“I thought this was supposed to be your pirate haven,” Bayne said. “A paradise. No rules. No governors telling you what to do. Why would invite them here?”
“Because Ore Town is not the end goal. It’s a steppingstone. Every mining outpost, every moon, every planet, should be like this. By ignoring what we’ve accomplished in Ore Town, they keep us hidden. But they will not ignore us anymore.”
He put his mask back on. He seemed able to smile again, like he was transformed into another man. “The galaxy will know us.”
7
The assemblage was something Bayne hadn’t seen since his early days in the Navy. When they were still trying to gather everyone under one banner. Sailors all lined up, standing at attention, watching the admiral drone on about duty and responsibility and the innate heroism that seemed to come with death.
This gathering had one notable difference: it wasn’t Ayala reciting her carefully-crafted speech, it was Parallax preaching.
He stood on a balcony halfway up the command center tower flanked by Hix. The grandeur and spectacle made Bayne uneasy, but it also didn’t surprise him. Parallax was a showman. Kyte was the planner, the tactician. Bayne had begun to realize the two identities served two purposes, and they were compartmentalized.
The sailors and captains and deckhands of Ore Town stood together in one mass. No one stood at attention. No one saluted. On the surface, it seemed like a perfect representation of Parallax’s vision—no rank, no hierarchy—until you looked up and saw him looking down on you.
“Friends,” Parallax’s voice boomed from the speakers mounted on the command center. “We have worked tirelessly together to build this place, to shape it into something we are happy to call home. We knew from the beginning that the simple existence we carved for ourselves would be taken as a threat. That we would one day need to defend what we’ve built. Defend our home.”
The pause that followed was heavy. It pressed down on the crowd. Bayne felt the pent-up energy of the thousands standing shoulder to shoulder surge through him. Excited energy. Nervous. Angry. There were some who wanted to fight. They looked for excuses to fight, and there was no better excuse than this. But, looking at some of their faces, Bayne knew there were others who genuinely wanted what Parallax was selling them—a home. Peace.
“That day has come.” Parallax drew his sword and stabbed it into the bannister so that it stood like a conquering flag. “The combined might of the United Navy and Byers Clan are coming for us. Our existence spits in their faces. To have the gall to believe that we could not only survive but thrive outside of their influence, without their protection, without their boots on our necks, shows the galaxy that these bloated institutions are unnecessary.”
The energy of the crowd waned. Parallax was losing them. But he seemed to realize that. He looked out at them, studied them, then adjusted his approach.
“They want to take what’s yours. Everything that you’ve bled for. Will you let them?”
The crowd screamed back. “No!”
“Will you fight?”
“Yes!”
Ever the showman.
“The fight comes in three days. Sailors report to your captains. All others report to your team leaders. We prepare for victory!”
The energy built and broke apart as the crowd dispersed. Bayne felt like a rock in a stream, water rushing around him, slamming into him, but he was immovable. Over time, the water would wear him down, smooth his hard edges, whittle him down to nothing.
He felt Parallax’s eyes on him. From his balcony, he looked down on Bayne. He was waiting for Bayne to move. This was a chess move, and now it was Bayne’s play.
Wilco nudged Bayne’s side. He had forgotten the boy was standing next to him. “Hell of a thing.”
Bayne didn’t look away from Parallax.
Wilco tugged on his arm. “Don’t think the others bothered to come. We should fill them in, right? Get the ship ready to fly?”
Bayne allowed the stream to pull him away. “Yeah, I suppose we should.”
Wilco walked ahead, youthful energy thrumming through him. He chattered like a bird. “I been stuck planet-side too long. Sure, we just ran that caravan mission, but that was all quiet. I need some noise. A damn dogfight, that’s what I need.”
He continued to chatter all the way back to the ship, but Bayne tuned him out. He couldn’t stop thinking about Parallax. About Kyte. How they seemed so different from each other still. They were one body, but when he took that mask off, Bayne saw a visible change in him. The show. The performance. Bayne couldn’t tell which was which anymore.
