Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies)

by Jasper T. Scott

  “He will be a shadow.”

  “A what?” Lucien asked.

  “You mean he’ll be like a shadow?” Addy suggested.

  Katawa shook his head. “Shadows are Faro slaves. They appear as shadows. Their garments hide their features to make them less noticeable and more aesthetically pleasing to the Faros.”

  Lucien remembered the shadowy beings that they’d seen when they first met the Faros and Abaddon. Brak had killed a few of them on the landing pad before running away on his impulsive quest to free Faro slaves.

  “I will also be a shadow,” Katawa said.

  Lucien waited for Brak’s reaction. After a moment, Brak bared his dagger-sharp black teeth in a grin. “I agree with this plan.”

  “Garek?” Lucien asked.

  The scarred veteran hesitated. “We should talk about this.”

  “We are talking.”

  In private. Garek’s voice echoed inside Lucien’s head, spoken via their augmented reality contacts (ARCs) rather than aloud.

  What’s wrong? Lucien asked. I thought you wanted to rescue your daughter?

  I do, but I don’t trust this guy.

  What does he have to gain by lying to us? Lucien countered. If he’s a spy for Abaddon, there are less convoluted ways to capture us. In fact, if he is a spy, why not simply call in the Faros’ fleet and capture all of the Marauders on Freedom Station? Why lure us away with this story?

  I don’t know. He might not be a spy, but he has an agenda that he’s not telling us about.

  You can’t possibly know that, Lucien replied.

  “Well?” Addy asked, growing impatient with the awkward silence.

  “Majority rules,” Lucien decided, nodding to Garek. “You can either join us or not.”

  Garek frowned, but said nothing.

  Lucien turned to Katawa. “When do we start?”

  “Right now.” The gray alien said as he rose from the table. “Follow me.”

  Chapter 3

  Astralis

  SEVEN DAYS UNTIL THE FAROS ATTACK...

  Chief of Security Lucien Ortane sat in the front of an unmarked hover car, eating a burger and watching the back door of a night club in Sub-District Two of Astralis. Brak sat beside him eating his own kind of burger—all meat, no bun, and so raw it was practically dripping.

  “Don’t get blood on the seats,” Lucien mumbled around a mouthful.

  Brak grunted and stuffed the rest of the raw burger into his mouth.

  Lucien shook what was left of his meal at the rear entrance. “I don’t get it. My source said the deal was going down here. Tonight.” They’d parked in the shadows of an alley that ran crosswise to the one looping around the night club. The club was located in a particularly seedy part of Sub-District Two, and night club was a misnomer. The Crack of Dawn was a strip club, pure and simple, but more than that, it was a front for the Coretti Brothers’ black market arms dealing and money laundering.

  The whole neighborhood was run by the Corettis, and the police in Sub-District Two knew better than to go patrolling around here. The only cops found in this neighborhood were dead ones, hence why no one from Lucien’s department had volunteered for this mission. Unfortunately, since Sub-District Two wasn’t technically part of Fallside’s jurisdiction, the mission was volunteer only. Lucien could have passed on his tip to the chief of security for Sub-District Two and let their department handle it, but he wasn’t convinced that would amount to anything. He strongly suspected the chief and/or several of his deputies and detectives were on the Coretti brothers’ payroll.

  “Look,” Brak pointed. The back door of the club opened and six sketchy-looking characters poured out—including one Joseph Coretti, eldest of the three Coretti brothers. Lucien would have recognized him anywhere: medium height and build, skinny and pale to the point of looking sickly, with gaunt cheeks and blue-black hair slicked back from his forehead. He had a square jaw and silver eyes that shone in the dark like two pearls. A glow stick dangled out the side of his mouth, glowing blue-white all along its length and glowing orange from the lit end.

  Lucien could have pulled him up on charges for drug possession right there, but there was that little problem of not having jurisdiction. Not to mention, simple possession charges wouldn’t keep Joe Coretti locked up for long.

