Dark Side of the Moon

by P. C. Rasmussen

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The cover of this book is created in Photoshop and consists of two images obtained from Dreamstime.com as royalty free images.

  Skull © Ba-mi | Dreamstime.com

  Blue Moon © Mopic | Dreamstime.com

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Yvonne, Simon, Michelle and Amanda for reading this tale and giving me honest feedback.

  Thank you to Derek from goodreads.com for reading through it and giving me pointers how to improve and tightened this baby up.

  And thank you to NaNoWriMo for getting me started on this one. If I hadn't known about NaNoWriMo.com, this book might never have happened. In extension I want to thank Eva for telling me about NaNoWriMo and pushing me to join. Now look what you've done.

  And thank you Kurt, for giving me the idea.

  Prologue

  The end of the trial

  It wasn't the fact that he was in a courtroom that got to him. No sir, not at all. It wasn't the fact that they had evidence against him and that he knew he probably couldn't weasel his way out of this one. No, not that either. It was the fact that his father, the high-and-mighty head of one of the biggest companies on the face of the planet, was sitting among the audience, watching with a stony expression. Every fiber in Kyle's body told him that his father was not going to stand up for him this time.

  Fight your own battles, Kyle. It's what makes you a man.

  How often had he heard that phrase in his childhood? This hadn't stopped his father from buying his freedom time and time again when he got in over his head, though. He couldn't count the times his father had come to his rescue, and in part Kyle always managed to convince himself that it was the old man's way of showing that he cared. But this time was different. This time, his request for a rescue had been stomped out in infancy. The mandatory call to his father had been short and brutal. What have you done this time? Murder? You're on your own, Kyle.

  "A verdict has been reached," the judge said.

  Kyle glanced over at the place where a jury would normally preside over a case like this and sighed at the sight of the empty seats.

  "Do you have anything to say for yourself first?" The judge was a corpulent man with a round face and next to no hair on his head. His eyes were hard, his expression - despite the Pillsbury-Doughboy likeness - unrelenting.

  For a moment, Kyle considered voicing the feeble defense he had come up with while waiting for the last part of this ridiculous trial to commence, but he figured he was better off keeping his trap shut. "No, Your Honor."

  The judge looked surprised for a moment. Kyle hadn't made much of an effort to defend himself, but then he had an appointed lawyer for that. As it had turned out, though, the man was completely incompetent, making a mockery of the trial by mostly looking lost and failing to ask the most obvious questions which might have been able to get Kyle off. Everybody had expected him to raise a stink about the bad representation, but throughout Kyle had counted on his father to intervene, fully expecting this to be one of his many lessons.

  "Very well," the judge boomed and glanced down at the desk top and the e-paper lying there. Then he looked up again, his hard eyes meeting Kyle's across the courtroom. "Under circumstances such as these, the death penalty should be invoked, but since we have reached the no-death consensus, such a sentence is unfortunately no longer an option. So we will have to settle for life in LPC."

  Kyle blinked slowly. It was a little funny that the idea of a life sentence rattled him more than a death sentence would have. But it wasn't so much the sentence itself as where he was going to have to serve it that made an impact. LPC, short for Lunar Prison Colony, was the one place he did not want to go because there was no coming back from there. "You can't do that," he said, more stunned than angry.

  "I can and I have," the judge countered indifferently. "Regardless of the fact that you are a first-time offender, for the crime you have committed, for murder and rape, you deserve nothing less."

  The reality of this trial was slowly starting to sink in and Kyle rose slowly to his feet. "I didn't kill her," he said. "I didn't fucking kill her," he repeated heatedly. "You can't send me to LPC for something I didn't do."

  The judge eyed him, a slight frown furrowing his otherwise smooth brow. "Not only did you confess to the crime, but you had every opportunity throughout this trial to raise objections, and you did not. And now you want us to consider the possibility that you may not have committed this crime? A crime for which there is so much evidence pointing at you that only a live vid-feed of the deed would have been more definitive?" Despite his frown, the judge sounded a tad smug. This was what he had been waiting for, the outrage, the fear. Kyle knew men like this. Over the years, some of Kyle's father's social functions had given him a unique insight into the baser side of the high-and-mighty and thereby the ability to recognize a sadistic prick when he saw one.

  "I took the blame for this because I thought I had a way out, but I didn't kill her," Kyle tried. He had neither killed nor raped the woman in question, but had merely taken the blame to get a friend off the hook. Now that Kyle really thought about it, that friend wasn't worth standing up for because he had allowed Kyle to take the blame and had since made no move to rectify the situation. "I can give you the name of the man who did it and explain why I decided to take the blame too."

  The judge eyed him darkly and his father's stare burned holes in his back. "The sentence stands. You will be transferred to LPC tomorrow morning. May the fates have mercy on your soul." The gavel hit the desk top, sealing his fate, and all Kyle could do was stand there and stare at that offending little piece of wood in the judge's heavy hand.

  I'm not a nice guy, he thought and made no move to oppose the guards when they led him away.

