Overview: Across the galaxy, in a place where demons and Hunters are little more than myth, is a star system on the verge of war. Its name: Teegarden c.
Ceriat Parker is an Earth Terraforming League technician. He turns barren and lifeless planets into habitable worlds as self-imposed penance for his time as a bomber pilot for the Galactic Protectorate military.
When Ceriat comes out of faster than light travel, he expects Teegarden c to be uninhabited and ready for terraforming. Instead, he drops into a warzone.
Then, with his ship disabled and his life support failing, he watches as a fusion bomb breaks through Teegarden c’s atmosphere… and he realizes if he’s really going to make amends, he can’t let history repeat itself.
%20by%20Mike%20Wyant%20Jr%20Book.jpg "Focus on the Wind (The Anisian Convergence Book 3) by Mike Wyant Jr Book") |
| Focus on the Wind (The Anisian Convergence Book 3) by Mike Wyant Jr Book |
Focus on the Wind (The Anisian Convergence Book 3) by Mike Wyant Jr Book Read Online Chapter One
Ceriat hated FTL.
It had this humming sound that, if you listened hard enough, developed into a high-pitched screeching, like a cracked vacuum line.
Or the souls of people lost in this fracture in spacetime. The FTL lane.
Maybe the carbon-fiber plate in the right side of his skull—and the embedded transmitter beneath—made it worse, maybe not. Did it matter? Eyes squeezed shut, Ceriat plucked at the small, circular disk attached to the necklace he wore. He rubbed at it as if the repetition of polishing it could drag the anxiety from his veins, the tension from his shoulders.
And it did. It always did, even though each time it rubbed away the letters stamped into it. Even though each trip meant sacrificing a bit of an old friend.
If Gerry were here, he’d have told Ceriat to open his eyes, to watch the ripple of reality in ambers and gray beyond the viewscreen. To focus on the wind roaring past.
But it wasn’t wind. Ceriat had always pointed that out to Gerry. Wind didn’t screech like that, didn’t rend your mind.
Ceriat was a terraforming specialist nowadays. He should know.
Gerry would laugh as he stared at the twisting lights and hummed along with a melody only he could hear. Gerald Harris. His best friend. Dead a little over a year now when his ship exploded in the FTL lane outside Terrera-2.
It was one of Gerry’s dog tags Ceriat had between his fingers, the erstwhile military data storage chip wiped and repurposed to hold terraforming instructions for Teegarden c, a project ten years in the making.
He and Gerry had traded their tags years ago.
That meant one of Ceriat’s tags was somewhere in this void, maybe still clutched in Gerry’s frozen fist… if the lane hadn’t atomized him.
A welcome tone issued from the speakers of the cockpit. “Ceriat, we are approaching Teegarden.”
Ceriat choked on spit when he tried to reply, breaking into a coughing fit made more awkward by the five-point harness holding him in place. The old war wound in his left hip complained at the sudden movement.
“Are you well, Ceriat?” a cheery, feminine voice asked from the speakers in the dash before him. “Do you require a lozenge?”
“No, Izzy,” he replied to the ship’s AI. Ceriat cleared his throat and shifted in his seat to relieve the tension in his hip. “Just surprised.”
Now that his eyes were open, he couldn’t help but stare at the writhing, twisting mass of wrong displayed on the viewscreen. Where others saw beauty, he saw the tearing flesh of the universe as he shot through it like a bullet.
Against that backdrop, the dashboard of the Sparrow looked decidedly out of place. The Sparrow was a single-person transport he’d purchased in the months after Gerry’s disappearance. He’d read an article that said smaller vessels were less likely to tear holes in FTL lanes.
It didn’t really matter if it was true.
“Dropping out of Sol-Teegarden FTL Lane in ten seconds,” Izzy said.
Ceriat squeezed the disk between his fingers. “Acknowledged.”
“Exiting in three,” Izzy said, “two… one.”
Ceriat dropped out of FTL and into a warzone.
“Izzy! What’s going on?” Ceriat cried out as the comm station flashed to life. Proximity alarms went off, red light rippling through the tiny cabin.
