by Alex Oliver
Acknowledgements
It took me ten years to get up the courage to begin as a self-published author of SF/F. If I had known there were so many generous and talented people out there willing to help me, I might have started sooner. I can’t name everyone here who has kept me going—if you’ve left me a review or comment, if you’ve given me a thumbs up on Facebook or liked my page, you’re one of them.
But I do want to name the individual members of my beta reading team, without whom this book would be much less coherent and far worse spelled. Thank you so much to Sarah Liu, Barbara Harrison, Simon Ball and Grady Murray. You are stars!
CHAPTER ONE
Portents on the edge of the galaxy
Prologue
The cabin lights flickered. Dezba’s heart made a swoop and lurch under her breastbone as if it was knocking to get out. In a spaceship, with vacuum outside and seven backup systems that all had to be interrupted at once for failure to occur, the tiny twinkle was like having the earth shake beneath her.
She opened up all the engineering diagnostics, but they read in the normal ranges. Nothing to suggest imminent catastrophic failure. The engine’s reactor bottle was sound, they were not about to explode into a blazing but short lived sun.
“Report,” Captain Joely barked.
“Nothing from engineering sir,” Dezba answered as professionally as she could. “All the readouts are good. Connecting with the chief now.” She opened a window to talk to the engineering chief, a fierce little Irishwoman with flaming red hair.
“Don’t bother me now,” the chief said, not even looking in Dezba’s direction.
“Are we or are we not under attack?” Captain Joely snapped, buckling the restraints closed on his chair.
Attack? The thought of being attacked had not occurred to Dezba. They were hauling ice to the new colony on Hamza III, which had chosen to settle on a bare moon for religious reasons. The galaxy had been at peace for five hundred years, and though there were sometimes local wars, or smuggling operations that turned to violence and piracy, for the most part no one was shooting at one another.
In the event of a grievance, a government Inquisitor would be sent and a report drawn up, after which a genuine attempt to address the problems and come to a mutually beneficial solution would be made.
Where it did come to violence, one of the specially made enforcement ships would be sent out to protect the lives and livelihoods of government citizens. Those ships were armed and armored in the expectation of combat.
The NXA Intrepid was not such a ship. She was a work-horse, a hauler of supplies and a transporter of passengers, robust, safe and utterly unglamorous. Dezba preferred it that way.
Unlike her younger brother Yas, what Dezba wanted out of a life in the Space Service was solid, useful work, not too far from home. Regular pay and a good pension. Yas was the one with the romantic notions. But thinking of him now made the dread all the worse. What if something terrible was happening and she wouldn’t get to his graduation? What if she—
Gravity doubled, then tripled, grinding her skull into her spine. Pain erupted over her back as the orientation of the cabin shifted. Whereas down had been the engines it was now the wall. Something out there was dragging, dragging, as though a planet had appeared without warning outside the window.
“We’re not seeing anything,” she gritted, flicking through screens of telemetry. They were falling. Her body was screaming at her that they were falling fast towards an inevitable impact, but the data said nothing had changed. Sensors were picking up nothing abnormal at all. “I mean there’s obviously a massive gravity well out there, but it’s not registering on sensors.”
“Pilot, get us the fuck away from it,” Joely directed, settling back into his supportive chair as if he was still completely in control.
The engines answered and the ship strained to turn. There was a moment when it seemed it was working. The ship whined and juddered and a high note sang through the vibrating metal keel, but for a second it seemed they were pulling away.
Blood drained from Dezba’s head, despite her flight suit. Her skin was cold and the hairs stood up on her arms. She thought at first it was fear, but when she brushed against her clothes little sparks of blue light trailed her fingertips.
The air in the cabin tasted fizzy. The dancing gray lights in the corner of her vision were more than the encroaching dizziness of high-g acceleration, because they grew into little fires and spread over the bridge readouts, streaming from the angled corners of the chairs and burning cool and tingly like ice and mint. St. Elmo’s fire. It would almost have been beautiful if it had not been impossible.
The comms officer was off shift—nothing had supposed to be happening for at least the next seven days—so it was Dezba who fought to open the channel to the Admiralty. Whatever was happening, she would record this. No one else would be taken by surprise.
“Maximum acceleration,” the captain yelled over the sounds of juddering.
“We already are, sir,” the pilot gritted. “We can’t go any faster. It’s going to get us. I’m sorry.”
Dezba thought of Yas, thought of her mum. Her brother would hear about this around the same time that he was getting ready to be deployed. Gods, she wished they would send him somewhere close to home, where he could visit their parents. The thought of what her mum would feel was too painful to contemplate. “I’m sorry, mum,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
The ship strained against the unnatural pull. The cabin grew warmer as the engine overheated. Sparks flew from the conduits over her head, mingling with the unnatural gray flames around her.
Seized by a sudden fury, she redirected all power from her station into the sensors and looked straight down - down to whatever it was that was pulling them in.
Dark, like the darkness of space. Against the sparse smattering of stars here on the outer rim of the galaxy it was hard to make out an obstruction, but once the map was populated, she saw one of the stars go out as if something had moved in front of it—something the same color as a black hole. It was emitting no energy, invisible as a phantom.
