Star Runner Book 4: Journey's End ?

By Mark McDonough

When Star Runner, along with her Mamoan allies, stopped to trade for supplies with the people of Jellican III, they never expected to end up helping in a planet-wide evacuation. Worse still was the sun exploding much earlier than anticipated, resulting in the combined Mamoan and Jellican space fleets being pulled inside a newly formed black hole. Now the crew of Star Runner has to race against time, not only to find out what happened to all of their new friends, but also to find a way to escape the Bubble once more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark McDonough
• Release date: Sep 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310724084

Mark McDonough

Mark McDonough has lived his whole life in Queensland, Australia. After growing up in Ipswich, he lived for a short time in Brisbane while attending University. Work then took him to Far North Queensland for a number of years before he moved to his current home of Toowoomba. For as long as Mark can remember, there have been characters clamouring to have their stories told – everything from the depths of time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth through to the vast reaches of space where only the bravest spaceships dare to fly and everywhere in between. Most were written in secret until, one day, those characters demanded that their tales be spread far and wide. Thus, was born Stargon Books. When he's not sitting with laptop or notebook in hand, he can be found at work, with his family or out on the football field where he not only plays but also referees and Coordinates an entire competition. Ultimately, Mark dreams of the day when he can write full time but until then, as he says, "I'm a wordsmith, it's who I am; if I didn't write, I wouldn't be me".

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The Star Runner Series

Book 4 – JOURNEY’S END?

By Mark McDonough

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Mark McDonough

Current Edition 2019

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to http://www.smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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The Star Runner Series

Book 4 – JOURNEY’S END?

Chapter One – Driving Back the Dark

Silence.

Weightlessness.

Peacefulness.

Darkness.

Complete utter darkness. Not a single glow, not a single flicker, not even an after-image. Just the complete absence of light.

Pete Daniels, Chief Engineer of the star ship Star Runner panicked.

None of his senses seemed to be working. There was no sound. He couldn’t see a thing. He couldn’t feel anything – not even the floor under his feet.

Flailing his arms around, he felt his body twist. And then realisation dawned.

Weightless. I’m weightless. There’s no gravity.

Zheen! he called, glad to find out that his ears were still working.

He flailed his arms again, trying to turn himself around, hoping that there’d be some sign of his purple-skinned friend. His heart beat a tattoo in his chest as he searched for her, straining to hear a response.

Zheen! he tried again.

"Varzel, Pete."

With a sigh, Pete frowned but relaxed. She was alive. Not making any sense, but alive.

Something grazed his knee and instinctively, he threw out a hand.

It met a smooth, cool surface. Quickly running his hand backwards and forwards on it, Pete searched for something to hold on to. Finally, he found what he was looking for. A pipe, he guessed. His hand grasped it in a vice-like hold. Now that he had something to stop himself floating around helplessly, there was no way that he was going to let go.

With some vague semblance of normality returned to him, Pete let his mind fix on the problem at hand. No lights, no gravity, no sound from the engines meant only one thing. Star Runner’d lost power. And not just a power-down, but a complete system shut down.

He had no idea how that was even possible.

While trying to get his breathing back under control, he focussed on the last thing that he remembered.

He and Zheen were at the master engineering console. The rest of the crew, including his two brothers Alex and Nick, had been up on the flight deck. Star Runner had been in the final stages of helping to evacuate the planet Jellican Three from the imminent threat of its star exploding.

They’d only been in the Jellican star system a handful of minutes before they realised that something was wrong. It’d been Nick, Pete’s younger brother, their helmsman extraordinaire, who’d spotted the first sign. Far too many space ships, most of them large enough to transport thousands of people at once all gathered between the third and fourth planets.

And then Alex manning the science console had noticed that something was wrong with the star at the heart of the system.

Star Runner was a trader, a merchant class star ship. She was designed to travel between the stars, buying and selling goods to different peoples wherever she went. Pete seriously doubted that even Holas, their captain and Zheen’s father, the alien who’d been trading his whole life would have taken the ship into a situation like that unless he was forced to do so. Tran, Pete considered, probably would have, but then, the cat-like Ok’neie tended to take a lot more risks than anyone else, with the possible exception of Nick.

But their situation had been desperate. Star Runner was the advance ship for a vast fleet of alien vessels. The Mamoans were refugees, forced from their planet after a vicious war and now relegated to wandering the stars looking for a new home. And the entire fleet was desperate for food supplies.

The Jellicans, to their everlasting credit, hadn’t turned Star Runner away. Despite the imminent danger of their star exploding, they’d opened their arms and hearts to help the Mamoan people. And in return, Star Runner and the Mamoan fleet had stayed to help evacuate the star system.

