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  The Discovery

  Alternate Dimensions | Book 4

  Blake B. Rivers

  Contents

  The Discovery

  Extras

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  The Discovery

  Chapter One: Starts Off with a Bang

  I looked down at the mini-planet we were heading toward. I guess technically it wasn’t a planet. Angel had explained to me about a dozen different times how it was a sizable asteroid that had been caught in the gravitational pull of the real planet and terraformed by some company or another wanting to experiment with colonization. Colonization that had failed, in no small part, due to a rival company sabotaging the atmosphere generator. This had been one of the biggest events that lead to the Council of Six, and while that was fascinating, it was about the last thing I cared about at the moment.

  Because we were almost there. Even before I had known that Jyra was my long-forgotten BFF from my childhood, she had been my end goal, my ticket for getting out of here. And although I was shaky on whether escaping this universe was my finishing line anymore, I knew that rescuing Gee-gee was what I was meant to do.

  It was so funny, Jyra bringing me here because she thought I was going to be a vital part of defeating Genesis. I mean, I was, but I was fairly certain my purpose was to spring her from those cloudy, ghostly clutches so she could save everyone in a neat and science-filled little handbasket.

  We were a good pair, even all these years later. She the brain, and me the not-entirely-dumb muscle. I just hoped I hadn’t disappointed her.

  Atmospheric re-entry in one minute.

  “At least our readings were right that they fixed up the abandoned machinery,” I observed, still unable to tear my eyes away from the celestial body we were about to land on.

  “Of course, our readings were right!” Angel called from the pilot’s seat. “I didn’t spend years dodging around Council security measures to violently crack down on slavers to not have the best equipment you can illegally procure.”

  “I don’t know if I would say you have the best equipment,” Viys’k countered. “Although you certainly have quantity on anyone else I’ve worked with.”

  “Excuse me?” the half-kin shot back. “Name one person who has a better set up than me.”

  “I didn’t say set up, I said equipment. Don’t get me wrong, your stuff is great, but I’ve been all through your equipment and I couldn’t find a single personal cloaking device.”

  “Well, yeah, because sneaking around invisible is nice, but who wants to be irradiated on the molecular level?”

  Janix and I exchanged a look. This was like watching two super nerds fight over whose gaming console was better, amusing, but otherwise going to end up nowhere.

  Viys’k audibly scoffed. “How many years are you behind? That bug was fixed back when I was a petty criminal.”

  “You’re sitting right up there on your thieving throne, aren’t you? Looking down on us little pleebs who work en masse rather than one-off missions for rich collectors?”

  “Was that judgement I heard layering your tone? Perhaps pirates shouldn’t throw stones in glass ships.”

  Atmospheric re-entry imminent.

  At least that shut them up as they concentrated on whatever procedure was needed to make sure we didn’t burn up in the atmosphere. I should probably learn what was necessary, in case I was ever in the situation where I needed to pilot a ship. But if we ever got into a position like that, it was probably a lost cause already.

  The flyer we were on started to rattle, and I looked through the front to see the surface coming ever closer until flames completely obscured our vision. It was happening. We were just a couple steps away. I almost wanted to rub my eyes in disbelief several times, but I managed to keep my cool. I would need that, coming up.

  Even if our mission went exactly according to plan, our scans had revealed a fairly large facility where Maven had landed when he brought the scientists here. Sure, we had infiltrated other high-security, impossible buildings before, but those were all ones with blueprints and heaps of info Angel and her hackers had been able to illegally download. We knew nothing about this one. Not a single file, a blip, or even an echo in a database. We were flying blind and I hadn’t had to do that since I met the infamous pirate.

  And then we were through the hard part and leveling off, the rattling easing as we angled ourselves for landing to finally touch down on the ground.

  Warning. Incom-

  The security system never got out its full warning, which I thought was impossible, considering it could sense when we were being targeted previously. The next thing I knew, something massive slammed into the side of our ship and we were sent pinwheeling through the air.

  My world spun as a chorus of sirens, warning and alarming beeps sounded around us. They were so cacophonous that I couldn’t even make out the individual words, or the curses pouring out of Angel’s mouth in a steady, heated stream.

  And then another blow hit up, spinning us violently the other way. Parts of the ship crumpled around us. My first instinct was to run, but releasing the harness would be certain death with how quickly we were tumbling about.

  That was, until a piece of siding structure pieced through the roof, slamming down into the floor right between Janix’s short, muscled legs. Now he, too, also cursed, although his were in relief.

  We couldn’t keep on like this. We were going to be torn apart and speared by shrapnel like we were a pincushion.

  I reached out, letting my hand press into the side of the cockpit. The metal was hot to the touch, but I forced myself not to pull away. Furrowing my brow, I reached into that bubbling happiness I had that we were about to save my best friend. The determination, the resolve, the steeling feeling inside my gut that we would get her no matter what.

