Gaunt Galaxy / Blue Angel: Book 1

The Road Out

I awoke suddenly, with an alarm going off inside my head, I turned to see Lererial staring straight into my eyes, she had felt it too. It was a strong feeling, something powerful was making itself know somewhere, we just had to figure out where. Still lying in bed in each others arms we allowed the rift to open before us, there on the outer edge of the Galaxy, in a different arm this time. It was on the outer edge of the Sagittarius arm, probably 60,000 light cycles away, almost completely opposite from the big base. Was this new destination the home of the nightmarish thing I had fought in Shanaeh's mind, if so there could be others? No telling what other demonic, ungodly creatures Mykereyl has thought to try to splice together! The rift began to zoom in on the area in question, to be on the outer edge of the Sagittarius arm, it is pretty dense with star systems. They are so closely packed together, that from this distance they look like a single large star.

The stars were loosely grouped around what appeared to be a large planetary nebula. This is likely the result of a red star finally dying and leaving some gases around for anyone to see. There have been cases of the planets around one of these suns to have survived its dying. If this is true it would be a good place to hide another base. The rift continued to zoom in on this nebulae and sure enough there were several masses of planetary rock still in a loose orbit around what used to be a star. We saw four, one was of particular interest, it seemed to be alive from the inside. It possibly was still burning from the expansion of the dying sun, but this would be a good thing as if would give heat that could help a base to survive in the cold of deep space. It would also draw attention away from anything else that might be going on.

The rift faded and we lay staring at each other as we contemplated what we now had to do. I opened the mind link to Shimmer, "Good morning beautiful ladies!"

"Good morning boss," they did not call me boss except when we were working on something, how did they know? "We felt the disturbance as well. Your sensitivities have rubbed off on us as much as our Ovarunt systems keep rubbing off on you!"

"OK, here are the details," I gave them all that Lererial and I had seen and sensed.

"We will get stocked up immediately, just sent out recall to all crew. Just informed Patriarch & Monarch, he said he would contact you directly very shortly. All Ovarunt, Ovarunt Enforcers and Galactic Patrol have been notified and are standing by"

"Thank You! Any possibility of there being anyone within a forte's journey of this place to be able to assist us?"

"That is what I want to talk to you about," Patriarch replied "There are several Enforcers who can meet us there in close to a forte, give or take a few days."

"Us? Does that mean that you will be meeting us there?"

"Yes, Matriarch and I will be there, we will be stopping along the way and picking up some ground troops and other equipment for this one. As you say we are all one big family now, and this is what families do, Help Each Other!!!"

"Thank you it will be nice to have some back up this time!"

"Actually, we sent an investigative team toward this area several days ago, we have reason to believe that this is the largest of the bases we have yet discovered. The team will be there in another 10 days and we can begin to get some preliminary data on the place by the time we get there."

"That sounds great! I hope they are equipped with the latest cloak, and tell them to watch for anything that may look suspicious. I am getting a feeling that the enemy will change it's tactics, they may start using camouflaged traps and ships. They know we have their latest cloak figured out and they will try to hide and take us by surprise. It is best to never uncloak, stay fully shielded and stay away from any object big enough to be a disguised sentry or even a bomb!"