  Chapter 1

  In the brig

  The cell was the same he had spent the past week in during the trial and the service was just as crappy as it had been all week. Nobody gave a damn. Everybody thought he was a scumbag, that he had raped and killed a young woman. And now as he sat there, waiting for the sentence to be carried out, he started wondering why he had taken the blame in the first place. Pete wasn't a good friend, was he? Sure, the guy had come through on some pretty tough deals. He had managed to procure Kyle's drug of choice at times when it seemed nobody else could or would, but was that reason enough for Kyle to end his days in LPC?

  With a sigh born both of frustration and defeat, he slumped back against the wall and closed his eyes. What could he really do? The old man wasn't going to do anything. He had made that abundantly clear over the past week by saying nothing and making damned sure Kyle had no benefits at all.

  "Thanks dad," he grumbled under his breath.

  "For what?"

  The sound of that voice made him jerk upright. Twenty-six years of perceived neglect had led him here and he blamed it all on his father. And now the man stood there, outside his cell, eying him with cold eyes. "For this," Kyle said and spread his arms, rising to his feet. "I owe all of this to you." He could no more keep the sarcasm out of his tone than he could pretend he gave a crap about his father's opinion right now.

  "I am not to blame for your frivolous lifestyle, Kyle," Whitmore Sr. said, his tone almost as frosty as his eyes. He was a tall man, taller than Kyle, with dark hair and dark eyes and a face that had always struck Kyle as being chiseled from the hardest marble.

  "I didn't kill anyone. I didn't rape anyone. I took th
e blame for someone I thought was a friend," Kyle said angrily and stepped closer. "I didn't do this. You think I've earned life in LPC for something I didn't do?"

  "All your life you have lied, cheated, bullied and punched your way through every day. I cannot count the times I had to step in and save the day, the times I've had to pick you up at one of the countless schools you have gone to because you earned yet another expulsion. I have no idea whether you're telling the truth - if you're even capable of such a noble act," Whitmore Sr. said.

  Kyle considered his options, well aware that his relationship with his father had pretty much been doomed the moment his mother had drawn her last breath, and shoved his hands into the pockets of his prison jeans. "Doesn't matter anymore, does it?" he asked and hunched his shoulders a little. "You don't care one way or another anyway. I'm not sure you ever did." Despite all the money, despite all the times he had been saved at the last possible moment, in his darker moments Kyle had always figured that his father's need to step in and clean up the mess he made was to save his own hide rather than Kyle's.

  Whitmore Sr. sighed and briefly glanced off into the distance. "I am thankful that your mother is not here to witness this," he said.

  Any mention of his mother always got a rise out of Kyle. In school, he had beaten up others and been beaten up countless times because of this very topic. "Has it ever crossed your petrified old mind that maybe I wouldn't have turned out this way if she'd been around?" he snarled, grabbed the bars and glared at his father. "At least she cared about me."

  Whitmore Sr. eyed his wayward son for a moment and arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. "You are delusional. I should have seen this coming, should have done something about it sooner. That poor girl would still be alive today if I had. But now you will pay for what you have done. And I will be done with you. You are no longer my son." That said, he turned his back and walked away.

  Kyle watched him go, desperately wanting the last word in this conversation and knowing full well that he would never get it. He peeled his sweaty fingers off the bars and took a step back, then sent a quick look around the austere prison cell. "Well, at least it can't get any worse than this," he tried to cheer himself up, returned to the bunk and dropped down on it. "I hope you die horribly, you son of a bitch," he added darkly, pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them.

  No, he wasn't a nice guy. Like father like son, he mused. His father had been cold and distant ever since his mother had died and Kyle had never been able to let go of the idea that his father somehow blamed him for his mother's death. With a snort, he pressed his face against his knees. It wasn't like he had any influence over her accident. The woman had taken a header down the stairs and had broken her neck. That was the official ruling, publicly available. So how could he be responsible? He hadn't even been anywhere near his mother when it happened. His nanny had made sure he saw nothing by ushering him away and leaving the rest of the servants to deal with the subsequent chaos.

  It had been a rollercoaster ride ever since; until that fateful day a month ago when Kyle had decided to bail his friend - or rather his supplier - out of a bad mess, which had led him straight here.

  Kyle was smart, but he wasn't smart enough to beat the system. He didn't have insight enough into how the system worked to circumvent it and because of this, Kyle had somehow expected his father to step up to the plate and bail him out like he had done so many times before. A few well-placed bribes would have gotten him off the hook immediately. His father was, after all, one of the most powerful men in this rotten world, and he was usually not opposed to bailing Kyle out of trouble if it meant his reputation remained as spotless as possible in the process.

  But it had been a rude awakening when the police chief had placed that call to Kyle's father and had been told that Kyle had done enough damage and that he had to pay the price at some point. As a thorn in his father's side, Kyle had decided not to confess and tell the truth; mainly because suppliers like Pete were hard to come by in a system where drugs were illegal and dealing them was punishable by ... well, LPC. Instead of putting in the effort of finding a new supplier, Kyle had decided to take the blame and then have his father bail him out. It hadn't crossed his mind at any time that his father would not do so, because somewhere, deep inside, Kyle had still hoped that the old man's façade would crumble one day.

