by Jon Gerrard
Shadowplay:
Book One of the Starcrown Chronicles
by Jon Gerrard
Copyright 2012 Jon Gerrard
Cover by Dane Low
For D
Who Believed.
Special Thanks to my two biggest fans:
Shay
Whose perceptive critique helped me make the story work
and Puka
Whose constant encouragement helped keep me going.
Chapter One
I guess it was the vibration of the deck plates that dragged me back to consciousness. I lay there with my face pressed against the decking for several moments trying to get my bearings. My thoughts were a complete jumble. I tried lifting my head and a grenade went off in my brain. Okay, bad idea. I let my cheek settle back into the warm puddle of drool on the deck.
I felt completely drained and wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep but there was something tugging at my mind. Some nagging little voice was running around in my head trying to get my attention.
“G’ way,” I mumbled with all the authority I could muster. Then the vibration in the deck plates changed as power to the ion drive was sharply increased. I could always tell when the drive in a ship shifted by the way…
It finally penetrated the pea soup my brain was swimming in that I was on a ship. The problem was that I didn’t remember boarding a ship. In fact, now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember anything about how I had gotten here … wherever here was. I tried thinking back but found that I couldn’t remember what had happened yesterday, or the day before that, or the week before that. There was nothing there, just a black hole where my memory should have been.
That got my attention.
I heaved myself to my elbows and snapped my eyes open. A supernova went off in my brain. Screwing my eyes shut against the light spearing its way to the back of my skull I waited for the torture to end or my head to explode. Either would be an improvement. When the pain finally dimmed to mere agony I cracked my eyes and looked around. Bare synthesteel deck and bulkheads, harsh overhead light panels, barred doorway, and about a dozen men all dressed in alike orange jumpsuits. A quick glance down at myself confirmed that I was wearing the same thing.
A knot formed in the pit of my stomach. There had to be some mistake. I wasn’t a criminal, I was … I couldn’t complete the thought. I felt my heart begin pounding in my chest. I had to figure out what was happening. Think! What I needed was more information. Focus on the surroundings. There had to be something else to help me figure out what the hell was going on.
Through the door bars I could see a passageway with other cells like the one I was in. My legs didn’t feel like they were strong enough to hold me up just yet so I crawled to the doorway and used the bars to pull myself up. When I finally got my feet under me I had to wait for several moments for my sight to swim back into focus. I decided I could ignore the little star-bursts going off at the edges of my vision for now.
Looking through the bars I counted four cells on the opposite side of the passage, each of which appeared to be as full as the one I was in. That probably meant the same number on my side. Assuming an average of a dozen in each cell that meant somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred prisoners. To the left the passage ended at a bulkhead with a secured hatch. To the right was a one man station where a bored looking guard sat flipping through pages on his datapad. He was seated sideways to me but on his shoulder I could make out a patch with the emblem of the Royal Department of Corrections—a federal transport. My hands started to tremble. Squeezing tightly on the bars I took several deep breaths. Calm down! There had to be an explanation! I didn’t know what was going on but I knew in my gut that I didn’t belong here.
“Excuse me, guard,” I actually managed to speak above a whisper without my head quite splitting open.
He looked up, his eyes meeting mine. Something passed briefly across his features–pity? Then he looked back down at his pad and swiveled his back to me.
Okay, so no help there.
Using the bars to steady myself, I turned and faced my fellow prisoners. Most had staked out a place on the deck and were just sitting there brooding silently by themselves. They didn’t seem like a very talkative bunch.
“Pell!”
Now that I thought about it, the cell seemed pretty crowded. This size space was only rated for about half as many people as there were here. I wondered why I would even know that. A sudden inspiration made me glance up at the outer wall of the cell only to find a blank synthesteel plate greeting me. A viewport would have let me see the stars and get an idea of what system I was in or at least what sector, but the only breaks in the walls were small ventilation grilles in the center of the bulkheads to either side.
“Pell!”
Me?
“Over here!”
There was movement in the grille to my left.
“Pell! Over here!”
Pushing away from the cell door I staggered miserably over to the vent. I got several dirty looks as I picked my way through the other prisoners sprawled around the cell, but I managed not to step on any fingers. The opening was too small for me to see more than the upper half of her face. Dark, intelligent eyes regarded me through the narrow opening and I could see smile crinkles in the corners. I decided that I liked those eyes.
“It’s me, Alex. I was starting to get worried. That was some smack on the head the guard gave you.”
That explained a lot. I reached up and ran a cursory hand through my hair but didn’t find a lump.
Her eyes sized me up. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks. Just a headache the size of a small moon.” I lied. It was more like the size of a gas giant. “Do you have any idea where we are?”
“Well, we’ve been boosting for a couple of hours now, so I guess we’re just about out to the Tombs.”
The Tombs was what prisoners called the federal detention facility on Demerl, the last planet in the capital system, Argo. Prisoners checked in, but they didn’t check out. Officially, Demerl was just one of several maximum-security prisons across the kingdom. What most people didn’t know was that in actuality it was where the government buried those cases they wanted to go away—serial murderers, mob bosses, national traitors and the like. How many damned fragments of random crap did I know that didn’t connect to anything useful?
A thought struck me. “Aren’t there a lot of us? I mean, this seems like an awful lot of lifers in one trip.”
“We’re part of the new King’s program to ship all of the so called ‘undesirables’ off planet.” I must have been giving her a blank stare. “Geez, Pell, don’t you read the news?”
“Guess I’m more of a sports page guy.”
“You really need to start paying attention to what’s going on in the world. Anyway, ever since Duke Sebastian assumed the throne the courts have been working overtime.”
“Who?”
She gave me an odd look. “Duke Sebastian, well its King Sebastian now, the uncle of King Jason? He took the throne after the young King was assassinated.”
I felt like I should know what she was talking about but my mind was a complete blank. How could I know so many odd little scraps of information and not know major things like who the King was?
“Pell? Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Sure. I mean, I guess I’m still a little out of it, you know. So, you were explaining why there are so many of us aboard.”
She gave me a penetrating look for a moment before continuing.
“What it boils down to is
that they need to make room. Things have gotten pretty bad on Haven ever since Sebastian came into power. He’s made the laws so strict that people are being arrested for every little thing. Crime is practically zero, but people have virtually no freedom either. Of course people tried speaking out against what the King is doing, but that’s a crime now, too. As a result, the prisons on Haven are getting so full with all of the unfortunates they’ve been rounding up that they had to start shipping anyone with more than a couple of years sentence off planet to make room. Hence our crowded little transport ride.”
A glimmer of hope. “So we’re not being sent away for life.”
She stared at me for a moment, then laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding me! Cordass Pell, the most notorious smuggler in this sector, and his pilot? Us they’re going to lock up and throw away the key!”
The name still meant absolutely nothing to me. But that didn’t matter. The law had decided that Cordass Pell was a danger to society and I was on my way to spend the rest of my life in prison. An overwhelming sense of hopelessness started to settle over me when that nagging little voice in my head came back.
“Wait. Didn’t you say we were just about at the Tombs? But, if we’re nearly there, why would they be increasing power to the drive? They should be cutting back power to swing us into orbit.”
My mysterious companion stared at me and the smile lines disappeared from the corners of her eyes. I told her about what I had felt through the deck plating. She seemed to accept my opinion about what the engines were doing without question.
“Something’s wrong,” she said softly.
Something about the way she said those two words chilled me. They were still echoing in my ears moments later when the deck jumped up and kicked me in the jaw.