Read Amalfi Echo for Free Online Page A

Marion stopped her with a hand on her arm.
    After a while,
Digby went on as though offering a confidence he hardly ever
shared. “As you said, Tessa. A long time ago and far far away. Even
this ship takes eons to cover the space between galaxies and what
happened to my galaxy is now deep in the past. We had our bugs too.
Super bugs. They were unknown and unknowable and the Amalfi were
wiped out defending us against them. The remnants of our
civilisations that were left began rebuilding. Some of us didn’t
have the heart for it and left to cross the enormous reaches of
space to somewhere else. And now it’s happening again. Believe me
when I say I feel sick at the fate that awaits your people.”
    With that,
Digby faded out.
    “Don’t think
we’ve finished,” Tessa said. “I’ll ask him to come back.”
    “No. Leave him
be.” Marion called the hangar back. “Maybe you’d like to show me
over your Starfighter.”
    -oOo-
    A week later,
Marion and Tessa had lunch by a waterfall. Schools of fish leapt
playfully from the water at the foot of the falls. Large,
brightly-coloured butterflies fluttered all about their table which
was a masterpiece of ironwork. Tropical rainforest, teeming with
wildlife, provided a verdant backdrop. Marion and Tessa hardly
noticed.
    The week had
been frenetic. Tessa trained intensively with the Amalfi pistol and
towards the end of the week announced that the little button was
now an icky, greenish, maybe, sort of colour and that meant she had
only a few lessons to go before the weapon was armed and she could
start blowing holes in stuff.
    “You are
absolutely not to blow holes in anything,” Marion said.
    “Give a girl a
gun, dude, and she is going to use it,” Tessa said. “We’re
only talking live firing on a range which I have done lots of
times.”
    “I really wish
Digby wouldn’t encourage you.”
    Tessa created a
darkly lit desert scene with howling winds and nightmarish
creatures. She struck a gunslinger’s pose, hand on her side arm.
“When yuh hit dirt on an alien planet all on yuh little lonesome,
it doesn’t pay to be a scaredy-cat.”
    The ship still
hadn’t done its little trick with time. Apparently that was still
on the agenda.
    Now they were
having lunch by the waterfall. Marion wasn’t hungry. She picked at
her food, her mind elsewhere. Her living quarters now looked
exactly like her London apartment in Mill Hill, which she had
loved, and contained all of her treasured possessions. On Earth,
nothing much had changed. Mostly Marion thought of the library of
holograms of the bugs and their activities. Unfortunately, they
came across as nothing more than another science-fiction movie and
a low budget one at that. Bugs. It’s been done.
    Tessa was also
thinking the same. “ We need proper Intel ,” she thought to
Marion through the link.
    “I don’t like
that,” Marion snapped. “It gives me the creeps.”
    “Okay, okay.
Happy now?” Tessa said. She continued shovelling in slices of
pizza, amusing herself by ordering random toppings as the slice
entered her mouth. In between mouthfuls, she said, “We have to go
there.”
    “Go where?”
    “The bug fleet,
of course. We have to see it for ourselves.” The alien fleet was
strung out in a giant arc about a half a light year towards Alpha
Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth, and ploughing steadily
closer.
    “What will that
prove?” Marion said. “What’s the difference between looking at it
on a big screen here and looking at it on a big screen out there in
the middle of nowhere?” Despite the solidness of the windows and
their oh so real frames, both Marion and Tessa had now fully
realised that the ship had no windows. Nothing at all broke the
smooth surface of the outer skin. Not hatches. Not anything. Entry
and exit was achieved by the ship aligning the atoms of its skin
with the atoms of whatever was passing through and doing a neat
trick of balancing all the respective forces. It felt like