Show yourself! She thought suddenly as the laboring ship plummeted towards the thing. If you’re going to kill us anyway, show us your face!
Perhaps she beamed the thought into space and they received it. For a moment she thought she saw a golden vessel the size of Pluto. Then it was eclipsed by something so dark eyes and sensors could not decipher it. It couldn’t possibly be the shape of a jaguar—the shape of a cat’s paw with claws made of a diamond so pure they were all but invisible except for the way they bent the light of the stars behind them.
Chariots, cats. Ridiculous. The paw hit Intrepid as if she had driven herself into the surface of a moon. Dezba’s lived experience speeded up. She had time to be offended at being taken out of the sky by a damn kitty, and time after that to think Yas. Whatever it is, don’t let it come for him!
Then the hull ripped in two and she poured with the oxygen out into space, and that was the last thing she remembered.
#
“Hey Sundeen,” came the voice of one of Yas’s year-mates from behind him as he straightened the color-changing panel down the left breast of his dress uniform, waiting to be called into the auditorium. “Celebratory post-graduation threesome?”
He turned to roll his eyes at the voice’s owner, cadet Ebo—an ivory-skinned young person with dyed silver hair, who had vowed to sleep their way through their whole graduating class, but had found themself thwarted by Yas.
“He’s not going to say yes now,” Ebo’s companion scoffed, adjusting her cap to sit lower across her forehead. “He’s been the whole four years without a single date—”
“That’s why he’ll say y
es,” Ebo insisted. “Four years! If he was trying not to be distracted from his studies, well, his studies are over now. We walk across that stage and we’re free persons for however long it takes to get to our new assignments.” They turned cosmetically dyed sapphire eyes on Yas’s face with a look of cheeky appeal. “It’s your last window before there’ll be fraternization issues to think about. Maybe for years. Seize the day! How about it?”
“Is it ever going to get through to you that I’m not interested in that stuff?” Yas shook his head, amused rather than annoyed. Ebo’s insistence had become a running joke by now. “How many times do I have to turn you down?”
“This is your last chance,” Ebo gestured at their chest dramatically, “to experience the magnificence that is all this. Are you sure?”
Yas laughed. “Quite sure, thank you.”
The door swished open, and one of their tutors called out “E to G please. Students with surnames starting E to G, follow me.”
Milling ensued. The crowd of cadets lumped together in the vestibule thinned until there was almost room to move. Ebo and their companion walked out into polite applause, and Yas straightened his tunic once more and wished he wasn’t a letter S.
“What are you hoping for?” cadet Wu asked, leaning against the flimsy internal wall with the patience of a man at the very end of the alphabet. “I want a patrol ship. I want to fight pirates, bring peace. Be a captain one day. You?”
Yas gazed at the door into the auditorium. The airlocks had not been engaged, so the sound of clapping filtered from it. Every now and again a particularly popular student would be welcomed with whistles and cheers.
His cheeks had begun to ache from grinning. His sister Dezba would be out there. She would holler for him. She would probably even stand up and wave, embarrassing him.
Travel on the wormhole-gate system that connected the far-flung quarters of the galaxy with the home world was more expensive for civilians than it was for members of the Native-Xeno Alliance fleet, so it had been Dezba who had brought him to the Academy four years ago. Her dress uniform had been old, a little too short in the arm and leg for her, as she’d had an unexpected growth spurt just after she left. He recalled standing in the domes of Luna for the first time, feeling strong enough to jump through the roof, and yet fizzy with nerves too. He’d told her she looked like a scarecrow and she’d bent an arm around his neck, pulled him down and knuckled him on the head, laughing.
“Argh, you’re so annoying!” he’d said.
But she was also everything he’d ever wanted to be. From the days when he’d toddled after her on their morning sprints, making it half way on her course and then plumping down in the dirt to wait for her to pick him up on her way back so they could run home side by side, he had been following in her footsteps. That morning, faced with stepping out onto his own career, it had finally hit him that he would be making his own way from now on, and when she went to take her arm away, he had grabbed it and held it tight. She’d had to pry him away, laughing as though this too was part of the game.
“I guess I just want to out-do my sister,” he said now. “She’s a navigator on the NXA Intrepid. She’s always been the grown up one, you know? But the Intrepid’s not much more than a freighter, so as long as I get patrol or exploration of some kind, I’ll be happy. I want her to be proud of me.”
“She’s come to watch?” Wu asked, nodding. Yas knew he too had family obligations to live up to, and was expecting all three parents and two siblings to be present today.
“She booked the leave almost as soon as I enrolled,” Yas boasted, smiling. Dezba was overbearing, like most older siblings, and she did tend to tell him what to do. But she loved him, and she’d be cheering for him, he had no doubt of it, and it made him feel like the luckiest man alive, because he was proud of her too.
H to N had gone in while they chatted. Now the tutor returned for O to S. Yas found his place at the far end of the line and—with a deep breath to brace his shoulders—walked proudly out into the graduating auditorium of the Academy.