  As it turned out, it wasn't a façade and Kyle's shenanigans had finally overstepped his father's boundaries of what he would put up with. It couldn't have happened at a worse time.

  ***

  The transfer

  All shuttles going to and from LPC were maintained to a tee. Kyle eyed the inside of this hell ride and couldn't help a snide smirk; looked like he would be going to Hell in style.

  Clad in ankle and wrist cuffs and the usual prison garb - jeans, blue denim shirt and boots - he pushed forward and managed to grab a seat by one of the small windows. The shuttles were retired passenger transports and even though they lacked the service that public transportation had, they were still pretty nice.

  "What are you grinning at? It's not like we'll end up at the Ritz." This comment came from one of his fellow prisoners, a big guy with a bashed-in face who looked like he had gone ten rounds with a block of cement and lost badly.

  Kyle shrugged and watched while the big guy dropped into the seat next to him. The gruff words did little to impress him. All he had to do was take one look at this man to know that he was nervous as hell. "I like to make the best of a bad situation," Kyle confessed.

  "Yeah? And what's so good about going to LPC? We ain't ever getting out of there again. It's a one way ticket to Hell," the big guy said, his tone tense.

  "Could be worse. They could have shot or hanged us. I consider it advantageous that the death penalty has been dropped," Kyle said, lying to himself and to his new friend like a pro.

  "Sit down, strap in and shut up!" one of the guards said loudly. "You can jabber all you want when you've settled in to your new home."

  Kyle rolled his eyes and settled back into his seat, turning his head to watch the takeoff through the window. Fact was that he usually always landed on his feet even though life had not exactly been at its best for him. Sure, he'd had access to the money and had been able to buy whatever the hell he wanted, but money didn't make up for an absent father and a dead mother. And it would be a challenge to try and get by in an environment that was exceedingly hostile. He didn't know if that was the case for LPC, of course, but this was the place where all the bad guys were sent. Logic offered that LPC was no paradise and would most likely resemble Hell more than Heaven.

  "What're you in for?" the big guy asked quietly while keeping an eye on the guards ushering the last stray prisoners to their seats.

  Kyle smirked at the window. "Rape and murder. Which I didn't commit," he said and rolled his head back to face the boxer. "You?"

  The big guy sighed. "Got a little carried away in a bar brawl," he said and looked down at his beefy hands lying clenched in his lap. "Hit the other guy too hard and killed him. I never meant to, you know. Just wasn't gonna let him call my girl names."

  Yeah, the system sure was fair, wasn't it? There were really no second chances for guys like that. "Well, you were right to hit him. You gotta stand up for your girl," Kyle said as ways of consoling the guy. "I'm Kyle, by the way."

  "Vinnie," he big guy said and rubbed the back of one hand under his nose, then glanced at him. "Rape and murder, huh?" he asked.

  "Yeah. I took the fall for my supplier because I thought my old man would bail me out," Kyle admitted and snorted. "Should have known better. Suppliers might not be easy to come by in this day and age, but ... sure would have been better to do without the drugs than to get stuck in LPC for the rest of my natural life."

  Vinnie nodded. "I'll say," he agreed and the sighed heavily. "Man, I'm gonna miss my girl."

  "I'm gonna miss my drugs," Kyle countered with a good-natured smile. "I wouldn'
t worry, man. I'm sure there are girls in LPC as well. And they're a hell of a lot tougher than any you've met on Earth."

  Vinnie couldn't help a smirk at that. "Yup. It's not like Leigh's gonna sit around and cry over me either," he said. "Don't think she ever appreciated me anyway. And I've gone and done a dumb thing like that for her." He shook his head. "Man, I should have gone to those anger management classes like my shrink suggested. Might have avoided this."

  "Yeah," Kyle agreed. "But ... like the old saying goes ... there is no sense in crying over spilled milk. We gotta make the best of what we've got, right?"

  Vinnie shrugged. "Guess so. Not like we got a choice," he muttered and lapsed into silence.

  Kyle eyed him for a second before returning his attention to the spaceport outside. What he had said to Vinnie was true. They had no choice other than to go with the flow. Kyle had no illusions about where they were going. LPC was going to be tougher than hell and all he could do was establish some kind of reputation as soon as he arrived. He narrowed his eyes a little in concentration, and then rolled his head back to look at Vinnie. Having a human sledge hammer like this on his side couldn't be a bad thing. He needed to stay on good terms with Vinnie and he figured he already knew how to handle the big guy. "Don't worry, Vin. If we stick together, we'll get through this," he said.

  Vinnie glanced at him, his eyes a little wet. Yup, the big guy was a softy, but he was also someone who stood up for what he believed in. And that always came in handy. "You think so?" Vinnie asked, his tone doubtful.

  "Yeah, of course. It's all about being smart. We gotta be tough up there, ready to dish out some blows if need be. You think you can do that?" Kyle countered and eyed Vinnie closely for a reaction.

  For a moment the big guy frowned lightly, and then scrubbed a palm over his battered face. "Yup, I can do that," he agreed and met Kyle's eyes. "I just ain't too happy about being in this on my own, you know."