Forged (Star Breed #10) - Elin Wyn Page 0,70

Every color I had ever seen exploded in my eyes, bringing me a level of pain I had never felt before.

My mouth opened to scream, but no sound came out. It was as if my throat was burning and ripping in half vertically. I felt my skin and scales peel away from my body, exposing my muscles and bones to the emptiness of the void.

My eyelids, clamped as tight as I could hold them, broke apart and fell away, slowly exposing my eyes to the grayness of the void we had entered.

The bridge of the Vengeance was a bright gray, and everything else was varying shades of gray, getting darker and darker.

I looked at Rouhr to see his body falling apart like sand. He was yelling at us, but there was no sound.

That’s when I realized that there was no sound at all. There wasn’t a single solitary noise. Was the rip in space this quiet or had my ears been destroyed?

I moved my hand to touch my ear and stared in wonder at the stump at the end of my arm. I looked down, and my fingers were on my lap.

I wanted to retch. I wanted to die. I wanted to close my damn eyes.

I looked up at the screen to see the ziggurat, at least the second half that we were attached to, reconstitute itself. It was rebuilding!

Then we were rebuilding, and the first of my senses to return was feeling. The pain was so much that I should have blacked out, except my eyelids weren’t there.

When they finally returned, and I blinked for the first time, tears fell down my face. Finally, sound came back with an explosion of noise.

“…the hell is happening?”

“…are we?”

“Damage reports!”

“…off the damn switch.”

“…switch, Vrehx!”

It felt as though forever was passing before my mind caught on to what they were wanting. I looked at my control panel and flipped the switch to the weapon. The void ended, and the alarms were back.

“Where the hell are we?” Rouhr asked.

“I’m not sure, Captain!” Sk’lar answered.

“Scan the—” Rouhr was interrupted as the ship shook violently, knocking most of us from our seats. “By all that is holy, what was that?”

Engineer Thribb’s voice came on over the intercom. “We’re losing engines, Captain. Partial power only. We’ve been caught by a gravitational field of some sort.”

“What is generating the field?”

“I’m not sure, sir. My systems are inoperative.”

“Sk’lar!”

“On it!” Sk’lar checked his system, letting out a curse that the translator didn’t bother to translate. There was no need. “We’re above a planet. Unfortunately, we are falling toward it.”

He tried to keep his voice calm, but the slight vibrato betrayed his emotions.

The Vengeance wasn’t built for the atmosphere of a planet. Our thrusters wouldn’t work. If we fell into the atmosphere of a planet, we’d fall until we impacted with the ground, and it would be a very hard landing.

“Sir! The Xathi!” I called out, pointing at the screen.

The Xathi ziggurat was tilting, as if it were falling as well. Outside scanners adjusted and brought the full picture into view.

The planet was covered in green and blue, and above it, the Xathi ship tilted ever more as it fell.

“What planet is this, and where are the Xathi going to land?” Rouhr asked.

I brought up our positioning and the star maps in our database. “Sir, this is uncharted space for us. We don’t have this planet or this system in our database.”

Rouhr nodded, absorbing the information. “Crash site?”

Sk’lar turned to look at me, then at Rouhr. The look on his face was silent resignation that something bad was going to happen.

“There appear to be seven main points of population on the planet. The Xathi are going to crash into the biggest concentration,” Sk’lar said.

“Estimated survival?”

“Not good. Easily half of their city will be destroyed, killing thousands.”

“And what of the Xathi? Will they survive the crash?”

“I’m not sure, sir. I’m not sure what the interior makeup of their vessel is, so I couldn’t give you an accurate guess,” Sk’lar replied, refusing to look at Rouhr as he stared at the computer.

“Engineer Thribb?”

“Captain?”

“Any chance of us breaking free and not crashing on the planet below?”

“Less than three percent, sir.”

“Well, groop.” We all looked at Rouhr in shock. “Any way to get us away from civilization?”

“Easily, as long as our engines don’t finish cutting out on the way down.”

“Then keep us away from any population centers. The rest of you, brace for impact!”

We watched the Xathi ziggurat crash into the center city, the largest