A Glimpse Beyond: A Space Opera Adventure (Infinite Horizons Book 2) Page 3

  Sherisza shook her head. “No, we should see to our needs first. I feel we are exposed now, though, and it is not a feeling I appreciate.”

  “I don’t know, I certainly appreciate seeing you exposed.”

  She gave him a love tap to the sternum. “Well, come on then.”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE UNKNOWN

  They enjoyed a meal and then a shower, the latter being romantic despite a lack of physical intimacy. Soon enough, though, Sherisza was back in her seat on the flight deck, a holodisplay before her so she could work on the design of the phase-cloaking device. Dillon sat beside her, listening to her preoccupied chatter that was mostly aimed at herself. They hadn’t gotten much sleep after their lovemaking, but she was still too worked up, even after a workout and a shower, to go back to bed just yet.

  Dillon tried to pick up as much as he could about the device and its workings, but as usual, the theories were all beyond him. She was working with focusing crystals and compounds he didn’t have the foggiest idea about, but he did recognize many of the other components. Any machine, no matter how complex and how technologically advanced, had to have some of the same base components, and he concentrated on that. If nothing else, he’d be able to build the shell and the acting parts for her while she concocted the part that made it all work.

  He had to laugh at himself, as he found it sexy to watch her at work. She was beautiful, athletic, and sensual, but she was also astonishingly brilliant, and he found that just as attractive, if not more so. His amusement multiplied as he considered she was beautiful, intelligent, and rich, ticking off all the boxes that would please his parents except the one that said human. But even then, his parents liked her, they at least pretended to be satisfied that the two of them were happy, and whatever they thought, Dillon didn’t care one bit that she was Kiandarian. She was his, and he was in love with her, he was sure of it.

  She looked over at him as if sensing his thoughts and smiled. “I am not keeping you awake, am I? Feel free to go get some rest. I will not be at this much longer, I think,” she said despite what he’d been thinking.

  “I like watching you work almost as much as I like working with you,” he told her. He thought it sounded corny once he’d said it, and he hoped she didn’t feel the same way.

  “You are very sweet,” she said with her little smile.

  “How smart was Daevol?” he asked, drawing a curious gaze from her. “I mean, you’re brilliant, Sherisza, but you talk about him like he was a genius compared to you.”

  “He was.”

  “Sherisza…”

  She shook her head. “As I have explained, Dillon, I build things, but Daevol was the one who figured out how to make any of it work. He discovered how to rend the very veil of time, and that is something I still, to this day, cannot make any sense out of. I know what the Chrono Drive is built from and how to put it together, but I do not understand why it works at all.”

  He gestured toward the schematic before them. “You’re building this without him.”

  “True,” she conceded with a little half-shrug. “Yet even this is partially based on theories he and others have discovered and distilled.”

  “Daevol, a little help here?” Dillon prompted the AI. “How smart was the guy you’re named after? And how many degrees did he have?”

 

  “Holy crap,” Dillon blurted, almost tempted to ask if he’d misheard the AI. Instead, he prompted, “What about Sherisza?”

  She flashed Dillon a sour look, but the AI answered anyway.

  “Damn, girl!” Dillon said, turning to look at her, and her sour look melted away into a blush. “I knew you were brilliant. That’s got to be a lot higher than mine, I expect. What’s mine, Daevol, about a buck twenty?”

 

  Dillon blinked, shocked.

  “Quite a bit higher than average,” Sherisza commented. “This, too, was a consideration when I chose you as my apprentice. You are adaptable and learn quickly, two important traits where teaching you my craft was concerned. Yet you have more than exceeded my expectations thus far. Do not set my brother on too high a pedestal, Dillon. Though we may not see the universe the way he did, we can use his research to bring his ideas to life.”

  “Yeah, and we have a bag of it in the back,” he said, Sherisza’s brow rising. “Did I forget to mention that? Things were hectic after that first visit to Kiandar and everything that happened with MacNault. But when we visited your old home, I grabbed Daevol’s notebooks, pads, laptop units, and computer cores. I put them in a storage locker in the back.”

  Sherisza’s mouth dropped open a little. “Right, how could I have forgotten? We should begin uploading all of it into Daevol’s memory banks. That would unlock a lot of potential with an AI assisting us with his considerable computing power. It would also make it far less likely that any of it will fall into the wrong hands.”

  “I assume there’s some way we can scan the notebooks in?” Dillon asked.

  “Yes, Daevol will be able to optically scan in written notes. The cores and laptop units can be plugged directly into the terminal in engineering. But that can wait until after we have gotten some rest, I think. I am losing my concentration and do not want to make mistakes in these schematics.”

  “Well, let’s clean up and get some sleep, then. Hopefully, nothing else takes shots at us while we’re in the time stream.”

  “Indeed.”

