by I G Hulme
Up above him, the sky was hazy with dust and debris, interspersed with larger asteroids hanging impossibly in the sky. Some of the nearer chunks that had been thrown up in the Luminal crash were now falling back down to the moon’s surface in a surreal, slow motion rainfall, caught in the moon’s weak gravity.
And much higher above, the clouds still lit up with dim flashes of greens and yellows as the battle between the Lumina and the ships of the Holy Empire raged all across the heavens.
But ahead of him, rising up like some dark tower, was the shape of the wrecked Luminal ship. It had the appearance of some gargantuan spear that had been plunged deep into the surface of the broken moon, thrusting out from the rock at a disconcerting angle.
As Ryann looked on, the clouds slowly parted again, and he searched the torn levels of the ship for another glimpse of that ethereal figure.
And there, high up in the wreckage, he spied a light flash out again and his heart raced. The ship seemed so tantalisingly close — less than a kilometre away. He almost cried out in frustration.
He stepped up to the very edge of the platform, peering gingerly into the depths. There was nothing but the boiling clouds that blanketed the moon’s torrid surface hundreds of metres below. He felt a sudden wave of vertigo wash over him, and he staggered back from the precipice, trying to get his ragged gasps under control. He instinctively reached for something with which to steady himself, but the loading platform was just an empty square, and he stood there panting in fear.
He tried to focus his attention upon his wrist-pack’s readouts, taking measurements of the moon’s weak gravity versus that of the Defiance. He eyed the barely-perceptible fall of rocks in the air, trying to gauge the forces that played out around him.
His eye caught the flash of light from the Luminal wreck once again, and as the cloud thinned he clearly saw the glowing figure observing him across the gulf.
Ryann took a step backwards, blocking out the dissenting voices that screamed inside his head.
And then, he set off at a run, every fibre of his concentration focussed upon that distant figure. In a few strides he was at the edge of the loading platform, and as ran he let out a cry of release, expunging all his pent up rage and fear. With a final effort, he leapt from the platform and out into the void.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A LEAP OF FAITH
Ryann heard himself cry out instinctively as he leapt from the edge of the platform. Every nerve in his brain told him that he would instantly plunge down into the abyss, a deathly fall to that boiling surface of the broken moon far below. He fought his instincts, screaming at himself to keep his eyes open in an effort to conquer his fear.
He felt the weight of the Defiance’s gravity field pulling him down as he flew out into the void.
But then, in an instant, the heaviness of his body melted away, and the much weaker gravity of the moon took hold. Instead of falling straight downwards, the inertia of his leap was sending him out, straight towards the Luminal wreck.
But he was still falling nevertheless. He predicted that his impossible leap would get him roughly half way across the gulf before he hit the moon’s surface.
He flew on, passing between great chunks of falling rock, tumbling slowly as he went. He caught a brief glimpse of the sheer walls of the Defiance receding into the distance, and tried to slow his body’s spin. As the Luminal wreck came into view once more, he flipped open the emergency panel located on his wrist-pack and hit the EVA button.
Instantly, he felt the weight of his body increase as micro-thrusters all about his flight suit fired out in unison, automatically stabilising his tumble. Slowly, his view of the Luminal wreck steadied, until his body was pointing straight for it.
And then the thrusters cut off and he was left in a silence punctuated only by his own ragged breathing.
Ryann gazed about in panic at his surreal situation. He was hurtling out across the void, his velocity steadily increasing as his trajectory dipped inexorably towards the moon’s surface. He was still two hundred or so metres above the clouds and roughly double that from the Luminal ship, but the shallow arc of his fall meant there was no way that he would reach the safety of the wreck at this rate.
Rocks of all sizes whipped past him on either side, above and below as he sped on getting faster and faster.
He fought every instinct to fire the thrusters on his suit once again. He knew that he needed more speed if he were to reach the derelict; and that meant falling further. His emergency EVA system wasn’t designed to overcome the gravity of this moon, weak as it was. It was created to get the wearer back through the weightlessness of space should he have an accident and find himself separated from his ship. But if he could gain the momentum to carry him forwards, he was hoping that the thrusters would give enough lift to keep him above the moon’s lava-strewn surface.
But it was going to be a close call.
So he let himself be drawn painstakingly into the moon’s pull, hoping it would increase the velocity of this bizarre, slow-motion flight across the void.
He looked down and saw the sea of vapour approaching as though it were rising up to engulf him. His hand hovered over the wrist-pack controls, ready to fire the thrusters. As he disappeared into the mists he caught a last glimpse of the Luminal derelict still agonisingly far from reach.
The clouds whipped past in a blur, a disorienting white veil. Again, he resisted the urge to fire the thrusters, praying he was still some way off the cratered surface.
And then suddenly he had fallen below the cloud layer and a primordial vision of hell stretched out before him. Everywhere he looked, fragments of torn wreckage burned, belching smoke up into the ravaged skies. The rocks themselves were blackened and scorched, and in places glowed a dull red, casting a shimmering heat haze over the terrain. And thrusting out from it all, the Luminal ship rose up like some impossible mountain.