Wilco was like an unstable battery. Energy pulsed through him that, with one crack in the casing containing it, would explode outward, incinerating everything around him. It was a distraction and liability Bayne didn’t need right now. He grabbed the boy by the shoulder as they reached the docks.
“Go to the weapons bay,” Bayne said to him. “I’ll have Graeme send a list of everything we need. We need the Blue packed to the gills for this fight and we’ve only a few days to prepare.”
Wilco seemed reluctant, but the thought of using his body and hauling weapons and ammo won out over the prospect of pacing the ship for three days. “Aye, aye.”
The docks bustled. The same energy that surged through Wilco seeped out into the deckhands and sailors. They frantically scuttled about like crabs on the beach, sorting supplies, loading and unloading ships, carting ammo to the planetary defenses. Team leaders barked orders, directing the energy as efficiently as they could, given the crazed atmosphere.
The noise dropped away when Bayne reached the Royal Blue. He stood at the foot of the landing platform, looking up at the bow. His home. The only thing he ever really wanted. And now he was pulled into this chaotic mess. He thought about climbing aboard his ship and setting course for the edge of the galaxy, sailing into the farthest reaches of the Deep Black, places no sailor had ever gone.
He would drift, lost, until he found that moon he’d been dreaming of, instead of being embroiled in this mess. But then he remembered the ship graveyard. The corpses of the Rangers left to float, preserved forever in the emptiness. The only reason he wasn’t dead was because he unknowingly served his comrades’ murderers for years.
Bayne could have become Parallax just as easily as Alexander Kyte. One decision kept him from that fate. One more decision could reverse it.
He boarded the Royal Blue. The quiet inside was an even more startling contrast to the outside than usual. The quiet on the bridge felt heavier than elsewhere on the ship, like those aboard were struggling to maintain it.
Mao and Delphyne turned their eyes to him when he appeared in the doorway. Delphyne’s eyes were red and swollen, like she’d been crying. She looked away from Bayne, avoided him. Mao stared holes into him.
“Am I interrupting something?” Bayne said.
“It’s your ship,” Mao said.
Bayne caught the words in his throat before speaking them, a rebuke, a burst of anger he’d struggled for days to keep at bay. He swallowed and said, “There’s been a development.”
“We heard,” Mao said. “They broadcast it over the radio.”
“Parallax is giving a thorough briefing of the situation to captains and bridge officers in an hour.”
Mao stared at him with his stone face.
Bayne felt compelled to clarify. “I want you with me.”
“Of course, sir,” Mao said. “It’s your ship.”
Bayne swallowed hard, nearly choking on the words. He left the bridge without saying anything else.
The bottom floor of the command center was one large room, an assembly hall that the mine bosses used to address the gathered workforce. It felt like it was being used for that same purpose now as Parallax stepped onto the raised platform at the far end of the room. The irony seemed to be lost on all but Bayne, Parallax addressing the gathered captains like he was the boss and they were his laborers, telling them his plan for def
ending this egalitarian mecca he was building.
Mao stood like a statue at Bayne’s side. It was a defiant gesture among the crowd of buzzing captains and officers. His composure, his discipline, was sign that he was still a Naval officer, even if he was the only one who believed as such.
“Captains,” Parallax said, raising his arms to quiet the crowd, “we’ve much to do and little time with which to do it.”
He set aside his standard performance. He’d already sold the idea, now he was laying out the specifics. And, as much as Bayne loathed to admit, the plan was brilliant. He would utilize every advantage they had while turning seeming weaknesses into advantages that Bayne would never have seen.
Parallax understood the Navy and the Byers Clan and how they operated. Add to that the still-active Captain Hix as an inside man and Horus, the former Byers Clan operative, and he had all the intel he needed to wage war against both.
