Oath Breaker (Death of Empire Book 1)

by A. B. Keuser

  Nodding, Lyz saluted. “The computer shows a random alpha numeric code. That makes me nervous. There’s no point in losing power to some long-dead meckie’s miss-wired stereo.”

  She disappeared and then popped back into view, her blue lips pulled up in a wide smile. “Who knows, maybe I’ll find the lost treasure of the Abolitionists down there! Mopeña is going to be pissed I went without him.” She looked down the corridor wistfully.

  Dani smiled back at her. “We both know he’ll get over it.”

  She sat in the captain’s chair and stretched as she absently wondered which quarters she’d assign her crew. They’d be spoiled for choice.

  Flicking through the control commands, she made sure Lyz had gone through everything. With all of it seemingly in order, she took a moment to survey the bridge.

  It would have been impressive fifteen years ago. She could imagine it gleaming and new. “Hell, who am I kidding.” It was damn impressive now, even as a relic.

  She allowed herself a quick smile. With the Pääom searching for every last vestige of the Abolitionist cause, every last technological memory… she was about to unearth the ship that should have won the war for the now all-but-imprisoned resistance. She was freaking amazing.

  Pulling a hand down her face, she saw the flaw in her plans. “I’m freaking insane.”

  Standing, she swept her hands above her head toward the dark ceiling. They didn’t come close to touching metal. No other ship she’d captained through the black could boast that. But then, no other ship had been built specifically for a mountain of a man. Oath Breaker’s previous captain was rumored to be seven feet tall.

  Danielle knew that was a myth because she’d known the man. He’d been six foot eight, though no less formidable.

  Shaking her head, she looked back to the panels. The past was dead and gone and thinking about it only dredged up new problems—even if they were problems she could medicate.

  The fifteen-year-old computer hummed and flickered, searching through an incomplete database. There were large chunks of data missing from the ship’s outdated logs, almost as if someone had set a worm to clean up any traces of Oath Breaker’s early dealings.

  That wouldn’t surprise her.

  “Nothing about this ship would surprise me.”

  A trill echoed from the speakers when the computer finished its search, and Dani verified that all of the crew’s quarters were on decks three, eight and nine. But even these plans were incomplete. She’d have to take a walk to accurately assess the layout. Even with a skeleton crew, there were concessions to consider. Clashing personalities made for bad neighbors.

  The pen-comm in her pocket chirped three times and she pulled it out, pressing the button that allowed transmission. It crackled to life before she got a chance to acknowledge.

  “Dani, you’ve got to come see this!” Lyz frenzied tone sent a spike of dread through her, but it only lasted a moment. It wasn’t her well-known “panic voice,” and worrying got them nowhere.

  “What is it?”

  “I— I don’t know that I believe my eyes enough to risk saying it aloud. Seriously. You have got to come down here.”

  Letting out an annoyed sigh, Dani tucked the pen-comm away and followed the long line of strip lights that illuminated the path to the ladderway. Decks two through seven were deathly silent and dark as a tomb. The hatches had all been opened by Goo, Dani's weapons specialist, who had done a quick sweep to check for any intergalactic hobos living on board. But Dani knew there’d be no vagrants. Oath Breaker had been shuttered for long term parking. Anyone who had the skill to get in wouldn’t hang around. Like her, they’d be headed for the fastest takeoff possible.

  She reached deck ten again and glared at the hatches she’d ignored before. These holds were reserved mainly for cargo and anything else that was rarely needed during flight—including some personal effects.

  Panic tugged at the back of her mind. Personal effects could hold difficult memories.

  She’d known the job would be difficult. Spending this much time around something so closely connected to her past…. she’d be lucky if she made it out whole. But who needed to be whole or sane when you were rich?

  Lugging open the heavy hatch, she shined her light in. It was swallowed by a blue glow and her heart shuddered in her chest.

  There was no dust. This part of Oath Breaker had been hermetically sealed.

