Eye of the Ocean Book 3 Ji'jin Station

Eye of the Ocean – Book 3: Ji’Jin Station
- 2 -
A pocked moon, a silver-skinned crescent of reflected sunlight, a dusky plain
directly below. No atmosphere. They were in the sun shadow, in orbit. On the
light-capped forward horizon, small with distance, a clouded world rose. They
didn't know where they were.
“Try again,” Rit said to Kori. She was kneeling before the crystal array and the
interface systems with the data points. “We'll fall apart if they keep this up.” The
larger ship had ignored each of their attempts at a greeting through the Net. They
were being scanned or attacked, he wasn't sure which of the two was intended.
The ship had come out of the direction of the sun, its shielding an aurora of
flaring energy they hadn't been able to distinguish from the natural until it was
practically on top them. “It is an attack,” Kori had said and then repeated each
time he suggested an alternative explanation. She had reset their shields at the
same moment the first scan hit, the need to complete the action with a return
attack obvious to Rit even with the blocker still in his system and his pattern
senses muted. An attack wasn’t possible; they didn’t have the power in the
crystals to spare.
Istarom. Rit caught a faint sense of what Kori had done there to hold off the
Empire forces. At each point where he tried to see it more clearly, the impression
retreated.
The flitter groaned as the effect of the scanning waves on the shielding bled
into tiles already weakened by the time surge in the diamond. “They don't like
what I'm doing,” she said. And the reason expanded: they didn't like her.
“Bolda?” he asked through the Net, offering what they had so far. “What do
you think?” The equivalent of a shrug came back.
Kori had turned her head away. She might be right. It hadn't worked and
whoever was in the other ship didn't like something about what they had been
doing.
Spreading his mind over the Net focus she had been using, he pushed it past
the shielding, following the last signature path Kori had tried. “Alisim Temple,” he
said simply in Empire plain tongue as the Temple colors flared on their hull in the
Altasimic mark. The opal light from the six radiating lines - the stylized petals -
half blinded him. Outside and in, he hadn't thought to set a different inner shell.
The light dimmed as Kori took over.
The scanning stopped. Rit sat back against the support of the nose rib of the
craft and let his breath out.
From near by, Bolda snorted. “As Alicia would say, that let the cat out of the
bag.” The weaver was sitting on one of the chests that made this area almost a
Laurel Hickey www.2morrow.bc.ca