Here’s the rough draft of chapter four!
“Lord of All,” McClaren breathed as the alien gently shoved his naked body through the perfectly circular hole, about three meters across, that they’d cut in the side of his ship. He had thought at first that they were going to push him into hard vacuum through some sort of invisible barrier, for there was nothing visible between the Aurora’s hull and that of the enemy vessel that now stood very close alongside. But he had seen that there were warriors at a few spots along the invisible gangway that somehow linked the ships, and that had held his fear in check. Barely.
But my God, the view, he thought as he crossed over the threshold from the metal deck into the void, suddenly leaving the ship’s artificial gravity behind, his stomach momentarily dropping away into weightlessness. He could see down the Aurora’s flank, noting grimly where the enemy warriors had boarded his ship. And then there was the enemy ship – huge! – that didn’t look a thing like any spacecraft ever made by humankind. The smooth metal (he assumed it was metal) of the hull gleamed a deep but brilliant green, with contoured dark gunmetal-colored ports and blisters where he assumed some sort of hatches or weapons were mounted. Unlike a human ship, which was a patchwork of plates, the surface of the alien ship’s hull was as smooth as a still pond: he couldn’t see any joints or welds, rivets, screws or other fastenings as he got closer. It was as if the hull was one gigantic sheet of…whatever it was made of. The craft was all graceful curves, as if it were designed to fly in an atmosphere, with none of the boxy fittings and other angular projections typical of human ships. Looking forward, he saw that giant runes were inscribed along its raked prow, perhaps proclaiming the ship’s name, whatever it might be.
And all around him: the stars. As if his hand had a will of its own, he reached out to touch them. He knew they were billions of miles away, but they seemed so close. The alien sun burned brightly mere millions of miles away, and a star far brighter than the other stars proclaimed itself the planet the four warships had come from. He had been on plenty of spacewalks, but this wasn’t the same. Maybe it was the emotional exhaustion of the last hour or so since the alien ships had been spotted. So little time on the scale of his life, but an eternity for those who had lived through it.
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