Cypher- Revolution by Eileen Sharp

Author:Eileen Sharp [Sharp, Eileen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amerie Publishing
Published: 2019-05-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

The Exchange

HE WAS GOING TO NEED more plasma, Joshua realized. He snapped his gun into the cruiser’s wall, watching the gun light up, the charging indicators glowing. He didn’t have time to resupply, and from what he’d learned from Cristian, brute force wasn’t the answer. For some reason, the Nostekoi wanted Joshua West. Well, they were about to get him.

Cristian sat in the pilot’s seat going over the navigation calculations. It had only been hours since Joshua had returned, and he needed to rest, so Cristian would have to take them most of the way. “Are we r-ready?” Cristian asked, turning around. His knee stuck out straight, still in a flexible cast.

Between the pain meds and the latent trauma that kept surfacing, Joshua wished he could have left Cristian back at the clinic. It wasn’t an option, unfortunately. Cristian was the only one who had been on Daedalus.

“Yeah, I’m ready,” Joshua answered.

The cruiser whined to life and began moving out of the landing bay. Joshua lay back on the bunk, his hands under his head. He was so tired his bones felt like they were melting.

Kirk wanted to come with them, but he still had a normal life with parents who thought he was on a summer break, and a job waiting for him, so Joshua had said no. Shawn had buried himself in some hacking enterprise back at the clinic, plugging his ears with loud music and eating the junkiest food he could find. They all seemed safe enough on Apollux, to Joshua’s relief.

Behind his closed eyes, he could see red. When Cristian had described the way the Nostekoi soldiers moved in the training room, it was familiar. The red-eyed girl who nearly bested him in the landing bay back on Benning 5 had moved like that.

The girl he’d shot. Never in a million years did he imagine he could be so callous. He’d shot her without even thinking about it, some primal instinct he couldn’t control taking over him. Where had that come from? It was only green plasma, but still…his cold reflex surprised him.

His exhausted body claimed his brain, and he slept. It seemed like only moments later when Cristian woke him.

“I think I’ve f-found something,” Cristian said.

At first, Joshua thought the screen was malfunctioning. Half the screen was a pure, inky black. The other half was filled with red dust and sparkling suns. “Black hole?” he asked, taking a seat in front of the screen as Cristian navigated.

“Yeah….and I don’t want to get much closer.”

“Too bad about that. Let’s go in, follow that dusty stuff.”

They cruised towards the spiral galaxy, the inky black arms intertwining with the froth of galaxy debris. They moved closer to the sun in the middle of the scarlet haze. The first planet they came to was surrounded by countless rings of various widths that looked like sharp blades from a distance, and then melted into asteroid fields as they got closer.

“That’s one big planet,” Joshua said, awed at its mass.

They rode around the rings and swung out and back towards the steadily burning yellow sun.

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