The Last Story by Christopher Pike Read Free Book Online Page B

on white ships. Blue and red beams erupted from the purple ships, striking the white ones. Soundless explosions splashed the vast black canvas with light.
    Yet this was the light of death; for each of the white spheres was gigantic and filled with thousands of people.

    The purple ships were not bent solely on destruc

    tion, however. Even as I watched, they maneuvered to corral in the white fleet, to capture its millions of occupants, ultimately to force them into submission.

    But for what purpose I didn't know, only that the invaders' ultimate goal was evil beyond words.

    Better to die, I thought, than surrender to their will.

    The will of the others.

    CHAPTER

    VI

    U^/VENING MY EYES, I stared at the black ceiling.

    For a moment I was surprised there were no stars embedded there. Yet I had no conscious remembrance of having dreamed. I sat up and looked out the window. The moon was a shade past full; its pitted surface, yellowed by the curve of the atmosphere, hung close to the sea. It was odd that I could see the marks of meteors on it without a telescope.

    Yet as I blinked and rubbed my eyes, my supernormal vision fled, and I was left with Peter's soft breathing, a normal-size moon out our window, and fragments of dreams I couldn't quite piece together. I remembered the yogi flying in a white spaceship beside me. No, I remembered my mother clutching a rose and crying as she asked me to sign a book for her.
    Shaking my head, I climbed out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

    "It must have been the wine," I muttered.

    After I peed, however, I didn't climb back into bed. My mind was alert. My headache was gone, as

    well as my fatigue. A subtle power swept over me, as often happened when I did my best writing. Not entirely sure what I was doing, I went into my office and sat down in front of my computer. The screen glowed eerie blue white as I booted my hard disk.

    For the first time in a long time, I found myself not working on a particular project. My efforts to get the movie going consumed all my energy. But I missed telling stories; there was nothing like it in the world. The strange thing about writing is that you never know when the magic will strike to let you tell the stories. In fact, you never know if the magic will ever come again.

    I felt the magic then.

    I opened a new file, thought for a moment, then began to type.

    THE STARLIGHT CRYSTAL

    Captain Sarteen smiled with satisfaction as her starship, the Crystal, materialized out of hyperspace far beyond the orbit of the tenth planet. The familiar yellow light of Sol glistened on the main screen, faint at this great distance but nonetheless welcome. Over a thousand years had elapsed since Sarteen had seen the sun of her birth. The travels of her starship had been vast, and the knowledge gained—invaluable. But now the journey was complete. Today was mankind's birthday.

    Today they would be welcomed into the Galactic Confederation, and no longer be bound by the laws of the physical realm. The contact with the elder races had come only recently, while Sarteen and her crew had

    been thousands of light-years away, searching for other intelligent races they feared they would never find. Now the doubt was past, the loneliness over. The call had gone out. All of mankind was returning home. Sarteen knew her starship was the last to reenter the solar system.

    "Begin deceleration," Sarteen said from her command seat on the bridge of the starship.
    The vessel was vast, over a mile in diameter, and carried a crew in excess of a hundred thousand.
    It could jump in and out of hyperspace only at close to light speed; they would have to cancel out most of that great velocity before they reached the inner planets. In a split second, their last hyperspace jump had carried them over a hundred light-years. But now that they were in real space, the ship's great graviton engines would have to labor to keep them from flying past Earth.
    As she gave her order, she heard a