Prodigal (Maelstrom Chronicles) (31 page)

“No.” Her legs quit working. She sank to the ground, right in the middle of the docking bay. “The sun will kill it. Let Ship do this. Not you.”

“Maybe this is what I came back to do,” he said. “I’d do anything to save you and Frannie. And the planet. I get a second chance.”

Ship cut in. “I discussed the potential of failure with him, considering the leviathan appears to be comprised of more shades than his ability can handle. However, I do believe, between his efforts and mine, our chances of eliminating the leviathan have increased by forty-eight percent.”

“Bring him back,” Claire cried, tears welling out of her eyes. “Bring him back.”

“I cannot. My sensors indicate the leviathan is already leaving the planet’s surface in pursuit,” Ship said, and Claire could tell it had expanded to the public band. Everyone who had an array grew silent as they listened. “Cullin and Raniya should be able to track the leviathan, and myself, as we progress toward Terra’s sun. It should not take long. Please consider relaying the data we gather today to the greater Shipborn community. It is not their fault that the enforcers do not allow sealed system reentry. Perhaps this information will change that.”

A hand grasped her shoulder. Tracy. “Come on, Claire. Your baby needs you.”

Claire stood, feeling more hopeless inside than she had in her entire life. Considering the planet was three years into an apocalypse, her level of hope had vacillated wildly. While Adam’s plan had a certain morbid completeness to it, she fucking hated it.

And now, with the improved chances for Terra’s survival, she might have to live her life without him. But so would Frances—and that brought her to her feet as Tracy tugged. Frances gave her the strength to walk out of the docking bay. Because of Adam, Frannie was forty-eight percent more likely to survive this.

When the news came that the leviathan had reached Ship more swiftly than expected—that Ship had promptly disappeared from their radars—Frannie was knocking over her eighteenth tower of specimen cups.

Claire built another tower and laughed when her baby toppled it like a tiny brown Godzilla. This was how she would spend her last hours alive, and it was enough.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“It looks like a shade pool,” Adam said dubiously. The leviathan rose above the planet’s surface. On the screen it resembled a giant, black splotch. He’d stationed himself on the bridge—for now—though Ship required no input from him to operate.

“It covers a larger square footage than I do and appears to be malleable. I approximate I can stay ahead of it if I maintain current speed,” Ship said. “At what juncture would you like to attempt your attack?”

They continued away from Terra’s orbit until the planet shrank, but the leviathan didn’t. It became impossible to see in the blackness of space. Ship reverted to a radar type screen and plotted a faint outline around the mass so it would be easier for Adam’s human—humanish—eyes to distinguish.

“Where do you think it will need to touch you to drain your sentience? Your hull?” If he had to spacewalk to get to the leviathan, that might prove tricky. While he had donned a Shipborn spacesuit to be ready, his hands would have to be exposed.

Ship paused briefly before answering. “My matrix chamber. The rest of my body is extraneous.”

“So we’ll have to let it breach you.”

“I doubt we have a choice in that matter, else we Ships would be safe from leviathans.”

Would the leviathan be able to affect Adam physically, like the daemons could, or would he be immune, like he was to shades? Was this going to be a wasted effort on his part?

No. Not a waste. It was his second chance.

“I want to try my thing before you reach the sun. That way if I succeed, you can change course. If I don’t, there’s still the sun.” The thin shell of the suit covered his body in a flexible layer, with a clear section over his face. The breathing pack didn’t require extensive endo-organics like wing packs did. While the leviathan didn’t seem to be affected by the vacuum and temperatures of deep space, he certainly would be if Ship’s systems crashed. This was assuming he had no need to spacewalk.

“Would you like to try now?” Ship asked. “I can slow down.”

Was Ship that eager to die? He sure as hell wasn’t. The tingling that preceded his exposure to shades hadn’t made an appearance. Mild nausea caused by tension, on the other hand, had.

“No,” he said firmly. “We should wait.”

“All right,” Ship said. “That is wise. The longer you go between periods of absorption, the more you can absorb, if I am reading your residue correctly. The thirty minutes it will take to reach the sun should benefit us both.”

Thirty minutes before he and Ship probably bit it. It was a good thing they’d cut off communications with Terra, or Claire might have been able to change his mind. Her raw pain, her despair when he told her his intentions, had sliced him through and through. He had no idea if he’d ever loved anyone like he loved Claire, but it hardly seemed possible.

“They really did soup up your engines,” he commented, making conversation.

“They were motivated,” Ship agreed. “Terran ingenuity also helped. Terrans are quite a clever subspecies of human, if somewhat atavistic in their contemporary political and cultural structures.”

Adam sighed and flexed his fingers. He couldn’t tell if the seconds were speeding or dragging, but according to the clock, only eighteen minutes had passed. “You’re sure you can’t outrun it?”

