He pulled up, and with the loudest of thuds, he crashed into the top of the dorsal hull, sliding across the alloy plating. The suit jettisoned his chute, and he rolled to a standstill.

  Bull’s-eye!

  He peered into the sky, awaiting his friends’ arrival. Kevin was the first to join him. He came down hard, winding himself in the process. Jason helped him up and threw his chute aside.

  “Just like riding a bike, huh?” Kevin quipped, gasping for some air to fill his lungs

  Kione followed, landing more violently than the other two combined. A gust of wind picked up and dragged his chute along with him to the edge of the ship.

  “Kione, your chute’s malfunctioned, release it manually!” Jason yelled.

  Kione finally jerked the release, and the chute flew into the air. But it was too late. His momentum continued to carry him toward the edge. Jason bounded to him, sliding along the hull. Just as Kione fell over, he clasped on to his hand like a vise.

  With their momentum halted, they both eyed each other with relief. But then Kione’s weight shifted him again. Jason was on the move, too, refusing to let go. He tried to grab anything he could with his spare hand, but there was nothing on the hull to latch on to.

  Around his ankle, Kevin took hold. But it didn’t stop their slide, and Jason dropped from the edge with Kione firmly locked in one hand.

  We must look like a bucket of monkeys.

  Kevin glided over, and their fate was all but sealed.

  Just as their fall to the surface seemed assured, a tendril grabbed Kevin around his waist, followed by another around Jason, and then finally Kione.

  It yanked them all up onto the hull of the Natrusian ship and plopped them down in a heap. Jason heaved himself up and stared at their savior with a newfound appreciation.

  “Thank you,” he said to the kwigalark.

  The being didn’t respond. Instead, a tendril pointed toward the Sansarak’s dorsal airlock. There was still a mission to complete.

  Thirty-Three

  Sansarak

  “Fire in the hole!”

  The kwigalark ripped the airlock off its hinges, and Jason threw a shock grenade into the opened space.

  A bright-blue light emanated from below, signifying its detonation. Jason jumped in, and with his rifle at the ready, he stared down at the two slumped Natrusian bodies on the deck. Each end of the corridor was clear of any of their compatriots.

  He waved to Kevin, Kione, and the kwigalark, and they promptly followed him. “This way,” he said, pointing.

  The kwigalark had other plans and proceeded in the opposite direction. Jason threw his arms up in the air, and Kevin sidled up beside him.

  “It obviously knows something we don’t.”

  Jason relented and took up the rear. But around the next corner they ran into further resistance. Before anyone got a shot off, the kwigalark extended its tendrils and grabbed the pair of Natrusians in a vise-like grip and mashed their bodies into the bulkhead. They ended up little more than pancakes of blood and bone.

  “That works, too, I guess,” Jason quipped.

  A bolt of energy whizzed past Jason’s head. Behind him, three more Natrusians sprinted toward them. They were led by Haralan, and all held the same large weapons they’d used on the Company ship to render the kwigalark inert.

  Jason dived around the next corner and yelled up ahead, “Kevin! Kione! We’ve got trouble!”

  Kevin backtracked and took the opposite side of the nearest hatchway. “If those guns get near the kwigalark—”

  “I know,” Jason said. “My kingdom for more shock grenades.”

  “The Argo doesn’t exactly have the arsenal of a CDF destroyer.”

  “Being the road team doesn’t help either. There’s more corridors on this ship than a haunted house.”

  “We could use that to our advantage.”

  Jason raised an eyebrow. “Kevin Rycroft, you sly dog…”

  Haralan led the other two men down the corridor with their disintegrators at the ready. The crew had fallen like flies. Two had been knocked out at the airlock, and another pair were dead. He didn’t intend on adding any more names to the list. Especially not his own.

  When he’d visited the small alien cargo ship with Captain Vorholan, he’d known the strange humans would be trouble. They continued farther down the corridor. But there wasn’t so much as a sound.

  Where’s that human gone?

