War Begins Book Four: War Begins, #4

By Odette C. Bell

The Force arrive, and this time, they can't lose.
Diana and Sampson reach Baxan A. But so do their enemies. The Force won't let them open the time gate to buy the Milky Way one last chance.
But Sampson and Diana won't give up. They've made a promise that cannot break – they will stand with their backs to the past and their hearts to the future. For only together can they save the Coalition and protect all.

…

War Begins follows a secret alien weapon and a covert psychic fighting to save the Coalition from their greatest enemy. If you love your space operas with action, heart, and a splash of romance, grab War Begins Book Four today and soar free with an Odette C. Bell series.

War Begins is the 8th Galactic Coalition Academy series. A sprawling, epic, and exciting sci-fi world where cadets become heroes and hearts are always won, each series can be read separately, so plunge in today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odette C. Bell
• Release date: Feb 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386748922

Book preview

1

Diana Fenton

Just when she thought it was over, she reached out a hand, and her fingers touched the wall.

For a split second, nothing happened. She felt her nails dragging along the hard, grainy surface of the old, carved stone.

Then the creature attacking her caught up.

It smashed into her back, grabbed her around the throat, and yanked her to the side.

But it could not move her. For Diana had finally opened the time gate.

The wall fell away. It didn’t crumble. It didn’t fall as if an earthquake had suddenly shuddered through the room and broken it with all the ease of somebody taking a hammer to cracked bone.

It disappeared as if it had always been nothing more than an image.

From somewhere, Diana heard a scream. It seemed to pitch through all of matter. It shook around her, through her, inside her, outside – in every conceivable direction and orientation at once.

It was almost too much to bear, but it didn’t last.

In a split second, it ended.

Diana, move. Throw yourself through the gate, she heard Sampson scream behind her. His voice bellowed out. She’d never heard it louder. Yet, as she jerked her head around, she still couldn’t see him.

She could feel him, though. He was all around her, and yet, he was nowhere distinct.

… He was throwing his mind, wasn’t he? Just as she’d learned during that vision of his past, Sampson Ventura had the singular, peculiar psychic ability to be able to push his mind through space.

Diana, move, he bellowed again, his voice somehow getting louder until it felt like it could bring the ceiling down.

Finally she pushed to her feet.

Whatever was attacking her had to be some form of psychic force, just like Sampson was at the moment. That eerie, terrifying scream that had pitched through the room had come from it. But with a scattering that sounded like a thousand claws climbing up the broken backs of corpses, she realized the creature wasn’t down yet.

Diana pitched to her feet. She threw herself up so fast, her hair whipped around her face.

She pulsed forward.

There may be no wall between her and the time gate anymore, but there was still a threshold. And crossing it felt like pushing from the ordinary into the extraordinary. From the mundane, into the higher realms that always sat beyond.

And from peace into unending war.

As she pushed through that threshold, her whole body vibrated as if someone had broken her down to the atomic level and she had become one with each of her atoms.

Her skin cascaded with nerves, a sparking feeling rushing down into her stomach and spilling out over her chest.

But more than anything, it was her psychic senses that ran wild. They pulsed like a heart getting faster and faster and faster as it recognized it was finally nearing safety.

Just as she heard another one of those eerie, terrifying cries that seemed to shake through all of matter at once, Diana pushed into the time gate.

Ostensibly, the only thing on the opposite side of the wall was a dark cavern of no more than 10-meters depth. Or at least, it would look like that to someone with ordinary eyes. To her, it….

There was no way to describe it.

You couldn’t look at it with your eyes. You couldn’t feel it with your fingers. And God knows you couldn’t sense it with the rest of your limited human faculties.

But to the mind, it was like a field of doors. Doors that led to different times and places, doors that led to different opportunities and ways to save all.

As she stood amongst them, it felt like she rose up. The danger of the situation seemed far away as she felt a sense she’d been longing for her entire life.

She was here. The time was now. She’d finally arrived. All those torturous years she’d spent waiting for her life to make sense now seemed long in the past. For now she understood.

But she didn’t exactly have time to stand here and appreciate that fact.