  And I poured that feeling into the ship around me. Strengthening, fortifying, sealing us against the attack.

  We were struck again, but this time, instead of spinning off into the air- the cockpit shot out of the front of the ship, hurtling down to the ground as the rest of our vessel combusted in a massive explosion.

  We picked up speed as we fell, and try as I might, I couldn’t kill our momentum. At this rate, if we suddenly stopped with a direct hit to the hard earth, I didn’t think we would survive it. Inertia was a bit of an unforgiving bitch, after all.

  “Is this your doing, Andi?” Viys’k called, her whiskers shaking almost too fast to see with our reverberations.

  I couldn’t open my mouth to speak, so I just nodded with great effort.

  “Any chance you’re gonna slow us down, or are we going to have a brace for impact moment?”

  “I’m trying,” I ground out, my head throbbing as I continued to envision a fortress around us.

  “Maybe I can help,” Angel said. “I think we still might have the coolant sys
tem below us in case of cabin-fire.”

  “I think we’re a bit past that point,” Janix shouted over the wind whipping around the barrier surrounding us.

  “Not if I point it at the ground. The propulsion of it might just give us enough of a pushback to slow us down not to be smashed into a fine jelly when we hit.”

  “I’m all about that not dying a horrific death idea.”

  “Well, here goes nothing. Let’s see if it’s even still hooked up to our command board.”

  She leaned forward, somehow managing to press the correct buttons despite our violent rattling, and I heard the screeching of metal below us. “Computer! Time and distance to impact!”

  “Fifteen kilometers and an estimated twen- ninete- eighte- seve-”

  “Coolant now!” she snapped, slamming another button.

  More screeching, followed by what sounded like rushing water. Sure enough, our momentum started to slow. But would it be enough?

  I didn’t have a mystic eight ball to shake, but I’m sure it would have been just as in the dark as I was. I tried to stretch out my energy to make our little chunk of a ship bigger, broader and more wind resistant, but all my attempts crumpled inward, leaving only the field I had around us.

  “Brace for impact! And by that, I mean relax your muscles and get ready for what might be our sudden and very violent dem-”

  Then we hit. I felt like I was thrown out of my body while being yanked viciously against the back of my seat. Metal crumples and screams while my field made my brain feel like it was catching fire.

  My perception was volatile, shaking, smoke-filled and incomprehensible. It was like I had been sucked into a tornado with a bunch of thunder in it to boot. I couldn’t tell if the fire licking at my feet and arms was real, or a manifestation of my mind trying to hold onto my protection around us.

  And then finally, after all the shaking, screeching, and terror, we stopped.

  I sat there a moment, in complete and utter darkness, in quite a bit of disbelief. We had just survived dropping from the sky after being pummeled with a trio of missiles. Man, if I hadn’t eaten Genesis the first time I met him one on one, we would probably be dead about seven times over.

  I might have just rested there a while, but sweat was pouring down my face, getting into my eyes and stinging the open cuts on my face. I needed to get out of there if I didn’t want to end up a dehydrated, slightly crispy prune.

  I slowly extricated myself from the rubble, every part of my body aching. You think I would be used to this by now; rising from the ashes with my limbs in solid protest, but each time was just as painful as the last.

  “Is everyone all right?” I groaned, looking through the smoke and debris of what remained of our little impromptu escape cabin.

  “I might be dead,” Janix replied. I looked around for him, my heart picking up its rhythm, before I spotted a large piece of metal that was sliding from side to side. I stumbled over, before reaching out and tossing it off into the distance.

  “Thanks there, love,” the mooreerie said, the sudden freedom allowing him to push away the chair that was pinning him to the charred bottom of what had once been the cockpit. I helped him to his feet and we looked for the others.

  I barely saw a glimpse of a long, flesh-colored tail before one of the guns fired off a beam that send several large pieces of scrap flying. “That was probably more dangerous than I thought it would be,” Viys'k noted, pulling Angel up out of the hole before scrambling out herself. Both looked rather worse for wear, with cuts, bruises and blood on various parts of their bodies, and I was sure that I probably was not that much better.

  “That was fun.” Angel said, wiping shoot from her cheek only to streak blood across her face. “Let's not do that again.”

  “Really?” Janix shot back, already digging around for supplies. “I thought I might want another go.”

  “See, I would think you were being facetious, but considering you're both Mooreerie and a smuggler, I'm going to assume you're not.”

  “That's quite xenophobic of you.”

  Angel shrugged. “I'm a pirate, not a saint.”

  “Yeah, that much is apparent.”

  I exchanged a look with Viys'k, who rolled her eyes at the banter. Neither of us stopped it, however. We had just lived through yet another near-death experience and they just needed to cope with it by making a series of borderline irritating comebacks.