  A clatter emanated ahead.

  He smiled and motioned his two men onward where they reached the intersection of three corridors above the engine room.

  He furrowed his brow, peering down each passageway. They were clear in all directions. At his feet, something stared up at him.

  Haralan cautiously put out his hand and picked it up. It was a device he’d seen on the alien cargo ship.

  A data tablet?

  He pressed the small screen and flinched as Captain Cassidy appeared on it.

  The human smiled. “Surprise!”

  Haralan darted his eyes around him. At one end of the corridor, a blast sounded and knocked one of his men down. In the next passageway, another discharge floored the other.

  He raised his hands in the air. “I hate humans…”

  “Would you get a load of this place.”

  After dispatching Haralan and his men, Jason and Kevin caught up with Kione and the kwigalark inside a vast two-deck section of the Sansarak.

  In the heart of the facility stood ten huge cylindrical tanks. Three were full of the gray residue they now knew were the kwigalarks in their disintegrated form.

  Kione and the kwigalark stood over a circular workstation when Jason approached. “Any luck?” he asked them.

  Kione shrugged. “Our friend here is doing his best to hack into the system, at least as far as I can tell. And—”

  The loud buzz of the ship’s external disintegrator beam came to a halt, and the fourth tank stopped filling.

  “And,” Kione continued, “it would seem he’s done it.”

  Jason checked over the console. “Now it’s just a matter of returning the kwigalarks to the surface.”

  “Not so fast, Cassidy!”

  Everyone spun around to the voice of Vorholan.

  The Natrusian captain stepped toward them with the large disintegrator rifle pointed at the kwigalark. “Has anyone ever told you what a nuisance you are?”

  “It’s come up from time to time,” Jason admitted.

  Kione approached from behind, but Kevin seemed to have disappeared. The kwigalark shrieked, waving its limbs in the air, and Vorholan prepared to fire.

  “Don’t do it, Vorholan!” Kione yelled.

  The Natrusian captain’s finger came down on the trigger, and the sound of shattering glass echoed around them. Jason turned to Kevin, smashing open one of the tanks with the butt of his rifle.

  The gray goo flooded from the container as if a dam were breaking. The residue gradually reanimated, and full-sized kwigalarks began to emerge.

  Vorholan hesitated and attempted to fire, but a tendril from one of the now dozens of kwigalarks wrapped around his torso and suffocated the life from him. His body convulsed and fell to the deck with a thud. It was a pathetic end to a pathetic man.

  “Jason, we have to go!” Kevin pulled him to the door.

  The kwigalarks reanimated at a rapid rate of knots and quickly filled every bit of free space. Jason didn’t need to be told twice and made a run for it.

  “Where’s Kione?” he wondered in all the chaos.

  Kevin interrupted his train of thought and pointed out the nearest viewport where the surface was approaching quickly. “We’re going down!” He activated his commband. “Argo, we—”

  “Way ahead of you, Dad,” Aly’s voice rang over the commlink. “We’re on our way. Get to the dorsal hatch, and I’ll meet you with our grapple.”

  “We’ll be there!”

  Jason peered around for his missing friend. “We can’t go without him.”

  “We can’t go back either!” Kevin grabbed him. “We have to go!”

  More of the kwigalarks spilled into the exterior corridor along with the flow of gray residue. The pair got swept up in the stream, as if they’d been thrown from a canoe into wild rapids. Bouncing from one bulkhead to another, Jason noticed a pattern. They were following the maze of corridors back to the airlock. The kwigalarks were helping them through the ship.

  Sure enough, above their heads, the open hatch appeared. Jason grabbed on to the ladder and pushed Kevin upward, while he took another look behind. A tendril emerged from the goo and shoved him up through the airlock with Kevin atop of the Sansarak’s dorsal hull.

  The ship reverberated around them as it continued to fall. In the sky, the Argo appeared, moving toward them. It extended its grapple downward, and Kevin climbed on, latching himself to it with a safety line. Jason did the same but peered once more at the airlock where the residue of the kwigalarks spewed out.