Sampson was still fighting the creature, and though she couldn’t see them, she jerked her head to the side, her hair whipping against her shoulder as her eyes pulsed wide.

Again she heard that unmistakable, terrifying scattering sound as if thousands of predators were marching up the walls at once.

Then, right at the back of the dig site, a scream.

It was human. And it was Sampson.

Sampson, she bellowed. Her body acted on instinct, and she took a step toward the dig site.

No, he screamed back. Use the time gate. Get out of here. The psychic guard is after you. If it gets you, we won’t be able to control the time gates. Go, Diana, I’ve got this.

There’s no way I’m going to leave you alone, Diana said, her voice shaking so badly, it felt like it would tear a hole in her throat.

Diana, go, he screamed with all his might.

Tears streaked down her cheeks, wetting her collar, trickling down her neck and feeling like drops of blood. For as she stood there, staring in wide-eyed horror, despite the fact she could see nothing, it felt like she lost a part of herself. Sampson—

I’ll find a way to beat it. I’ll meet you on the other side. We have to do this, Diana. If they get you—

They’ll win the war, she said, her voice dead. Then she did it. The hardest thing she would ever do. She turned her back on Sampson. As tears streamed down her cheeks, making it feel like her grief had turned into a waterfall, Diana opened her arms.

She could feel that other her – the her she was in her dreams. The soldier that had fought the Force tirelessly.

Though Diana’s full memory of losing her parents had finally returned, she still didn’t understand what an angel was and what it meant that she now was the host of one.

As she spread her arms wide, though knowledge didn’t strike her, a sense of belonging did. As her fingers extended through the formless, dark shadows of the time gate and her eyes closed, she felt another her.

The angel.

She felt a sword in her hand, a shield around her waist, and a purpose in her mind. A singular desire that she would never lose hold of, no matter how much time passed, how much was destroyed, and how much there was left to save.

She found her lips parting, and a single word echoed out of them. Omega.

That was her name.

As she said that, the psychic guard Sampson fought screamed even louder. This wasn’t the pitching, desperate cry of a creature who’d just lost. This was rage incarnate. Violent, destructive desires that came deep from the realms of the Force. And destructive desires that would never stop, that would never show compassion, and that would destroy everything in their path, for they thought that was their right.

Go, Diana, Sampson called again, his voice somehow more desperate. She could hear the stress pitching through it. And though her back was to him and she couldn’t even see him in the first place, she knew that he was losing.

The desire to turn and help him rose in her heart, but she wouldn’t move.

That angel part of her – Omega – wouldn’t let her. So she spread her fingers wider. As she stretched them out, not only did she feel the sword in her hand, but she felt matter like she never had before.

She felt it as if it – and everything – were nothing but doors. Every object, every process, every property in existence – all were doors.

But doors that could only be opened to those who could see.

Suddenly, Diana blasted her eyes open, and she saw, right through the blackness around her, and right through time.

Something began to form around her, encircling her like hands. She felt this distinct sensation wrap around her stomach, race up her back, spread over her shoulders, and plunge down her arms.

She felt encased in chance itself. For the prickling, tender feeling that gushed around her body seemed like the very fabric of reality – and what is reality but continuous change?

Open, she found herself bellowing, the word pitching from her lips and echoing through the room.

Sampson’s screams had been so loud they’d cause the ceiling to shake earlier – but her cry was even louder. For it pitched right through the roof, and up, up into the rest of the outpost. And down, down into the depths of this cold planet. But more than that – through the time gate.

It opened.

And Diana was pulled through.

She was alone.

For now.

There would be others to help her.

2

Sampson

He could feel as the time gate opened. It was a sensation he would never forget for as long as he lived – if he lived more than a few seconds, that was.

Because Sampson had lied. There was no way he could defeat this psychic guard and meet Diana on the other side.

He was dead – it was just a matter of minutes or seconds.

Again that psychic guard threw itself at Sampson, and now it did so with such vicious force, it felt as if Sampson was fighting the Devil himself.

Diana was through the time gate. He could retreat, and yet, the psychic guard wouldn’t let him.

Sampson knew that even if Fenton pounded on his face on the Oden, Sampson’s mind would not be snapped back to his body.

