The Dark Between The Stars

TWENTY-TWO
ELISA REEVES

Elisa’s screens went blank as emergency filters blocked the surge of energy from the exploding bloaters. The concussion hurled her ship backward, spinning out of control. Garrison’s ship vanished in the blossoming flash.

Since she’d been worried her husband might trick her, maybe even open fire with his low-power weapons, Elisa already had her shields up. That probably saved her life.

As the cluster of nodules continued to explode in a chain reaction, her ship tumbled away, damaged and blind. Elisa couldn’t orient it, couldn’t regain engine control. It was all she could do to hold on.

She finally managed to restore one screen, but the view was disorienting. The spreading inferno filled space, and the shock waves rippled farther and farther. Even the outlying bloaters glinted and sparked, as if in alarm.

Her screens went to static again. Through the windowports, she could see the blast going on and on and on.

Alarms rang through the cockpit, and her life support wavered into the red zones before secondary systems stabilized the air and light. The chain reaction continued interminably, until the inferno climaxed and dwindled as the explosions spread to the diffuse outlying bloaters.

Half-blinded, she tried to catch her breath, astonished to be alive.

With only a few of her sensors still functioning, she scanned the fading energy cloud, frantic. Elisa couldn’t detect Garrison’s ship, not even any wreckage. But if his vessel had been in the heart of those detonating bloaters, it would have been vaporized. That meant her son was dead!

Anger warred with her grief. Garrison had ripped the boy away from her because he feared Sheol was a dangerous place—and he’d brought Seth out here to a cluster of unstable bombs in space. Damn him! She felt sick inside.

Over the next several hours, the glare from the clustered explosions dissipated, but her ship was too damaged to move. Her screens remained dark, most sensors nonfunctional, and she would have to determine how many other systems were ruined. It was going to take all of her resources just to limp back to civilization.

With burning eyes, she looked at the portrait image of Seth she kept in the cockpit. She didn’t understand what had happened, refused to believe what she knew was true. It was just a small warning shot with low-powered jazers!

Hundreds of the bloaters still drifted around her, as mysterious as before. Another question tugged at the back of her mind. What the hell are those things made of?