Broken Worlds: The Awakening (A Sci-Fi Mystery)

by Jasper T. Scott

  Her visage faded from the holo panel, only to return a few minutes later. “The beacon was stolen. It must have been a ploy designed to lure our fleet away from the Eye. It is good that King Assuraga had the sense to send you instead.”

  “Yes...” Captain Okara agreed, but she sounded far away, as if lost in thought. “We’ll be on our way, then. Goodbye, my Queen.”

  A minute later, the Ghoul Queen answered Captain Okara’s dismissal with a sneer, and her face abruptly faded from the holo panel.

  Gatticus slowly shook his head. “Even if the Coalition, or whoever stole the beacon, had managed to lure the 22nd Fleet away, what could they possibly have accomplished by doing so?”

  Captain Okara didn’t reply for a long moment. She just stared dead ahead at the gleaming red, white, and blue orb of Hades.

  “Captain?” Gatticus prompted.

  “We’re going to establish orbit....” she said slowly.

  “What? Why? You heard the Queen—there’s no threat here. We need to go back and drop off the cryo pods so that we can get on with our mission.”

  Captain Okara turned to look at him, but her eyes were oddly glazed, and she seemed to be staring past him. “If there’s no threat here, then how did a beacon drone get stolen and sent without the Queen’s knowledge?”

  Gatticus shrugged. “Let Queen Cithasi deal with it.”

  “No.”

  “Captain Okara—”

  “You may be in overall command of this mission, Ambassador, but I am still the captain of this ship, and I have my orders: King Assuraga told me to investigate, and that is exactly what I am going to do.”

  Gatticus frowned. “Very well.”

  A hiss sounded behind him, and he turned to see his Banshee honor guards glaring at Captain Okara from where they sat in their acceleration harnesses on either side of the bridge doors. Negotiating with the Kassaraks was their mission too.

  The Captain turned to look at them, and they both bowed their heads in a gesture of submission.

  Shock rippled through Gatticus at the sight of that. Cygnians never bowed their heads to a subjugated species, much less physically weaker ones like humans.

  Gatticus paused the playback there. The mystery deepens... he thought. He fast-forwarded through the approach to Hades, and then played his memories forward at normal speed once more.

  “Geostationary orbit established,” the officer at the helm announced.

  “Good,” Captain Osaka replied. “Now let’s all go to sleep.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the helmsman replied.

  “Sleep?” Gatticus echoed. He turned to see Captain Osaka release her safety harness and stand up from her station. Her brown eyes still had that glazed look about them, as if she were half-asleep herself. “Captain?”

  “Yes, Ambassador?” She drew her sidearm and aimed it at his head.

  Gatticus froze, his thoughts racing in a dozen different directions at once. The crew wasn’t reacting, but his honor guards were busy releasing their harnesses.

  “What do you think you are doing, Captain?” Gatticus said quietly, hoping to buy enough time for the Banshees to reach her. He caught a glimpse of them stalking toward the captain on all sixes. The sticky pads of their feet kept them rooted to the deck without the need for mag boots.

  “I’m taking control of this ship,” Captain Okara replied.

  The Banshees stopped, one on either side of her, and turned their giant heads to look up at her. Gatticus was just about to tell them to attack—

  When they sat back on their haunches and bowed their heads to Captain Okara.

  Gatticus couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Even more incredible than the fact that these Banshees were somehow inexplicably treating the captain like their master, rather than the other way around, was the fact that none of the bridge crew had reacted to the developing confrontation. At the very least, Gatticus would have expected them to turn their chairs toward the Captain to see what was going on, but they just sat there, staring dead ahead, not moving or speaking—as if they really had gone to sleep.

  Gatticus shook his head to clear it. He could figure out what was happening later. He made a mental connection with the ship and used his override code to fire the thrusters at full throttle.

  A deep, rumbling roar shivered through the deck, and Captain Okara’s eyes widened in horror just before the sudden acceleration broke the mag lock of her boots and sent her tumbling backward. The two Banshees beside her went flying too, and all three of them hit the rear wall of the bridge with a thunderous boom.

