Dark Space: The Invisible War Read Online Free PDF Page A

jumped into the air like a grasshopper.
    It settled down once more, and soon she joined the cliffside road and began winding around the base of the mountains. Destra let out a shaky breath. So far so good. No more enemy fire rained down around her. Destra turned a sharp corner in the road at high speed—
    Only to see three bright orange shapes walking out of the trees, straight into her path. One of them was small—just a child. Destra felt her heart seize in her chest. Without her headlights on, they couldn’t see her, and hover vehicles were very quiet.
    Destra stomped on the air brakes and yanked up on the flight yoke, hoping to clear their heads with enough of a margin that the grav lifts wouldn’t break their necks. She heard their muted screams and exclamations as she passed over their heads, and then the transport touched down ten meters distant. Despite the inertial management system, Destra’s head flew forward and hit the dash. She saw stars, and heard more screaming, but as from a great distance. Minutes or hours later—she couldn’t tell which—the world began to shake violently, and she thought the Sythians must have found her and shot the hover to pieces.
    A second later the screams resolved into something intelligible and Destra realized the world was shaking because someone was shaking her by her shoulders.
    “Hoi! Are you okay . . . ?” A man’s voice. “Frek! She’s out of it! You know how to pilot a hover?”
    “No,” came a woman’s reply. “Do I look like I have the sols for a hover?”
    “Hoi!” the man shaking her said again. Destra’s eyes rolled in her head. “That’s it! Wakey wake! She’s coming around!”
    Destra’s eyes fixed on the man who—for frek’s sake!—was still shaking her. “Stop it!” she groaned.
    “Sorry, girlie. Think you can drive us all outta here?”
    Destra sat up and shook her head. “Give me a second. Let me out. I need some fresh air.” Destra felt stifled. She couldn’t breathe. She stumbled out of the driver’s seat, and fell to the snow-covered road on her hands and knees. She focused on her breathing, trying to calm herself. Atton was gone. He was gone , and she would never see him again!
    “I think she’s having some kinda panic attack . . .” said the man who’d been shaking her, now standing to her right.
    “We’ve got to get out of here!” said the woman.
    A child whimpered.
    Destra looked up at the man beside her and studied his shadowy features.
    “Help me up,” she said.
    “Yea, sure.”
    Halfway to her feet, the dark, snowy world flashed brightly, revealing the man’s face. He had short, curly black hair, wet with melted snow, a ragged cut on his left cheek, which had smeared that side of his face with blood before freezing into a thick red scab, and he had a shifty look in his small, dark eyes.
    The man’s gaze snapped up to study the source of the sudden brightness. “Holy krak!” he yelled. “There she goes!”
    Destra spun to see what had suddenly peeled away all the shadows, and her eyes were immediately drawn to the expanding fireball in the sky. Just then the sound of the explosion reached their ears with a thunderous boom.
    “Six thousand motherfrekkers! That’s what ya get! Leavin’ us all to die! Frek you!” The man pumped his fist as he railed at the sky.
    Destra turned to stare at him. He was actually happy. “We’d better go,” she said, swallowing her disgust with a frown.
    “Yea, don’t want the same to happen to us,” he said, nodding. “Second that!”
    Destra retook the driver’s seat, and turned to see a woman and her young child approaching. She felt a stab of recognition to see them. This was the little blond boy who’d been clinging to the fence as she’d waited for Captain Reichland to arrive—and his mother, the one who’d yelled at her.
    “You!” the woman said as she drew near.
    Apparently Destra wasn’t the only one with a good memory. She nodded. “Hop in.”
    The