by S. A. Lusher
INTO THE VOID
–A NOVEL OF SCI-FI ACTION–
Book #14 in
The Shadow Wars
written by
–S. A. Lusher–
cover by
–M. Knepper–
editing by
–Sarah Lusher–
Dedicated to Aron Stanley,
for lots of awesome gaming sessions
and enduring my presence.
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
CHAPTER 01
CHAPTER 02
CHAPTER 03
CHAPTER 04
CHAPTER 05
CHAPTER 06
CHAPTER 07
CHAPTER 08
CHAPTER 09
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOREWORD
What you are about to read is the fourteenth novel in The Shadow Wars series. This is a continuation of the other books and cannot be read as a stand-alone title. I highly recommend that you go back to the beginning and start reading.
You can start here, with the first book, Necropolis.
If you've already read Necropolis 1, 2, & 3, Absolute Zero, Ceaseless, Syberian Sunrise, Snowblind, Quarantine, Rogue Ops Rising, Countdown, Necropolis 4, Starck's Lament, Deathless, & The Blind War, then thank you for reading this! I hope you enjoy it, as well.
For the sake of convenience, here is a list of all titles in The Shadow Wars in the order in which they are meant to be read. (NOTE: Some of these titles may not yet be published.)
-Dead Ice [Companion]
-Dead Skies [Companion]
-Necropolis
-Necropolis 2: Endurance
-Nerves of Steel [Companion]
-Necropolis 3: Annihilation
-Absolute Zero
-Blood & Tears [Companion]
-Ceaseless
-Syberian Sunrise
-Snowblind
-Quarantine
-Rogue Ops Rising
-Countdown
-Warm Memories [Companion]
-Laid To Rest [Companion]
-Necropolis 4: Terminal
-Small Acts of Kindness [Companion]
-EB-303 [Companion]
-Alone? [Companion]
-Starck's Lament
-Deathless
-Outpost 88 [Companion]
-The Blind War
-Lethal Cargo [Companion]
-Into the Void
-Saturate (Out 2016)
-Loose Ends [Companion] (Out 2016)
CHAPTER 01
–High Hopes–
CPL. Matthew Cage
L. CPL. John Powell
PVT. Jerome Baker
William Holt
Linda Lawrence
Susan Sharpe
Gideon Stewart
Lucy Banks
PFC Juan Ramirez
SPEC. Duncan Kato
SPEC. Colin Epps
SGT. Jonathan Philbrick
PFC Aaron Malone
Mark Collins
SPEC. Lin Parker
Greg found it difficult to stop staring at the wall of engravings. Some of these names he knew, some of them he didn’t. Hell, some of them he’d personally requested. It had been a grim task, but Hawkins thought it was something that needed to be done. And he wasn’t wrong. More than something that needed to be done, it was something that deserved to be done. Here were the men and women who had died fighting Rogue Operations, and later, after Rogue Ops was put six feet under, fighting to keep the galaxy a safe place.
There were more names on there, a lot more.
Over the past several weeks, Greg had found himself coming to this spot more often. The gold plaque was huge, taking up a solid section of the wall where it was placed, in an intersection room that connected the bridge, the primary airlock and the rest of the ship. Unconsciously, Greg reached up and gently rubbed his neck.
Sometimes, he could still feel the phantom pain of his decapitation.
He continued staring at the flat plate of gold. There were a lot of names, dozens...and there was still a lot of space yet to be filled. The fact that he could be another name on this list hadn’t escaped him. It didn’t bother him, either. At least, not as much as it used to. No, what bothered him now was the fact that he might end up in a situation where he was incapable of dying and in essentially eternal torment.
He could face death, he didn’t think he could face that.
That brought him around to the other thing he’d been thinking about. There was a name missing. Greg had never made up his mind about Enzo Rains.
The man had fucked up. There was no question about that. But even though he’d first knocked Greg out, robbed him and left him stranded on an island, and later had tried to kill him and Eve and Drake and Jennifer, Greg wasn’t sure he could entirely blame the man. It was obvious that his actions were motivated by his inescapable pain. Before, Greg hadn’t been so sure it was an excuse, and although he still wasn’t entirely certain about it, he felt a lot less concrete about that having endured what he had on Ash.
Turning away from the plaque, Greg began to make his way slowly through the ship.
He’d hoped that today would be different from yesterday, and the day before that, and the ones before that, ever since he’d come out of his medically induced coma. But it wasn’t. It was the same as before, and he was beginning to suspect that if he didn’t do something, something big, then it was just going to stay this way.
Or maybe even get worse.
There was always that possibility.
As he kept going, unsure of where he was headed, Greg reached into his pocket and fished out his pack of Galactic Lites and Zippo lighter. He stuck a cig in his mouth, lit up and snapped the lighter shut, replacing everything in his pocket. This wasn’t helping, either. All it did was make him think of Cage, and that just made him think of Cage coming after him with glowing eyes and metal limbs. And all of that inevitably led him back to Kyra.
