Heaven's Call: A thrilling military science fiction book (LUMINA Book 3) I.G. Hulme (audio ebook reader .TXT) 📖

his ship. But if he could gain the momentum to carry him forwards, he was hoping that the thrusters would give enough lift to keep him above the moon’s lava-strewn surface.

But it was going to be a close call.

So he let himself be drawn painstakingly into the moon’s pull, hoping it would increase the velocity of this bizarre, slow-motion flight across the void.

He looked down and saw the sea of vapour approaching as though it were rising up to engulf him. His hand hovered over the wrist-pack controls, ready to fire the thrusters. As he disappeared into the mists he caught a last glimpse of the Luminal derelict still agonisingly far from reach.

The clouds whipped past in a blur, a disorienting white veil. Again, he resisted the urge to fire the thrusters, praying he was still some way off the cratered surface.

And then suddenly he had fallen below the cloud layer and a primordial vision of hell stretched out before him. Everywhere he looked, fragments of torn wreckage burned, belching smoke up into the ravaged skies. The rocks themselves were blackened and scorched, and in places glowed a dull red, casting a shimmering heat haze over the terrain. And thrusting out from it all, the Luminal ship rose up like some impossible mountain.

Ryann cried out in alarm as he plummeted towards the rocks, skimming between twisted metal fragments as a slow rain of fiery rock fell all around.

At the last moment he hit the controls on his wrist-pack and felt the thrusters dragging at his body, slowing his descent. He looked at the fast-approaching terrain and saw the dark speck of his shadow skimming across the glowing rocks. There had been little point of reference before, but as the surface grew ever nearer, he suddenly realised with horror the speed with which he was travelling. He burned his thrusters at full power, fighting the pull of the moon, and to his relief saw his trajectory level out as the tangled mass of the derelict loomed ever closer.

He prayed that he had enough power in his flight suit. He was no longer falling, but the wreckage at the foot of the ship where it had impacted the surface looked impassable. He needed to coax a little more altitude out of his thrusters before they died. To his relief he felt himself rising back up towards the cloud layer.

“Ryann! Ryann, where the hell are you!”

He felt a terrible wave of nausea wash over him as his father’s voice crackled into his earpiece.

“We’ve got an alarm that a weapon was taken from one of the airlock storage safes. Your code was used to open it. Ryann? We’ve been trying to reach you — are you alright?”

At that moment, hurtling through a firestorm twenty metres above a lava field, he actually laughed out loud. He felt such an overwhelming range of emotions, there was no other way for him to cope.

“I’m okay Dad — I’m a little busy right now — I’ll have to get back to you.”

It was all Ryann could manage as he gazed on in utter disbelief at his predicament.

And then, as though the Luminal ship had suddenly launched itself towards him, he was in the midst of a deadly blur of girders and twisted hull plates whipping past. He frantically hit the thrusters full reverse, surprised by the sudden sensation of speed. He was heading straight for one of the floor sections, a maze of torn metal, and in desperation he steered his thrusters upwards, trying to reach the shadowed void of a drive hall above.

There was a brief moment when Ryann realised that his body felt suddenly heavy, and that the gravity plates of the wreck must still be functioning. He jerked his body to one side as he sped past a jagged girder, missing it by only inches. At the last moment he cleared the approaching floor level and was engulfed in the shadow of the drive hall. It was an immense open chamber, filled with wreckage and destruction.

The urgent alarm rang out in his earpiece, signalling the last dying power of his thrusters as they fought in vain to slow him down. He caught fleeting glimpses of wreckage looming up out of the darkness, before he crashed to the floor, spinning and sliding through unseen obstacles, thrown this way and that in a blur of pain.

He felt the wind forced from his lungs as he hit some immovable object in the gloom and then silence.

He lay there gasping in the darkness letting the pain wash over him. He didn’t dare move, and only after what seemed like an age did he tentatively test each battered limb for injury. He looked back towards the light of the moon and saw the trail he had gouged through the wreckage with his fall. He pulled himself gingerly up to his feet, checking over his suit for any damage, a great grin of disbelief spreading across his features.

Despite everything, his view from the torn-open side of this leviathan was breathtaking.

He was standing at the edge of the clouds, a swirling carpet that stretched away before him. And way off, high above him, was the vast shape of the Defiance, hovering above the moon at a crazy angle, swathed in mist. He realised that his point of reference had changed now that he was aboard the tilted wreck. Its gravity was aligned such that he felt upright, even though his vision told him he was leaning at a sharp angle to the moon’s surface. Gravity always played such tricks on your brain, he thought wearily to himself.

He turned back into the ship, craning his neck to take in the enormity of the chamber.

Everything was dead. All was twisted and torn, and not a single power source showed in the darkness. He felt a surge of anxiety at his predicament, that perhaps his father was right and there was nothing left to find aboard this hulk.

He went to adjust the controls on