The psychic guard was somehow anchoring Sampson in place.

It was angry as all hell. It had failed in its task to stop Diana from opening the time gate. It would not fail in stopping Sampson from joining her.

Sampson screamed again as he hauled his body forward. His mind-body, at least. He… the longer he was down here, the harder it was getting to differentiate between what he was and what his mind was. His psyche and his body had just smashed together until they’d become this undifferentiated pool of force.

One that was far weaker than his enemy.

The psychic guard screamed again, though scream was a generous term. It was something you tended to associate with the throats of the living. Be they humans or aliens – a scream tended to come with emotion and intelligence. The shrieking cry the guard gave, however, came with nothing more than undiluted greed.

It didn’t belong in this galaxy – heck, it didn’t belong in this universe.

It belonged in a realm far away where it had been banished to long ago.

These thoughts might’ve had a chance to assail Sampson’s mind, but they couldn’t help him. Nothing could. The psychic guard rounded on him and threw itself at him with all of the force of a speeding wall.

Sampson was knocked off the psychic equivalent of his feet. Though he couldn’t technically be winded in this form, he could be crushed, which was precisely what the guard proceeded to do as it pinned him against the floor.

Pain erupted through his body, and it was an agony far more precise than any he’d ever experienced. Despite the fact pain ought to come from the body, without a body, there was nothing to distract him from the pure intensity of it. It ripped through his mind, boiling and burning, shredding and tearing.

He screamed, screamed with all his might.

… At the back of his head, he understood he only had seconds left.

Which was okay. He’d done his job. He’d gotten Diana out of here. The Coalition would have a chance.

Way, way back at the edges of his mind, he appreciated another thing. He’d done what his father had intended him to do. Sampson had become the sleeper agent Ventura had always wanted. And though Sampson hadn’t defeated the Force, by allowing Diana through the time gate, at least he’d harmed them. His father would be proud….

Maybe that psychic guard could read his mind – or perhaps it was only getting more eager by the second to end this – because it suddenly gave such a growl, it sounded like a pack of hungry wolves. It pressed against Sampson with ever-growing might until Sampson’s mind finally started to shut down. He knew somehow that back on the Oden, his body would be crumbling out from underneath him. By now Forest would have whisked him off to the med bay, but there was nothing the doctors would be able to do.

Sampson was dead. It was just a matter of seconds now. A matter of….

As his mind began to fracture, it pulled him back into the past. He saw flashes of his childhood self, then of the training he’d undergone as a psychic soldier. Then, one after another, in a seemingly unending diary of horror, he saw every patient of Infection Zero he’d ever dealt with.

And there’d been hundreds of them. They flashed through his mind, over and over again, unending, unending.

Just when Sampson thought he didn’t have a mind capable of screaming anymore, a cry echoed from his throat greater than any other.

It wasn’t at the agony of his mind being crushed – it was at the tyranny of what the Force had done.

All those patients who’d succumbed to Infection Zero. All those minds who’d been crushed, just to give the Force a chance to consume the Milky Way. All that goddamn injustice and pain.

Someone would have to pay for them.

The Force.

They would have to pay for every soul they’d ever broken.

Somehow – and Sampson would never know exactly how – he moved. His body bucked, or at least his mind-body did. He pushed. But he did not just struggle with his mind anymore – he pushed with everything. Every belief he’d ever had. Every memory – and importantly, every victim he’d ever killed. They just created this power within him purer than any other.

Sampson threw the psychic guard off him.

It was a strange experience to fight mind-to-mind. Though he could technically interact with the dig site around him, it wasn’t the same as using his body. As he threw the psychic guard off him, the thing didn’t tumble into a wall so hard, the ceiling shook. It flew through the air and came to a stop 20 meters away.

It paused. Perhaps it was reassessing him – maybe it was merely resetting its desire to murder everything in its path. But Sampson used that pause.

He finally went on the offensive. He threw himself forward. He didn’t scream. He didn’t make a damn noise. He used every ounce of energy, re-channeling it into the task of weaponizing his mind.

By the time he reached the psychic guard, Sampson felt like he was nothing more than