Ocean of Stars by John Dodd

Author:John Dodd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science-Fantasy
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Published: 2021-12-24T10:31:30+00:00

*

Up on deck, the Sonskyn is still rotating above us, but there are more lights on inside it and faint gusts of escaping air where the atmosphere generators are coming back online.

All that should have escaped centuries ago.

I tap my comms. ‘Morgan to Clara.’

‘Clara here.’ There’s an edge of weariness in her voice, and a whirring sound in the background.

‘You’re losing air from a number of places there.’

‘Won’t be for long.’ A high-pitched shrill reverberates down the earpiece for a second and the venting air ceases. ‘You’ve got to come over here; the tech on this thing could make you rich beyond imagination.’

What good are riches if you can never spend them?

‘We’re just pulling the logs, then we’re out of here.’ I keep my voice even.

‘You need to come over here.’ It’s a plea, not a request.

‘Fine.’ I clip my sword to my hip and scramble up the torsion line to the hole in the side of the ship.

Up close, the damage on the Sonskyn is far worse. The huge gouges across the dorsal armour were what breached the ship, but the hull is covered with burns and scrapes where smaller creatures have swarmed all over it like locusts.

What must it have been like to be trapped in a ship covered in a million things whose every purpose was your death?

It’s not a cheerful thought, and I drift down into the main entryway, moving in silence through the darkened hull. The insides of the ship are as broken as the outside, a silent memory of the hundreds that died in here, all the contents vented when the ship was breached; the things which followed the breach have left their marks everywhere. The airlocks are open wide, no damage on them—looks like the crew didn’t get a chance to close them.

Death moves fast...

I scan the lines of the ship. Back in the academy, I saw a prototype for a Beyondlight drive system that would allow any ship using it to go so far beyond the normal light-speed of most other ships that they’d make them look like they were standing still. The drive allowed for frictionless travel, with no resistance. If the theory could be proven, it could achieve infinite velocities, but only in straight lines, though it would cause massive devastation to anything nearby when it engaged because it left holes in space where it had been. The mathematics of it back then had been pretty rudimentary, but the prototypes had looked a lot like what I’m seeing here.

And that’s what this is, this ship must have been faster than anything ever built before or after, so why didn’t they just jump away?

The bridge airlock cycles, and I step through. The room beyond is well lit. The atmosphere doesn’t smell like the normal recycled air most ships emit; it’s cleaner, thicker, almost like the Olympus Forest back on Mars.

But you’d need real trees for that...

Clara glances back from the console with a tired but wide grin, tilting her head backwards and exaggerating sniffing the air.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.