The Well of Forever: The Classic Sci-fi Adventure Continues (The Star Rim Empire Adventures Book 2) Read online

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  The Well of Forever

  Book 2 of the Star Rim Empire Adventures

  R.A. Nargi

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Dear Reader

  Keep Reading

  Also by R.A. Nargi

  1

  “Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.”

  Ben Okri

  Without warning, the Vostok lurched hard, throwing the three of us off our feet. Then the ship twisted around and suddenly up was down and down was up.

  It happened so fast that the inertial compensators and artificial gravity couldn’t react in time. Neither could the gyrostabilizers.

  Chiraine Portelle screamed and Ana-Zhi Agrada bellowed. I was too shocked to make a sound. I was concentrating on not breaking my neck as I smacked into a ventilation pylon that used to run from the floor to the ceiling and was now coming diagonally at my head.

  Urgent klaxons sounded and console’s displays flashed alert upon alert. The main viewport showed a creature so large that I could only see parts of it: a muscled appendage, rippling in the mist.

  I knew what it was, of course. It was the one thing we feared running into. A cthulian.

  We had been flying blind through the mist-filled chasms of Yueld. The sensors on the Vostok weren’t much better than what we had on the Freya—even though the Vostok was a newer vessel—but I had hoped they were enough to help us avoid the megafauna that dwelt in the lower reaches of the planet.

  No such luck.

  “Prox plates!” Ana-Zhi yelled, as she tried to right herself.

  The ship heaved again and all I could think of was how impossible it was to toss a 40-meter spaceship around like a child’s toy. But impossible or not, it was happening.

  I plummeted down towards the console as the power flickered.

  “Jannigan!” Ana-Zhi bellowed.

  I managed to grab ahold of the pilot’s seat she had been sitting in moments before, and hung on to it. The Vostok shuddered again. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the shield control, but I was too far away to reach it.

  My muscles burned as I tried to pull myself up on the side of the upside-down chair. Somewhere below me I saw Chiraine’s body crumpled on the ground. She wasn’t moving. And a wave of panic washed over me.

  “Chiraine’s hurt!” I yelled at Ana-Zhi.

  “We’re all going to be worse than hurt if you don’t hit those shields!”

  The Vostok groaned and trembled and new alarms sounded.

  Screw it.

  Before the ship could change its orientation again, I dove for the console, twisting my body as I fell towards it. I stabbed out at the shield control and managed to flip the auxiliary power rocker for the proximity plates.

  Then I crashed down to the ground, narrowly missing Chiraine. Pain spidered through my shoulder and back, but I rolled just like I had been trained to do.

  The lights flickered again and then faded off, plunging us into darkness.

  That went well.

  “Jannigan!” Ana-Zhi yelled again.

  “I thought I got the shields!”

  It turned out that I did activate the proximity plates. The process wasn’t instant, though. The plates took a few moments to charge. A loud electrical whine filled the cabin, and then through the main viewport I saw a shockwave of lightning dance over the hull.

  The ship’s hull creaked again, girders complaining at being twisted at such unnatural angles. I felt the ground beneath me shift once more, but this time it was gradual. The various inertial and gravity systems were finally coming back online.

  I crawled over to where I thought Chiraine was, and found her limp body in the dark,

  “Chiraine? You’re going to be okay.”

  I was relieved to feel her pulse. She was alive, but unconscious. Beyond that, I had no idea.

  Chiraine moaned. I hoisted her up over my shoulder and made my way down the walls as the Vostok gradually righted itself.

  On my right Ana-Zhi wiped the blood from her forehead, eased into the pilot’s seat, and started checking the systems. “Fucking cthulian.”

  “Is it gone?”

  “I think so. I’m going to try to find that cave mouth and get us someplace safe. How’s the princess?”

  “Messed up,” Chiraine groaned. She looked up into my eyes. At least she was conscious.

  “I’m going to take her to the infirmary,” I said.

  “Check on Qualt once you’re done. But don’t let him out.”

  “Obviously.”

  Chiraine faded in and out of consciousness as I made my way down to the infirmary with her in my arms. I’d get her settled in a MedBed before checking on the former captain of the Vostok, Agon Qualt, who was now residing in the brig.

  “This is what it takes to get me in your arms?” she joked woozily.

  “We don’t have time for anything else,” I grinned back at her.

  Even though the MedBed here on the Vostok was newer than the one we had on the Freya, it was automated enough that I didn’t have any problems operating it.

  Soon Chiraine was being scanned for a concussion, broken bones, internal injuries, and anything else the AI thought might be relevant. She was also being pumped full of pain suppressors, anti-infectives, an array of stabilizers, coagulants, and neuroid picobot healants which would repair any physical damage.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told her—though at that point she was too out of it to notice.

