Breeze Corinth (Book 1): Sky Shatter (65 page)

She stared at him for a moment, then leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. She whimpered when her astral form broke free from her body. Her nose began to bleed.

She floated out of the ship and into open space, and then turned to look back as it hurtled away. The armored skin was beginning to glow bright red as it entered the outer fringes of the atmosphere. She looked up and saw the platform in the distance. She scanned for signs of life amidst the cloud of debris that spewed from it. Not far from the platform, she detected Breeze’s aura. He was surrounded by Elephim and patrol ships.

She rushed to him, consciously aware that the further away from her body she traveled, the greater the feeling that a chain was pulling her back. She was too weak to project, and her body was telling her so.

She strained to get closer to Breeze. She could see him amidst the horde of Elephim that were trying to overwhelm him. He was glowing brightly, brighter than she’d ever seen.

The malevolent energy surrounding the Elephim was horrifying. If they were once human, there was very little evidence of it. They were so focused on capturing Breeze, they did not detect her.

She moved in closer.

Breeze was trapped. They were closing in on him.

Beyond the encroaching Elephim, he saw a faint wisp of light approaching like a firefly in the night sky.

A ghostly image of a young woman materialized from it. She spoke with a faint, but familiar voice that echoed in his head. She kept calling his name and pleading with him.

The Elephim inched closer, their faces nothing more than a swirling black mass. The static they emanated was overwhelming.

Through the cacophony of static, he could still hear the woman calling his name. He cleared his mind and tuned in to her voice, when a face appeared before him. It was Sally.

“Come back to us Breeze,” he heard her voice in his head.

A sense of calm swept over him as fear and doubt melted away. He saw a path that trailed behind her, a ribbon of light that stretched toward a burning flame in the distance as it hurtled toward Earth.

He knew what had to be done.

The scout ship rattled and groaned horribly as its metal skin peeled off from the friction of the atmosphere. The temperature inside the ship was beginning to rise. Inside, Ray and Achilles sat strapped into their seats while monitoring the only active vid-screen that displayed the hull’s temperature, and it continued to rise toward critical mass. They didn’t bother looking at one another. There was nothing to be said.

Raven spoke from within.
That Elephim we fought with on the platform has drained us. Otherwise, we could save the ship.

Achilles swiveled its head and responded.
We have done all that we are capable of performing. It is imperative now for Breeze to find the strength and the will to come to our aid.

Raven sighed.
Our fate in the hands of a young man who is not aware of his potential. Has it come to this?

You must have faith in him,
Achilles said.

My dear Achilles, most of my faith has faded from me a long time ago,
Raven replied.

Oslo held tightly to Sally’s hand as the lighting flickered erratically throughout the ship. He was her anchor. He wouldn’t let her go.

Sally’s nose was bleeding profusely.

One of Excort’s sons came running down the stairs to the chamber. “Father, we have an incoming ship heading toward us!” he said breathlessly.

“Impossible! The fog has us hidden,” Excort said.

“Father, it is coming from high above, not from sea level,” his son responded.

Excort broke away from the reunion and followed his son up the stairs as they exited the dormitory and headed to the Administrative Building. They took the elevator up to the roof and stepped out into the brilliant sunshine. Situated in the middle was a rectangular structure with no windows and a metal door. A tower with a spiral staircase leading to the top stood next to it. On top of the tower laid an antenna array.

Excort rushed toward the structure. “Follow me, Xenthan.”

Xenthan ran behind his father. “The auxiliary air traffic control tower? I didn’t know it was still active,” he said.

They burst into a dimly lit room with only the glow of vid-screens to light up its interior, coupled with the endless hum of electronics operating at maximum capacity. All the walls were covered with consoles attached to vid-screens displaying data. In the middle stood a table with a glass surface.

Alongside one wall, a console beeped insistently with a glaring icon flashing across its vid-screen.

Xenthan pointed at it. “An automatic guidance sequence has been initiated. The computer is guiding a ship back to the island!”