A surge of excitement rushed through Bayne. For the first time, he found himself wanting this to succeed. He was invested. That energy carried him out of the room when Parallax dismissed the captains. It blinded him to the crack in Mao’s stony façade.
As they approached the docks, Mao grabbed Bayne by the shoulder and spun him around. Bayne instinctively reached for his sidearm.
“I’ve held my tongue until now,” Mao said.
Bayne scoffed.
“But this is insane. Parallax is going to get everyone killed.”
Bayne ripped his arm free of Mao’s grip. “Did you attend the same briefing that I did? His plan is solid. This could work.”
“Say it does. Assume we don’t all die in this attack. What next? What happens after we fend off the combined might of the United Navy and the Byers Clan?”
“Maybe they leave us alone?”
Mao looked like he was punched in the gut. “Us? You and Parallax?”
Bayne turned his back to his XO, fire raging in his belly. “I was with Kyte long before I was with the Navy. Before the Navy murdered all my people.”
“What about your crew?” His voice boomed, full of fury. “Aren’t they your people?”
Bayne spun back to face Mao. “Are they? What few didn’t abandon me look at me like I’m some kind of monster and whisper behind my back. Don’t think I haven’t heard.”
Mao stepped up to Bayne so they were nose to nose. “They didn’t abandon you. You abandoned them. You turned them into criminals and fugitives. The least you can do now is keep them alive.”
Bayne shoved his shoulder into Mao’s chest as he attempted to force his way past, but Mao was immovable. He planted his feet on the ground and his hand on Bayne’s chest.
“You are blinded by him,” Mao said. “That man is not Alexander Kyte. Not anymore. Parallax is a lunatic. This plan of his will end with Ore Town burning and all of us dead. And I think that is exactly what he wants.”
Mao’s words took root in Bayne’s mind. Bayne tried to shake them free. He slapped Mao’s hand away and marched to the ship.
“Prepare the ship, XO,” Bayne ordered over his shoulder. “We go to war in three days.”
8
In the early days of the war, when the loose alliance of warlords battled the infant United Systems, Alexander Kyte had come to a realization: ideals only worked small scale.
The grander the scope to which one attempted to apply them, the more twisted they became. At its heart, the war was about self-determination. Inhabitants of backwater moons and frontier planets wanted to decide for themselves how to live. The warlords wanted to make those decisions for them. They wanted to seize power at the barrel of a gun and hold it until they died.
Idealists like Shay Ayala would not let that happen. They organized, and they fought to wrest that right back from the self-serving pigs and return it to the people. Except they never gave it back. They held onto it. And they killed to keep it.
Kyte was naïve until the end. He volunteered to fight alongside Ayala because he believed in her fight. He believed people should be able to determine the course their lives took. They should set their own path. He held to that belief after the war ended. He would not join the United Navy. He would chart his own course.
Only he could not be allowed to do that. To set that example. The Rangers’ philosophy was too close to that of the warlords they’d just defeated, in the eyes of the newly self-christened sentinels of liberty. Anarchy was how they viewed it. And they could not risk descending into the very pit they just clawed their way out of.
So they lured the Rangers with promises of friendship and freedom. Even then, Kyte believed their promises. He thought Ayala and her sort to be honorable, true believers in the principles they just bled side by side to protect. Until the self-righteous wards gunned the Rangers down like rats in an alley.
The sound of the alarms seemed like a mistake at first. Kyte assumed his novice engineer pressed a wrong button as she fumbled her way around the console. She had just been promoted to fill the position after her predecessor was killed in action. But the torpedoes came seconds later.
They were never hailed, never given the opportunity to surrender. Never given an explanation.
The rear of the ship was struck. The engines. They burst and sent shockwaves of energy rippling through the rest of the ship. The bridge of the Supernova filled with fire and screams. Kyte had just returned from a personal meeting with Ayala and was anxious to set sail, so he skipped his cabin and went straight for the bridge upon boarding. He was still wearing his spacewalk suit.
