Клаудия Грэй - Into the Dark

Before long he found the circular hatch where Dez had died, which led to the path he and Nan had traveled down before. At that time, Reath had been looking for answers about Dez. He no longer trusted Nan’s explanation for why she’d been there. What had she really been after? Whatever it was, he’d probably kept her from it.

Time to figure it out. Hague and Nan had clearly had a secret agenda throughout their stay on the station, and Reath didn’t intend to let it slip by him again. If he managed to confront and arrest them, he intended to hold them responsible for everything they’d done.

Cautiously, Reath spun the hatch open and eased his way through, reminding himself, Be careful about the helix rings—

I don’t actually see the helix rings—

Since when is this tunnel white inside?

The hatch slammed shut.

Reath wheeled around and tried to push it open again, but no. Through the thin slits of the door, he saw no light or movement; nobody was out there. Whatever had happened with the hatch was automatic. But an automated system could kill him as surely as any being’s malice.

Even worse than the locked door was the realization that the tunnel he’d entered was no longer a tunnel. It was much smaller—pale inside, almost like some kind of a cell—

Everything shifted, vibrated, changed . Reath was thrown backward as light suddenly filled the tiny space, and he found himself in a room that had to be intended for a prisoner. The small seat molded in the back, the thin windows…

Reath’s eyes widened. He saw that not all the light surrounding him was coming from within the pod. Some came from outside—and it was the unmistakable electric blue of hyperspace.

This isn’t for a prisoner , he realized. It’s for a passenger.

Where the hell am I going?

And how am I ever going to get back?

A deep shudder-shiver within the station froze Affie where she stood. What was that?

She moved to the nearest corner, wedged her back into it, and kept her blaster at the ready. Her instinct told her that what she’d heard wasn’t the work of the Jedi, the Nihil, or even the 8-Ts—that it had been mechanical movement deep within the workings of the station itself.

An airlock being blown? No, if that were it, they’d already be fatally depressurizing. The Nihil warship docking with the Amaxine station? Affie wasn’t even sure that was possible. She hoped not, anyway. If that happened, it would take many, many more Jedi to save them than they had on hand.

The sound was vaguely familiar to her. It took Affie a few seconds to place it before she realized she’d heard something very like that when Dez Rydan was killed.

Had Reath blown himself up? She hoped not—she’d become fonder of him than she’d expected to. It turned out even arrogant citified guys could prove to be decent people.

Maybe he was dead. Maybe he wasn’t. There was nothing Affie could do about it either way. After a few seconds, when no other sounds emerged from the station, she resumed her progress through the dark chambers. She made her way through the thick curtains of vines that dangled down, brushing against her from every direction.

In the far distance, she saw movement, too high from the ground to be an 8-T, too far from the central chamber to be one of the Jedi. Affie ducked low as she took a careful look and recognized Nan.

Instead of the colorful dress she’d worn earlier, Nan wore a coverall as simple and utilitarian as Affie’s own, and bandoliers and a belt strapped with at least three times as much weaponry as Affie was carrying. Nan’s arms were bared, revealing tattoos—not pictures, but some kind of writing, too small to be read from that distance. To Affie, it seemed like a lot of tattoos for someone so young. Maybe that was common among the Nihil.

But she’d worry about getting more intel on the Nihil later. For now, Affie only needed to know that Nan and Hague hadn’t discovered their presence, and to judge by Nan’s nonchalant stroll, they hadn’t. That meant the Jedi were free to do whatever they were doing.

And Affie was free to get the proof she needed to make Scover back down.

“This is bad,” Reath repeated to himself as he slumped into the seat of the hyperspace pod. “This is very, very bad. This is what happens when you don’t have access to research materials.”

He trusted in his ability as a Jedi, and in the ways of the Force. His lightsaber remained at his side. So Reath could prepare himself to deal with whatever came.

But preparing himself included accurately assessing the situation he’d found himself in, which was in fact extremely terrible .

“I am in a hyperspace pod,” Reath said out loud. The rounded interior of the pod caught sounds and shaped them strangely. “No navicomputer on board that I can see, and besides, this has to be too small to have a hyperdrive of its own. I think…I think this has to be some kind of one-way transit vehicle, the human-sized equivalent of a probe droid.”

He tried very hard not to dwell on the words one-way . Panic couldn’t help him, while analysis…probably wasn’t going to help much, either, but it was at least worth trying.

“I don’t know where I’m going, what I’ll find there, or how to get back. Okay. That more or less sums it up.”

Hyperspace journeys could last anywhere from a few minutes to several weeks. Without any way of knowing how long this one would be, Reath began to be concerned about the lack of food, water, and an evac tube. But no sooner had he noticed that than the pod suddenly jolted out of hyperspace. He blinked as he stared at the thin windows in the hatch, the ones that had just blinked from electric blue to black night. A star field lay beyond. Had the pod deposited him in the middle of nowhere?

The one sensor within the pod began to blink, and Reath felt the rumbling that could mean only one thing: a tractor beam.

“At least I’m going someplace ,” he said, taking his lightsaber from his belt. Whatever came next, he intended to be ready.

The pod tilted as it began descending through an atmosphere. Clouds didn’t vary that much planet to planet—assuming they were water vapor and not methane, which Reath profoundly hoped to be the case. He wasn’t going to be able to tell much on the way down; investigation would have to wait for the planet’s surface.

The tractor beam pulled the pod down inexorably, but in a controlled descent. Reath felt no more than a small thud as the pod settled into…something.

He looked through the thin hatch windows and saw nothing but greenery: trees, bushes, a sort of marshy landscape. In fact, he recognized the vines from the station; some seeds must’ve made the same journey in the past. This strongly suggested that the atmosphere was breathable by humans. Nobody was waiting to kill him, either, which was always a good sign.

Reath pushed the hatch door open and stepped outside. Thick clouds filtered, but didn’t conceal, a white sun’s light. The air was warm and damp, and it smelled like loamy soil, salt water, and thick green marsh plants. Wet ground had to be nearby. However, the pod had come to rest on a spar of rockier land.

A spar that must have been chosen, very long before, as the base for this hyperspace pod.

As Reath stepped farther back from the pod, he got a better look at the mechanism. The small, almost spherical pod he’d been in was only part of the whole—the “cabin,” as it were, at the head. Behind it stretched the rest of the mechanism, long and slender, what he had to assume was the hyperdrive. Another such pod, identical to the one he’d traveled in, rested farther along the sinuous track. It curves through the tunnels , he realized. It’s an ancient, fully automated mechanism. There must be multiple pods still within the Amaxine station. People step inside a pod, and it travels to predetermined coordinates.