Ryann cried out in alarm as he plummeted towards the rocks, skimming between twisted metal fragments as a slow rain of fiery rock fell all around.
At the last moment he hit the controls on his wrist-pack and felt the thrusters dragging at his body, slowing his descent. He looked at the fast-approaching terrain and saw the dark speck of his shadow skimming across the glowing rocks. There had been little point of reference before, but as the surface grew ever nearer, he suddenly realised with horror the speed with which he was travelling. He burned his thrusters at full power, fighting the pull of the moon, and to his relief saw his trajectory level out as the tangled mass of the derelict loomed ever closer.
He prayed that he had enough power in his flight suit. He was no longer falling, but the wreckage at the foot of the ship where it had impacted the surface looked impassable. He needed to coax a little more altitude out of his thrusters before they died. To his relief he felt himself rising back up towards the cloud layer.
“Ryann! Ryann, where the hell are you!”
He felt a terrible wave of nausea wash over him as his father’s voice crackled into his earpiece.
“We’ve got an alarm that a weapon was taken from one of the airlock storage safes. Your code was used to open it. Ryann? We’ve been trying to reach you — are you alright?”
At that moment, hurtling through a firestorm twenty metres above a lava field, he actually laughed out loud. He felt such an overwhelming range of emotions, there was no other way for him to cope.
“I’m okay Dad — I’m a little busy right now — I’ll have to get back to you.”
It was all Ryann could manage as he gazed on in utter disbelief at his predicament.
And then, as though the Luminal ship had suddenly launched itself towards him, he was in the midst of a deadly blur of girders and twisted hull plates whipping past. He frantically hit the thrusters full reverse, surprised by the sudden sensation of speed. He was heading straight for one of the floor sections, a maze of torn metal, and in desperation he steered his thrusters upwards, trying to reach the shadowed void o
f a drive hall above.
There was a brief moment when Ryann realised that his body felt suddenly heavy, and that the gravity plates of the wreck must still be functioning. He jerked his body to one side as he sped past a jagged girder, missing it by only inches. At the last moment he cleared the approaching floor level and was engulfed in the shadow of the drive hall. It was an immense open chamber, filled with wreckage and destruction.
The urgent alarm rang out in his earpiece, signalling the last dying power of his thrusters as they fought in vain to slow him down. He caught fleeting glimpses of wreckage looming up out of the darkness, before he crashed to the floor, spinning and sliding through unseen obstacles, thrown this way and that in a blur of pain.
He felt the wind forced from his lungs as he hit some immovable object in the gloom and then silence.
He lay there gasping in the darkness letting the pain wash over him. He didn’t dare move, and only after what seemed like an age did he tentatively test each battered limb for injury. He looked back towards the light of the moon and saw the trail he had gouged through the wreckage with his fall. He pulled himself gingerly up to his feet, checking over his suit for any damage, a great grin of disbelief spreading across his features.
Despite everything, his view from the torn-open side of this leviathan was breathtaking.
He was standing at the edge of the clouds, a swirling carpet that stretched away before him. And way off, high above him, was the vast shape of the Defiance, hovering above the moon at a crazy angle, swathed in mist. He realised that his point of reference had changed now that he was aboard the tilted wreck. Its gravity was aligned such that he felt upright, even though his vision told him he was leaning at a sharp angle to the moon’s surface. Gravity always played such tricks on your brain, he thought wearily to himself.
He turned back into the ship, craning his neck to take in the enormity of the chamber.
Everything was dead. All was twisted and torn, and not a single power source showed in the darkness. He felt a surge of anxiety at his predicament, that perhaps his father was right and there was nothing left to find aboard this hulk.
He went to adjust the controls on his comms-unit in an attempt to contact the Defiance. He stopped as a tumble of emotions assailed him: fear, failure, embarrassment.
He flipped the controls off angrily and the crackle in his earpiece went dead.
A walkway led off around the circumference of the hall a little way off, with steps rising up its sheer sides to be lost in the lofty heights. Perhaps the higher levels might have sustained less damage, he thought to himself. He sighed, reaching for his rifle and checking it over.
He picked his way cautiously through the tangled metal towards the walkway, with no idea of what awaited him in the heart of that alien ship.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A DREAM WITHIN
Ryann reached the top of the walkway after a long and arduous climb. The floor of the shaft where he had crashed was now lost in the darkness far below. He stepped warily through a doorway and out into a darkened corridor. The floor was debris-strewn, and a profusion of wires and severed pipes hung down, disgorged from the torn-open ceiling.
All was still and silent, but there was a strange feeling of static electricity in the air, as though it were the moment preceding a thunder storm. He went to move, and then to his amazement, as he placed his foot upon one of the floor panels, he saw faint traceries of electricity snake outwards. They ran off along the corridor and played over the walls casting a brief glow before fading back to darkness. But it was the image that these lines of energy brought into a flickering temporal view that snatched Ryann’s breath away.
Each spark had momentarily illuminated a portion of the corridor as though it were new-built. For an instant, a vision played out of pristine white walls and floors, before the mirage faded away back to wreckage.
