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

by Jasper T. Scott

  A data transfer request popped up before Tyra’s eyes, and she accepted. The green diamond of a waypoint appeared along a pale green compass/heading indicator bar at the top of her field of view.

  “Got it. I’ll see you soon, Doctor.”

  Tyra turned back to Lucien and Troo. “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

  Lucien regarded her with a frown.

  “Duty calls. I’m the acting Chief Councilor,” she explained, but somehow that explanation didn’t seem good enough. Lucien nodded and looked away, and Tyra felt her mood darken. What did he expect her to do? Resign in the middle of a crisis?

  Shoving those thoughts aside, she went to kiss Atara on the forehead and then kissed Theola on the cheek. She waved goodbye to Troo on her way out.

  “Bye,” Lucien said accusingly as she left.

  She’d deliberately not said goodbye to him. Despite her best efforts, she was fuming at him all the way down to the morgue. Lucien had this unrealistic, romantic idea about life and marriage, that it should all be one long honeymoon, with them spending every waking minute together, and to the netherworld with mundane concerns like paying for a mortgage or expensive private schools.

  She emerged from the elevator and walked down a corridor to the examination room that Doctor Fushiwa had marked on her ARCs. He was waiting for her outside the door.

  “Doctor,” she said.

  He nodded in lieu of a reply and waved the door open to reveal a room crowded with more doctors in operating gowns—as well as Marine bots and a human sergeant. Everyone was clustered around a steel operating table with a naked blue-skinned being strapped to it.

  As they approached the table, the crowd parted to let them in, and Tyra eyed the Marines, wondering what they were doing there.

  She turned her attention to the dead Faro. Anatomically, the alien had no visible genitalia, but the body looked male in terms of its shape and musculature. “What is it you wanted me to see, Doctor?”

  “This.” Doctor Fushiwa took a scalpel from one of his colleagues and ran it across the alien’s chest. The skin flayed open and black blood oozed out. Silvery bones peeked out at Tyra, and she frowned, wondering what they were made of. While she was wondering about that, the wound sealed itself before her eyes.

  Tyra jumped back from the table, and her eyes darted to the alien’s face, expecting to see its eyes pop open.

  But nothing happened.

  She blinked and shook her head. “How did he do that?” And right on the heels of that question came another: “He’s alive?”

  “He wasn’t when we began the autopsy,” Doctor Fushiwa explained. “He woke up with his chest open and started screaming. We had to induce a coma for our own safety, but we’re having to administer high doses of three different sedatives in order to keep him under.”

  “You’re saying he was dead, but then he somehow resurrected himself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure he really was dead? What was the cause of death?”

  “We assumed that he bled out from all the bullet wounds, but by the time he got here, those wounds had sealed, and the bullets had been pushed out.”

  Tyra shook her head. “By what?”

  “Their blood appears to be filled with billions of microscopic machines.”

  “Nanites,” Tyra said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then the Faros are actually bots?”

  “They’re genetically-enhanced cyborgs as near as I can tell. The level of biological and mechanical integration is astounding, far beyond anything we’ve been able to manage.”

  “Well, that explains the lack of genitalia,” Tyra said, nodding to the alien’s crotch.

  “Yes,” Doctor Fushiwa replied with a grim smile. “It also explains why they don’t wear any visible technology, yet seem to receive all the benefits of doing so.”

  “Have you found a power source? It must be very dense for them to be able to shoot bolts of plasma from their hands and have such strong shields.”

  “The power source is more or less where you’d expect to find our heart and lungs.”

  “So they don’t have a heart and lungs?” Tyra asked.

  “They do have something analogous to a heart, but smaller. It circulates their conducting fluid, which doubles as coolant to keep them from overheating. And they do have a kind of lung, but they don’t breathe in and out as we do—they circulate air constantly with a turbine, and they don’t appear to require oxygen or any other type of atmosphere. Their air circulation system seems to be part of a secondary cooling system.”

  “They sound more like bots than organics to me,” Tyra said.

  “Indeed, that may well be the case.”

  Tyra jerked her chin to the Faro on the table. “How did you learn all of that if the subject woke up while it’s chest was open?”

  “We did have about ten minutes to examine the alien’s internal structure before it woke up, and we’ve taken scans since then to model that structure without having to open him again. There are also other autopsies being conducted in other hospitals, and we were able to collate their findings with ours. For example, not all of the patients woke up. The ones who were beheaded, for example, never revived themselves.”

  “So the only sure way to kill one of them is to lop off its head.”

  Doctor Fushiwa nodded. “That, or to critically damage the power supply in their chests, but to do that you have to get past their breastbone—not an easy feat. We had to use laser scalpels on full power, and it still took us half an hour to cut through.”

  “I saw silvery bones when you ran your scalpel through his chest,” Tyra mentioned. “I’m guessing they’re not like our bones.”

  “A metal alloy, lightweight and porous, with an extremely strong molecular structure, at least ten times stronger and a hundred times lighter than solid duranium steel.”

  Tyra slowly shook her head. “I want a full work-up on the abilities of these aliens. Analyze them for weaknesses. There must be some way to get past their shields besides overwhelming force. We can’t always assume we’ll have them outnumbered.”

