Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) Ben Stevens (best contemporary novels txt) 📖

Maya was still buckled into her chair and harness, her small hands folded across her lap, eyes closed. She continued her invocation song, however hard it was to hear over the noise of the ship imploding. Lucy had unbuttoned her shirt and was frantically ripping, pulling and plugging wires from the ship’s control panel into jacks in her breastbone. Other than her working arms and hands, she was as motionless as a statue, and she appeared to be withdrawn inside herself, in some sort of self-induced trance.

Just then, there came a bang with a higher pitch, a different tone, followed by an incredible hissing sound, like high-pressure gas releasing at great speed from a small opening. The hiss became more of a roar, ear-bleedingly loud.

Shit! The air! It is a vacuum! Jon thought, grimacing. He was unable to cover his ears without releasing the hammer, and he would die before he let that happen. His eyes darted around the room. Maya, strangely, seemed unfazed, though Carbine clutched both his ears. His face was awash with agony, his fists open as he palmed the flat of his blade against his head. Lucy, like Maya, seemed unaffected, though this wasn’t surprising. Jon was sure she was either mentally elsewhere or was capable of tuning out any noise she wanted. What was a surprise was that the air didn’t seem to be leaving the cabin. Despite the deafening roar of high-velocity gas, there was no sign of anything loose being sucked out or moving around, and no breeze—nothing at all except the noise.

Phew. Jon allowed himself a small moment of relief. The bardo was not a vacuum, after all.

Nothing was going out. But something was coming in. Jon spied a rent in the ship’s hull, through which the silt-smoke was starting to billow.

“They’re coming through!” Jon shouted, cocking his hammer back. He wondered how effective his swing would be in a zero-g environment but had no idea what else to do. The rolling smoke poured itself into a large globule in the cabin and began to morph into a humanoid sandstorm. Hazy columns where its legs might have been, maintained an umbilical connection to the sea outside the ship. Looking like the sand genie emerging from the proverbial bottle, the guardian of the bardo hovered in the air, surveying the room, then screamed.

The scream filled the cabin with an unearthly beast’s roar that was unlike anything Jon had ever heard before.

The nervous tension broke Jon’s cool, and he returned the animalistic shriek with his own war cry. His attempt to draw the beast’s attention worked, the genie launching straight for him. He was ready for it—or so he thought—and swung at the smoke-thing’s face. Jon couldn’t tell whether his hammer passed straight through his target ineffectively, or whether he’d missed entirely, for as soon as he fired his hammer shot, his body spiraled into a pirouette.

Dammit! Jon had wondered for a second what might happen, but his lack of zero-g experience hadn’t prepared him for this much of a blunder. The rapid spinning caused him to lose sight of the creature, as well as his bearings. He released the hammer with one hand, stretching out his arm in the hope of finding something with which to stop the spiral. Before he could locate anything solid, something found him.

It wasn’t impact that he felt, more a sort of penetration. A sudden, shocking cold was simply there, where a moment before it had not been. His guts felt beyond ice cold. There was no gradual change in temperature; it was as if someone had teleported dry ice into his chest cavity, or he had been stabbed with an enormous icicle. The spinning stopped, and he realized he was now held fast in the clutches of the smoke. Its thick, rolling substance cocooned him and pierced him. He felt as bound by the silt-smoke as he would have in chains. The cold continued to burn his insides as he struggled to overcome his ethereal restraints.

The umbilical tail that connected the creature to the raging storm outside forked and sent a tentacle-like polyp straight toward Maya, who was still chanting in her chair. Her song ended the second the ghostly appendage reached her. A soft purple glow appeared out of thin air between her and the tendril, interrupting the attack.

The smoky filament smacked into the purple shield that had grown to outline Maya’s body and splashed into a dozen directions. The different tributaries of the split smoke-tentacle regrouped in the center of the cabin near the ceiling and began to take the shape of another humanoid.

Jon could feel himself fading, like a sinking swimmer who had already run out of breath and was running on the oxygen fumes left in his blood, his brain slowly shutting down and his vision fading to black. The panicky struggle had passed, and he found himself in a state of almost serene relaxation, of surrender.

He felt his memories slipping from his mind like water through a closed fist. He couldn’t grab them. Although his vision had already faded, he closed his eyes and concentrated on one thing. Maya. Perhaps if he could not grip that thought, he could cup his hands and try to support it. Maya. Maya. To his dismay, he found he couldn’t remember what she looked like. Hold on to the idea, the idea of Maya. Please, please.

Carbine, who had been clutching his ears in pain from the thunderous noise, found sudden respite when the scream of the storm was somehow muffled. He opened his eyes, examining his hands and arms, then the rest of his body. A soft purple glow covered him and seemed to be shielding him. He glanced up and saw Maya surrounded by the same glow. Then he spotted Jon, above the stairwell near the back of the cabin, gripped by a tornado of smoke. He shouted to Jon, but his words