Endless Chaos Book Four

By Odette C. Bell

The galaxy will fall, the Coalition too, unless Birim can do something. But to fight, he’ll have to win against his demons first.
As the various players in this deadly game are smashed together in a final match of dread and peril, there’s every chance the Coalition will lose. As their forces are fractured and pushed far afield, only one thing can hold them together.
When you join the Coalition, you take an oath to protect the Milky Way from every threat, no matter how big or personal. If Birim and Sharon can remember that – and fight for it – they’ll find each other again. And once they join as one, they’ll be unstoppable.
....
Endless Chaos follows a damaged superweapon and an arrogant cadet fighting to save the Coalition from an admiral gone rogue. If you love your space operas with action, heart, and a splash of romance, grab Endless Chaos Book Four today and soar free with an Odette C. Bell series.
Endless Chaos is the 21st 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: Mar 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215036044

Book preview

Chapter 1

Sharon

I now had the secret to taking the suit off, but no way to do it and no time to waste.

The anomaly expanding through the station had to be one of the most destructive yet. It might look simple. It was not. Because anything it touched soon crumbled. In a minute or two, walls became dust – the floor, power conduits, and people too.

Nothing could stop it.

And that was the point.

Nothing could stop Aurora, either, even though I knew she wasn’t here, even though I knew she’d essentially disappeared into the recesses of her own mind. There was no point in telling her to run when she had the chance. She’d had the chance, but it had disappeared.

She suddenly turned after she’d smashed through several commandos. She left them on the floor, and they too soon interacted with the growing anomaly. It just crushed them. It was like some giant trash compactor of old.

If you were stupid enough to get in its way, you’d never get the chance to get out of its way.

We will go to— Aurora began, but I felt something behind me. It was attention.

You might not think you can feel attention, but after playing the game for as long as I had, I could. You’d get a sixth sense for when someone was watching you, and I knew eyes locked on me. Not just any eyes. It was a spark. Somehow there was one on the station—

It was right behind me.

I felt something fidget out from inside my boot, then stared in aghast horror when I realized it was one of the sparks.

Aurora just stared at it as if she didn’t quite understand. She ran out of time to do anything. The spark smashed into my chest then forced me through the floor. It was easy enough considering the floor itself was compromised by the growing anomaly.

I fell down into a tunnel beneath. It was for maintenance, and there was a pit of power conduits to my left. They were shielded for now, but as the anomaly wreaked havoc with this ship, the shields disappeared. I rolled into the pit, energy jolting through me as the spark continued the fight.

I didn’t know what it was after, but it soon became apparent. It was trying to move into my suit, trying to embody it.

If I thought it was bad working for Bellamy, working for one of the sparks would be deadly.

I fought with everything I had, wrapping my arms around it, trying to stop it from attacking me, but there was nothing I could frigging do.

I roared. I swear the spark roared louder.

I rolled, somehow managing to remove myself from the pit. But that didn’t save me yet.

The spark wheedled in even further. I felt something start to fail in my suit. I’d told you I needed a miracle to get rid of it. Maybe all I needed was this spark.

But what I definitely needed was a better name for it. A spark suggested something that wasn’t alive. Some small blast of brilliant illumination. Nothing that could change the galaxy and that intended to destroy it in one fell swoop.

Maybe now wasn’t the best time to figure out a name for them, but one snapped into my head anyway. Why not Spiral?

You might think Death was more appropriate. I was taking the name from the game. For it felt like, as the spark touched me, it was there to make me spiral into oblivion. There to make me lose control, there to make my suit fail, there to take me.

It had watched me, it had liked what it’d seen, and now it would use me as its ultimate player. If it ever got through my defenses.

Even if you weren’t a psychic, you could technically have psychic defenses. That’s why there was an entire class devoted to it at the Academy.

I’d taken it. And I will admit I’d learned a thing or two. It’d probably made me a better player, because it’d covered sharpening your mind to ensure nothing could stop you, nothing could get between you and your sense of self. Descend into it and inhabit it fully, and something else won’t be able to own it for you.

