Star Forge (Imperial Hammer Book 2) by Cameron Cooper

Author:Cameron Cooper [Cooper, Cameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stories Rule Press
Published: 2020-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

9

I can only remember one other time my shell has closed over me. That was during training, when they wanted us to know what it would be like if it ever happened in the field.

Blacking out was normal. It was also a nice way of avoiding the claustrophobia the gel shell could induce.

I came back to consciousness.

Captain?

It was Lyth’s voice in my head.

I relaxed. We’re still in one piece? I wouldn’t be able to speak normally until the gel retracted. I could feel it separating, the gentle pressure on every centimeter of my body easing swiftly, but not instantly, for that could be jarring, too.

Still whole and now over a planet.

Which planet?

Still calibrating.

The navigation AI relied, as humans did, upon relational positioning. It had no better idea where we were than we did, right now. It would take a moment to figure out actual coordinates, starting at absolute zero—the centre of the galaxy—and moving across known star positions until it had a match. Normally, nav computers were a lot quicker to calibrate because they knew where they had come from and where they had been heading. We’d dumped the Lythion nav AI in the middle of nowhere with no before-after expectations to guide it. Now it was looking out the window and scratching its head.

The shell retracted back to normal and the gel with it. I took a breath of normal air, then another, while blinking to get my vision to restore itself. Stars hung silent around us. I could see the noses of the shuttles projecting ahead of the ship, twenty meters below.

“There’s a sun out there, nearby,” I murmured.

“What the hell is going on?” Dalton growled. He was a true claustrophobe, which was inflamed by his inability to deal with inertia, because Lyth tended to shut the shell over Dalton with any manoeuvre even a little bit above a standard gee. He always emerged cranky.

“I’ll get back to you on that,” I murmured. I didn’t have the time to deal with his ruffled feelings right now. “Lyth, swing a lens around in a three-sixty. Let’s see what there is to see.”

“Scanning.”

“On screen.”

The feed from the lens he was using to scan in all directions around the ship popped up over the windows, scrolling by in a long vista of stars. Then a planet came into view, blue-green, with edges diffused by an atmosphere. A big blue ocean covered most of the crescent we could see from our angle.

“Pause,” I said. “Scan for life.”

“Where’s the damn station?” Juliyana said. “Is this one of those weird places forced to locate the station on the far side from the gates?”

“There’s not a single moon, let alone a few of them, to make that necessary,” Dalton pointed out.

“Head in that direction, Lyth,” I told him. “We can hang in the gravity while the cells recharge.”

“Shifting vectors,” Lyth informed me. He cleared the screen, which meant the windows were showing the real view. We watched the planet swing back into view the way it had via the lens feed.

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