  “We’re working on it, ma’am,” Doctor Fushiwa said.

  “My husband mentioned using one of their own swords to kill them. That might be a good place to start looking for weaknesses.”

  The Marine sergeant was the one who replied to that, “We don’t know how those swords work, but they do appear to be able to get past the Faros’ shields—and ours,” he added with a grimace. “Our own razor swords might offer a similar advantage.”

  Tyra nodded to the sergeant. “That’s progress. Who’s in charge of reverse-engineering the Faros’ technology?”

  “Last I checked, the Marines were, ma’am.”

  “I’ll ask Commander Wheeler about it, then.” Tyra redirected her attention to Doctor Fushiwa. “Thanks for showing me this.”

  “Of course.”

  Tyra’s gaze slid away from his, back to the impassive face of the Faro on the operating table. “Keep an eye on him. I’m going to see about moving the captives to a more secure facility—stasis maybe. We don’t need them waking up and breaking free.”

  “Second that,” the Marine sergeant said.

  Tyra turned and left, wondering as she went if it wouldn’t simply be safer to cut off all the Faros’ heads and be done with it. She grimaced at the gruesomeness of that thought, but it might be the lesser of evils. One of the most hateful truisms of war is that you have to kill in order to stop the killing.

  May the universe have mercy on our souls... were that we had them.

  Chapter 18

  Astralis

  SEVERAL HOURS EARLIER...

  Nora Helios ran down the stairs to her basement. Her mag boots were set to grav-mode to keep her feet rooted. Nora had been watching the news when the gravity had turned off, and just a few seconds later she’d seen the fiery hole open up in the sky. She’d known what that meant even before the reporter figured it out.

&
nbsp; Upstairs she heard windows exploding as the air pressure in Fallside abruptly dropped with the city’s atmosphere streaming out into space. If she didn’t do something soon, she’d suffocate.

  Nora ran through the basement to her safe room, already hyperventilating at the thought of the air getting too thin to breathe.

  She shut the door, sealing herself in with whatever was left of the air. The room was designed without any ventilation, so would-be abductors couldn’t inject poison or sedatives into the air. Being the director of Astralis’s Resurrection Center was a heavy burden. Enterprising criminals could extort just about anything from anyone if they could find a way to threaten their lives and the backups of their memories and consciousness in the Resurrection Center. Nora was one of the few people with administrative access to those records, so she had to live in a fortress.

  Her eyes skipped around her safe room. It was a home within a home: a kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom... and to one side of the living room, sat the mirror-smooth golden dome of her own private quantum junction. It was locked down to prevent unauthorized entry, but it would work just fine to jump her away in an emergency.

  Nora considered using it now. That would probably be the safest option. With all of the chaos in Fallside, her security team had probably been forced to evacuate the premises.

  Bang, bang, bang!

  Nora whirled around, eyes wide as she stared at the door to her safe house. Maybe her security hadn’t all left. They couldn’t seriously expect her to open the door so they could ride out this disaster with her. “Who is it?” she demanded.

  No answer.

  BOOM!

  The shiny metallic surface of the door shivered, and glowed a faint, molten orange around the edges.

  Nora’s heart started pounding in her chest. “I’m calling the police!” she said. “You won’t be able to get in before they arrive!” It was an empty threat with all of the chaos in the city, but maybe whoever it was would believe her and leave.

  Unless it was one of those aliens.

  BOOM!

  The door shivered once more, and glowed a brighter shade of orange.

  Nora shook her head. It was supposed to be impossible to break through that door. The security company had assured her... It didn’t matter. She could sue them later. She turned and ran for her quantum junction, using her ARCs to activate it as she approached. The shiny golden dome of the junction hovered up on four shimmering pillars of light. Underneath that was a black podium with two glowing circles: one red, running around the outer edge of the podium, and a smaller green one inside of that. Nora just had to make it into the green circle and activate the junction...

  BOOM! Superheated shrapnel went whizzing by her ears, and some of it bit into her back. She stumbled and cried out, but managed to keep moving. By now her security system had to have alerted the authorities about the break-in, but Nora doubted any officers would still be at their posts to see the alert.

  Nora reached the edge of the junction and lunged for the green circle of safety in the middle of the podium...

  She jerked to a sudden stop as if she’d hit an invisible wall. An unseen hand had grabbed her and pulled her inexorably back toward the open doors of the safe room. She twisted around to look, and saw a blue-skinned humanoid alien standing in the doorway with one, glowing hand raised toward her. He wore gray robes, a luminous golden crown, and a horrible grin. She couldn’t see a grav gun in his hand, but somehow he was pulling her toward him all the same.

  “Hello, Director,” he said over the whistling noise of air being sucked out and up the stairs.

  “Who are you?” Nora demanded.

  His grin broadened until she could see his black tongue. His palm glowed even more brightly, dazzling her eyes as she drew near. “Let me show you,” he said as her face hit his palm with a meaty smack.

  Stars burst inside of her head. A flood of awareness filled her. Suddenly she knew exactly who this alien was. She could see his every thought. She knew what he knew, and felt what he felt. They became one and thought as one. Her fear vanished, replaced by simmering resolve and a surety of purpose. She had an important mission to accomplish.