No one could have foreseen how early the star went supernova. That initial shockwave had destroyed planets and star ships alike. Pete had no idea how they’d survived. His best guess was Nick. ‘Ace’ their father had called him after the fighter pilots of old Earth. Nick was a pilot at heart, a boy of eleven who could fly rings around almost any pilot in the galaxy.

Pete and Zheen had been assigned to engineering. Which is exactly where they both wanted to be.

They’d watched the readings on the master control board with dread. Power fluctuations appeared every couple of seconds in just about every system on the ship. Damage warning lights flickered on and off demanding attention. They’d worked hard and fast, shunting power to the engines from wherever they could steal it, bypassing damaged systems and doing everything in their power to make sure the ship didn’t either explode or simply shut down.

Like she had now.

Not that Pete understood why the engines had shut down so completely the way that they had.

With his left hand, Pete reached across his body to his engineering pouch attached to his belt. Flicking it open, he searched out the small torch that he always carried.

Its beam of light lit up the grey metal directly in front of him. With a frown and a twist of his body, Pete shone the torch around. A second wall was close by and he followed it with his torch. Finally, far above his head, the light lit on something that he recognised. The secondary control panel for the ion engines.

But if that was up there, then that meant that he was really …

Shining his torch at the pipe that he still held, Pete surveyed the length of it, realising immediately where he was. Attached to the ceiling. Upside down.

Now that he was orientated, he quickly picked out other ‘landmarks’ – the door, the master control board, the hatch leading to the port wing. A flash of purple caught his eye as his light went past the tool’s locker causing him to swing it back.

Zheen, are you alright?

A purple face looked up at him, one arm raised to shield her eyes. Behind her, a length of blue-black hair floated like a tail, slowing whipping backwards and forwards as she moved.

"Varn eezleg ti graven, Pete!"

Pete frowned. He had no idea what Zheen’d just growled at him.

Hang on, I’m going to try to get to the master control board, he told her.

Focussing the light on his destination, Pete brought his knees up and his feet onto the wall ‘below’ him. Then, praying like mad that he didn’t miss, he kicked off. With no gravity to help, just sheer momentum, it was a long slow glide. He kept the torch fixed dead in front of him, his target firmly in its light.

Finally, Pete was able to reach out and snag a corner of the console and haul himself in. Forcing his legs down, he tucked them in under the lip of the console, anchoring himself as best as he could.

As expected, there wasn’t even the hint of a light coming from anywhere on the board. Shining his torch across its surface, he pointlessly tried to survey the damage, to find some cause to the power outage.

It took three passes over the board before he realised that he was seeing something that wasn’t right. Star Runner was a Ghezenium ship, which, in human terms, meant alien. Therefore, all of the labels on the board were in Ghezenium, a language that Pete had been only able to read for the last three months because of the glasses that he constantly wore.

Universal Translator Glasses. Designed to recognise any written language programmed into them and display a written translation onto the lens of the glasses in the desired language of the user.

But right now, all Pete was seeing was Ghezenium.

Sure, he knew what it all said, but that was only because he’d been working with the board constantly since they’d come on board. But Ghezenium or not, he should have been seeing the English words on the lens of his UT glasses. And he wasn’t.

Taking them off, Pete examined them in the light from his torch. Completely drained. Not a single watt of power in them at all. In disgust, he threw them onto the control board and instantly realised his mistake. No gravity. The glasses simply ricocheted off and floated away before he could grab them again. He dismissed them with a shrug.

Nothing made sense to Pete. The ship may have lost power, but the glasses had its own independent power supply. Whatever had affected the ship couldn’t have affected the glasses.

There was nothing that he knew of that could affect multiple energy sources at the same time like that. Well, thinking about it, he realised that that wasn’t strictly true. There was one space phenomena that could drain energy sources like that.

He and his brothers, not to mention Zheen, Holas and Tran, had encountered it once before. Pete shuddered.

He didn’t like to think of that time.

Being sucked into a black hole, only to find out that it was in reality also a wormhole leading to a giant space going Bubble that drained all power sources whenever its boundary was crossed was not something that he liked to dwell on.

He and his brothers had been left adrift in Work Pod Nine with no power until he’d been able to shunt power from the dormant generators that the pod had been carrying – the exact same method that he’d used to get Star Runner working again when they’d found her adrift in the Bubble as well.

With a grin and a nod, Pete swung the torch back to the last place that he’d seen Zheen.

Zheen, I’ve got a plan, he told her.

The confused look on her face made him slap himself in the face.

Of course. No power means no universal translators – glasses or earpieces, he reminded himself.

His plan had just become twice as difficult to implement.

Chapter Two – Flight Deck Babble

The Bubble. We’re in the Bubble.

Alexander stared in the dark of the flight deck. His youngest brother, Nick, had just uttered the most terrifying statement