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

Shadow froze, uncertain, his clever mind slow to put it together.

“War comes, with all its chaos, but perhaps we may hold to something more all the same.” Isgono floated away and cleared the wall screen. “We have been pulled from hyperspace. Your people will be looking for you.”

Isgono turned away, and Shadow vibrated with half a dozen conflicting urges. Demand answers, find out more about Night Song, ask how they could possibly have been ejected from hyperspace and still be alive, find his siblings, find his father, let the clinging edges of the vision reclaim him…

Then he remembered there had been alarms, and his unit had been ordered to report, which he had not done—

And Shadow grabbed a handhold, propelling himself from the compartment.

* * *

As soon as everything began to feel strange, Ripley knew in the pit of her stomach there was a huge problem. She lived and breathed space, and had since she was a little pup dreaming and watching the vast amounts of Human-made sci-fi. Mom had told her she was named after an incredible space pilot. Ripley hadn’t found out her name was sort of an ironic homage until she finally got around to seeing Ghostbusters.

“The Human name for my species is a joke?” she demanded from her mother.

“A joke? Not at all,” she’d explained.

“But you said the original explorers were mostly Japanese.”

“They were. But that doesn’t mean they never watched American movies, dear. It does mean they hadn’t met the Besquith when they named your race, though.”

Ripley pushed away from the little desk where she’d been studying her native language in more detail. The Zuul didn’t go in for slates as much as Humans did. They preferred fixed displays to ones you could carry around. Not that there weren’t slates aboard Paku, just not in the profusion she was used to, and she didn’t know why.

“What’s wrong?” Sonya asked.

Ripley looked at her sibling and could tell Sonya hadn’t asked the question because she’d seen Ripley felt something, but because Sonya had felt something herself. On the far side of the compartment Drake’s ears were back, and he let out an involuntary snarl. He was looking around in a mixture of confusion and anger.

Oh, no, Ripley thought, then Paku fell out of hyperspace.

Someone barked a scream in alarm. It took her a moment to realize it was her. Or maybe it was all three of them; she wasn’t sure. All she knew was, they were many hours prior to emergence, and when a starship fell out of hyperspace prematurely, it was a bad, bad thing.

“What the fuck was that?” Drake’s harsh growling voice cut through her momentary panic.

“We dropped out of hyperspace,” Sonya said, looking at Ripley for confirmation. “Right?”

“Yeah, that’s what it felt like,” Ripley confirmed.

“That’s not supposed to happen,” Drake said.

“You think? Don’t be a bloody idiot,” Ripley snapped.

“You’re supposed to die when you come out of hyperspace too soon,” Sonya said.

“Those are all furphies,” Ripley said quickly. “Stories they tell pups to scare them.”

“Yeah?” Sonya replied, her eyes wide. “Well I’m pretty bloody scared right now.”

Ripley pushed toward the squad bay they shared with the rest of their platoon. The sound of Humans yelling at each other in confusion and alarm came to her ears as she pulled the airtight door open.

“What are you doing?” Drake asked.

“Getting geared up,” she said. A few of the Human mercs were entering the compartment as well, all floating toward equipment lockers.

“Why?” Drake demanded. A second later, Paku’s howling general quarters alarm went off.

“That’s why.” Everyone else exploded into motion.

* * *

“The ship is on combat footing,” Paku’s tactical officer reported.

Alan again admired the discipline of the Zuul crew. Faced with the unexpected and impossible, they’d quickly overcome their own feelings and gone to work. As a merc company commander, he’d spent innumerable hours with his troopers, teaching them to work the problem. It seemed to be instinctive to the Zuul crew. They all knew their duty as though it were intrinsic to their being.

“Sensors are coming online,” a technician reported.

One of the problems with their predicament was not being ready for anything. Most of the bridge was unmanned during hyperspace, with the crew reporting for duty an hour or two before emergence to check out their instruments. Not only did Captain I’kik have to wait impatiently for her crew to get to their stations, but many systems had to be booted up and brought online.

“What do we have?” Captain I’kik asked. “And get me a position fix.”

“Working on the positional fix,” the navigator replied.

Navigational systems were relatively simple. They used cameras to take pictures of the stars, and computers to compare those pictures against all the recorded positions of those stars. Run a few million comparisons, and bingo; you know where you are.

“Got it, we’re in the E’cop’k system.”

“Never heard of it,” Alan said.

“Me neither,” the captain admitted.

“Nor me,” A’kef made it unanimous.

“Details?” I’kik asked the navigator.

“Roughly between Klbood and our intended destination of P’k’k, which were 295 light years apart. It’s closer to P’k’k than Klbood, but since hyperspace is non-Einsteinian in its physics, that doesn’t really—”

“No, it doesn’t really matter, does it?” the captain said icily.

Alan was amused that his translator assigned Einstein to a term the Zuul used. He guessed every race might have a brilliant mathematician in their past, so it was a universally translatable term?

“Sorry, Captain. E’cop’k system wouldn’t be well known because it’s not a charted system for travel. There’s no stargate here, and I have nothing more than its positional data and spectral class. This usually means the system has no planets or asteroids.”

“No stargate?” Alan hissed, looking at the captain in alarm. “That means…”

“It means, unless the