What he meant was this his chances of survival were greater, but they didn’t know what was going to happen.
The hatch closed between them, but Tim couldn’t look away from his friend. He knew he’d have secured himself to the outside as well as anyone could have.
It didn’t help.
It felt like it took forever for him for the hatch to open at his back and for him to stagger back into the shuttle bay. He spun around and started the cycle for Trac.
The disturbance was increasing. The shuttle rocked with it, setting off a round of murmuring distress from their unwilling passengers.
“You are on board?” Riina’s voice was in his ear.
“Yes,” he said, his eyes on the controls.
The outer door opened. And then it closed.
Trac was inside.
And then it felt like the bottom fell out of whatever contained them.
Coming into they hadn’t sensed anything or felt anything.
This time, he knew the shuttle was falling.
17
Tim grabbed a hand hold, but he still felt himself flailing around. And just when he was sure they’d smash into the ground? Had they been dropped back onto the planet? Or was the thing the aliens had feared happening?
His stomach rose higher in his throat, and the buffeting seemed to increase and then…
It tapered off and they stopped falling with a small bump.
Tim’s legs dropped back to the deck with more of a bump than the shuttle.
They were somewhere, but where?
Rinna had hoped they were being returned to the planet, but the sight out of her front view screen did not look anything like the planet they’d been on.
She tried to decide what it was she was actually seeing, it was so chaotic.
As near as she could tell, it was a large space. She craned to peer up out the front view screen and thought she saw stars overhead. No, not stars. Ships. They appeared to be stationary and randomly placed. She had a sense of something vast beyond them, though she couldn’t say why.
A soft sound began to filter into the silence, and she realized it was music. For once, there were no words, but the sound fitted their surroundings. The sound of the music was also boundless and terrifying.
But at the same time, it helped her feel grounded. Was it the AI’s way of coping?
She pulled her view in from the distant to the particular. Ahead of them was a large chunk of what could have been a spacecraft. And she thought she saw more pieces scattered around.
There was nothing tidy, nothing orderly about the disposition of the debris, but it also didn’t look to her as if it had crashed here. It felt more…dumped.
There were patches of sad looking growth on the edges of what could have been a path, but she couldn’t be sure.
Her strongest impression was of a drab and bleak place, painted in the dullest of colors, other than the occasional glimpse of a faded logo on the side of a destroyed vessel.
“Veirn?” She wasn’t happy to hear the faint quiver in her voice. But it had been a rough day. A long day that didn’t look as if it were ending any time soon.
“Our scanning is once again offline,” the AI said.
There was an amazing amount of not happy in its tone.
