Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming by Van Allen Plexico

Author:Van Allen Plexico
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Action & Adventure, Fiction
ISBN: 9780615606422
Publisher: White Rocket Books
Published: 2009-06-30T17:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Spiraling swirling rainbows twisting and contorting one upon the other in mad embrace until they disgorged a single spacecraft, spat out and spinning madly through strange emptiness.

We had exchanged one universe for another. Shimmering violet rather than deep black surrounded us on all sides.

Evelyn peered at the displays and frowned.

“These readings are crazy,” she said. “We’re not anywhere I know.”

“One level up in the Above, if I did it right,” I replied.

She smiled wryly and nodded. Apparently, my cursory explanations of the wider universe had made some sense to her.

“I get it,” she said. “They’ll have no choice but to assume we jumped to subspace. But when they look there, they won’t find us.” She laughed. “That’ll drive them crazy—it would certainly drive me crazy. Almost as crazy as trying to figure out how a ship this small pulled that off in the first place.”

I smiled.

“I’d like to know who they were, though,” she said, looking at me again.

I shrugged. Innocent as ever, this dark lord. Of course.

And so we made ourselves busy inspecting the ship’s components, evaluating the damage to what was obviously broken and instructing the computer to find the problems that were not so obvious. Fortunately, it seemed to be largely superficial and well within our abilities to repair.

“So,” Evelyn asked after a few minutes of silent work underneath a console, “you really don’t know who it was we were avoiding back there?”

She was not letting it go. Fine.

“No clue,” I replied, adding, “It did not resemble any ship I have seen anywhere in the Outer Worlds.”

“I agree. It could have been an Alliance ship,” she said, “though not one I’m familiar with.”

“There are some you are not familiar with?”

She frowned at me.

“There are plenty in secret development, I’m sure. I just fly the ones they give me.”

“Of course,” I said, nodding. “I forgot the deep secrecy surrounding all things Alliance.”

She rolled her eyes at me.

“Please, Mr. Dictator-for-a-thousand-years.”

“Touché.”

She bit her lip, thinking. “If it was an Alliance craft, you’d better hope they don’t conclude from this that your Outworlder ships are growing too advanced for them to keep up with. They might choose to act sooner rather than later to put a halt to something like that.”

I frowned, finding myself genuinely troubled by that. I considered a number of responses before hardening my heart and simply saying, “That is of no further consequence to me.”

She stared at me for a few somewhat uncomfortable moments, then crawled back under the console and returned her attention to repairing the ship.

I said nothing more, but did dwell upon her words a bit longer, and found they were not so easily dismissed from my thoughts as I would have expected, or hoped.

We worked for a while longer, neither of us speaking beyond the necessities of the job. After about an hour of work, the computer indicated that we had accomplished as much as we could, given that we had limited resources and were floating in the void. Most of the systems were back up and the indicator lights in the cabin were all green.

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