  There was no way the captain had survived that. The Banshees might have, but hopefully they were at least stunned. Gatticus killed the thrusters and activated ship-wide comms. Peripherally he noticed the bridge crew stirring to life around him with a combination of groans and confused murmurs.

  “This is a code red security alert!” Gatticus said over the ship’s intercom. “Coalition agents are trying to take over the ship. All hands, arm yourselves!”

  “Ambassador? What’s going on?” Gatticus recognized the voice of the ship’s sensor operator and turned his chair to see the man standing behind him—

  With his sidearm drawn and aimed at Gatticus’s head. “Lieutenant Reed?” Gatticus asked.

  “You can’t stop this,” the sensor operator said.

  Gatticus saw the look in his eyes, and he knew he didn’t have much time. This was a mutiny. The Coalition was trying to take over the ship, and if the captain, two Banshees, and the sensor operator were all involved, there was no way of knowing how deep this plot went. There was only one sure way to stop them.

  Gatticus issued a command to jettison all of the ship’s antimatter reserves into space, and a second command to dump his memory to one of the data cubes in his quarters. It all happened in a fraction of a second—too fast for Lieutenant Reed to react.

  An automated voice echoed through the bridge: “Fuel dump complete.”

  “What did you do?!” Lieutenant Reed demanded.

  And then a burst of blinding silver light consumed Gatticus, and his memory playback ceased.

  A line of text appeared: End of data stream.

  Chapter 37

  Darius left the mess hall at a run, determined to catch up with Dyara before she could disappear in the labyrinthine corridors and decks of the Deliverance.

  “Hey, slow down!” he said as he ran up behind her.

  She glanced back at him and stopped to wait for him to catch up.

  “Look, whatever you know about Tanik, I don’t care. All I want is to find my daughter. Everything else is secondary or unimportant right now.”

  “I don’t know much,” Dyara said quietly, and then glanced behind them once more, as if to check that there was no one else around. When her eyes met his again, she said, “What I do know is that he’s not a good man.”

  “In what way?”

  “He’s a pirate, Darius.” Dyara looked away and slowly shook her head. “We all are.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?” Dyara asked. “What do you think happens when you board a civilian ship and steal its cargo?”

  Darius shook his head. “They lose a lot of money?”

  “Worse. Cygnian law states that anyone who gives up their cargo to pirates is guilty of the same offense as the pirates who stole it, unless they can prove that they were willing to lay down their lives in defense of their ship.”

  Darius’s brow furrowed. “In other words...”

  “They’re not allowed to surrender, so we’re forced to kill them, and the ones who do surrender get marked for death and sent to designated hunting worlds. Tanik knows that, so he steals their ships too, making it impossible for them to go back to the USO. Then he gives the crews a choice: join the Coalition, or die. He says the death he offers is more merciful than what the Cygnians will give them, but I think that’s just a way to force transport crews to join his war. It works. I joined.”

  “You were a crew member
on one of the transports that Tanik pirated?”

  “I was the captain.”

  “Did he kill any of your crew?”

  “Not my crew, no. They died later, fighting the Cygnians. But he’s killed plenty of other crews. There was this one ship, crewed by Udarians....”

  A brief image of an Udarian flashed through Darius’s mind, thanks to the lexicon module Gatticus had downloaded for him back on the Deliverance: Udarians were small, furry four-legged creatures that looked like a cuddlier version of a hedgehog from Earth.

  “What happened to them?” Darius prompted.

  Dyara glanced back to the mess hall once more, to make sure no one was coming. When she saw that the way was still clear, she whispered, “They’re pacifists. They refused to join, so Tanik gassed them.”

  Darius grimaced. “That’s terrible. Why are you still with him?”

  Dyara frowned. “Once you join the Coalition, there’s no way out. Desertion is punishable by death.”

  “Well, he’s letting you leave now, so maybe we shouldn’t come back.”

  Dyara raised her left arm and pulled up her sleeve to reveal the glowing sickle-shaped mark on her wrist. “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said.

  Darius grimaced. “There might be a third option.”

  “Like what?”

