Night Song (The Guild Wars Book 9) by Mark Wandrey (best ereader under 100 .txt) 📕

was more than 30 hours before they were scheduled to arrive in P’k’k. He immediately wondered if the hyperspace generator failed. The chill of fear yielded to a logical thought. If that happened you wouldn’t be thinking about it.

He grabbed his pants and uniform shirt and quickly got dressed. Around him, Paku shuddered to life. He could hear shouts in Zuul and English asking and theorizing what had happened. He wondered how much of it was his own imagination. Sure, others were responding, but maybe it was just some strange movement by the ship. That happened in hyperspace, he tried to convince himself. The effort fell flat.

“What the bloody hell was that?” Tucker said, floating up next to Alan’s open compartment.

“You felt it, too?” he asked his XO.

“Damned right I did. We dropped out of hyperspace.”

“Impossible,” Alan said. He found the old-fashioned wristwatch he wore on deployment in a zippered compartment in his duffle bag. It operated on a tiny RTG, or radio thermoelectric generator. Basically, decaying radioactive material made heat, which it converted into power. Only a little radiation, which was shielded in the watch, and only a little power. It was enough to run the watch, and even make it glow at night. He confirmed the date and time. “Over a day early,” he said.

The howling alert to battle stations sounded in Paku’s hallways. Alan cringed; the damned sound reminded him of a dog his dad had run over when he was a kid.

“All command staff, report to the bridge,” a Zuul voice announced.

“That tears it,” Alan said. “Not just some weirdness.”

“Commander!” It was Sergeant Bana of Second Squad.

“Sergeant, report,” Tucker ordered.

“I was listening to music in the Phoenix,” the older sergeant explained.

“What did you see?” Alan asked.

“We’re in normal space! It wasn’t smooth, either. Everything kinda swirled and resolved. Never seen nuthin’ like it.”

Alan cursed. “Get the squads assembled and warm up the CASPers,” he said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

* * *

Isgono sat silently beside him, but Shadow replayed the Sei’s instructions on a loop in an attempt to stay focused.

Breathe in the scent.

Deep, regular breaths as Shadow worked to match the older Zuul’s slow tempo.

Differentiate each component part.

Shadow had never encountered a scent so complex. He’d grown up in a Human city built against the ocean, and low tide and concentrated Human had provided a sometimes-overwhelming stench, but this…

Every time he thought he had it, some new, subtler piece would brush past his nose. Each one he chased down had another part, and then another, until his skin jumped at the impossibility of it, and he had to force his breathing back to steadiness.

Follow the trail.

In his eagerness to learn, Shadow had always had a high tolerance for instructions that didn’t make initial sense. He trusted in his teachers, believed they had access to wisdom he did not. Certainly Isgono had proven himself already, in sharing information about their clan and their kind that Shadow was only beginning to grasp.

But this…he’d been at it for hours. Breathe a scent, break it down, follow a trail. The words had become nonsense, the smell endless, the trail nonexistent.

Perhaps he didn’t have true visions at all, in the way Zuul understood them. He’d learned to dream, somehow, from Humans, so this Zuul approach to entering a space that would allow him to consciously bring one about couldn’t work for him.

Breathe—

Isgono was wrong about him.

Breathe—

Maybe he’d had the skill, but it couldn’t be controlled or learned like a normal Zuul could control or learn it because he wasn’t a normal Zuul; he and his siblings could never be truly Zuul, and absolutely not Human, and instead they would be some disconnected in between, left to drift through the galaxy and—

“No,” Isgono said, or maybe Shadow imagined he’d said it, because in his attempt to force focus, everything around him had blurred, and now he was falling…

The scent twisted around him, and he tried to open his eyes to see how he could be falling in zero G, what had happened to make the air solidify and slash against him, a whip that struck every nerve ending. But he didn’t have eyes to open, only the pain. The scent thickened further, and he plummeted through it, burning.

Space closed in.

Three stars rose, their light intensifying and fading in a pattern he couldn’t bring into focus.

The smell crawled through his nose, worming sharp fingers up his nasal cavity, behind his eyes, scraping the inside of his skull.

He burned, and the scent Isgono had put in front of him ate his bones. He would die here, falling. He would fall here forever, dying.

No, someone said, but he could no longer differentiate his own voice from Isgono’s. Couldn’t remember where he was, or how he’d gotten there.

One of the stars faded, and a sharp bar of light stabbed through him.

Ships, small enough he could pick them up, if only he could reach, threw more bars of light at each other, and at him. He spun as he fell, but no matter how he turned, the stars and the ships remained in his line of sight.

But how could he see without eyes? At the thought, space shuddered around him, and the burning pain clenched tighter around him.

One of the ships exploded, and then the other. Every point of light around him was a ship exploding, the life in them pouring out, everything falling and dying and the burning and the burning and the burning…

SHADOW.

Death.

SHADOW.

Every point of light was a death, a thousand deaths, a trillion, an impossibility of deaths.

SHADOW.

Was the shadow causing the death?

No, he was the shadow, he was Shadow, this was only a vision, a Zuul way of understanding the universe around him.