  “Want to help me look for supplies?”

  I nodded, and we started toward the hole she had extricated herself from. We only moved a few pieces and found one supply pack when Angel's tone grew serious in the background.

  “Since someone shot us out of the sky and all, why are we not panicking that they're looking for us on the ground. It’s obvious they know we're here.”

  “Actually,” Viys'k answered, not even breaking her rhythm of sifting through debris. “I'm willing to bet that system is semi-automated. And even if it wasn't, they completely blew us out of the sky. There's no way anyone could survive that, so they know they're searching for corpses and shrapnel, which means there's not a huge rush. I would estimate we've got ten, maybe fifteen minutes before we need to find some cover so we can get the jump on them.”

  “Jump on them?” I echoed, straightening from where I was pulling a half-way melted pillar away from a locker.

  “Wait, am I thinking what I think you're thinking?” Angel asked, squinting at the thief.

  “Only if you're thinking of all of us hiding and then hitching a ride on whatever scrap collector they send, or overthrowing the crew if they send a whole scouter.”

  Janix clapped, his dirty face brightening. “Now this is something I can help with. In my career, I have snuck both myself and many goods out of buildings in trashers, scouters and collectors.”

  “Yeah, well, now we're going to be sneaking in. Does that change the process much?”

  He shrugged. “There's only one way to find out, isn't there?”

  “I am really not liking the sound of winging it,” I objected, returning to wrestling with the pillar.

  “Really? The woman who rushed the entire second half of our plan on the station and improvised a make-out session with the enemy doesn't like winging it?”

  “That was a special occasion and could be considered the exception, not the default.”

  “A convenient enough excuse.”

  I glanced to Viys’k and Janix, who were now the ones ignoring banter and busying themselves with salvaging what supplies that they could with the limited time that we had. “Whoops,” I muttered before finally ripping the pillar from where it had melded. The door of the locker came with it, and several singed -but very much still together- supply packs tumbled out. “Jackpot!” I stumbled over pieces of debris to grab them and swing them over my back.

  “I found a gun!” Janix cried a moment later, holding above his head like a tropy.

  “That’s two firearms and six supply packs,” Angel said. “I say we call it at that and find some cover before we get blasted into pieces by a collector.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Janix mused. “Come all this way only to have a glorified trashcan take us out?”

  “Not the epitaph I envisioned on my tombstone.”

  “What’s a tombstone?”

  “Nevermind. So, where are we hiding?”

  Angel fiddled with something on her wrist, and after some very sci-fi beeps and boops, a small holograph hovered above her hand.

  “Captain! Is that you? I’m getting a ping from your handheld!” a voice issued from the bit of gizmo that I vaguely recognized as one of her technicians. Why it wasn’t her Captain-double I didn’t know, but I guessed it wasn’t the time to ask.

  “Yes, it’s me.” There was a chorus of cheers and whoops, which Angel quickly shushed. “Celebrate when I get off this rock. We were shot out of the sky and I need to know whether it was automated or direct.”

  “Will do.”

  “And
also a readout of the lay of the land for the next mile or so. We need a place to find some cover.”

  “Yes, Cap—”

  “And I’m gonna need a sensor running on any sort of vehicle coming our way. I need to know it’s build and purpose as soon as you know.” There was silence for almost half a minute. “Hello?”

  “Oh, I thought there was something else.”

  “No, that’ll do for now. Priority is that layout, if you didn’t put that together.” She pressed another button and the hologram dissipated. “Let’s get out of this hole, shall we?”

  Hole? I looked up to see that we were indeed several yards below the still-smoking crust of the ground we had hammered ourselves into. Once more, I was stuck by how miraculous it was that we had all survived.

  “Human ladder anyone?” I suggested. The three of them gave me a curious look, and it took me a beat to remember that I was the only human in our little ragtag band of universe-savers. “All right, shutting up now.”

  “I’ll go first,” Viys’k said, taking the focus off me. “I’ll see if there’s anything I can use as a rope to hang down.”

  She crouched down, wiggling her hindquarters before launching herself upwards. It was a bit like watching a trapeze artist free-styling it as she jumped from handhold to foothold to errant piece of metal sticking out of the hard-packed earthen slope. In barely more than a blink, she was up over the edge and out of her vision.

  It was right about them that my stomach rocked.

  “Oh, not this again.” I leaned to the side and spewing the black liquid that was getting much less surprise horror and much more tedious mess.

  Thankfully, Janix and Angel kept on shouting up to Viys’k, ignoring my monochromatic shouting. Once I finished, the Captain handed me a small square of fabric ripped from her sleeve and I gratefully rubbed my mouth clean.

  “Got it!” the thief called from above. Almost immediately after, a tangle of vines came down over the edge, stopping a few feet above our heads.