The Crimson Peril
Book 3 of the Star Rim Empire Adventures
R.A. Nargi
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Dear Reader
The OmniWorld Adventures
Also by R.A. Nargi
1
“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
Henry David Thoreau
The Vostok was completely deserted.
After I had landed the ship, I spent nearly two hours combing every inch of it, but there was no sign of Ana-Zhi, Chiraine, Narcissa, or the Sean bot. I couldn’t comprehend it. Where had everyone gone?
The launch was still there, all of the exosuits were accounted for, and when I reviewed the surveillance logs I saw all of us in the bridge—right up until a few seconds after the Sean bot returned to the bridge. Then the ship turned upside down and everything went black.
There was a gap in the logs, but it was less than a second.
What had happened? And where did everyone go? This didn’t make sense.
As I made my way down to check life support, the lights flickered and the ship lost power for a few seconds.
Crap. Not this again. The discharge retainer couldn’t be broken. Panic welled up inside of me at the thought of trying to figure out the ship’s isolator module myself. That was way above my pay grade.
I pushed the thought out of my mind. I was going to sort this out.
The first thing I needed to do was figure out where the hell I was. The exterior cameras showed that I had set down upon a grassy plain strewn with boulders. Mountains loomed in the distance to the north and a lush valley stretched out to the southeast. The air was clear and the sky was blue, with just a smattering of wispy clouds.
Wherever I was, it certainly wasn’t Yueld. And it wasn’t either of Yueld’s moons. I tried to remember what else was in the Nymorean system. All I could recall was a bunch of asteroids, a small ice planet named Usteron, and Arai—another planet which was nearly all water.
This place didn’t seem like it could be any of those.
As I made my way up to the science station near the bridge, the Vostok lost power again—for a good sixty seconds.
This was not good. Why wasn’t aux power kicking in? I checked life support and learned that all of the CO2 scrubbers were offline. Yeah, not good at all.
I initiated external scans, including environmental readings. If I had to go outside, I needed to know what I was dealing with.
Next, I accessed the navsys, trying to identify where exactly I was. But the system was completely scrambled. I couldn’t tell if it had been messed up by a power surge or something else, but it was definitely stuck in some sort of loop, with the status displaying ‘SEARCHING…’ and nothing else.
The one bit of good news was that the environmental scan showed that the atmosphere was breathable, the temperature was a balmy 300 K, and there were no dangerous radiation levels detected. The gravity was 7.172 m/s²—a bit less than the gravity back on my home world of Anglad. According to the computer, I’d be able to go out without a suit. Not that I was planning to.
I left the comm shut down. I could have sent a distress call over the FSOC, but I had no idea if the Mayir Carrier was orbiting this planet, waiting for me to make a peep.
After I finished up in the science station, I went down to engineering with the idea of running the cognitive tracers to figure out why the power was still on the fritz. I didn’t get very far.
The power died again.
Dynark’s blood! I slammed my fist into the bulkhead and then spent the next several minutes cursing this piece of shit ship.
When all the rage was out of my system, I slumped to the floor in despair.
I barely noticed the emergency lights blink on, mostly because my head was in my hands and I was taking deep breaths in order to calm myself.
This was ridiculous. It really was.
But I needed to just chill out and think through what was going on.
The Sean bot had found something called the Levirion, an ancient Marimoran relic stolen by the Yueldian Sky Reavers. When energized by a powerful enough source, the Levirion acted as a dark space jump gate. And, as impossible as it seemed, the Sean bot had succeeded in activating the Levirion.
Supposedly the jump gate was going to send the Vostok to one of four locations programmed into the artifact. With our limited knowledge of how the Levirion worked, we had no idea where we’d end up, though.
What no one expected was that the Levirion might have side effects—like only transporting one person along with the ship.
And then there was the strange matter of my dream—if it really was a dream, that is.
After I had lost consciousness, I woke up back in New Torino. But I couldn’t tell if I had really returned home or if it was just in my mind. The timeline was all messed up, and I had nearly two weeks’ worth of memories that seemed to be impossible. Oh, and when I had contacted Chiraine, she had no memory of me.
What did this all mean?
A blaring klaxon interrupted my thoughts.
What now?
The ship’s alert system announced that there was a breach on level 3, but it didn’t make sense. How could there be a hull breach when we were parked?
I didn’t bother with the lift, just slid down the access ladder into the level 3 hold. There I saw a trio of maintenance bots frantically spraying catafoam on a gaping hole. But the hole wasn’t in the hull, it was on the floor of the hold.
How could that be?
I moved closer, trying not to get run over by the maintenance bots, who
