Search the Stars (Cross the Stars Book 1) by Nicole Grotepas

Author:Nicole Grotepas [Grotepas, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2023-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

“Ozzy, you seeing this?” Zach asked, doing his best to keep his voice sounding normal.

“See what? No, I don’t see whatever you see.”

“A tunnel,” Zach whispered.

That was the word no one wanted to hear in the Jump Plane. The second word, anyway.

The first word no one wanted to hear was wyrm.

Wyrms made tunnels. A dangerous creature, they burrowed through the Jump Plane connecting everything together. Some argued that they were harmless and, even crazier, helpful. Would the Jump Plane be so healthy and full of life without them? Was what people saw—the coruscating lights, the flows of energy, the connections, the sparks fizzing and fading, the soft black lit up like the Milky Way on a clear night—life? Was it more than merely bolts of lightning through the material? Could it be something like blood for the planets and stars?

The answers had not yet been given or found.

A battle with a wyrm was preferable to being its dinner, but Zach was out of it—typical for being in the Jump Plane and with just one of them capable of piloting—and he was worried about Ozzy handling a wyrm by himself. Back in his mercenary days for Jungle or the mushroom concern, Zach hadn’t been the only pilot on board. In those situations, the only way to cross distances beyond the standard seven to ten light years that the Jungle mushrooms afforded was through stringing together jumps using multiple pilots. Due to the impurity of the mushroom strains, a pilot typically required three to four weeks to recover and be ready for another jump. Zach had been just one of many pilots in a string of them for the mushroom concern and Jungle.

Very little was known about wyrms for obvious reasons. Orcanans— whose very wet homeworld was where the purest strains of flight state mushrooms had originated—worshiped them as gods. They believed the wyrms were the keys to the underside of all things, connecting the energy flows, creating new energy flows, it was said, nurturing the matter and the light like a gardener might nurture his beds of vegetables. It sounded romantic and impossible and naïive, but maybe it was true.

Whatever the truth of the wyrms’ existence was, they were usually not kind to ships they encountered in the Jump Plane.

The glowing nose of a wyrm appeared in the tunnel, almost like it had heard the scurrying noise of The Toadstool along the blue stream that was carrying them back to the Sol system.

“Shit,” Mia said.

“I can’t be here for this,” Dox said, his voice stressed. “Has it seen us?”

“It will,” Mia answered.

“We can handle it,” Ozzy said.

Zach had bumped into perhaps two wyrms in all his time in the underside of things. Most people went their whole lives without seeing one. They were either lucky or unlucky, depending on what angle a person took on it.

Something so massive, so unreal, and so sublime had the power to change a person. It put Zach in his place to encounter a wyrm. There was something cold and indifferent about a galaxy where such a creature existed.

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