  As I grabbed a Medascap case, the overhead lights flickered ominously. They weren’t supposed to do that—given that Lampreys were designed with probably a half-dozen back-up power systems. But I couldn’t worry about that now. I borrowed Chiraine’s AuraView and set a timer. I’d return to the infirmary once her treatment was complete.

  My next stop was the cabin where we had stowed my father’s unconscious body. Thankfully, Ana-Zhi had secured him with the webbing that was a standard part of every crew bunk, so he hadn’t been banged around. Even though he was wearing his exosuit, being slammed around a cabin probably wasn’t the best thing for someone who had been preserved for seven years.

  The power indicator on the suit still glowed strongly. Thank Dynark for Welkin’s wafer battery technology. Even this old model was rock-solid in the power department. And the various power losses and surges from the ship’s power seemed not to have affected the suit.

  “We’ll get you out of there soon, Dad,” I said more to myself than anyone else. It was a promise I intended to keep, but we needed a stretch of at least 24 hours when we weren’t running from exploding asteroids, fascist armadas, or creatures bigger than our ship.<
br />
  I returned to the top level of the Vostok, and made my way to the brig.

  Even out in the corridor, I heard Qualt groaning—although I’m not sure if he was making those sounds for my benefit or not.

  “Fucking A, kid. What the hell happened?” He was slumped on the floor in the small cell, but didn’t look injured at all. “A.Z. forget how to fly a starship?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t dead.”

  “Almost, sport, almost. Seriously, what the hell is going on? You didn’t break my ship, did you?”

  “The ship’s fine,” I said. Although, in truth, I wasn’t so sure.

  “It better be.”

  As I turned to go, Qualt called after me. “Hey, kid. Come back a sec. There’s something I want to run by you.”

  “What?”

  “Listen, I don’t know what your boss is playing at, but this is rapidly turning into a situation here. You feel me?”

  “Not really.” I was curious what his angle might be.

  “I’m guessing that the Mayir are either in system already or real close. What do you think will happen when they hail the Vostok and no one answers?”

  “Not my problem.”

  “Not your problem?” he chortled. “I beg to disagree, manito. See, when Uncle Prundt realizes he’s got a rogue ship on his hands, he’s going to assume the worst—i.e. traitors, thieves, hijackers. I believe you and your compadres fall into that latter camp.”

  “Again, not my problem.”

  “Bear with me here, sonny. Because a ’57 Lamprey-class such as the Vostok has some intrinsic value, the good Field Marshal may be a bit hesitant to reduce it to so many scattered atoms, so he’ll knock out the engines and send a dozen of their crimson legionnaires in to do pest control. No offense. I can see you’re a studly guy and all, but you are no match for a legionnaire. And likewise for Miss Agrada and little Professor Ladybug.”

  I didn’t say anything—just let Qualt talk. He was on quite a roll.

  “There really is only one play here, son. Let me out so I can answer when the big man comes a-calling. And then we hand over the Kryrk and bask in our collective rewards.” He grinned at me. “I can see those wheels turning, Jannigan Beck. You know I’m right.”

  “Uh huh. We’ll see.” With that, I spun on my heel and strode away from the brig.

  “Beck!” Qualt called after me. “I am not fucking around. You need to let me out of here pronto.”

  When I returned to the bridge, I found Ana-Zhi cursing at the console and flipping through displays seemingly at random.

  “That doesn’t look good,” I said.

  “It’s not. The cthulian broke something. I just can’t trace it.”

  I could tell from looking out of the main viewport that we had set down somewhere. Judging from the darkness, it was probably inside the cavern that ran a half a kilometer into the base of the mesa beneath Roan Andessa.

  “Did we make it?” I asked Ana-Zhi.

  “Of course we made it. What do I look like?”

  “So we’re safe?”

  “If you call nearly being ripped in half by a cthulian safe, then yeah.”

  “I meant safe from the Mayir.”

  She slammed the heel of her hand against a relay box, trying to get something to work. “Damn it!”

  “The Mayir?” I asked again.

  “What? Yeah. There’s six hundred meters of stone between us and the surface. Unless they’re running geo scans with deep EMR, there’s no way they’d know we’re down here.”

  “Good.” I sighed as I eased myself into the co-pilot’s seat. “Then we can talk about reviving my father.”

  “Yeah, that’s not a good idea until we figure out why the power’s so sketchy. You don’t want to be halfway through a karokinesia procedure and everything goes dark.”

  “Surely the MedBed has a battery back-up?”

  “For simple procedures. But karokinesia takes a little more AI than the built-in unit. That’s why you run it off of the ship’s brain.”