  On the far wall a long line of light pierced through the darkness. The silence and the pale light of the LEDs sent an ugly slithering through her stomach. Every raised hair on the back of her neck said something was wrong. The space was chilly, it echoed… and mechanical noises high above gave her the impression of the tomb José had so recently assured her the ship was not.

  A shadow passed in front of the lights and a flash of red pulled Danielle’s gaze to Lyz. The tech’s row of three eyebrow rings glimmered in the faint rays of Dani’s light. “It’s over here,” she said, waving as though she were marshalling a plane on the tarmac.

  Switching off her light, Dani moved across the deck with slow, measured steps. “What is it?”

  “It’s… well, it’s freaking amazing, that’s what it is,” Lyz said before Danielle could see what she was pointing at.

  Beside the maintenance and housing units for the ship’s bulkhead scrubbers, stood devices that shouldn’t have been around fifteen years ago. The row of eight-foot tall, metal containers were connected to the walls with a tangle of cords and tubes larger in circumference than Danielle’s arm. The long line of capsules sent a cold slice of fear through her.

  Their cylindrical bodies were the same tinted steel as the rest of the ship, and their plazglass fronts were clouded over with frost: cryonic storage tubes.

  Three glowed dimly, signaling they were operational. The rest were dark, vacant.

  “Who do you think is in there?” Lyz’s voice was full of the wonder Dani had come to love from the tech. It felt out of place with the dread roiling through her.

  Cold air rolled off the units, giving Danielle an excuse for the shiver that made her pull her jacket more tightly around her.

  “Did you check to see if there are any logs?” she asked, turning back to Lyz to distract herself. “A cryo-system this old has to have its own brain if it was able to override a full system shutdown to keep whoever’s in there alive.”

  “It does, but the information’s entirely encrypted. I could hack it, but it would take a while…” Lyz studied her but didn’t comment on whatever she saw in Dani’s face. Instead, she patted the computer console like it was a dog. “And there’s a chance this bad boy has a self-destruct sequence that would kill our guests if I messed with it.”

  Dani doubted that, but she didn’t argue. She took a long look at the gangplank scaffolding that ran in front of the raised tubes before grabbing a hold of the handrail and shaking it. “I’m not sure this thing is stable.”

  Lyz glanced from her to it. “Luckily, it’ll only be a short fall.”

  She stepped up to one of the operational capsules, raising her hand to wipe away the frost. Pausing, her fingers hovering over the plazglass and she silently hoped she wouldn’t come face to face with the mummified corpse of whoever was shut inside.

  Dani used her coat sleeve to wipe away the melting frost that clung to it. A mean looking woman Dani didn’t recognize stared back at her.

  The only thing Dani knew was that the two, thin, white bars on her shoulder indicated she’d been a lieutenant for the Abolitionists. Dani didn’t want to be the one to tell her they’d lost.

  The next tube held a man whose head was lolled to the side, as if he’d been improperly placed in the tube. His shoulder told Dani he was a lieutenant commander, three bars, the middle thinner than the others, and silver. They were both relics of a long-dead authority and she had no intention of letting them out to question her methods. She’d remove them before delivering the ship, but not until they were safely away from here.

&
nbsp; “Anything special?” Lyz called from the console, making her flinch.

  “Just some soldier popsicles in the first two.”

  “Are they cute?”

  “Your standards or mine?”

  “Yours.”

  She glanced at both of the frosty soldiers. “I wouldn’t do either of them, but they’re cute enough. She looks mean, I think I like her.”

  Lyz laughed and Dani swallowed her own nervous chuckle. Not even a moment’s joking could save her from the ugly fear welling toward her throat.

  She scraped away a line of frost with her sleeve and stared in at the dark lips she’d uncovered. Her heart stopped and panic-fueled tears began to well in her eyes.

  Suddenly unable to control her breathing, she hurriedly scraped away the icy layer. The man in stasis…. He was very much alive.

  “I’m hallucinating.” That made more sense. “When you want something badly enough… the universe will trick you into thinking you’ve gotten it.”