  The grapple retracted, and the Sansarak began crashing into the surface. Then just as Jason had given up hope, Kione burst from the airlock with a tendril wrapped around his body. It extended him upward and Jason and Kevin gathered him by each arm tightly, attaching him to the grapple.

  Jason locked eyes with his soaked friend. “Cutting it close, aren’t we?”

  Kione smiled. “I’ve learned from the best.”

  Thirty-Four

  Cargo Ship Argo

  Jason rested his feet on the helm console of the Julieanne and leaned back in his chair. Even with all the bruises from the mission on the Sansarak, he was lucky enough to find a comfy position to lie in.

  He took Marissa’s recorder from his pocket and closed his eyes. With a press, he activated the device and placed it beside him. “When Marissa told me to record my thoughts, I thought she was crazy. I’ve got no interest in deciphering my innermost feelings, and neither will anyone else. But after what’s happened to us of late, I’m beginning to think maybe it’s not such a bad idea.

  “In the short space of time we’ve been out here, we’ve got away with our lives on more than one occasion. Space is so much more dangerous beyond the Reach. I worry we may never make the Horizon Cluster. I suppose if we don’t, at least this recording will make those back home aware of what we’ve done.”

  He opened his eyes. “With our trans-space actuator destroyed, I’ve instructed Kevin to calculate a course to Tadrosia at standard FTL. Once Aly gives him the go-ahead from the engine room, we’ll break orbit and be on our way. While it’ll take us another year and a half to reach our destination, there will be at least the promise of the gateway network on the other end.”

  Footsteps approached the door to the transport pod, and Kione stepped through the airlock.

  “We keep meeting like this,” Jason said.

  “Indeed.”

  Jason switched off the recorder and placed his feet down. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened. Reflecting how we, or should I say I, went about everything after boarding the Company ship.”

  “And what’ve you discovered?”

  “That no matter how far humanity comes as a species, there’s still a deep-seated prejudice in all of us.” Jason swiveled around in his chair. “While racism, sexism, and every other ism are a thing of the past, it seems out here we have to reexamine all of that. It’s like we’re starting over again.”

  “You’re being too harsh on yourself and your race,” Kione said.

  “Am I?” Jason shook his head. “When we came across the Natrusians, I trusted them. They had two arms, two legs, eyes, ears, a nose. They looked like us. More or less anyway. The kwigalarks, on the other hand, were big fuzzy balls of tentacles. My first impression of both was completely wrong.”

  “To be fair, your first contact with the kwigalark was very confusing.”

  “Perhaps. But that didn’t matter to you. You gave it the benefit of the doubt. And because of it, everything turned out very differently.”

  Kione shrugged. “We got lucky.”

  “Bridge to Jason.”

  Jason activated his commband. “Go ahead, Kevin.”

  “We’re detecting massive Iota activity from the kwigalark home world.”

  Jason and Kione shared a curious glance with each other and dashed to the bridge. Everyone else was there when they arrived.

  Jason gazed at the glowing point of light on the planet’s surface. “What do you make of it, Aly?”

  “I’ve never seen readings like this,” she said from the operations station. “The buildup of Iota particles is off the scopes.”

  “And it’s directly beneath us,” Althaus added.

  “Kevin, move us away and—”

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t,” Kione interrupted him and approached his side. “Remember what we talked about?”

  Jason eyed the planet. It was as if he were being tested.

  “Jason, what are my orders?” Kevin asked.

  “Keep us where we are.”

  Althaus stood from his chair at the systems station. “That is an idiotic—”

  Jason’s glare told him to sit down and shut up, which his uncle reluctantly did.

  “There’s something coming from the planet!” Aly said.

  Everyone returned their attention to the viewport. A large wisp of energy blasted toward the Argo. The beam shot past the ship, and a globe of energy formed ahead of them.