I retreated to that position now with everything I had, but maybe with a little added extra, too.

I was not the same cadet who’d joined the Academy. The last two fraught days had taught me even more than five years combined. And a certain man had taught me more still. A certain man that my mind found it easy to concentrate on. A certain man who, if I tried to imagine him, I could do so in perfect detail. And it was those details I sank my mind into, those details I let make my psyche come alive. They were a house I could live in while the Spirals tried to embody me. A house that could distract me from the Spiral’s groping power. A house where, if I just waited out the storm, maybe, one day, I could emerge from it.

I closed my eyes. I was still thrashing on the floor with this thing. I was still trying to stop it from making me its perfect weapon. Yet I closed my eyes. Yet I managed to find a point of calm in the middle of the storm where it could rain, but it didn’t rain on me.

I doubted I looked calm from the outside, doubted my features showed anything other than contracted fear. But inside, my ego had a place to hide.

A place with a certain name and a certain boyish smile.

If you’d asked me two days ago, I would’ve told you Birim was just an idiot, someone so consumed by his concept of what a career should be, he couldn’t actually see the rest of the world. That’s why he’d been a bully.

Now I realized how delightfully complex he was. And I realized exactly why my mind could hold onto him so well.

I don’t think Spiral could speak. Not without a mouth. But if it could communicate with me, right now it would be screaming at me to give up. I’d scream back that I couldn’t. That I never would. And there was nothing this Spiral could do to stop me.

We thrashed on the floor, thrashed for God knows how long, thrashed until something happened. I’d already made the conclusion that the Spirals could not operate outside of armor or holograms for long. This one had stuck around, hidden in my suit, and followed me. But it had a time limit. And it reached it. Just when it felt as if it would win, it stopped. It shivered like it was some baby bird that had just fallen from the nest or a child that realized it had locked itself out in the snow and howling wind.

I opened one eye and stared at it. Stared at it as I finally thrust it back.

There was nothing much to look at. I still made eye contact with it, though, opened my stiff lips, and promised it, Wherever you live, the Coalition is coming for you. And we will stop Death Spiral. Your days are numbered.

As that threat ripped from my lips, the spark disappeared in a blast of dissipating energy.

I lurched up. Lurched up for one thing to happen. My suit fell off. In the fight for it, the spark had damaged it sufficiently that now it just withered from me like dried-up petals from a rose.

At first, I couldn’t even accept what was going on. I stared at it, eyes not moving, brain not working.

Then I reached down. I went to touch the suit but stopped my fingers in place. I kicked it instead. Then, lurching around, I finally realized I was honestly free. But to truly be free, I needed to do something to stop this attack.

I checked that I was okay, that my body was still whole, then turned. I faced the suit. Though the last thing I wanted to do was touch it, I got down on a crunching knee and slid my hand over the back.

I had to appreciate that this wasn’t a standard game suit. This came from Bellamy. The same man who was intent on destroying this listening station.

You’d be surprised, but I didn’t understand too much about suit engineering. Not from the outside. But from the inside, I knew exactly what they felt like and precisely how Bellamy’s suit had been different.

I inverted the jumpsuit, shoving my hand into it but shaking all the way, my elbow trembling so badly, I thought I’d lose it.

My prying fingers soon found a different set of control modules along the spine unit.

I used my strength to pull them out.

A dangling set of cords attached to a thumb-sized silver disk fell into my grip.

I frowned.

There was something about it…. It didn’t take long to remember what that was. It resembled the disc I took from the ceiling of the Scarax God facility.

I became cold, that deep kind of aching cold that takes hold of your muscles, rips them back until they’re nothing but naked fibers, then shakes them down further. It is there to ensure you can’t move again, to ensure you can’t even imagine the concept of moving.

Bellamy must’ve done something. He must have some incredible skill to be able to take on not just the entire game ring, but the Academy, too.

I wasn’t just talking about the black holes. He must’ve found something, some other technological edge. And this was it, wasn’t it? It confirmed that he really had contacted a version of the sparks.

I corrected myself quickly. The Spirals. Those who had begun the game. And those who I’d ultimately stop.