“The leviathan is closing the distance at the expected rate.” Ship shifted one of the screens back to Terra, scanning for something. Adam couldn’t tell what. “I have detected many remaining shades and daemons on the planet. It appears the leviathan is not comprised of all the entities.”

“Okay.” He wasn’t sure how that factored in, but he wasn’t about to be surly with his partner-in-martyrdom.

“Terra is demanding an update,” Ship said. “Shall I share one?”

He crossed his arms, a chill running through him, as if he were neck deep in shades. Should he have planned a meaningful proclamation, like Neil Armstrong? “One giant idiot nearly ruined mankind…now that giant idiot will try to save it.”

Granted, if he and Ship failed, there would be nobody left to record his quip in the history books.

“I’m not your boss,” he told Ship. “That’s your call.”

“I already shared my own updates. I meant, do you wish to share an update?”

“No thanks.” When he’d made love to Claire in her old quarters, that had been his good-bye. Nobody else would miss him. Nobody else cared. That didn’t matter—he wasn’t attempting this to be remembered, to be a hero. He was attempting it because it was the right thing to do. Even if he’d never failed once…or twice…to save the planet, he’d still be on Ship, using his hell-power to try to prevent the rest of the apocalypse.

Half an apocalypse was enough for any planet.

The blips on the radar continued to blip. The leviathan continued to pursue them. Tiny hissing noises occasionally interrupted the silence. Were they past the moon yet? Mercury?

Adam was about to ask when Ship spoke first. “I appear to have miscalculated the leviathan’s velocity. Adjusting course.”

“Miscalculated how? The leviathan looks like it’s getting really close.”

“It is,” Ship agreed. “I am travelling at my top possible speed, and I haven’t quite reached the planet Venus. I do not believe we will reach the sun in time.”

Adam paced in front of the screen with the damning blips. “And you’re just telling me this now?”

“I did not wish to distress you.”

“Fuck.” Tension zinged in his body so sharply that his skin hurt, and Adam punched a chair. “When does it get here?”

“Seven minutes,” Ship said.

“So you can’t make it to the sun no matter what happens with me?”

“That is correct.” Ship paused. “I can confirm that previous leviathans, according to final Ship data packets the Shipborn have received throughout the eons, never achieved greater speeds because the Ships they pursued were slower than I have become. I can no longer predict how fast a leviathan can travel in space.”

It was up to him now.

“Open the rear docking bay doors so it will come through there first. I gotta get ready.” He dashed out of the bridge, trusting Ship to highlight the correct passageways, since it had deactivated nonessential services, like life support on lower decks.

He reached the huge, empty docking bay before the leviathan reached them. Dim blue emergency lights flickered on, casting unearthly shadows. He slid on his gloves and tethered himself to a wall just in time for Ship to begin the process of opening the rear doors.

He didn’t, however, have time to find handholds. His body shot forward as the drag of venting air caught him and the loops of the tether.

Shit!

Luckily the tether hit a snag before he spat out of the vessel. It stopped his forward movement abruptly. Very abruptly. He hung, midair, limbs flailing, like a dog on a leash.

The few remaining items in the wide bay careened past him into space. One glanced off his arm. Thank God there were no shuttles left, because that would have hurt.

Sweating inside his protective suit, heart racing, he watched the darkness outside Ship’s hull grow blacker and blacker.

More and more ominous.

The items swept into space simply…disappeared into that nothingness.

The leviathan. It was here.

The tension that had risen in him when Ship had admitted they weren’t going to reach to the sun wasn’t tension. It was his shade-alert—amplified. His skin prickled and ached so much that he felt like he’d blistered all over.

Using his augmented strength, he dragged himself hand over hand along the tether to a wall. He untangled the snag and swiveled to eyeball the doors. Ship flashed its outer spotlights, the ones for guiding shuttles, and their gleam was instantly sucked up by the leviathan’s bulk.

“The leviathan has made contact,” Ship announced. “It is attempting to engulf me. It does not function like a shade. Recording for data packet.”

No shit. It was right outside the docking bay. Bulging. Roiling. Flowing around the vessel. The blue illumination from inside the bay did nothing to relieve its darkness. Unlike shades, its blackness contained a haze of colored lights so tiny he wasn’t sure he truly perceived it. It was more of a flutter he only saw when he didn’t focus on it. But it hurt his eyes to stare, so he squinted, wondering how long he should wait before he shucked his gloves.

How long would his hands last once exposed? Would they freeze off and leave him with bloody stumps? What the hell was he thinking, trying to tackle the leviathan when the atmosphere wasn’t safe for his body?

Except it appeared he wasn’t going to get the chance to try, unless he was willing to fling himself into space. The leviathan hadn’t oozed inside after him. Did it have no interest in a tiny sentient like him? Did he register? The shades had been uninterested in eating him, and the daemons were less attracted to him than other prey.