Excort approached the console and typed in a series of commands. “The vessel’s transponder is identifying itself as the scout ship,” he said as data scrolled across the vid-screen.

“They were successful!” his son shouted.

“Were they? The plan was to send me an encoded message if they succeeded, then return to Appalachia from the Pacific Northwest where they were to remain until they were certain they had not been followed. Instead, the ship is unresponsive to any attempts to hail it. On top of that, it is sending out distress signals and the automatic pilot has been engaged. For all we know they could be dead, and the scout ship is a Trojan horse sent to infiltrate the island.” Excort grimaced and his eyes narrowed. “How can the ship be heading toward us with that trajectory? That can only be possible if the fog is not active.” He moved to another console and scanned its vid-screen. “The fog is down! How can this be? Why didn’t the alarms go off?” He typed commands and studied the data that scrolled across the screen. “Now the computer is telling me the emergency shielding is inactive and the generators are offline. What is happening here?”

Excort contacted his sons, who were with Mila by the pool, via his wireless earpiece. “Get the generators back online! Both the shield and the fog are inactive! We are exposed to those above!”

“Should we shut off the guidance system and divert the ship away from us?” Xenthan said.

“We could, but if they’re alive we might harm them. The ship is programmed to return to Perihelion if it’s in distress, but it must enter the vortex along a horizontal plane to safely traverse the fog. For any ship to approach Perihelion from a vertical descent can only mean that…its pilot knew the fog would be down and the island could be seen from above. If not the pilot, then it was the ship’s computer detecting that the fog is not active, and determined that a vertical descent would be more expedient.”

The dwarf clenched his fist. “Regardless, we are most likely the victims of sabotage. Perhaps the squadron of Elephim who invaded us before have not been fully purged from the island. Some may still be here and are responsible for shutting down the generators. By doing so, the ship can be tracked to expose Perihelion’s location. It is as if they knew we would all be gathered here in one location, making it much easier to destroy us all in one fell swoop.” The dwarf tilted his head to look up at the ceiling. “As if someone on that platform had planned this all along,” he muttered, and then shook his head. “No, we cannot divert them. We need to know if they are still alive. It is a risk we have to take.” Excort thumped the console. “I told that Scandinavian to leave things be and not stir up a hornets’ nest. No good would come of it.”

“Father, what are you talking about?”

“Never mind and follow me.”

Excort stepped out of the control room and clambered up the spiral stairs of the tower while Xenthan followed. At the apex of the tower was an observation platform. They stepped onto it and gazed up at the fiery trail slashing across the sky.

Xenthan squinted and shielded his eyes. “Do you really believe it is them?”

“We will find out soon enough,” Excort said.

Breeze relaxed his shield so that it hugged his skin. He could sense the patrol ships behind him as they pulsated with an energy that reverberated through his body.

The Elephim drifted even closer as one of them lifted a hand and pointed at him. The patrol ships responded by moving into a tighter formation.

Breeze felt a calm he had never known before as he drifted back into his mind and remembered the nights he spent in the desert struggling to master his power of flight. He recalled the joy and elation that swept over him when he lifted off the ground, or the hours he spent hovering in the night sky and marveling at the desert below, with the moon splashing its luminescence across the landscape. He felt that same power and energy rush through him now. He smiled and opened his eyes.

An Elephim hovering before him tilted his head quizzically.

Breeze ballooned his shield. The rapid expansion slammed the encroaching Elephim and sent them hurtling away as patrol ships were smashed into pieces.

Breeze hovered with his arms outstretched as he reveled in the surge of power. Lost in the moment, he barely heard Sally calling his name within his mind. He turned and saw the ribbon of light that trailed her was pulling her away.

“Come back to me!” she pleaded.

Breeze leaned forward and accelerated to chase her. He strained to grab her outstretched hand, but she was always out of reach. Just ahead of them was the scout ship, on fire and falling apart, as it plunged deeper into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. He could barely sense the light wave that once flowed freely through the ship.

Breeze spoke to her with the mind link they shared. “Sally, I won’t leave you, but I need to do something first.”

