The Phoenix Project Read Online Free

in
a hoarse voice. He realized how dehydrated he was and wondered how long he had
been unconscious. He craned his neck to look around him and saw a few flashes
of flame flickering against the far wall where the main monitor was. As best as
he could see, a long crack ran down the center of the screen. He looked over to
his console and noticed that it had been battered by something heavy. The
likely perpetrator had him pinned to the floor.
         “Ranik?” Lathiel called out
again. The rest of the room was a post—apocalyptic battle scene from the old
legends of his race. The walls were warped from quakes and blackened by fire.
He wished that he had listened to his family now and had continued the work his
grandfather had begun. His family studied Null Space in an attempt to learn its
secrets from afar.
         He would have happily spent
more time analysing data with his father and brother but the war had
intervened. He had taken up the defence of his people by leading the expedition
to repair and reactivate the doomsday weapon that their ancestors had abandoned
a millennium ago.
         Lathiel knew that this
immense, ancient weapon wouldn’t fire again. Never would their ancestors come
to rescue them again in their time of need. Presently, he heard the sound of
movement from somewhere to his left.
         “Ranik? I hope it’s you,”
Lathiel said to the sound of moving debris nearby.
         “Cousin,” Ranik replied. His
head became visible once a piece of melted plastic fell out of the way.
         “Are you alright?”
         “I’m better than the rest of
this place,” Ranik rasped through a dry throat. “I could use a drink.”
         “Can you move?”
         “Yes,” Ranik replied and
struggled up off the floor. He walked to where the young Ferine’s voice originated.
He took a look at the beam across his chest for a moment before shaking his
head. “Youth never manage to stay out of trouble.”
         “Just move the beam, please.”
         Ranik let out a brief chuckle and
then placed both hands on one end of the severed support. He huffed with effort,
realizing just how heavy the beam really was.
         “Maybe you should go and get
some help,” Lathiel said.
         “You don’t want to know what’s
left of the rest of this place. I don’t think there’s anyone else alive in here
to help.”
         Lathiel fell silent at the
news and watched as Ranik wrapped both of his arms around the beam and pulled
upwards. To his relief, the beam moved off his chest with barely a scrape to
his spotted skin. Ranik hefted the collapsed support in the safest direction,
which was unfortunately Lathiel’s station. The beam’s added weight was more
than it could handle and the console crumpled to the floor.
         “Thanks,” Lathiel said. The yellow
eyed Ferine lent him a hand to help him up. “Is anything still working in
here?”
         Ranik looked around the room
before responding. “I don’t think so.”
         “We need to get to a working
station and assess the damage.”
         Ranik took a scanner from his
belt. He was gratified to see that it still functioned and moved it around in a
semicircle to gather data. “There’s some power readings in that direction,”
Ranik said, pointing toward a wall.
         “The medical bay is there.
Let’s go,” Lathiel said. It was then that he realized that the fire he saw
flickering on the wall wasn’t coming from the doorway but from the lift
entrance beyond it. Tongues of flame licked the cracked doors of the elevator.
         “It is coming from the med—bay,”
Ranik confirmed from the information displayed on his scanner. “Five decks
below us.”
         “It’s the stairs whether we
like it or not,” Lathiel said, nodding towards the burning elevator shaft. They
wrenched open a pair of doors next to the lift and saw a stairway coiling down
into the dark.
         They felt their