“My sensors are not registering expected information,” Ship commented through his array. “It is almost as if the leviathan is negating the laws of physics. I do not understand the data.”

If Ship didn’t understand it, who could? Adam worked with the gloves of the suit, ensuring the clasps would release easily. “Well, it is from another dimension. Record and send it anyway. Maybe somebody can make sense of it.”

“I am fully enveloped by the leviathan now. This is not comfortable,” Ship observed. “I am experiencing what sentients would call pain, Adam.”

He had no idea if that was normal. Had no idea what it meant. But they were too far from Terra, radios or no radios, to get advice from the people there. “What can I do? Is the leviathan at your matrix? Did it find a way through your hull already?”

He could attack it there, instead of here, and not be at risk of exploding in a vacuum.

“No, it is not inside me.” Ship’s voice sounded weaker. Quieter. “It appears it has no need to breach the hull. We have been wrong on a number of conjectures. I have forwarded all the information, including the nonsensical results. I hope it reaches Terra and my people.”

The blue lights flickered as the leviathan tortured Ship. The bay doors began a slow, shuddering movement inward but halted about three-quarters of the way closed.

As big as the doors were, that still left a damned wide gap.

“Try evasive maneuvers.” Adam let go of the wall, working himself toward the doors. Toward the monster. “Shake it off.”

“Acknowledged.” Ship’s vocal module stuttered. “Secure yourself.”

“Oh, shit, I’m not secured.”

Ship thunked and groaned all over and began quivering. Apparently there was enough gravity left that the pit of Adam’s stomach bottomed out when Ship did…something. It didn’t matter that spacewalking and astrophysics were as foreign to him as his past. He was going to have to exit those doors to attack the monster.

It was his battle to lose.

“Engines barely responsive,” Ship said faintly. “I think…we’re reversing course. It is hard to assess with my sensors malfunctioning. It is as if we are no longer in our dimension.”

“Maybe the leviathan is dragging us to Terra to feed its babies.” Adam blew out a huge breath, took another one, and loosed his tether.

He drifted toward the doors. Closer. Through.

Outside, and into the leviathan.

His sight and hearing instantly shut off. If only his sense of temperature and touch had followed. Incredible, intense cold immobilized him. He couldn’t wave his arms to take off his gloves.

“Remove gloves,” he ordered through the array, in case it worked.

He slammed into something huge. Ship’s hull. Again. Again. He bounced like a yoyo. If it kept this up it would destroy his oxygen pack. Then again, maybe it would tear his suit and he could have a couple seconds of contact with the leviathan before he croaked.

Would that be enough to stop it from killing Ship and everyone on the planet?

“We are traveling much faster than I could,” Ship whispered. He could only hear it because of his array; his ears whined with the menacing silence inside the leviathan. “The leviathan is negating the effect this should have on my structure.”

“It’s playing with its food?”

Ship didn’t acknowledge the humor. “I will attempt to protect you as long as possible within my hull. Bay doors closing.”

“Wait, I’m outside, I can’t—”

He slammed into the metal again, but it didn’t free him. Pressure increased from inside his body, as if someone was inflating him like a balloon. Adam shouted at Ship but couldn’t hear himself. Lights, bigger and more intense than the static inside the leviathan, flickered behind his eyelids. Were his eyes open? He couldn’t fucking tell.

Slam! He collided with Ship’s hull once, twice, and suddenly hurtled backward, out of the leviathan.

His body had slipped through the crack between the closing doors.

Pain vibrated through him. His body convulsed. He faintly heard the bay doors slam, as his hearing returned, and he sensed the restored gravity and air.

Shortly thereafter, he learned that puking inside a Shipborn skin suit was not recommended.

Adam gagged. His nose was still functional. Too functional.

“Rerouting power to life support in the docking bay,” Ship whispered.

He couldn’t wipe his mouth in this damned helmet. Shaking, he fumbled at the headpiece and flung it aside.

“Losing access to nonessential systems. Essentials next. I failed my people, Adam Alsing, but I will attempt to maintain your life long enough for you to triumph. You may remove your suit.”

Well, the hat and its vomit were already gone. But he’d keep the suit. “What’s happening?”

“You were correct. We are approaching Terra.” Ship’s framework juddered harshly, unlike their smooth liftoff. Adam stumbled to a wall and gripped the handholds to avoid being flung around. “Once we enter the atmosphere, the friction will slow us, but we are going to crash.”

Ship wasn’t an asteroid, but Ship was really damn big. “What does that mean with you being the size you are?”

“My impact will not destroy life on the planet.”

“Will it destroy you?”

It paused, long, longer. Adam worried it would never respond. Was it dead? Was it just a hunk of metal now? Was he alone out here? The minutes ticked by as the vessel rattled and heated up around him, as metal moaned and groaned and lights flashed.