Greg sighed heavily, a plume of formless blue smoke escaping his nostrils.
Everything felt like shit. When he wasn’t afraid he was lonely, when he wasn’t lonely he was anxious, when he wasn’t anxious he was confused. Or frustrated. Or pissed. He hadn’t slept through the night since waking up from the procedure. There were always nightmares, usually involving his head falling off.
He’d been talking to the others about it, those that had been there, but it wasn’t helping. Eric had blocked most of it out and Drake seemed pretty zen about what had happened. Jennifer was probably the most helpful, he guessed, in the sense that she was pretty fucked up about what had happened. She’d told him that she couldn’t eat cheese pizza anymore. She’d been in the mess hall two weeks ago and someone was pulling away a piece, stretching the cheese out and she’d had a fucking flashback to her leg getting ripped off.
She’d puked right there on the spot and had passed out a minute later.
But even she was doing better now. And as shitty as it made him feel, Greg kind of wished she was still fucked up like he was. Because being fucked up about this was hard enough as it was, but doing it alone was a lot harder. Wishing this on someone else just made him feel guilty. To make matters even worse, almost everyone was gone.
Jennifer, Genevieve, Drake, Eric, Allan and Callie were all gone on missions, and they’d taken some of the staff with them. Eve was still here, but she was making him feel even guiltier. The idea of leaving Anomalous Ops had been kicking around his head ever since he’d woken. Beside
s the obvious problem of his mortal terror at running into a situation like that again, there was the added problem of his instability. He didn’t feel capable of taking on another mission, which put himself and, more importantly, others at risk.
But could he really leave?
There was a conclusion that Greg had come to, but he was afraid to face it. Having woken up with no memories one day a little over a year ago, there hadn’t really been much in his life that held significance or meaning. He’d latched onto certain things that had kind of just been there. Namely, the adrenaline kick that come from fighting the insane odds...and Kyra. He’d never really gotten over her and now that it felt like he’d lost his connection to his professional life and his adrenaline addiction, it seemed like all his thoughts were being drawn to her.
He hadn’t spoken to her once since she’d left.
It hadn’t been easy, although being with Eve and Callie and Vanessa had gone a long way towards helping. But now…
Greg stopped where he was, coming to a halt beside a window that was currently shuttered because they were in FLT flight. He leaned against the nearest bulkhead and closed his eyes. This wasn’t working. Whatever he was doing here, moping about on the Dauntless, arguing with Eve, his head a swirl of confusing, painful emotions...
He needed to act.
Abruptly, he straightened up, turned around and marched off. He needed to leave. Before, he’d spent time running down potential paths to his lost memories, and nothing had worked. It hadn’t made him happy, but once he felt confident that there was nothing he could do, that there was no way to recover his memories, he had turned away from them and started focusing on building new ones and a new life. That’s what he needed to do now.
He needed to know if his only other viable path would work.
He needed to see Kyra.
Greg walked until he reached Hawkins’ office. The little light beside the door that indicated whether or not he was busy, red for ‘fuck off’, green for ‘fine, come in, but make it quick’, was green. He hit the call button. A few seconds later the door slid open. Greg stepped into the room, finding the old commander as he always did: hunched behind his desk, a bottle of something strong and a shot glass on the desktop, amidst towers of infopads.
“Greg,” Hawkins said, stopping what he was doing. “What can I do for you?”
For a moment, Greg felt guilty. He knew Hawkins wanted to help, and he also knew that Hawkins didn’t want to lose him.
“Where are we going right now?” he asked.
“We’re headed for a resupply run to a space station in the Keene System, why?”
“I need you drop me off there.”
Hawkins frowned, staring at him for a long moment. “Why?” he repeated.
“I’m leaving. I...I’m sorry. I’m leaving and I’m not sure if I’m coming back.”
Hawkins continued staring at him, perhaps going through a list of responses, wondering if there was anything he could say to change Greg’s mind. Ultimately, he must have decided that there wasn’t anything.
He sighed. “Okay.”
“Thank you.”
Greg stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on Hawkins’ desk and turned to go, then hesitated. He began feeling even shittier now that he needed a favor.
“Before I go, I’m going to need some information.”
“What information?” Hawkins replied.
“I need to know where someone is.”
* * * * *
“So that’s it? You’re just...leaving?” Eve asked.
“Yes. I’m sorry,” Greg said, continuing to sort through his clothing, trying to figure out what he should take with him. He didn’t exactly have a lot of personal items, probably because he didn’t have much of a personality.
“Greg...”
He stopped looking around and turned to face her. Looking at her just made him feel even more like shit. Goddamn, was there a bottom to this well of crappy feelings?
“Eve, I’m sorry, okay? I just...I can’t handle this anymore. I can’t do fucking anything. I can’t come to any fucking decisions about anything and I just can’t fucking do this. I need to figure out if this is going to work.”
“Going back to her?”