  Nora felt herself falling even as her consciousness faded. By the time she awoke, she was breathing hard, gasping for air in the thin atmosphere.

  This is what it is like to be human? she thought, her lips curling in disgust as she stumbled back to the quantum junction. Pathetic creatures. Once she was standing inside the green circle under the hovering dome of the junction, she used her ARCs to set the Resurrection Center as her destination, and activated the junction. The dome began glowing brightly overhead, and a whirring noise filled the air, quickly rising in tempo and pitch. Then the dome fell with a boom, and it became painfully bright to look at. The air inside the dome whipped around violently, ripping at her hair and clothes. Then suddenly the light vanished, and she was left blinking spots as it rose on four shimmering pillars of light once more. Now she was in the Resurrection Center, in the middle of the center’s ostentatious lobby on Sub Level 150.

  The lobby was deserted, and the facility was in the middle of a security lock-down. Nora strode through the lobby to the elevators at the back. A security bot moved to stop her.

  “Access to the center is restricted during lock-down, ma’am.”

  “Override. Code zeta, sixteen, forty-seven, nine, nine, seven six, alpha, one.”

  The bot scanned her with a flickering blue fan of light, and then stepped aside. “Welcome back, Madam Director.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and proceeded to the nearest elevator. Once inside, she selected the records room from the control panel.

  At the entrance of the records room she had to get past another bot and another routine security check. She pretended to look bored by the procedures, but once she was inside, she smiled. The plan was working flawlessly so far.

  When infiltrating an enemy base, the easiest way to do so was to have a man on the inside who already knew how everything worked. Sergeant Garek Helios just happened to be that man. Sadly, he was no longer alive to appreciate the brilliance of the plan he’d been forced to come up with. Thank you, Garek, for your insight—or should I say, thank you, Dad.

  Nora was, after all, Garek’s daughter.

  It took barely half an hour to reach the data terminal in the records room and to download her consciousness and memories to the Center’s records. Once she’d done that, she isolated the recent changes and copies them to the most recent records of all the others who’d been touched by Abaddon.

  Nora smiled as she finished her work. When she was done, she covered her tracks by hacking the last changed time-stamps on the records she’d altered, and then she left the records room as if she’d never been there. With everything going on, no one would even bother to check the Center’s surveillance tapes, and even if they did, she’d be able to explain herself easily enough. There’d been a sync error, and she’d come to make a manual backup of her own consciousness in case something happened to her. The changes she’d made to her own records would corroborate that. No one would think to look any deeper. They’d never suspect that she, Director Helios, would compromise the system.

  But really, it wasn’t her who had compromised the system; she wasn’t even a she, and her name wasn’t Nora.

  It was Abaddon.

  Abaddon smiled to himself as he went to Nora’s office in the Resurrection Center. He disengaged his mag boots and jumped up to float above the director’s desk, arms crossed behind his head, feet stretched out... basking in the glow of his plans.

  After billions of years of waiting and raging impotently against his enemy, it was all finally coming together. Soon everyone would know that Etherus was a fraud. Abaddon would return to Etheria, not as an exile, slinking back meekly, but as a conquering king come back to claim his rightful throne.

  Chapter 19

  Astralis

  —TWO DAYS LATER—

  Tyra answere
d the insistent trilling of an incoming comm call. It was from Winterside General. “Hello?”

  “Chief Councilor, it’s Doctor Fushiwa. I have your daughter’s probe results.”

  “And? What are they?” Tyra’s heart thundered in her ears.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Thank goodness,” Tyra breathed. “That is very good news, Doctor! You’ve just made my day. What about the others?”

  “Apparently all of them are fine, too.”

  Tyra’s brow furrowed. “Then what were those aliens doing to them? What was the point of it?”

  She could almost hear Doctor Fushiwa shrug. “To gather intel, if I had to guess. Their version of a mind probe. They must have been planning to escape Astralis with whatever they’d learned. Thankfully none of them did. Who knows how we might have been compromised if they had.”

  Tyra nodded slowly. It made sense. She’d also thought they might have been gathering intel. “We got lucky.”

  “Indeed.”

  “When can Atara be released?”

  “Your husband is already signing her out.”

  “Without me?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’d better go find them,” Tyra said. “Thank you for calling, Doctor.”

  “Of course.”

  Tyra hung up, and hurried from her office to the nearest quantum junction. It was expensive to use the junctions all the time, but she made six figures as a councilor, so she could spare a few thousand now and then.

  She arrived right outside Winterside General in front of the ER, behind a group of EMTs pushing a grav gurney with a burn victim on it.

  Tyra ran through the ER to the nearest bank of elevators. There she rode up to Level Four where she ran into Lucien, Atara, and Theola already on their way out.

  “Mama!” Theola said, bouncing in Lucien’s arms at the sight of her.

  “I thought you had urgent business to take care of?” Lucien said.

  Tyra shot him a look as she dropped to her haunches in front of Atara. “Nothing’s more urgent than taking my daughter home. How are you feeling, sweetheart?”