  “Have you ever done that before?”

  “What, wake someone up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Only once. When I was crewing for Donal Sarkelan.”

  “Sarkelan? I thought he died.”

  “Yeah, this was a long time ago. I was way younger than you. We were in the Old Cariq mines on Rygond for six months. One of our guys contracted taricula syndrome and we had to put him under until the supply drone came back.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. Three, four months?”

  “Then you revived him?”

  “Once we were all inoculated.”

  “And you used the facilities on a ship?”

  “We had an expedition base in the caves. Full infirmary with medics. Not just a MedBed. People tend to get kind of chewed up when mining for cloud diamonds.”

  That was for sure.

  “So it wasn’t really the same situation as we have here?”

  Ana-Zhi shook her head. “No. Didn’t matter, though. The guy didn’t make it.”

  “Great.”

  “Yeah, it’s not quite as simple as you’d think. You should access the KB. Learn more about it for yourself.”

  She was right. I had a decent theoretical knowledge of the karokinesia process, but obviously no hands-on experience. I did know it was something that couldn’t be interrupted. The Sean bot had told me that the right way to resuscitate someone from long-term stasis was in a controlled environment with medical staff monitoring. Unfortunately that was looking like less and less of a possibility. Especially now.

  We were trapped. Here in a remote galaxy. Three billion light years from civilization. With no way to get home.

  2

  Ana-Zhi got up without a word and stalked away from the bridge.

  “Hey!” I hurried after her. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know—and that’s the fucking problem. I think one of the isolators on the starboard nacelle could be interfering with the helical power weave—or maybe the Braun tube, but this is way above my pay grade.”

  I had some amount of starship systems knowledge implanted in my brain, so I followed Ana-Zhi to engineering. Together we spent the next hour or so running diagnostics on the Vostok’s power systems, but couldn’t come up with anything.

  “As much as I’m glad that he’s dead, I kind of wish Obarral were here to figure this out,” Ana-Zhi said.

  “Yeah, I don’t.”

  We restarted the cognitive auditing module for the third time, hoping it would be able to trace the problem. But halfway through we lost power again. It only lasted twenty seconds, but it meant that we needed to start from scratch.

  “What about Qualt?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Maybe he knows something about this problem.”

  “I doubt it. I’m sure he’d just say anything to get us to let him out.”

  “Still, it might be worth a shot. You never know. Maybe this is kind of a recurring problem with this shit.”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t work that way.” But she decided to go pay Qualt a visit anyway.

  I headed back down to the infirmary to check on Chiraine. According to the Aura, her treatment was just about done. I was a little concerned that the power outages might have interrupted her MedBed, but it did have a battery back-up, so theoretically it wouldn’t have been affected.

  When I arrived Chiraine was awake, but moving pretty slow.

  “I can’t feel my shoulder,” she said in a rough voice.

  “Probably a good thing.” I looked over the MedBed’s report. “No broken bones. You’re lucky.”

  “I don’t feel very lucky. What the hell happened?”

  “Near as I can tell, we had a run-in with a cthulian.”

  “So they’re real after all?”

  “Yeah, and this one messed up the ship pretty badly. We can’t get the power weave stabilized
.”

  “So we’re stuck down here.”

  “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Ana-Zhi. The other issue is that we can’t revive my dad until we fix this thing. Apparently the procedure is a bit more complicated than I thought, and we’d need the ship’s computer.”

  Chiraine stared at me, but didn’t say anything.

  I said, “I’m just concerned that if something goes wrong with his suit, all this will be for nothing. I want him alive, well, and awake.”

  “I know you do, Jannigan. And we’ll wake him up. I promise. But I think you’re right not to risk it if the power is sketchy.”

  I nodded. “But even if we revive him, we’re still kind of screwed. The Mayir are in this system and they are probably scanning Yueld and the moons with a fine-toothed comb, trying to find us. And we don’t have a lot of options for laying low.”

  “Yeah.” She closed her eyes for a few moments.

  “You want to rest up some more?” I asked. “We can talk later.”

  “No, I’m just thinking. You’re sure the Fountain is completely closed?”

  “I’m sure. We scanned it down to its last bolt. Reactor is colder than an iceberg. No power. Not even any residual traces.”

  “How hard would it be to get it back online?”

  Despite the fact that our situation was so grim, a laugh escaped my throat. “Probably very hard, since we’re talking about Rhya tech here. But even if we were able to get the power back on, we’re still screwed.”

  “Why?”

  “The passage has been closed for eight hours.”

  “Unless…” She trailed off, deep in thought.

  “Unless what?”

  “Well, think about it from the point-of-view of the Rhya.”