  But she wasn’t hallucinating.

  His face, slack and unmoving in the harsh lights of the tube, sent her stomach into a quick succession of flips. The prickling of her skin had nothing to do with the temperature.

  “This changes everything.”

  TWO

  Pressing her fingers to her lips, Danielle inhaled an icy breath. “I am not going to throw up.”

  The man on the other side of the glass shouldn’t exist.

  “Osiris Bowlin.” The name sent a quake through the pit of Danielle’s stomach. She hadn’t spoken his name aloud in….

  Breathing deeply, she forced her mind to wrap itself around the numbers bouncing erratically inside her head.

  She swallowed hard and sorted through her memories. How long had it been since she’d given up on him?

  Blowing out a long breath, she pulled her hand down her face, covering her mouth again and trying to come to terms with what couldn’t be possible.

  His black hair, stubble atop his head; dark skin an otherworldly gray tinge….

  How could a man who was so familiar look so alien?

  Dani turned to Lyz—happy for the excuse to look away. Eyes as wide as dinner plates, her best friend’s jaw dropped, exposing the purple end of the barbell through her tongue.

  For the moment, they were the only two people in the whole of the galaxy who knew the stories were flawed.

  Captain Bowlin had not died at the end of the Reject Wars.

  The Pääom had not achieved their great victory in capturing him.

  “I wonder what poor sod got his head lopped off in the name of propaganda?” Dani asked absently.

  Lyz had the grace not to answer. The news reels lied… again. They always did. But this was different.

  This was incendiary.

  “Holy F—” Lyz shook her head at the glass. Her hair flickered around her face, tinted an odd, murky brown by the tube’s glow.

  “He looks just like the pictures from the textbooks.”

  Swallowing the lump in her throat, Danielle stared at the Abolitionist’s hero—at the Pääom’s so-called greatest enemy.

  “Cryo will do that to a person.”

  Lyz was wrong.

  He didn’t look like the pictures plastered on buildings and on flickering billboards. That man—though shown in his finest uniform—was painted a traitor. In the pictures he didn’t have a purple bruise shading his cheek a half inch below his right eye, or the split in his skin that cut off at an odd angle toward his square jaw through the dark, full flesh of his lips.

  Her eyes followed the line of his hard, square jaw, across the glaring scar. “He should be nearly fifty…”

  Examining him further, he gaze traveled down his arm. He had a long gash on the top of his left hand. He’d been in a fight shortly before he’d gotten in the tube. No harm, no healing.

  Clenching her teeth, she closed her eyes and promised herself she wouldn’t freak out. The tingling in her limbs was just from the cold. She was fine. The past was gone. It wasn’t going to drag her back. And she definitely wasn’t going to throw up. Probably.

  Opening her eyes, she turned her attention to the mechanisms keeping him alive. His sleeves had been rolled up, and his arms were a pincushion jungle of fluid delivery tubes. Tearing her eyes from the blue-tinged flesh, she examined the tattoo on his right forearm: a dancing skeleton holding an open music box. It was delicate and out of place on a man like Osiris, and exactly as she remembered it.

  Gnawing her tongue, she swallowed the urgent panic that wormed its way from her belly to her throat. She blinked to fight the moisture gathering at the corner of her eyes. Frustrated, she clenched her fists and shoved them into her jacket pockets. It would keep her from beating on the capsule’s glass front—keep her from screaming at him for what they went through when he disappeared. For the punishment they’d found for Lyz because she was too free a spirit for the Pääom’s new galactic order. For the way they’d dismantled José’s life—her family’s life.

  Breathing deeply, she reminded herself. “The past is darkness, darkness deserves nothing from me.”

  If Lyz heard her, she ignored the well-worn phrase.

  She wondered if Si would be able to live with the guilt, wondered if leaving him caged in a cryo tube wasn’t the more humane choice.

  Would he bat an eye at the tortures so many had gone through in the government institutions? At the systems of planets that had been counting on him to save them, those that now suffered beneath the weight of extreme galactic prejudice.

