Characters | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Epilogue
Chapter 4: A Flashback to a Diamond
The closer we got to Sol and his system, the more powerful my visions became. The visions were intense and terrifying.
There was more than just Black-Sun massing to attack. There was a whole rainbow of suns. The full spectrum; Black, White, Blue, Violet, Red, Orange, and Yellow.
The irony is that Sol’s system spawned the humans that comprised these fleets. Old Earth had had three mass exodus, the first two had colonised the Sol System, the third had seen them colonise the galaxy.
As they’d travelled, they’d come across the sapient stars and those same stars saw the human’s potential. It had taken just over five hundred years for the whole thing to go from scattered explorers to trillions of soldiers. The suns worked fast to try and quell the rebels among them.
Sol believed in the sanctity of life and freewill, while the others believed it was their right to rule the universe. I, newly renamed, ironically, Diamond Stars, wanted one thing. The same as the name of my ship, Revenge.
How was my small, mostly unarmed, ship supposed to exact revenge on a fleet counting millions? I had no idea.
We were cloaked from the fleet, both from their scanners and from their Sun Speakers. I had found a nifty device that blocked the Black-Sun from finding us. From wormhole to wormhole we followed them, since we didn’t have our own wormhole generator, and caused havoc when we could.
It was just me, Onyx, my boyfriend, and his little sister Sphene. We had all the expertise to run the ship and take care of ourselves, but not to cause any major damage to the fleet. After almost two years we got our chance.
Sol gave me the answer in the form of a vision. The Sun Speakers from Black-Sun are trained from birth in how to handle and survive the visions. I had forced the information out of one of their Sun Speakers, which meant I wasn’t in constant pain or slowly killing my brain. That didn’t mean it was pleasant.
After the vision, I ran to a computer terminal and started typing. When I was done, Onyx massaged my shoulders and asked, “What is that?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Your sun god is really vague and like I’m not sure he knows what he’s doing,” Sphene said from across the room, lounging in the way only a teenager could. She stood up and walked over. She read the gibberish in front of me and said, “That’s computer code. Looks like a program to hijack their wormhole generator.”
The three of us were geniuses, me with mechanical devices and ships, Onyx with anything biological, and Sphene with code, although she preferred weapons.
“Where will it send them?” I knew it was sending them somewhere the moment she described it.
“Looks like the galactic core,” Sphene chuckled. “That many ships that close to the core would definitely get sucked into the black hole.”
Onyx played with my hair, which was making thinking hard, and asked, “How do we get that code to them?”
“We’ll need to infiltrate a ship,” Sphene replied.
I shook my head, “No. We just need a comms antenna. I could do it from outside a ship.”
The strong brown fingers stopped playing with my hair. Onyx said, “Wouldn’t we be stuck here?”
“We have a matter-replicator and the Black-Sun plans. I’m sure I could build a wormhole generator.” I didn’t say that it would have to be one jump and if I screwed up the math, we’d die a horrible death with our atoms spread across a dozen systems.
I suited up and Sphene took us close to one of the ships. The cloak worked better from a distance and the closer we got, the easier it would be for Black-Sun to see us.
The calm of space is also its scariest attribute. The quiet, cold, and seemingly unending distances seem safe, until you factor in the fact that space wants you dead. Despite this, I jumped out of the ship with nothing but a spacesuit to protect me. I had a little jetpack that propelled me to the ship.
I floated toward the comms array, and when I got there, I unscrewed the panel and plugged in my small pad. It took me a few moments to download the code and send it to the fleet.
“They’re activating the wormhole generators,” Onix said into my earpiece, sounding worried. “Get out of there!”
It’s called space but it’s pretty full of stuff. Space radiation, debris, and other things fly around at high speeds everywhere. As I headed back to the ship, I was hit by a small meteor and tossed off course.
I was about to get hit by the ship I’d added the code to when a well-aimed grappling hook caught me and pulled me back into the Revenge.
“Thanks, Sphene,” I said panting as I got back into the ship.
“Go to medical. You’re bleeding.” She sounded annoyed but I could hear the worry behind her tone.
In the room that was deemed medical, I watched the last of the Black-Sun ships fly into the wormhole. “Good riddance,” I said. A vision from Sol told me that the fleet would be decimated by the gravity wells and the creatures that lived there. Horrifying humanoid dog alligator creatures, I’d seen them before, they were nightmare creatures we’d called Void-Beasts.
“You look pale, let me sew that up,” Onyx said, gently helping me in bed. “I’ve seen you hurt worse. Why do you look terrified?”
“We just destroyed ninety-percent of the Black-Sun fleet.”
“That’s great!”
“Those ships that survived are going to be joining the fight with void-beasts by their side.” We’d won a victory, but at what cost?Sol gave me a new vision and it was of the same battle I’d been dreaming about, but this time there were less Black-Sun, and I could see a fleet of Sol ships led into battle by three ships; the Warship Ennill, the Hey-Sunny, and the Revenge.
Read Chapter 5
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