AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“There! Look, an opening in the hull.” Hess focused the viewer on a buckled stretch of the bioship and grinned like a maniac. “That’s where we get in.”
I clenched my teeth and didn’t argue. No point insisting on a proper survey when the mob boss wants to get insidenow.Maneuvering closer, I matched the gigantic ship’s tumble and anchored theJoyabove the hole Hess had spotted.
“There. I’ll hold position until—”
Volkov laughed, and Hess cut me off with a savage, cutting gesture. “No chance, sweetheart. Your autopilot can handle that while you come with us. Don’t want you to ‘accidentally’ fly off and strand us here. Think of it as an adventure—how many people have set foot in an Ancient ship?”
Better question: how many survived and came back without some horrible contamination?Again, I swallowed the question. It wouldn’t make a difference, and he had a point. Now that I was here, I wanted to see the inside of a Tyradyn ship.
Getting into my spacesuit was a chore. Designed to be put on with a crewmate’s help, I struggled to get into it on my own. The mobsters would have been happy to help, but I chose the risk of spacing myself over stripping in front of them.
While they dressed in their fancy, armored suits, I checked every inch of mine for scratches that might become tears. It was pointless—what was I going to do if I didn’t like the look of it?—but the ritual made me feel safer. When I finally closed the helmet and turned on the suit’s airmaker, I was ready to face the unknown.
The air in the suit was worse than theJoy’s. It lacked the burned hydrocarbon smell, but it somehow tastedsticky. Doing my best to ignore that worrying sign, I joined the others in the airlock and looked out at the punctured hull of the ancient ship.
Hess made the jump across first, and his childlike shout of glee when his boots hit the alien surface almost endeared him to me. My first step onto the bioship’s hull felt like sacrilege, like I was walking on someone’s grave. To be fair, that was probably literally true, but the deaths had been too long ago to worry about. At least, that’s what I tried to tell myself as Volkov joined us and we made our way to the hull breach.
Chapter 2
Monster
Out here on the frozen edge of interstellar space, nothing happens fast. Eons passed without change, and I slumbered in my cocoon, barely aware of time passing.
Over the long centuries, Home pulled herself back together. Scavenging material from drifting space dust was a slow process and gathering energy to do anything with it even slower. The race between the self-repair systems and entropy was a long one, and no winner had emerged yet.
Unexpectedly, something changed. Light! A feast of energy, pumped in at a rate Home had almost forgotten was possible. Thirsty, she drank in more than the distant starlight would provide in a century. Systems that hadn’t seen activity in thousands of years sprang to life, spending carefully hoarded materials in a flurry of activity, and I drifted toward consciousness.
Waking up hurt. Of course it did—waking from longsleep always did. The ship’s umbilicals pumped me full of life, my veins expanding as fluid filled through them for the first time in far too long. I shifted, testing my body and finding it ready for action. My limbs moved at my command, my claws slid out of their sheaths, and I breathed again.
Thin air, carrying a scent of rot, filled my lungs. Something else, too, a smell I did not recognize. The reason Home woke me.
Intruders.
Chapter 3
Myra
The first surprise greeted us as we pulled ourselves through the crack in the warship’s hull. The moment I was inside, I had weight again. Artificial gravity turnedinwardintodownand pulled me to the deck with a thud. If it had been any stronger, I’d have risked breaking something. As it was, I stumbled but kept my feet.
Hess landed harder, tumbling across the decking with a string of curses. Volkov surprised me by landing elegantly. His genemods hadn’t just jacked up his strength, they’d given him superb reflexes too.
While Volkov lifted Hess to his feet, I looked up, cursing under my breath. We’d dropped twenty feet or more from the opening, and getting back up would be a challenge. Especially if we found something worth bringing back.
“How is thegravitystill working?” Hess’s voice crackled with static, but that didn’t hide the awe in it.
Volkov shrugged. “More concerned about the air.”
He tapped the wrist readout of his suit, and I checked my own. Blinked, and checked again. We were in an atmosphere? I’d have assumed my battered old suit’s sensors were playing up, but his suit was brand new. We couldn’t both have the same malfunction.
It was too thin to breathe, but as I watched, the pressure gauge crept up. So did the temperature, though it was still below freezing.
“The ship is waking up,” Hess said, rubbing his hands together. “We should get a move on. If the power’s working, there has to be some amazing treasure in here.”
Great, the Ancient warship is still functioning, and that makes himhappierto loot it?Not trusting myself to say anything, I shone my flashlight around, examining the room we’d landed in for anything that might satisfy his greed.
Nothing. We’d fallen into what might have once been a cargo hold. Hard to tell, since it was empty, the dark green deck stretching away in every direction. The rough surface seemed to be made of twisted roots or branches, woven together in a pattern that looked as though it was moving under my flashlight.
Nothing to take here. We’re going to have to go deeper.The idea made me shiver. This ‘wreck’ was too functional for my tastes, and every minute we spent in it just upped the chances of something going wrong. But Hess wasn’t going back empty-handed, and standing around worrying about it wouldn’t help anyone.
