The three of them remained silent for a while, watching the scenery roll by below. Lucien noticed that every now and then the plains would part to reveal a gaping black hole belching steam. Volcanic vents? Lucien wondered. That got him wondering about the Mokari underworld. Would it be volcanically active? Too hot to safely explore? Or perhaps the air was simply toxic. That would explain why no Mokari who’d ever gone there had returned.
Eventually Lucien grew tired of standing and he sat down on the deck with his back to one of the curving bulkheads. After about an hour of sitting, Lucien’s back and backside were aching enough to force him to his feet once more.
“I have a suggestion for you, Katawa,” he said, looming between the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs once more.
“Yes?”
“Install some extra seating up here.”
“Oh yes. That is a good idea. But we may have to survive on less appetizing meals from the fabricator in order to afford them.”
“Less appetizing? If the meals get any less appetizing I’m going to starve. Forget the chairs.” Lucien jerked his chin to the horizon where the Mokari were still flying on up ahead. “They haven’t even stopped for a break.”
“The Mokari are strong. They do not need breaks,” Katawa replied.
“They must have heard you. Look—” Addy pointed out the canopy. “They’re dropping down into that field. I guess they take breaks after all.”
Lucien leaned over her chair and peered into the distance. She was right. The black specks were growing larger and closer, and they were circling down. “So what do we do while we wait?” he asked. “Stop and hover, or go down and take a look around?”
Katawa hauled back on the throttle until they were hovering amidst a swarm of Mokari, all swooping and circling around them. Katawa pointed to something on the ship’s sensor display. “They did not stop for a break. They stopped because we have arrived.”
Lucien spent a moment trying to decipher the sensor display while Katawa hovered down for a landing.
“I don’t know what I’m looking at,” Lucien said.
Addy sucked in a breath. “Then you’re looking in the wrong place.”
Lucien looked up from the display and saw what she was talking about. As the Specter dropped down, the ground opened up beneath them in an enormous, almost perfectly circular opening that plunged straight down into darkness. Lucien couldn’t see the bottom of it. It just went on and on...
“How deep is that?” Addy asked.
“More than seven kilometers,” Katawa said as the Specter’s landing struts touched ground with a subtle jolt. The yawning hole leading into the Mokari Underworld was just a few meters from the bow of the ship.
“Seven kilometers?” Lucien asked. He imagined the edge of the hole crumbling and sending the Specter tumbling down. “Is it going to be safe down there? How thick is Mokar’s crust?” He assumed there must be magma after a certain point, since they’d seen steam rising from smaller vents along the way.
“It will not be safe, but if you mean to ask whether or not you’ll have to walk through magma, this will not be a concern. Thermal readings suggest that the crust is approximately fifty kilometers thick at this point.”
“Even so, we’ll need our suits. The temperature and air pressure are going to be a lot higher at the bottom.”
“Yes,” Katawa agreed.
Addy turned to him. “I thought you said the Mokari don’t like false skins.”
“They will not be going with you, so it will not be a problem.”
Something about what Katawa had just said bothered Lucien, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Addy figured it out first. “You?” she echoed.
That was it. Katawa’s choice of pronouns. He hadn’t included himself in that statement.
“You’re not going with us?” Lucien asked, his eyes narrowing with sudden suspicion.
“No. I cannot.”
“Why not?”
Katawa rotated his chair away from the ship’s controls to face Lucien. The alien’s face was expressionless, but he sat with his hands folded in his lap, and big black eyes blinking lazily.
Lucien glared. “Well?”
“I am a god to the Mokari,” Katawa explained, and left it at that, as if the rest should be self-evident.
“So what?” Addy said.
“So, I cannot go into their underworld. It would defile me, and they would no longer trust me to listen to their songs.”
“You’ve already heard their songs,” Lucien replied.
“They have others that may help us in our search. I will listen to them while I wait for you to return from the underworld.”