Ryann went on in cautious wonder. Each step he took was as though he were given a glimpse into another dimension, of a time when the Luminal ship had been fully-functional.
He paused, running his gloved hand over the wall, but the panels were blackened and twisted from a great fire that had swept the interior.
The further he went on, the more Ryann felt as though he were witnessing his own descent into madness. He watched with a curious detachment as another footfall sent out a pulse of pale blue phosphorescence.
But it did feel as though the illusion were solidifying about him, as though each step brought the fleeting images more readily into focus. And the stronger the images became, the longer they lingered, until he was witnessing some double-exposure of reality — one superimposed upon the other. He could clearly discern the undamaged lines of wall panels amongst the twisted wreckage. But when he attempted to touch them, the faint shapes would scatter in a wisp of blue light.
He went on as though he were inhabiting a dream. He walked endless corridors and burned-out hangar halls filled with the twisted husks of Luminal drone ships. He traversed precipitous gantries over galleries that disappeared off into the darkness. Dim shadows of mangled turbines and vast towers of machinery stood like silent monoliths.
He wandered aimlessly, lost in the sheer alien majesty of the ship’s scale. Even though the exterior hull of the Defiance was almost an exact replica, there was something about this vessel that was simultaneously awe-inspiring and deeply unsettling. The scale of the drive rooms he crossed felt less like familiar mechanisms and more like the innards of some gargantuan organic structure.
But even though he travelled without purpose, every step of his silent journey seemed to lead him upwards through level after wrecked level, towards the very apex of the towering structure almost a kilometre above the boiling surface of the broken moon.
And with every leaden step that took him closer, the sleeping ship seemed to awaken a little more.
The lines of phosphorescence played outwards from him in a continuous display now. He could clearly see the ghostly outlines of walls and machinery in the spaces they once inhabited before their destruction.
He paused, gazing out over a sheer precipice, casting his eye back down the way he had travelled. He gasped to see a perfect vision of the ship complete below him. For a second, everything was illuminated in that pale blue glow, and he made out the distant shapes of figures upon the walkways that criss-crossed the open shaft he now circumnavigated. He instinctively ducked down into a crouch as a stream of drone ships issue from the mouth of a tunnel far below. They streaked out into the shaft, curving sharply up towards him.
Ryann pressed himself further down behind the broken handrail that edged the narrow walkway. He looked about in fear for any more cover in which to hide, but he was hopelessly out in the open with no time to run.
He saw the growing illumination of the drone ships approaching and heard the mounting scream of their engines. He flattened himself to the ground as they tore past in a blur, shooting upwards into the impossible heights of the shaft.
He froze, wide-eyed in fear and confusion. As quickly as the vision had appeared, the scene suddenly collapsed back into darkness.
The drone ships exploded in a momentary cloud of glowing light before fading away like mute fireworks.
For many minutes, Ryann just lay there, barely daring to breath, his trembling hands gripping the rail until they ached.
The vision had seemed so unquestioningly real, and then in the next instant had been torn away. He had heard the wail of the drone ships’ engines, and had felt the walkway shudder with their passing. Yet none of it had been real. It was all some illusion, as though the memory of the dying ship played out in some strange refrain, and Ryann were its unwilling catalyst.
Eventually he found the strength from somewhere to carry on. He forced his leaden limbs into action, standing shakily, peering in disbelief once more over the edge.
All was once again a dark, shadow-filled chasm of mangled metal. There was no light any more, and not a soul moved. Any sign of those dist
ant figures had melted away, and Ryann was once more utterly alone aboard that vast ship.
The emptiness of the wreck weighed heavily upon him now that the vision of life had been extinguished. It felt as though there weren’t another living soul in all of existence.
This place was nothing like the time that he and Angelique had crept through the empty bowels of the Ibis, stalked by the Spiner. He couldn’t even muster the will to see the irony of how he almost longed to trade places for that familiar, knowable fear and dread. This sensation that assailed him was utterly alien — at once empty, and yet brooding and watchful, as though he were a lone prisoner trapped inside the mind of another.
He took a deep breath and gripped the railing once more to reassure his senses — to ground himself in reality.
He started at a sound of movement echoing high above him and craned his neck upwards, his view hampered by the aperture of his flight helmet.
For a brief moment he saw a light blink on and off in the darkness of a corridor that led from the shaft. At first, Ryann’s overwhelming desire was to turn and run, to flee in terror from any more dream-like visions.
But almost before he knew what was happening, he found himself moving towards the light — those three short flashes, as though somebody were sending out a signal.
Almost delirious with fear and fatigue he staggered on, climbing ever upwards towards that guiding light.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
INFINITE CONNECTIONS
Ryann trudged on through the silent halls in a daze of fatigue and spent fear. It felt as though hours had passed since he had first seen that light signalling to him. But, no matter how he tried, he never seemed to get any nearer.
He climbed up and up through the ship, and each time that he thought he could not take a step farther, those three short flashes would shine out above him spurring him on.