  Two of the goons with Joe were pushing a large black case on a hover cart between them. Something was off about the taller of the two, but Lucien couldn’t quite tell what it was... short dark hair, dark eyes, blank, generic face... it wasn’t his appearance. Something else. He stood too straight. His movements were too precise, like a machine. But he looked human. An android maybe? Androids were illegal. That might be another thing to pin on Coretti. No way to prove it without a warrant, though.

  Lucien watched as the rigid man and his more-human looking counterpart pushed the case to the front of the group and waited there. Joe blew out a stream of smoke and glanced up at a flickering street light.

  “Ten to one there’s weapons in that case,” Lucien said.

  Brak nodded. “Want me to get a better look?”

  Lucien glanced at his partner. The Gor was a unique asset on stakeouts thanks to his innate cloaking abilities. “Not yet. Let’s wait and see who shows up.”

  They didn’t have to wait long. A long black hover van with tinted windows came screaming down the alley, flying low to the ground.

  “Hello...” Lucien whispered. The car stopped right in front of Coretti’s gang and four tall men in black suits jumped out.

  Joe nodded to the case on the hover cart and his men popped it open, but the four men in suits blocked Lucien’s view of the contents.

  “All right, now you can go,” Lucien said, nodding to Brak.

  The Gor nodded back and the air shimmered around him as he cloaked himself. The door slid open, and he slipped out. Lucien watched him go, then went back to watching the group of gangsters in the alley. The four who’d arrived in the van were gesturing wildly to the case, as if it wasn’t what they’d ordered. Coretti’s goons began posturing in turn, and soon everyone had drawn their sidearms and was pointing them at each other’s heads.

  “Go on, start shooting,” Lucien mumbled. “Save me the trouble of booking you all later.”

  Technically none of them would die thanks to cloning and the technology for transfer of consciousness, but resurrection wasn’t a given right when it came to criminals. Murderers, for example, were almost never brought back—a kind of passive death penalty.

  Unfortunately, none of the gangsters opened fire. Joe held up his hands and said something that cooled everyone’s tempers. They all holstered their weapons, and the four black-suited men shut the case and loaded it into the back of their van. Lucien frowned, wishing he could hear what had been said between them. He hadn’t brought any listening gear because he had Brak, but he hadn’t anticipated this deal going down so fast.

  Before the men in suits could leave the scene, Lucien saw the telltale shimmer of a cloaking shield deactivate, and a naked gray monster appeared, standing to one side of the gangsters.

  “Brak, you dumb skriff!” Lucien gritted out.

  All eyes turned to the naked Gor, and weapons flew out of their holsters once more.

  Lucien waved open the door on his side of the hover car and ran out with his own sidearm drawn. “Fallside PD!” he yelled, flashing his holographic badge in their eyes as he ran. “Drop your weapons and put your hands in the air!”

  Joe Coretti smirked around the butt of his glow stick as Lucien skidded to a stop beside Brak.

  “Well, well. Aren’t you a little far from home, Chief?”

  “What’s in the case, Coretti?”

  “You got a warrant? Oh, wait—” Coretti broke off, shaking his head. “—not your jurisdiction. I almost forgot.”

  “It won’t matter who’s jurisdiction this is when I submit the recordings I just took of this deal going down. I’ve got you on at least three different charges here.”
/>
  “You sure about that?” Joe asked. “You just asked me what’s in the case, so I’m betting you’ve got nothing.”

  “Hand over the case and we’ll see about that.”

  The men in black suits traded glances with each other, but said nothing.

  “Or what?” Coretti smiled smugly and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke in Lucien’s direction.

  Lucien frowned. He had no authority here, and Joe knew it. The whole purpose of tonight’s stakeout had been to get enough evidence for a warrant, not to bring Coretti in prematurely without any hard evidence to make a conviction stick. What was Brak thinking?

  “We’ll be back,” Lucien said, and grabbed Brak’s forearm, dragging him back toward their hover car.

  “Sure you will,” Joe said. “In the meantime—” He made a shooing gesture with both hands, and gold rings glinted in the dim, flickering light of the alley.

  Lucien walked backward all the way to the car, not taking eyes off any of them for a second. Once they were back inside, the black van raced away and Joe Coretti returned to his club, waving a vulgar sign at them as he left.

