‘Well,’ Grie thought to himself as he fell through the silence of space away from the half-destroyed Fhit, ‘This is quite a predicament.’ He wasn’t sure if his armor would even handle re-entry on its own, but he was certain no matter what he hit when he finally reached the surface, he’d be pulverized. He wondered if any of his comrades had survived the initial blast of the explosion. Truth be told, he had only survived because he had gotten a bad feeling immediately beforehand and put his gloves and helmet back on before running into the main passageway to see if something was wrong. Had he not, exposure alone would have already killed him, even if the blast that ripped the galley to shreds hadn’t done so first.
‘At least I have a few minutes to sort out my last thoughts.’ Based on the distance at which the Fhit had been orbiting, it would be another ten minutes at least before he even hit atmo. Grie pulled himself into a ball, using changes in his center of gravity to turn himself back toward the ship to see how it was faring. He wished he hadn’t.
The section of the ship that contained the TMDS itself had been torn open in the blast. As a result, the system was now providing additional forces on the frame of the ship and was slowly tearing the ship apart. After the TMDS containment unit was compromised, the crew should have had two minutes to reach the nearest escape shuttle. Unfortunately, whatever had caused the blast had blown open the main steam lines, which meant there was only enough pressure to operate the underbridge launchers, which ran on an auxiliary system. With those limitations, only about four hundred could get off the ship, maximum, and a Qzeno-class Ultracarrier had a crew in the tens of thousands. Whoever had planned this had either gotten very lucky or knew far too much about Thorlinthian ship design.
Looking about, he saw a few other possible survivors, but before he could even try to reach them on the wireless, the Fhit’s TMDS finally collapsed, and the resulting forms of radiation, while not particularly harmful to organics, knocked out any chance of communication for the next five minutes while the suits’ electrical subsystems restarted. Luckily, when electrical current was cut to the helmet, the darkened visor cleared up, allowing the wearer to see even if the suit was shut down by these exact types of conditions. Resigning from his attempts to hail the survivors, Grie lay his head back.
He did so just in time to see a shuttle create a small shadow over a star. It had to be more than a mile away, but for some reason, it gave Grie hope. It had the Armada’s insignia on it, after all, and that’s exactly the type of sight he needed right now. Now thinking along lines more in favor of living, Grie thought back to a conversation he had had with Drigondii Sheii’Cronell several months ago.
“Sir, there’s something that’s been bothering me for a while now,” Grie said as he looked up from his plate to his leader. “The day you saved me, your eyes shone red, just like the Sheii’Cronell stories, and they do every time you perform one of your incredible feats. Does it have anything to do with how you achieve them?”
Drigondii looked up from his own plate, grinning ever so slightly. “You know, now that you mention it, it probably does. My eyes shine like that whenever I manipulate lifeforce.”
“Lifeforce, sir? Like in those movies you like much?” Grie began to think of laser swords, energy shields, and other such impossible or simply impractical things that were also featured in those films. “Seems a bit fictitious to me, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.”
“Well, that’s just what it’s called. Apparently, it’s derived from a very ancient word used to describe the powerful nature of the universe. I think it was even a religious term at one point. The word itself apparently has a strange interaction with some people’s brains, allowing them to access these types of powers. It’s really got more to do with quantum interdimensional connections between matter and energy than an actual life force, but I have to admit, I’m not exactly well enough educated in those matters to explain it to you, and I don’t know a better word for quantum interdimensional connections. Plus, whenever you use it, it’s like a million voices are speaking to you from inside and outside yourself at the same time. Lifeforce doesn’t seem unfitting.” At this Drigondii chuckled and took another bite of his steak.
“What’s the word, sir?” Grie asked. Drigondii looked up again, giving Grie a look that expressed both pride and amusement.
“The word, Grie? Are you asking because you don’t know or because you do?” Drigondii didn’t speak again until the end of the dinner.
Reaching out with every fiber of his being to the ship, Grie spoke into the nothingness the word that he could never have known and yet which now seemed so obvious. It was a word so ancient, it could not be expressed with sound or symbol. It could only be spoken with thought, feeling, and understanding. Grie thought of his child’s birth, his own growth to a man, his best friend’s death, the tree that stood in his yard. He thought of the cycle of a star, a cloud of gas, a bu
rning inferno, and a massive explosion leading to more clouds of gas which would do the same.
And as he thought these things, as he began to make all the connections between himself and every particle and thing and person around him, the word came, like a thundering voice in and out of himself. And it spoke power into him, and he spoke it out to the shuttle. For the shuttle was as much a part of that word as he was, as was the space between them. And for those few moments, as Grie found himself coming closer to the shuttle, he felt as though he could see all the expanse of the worlds. Was this how the Great One saw, he wondered, as if nothing were separate and all of space and time were the same?
But just as he had begun to form these thoughts, he found his hand grasping the cold metal of the shuttle, and the word was gone and took with it all of its profound thoughts. ‘Just in time, too,’ Grie thought, as the flames of re-entry began to wrap around the shuttle, barely missing him as he lay as flat against the top of the shuttle as he could while holding onto its piping hot throughput vents as hard as he could. And with that, he passed into an exhausted slumber.
Inside the shuttle, Angus Ayling looked up toward the thunking sound which had occured just before the deafening roar of re-entry. “What was that?” He looked to his wife, Summer, who shrugged.
“Probably just an insulator plate popping. I’ve heard they have a tendency to do that sometimes.” She placed her hand on Angus’s shoulder. He’d been thoroughly shaken since he had seen the face of one of the Tees back on the ship. It had been a young man, no older than seventeen, and he had looked more normal than any of the Tees Angus had seen thus far. No unusual or foreign trait was to be spotted on the boy. Angus had realized just as the shuttle’s door was closing that it was because the boy was from Earth, visiting the ship with a group of high schoolers who were being recruited for the Armada.
“Well, we can check it out when we land,” Lieutenant Denton said. He looked even paler than Angus. The Dragon Riders had been there as part of a recruitment ploy, and he had realized it far too late to abort or even alter the mission. “For now, let’s just get some rest.” The team retired to their rooms for a few hours’ rest as the shuttle moved across the Pacific toward their awaiting landing zone.