Star Trek: Corp of Engineers - 024 - WildFire - Book 2 by David Mack

Author:David Mack [Mack, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction, Adventure, High Tech
ISBN: 9780743456791
Google: 6MBqJ4TUSMEC
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2003-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter

8

Falling…

The sky had opened up beneath Duffy. He tumbled downward, spiraling in tight circles beside the nowinert Wildfire device. He felt his weight increase with each passing moment, and his vision had long since blurred.

He was no longer in darkness; all he saw were washes of color racing past him—or perhaps he was racing past them. He sensed he was moving with tremendous speed, even though his pressure suit’s plasma thrusters were out of fuel.

Then the sensations changed. The pressure abated. He no longer felt the heat. Lense warned me about this, he remembered. Pressure psychosis. I’m losing it. He wondered which would come first—crushing implosion or asphyxia. He hoped for asphyxia.

He pulled a breath of thinning air into his lungs and struggled to focus his eyes. He was hurtling headlong through a vertical tunnel of multicolored light. He plunged past its spiraling walls toward a bright surface of shifting colors and swirling semiliquid gases.

The multichromatic wall rushed up to meet him. He braced for the impact. Instead, he broke through the luminescent barrier, penetrating it like a bullet.

Duffy emerged into a vast expanse of vacuum, a region of negative space at the heart of the gas giant. The pocket of vacuum was encased in a shimmering, hollow sphere of liquid metallic hydrogen.

At its center was a sphere of light.

The sphere wasn’t like a star, or some monochromatic orb; its surface was made up of what Duffy surmised must have been many trillions of individual beams of light with definitive beginnings and endings, collections of coherently ordered light that seemed to be their own source.

Hundreds of colossal tentacles of energy, which reached from the surface of the sphere to the shimmering wall above the vacuum, undulated and twisted around one another; they resembled tornadoes of light and moved in complex patterns that Duffy couldn’t help but think of as a dance.

The beams in the sphere and tentacles spanned more hues than Duffy could discern, in shadings and gradations too subtle for him to comprehend. He continued to descend, slipping through a narrow gap in two tentacles as they closed their double-helix into a single strand. He found it difficult to judge sizes and distances without the benefit of his suit’s sensors, but he guessed the sphere he was falling toward was at least eight times the size of the Earth.

The surface of the sphere dominated his field of vision; its horizon grew wider and flatter. Duffy felt like he was falling in slow motion as he neared the moment of impact.

He fell into the sphere and sank through its shifting layers of light and energy. The systems of his enhanced pressure suit flickered, then failed.

Duffy was oblivious to the shutdown of his equipment; he was far away, drowning in the deep, swift currents of memory.

* * *

The blades of grass prickled young Kieran’s neck as he lay on his back, arms folded behind his head. He stared up at the night sky from his parents’ backyard. His father sat beside

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