Lucien snorted and shook his head. “And what if we don’t return?”
“If you die, I will mourn your passing. As will the Mokari. Songs will be sung of you. I will make sure of it.”
“Gee, thanks,” Lucien said dryly. Suddenly he felt just as suspicious as Garek, and more. He had a bad feeling about this so-called underworld, and how Katawa seemed to know so much about Mokar and the Mokari, even though he’d supposedly never been here.
Maybe that was a lie. The truth could be far more sinister. They might be about to become Katawa’s latest victims. For all they knew, he’d already lured dozens (or hundreds!) of others to their deaths in the Mokari underworld, all of them looking for the magical key that would open the portal to the planet where the lost fleet had gone.
Now that Lucien thought about it, that would make a lot more sense. Katawa had been looking for his people and their lost fleet for thousands of years, so how was it possible that he was only now starting to follow all the rumors and legends he’d heard? It was far more likely that he’d followed them all already, and this Mokari legend was the last and most promising one—the one he’d been unable to follow because everyone he sent into the underworld ended up dead.
Addy shot him a worried look, and he wondered if she was thinking along similar lines.
“We should not delay,” Katawa said, after enduring the long silence of Lucien’s thoughts. “There is much to do to prepare you for your journey.” Katawa rose from his chair and walked by him, heading off the bridge.
“What if we decide not to go?” Lucien asked.
Katawa froze in the entrance of the bridge and slowly turned. “Why would you change your mind now, at the last possible second? Are you afraid of the underworld? I thought you were explorers. Paragons.”
“Paragons?” Lucien asked, the word slicing through him like a hot knife.
Katawa nodded slowly. “Yes. Trained to explore the universe. Etherus trained you himself, did he not?”
Lucien couldn’t believe what he was hearing, couldn’t bring himself to speak. Katawa had knocked the air right out of his lungs.
Addy stood up beside him, took his hand and squeezed it—hard. “We are Paragons,” she said. “We can handle this.”
“Good. This is what I thought. I am glad to not be mistaken,” Katawa replied. “Come, we must get the others.”
“Wait,” Addy said. “It would be better if we explained to them about you not coming with us—alone. If you’re there, they might think we’re being somehow coerced into this.”
Katawa blinked. “Coerced?”
“Garek is suspicious by nature. It’ll be easier to deal with his concerns without you there.”
“I see.”
“We’ll get our equipment together and put on our suits and then meet you at the rear airlock, fair enough?”
“Yes. Fair. I will meet you. Do not take long.”
“We won’t.”
Lucien watched Katawa leave, his thoughts racing and heart pounding. The little alien walked around a bend in the corridor and out of sight.
As soon as he was gone, Addy grabbed his arm and squeezed it to get his attention. “Garek was right,” she whispered. “Katawa is up to something.”
Lucien stared grimly back at her. “You figured it out, too.”
>
She nodded. “We never told him we were Paragons. And he’s been gone from the Etherian Empire for more than ten thousand years. The Paragons were only founded a little over thirty years ago, after we met Etherus for the first time. There’s no way he could have found out what we are unless someone told him.”
“And besides us, there’s only one person who could have told him that we’re Paragons.”
“Abaddon,” Addy breathed, her green eyes wide.
Lucien nodded slowly. “Abaddon.”
“What are we going to do?”
Lucien thought about it. “I think it’s time to execute Garek’s plan. We’re need to steal Katawa’s ship and get the frek out of here before it’s too late.”
Chapter 28
Mokar
“I knew it!” Garek said, and lashed out at the nearest bulkhead with his fist.
“I crack his head like egg!” Brak added.
Lucien suppressed a chill at Brak’s bloodthirstiness. “We don’t have to kill him. Just kick him out the airlock and fly off.”
Garek sent him a sour look. “It would be safer to kill him. What if he tells Abaddon we took his ship? We’ll have every Faro in the universe looking for us.”