  They went to the lavatory and got ready for bed, and Dillon found it was even fun to share the time with her just brushing their teeth and her mane. When they returned to their cabin, they curled up together in bed. With Sherisza’s head on his chest, purring softly, Dillon didn’t stay awake too long despite the tumultuous thoughts swirling through his mind. And yet despite what had happened, it wasn’t the violence of the day that fought for dominance.

  One hundred and fifty-five and one hundred and eighty? Damn…

  After breakfast, Dillon spent a while helping Daevol scan in his namesake’s notebooks from the terminal in engineering. It was a bit tedious, but it didn’t take long for the AI to scan each page, at least. There was so much to do, though, Daevol Rousilarru having filled numerous books with everything from theoretical math to quick sketches of designs to questions about whether he was really alive or just a part of his Goddess’ imagination.

  Dillon laughed at the last of those. He couldn’t help but think even a deity would be a bit confused by the things that had run through Sherisza’s brother’s head. He was of a brilliance that could sometimes lead people to go mad, their brains going in too many different directions at all times, unable to sit still and appreciate life for what it was. Based on the pictures and videos Dillon had seen, though, the man had enjoyed life with his twin sister and their children. And he had sired a pair of his own with another woman, so he’d lived a complete life, even though it had been cut well short by the bio-engineered plague.

  I can only imagine how smart his children had been before they were murdered…

  Most curious to Dillon were notes about a region of the galaxy that Daevol had referred to as the Doorstep of the Goddess. It reminded him of what the man had said when he told Sherisza he’d figured out how to build the Chrono Drive. He had mused about taking his people to the very doorstep of the Goddess’ realm, though Sherisza had insisted “not without invitation.” Had the man been talking purely theology, or was there a place in the galaxy that was so uniquely beautiful and impossible to fig
ure out that Daevol had thought it might be Heaven?

  “Daevol, see if you can figure out what your namesake was talking about here with all this stuff about the Doorstep of the Goddess,” Dillon said while he continued flipping pages to scan.

 

  “Seems like he may have been on to something interesting, if not divine,” he said. “I don’t suppose there’s already some things in your memory that he might’ve been talking about?”

 

  “Yeah, that’s kind of typical of geniuses, though, I think,” Dillon said. “Sherisza seems to be a lot harder to distract from her work.”

 

  “Is she still talking to the Kwaagi?”

 

  “That’s true,” Dillon said, flipping a page absently. “We really don’t know much of anything about the reaches beyond their space, do we?”

 

  “Not just her.” Dillon tossed the notebook back in the duffel bag as they finished scanning it. “How’s the damage to the rear of the ship? Anything that needs immediate attention?”

 

  “Hopefully, it can wait ‘til we return to Outer Dock Seventeen again with the next group of Kiandarians,” Dillon said. “Anything else I should look at?”

 

  “All right, I’ll do that now.”

  Dillon got a replacement part from the storage cabinet and grabbed the toolbox. He left the engineering section and made for the ship’s main corridor, where the indicated relay was located. He had just set the toolbox down when Sherisza looked at him from around the edge of her seat. She motioned for him to come over, so he left the box and replacement part and went to stand behind her seat. She smiled softly when he wrapped his arms around her.

  “The Kwaagi do not have an exact match, but they have been skirmishing with an unknown species from the reaches for weeks,” she said. “They are offering us a lucrative contract to go farther into their space and modify another of their wings to join in the fight. This would cause a substantial delay in our plans to bring others to Kiandar, though…”

  “Can we go help them, then retrieve the next group of Kiandarians and just come back into our time stream a month earlier?”

  “I do not know how any of this works, whether there would be issues with us being in two places at once in the same time frame, but I suspect it would, at the least, alert many others that we have a time-travel device of some sort. My instinct is to keep the time stream pure by only going to and from places where we do not already exist.”

  “I think I understand,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. “If we want to help the Kwaagi, though, we should do that first. A little delay in bringing settlers is only going to be an inconvenience, not life-threatening, right?”

  She let out a leonine sigh. “Agreed. Daevol, send a message to the Kwaagi, let them know we are heading to Outer Dock Five and will be there as soon as possible.”

 

  “Strap in so we can get underway, Dillon,” Sherisza said.

  “Hang on,” he said, rushing back to secure the toolbox and supplies first. Engaging the Chrono Drive didn’t seem to put any undue G-forces on them or their belongings, but it just seemed the prudent thing to not have anything loose that could project toward the flight deck in the event of a fight or sudden stop.

  Soon enough, he returned and got buckled in, and after laying in their course, Sherisza engaged the Chrono Drive. She must have set it for quite some speed because Dillon nearly lost consciousness after the echoes and the shivering of the universe about them subsided. He held onto wakefulness, though, and shook his head to clear it. And thus, he had a perfect view of the HUD as it came up and indicated that black ship was behind them again.

