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

eyes opened and witnessed with great relief the color and substance begin to return slowly but surely to Jon’s form. They floated like that for what seemed like a frozen moment in time. Jon seemed unconscious and was only beginning to return to existence, but all was right in her world despite the raging hell around them. She stared at the look of serenity on his still face like a mother watching her babe sleep, and her heart smiled.

Her victory was short-lived. The Drop-sentinel was not to be defeated. It had been spread across the room by the impact against Maya’s shield, but this time, instead of reforming into an anthropomorphic body, it simply began to grow, to multiply itself by way of some alien asexual reproduction. The swirling clouds began to fill the entirety of the cabin’s interior. Fear returned as master of Maya’s manor of thought; the thing was now erasing the ship.

Maya screamed in helpless frustration as the being returned to cocoon Jon, even though he was still in her arms. The silt poured over and around her form, avoiding her shield by just enough. She began to swat at it, but it was everywhere. Her efforts were as futile as if she were trying to slap away the air itself.

Jon began to fade again, and this time, the ship began to fade with him. Within a minute, the ghosts would have undone all of Lucy’s repair work, and the craft would return to a floating free-fall until it finally faded away to nothing. They were doomed… unless Lucy could find the way out.

The smoke wrapped itself around Lucy, and although unable to penetrate her shield, made her continuing search for the Drop extremely difficult. She let go of the sticks with one hand, and, like Maya, waved her shield-shrouded arm back and forth as if shooing a buzzing fly. It helped a little but created a kind of strobe-light effect on her vision. Like rapid blinking, her perceptions altered, but her mind was still able to string the diced-up images together and make a picture of pseudo-continuity. She scanned and scanned.

If Lucy’s heart had not been torn out of her chest years ago and replaced with a titanium and carbon-fiber mechanical pump, it would have leapt. Through the raging storm outside and growing thickness of the soul-smog inside, she caught a glimpse of blue-white color not too far off from the port bow of the wounded, dying transport. She shouted a victory yelp as she pulled the ship into a turn that would put it directly into the electric maw of dimensional freedom that was the promise of the Drop.

“I see a Drop! But I don’t know if it’s the right one!” Her voice was Olympian. Amplified by speakers in her cybernetic body, it overcame the scream of the storm.

It doesn’t matter! We have to take the risk! Maya screamed back telepathically through swatting palms and tears of impotent rage as the clouds consumed Jon before her very eyes.

More out of stoic determination than exertion, Lucy gritted her teeth and once again gripped the controls with both hands. Like a kamikaze pilot from Earth’s ancient past, she plunged the ship into the Drop without fear or regret as fast as its engines would propel them.

“Here goes.”

Lucy wasn’t one to knock on wood or cross her fingers, but somewhere deep inside, she crossed the ghost of her human heart. They all knew that if this wasn’t the same Drop they had come in through, that they could end up anywhere. Literally.

The second the ship passed the threshold, the ghost sentinels disappeared as thoroughly and suddenly as banished darkness before the glow of electric lights. For the stretch of a blink of an eye, it seemed as though their lives had been saved.

The Drop that delivered them from certain death in the bardo, however, was unlike the one that had brought them to that place; this one was not a rare high-altitude one.

The ship’s impact into the earth was abrupt and violent. The nigh-instantaneous destruction it suffered was nearly as complete as the stop it crashed to.

3

Only the faintest wisp of consciousness had returned to Jon when the transport exited the Drop.

The bardo spirit’s attack, which had nearly killed him, ended up being Jon’s saving grace: his body had not yet returned to a corporeal state when the transport slammed into the earth at top speed. The impact wrenched him free of Maya’s embrace, sending him floating and bouncing around like a balloon while everything else in and around the ship made its best impression of a detonating fragmentation grenade.

Having already had the integrity of its hull severely compromised by the ghosts, the transport came apart like so much aluminum foil when it hit. What was left by the time the last bit came to a stop resembled a slug’s trail in the sun; a glistening, silver smear across a desert plain. Jon came to as his body finished solidifying. He blinked his eyes several times in rapid succession in an attempt to clear the blur from his vision; he couldn’t even begin to describe the dull ache he felt in his… everything.

What the hell happened? The question slowly formed in his mind like a flower coming into bloom. He tasted something on his lips and realized upon reflection that he was lying face down in dry dirt. He licked his lips and spat, pushing himself upright, and slowly drew himself up into standing position. He rubbed his eyes to expedite the blur-removal and looked around.

Desert.

Where are we? Wait… we? He squinted in the bright sunlight that bathed the desert and bounced off the metal bits that used to be the transport. He brought his hand to his brow and continued to survey the scene. Having been unconscious during the wreck, he began to panic as his mind put two and two together. A lump formed in his throat and his chest felt tight. Where