Collision Course (Class 5, #6)

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

Dav Jallan was feeling pretty good. The worry of this morning at Rose’s fatigue had been assuaged by Hri Revil, and now it looked as if the planet they were looking for might well be up ahead in the next solar system.

“I can’t get a fix on the signals, but that might be deliberate,” Borji said. “Especially as they now know there are other high sentient life forms in the galaxy. And not friendly ones, either, after the Tecran stole Irini from them.”

“And killed her crew,” Dav said. Although from how Irini told it, the crew had self-terminated, in a bid to keep the secrets their ship held undiscovered.

“Yes.” Jia Appal, his second-in-command, shifted beside him to lean a little closer to the screen. “They could well be distorting their signals to make themselves less obvious.”

“If Irini hadn’t directed us to this general area, we would most likely not even have picked them up.” Borji stretched in his chair, and rubbed his eyes. He’d been here since early this morning, when the signals had first been noticed.

“We need a break. Let’s slow the forward momentum, take some time to study what we have before we proceed any further,” Dav said.

Borji gave a yawn, and Jia chuckled.

“I think that’s a good idea.”

A sudden noise blasted through the bridge, a sensory overload that for a moment flat-lined Dav’s brain.

“Rose.” Sazo’s ear-piercing shout was almost a relief after the blast of the siren, and it took Dav a moment to catch up to the fact that Sazo had made that noise, and that something had happened to Rose.

“Tell me.” He was the only one on the bridge still standing. Everyone else was on the ground, holding their heads.

“Something took her. On her way across to me.” Sazo was panicked in a way Dav had never heard him.

He understood. By now, his own panic had taken hold.

Jia was on her feet now, and she staggered to the console and activated the outer-facing lens feed. Rewound it five minutes.

“There.” She threw the vision up on the big screen.

The little explorer moved at a gentle pace from the Barrist toward the Class 5, and suddenly a silver ship, shiny as Irini was, seemed to pop into existence.

It extended a clamp around Rose’s ship, and then suddenly, both the silver ship and the explorer disappeared.

Dav felt for a moment as if the world was falling away from him, and then Jia Appal grabbed his arm.

The support forced him to straighten, to get a grip.

He gave her a quick nod.

“The signal we were picking up . . . it’s increased in activity,” Sazo said.

“I guess there’s no more maybe about it.” Borji winced as he dragged himself off the floor. “We’ve arrived.”

All the systems in the little explorer had died the moment the clamp had engaged, and so when Rose felt the pop as they appeared somewhere other than between the Barrist and the Class 5, she was in darkness.

The auxillary power and enviro systems flickered to life as she pressed her face against the window to see where she had been taken, but her view in one direction was just stars, and in the other, the dull, lifeless surface of a small moon or asteroid.

She tapped her ear, but she knew Sazo and Dav would be shouting at her if they could, so obviously something was jamming the comms.

She looked down at her bump and stroked it. “It’s just you and me right now, baby girl. We need to be sharp.”

Because it looked like whoever they’d come to meet had decided to make the first move.

She couldn’t blame them for the show of force. When the Tecran had come this way, they’d swooped in, stolen Irini, and flitted out. And while they’d been using Paxe’s Class 5 at the time, there was no way to tell the difference between Sazo and Paxe. For all these people knew, it could be the same ship again.

She gave a sigh, realized she wasn’t going to be able to sit quietly and wait, and began to pace, looking out of the window every now and then to see if she could see anything new.

She felt the explorer jerk, and then move upward, and as darkness closed around her again, this time from outside the ship, she guessed she was being pulled into a hold.

At least something was happening.

She forced herself to take deep breaths to calm herself, and felt the baby kick a few times.

She did not like being so vulnerable. There could be danger here, and she was not fighting for herself alone.

One last deep breath , she thought as the ship settled onto a floor and lights flickered on outside. It was what it was.

Time to make some new friends.