Chapter 19 #2
Through the viewports, the swirling chaos of the anomaly receded behind us, diminishing to a distant storm of sick color against the black. And ahead—
Stars. Clean, brilliant, vast beyond comprehension. Not the distorted pinpricks visible through the anomaly’s veil, but the true deep black of space, salted with light I had learned was so ancient it had been traveling since before either of our species had learned to name the sky.
The ship hung motionless in that perfect void, and for several heartbeats no one spoke. No one moved. We simply existed, suspended between one world and the next, while the universe arranged itself around us with a patience that made our struggles seem very small.
Someone laughed. I could not tell who. The sound broke the silence like glass, edged with somewhere between relief and hysteria, and then others joined.
Brooke, then Lila, then Kira’s higher, brighter laugh cutting through the tension until the entire command deck rang with the sound of people who had not expected to survive.
Quin’s grip loosened. Gradually, finger by finger, her hand easing its hold on mine until I could feel the blood returning to compressed tissue.
Her fingers remained laced through mine, resting now rather than gripping, and the warmth of her palm against mine carried a tenderness that twisted my hearts into knots.
“Veil clear. Anomaly behind us,” Vala’s voice cut through the laughter. “Ready with the tellic, Ruze.”
“Tellic is ready at your command,” replied the Nomadican’s disembodied voice.
“Course set for Valose,” Tyrk announced.
“Ready all for a hyper-jump,” Vala called out.
Voices answered through the comm and around the command deck. I added mine, though whether I was truly ready for what came next was another matter entirely—
The force that hit me was not directional.
It came from everywhere at once, flattening me into my seat with a weight that made the anomaly's worst feel mild by comparison.
My ears flattened hard against my skull.
My vision compressed to a tunnel, the edges darkening as the blood in my body made its own decisions about where to go.
My sword hand, still laced through Quin's, became an immovable thing, too heavy to grip and too heavy to release.
Through the viewport, the stars stretched, elongating into threads of white fire radiating outward from a central point directly ahead of us, as though the universe itself were being pulled inside out through a single fixed point in space.
Then they collapsed, everything collapsing, into a seamless, featureless void of impossible speed.
I could not have moved if the ship had been on fire.
The sound was wrong. Not loud, the opposite.
A deep, subsonic resonance that lived below hearing, felt in the chest rather than the ears, in the marrow rather than the mind.
My ancillary heart stuttered, then kicked into a brutal rhythm, pumping fresh fire of adrenalyne through veins that had gone cold with the jump’s unnatural pressure.
It seemed to go on for eternity, then stopped.
Not gradually. Not with deceleration. It simply stopped, the way a held breath stops when you finally let it go, and the universe reassembled itself around us with a patience that suggested it had been waiting.
The weight lifted. My ears unclamped. My vision expanded back to its full width and filled immediately with the sight of stars and a world I had longed to see again.
I turned my head. It required more effort than it should have.
Quin sat beside me, her grip on my hand slowly easing, her chest rising and falling in the controlled rhythm of someone who had just survived something and was taking careful inventory of her parts.
"Hyper-jump complete," Vala said from the console, his voice carrying the calm of a male for whom nothing about the last thirty seconds had been surprising.
"Is that Valose?" she asked in a small voice, her eyes wide, fixed on the viewport with the stillness of someone confronting what they had only ever heard described.
I turned my head and looked back out the viewport, at Valose filling the black in slow, inevitable increments of blue and silver.
Its surface a patchwork of dense jungle canopy and pale open plains, the Jurigon Mountains a jagged crown in the far north, the darker sprawl of the Trisess Forest a quiet counterpoint in the south, and the two seas framing the landmass on either side.
And there, barely visible at this distance, the faint luminous shimmer of the dome.
"Valose, this is Tyrk aboard the Yulineon Star Chaser," Tyrk said into the comm, his deep voice carrying the measured calm of a Nomadican who had been in worse situations and survived them. "Stand down on the gun," Tyrk added. "It's us. We brought back some old friends. And some new ones."
A pause. Then a voice came through, deep and unhurried, carrying the cadence of our new Moktian ally.
Zaku.
“Welcome back, Tyrk,” Zaku said, unmistakable amusement rumbling through the comm. “Any particular reason you’re in a Yulineon Star Chaser and not the Moktian Galaxy Cruiser you left here in?”
“Because we crashed and then ran into Vala on a planet straight out of Helios.”
“Vala?” Zaku exclaimed, genuine surprise replacing his amusement. “Jupiter’s balls! I never thought to see that Yulineon again.”
“Such little faith in me, Moktian deserter?” Vala asked dryly.
“Not in you but in Universeval Rule,” Zaku replied with a grunt. “That group of hard heads is not known to be receptive to change.”
“Stay on your current heading,” Zaku instructed. “I’ll open a portal in the planetary shielding. You’re clear to land north of the dome.”
“Copy all,” Tyrk replied.
"One more thing," Zaku added. "Nullar will be waiting outside the dome. No one enters the city until he clears you. The last thing Valose needs is another alien germ finding its way inside."
"Understood," Tyrk said.
There it was. Valose, filling the glass, growing larger with every passing mim, blue and silver and impossibly familiar, the new planetary shield shimmering across its surface like the planet was wearing armor.
Waiting with everything I had left behind, and everything I was no longer certain I deserved to return to.