It was a spectacular room—part of a bubble of glass-steel that had been built as a zero gee training suite in a sky-hook that floated above the moon with an air-tight elevator that connected the bubble to the buildings dug into the moon’s surface. Around the auditorium of sleek chrome chairs the glass-steel walls were invisible, and it seemed they hung among the stars, with the moon’s curve a swathe of silver-silk a long way beneath them, and the distant sun a sliver of furnace, barely visible as it slipped behind the bulk of the Earth.
But Yas had barely given a glance to the scenery, he was scanning the banks of seats for his sister, and his gaze kept coming back to the only unoccupied seat in the room like a tongue to the socket of a pulled tooth.
She wasn’t there. The conviction started small but grew into something bone breaking. Yes, just as though a bone had been pulled out of him and the hollow it had left was echoing. Where was she? What was the matter? She wouldn’t have changed her mind. She would have commed him… Something was wrong.
He shook hands distractedly with the Dean, receiving his commission and his new orders with one hand while he watched the doors in case she came in late. She didn’t.
On the other side of the stage, Ebo came forward with their own handshake. “What did you get?” and he remembered to open the archaic, ceremonial piece of paper and read the name of his new ship.
NXA Ragnarok.
“Oh my God, you got the Raggy!” Ebo gave a caw of startled laughter, clapping their hand over their mouth as if to keep anything ruder from spilling out. “The Raggy! But then, I suppose you wanted a scout ship, didn’t you?”
This was probably the only thing that could distract Yas from worrying about Dezba’s disappearance. “Not that one!” he hissed, absolutely mortified. He dropped the paper, fumbled to pick it back up. It couldn’t be the same Ragnarok. The scout ship whose captain had been fitted out with state of the art, faster than light recording and broadcasting devices, so his every thought and action could be scrutinized by the public—ostensibly so his great discoveries could be shared in real time with the watchers—and who had then had the most public nervous breakdown in the history of the galaxy?
The ship was a laughingstock which had been cruising through empty space for the past five years heading toward the last gate at the very edge of the galaxy while all that expensive tech cataloged the poker game of the day and how many liters of gut-rot the on-board still was producing.
Ebo gave up their attempt at politeness with a sputter of giggles. “The Raggy? Jesus. I’d think it was hilarious, but to be honest even I’m a little sorry for you. I’ve got the Indefatigable. Catch me cruising round the inner systems rubbing shoulders with diplomats and royalty. Oh, sorry, you won’t, because you’ll be at the ass-end of nowhere for ten years investigating space dust.”
Wu finally made his way across the stage and joined them, beaming. “I’m staying here. It’s what I wanted. I hear there’s some dodgy stuff going on on the boarders of Nahasdzáán. Ships disappearing, that kind of thing. I’m glad to be out of that.”
“What?” Yas’s mind snapped back from the humiliation of his posting as if it was an elastic band snapping stingingly into place. He connected the empty seat in the auditorium with rumors of disappearing ships in the sector where Dezba’s ship was running. He added two and two and came up with oh, God, no. “Disappearing how? What ships?”
Wu looked shifty. “Now that I think about it, I shouldn’t have told you that. It may have been classified. You didn’t hear it from me, okay?”
“I… then how am I going to go and ask about it?” Yas panicked. “Wu—my sister’s ship is in that quadrant. Was the Intrepid involved? Please. At least tell me that.”
Wu shrugged. “I don’t know, mate. I wasn’t really paying attention. I figured ‘it’s classified. The less I remember the better.’ And if it’s classified, even if you do ask, no one’s going to tell you.”
/> “I can’t….” Part of Yas was already grieving, screaming, the other part was steadfastly telling him he’d got it wrong and she’d call him tomorrow, unexpectedly delayed. He had to believe the second or he’d go mad, because Wu was right. If the information was classified, the academy would never tell him.
“The comms labs.” The idea came to him in a light-bulb moment. “They’ll have logged the messages that arrived. I can find out there.”
Wu shifted nervously. “We don’t have access to the comms labs.”
“We don’t need to,” Yas declared, a determination the shape of fear taking hold of him. “With Raggy as my other option I’ve got nothing left to lose. I’m going to break in.”
CHAPTER TWO
An inauspicious graduation
The orbital training rooms were connected to the main body of the academy by a space elevator of glass-steel. Descending from the outer platform was in normal circumstances fifteen minutes of zen-like contemplation, as Earth hung in the void almost directly ahead. Yas found himself fixating on the swirls of clouds over Europe, rather than thinking about his sister. Thinking caused panic, and panic made his legs tremble and a weight like a club push into the space between his lungs. Better not to think, then.
The blue planet was cut off by the moon's arc as they continued to descend, finding the sharp peaks of Aristarchus crater rising around them, with the outcropping of domes scattered in its socket like jewels. The elevator capsule slid into the airlock with a thunk, and the hiss of air pressure equalizing almost covered the sound of Wu typing on his bracer.
The heavy doors slid open, letting them pass through into the ever-lit biomes of the academy grounds. Here students were already scurrying around with suitcases, heading out of the barracks and towards the docks. Yas endured a stream of handshakes and claps on the shoulder as classmates left for their new assignments. Probably the last time he would see many of them, now they would be scattered all over the galaxy. He pulled his uniform cap down and tried to go unseen.