“Yes. I...I’m sorry.” How many times had he said that recently?
Eve looked at him for a long moment and he could see various emotions playing across her face. Anger. Frustration. Guilt? All at once, everything seemed to collapse. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and let it out.
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry, too. I can actually understand why you’d want to leave. I don’t know what I’d do if I’d gone through what you did. I just...wish you weren’t leaving. I...I really liked what we had going.”
“I did too,” Greg replied softly.
Eve crossed the distance between them and wrapped him in a tight, hard hug. He hugged her back, surprised by the action. After several seconds, she suddenly pulled back, then leaned in and gave him a quick kiss.
“Good luck. Goodbye,” she said, then turned and walked out of the room.
Greg watched her go, his stomach a churning cauldron of negative emotions, his heart hammering in his chest. He turned back to his dresser and continued sorting through his stuff, knowing that he had to keep going, had to keep forcing himself on, step by step. He’d done it before, although then it had been easier.
Personal problems were a lot harder to deal with than screaming zombies.
* * * * *
The shuttle Greg was riding in was finishing its descent through the atmosphere.
He’d been dozing, dreaming of terminals and orbital reentry and, sometimes, Ash. When the Dauntless had hit the Keene System, Greg had taken his bag full of stuff, mostly clothing, gone through the airlock and bought a ticket to a space station orbiting a blue-green farming world called Genesis. That’s what Hawkins’ data had turned up.
He’d reviewed the information as he was shot through space at faster than light speeds in first class, feeling a strange sense of dislocated unreality. Looking over the intelligence made him feel like he was preparing for one of his missions. In a way, he supposed he was. He just wanted to see her again, to know if she still felt anything for him, to see if...she would take him back. They’d been apart for over a year now.
Greg looked out the window as the last white wisps of clouds fell away, revealing a vast, dazzling landscape of green and blue and brown below. He could see forests and lakes and farmland surrounding a colony, the one he was headed for. Kyra had gone here almost immediately following their stint on the frozen, unnamed world, retrieving Matheson. She’d officially been transferred to Security-Investigations, although she had a new job now on the Investigations side as a communications technician.
And she hadn’t left the planet since, apparently.
A part of Greg felt weird, gathering all of this information on her, and it felt wrong, but he was just beyond the point of caring right now. It wasn’t like he was going to do anything bad with this data, he wasn’t going to stalk her or harass her. He just...needed to talk to her. Part of him argued that he should have just called her, but he didn’t want that either. He wanted to be there, face to face. It was too easy to hang up on someone when talking over a comms device, it was harder to walk away from them when they were right there in front of you.
Greg wasn’t sure why he kept assuming the worst case scenario, that Kyra would hate him and not want to talk to him.
It was probably all of the fucked up situations he’d found himself in literally since the moment his new memories began inside that wrecked ship full of corpses, in the middle of a rainy wasteland at night, surrounded by zombies.
That tended to fuck you up.
Greg sat back and waited for the shuttle to land, closing his eyes, trying to center himself. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say when he saw her, he only knew that he had to see her, even if it was the last time in his life that he did and she told
him to fuck off.
* * * * *
The colony was drenched in sunlight.
Greg thought rain would be more appropriate and found himself actually missing the rain as he was driven through the streets by a silent taxi driver. His military ID was enough to get his sidearm through any security checkpoints, which he’d opted into taking with him because he couldn’t go anywhere without a gun ever again, and he’d been a little surprised at that. He’d assumed that Hawkins would revoke his status the second he set foot off the Dauntless.
In a way, it was endearing.
The old man still had hope that Greg was going to come back.
“Here we are,” the taxi driver said as he pulled up to the curb in front of the Security-Investigations building. He obviously didn’t want to fuck with the process of getting into the parking lot.
“Thanks,” Greg replied, swiping his thumb over a pad and leaving a twenty credit tip for the hell of it.
He stepped out of the taxi, hefted his black duffel bag and made for the security post that granted entrance to the parking lot. He wasn’t sure if it was his demeanor or maybe the way he was walking or just the look on his face, but the man stationed in the post took immediate notice of him. His hand dipped out of sight, below the glass, and Greg knew almost by instinct that it was now resting on the butt of his holstered pistol.
“Can I help you, sir?” the man asked as he approached.
“I need access to your facility,” Greg replied. “My name is Greg Bishop. I’m with Special Operations.”
The man, though he really didn’t look older than his early twenties, just a kid with a buzzcut and a uniform, frowned.
“I’ll need some verification,” he replied, indicating a scanning pad mounted on the side of the small structure. “Retinal there, thumbprint there,” he added.
Greg swiped his thumb and moved his eye up to the pad. A few seconds passed as the sentry scrutinized the information.
Abruptly, he snapped to attention. “I apologize for the delay, sir, go right in,” he said, opening up the blockade that kept cars from getting in unless security wanted them to. “Should I inform them of your presence?” he asked, fumbling his words slightly.