Darkness Falling by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Gunnery Sergeant Roger Kilgore couldn’t tell what had happened. One moment, the Vera Cruz, with his company still tucked away inside her number-five drop bay, had been decelerating just above the massive, shifting world dubbed IO-1. Surrounding space was a vast and utterly alien starscape—Andromeda and the Milky Way filling the sky, with the local star a shrunken, brilliant point of light 10 astronomical units distant. And then, in an instant, the Vera Cruz was in darkness, the sun and the galaxies wiped away, leaving the Marine transport hanging between absolute black above, and a seemingly infinite, glowing blue-white plain below.

That plain, Kilgore knew, wasn’t truly infinite. It was the surface of the object dubbed IO-1, India Oscar One, or, more euphoniously, Bluestar. The surface no longer appeared to be turning itself inside out, thank God.

That solid bright plain was reassuring in a way. It meant that, despite its size, the object wasn’t a Jovian gas giant, but instead possessed a solid surface. His readouts, however, were showing a surface gravity of only about one G, perhaps a bit less, which seemed impossibly low for such a titanic mass. The thing possessed a volume equivalent to almost fifteen hundred Earths.

Which led Kilgore to wonder if the Vera Cruz had fallen into one of those higher dimensions favored by the Andromedan Dark. From this angle, as opposed to “outside,” back in normal space, Bluestar appeared to be an iridescent sphere larger than Jupiter. Through the visual data feeds from the Cruzer’s external cameras, he could see what looked like markings on that surface, rectilinear and geometric shapes and lines all but lost in a thin, brightly glowing haze.

The members of First Platoon, Bravo Company, 1/3, were wired up inside their cages on the drop bay deck, waiting for the final order to drop and boost. They’d been on track to drop in another sixty seconds as the Vera Cruz approached the mysterious Bluestar alien, but everything had gone on hold when the rest of the outside universe had vanished. As Kilgore glanced at the waiting Marines around him, he realized that something was wrong with what he was seeing with his physical eyes, something wrong enough to make him wonder if his helmet optics had wonked out. He was looking at Staff Sergeant Kari Rees, and, just for a moment, his gaze had gone past the open framework of her acceleration cage, past her Marine Combat Armor, past the tangle of electronics and coolant tubes until he’d glimpsed her uniform inside.

He moved his head slightly . . . and he saw skin . . . then he was looking past the skin and down into her internal organs. Her heart was a vivid scarlet lump pulsing away just beyond the white bands of her ribs. Her naked skull grinned hideously at him . . . and somehow at the same time he could see past the bone and into her brain.

Someone, one of the Marines opposite him, gasped. “My God! What the .

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