“He might tell Abaddon what happened whether we kill him or not. For all we know he has a neural implant like ours that will transmit his consciousness to the nearest Faro ship when he dies.”
“Well, whatever we’re going to do, we’d better do it fast,” Addy said. “We’re going to make him suspicious if we take any longer.”
“You said we’d suit up and meet him at the rear airlock...” Lucien mused.
“So we’ll be armed,” Garek said, smiling wryly. “Smart move.” He walked over to the closet and opened it to reveal the gleaming silver armor of his exosuit. They’d all met in Garek’s quarters, so his suit was the one closest at hand.
“We’ll meet you at the cargo bay,” Lucien said. It was located right before the aft airlock where Katawa would be waiting for them.
“Actually, it might make more sense for you and Addy to head up to the cockpit and get ready to fly. Brak and I can deal with Katawa.”
Lucien hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“It’s one little gray alien against his much bigger and nastier cousin, plus me, and I can be pretty nasty myself.”
Brak bared his black teeth in a grin. “We take care of the little gray one. Do not worry.”
“All right, but be careful,” Lucien said.
Garek nodded absently, already busy shucking his robes in favor of his Paragon-issue black jumpsuit and armor.
Lucien turned away before the sight of Garek’s backside struck him blind. He and Addy hurried from the room and ran back the way they’d come.
“How do you know you can fly this thing?” Addy asked on their way to the cockpit.
“I don’t,” Lucien said.
Addy made a noise in the back of her throat. “We should have told Garek to capture Katawa, in case we need him to pilot the ship.”
“Yeah...”
“We could end up stranded here.”
“Go back and tell him,” Lucien said. “I’ll see what I can figure out in the meantime.”
Addy nodded and ran back to Garek’s quarters.
Lucien reached the cockpit a few seconds later and fell into the pilot’s chair with a whuff of escaping air from the seat cushion. He scanned the holo displays in front of him. Thanks to his translator band he could understand the unfamiliar symbols perfectly, but that didn’t turn out to be much help. He tried accessing the ship’s engines, only to receive an error prompt:
Biometric profile not recognized.
Override code:
Lucien should have known better than to think Katawa would leave the ship’s systems unlocked. Addy was right. They needed Katawa alive or they were going to be stranded on Mokar until the next Faro ship came to visit.
Lucien jumped up from the pilot’s chair and ran back through the ship, heading for his and Addy’s quarters to get his own exosuit. If Katawa had been careful enough to lock them out of the ship, then he might have taken other precautions, too. There was no sense taking chances and facing him without armor.
Lucien tried sending Addy a message to explain the situation and suggest that she put on her suit, too, but his ARCs reported a connection error. The Specter was jamming their comms.
Lucien’s fingertips sparked with adrenaline as the implications of that hit home. Comms jamming and a systems lockout? Both seemed to point to the same conclusion: Katawa knew. Somehow he’d anticipated them. They weren’t going to take him by surprise with their ambush—it was the other way around: they were the ones being ambushed by him.
***
Mokar
Lucien ran back to his quarters as fast as he could. He stopped his momentum with the door, and a resounding bang shivered through it. He keyed the door open and hurried over to the closet to don his jumpsuit and armor.
Lucien had just finished putting on his jumpsuit when the door swished open behind him. He jumped and spun around, his heart beating in his ears. He half-expected to see a Mokari warrior come stalking in, jaws gaping for the kill...
But it was only Addy. Lucien blew out a breath. “You scared the krak out of me!”
She shook her head, breathless from running, and leaned heavily against the door jamb. Garek pushed in behind her, his armored boots clunking heavily on the deck.
His voice reverberated from his helmet speakers: “Katawa is gone. No sign of him on board.”
Brak stormed in next, his chest and shoulders heaving, slitted yellow eyes wide with rage. He was still wearing his shadow robes. “I will eat him alive, and make him watch!”