  A voice crackled across the hailing frequency, garbled and not in any language Dillon’s translator chip could make sense of. A quick glance at Sherisza said hers couldn’t, either. Dillon couldn’t even tell if it was a warning, some type of request, or what. The inflection, tone, and words themselves were all impossible to make out, but their intent seemed clear a moment later. The enemy ship fired two blaster bolts at the Malshekt, and though they were absorbed by the shields, Sherisza growled.

  She brought the Malshekt about and headed straight for the enemy ship. She didn’t even hesitate this time, firing the Kwaagi disruptors the moment she had a target lock. The enemy began evasive maneuvers, but it did take several hits. Like the first time they’d encountered it, the disruptors didn’t disintegrate the ship, but the enemy did flee. Sherisza gave chase, her face set in a fang-showing grimace, and she opened the hailing frequencies herself.

  “Whoever in the six hells you are, if you attack this ship again, I will destroy you,” she said, firing a burst warning shot, all four of the disruptor blasts hitting the rear of the retreating bogey.

  And then the enemy ship spun about the way Sherisza had so brilliantly done in some of their dogfights. Dillon could only watch in slack-jawed fascination as the enemy ship fired its own ion cannon, taking the Malshekt right in the nose. Everything in the ship went dark, and Dillon and Sherisza both grunted and clutched behind their left ears as even their translation chips went offline. Virtually every system on the ship was dead, even the Chrono Drive it seemed, leaving the Malshekt adrift in the time stream at a ridiculous speed.

  “Can you wake Daevol up?” Dillon asked as he rubbed away the pain in his chip.

  Sherisza didn’t answer, staring with wide eyes out the front viewport. The enemy ship came up in front of them, flying backwards with the same speed and vector as the Malshekt to stay before her. Dillon watched in what felt like slow motion horror as the enemy ship’s gun ports began to power up and several missile tubes extended out of its wings. Sherisza opened the little panel on the side of her console and pulled the switch that would activate the Chrono Drive’s defenses, but nothing happened. It, too, was offline.

  The enemy ship fired several shots, and Sherisza cried out as the Malshekt was rocked by the unmitigated blasts. Dillon threw caution to the wind. He released his harness and knelt next to her chair, wrapping her in his arms. If he was going to die, he was going to do it with her in his arms, wherever they went and whoever took them there. Sherisza clung to him, burying her face in the side of his neck as they waited for whatever end would come.

  CHAPTER 4

  INTERVENTION

  The seconds ticked by in agonizing slowness, until at last, Sherisza looked up again. She gasped, and Dillon, too, raised his eyes to find there was no longer a ship in front of them.

  “How do we get the systems back online?” Dillon asked, rising to his feet.

  “We can manually restart the Chrono Drive. That will get us power back, at least,” Sherisza answered. It was still amazing to Dillon how well-spoken she was in Terran English. When their translation chips weren’t working, it was more than amazing, it was
a godsend. “From there, we need hope that ion blast did not permanently cripple the ship or Daevol. We will need damage assessments, and we are heading in the wrong direction.”

  He nodded, and she unbuckled herself and started to half-walk, half-float to the back, the ship’s artificial gravity offline. Sherisza was shaking, and Dillon’s own legs felt like jelly as they went to engineering. He wasn’t sure where that ship was or if it was coming back, but there was little to be done about it either way at that moment. He took Sherisza’s hand in his, and she held onto him while they made their way to the back. It felt ominous to move farther into the darkness of the ship’s rear, but even the emergency lighting wasn’t on.

  They forced open the door to engineering and went in, though Dillon couldn’t see a thing. He followed Sherisza as she guided him by the hand she still held. Either by instinct or some extremely potent low-light vision like the feline she resembled, she led him right to the Daevol Drive. He could hear her clawed hands sliding across its surface as she looked for the release of the casing. He heard two clasps open, and then she began toggling some switch within.

  “I’m… not feeling so good,” Dillon said as the ship started to feel unnaturally warm. He had expected it to start getting cold immediately with life support offline.

  “It is radiation. The ship’s plating protects us from most, but there is some that the shields protect us from. Hang on, Dillon, I nearly have the drive awake again,” Sherisza said. The blue indicator light came on, then, and Sherisza put the casing back on the Chrono Drive as if afraid it was going to melt the two of them. “Come on, come on.”

  The life support came back online, then the artificial gravity, followed by the interior lighting. Dillon saw the terminal in the corner switch back on, rebooting along with Daevol. Some of their exercise equipment was askew, but otherwise, the ship didn’t appear to have taken much damage, if any. There was no telling what the cabins would look like, but there were no hull breach alarms as life support got back to nominal function. And then they heard the sound they both wanted to hear.