Though I didn’t want to get any closer to the disc unless I had to, I squeezed it against my palm, locking it there with my crooked fingers. Then I rose.

I glanced at the suit one last time. I didn’t have the luxury of spending any more seconds assessing it. The ship shook.

Dammit, I roared as a specific alarm rang out. That would be the spatial anomaly warning. The ship was losing structural integrity.

I whirled around.

I’d been thrust through the floor by the suit. The floor at the time had been in a state of flux. As I yanked my head up, I quickly collapsed to my knees, getting as low to the ground as I could. Because the ceiling wasn’t just fluxing anymore. It looked as if it was about to digest itself.

Inching along, keeping myself as flat as possible, I tried to remember standard ship design. There ought to be a hatch that should lead down to the next section of the maintenance tunnel just to my left—

There was, and my fingers chanced upon it. They raced over the mechanical opening, and I yanked it up, the springs within capable of functioning, even if electricity was cut completely.

I hefted it up, giving it a hand to move faster, then dropped down onto the ladder below, leaping and only catching hold of the railing halfway down.

I released my grip and slid until I landed on the floor below. Thankfully it was still solid.

With a grunt, I jettisoned myself forward, knowing speed was the only thing I had left.

Aurora might be broken, might be lost in her own world of grief, but Bellamy had taken me because he knew he needed me. When she’d done what she had to, she’d come for me.

I needed to ensure I was in a position where she couldn’t capture me.

I was out of my suit. But she still had one, and in any game between us, she would win. Hands down.

I trembled way too much.

I never usually trembled in my suit.

Before I could conclude that meant that my body would prefer to be back in that cage, I realized it was likely conditioning. Though I’d fought a little at the Academy, it had been nothing like this – nothing like fighting to the death. So my body associated fighting to the death with the suit.

Not any longer.

As I ran down this thankfully solid section of a maintenance tunnel, I heard the last sound I wanted to. A high-pitched buzz struck the air. And it held on. I twisted, my messy hair flying back across my face, my lips pulling thin with fear. There, sure enough, was a holographic drone.

It was one of Bellamy’s.

Or at least that’s the conclusion I made first. It looked like it had a basic Coalition design, and it most certainly had been altered, but—

Bellamy would catch me. This drone either wanted me half dead or fully so.

Without pause, it shot toward me, and it was instinct alone that saw me spin and fall face-first onto the floor. I lucked out. There was another hatch right to my side. It was only several centimeters away from my fingers. I groped toward it, but drones would always be quicker. I might have sharp human reflexes – it had extraordinary electronic ones.

A laser beam lanced out of the aperture at the front, and the next thing I knew, the hatch was melting. I could drop down through it, but all that would do was burn my body.

I had to roll, collapse my hands over my head, and bash up against the wall beside me. Then the drone was upon me. My heart beat so wildly fast, I thought I’d lose consciousness.

No. I would make a difference. That voice in my head promising me that was quiet at first. It would not remain so.

I would make a difference, it screamed louder. I would make a difference until the game ring saw me, felt me, and fell to me. I’d make a difference until the Academy that had saved me was saved in turn. I would make a difference until all of this was over and I was back with him.

It took too long to realize I’d thought the last bit, too long to appreciate it had felt so automatic that it had easily slipped from my mind. And it also took far too long, because I was far too busy. The drone reached me.

Something lanced out of the aperture at the front, and I thought it was an assault. My body readied itself to be splattered across the walls as best as a body could. The attack didn’t happen. A scanning beam struck me instead. I couldn’t feel it – only hear its high-pitched whir.

Something clicked within the drone.

The drone shot forward.

The next thing I knew, it sliced toward the thing in my hand.

… It wasn’t after me?

I didn’t have a weapon. There was no way I could possibly take on this drone.

But there’s a way to take on everything. All you have to do is find out what something is after and use it against them.

Instinctively, moving faster than I thought was possible, I yanked the ganglion-like device around and smashed it against the wall.

You should have seen the drone. It shuddered as if I was threatening its child.

I would’ve thought it would just