  When they were all gone, Lucien shot a scowl at Brak. “What the frek were you thinking?”

  Brak bared his black teeth and hissed. “They were about to leave. I had to get their attention.”

  “Why?”

  “I think I recognize one of them. I need to see his face to be sure.”

  “And?”

  “It is who I think. Judge Cleever’s son.”

  Lucien blinked. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Lucien played back the visual log from his ARCs and ran the faces of the men in black suits through Astralis’s database. Sure enough, one of them was a match for Titarus Cleever, only child and son of High Court Judge Exolia Cleever. Lucien checked Titarus’s record and found a long list of bookings for misdemeanor crimes.

  “Looks like this kid has a habit of getting into trouble,” Lucien said. “No convictions, though. Mommy’s probably always there to bail him out. Nice work, Brak. With this lead, our investigation is really going to open up. If Cleever is dismissing cases to keep her son out of jail, it might explain why we’ve had so much trouble getting charges against the Corettis to stick.”

  Brak nodded.

  Then Lucien spotted something at the bottom of Titarus’s record. “Wait—that can’t be right.”

  “What cannot be right?” Brak asked.

  “It says here Titarus was charged with murder six months ago—posthumously. He died in a shootout between two rival gangs before he could be arrested. Apparently he murdered his own step-father and another high court judge sentenced him to remain dead.” Lucien turned to Brak. “That couldn’t have been Titarus we saw. It’s just some look-alike.” To confirm that, Lucien checked the facial recognition score. “Facial match was only eighty percent.”

  Brak hissed. “It is dark. A perfect match requires better lighting.”

  “Or the right person,” Lucien replied. “Unless someone’s found a way to bring the dead back to life without going through the Res. Center, I’d say we just hit a dead end.” Lucien blew out a breath and checked the time on his ARCs—it was ten PM. “We spent six hours sitting here—for nothing! Did you even get a look at what was in the case?”

  “No.”

  Lucien rubbed tired eyes and shook his head. “Great.”

  “This is not for nothing. The patient hunter always catches his prey. We need more time if we are to catch Coretti.”

  Lucien glanced at Brak with bleary eyes. “What I need is a vacation.”

  Brak hissed and looked away. “You would not make a good hunter.”

  “Good thing I prefer my meat grown in a vat.”

  Brak gave no reply to that, and Lucien ordered the car’s driver program to take them home.

  After a few minutes of racing down the dark alleys and streets of Astralis’s sub levels, they emerged on the surface and flew up to five hundred meters, out over the frozen landscape of Winterside—trees laden with snow, rooftops white, ski hills lit up with spotlights and hover lifts carrying late night skiers back up, while others raced down: an endless loop on repeat.

  Lucien shivered at the sight of all that snow, thanking his luck that he and Tyra could afford a place in the more desirable, and warmer, city of Fallside.

  They crossed the fuzzy blue shield wall between Winterside and Fallside. At night all the colors of the latter city’s ever-changing trees were cloaked in shadows, but here and there streetlights revealed bright pools of red and gold. Lucien directed the car to drop Brak off at his apartment first.

  After that, the car flew on toward his home, a mansion clinging to the side of Hubble Mountain in the center of Astralis’s ground level. Lucien’s thoughts turned to his family while he waited to arrive. He’d left Tyra at home with the girls on one of her rare days off. Not that it mattered. She’d brought her work home with her, so it wasn’t as though they were going to spend any quality time together.

  He scowled, nursing old grievances. As the councilor of Fallside, Tyra didn’t get a lot of time off, but what time she did get, she never seemed to spend with her family. Maybe a vacation would be a good idea, Lucien thought as the car hovered in for a landing on his driveway. He resolved to mention the idea to Tyra... a beachside resort in Summerside, perhaps...

  Chapter 4

  Astralis

  FOUR HOURS UNTIL THE FAROS ATTACK...

