Galena (Galena Chronicles Book 3) by Samuel Best

Author:Samuel Best [Best, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: Sky City
Published: 2022-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

THE ENVOY

His ship was falling.

The radiation shielding he’d been so quick to shed exposed the secondary heat shield, which the Celerity’s computer had been screaming at him couldn’t take any more of what it was designed to deflect since he plunged into Galena’s upper atmosphere.

Jeff’s last skip had plunked him into the twilight between sky and space. Through the tinted face shield of his helmet, he could see both at the same time: brilliant blue gradating gently to a star-studded infinite blackness. He lifted his sun visor to see it more clearly.

His cargo was still dragging behind him by a tow line, a ball of fire in its own right. Jeff lowered his sun visor and silenced the shrill alarms, his thick fingers clumsy in the black gloves of his space suit, and held on to the sides of his quaking chair, listening to the rattle of loose ship parts and watching the flames lick up over the nose of his vessel through the cockpit window.

Then they were doused, and the cockpit fell silent. Jeff let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding and plotted a course on the nav screen.

As the Celerity sluggishly responded to his commands, it began running self-diagnostics. Jeff was skeptical those reports would come back in his favor. He settled back into his chair, enjoying the familiar sensation of gravity pulling down on his body, and watched the landscape of Galena unfold below.

From his altitude, rivers were thin ribbons wending into lakes and out again, crossing each other in a loose weave of glimmering water. Mountains were anthills, and the trees were ash gray toothpicks stuck in the smooth surface between the rivers.

It only looked smooth from up here, Jeff knew. Tiny silver-gray dots were actually boulders as large as his ship. They dotted the surface in multitudes. He had found it impossible to walk in a straight line any meaningful distance without at least a dozen of them blocking his path.

The control panel beeped and a flood of information lit up the screen, including details of his journey through the Rip.

On the subject of distance… he thought as he scrolled through the data.

He’d traveled from the Ceres Rip to Galena’s orbit in less than ten minutes, using only three skips. The last time it had taken him just under two months. His plotted trajectory showed as a dotted line on the control panel screen, yet there were three green blips along its length that indicated where his skips had landed him, and where he’d vanished again.

Not knowing the how of the process troubled him somewhat. Granted, neither did he know what he was doing — what kind of universal laws he might be breaking — every time he manipulated fold space, but that was less about transporting his person across vast distances than it was stacking closets to get more storage space.

Jeff conceded he would probably need a room full of people a lot smarter than he was to scratch the surface of that problem.

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