The fire swallowed him, danced across his face like a terrible wind, tickling his cheeks as it tore the flesh away. Then came the cold. The artificial atmosphere was gone. The flames suffocated along with the crew unlucky enough to survive the initial blast. Kyte dropped his facemask seconds before blacking out.
He woke in a graveyard. The Supernova was gone. Its remains floated around him. His crew was dead, some turned to ash, others left to float. And he, cursed to survive.
Time passed like a spiral, swirling in and out of itself. He lost conscious for long bouts, passing out when the pain became too great, waking when the thirst made his throat feel like it was on fire. He didn’t know how long he floated before that salvage crew found him.
The next several weeks were marked with stretches of emptiness. His wounds were such that his survival was not assured for nearly a month. He either slept and was unconscious or nursed back to health by the captain of the scavenger crew, a man called Luther.
Soon, the salvage crew became more than Kyte’s rescuers. They were his friends. They welcomed him, and he joined them. They didn’t ask him questions about the circumstances in which they found him, and Luther became more than Kyte’s savior. He grew to love the captain. Luther, likewise, asked him no questions. He did not shy away from Kyte’s face, scarred and burned.
The only time in the year that Kyte sailed aboard that ship that Luther looked on him with anything but love and kindness was the day the Byers Clan schooner boarded them. Byers had yet to solidify its hold on that region of Black. The Navy, despite all its rhetoric to the contrary, left the wilds at the edge of space unguarded. It was a lawless void. Which could have been the sort of place Kyte had loved, had the new warlords in the form of mining executives not taken power for themselves.
The Byers thugs claimed Luther owed them dues, a tax essentially, for being allowed to operate in the Black. Luther was a proud man, but he was not stupid. He would have paid, had Kyte not emerged from the bridge, knife in hand.
He told the thugs to leave, that they would not take what was not theirs. They fought, of course, and Kyte drove his knife into the throat of the first thug and then the second. The rest fled. Luther and the crew kept their money.
But Luther looked at Kyte with a sickened expression. All covered in blood. The dead at his feet.
Luther didn’t talk to him again. Maybe he would have, given the chance. But that night, as they drifted aimlessly through the void, a second Byers sh
ip came on them. A destroyer. It hit the salvager ship with a hard broadside, knocking out the engines. The salvagers weren’t fighters, nor was their ship. They had no defense. No instincts to defend.
The Byers thugs boarded and began the slaughter without words. They weren’t interested in money now. They weren’t interested in intimidation. They wanted only punishment.
Luther was the last to fall. He died on his knees, looking at the floor.
The Byers thugs who’d retreated from the first attack were among the newcomers. They identified Kyte as the one who’d killed their compatriots. They dragged Kyte away, shoved him in a hole aboard the destroyer, and he didn’t see light again for weeks.
As luck would have it, that destroyer was boarded by pirates within the month. A sour cuss called Wex Shill. He liberated Kyte from that hole. But he wasn’t Alexander Kyte when he emerged. That man was dead. Parts of him were scattered among the wreckage of the Supernova with his crew. The rest of him was on that salvage ship with the man he loved.
He was something else now. He was fury and fire. He was hatred. He was a black blade drawn across the throat. A blue blade shoved through the gut. He was a pirate.
He was Parallax.
9
There was no worse feeling than being a sailor without a captain. Some men, most men, thought themselves captains, or at least capable of it. They only needed take the helm, take command, and their path to glory was assured. It was always within their grasp.
Mao knew that was false. Every person had the ability to sit in a chair and bark commands, but that did not make a captain. Most people didn’t know what made a captain, and, so, were incapable of being one. Most people were not leaders, contrary to what they all believed.
Mao was not a leader. He had no illusions about that, and he was not sad for it. He was among the best followers in the United Navy. That was why he was appointed executive officer. He carried out his orders faithfully and dutifully. He dedicated his entire being to the success of his ship, his mission, and his captain.
The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set Page 31