The deep void of space served as a backdrop to dozens of small ships spinning amongst themselves, hulls flashing crimson in the dim light of the red dwarf in the distance. Artificial amber lines spread from each on the window display, flickering and changing as Izzy tried and failed to apply flight path tracking to them. Luckily, he didn’t need her assessment to know their focus wasn’t on him. Farther off, Ceriat made out Gatewood, the only populated planet in the system, a blue-green marble partially lit in the ruddy light of the solar system’s star. Beyond it, Teegarden c floated, white and pristine—a planet-sized snowball waiting for purpose. For development.
Which made it all the more confusing why there were ships visibly exiting its atmosphere to join the fight between the two worlds.
“Multiple incoming transmissions,” Izzy said.
“From who?”
Whatever Izzy said in response was lost in the static shockwave that followed. Three small fighters exploded less than a kilometer from him, brief flashes followed by scattered diamonds of shrapnel fanning away from the point of impact and toward the Sparrow.
Ceriat cursed and kicked a pedal near his left foot.
A flight stick extended from the dashboard. He grabbed it and yanked.
The dual engines a dozen feet behind him roared, rattling the interior bolts of the ship. On the dash, the inertial suppressor lights flashed from green to yellow as Ceriat spun the Sparrow around to avoid debris hurtling toward him at several hundred kilometers an hour.
He pulled the Sparrow to what he considered up as the cloud of daggers expanded into a massive arc of death. Even with the inertial suppressors, it felt like a tank pressed into his chest. Each breath became a struggle.
Breathing was going to get a lot harder if that shrapnel perforated the hull.
“Inertial suppressors require venting,” Izzy said as the dash light went red. “You have ten seconds until—”
“Shut up,” Ceriat hissed, counting down the ten seconds before he ended up splattered against the seat from the g-forces when the suppressors gave out.
At times like this, he wished he had his F-268 fighter back. Those had a good sixty seconds of high-g before they needed venting, not like the ones in the Sparrow. These were consumer grade, meant only for coming in and out of FTL lanes. They didn’t have longevity. Hell, they were meant to be vented in atmosphere, for Christ’s sake. He’d have to dump the emergency plasma-dampeners just to keep the ship from cooking him alive.
Sweat streaked across his forehead and down his cheeks from the pressure leaking around the suppressors.
He counted to nine and leveled out the ship, decelerating as quickly as he could.
The suppressors gave out with a harsh whine, his body whipping toward the dash as the Sparrow slowed to a steady acceleration. Carbon-fiber skull notwithstanding, if he hadn’t been wearing his harness, it likely would’ve killed him.
As it was, his head swam from the change. His body hurt as if he’d been hit by a truck.
“That has to be enough.” Ceriat tapped the digital display beneath the inertial suppressor indicator so it could vent the excess energy, now converted to superheated plasma, into the void.
It wasn’t.
Alarms screeched. The popcorn popping sound of shrapnel ripping through steel. A second, louder tearing sound rattled through the Sparrow; the engine hum spiked, going from a dull vibration to a high-pitched screech before shutting down with a low, fizzling echo.
The lights on the dash winked out, and the viewscreen powered off with a flash, leaving him encased in a tiny, silent tomb. Everything went black besides a few small lights scattered around the cockpit.
Ceriat cursed and rubbed Gerry’s dog tag to keep his heart steady, but in the now-blank glass before him, someone he didn’t recognize stared back. Someone with haunted eyes set deep in a pale, thin face with more forehead than hair. An ache filled his veins.
The expression in those eyes made him search the console for some signs of life. If there was power, the auxiliary would kick on shortly. If the engines were blown, he’d have to rely on the mechanical oxygen tank under his seat.
Should’ve worn a helmet. The thought rose to the surface just in time for him to crush it beneath his heel.
Never again.
“Izzy? Are you there?”
Nothing. That wasn’t good. Izzy was tied into emergency systems. If she was offline, all power was down. Auxiliary wasn’t going to kick in, then.
The Sparrow was dead in the water.
In the middle of a battlefield.
Cursing with every ounce of his being, Ceriat popped open a panel on the right side of the cabin and kicked on his emergency distress signal.
There was nothing to do now but wait and hope no one was trigger happy enough to take out an immobilized ship broadcasting an Earth Terraforming League—ETL—distress signal.
With a deep sigh, Ceriat plopped his head against the hard headrest behind him.
“I hate space travel.”
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