Lucien grimaced and shook his head. “He locked us out of the ship and activated comms jamming.”
“I know,” Garek said. “I already tried to contact you via ARCs.”
“We’ll have to go outside and hunt him down with our suit sensors,” Lucien said. “We’re not going anywhere until he gives us the override code for his ship.”
Addy ran her hands over her bald head, making the motions to tie her hair in a bun; then she seemed to notice that she didn’t have any hair to tie, and her hands fell back to her sides. “What about the Mokari?” she asked.
“What about them?” Lucien countered as he lugged his exosuit out of the closet and lay it out on the deck. He keyed it open with a holographic control panel in the chest plate, and the suit flayed open with a loud clicking of metallic joints and seals. Lucien lay down inside the suit, lining up his limbs.
“You think this was all by chance?” Addy said. “I think Katawa planned the whole thing, and he locked us out of his ship to make sure that we’d have no choice but to go down into the underworld. There’s supposed to be some kind of quantum junction down there, right?”
“Right,” Lucien said as his ARCs connected to the suit’s systems and he mentally sealed his armor. More clicking as it wrapped him up in a metal skin. At least the comms jamming didn’t affect communication with his suit.
“What if Katawa’s plan was to strand us here and then wait for us to go down and find the key to open that junction?” Addy continued.
“What’s he get out of that?” Lucien asked. “He’s looking for the lost fleet. If he betrays us and we find the fleet without him, we’re not going to use it to help him find his way home.”
“We might not have a choice. He’s probably got some kind of tracking device on us,” Garek pointed out.
“Or in us,” Addy said. “We’ve been eating his food.”
“So we’re doubly frekked,” Lucien said, standing up in his suit. He clomped over to the closet and retrieved his helmet. As soon as he slipped it over his head, HUD displays swarmed his view. He minimized the non-essential ones. “We can’t take his ship and leave, and we can’t go into the underworld to escape.”
Addy nodded slowly.
“I find the little gray one and squeeze h
is head until he give me the code,” Brak said.
Garek nodded. “That sounds about right to me.”
Lucien pointed to the closet where Addy’s exosuit was waiting for her. “Suit up and let’s go hunting. Brak—you, too. You’re going to need your suit for this.”
Brak’s predatory grin faded to a petulant frown. “I cannot rip out his throat with a helmet on.”
“You can’t rip out his throat period. He’s going to need it to tell us that override code. Now go.”
Brak hissed, but turned and left the room.
Addy hurried to undress, and Garek respectfully looked away. In less than a minute she was armored up and ready to go. A few seconds after that, Brak came hulking back into the room, his head now brushing the ceiling with the added inches provided by his armor.
“On me,” Garek said, and marched out the door.
They fell in behind him and followed him back through the ship. Lucien was technically the ranking officer, but Garek had a lot more experience as a Paragon, so Lucien was content to defer to his leadership.
They reached the cargo bay and were just about to open the doors to get to the rear airlock when the deck shivered under their feet. The movement was accompanied by a sound like grass swishing against the hull. They all froze, their heads cocked toward the outer bulkheads, listening.
The deck shivered once more, again accompanied by that swishing sound.
“What the frek...” Lucien muttered.
Another shiver. More swishing.
“I think the Mokari are trying to push us over the cliff!” Addy said.
“Frek that!” Garek slapped the cargo bay door controls and raced through to the rear airlock. Lucien and the others ran up behind him as he cycled the inner doors open. Garek waved them through just as the deck started trembling again. “Come on!” he yelled.
Before Garek could join them, the deck kicked up, angling sharply and sending them all tumbling and sliding back through the cargo bay, picking up speed. With the ship’s main reactor off, the inertial compensator and artificial gravity were offline, too.
Lucien fired the grav boosters in his boots to cushion his fall, but there wasn’t enough time to react, and his knees still buckled with the impact. Brak landed on top of him with a loud thunk that knocked him over and left him seeing stars.
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 45