  Sand gleamed gold in the sun. Generated waves swished up the beach, tickling children’s toes and making them squeal with delight. An artificial sun beamed down from the artificial sky. Lucien shaded his eyes with one hand and peered up at the distant floor of Level One, faded blue from all of the air in between. Five kilometers of atmosphere blanketed the ground level of Astralis, providing enough room for clouds to form, for the illusion to look almost as real as it felt. Lucien’s eyelids fluttered shut against the warmth of the fusion-powered sun. Fusion-powered. That clicked, and Lucien smiled. Astralis’s sun was the same as any other in that respect, just a lot smaller.

  He sighed, allowing the warmth to melt some of the ice around his heart. His ears pricked with girlish laughter. It belonged to his one-year-old and five-year-old daughters, Theola and Atara. His eyes cracked open and he squinted up at Level One once more, imagining for a moment that all those glinting viewports were stars he could travel to—but he couldn’t actually travel anywhere. It was hard to feel trapped aboard a spaceship with thousands of decks and millions of square kilometers of space, and yet he did.

  “Contemplating the unknown again, Lucien?” his wife asked.

  His gaze came down for a landing, catching diamonds off the water as it fell. He checked that his children were both fine—they were making sandcastles at the water’s edge—and then he turned to his wife.

  Tyra lay on a purple beach towel beside him, sunbathing in the intermittent shade of a tall palm tree from ancient Earth. A light breeze blew, bringing the smell of sand, flower blossoms, and salt water to Lucien’s nostrils. Palm fronds skittered, and black blades of shade flickered over his wife’s flawless skin.

  Lucien remembered when the top of that tree had barely come up to his shoulder. That was over eight years ago, right after he’d awoken on Astralis to the unsettling news that he’d just died. Death wasn’t permanent, but memory loss was. Lucien had no recollection of anything that had happened in the first month after coming aboard Astralis.

  Apparently he’d been assigned to Astralis’s expeditionary forces along with all the other ex-Paragons. They’d served together aboard Tyra’s galleon, the Inquisitor, going out to explore nearby systems for sentient life. But something had gone wrong, and they’d never returned. Instead, a hostile race of aliens had joined Astralis at the rendezvous, and they’d barely escaped the subsequent battle. Ever since then the expeditionary forces had been grounded, and Astralis had taken care to avoid contact with any other aliens. Their mission was cosmologica
l—to determine the nature of the universe, not to meet all of it’s inhabitants.

  “Hello?” Tyra propped herself up on her elbows and frowned at him. “Are you ignoring me?”

  Lucien flashed an apologetic smile. “Sorry. I’m just remembering. Or trying to.”

  “I see...”

  “Doesn’t it ever bother you?” He asked. “Not knowing what happened to us out there?”

  Tyra shook her head. “You can’t dwell on that. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

  Lucien nodded slowly, and his gaze slipped away from his wife, out to the hemmed-in ocean and the archipelago of sandy, palm-studded islands. Each of them was dotted with quaint little huts and villages, as well as a handful of modern mansions scattered between. This was Summerside, a tropical island paradise. Fuzzy blue shield walls ran from the soaring, balcony-lined sides of the wedge-shaped ship to its center, segregating each of the ship’s four climate zones and cities from each other.

  Lucien gazed out over the water to Hubble Mountain at the center of Astralis. More than one hundred kilometers distant, he could just barely see the faded blue outline of the mountain and the inverted glass pyramid at its peak, glinting in the sun. The Academy of Science. Directly below that, in the mountain itself, were the government offices where his wife and all the other councilors worked. For most people, the Academy was symbolic of Astralis. The inverted pyramid was the symbol on its flag, the symbol that evoked patriotism in the hearts of its people, but to Lucien it was the hateful symbol of his wife’s neglect. Even here, at a resort in the farthest corner of the ship, the Academy’s shadow still loomed over them. Out of mind, but never out of sight, Lucien thought.

  Tyra was a councilor and a workaholic, one of the elected rulers on Astralis who got to have a say in where they went and how they got there. Meanwhile, he was an ex-Paragon in Etheria’s army, now the chief of security for Fallside. He was an explorer with nothing to explore, trapped in a giant metal box.