Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2)

to Maya to make sure she was okay. Carbine—damn him—still hadn’t buckled himself and probably wouldn’t be able to at this point; his arms were locked in a wrestling match with the two halves of his harness, which dangled out from the sides of the chair. The ship was falling, Jon was sure of it, and beginning to go into a barrel roll. He decided that something must be done, and pulling himself up even with the plane of Ratt’s chair, began to climb over it, into the lap of the passed-out kid.
Gotta try to save us! How hard can flying this bucket be?
Trying not to smother or hurt the kid, Jon climbed onto Ratt and took hold of the controls just as the creeping barrel roll came into its own and the ship went full-on upside down, paused for a minute, and then completed its roll straight into a nosedive.
A nosedive right into the Drop.
Oh shit, Jon thought to himself as he surveyed the scene. The controls were shot; there was nothing he could do. He pulled and jockeyed the hand control wheel repeatedly, eliciting no response. The viewport filled again with the dark maw of the Drop and its wreath of electric tentacles and flashing cubes. Jon reflexively braced for an impact that never came, and then as suddenly as the whole episode had begun, their world plunged into darkness.
Zero gravity overcame them. Jon was sure that the ship was still pointed “down” in a nosedive, but that seemed meaningless now. They were in the Drop. The sea of stars he had seen on the other side of the rift before was gone, and now there was nothing but what looked like thick, rolling clouds of darkness. Not clouds in the dark, but clouds of dark, thick as clay and so close, they sheathed the ship like a coat of paint. Jon felt as if they were flying straight down a smokestack or a pit of quicksand.
The waves of silt-like smoke that rolled against the windows created strange, hypnotic patterns. Jon froze in place and calmed his anxious breathing—which he hadn’t even been aware of before—and waited for any sign of impact or further danger, but none came. He concluded that the immediate, life-threatening danger had passed, and sprang back into action, yelling over his shoulder.
“Is everyone all right? Maya?” His voice rang out, loud as the booms had been in the deathly quiet of the cabin.
“We’re okay,” Maya replied, her words slurred on the edges as if she were drunk. “What about Lucy? Ratt?”
Jon pulled and swung himself out of the chair and off the kid, examining Ratt as best he could in the low light. Not seeing any obvious wounds or bleeding, he pulled himself closer and leaned his ear up to the kid’s mouth. Jon released a sigh of relief when he felt Ratt’s soft breath against his cheek.
“He’s alive!” Jon exclaimed as he came back upright. Just then, Lucy appeared in the stairwell, crawling on all fours. LED flashlights, mounted to the lapels of her new trench coat, cast twin beams, illuminating the cabin with soft cones of blue-white light. Jon could see better now, thanks to Lucy’s torches, and glanced over the scene. He needed to visually verify that Maya was indeed okay, as well as his buddy.
“Carbine!” he exclaimed, happy his mate had been lucky enough to remain uninjured in his unbuckled state.
“Right!” Carbine snapped back affirmatively and went straight to work.
Lucy made her way fully into the cabin and pushed off the floor where she had been crawling, hovering in a gentle float toward the center of the room.
“What the hell happened?” she asked no one in particular.
“Something came out of the Drop and hit us. Fried the ship, then we fell in,” Jon explained. “Ratt was hit with something, electricity, I think. But it didn’t look right.”
“I was hit too, but just barely,” Maya mumbled groggily as if she had just woken from a deep sleep.
“Are you all right?” Jon asked, scanning her body for any sign of a wound.
“Yeah,” she said, rubbing her left temple with her fingertips. “I think so.”
“Wait, in? Into the Drop?” Carbine’s eyes were as wide as full moons.
“Yeah. I think we’re on the other side. It’s all cloudy or silty out there. I’m not sure which. It’s weird,” Jon reported.
“No. We can’t be on the other side. It doesn’t work that way, otherwise, none of the Displaced would be trapped on Earth. No, we are in some place we don’t want to be, a bardo of kinds. An in-between,” Maya said, her voice wavering with something Jon had seldom heard from her before—fear.
As if cued by the dread in her voice, Jon turned to look out the viewport at the smothering silt-clouds. He started to turn away, but something caught his eye in the swirling patterns. Still holding on to the chair with one hand, Jon pushed himself to float closer to the window.
There!
Something recognizable formed in the swirling patterns of chaos. A gestalt. A…
Face!
Jon started, pulling back awkwardly from the glass just as a humanoid face, constructed out of the swirling smoke, pressed itself against the outside of the window and opened its mouth in a silent scream.
Jon’s startled cry and sudden, jerky movement caught everyone’s attention.
“What is it?” Lucy asked, gliding over to him. Jon recovered from his zero-g tailspin and pointed to the swirling miasma outside.
“There! I saw someone.”
Lucy followed the direction of his gesture.
“All I see is cloud-stuff,” she said.
“Not someone. Something.” Maya’s words carried much weight as they fell on the ears of her guardians.
“What do you mean? What was it?” Jon asked.
“They don’t have a name in your language. They are the agents of this place—not Earth, but Hell.”
“What? Like Harvesters?”
“Yes, but different. These things aren’t so much beings in Hell. They are a part of Hell itself, part of the actual pocket dimension. A cog in the super-dimensional machinery. Built-in prison wardens. They keep the