Eden's Mirror: (LUMINA Book 2), I.G. Hulme [essential books to read .TXT] 📗

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Published by I.G Hulme 2020

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EDEN’S MIRROR

BOOK TWO OF THE LUMINA SERIES

by

I G HULME

CHAPTER ONE

DREAMWALKERS

It was like stepping back through a dream.

So many memories revisited, only this time Ryann was walking the dream in reverse, travelling backwards, returning to the source.

But this dream was shattered.

Everything that Ryann had held in his memory was now broken and burned.

The Lumina invasion had passed them by, marching its inexorable path towards the Core-Systems, towards Earth.

The immediate danger was gone for now, and when the Defiance had emerged from its hiding place in the impenetrable nebula of the Halion Belt, the universe felt empty, drained of all life.

Now Ryann and Angelique were part of the scout teams going on ahead, searching out the safest route. They took the Raven through the once vibrant planetary system of Viridis, where they had hunted the busy spaceports for Mellarnne only a matter of months ago. But now all they encountered were the innumerable charred husks of destroyed spaceships, ragged groups of refugees that had been caught by the advancing tide of the Luminal invasion. Most of the blackened hulks were in groups of ones and two’s, forlorn reminders of the futility of any attempt to escape.

But occasionally they would come across great refugee fleets, their wrecks closely-packed together in glittering fields of debris like some man-made asteroid belts.

Ryann and Angelique had explored them out of a morbid curiosity, alongside the slender hope that the Luminal guns had left something salvageable behind. Ryann had piloted their battered Raven — once a state-of-the-art hunter-trade ship — into the mass of slowly-spinning hulks of twisted metal, Angelique deftly navigating them through. The vessels on the outer edges of the field had been the smallest, the most vulnerable. Cargo skiffs towing container barges, or hull repair craft, tugboats, utility ships — even a couple of old construction platforms, an encrustation of cargo pods lashed between them. Anything that could be used to carry the fleeing tide of humanity had been utilised, and hundreds of frightened refugees had crammed aboard, often at the price of everything they owned.

But it hadn’t been enough.

The refugees couldn’t flee fast enough, and now the silent cargo pods were torn and twisted, and the frozen bodies of the dead spilled out to mingle with the sea of debris.

Ryann had tried to look away as his ship crept slowly through the field, the silence occasionally punctuated by the soft thump of smaller pieces of debris glancing off their hull as they pushed their way to the centre.

Through the glittering cloud, Ryann could make out the dark silhouettes of several larger craft, star-liners and converted freighters. Their broken hulls belched frozen fuel crystals into space, creating a shimmering sea that reflected rays of light in every hue from the distant sun of Viridis. This display of colour would have been spectacular had it not been for the thousands of bodies that tumbled out with it, slowly spiralling around the wrecks.

“There’s nothing we can salvage here.”

Ryann heard Angelique’s solemn whisper from behind him at the navigation-station. “Everything’s dead.”

“I think you’re right,” he replied.

“They haven’t left a single sign of life,” she murmured, her face cast in an eerie red glow from her readouts. “It’s hard to believe the Lumina were once human.”

“Plot us a course back to the Defiance at Lunar-15,” said Ryann, his eyes never leaving the glistening cloud. “We’ll report back that the debris field is too dense for her to traverse, but should mask our scanner signal from the Lumina if we skirt the outer edges. Mellarnne was scouting out the waypoint settlement en route to Viridis-6 — if we can get the Defiance to there we can hide up again and send the next wave of scout ships out.”

So this is how it would be from now on, thought Ryann sadly to himself. Endless hours spent scouting out the way ahead, just so their new home, the Defiance, created in the likeness of an enemy battleship — just so it could inch a little closer back towards the Lumina source.

It took them a further hour for Angelique to navigate the Raven out of the wreck-field. They didn’t dare use their main thrusters out in open space this close to the invasion front. There was too much risk of alerting the Lumina, who were known to patrol newly-taken territories, scanning for any signs of survivors as they emerged from hiding. Even now, Ryann could make out a far-off glow over towards the Arachne system, a bright new star born in space as a planet burned.

So, instead of their main engines, Ryann flew the ship on docking thrusters alone, propagating a tumble until they span slowly in their intended direction, appearing to any deep space probes as just another piece of dead wreckage.

“Phew, good work getting us out of the wreck-field Angelique,” muttered Ryann, as the concentration of hulks began to thin out. “Angelique?” He turned around in his chair to see her hunched over the navigation console peering intently into her displays. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure,” she replied distantly. “I thought I caught an echo of something on the passive scan.”

“What do you think? A Luminal ship?” Ryann looked urgently about the hemispherical display screen that surrounded his pilot’s station, giving him almost an all-round view. The dark wrecks drifted about them as they span silently in space, and Ryan quickly spotted