  Marissa’s eyes widened. “Is that a trans-space vortex?”

  The power of the purple anomaly pulled the Argo in until it enveloped the entire ship. Jason tried to grab something but was too late. He dropped to the floor and blacked out.

  Jason woke and heaved himself up with Kevin’s help. He felt the lump on his head and realized what had happened.

  “The kwigalarks. They opened a vortex?”

  Kevin nodded, and others around the bridge began to regain consciousness.

  Kione approached him and helped him into the captain’s chair. “They gave us a gift for our help.”

  “A gift?”

  Kione pointed to the viewport. “It’s Tadrosia.”

  A brown planet appeared ahead. And in its orbit a large man-made circular construct.

  The gateway…

  Part Three

  Thirty-Five

  Cargo Ship Argo

  The trans-space gateway was a perfect ring, at least a kilometer in diameter. Its shiny metal surface gleamed in the brilliance of the yellow Tadrosian sun.

  “Breathtaking…” Marissa stepped to Jason’s side in front of the bridge viewport.

  The same couldn’t be said of the planet it was orbiting. It didn’t share the magnificence of worlds like Earth or Centauri; instead, Tadrosia was a depressing red rock. The surface resembled the barren landscape of Mars. Marissa wondered why its image didn’t make her homesick. While the Martian sands had been her place of residence for several years, she had to question whether she truly thought of the world as home anymore.

  She looked at Jason, who peered at the newly discovered planet with awe. While she doubted he saw any beauty in Tadrosia, he knew it held the key to finding his brother and returning him to the Argo.

  Jason left her side and stepped toward Aly at the operations station on the starboard side of the bridge. “What can you tell me about the gateway?”

  “Hard to say,” she said, bringing up the scans on the monitor in front of her. “For something that’s supposed to propel vessels across interstellar distances, it appears rather ordinary.”

  “You’re not impressed?”

  “I didn’t say that.” She pointed to the readings. “It comprises of an alloy I can’t make head nor tail of. I’d guess it’s designed to shield itself from our scans.”

  “Makes sense,” her father chimed in from the helm. “It is a remarkable piece of engineering. I doubt the Tadrosians want to give away their secrets.”

  Kione joined Jason at the operations station. “What about Tadrosia itself?”

  “Not as remarkable,” Aly said. “With the limited data I’ve studied so far, I’d guess the planet’s gone through a severe environmental cataclysm. Its atmosphere has a heavy particulate concentration of an element I can’t identify, while native vegetation and water bodies appear minimal.”

  “Could we be looking at something akin to a global weather transformation?” Tai asked from the rear of the bridge.

  “Perhaps.”

  Althaus swiveled around in his chair at the systems station. “This might’ve been Earth if our forebears hadn’t acted in response to the major environmental challenges of their day. Seems the Tadrosians weren’t as lucky.”

  “You could be right—” Aly stopped mid-sentence. “Though, I am detecting a population on the surface.”

  “People are living down there?” Kione asked incredulously.

  “I can’t give you an exact number, but there appears to be millions scattered throughout different metropolises across the globe.”

  Something caught Marissa’s eye between the gateway and the planet. “Do you see that?”

  “What?” Jason approached her, and she indicated through the viewport.

  Aly picked it up too. “Space stations…”

  As the Argo closed in on the planet, the orbiting structures became clearer. But there weren’t just one or two of them. There were dozens, if not more. They surrounded Tadrosia like an artificial ring.

  Jason raised an eyebrow. “How many of them are there, Aly?”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “Hundreds. And that’s only the ones we can detect on this side of Tadrosia’s orbit.”

  “Phenomenal.” Jason moved toward the viewport. “Perhaps they’re the survivors of the planetary cataclysm.”

  “Maybe…”

  “Though it doesn’t explain the inhabitants on the surface,” Tai rightly stated.

  “No, it doesn’t.” Jason turned around and sat in the captain’s chair. “Aly, I think it’s time we introduced ourselves. Open a commlink.”

 

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