  Could a man—even one with so large a legend as Osiris Bowlin—survive that?

  A chuckle beside her reminded her Lyz was there too.

  “If only scientists could come up with a fountain of youth that didn’t require your complete absence from the real world.” Lyz traced her finger along the plazglass, leaving a new line down Osiris’ chest, and let out a long sigh. That sigh—Lyz’s wistful, addlepated daydream—forced Dani from her morbid thoughts.

  She needed to take her meds to level out.

  Danielle snorted at both Lyz tone and her own instability as she touched the tube. This was no fountain of youth.

  “They’re too busy coming up with vegetables that gestate every three days. I think their worry is in keeping those who are alive from dying too soon, rather than not at all.”

  Lyz nodded, her gaze shifting over the three tubes, one brow raised suggestively. “What do we do with them?”

  She tapped the glass and tried to name the emotion stabbing at her now.

  “This is one popsicle we can’t defrost.” Dani dug her fingers into her hair, further mussing her bun.

  She didn’t even know if she wanted him back—not that he’d really been hers to begin with.

  “We’ll have to deal with the power suck for now. Oath Breaker can compensate,” Dani said. “Head topside. I’ll lock this freezer up and join you for takeoff.”

  Danielle watched Lyz walk away. She knew the necessary sequence to prep for takeoff.

  Frost climbed up the glass again, retaking Osiris’ capsule. “So this is where you’ve been all along. What am I going to do with you, Si?”

  Choking on the words, her hand went to her throat—though she knew what was coming, knew she had no power to stop it, She clenched her jaw, biting so hard the pressure became pain. She had to turn away. Dani gripped the scaffold railing and struggled against the flood of chest-crushing panic.

  Shaking her head, she tried to clear the blackness fuzzing at the corners of her eyes.

  She should be happy he was still alive. She should be disappointed she had to be the one who found him. She should pull his plug. He’d abandoned them all.

  Fifteen years was a long time to let the galaxy think you were dead.

  Deep breaths kept her from sliding to the grated catwalk in a hyperventilating puddle. She talked herself down from the attack, from its after effects—that nagging and insistent knowledge that the emotions were irrational, that
she had no control over them.

  She was a product of the Pääom’s new galactic order whether she wanted to be or not.

  She dug the pills from her coat pocket, palmed two and swallowed them dry. The bottle was back in her pocket before she registered she’d taken a dose. It was a bad habit, one she couldn’t force herself to break.

  Forcing herself to look back at the hero who had failed her, she swallowed the last vestiges of dread. Slowly leveling out, she allowed herself an uneasy laugh as her hand pressed against the cold glass. “José is going to flip out.”

  She fidgeted with the pendant around her neck. The dragonfly had been her mother’s, and grandmother’s before that. It was the only part of them she had left, save for the memories. Memories peppered with glimpses of the man in a cold blue tube.

  “You knew him, Danielle Cholla?”

  The inhuman voice whispered through the overhead speakers and sent a fresh chill through Dani’s blood. She flinched, gaze darting to the dark ceiling above her, looking for the speaker. It was no one on her crew. But the only option that was plausible seemed impossible. She swallowed heavily, eyes darting to the dark confines above her head. “Who’s asking?”

  “I am Oath Breaker.”

  The mechanical voice was eerily emotive.

  “You knew my captain?”

  “In another lifetime.” Danielle breathed out a single laugh of disbelief. “If you’re sentient, why not say something before now?”

  Sentient ship AIs were scarce enough nowadays. Costs, glitches and megalomaniac tendencies kept the burgeoning technology from widespread implementation. The realization that the Abolitionists created one fifteen years ago bordered on unthinkable. That it was still operational and seemingly sane after so long alone was a damned miracle.

  “I did not trust you before.”

  “And now?” Danielle’s eyes darted to the airlock. An AI would have the ability to override safety protocols… if the old girl wanted to vent her, Dani would be dead before she could get off the scaffold.

  “If you knew him, you could not possibly wish to harm him.”