blast hit the sand at an angle to throw up heaping clouds. Mud played the blaster back and forth, crating a wall of sand that moved forward as they ran. He pulled to the left, Bee’s grip on his belt letting her know even as he started to move. She followed and together they broke left, Mud keeping the aim of the gun to appear as if they still ran directly at the oncoming horde.

  Sonic fire made whirling holes in the sand barrier that spiraled in the air before vanishing, allowing maddeningly tiny glimpses that only showed stretches of beach and water. Strike Force C hesitated. Outside of suppressing fire, which seemed to do nothing, they were unable to run into the abrasive wall of angry sand standing in front of them. No way of knowing what lay behind stumped any plans they had. So they kept firing, trying to keep a pattern up to pierce the wall long enough to map the enemy.

  “Jump in five steps,” Mud said as he ran at the tree line. The blaster range would still throw sand but already the angle had shifted, and Force Group C noticed, starting to head for the trees. Bee let go of Mud’s belt and they jumped into the trees together.

  “You know, if we had our GravPacks this would be so much easier,” Mud said, dodging behind another tree.

  “If we had our GravPacks we’d be with the rest of the team, and the Arrow. Which is why we need to get to them.” Bee dove from one tree to another, wishing for some more tech herself.

  “And hope they got the bomb locked down,” Mud added. The team had separated to finish a mission and that’s when everything went south, he knew. He felt the blame settle into his chest and wiped his goggles to distract himself. His extra-large Hurkz eyes needed to be moist, and so on most human-inhabited planets he needed the goggles to not dry out and go blind. He hated them, always getting scuffed and seeming to magically attract debris and damp leaves.

  Both of them stood, backs to trees a few feet apart, and thought. They wore their uniforms: solid black thinsuits, with blue piping running from the outer line of the boots along the leg and turning to travel along the back before winding over the shoulders and across the chest in a loose curve. Over the left breast of each suit an inverted V made of five arrows sat, with their names under it in small block letters. Camouflage they weren’t.

  Except.

  Hurkz naturally possessed limited biological stealth capabilities. Glands running in stripes along their bodies allowed them to match their skin tones to their environment. Scarred and tattooed over against his will, Mud couldn’t shift naturally, not quite. An abandoned foundling, he was given no standing and rejected by his own people. Found, and raised, instead by Jonah and Shae Madison, he had gained much more. Including a work-around to access his natural abilities.

  Hundreds of small, painful needles lined the inside of his thinsuit. They buried themselves along his tattooed clan markings, accessing the special properties that still lay in wait. Enhancing and completing certain chemical and bioelectrical processes, the special thinsuit let him blend as well as any Hurkz could. He hated it, the stabbing of the needles flooding him with memories of the pain and shame of the tattoo needles. It never faded.

  Slightly reluctantly, Mud again chose survival over pain and triggered the needles. “I’ll fade, make a break for the compound. You start to loop around the long way,” he told Bee, even as the black fabric and blue stripes of his thinsuit became browns and greens.

  “I’d rather not be bait,” she said, bracing for it regardless. She figured her sonic gun could shatter some trees, the shrapnel slowing down anyone after her.

  “No need, I’ll send random pot shots toward them—they’ve only seen my blaster in use so far so they can’t be sure that’s not the only weapon we have. They’ll be forced to follow me. You keep clear and we’ll meet up at the compound doors.”

  “Sounds good, boss,” Bee said, relieved. Not that everyone would follow Mud’s shots, but enough to instill some confidence of survival in her.

  “While we’re moving, figure out how we’re gonna get in the compound, huh?” Mud said, and she heard him move away from her.

  Great, she thought, nothing like multitasking while being chased. Invigorating, she told herself, a real character builder. She counted to ten and then started to move, just as Mud’s blaster sent a focused, deadly bolt between two trees. Grinning now, Bee picked up speed, knowing she’d have to move faster than him to meet up in time. Force Group C, she saw glancing over her shoulder, followed Mud’s random shots but were pointing all over the place, not able to spot him with any certainty. Still, while she was in range she felt she ought to make life a bit more exciting for them all.

  Aiming at the ground, she pulled the trigger on her gun, the sonic weapon set to its maximum field of disruption. Dirt, leaves, twigs, and a few small creatures went flying into the air, along with a thrum of noise loud enough to stop her pursuers. They’d dealt with sonics before, but when you aren’t expecting them—well, disruption is about right.

  The small creatures displaced, none bigger than a fat earthworm, all landed safely, accepting their new location and short flight as just one of those things that happens. They adapted far better than anyone else in the vicinity, and if their consciousnesses had allowed for that fact to filter through, they would have been smug as hell.

  A few members of the Force Group broke off to follow this new insurgent. The leader of the smaller segment felt proud. He’d insisted there were multiple invaders and had been told initially to shut up, his commander maintaining that if there were then they would obviously all fire a weapon. Arrogant as the earthworms could have felt but didn’t, he ran after Bee with four members of his group. They’d catch up while the main force took care of the clear leader of the intruders, and back at base they could celebrate and possibly he could even get a promotion.

  He brushed aside an internal pang telling him that no one got promoted for being smarter than their boss, and concentrated instead on
the chase. A tree exploded in front of him, becoming a cloud of shrapnel. It pinged off his chest armor and helmet, but ripped along his face and hands, flaying his exposed flesh like a badly rushed and drunken chef.

  Bee heard the screams behind her and changed direction as she ran. They’d really be after her now, she knew. Those who could still give chase, at least, and no way she’d taken them all out first try. They’d be faster, smarter, and, frankly, meaner now.

  Mud, for his part, ducked behind a tree early, letting his eight pursuers go right by him. He waited for them to get a good distance ahead and then took off after them. He reached down, while running, and scooped a few stones up, running his fingers over them. Dropping the few that didn’t pass muster, he threw the others in a high arc, knowing they’d be fairly invisible until they hit their target.

  Clonking off a tree, a good solid heavy clonk about ten feet up, the stones fell back to the ground, rustling leaves as they went. The Force Group members ahead of him turned toward the noise. Mud took the chance to leap. Literally.

  He sprang hard at the two armored folk in the rear, those closest to him, arms and legs spread like a flying squirrel on a mission. They caught his shadow as he reached them, his hands each grabbing a helmet and yanking them toward each other. The three of them went down in a tumble of bodies, but only Mud expected it, his legs clamping around the two other bodies, forcing them down as awkwardly as possible with himself on top. Grabbing their guns from holsters, Mud landed and rolled, coming back up and diving behind another tree.

  Now Force Company C started to fall apart. They were sure of one invader, then two, but this meant, to their reasoning, three. The six still standing halted, bunching up into a protective ring.

  Mud worked quickly, and silently. Considering his options, he fell back on an old habit: running through what his parents would do. Dad would run right at the guys, blasting hard, and try to take them on. He’d probably walk away from it, but chances of a random injury in a six-on-one fight were extremely high. Mom would lob a grenade and be done with it.