Breeze flew into the ship’s wake and trailed close behind it, then expanded his shield to encompass the vessel, which immediately snuffed out the burning flames consuming the ship. He gritted his teeth from the strain of containing such a large mass.

He tried to steer the ship back up into space, but it resisted him as rockets fired to adjust its course.

His shield instantly retracted and altered it shape to protect him as the exhaust from the rockets flung him away.

He regained control and turned to find the ship. He saw it in the distance as it plunged like a ball of fire into the atmosphere and rushed after it.

He changed his strategy, choosing this time to hover over the ship and keep pace with it. He expanded his shield around the vessel and tried to pull it up, but the gravitational pull was too powerful.

Sally glided up and touched his arm. Her touch felt electric and her voice echoed in his mind. “Oslo’s with me. He says the ship is on a fixed course, don’t try to alter it.”

Breeze nodded as he started to speak, and then grimaced as he concentrated to communicate to her by thought. “I understand that now. You need to go back.”

“I won’t leave you Breeze,” she said.

“You have to retract, you’re too weak. And besides, you didn’t leave. You came back for me.”

She smiled as they leaned in to kiss, but she faded away when the ship shook violently while rockets fired again to alter its course.

Breeze opened the back of the shield to vent the exhaust from the rockets, and then quickly closed it again when they stopped firing. He struggled to stay focused and keep the shield from collapsing as the friction from the atmosphere was mounting and the Earth loomed larger before him.

Breeze gritted his teeth and hung on to the ship.

Sally’s astral form merged back into her body. She reached up to touch her nose, and then pulled her hand away to find blood on her fingers. She turned to Oslo with a look of confusion.

He squeezed her shoulder. “You did good Sally, you did good.”

The ship continued to shake violently as the cabin lights flickered.

“He’s out there all alone, just like he’s been all his life,” she said.

Oslo shook his head. “No, he knows that he has someone who cares. And now it’s up to him to see us home safely.”

In the cockpit, Ray and Achilles watched as the hull temperature gauge began to drop.

“What’s happening out there?” Ray shouted.

Achilles looked back into the passenger cabin and saw Sally and Oslo in conversation.

“I possess a theory,” it replied.

Excort and Xenthan raced down from the tower and into the control room where they headed straight to the table with the glass surface.

Excort touched the glass and a hologram of the island appeared above it. He hastily typed commands on a virtual keyboard that hovered before him and a hologram of the scout ship appeared high above the island. “Here they are,” he said, and pointed at the image of the ship. “The transponder shows the call sign and registration of the scout ship here,” he nodded at the data that appeared next to the hologram, “along with telemetry relaying its current condition, while this arc represents their projected path.” He pointed to a ray of light that traced down from the ship to the landing facility, and then shook his head. “Their angle of entry is incorrect and they are descending far too rapidly to make a controlled landing. It’s as if something or someone is constantly trying to change the ship’s course. They will either burn up in the atmosphere or,” he pointed to the landing facility, “crash here and destroy a large portion of Perihelion with an impact of that magnitude.”

Xenthan shrugged. “Why do you say their angle is bad?”

Excort grunted. “If they approach the atmosphere too steep, they will smash into it like a wall of stone and break apart. Too shallow, and they will bounce off it and back out into space. If that happens, they would drift until…”

His son stared at him blankly.

“They would die,” Excort finished. “There is not enough fuel on that ship to make a second attempt to land.”

“Couldn’t we rescue them if they were to drift away?” Xenthan said.

Excort shook his head. “With what? We don’t have anything to reach them that far into space. At least not yet.”

Xenthan wagged a finger at the hologram of the scout ship. “You said Oslo set up the transponder to automatically bring back the ship to the island. Can you alter the programming to adjust their angle of entry?”

Excort’s eyes widened. “You’re right. We will make the ship ditch itself in the ocean here.” He pointed to an area of open water off the southeastern tip of the island on the holographic map. “These scout ships are designed to break apart, so there’s nothing but a capsule to protect the passengers. We can then use the transports to rescue them.”