  This time it was Darius’s turn to look behind him, but there still wasn’t anyone coming. “A change of leadership.”

  “You mean a mutiny. People have tried. Somehow, Tanik is always ready for it.”

  Darius sighed. He didn’t have time to deal with this. “He’s not a god, Dya. Besides, there are non-violent means of takeover. We could organize a vote after we get back. Once all the others are woken up, we’ll have a good excuse to do so. No one’s going to want to live in a military dictatorship.”

  Dyara looked unconvinced. “They might not have a choice.”

  “Tanik doesn’t have the numbers to keep us all in line with force. I’ll make sure there’s a vote, but first, I need you to take us to Hades.”

  Dyara nodded slowly. “I’ve been thinking about that. It would be better if you knew how to fly, too.”

  “Won’t it take a long time to download pilot’s training modules?”

  “We still have a few hours before the Deliverance drops out of FTL. That should be enough time to download the necessary modules.”

  Darius nodded. “Then let’s go.”

  Chapter 38

  Hours after he’d finished watching his memory playback, Gatticus was still reeling in the wake of everything he’d discovered. He was busy running the events through deductive reasoning algorithms while he re-charged his power cells from the room’s charging port.

  Clearly the stolen beacon drone had been an excuse for Coalition agents to take the Deliverance to Hades, but why Hades? And how had the Coalition managed to turn Lieutenant Reed, Captain Okara, and even two Banshees to their side? Gatticus shook his head in disbelief. Banshees working for the Coalition. He’d never have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

  Another mystery was how Captain Okara had managed to drug the ship’s entire crew—or at least the bridge crew—so that they’d been ready to fall asleep on her command.

  Gatticus still couldn’t answer any of those questions, so he adjusted his algorithms and ran through them again from the beginning, starting at Hades.

  Who had stolen the Cygnian beacon drone and programmed it with a fake distress signal?

  Whoever it was must have already known about the Deliverance’s trip to the Eye, and also known more or less when they would arrive. It would have taken close coordination to make sure the Deliverance came to investigate and not some other ship. That meant someone had to have sent another beacon drone to Hades, or at least piggybacked a message on a passing ship.

  Regardless of how it had been accomplished, there seemed to be only one likely candidate for co-conspirator on Hades—

  Tanik Gurhain.

  The timing of his raid on Hades’ fuel depot was no coincidence. Gatticus had dumped the carrier’s fuel in an effort to stop the Coalition from stealing the ship, so Tanik had stolen more.

  But that still left plenty of unanswered questions: what had happened after Gatticus lost consciousness? How had thousands of armed crew been killed by just two Banshees, and where were the Coalition agents who had tried to take over the ship? Had Lieutenant Reed survived?

  Gatticus had a feeling the answers to at least some of those questions lay with Tanik Gurhain. He spent the last hour of his charging cycle trying to think of a way to get the upper hand in a confrontation with the man. Since Tanik didn’t know that Gatticus suspected him, that would give him the element of surprise, but he needed to get the man alone or else he’d be outnumbered.

  “There you are, Gatticus,” a gruff voice said.

  If Gatticus had possessed a sympathetic nervous system, he would have jumped with the sound of that voice. Instead, he slowly turned to face the man standing in the open doorway to his quarters.

  “Tanik,” he said evenly, working hard to keep any hint of suspicion from his voice.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you,” Tanik said.

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “I need your help. I’m going to make an orientation video to show the people in cryo after we wake them. I need you to narrate it. I don’t speak their language, but you do.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Gatticus said, nodding agreeably.

  Tanik’s gaze flicked around the room and came to rest on the charging cable snaking from Gatticus’s hip to the wall. That outlet wasn’t a standard connection for appliances. The voltage was higher, made specifically for recharging an android’s power cells.

  “This is an unusual room....” Tanik said slowly.

  Gatticus pretended not to notice the suspicion in his voice. “Yes, it appears to have been designed for an android,” he said, as he casually unplugged himself and fed his charging cable back into the retractor. He released his safety harness, and turned to face Tanik with his best version of an innocent smile.

  “An android like you?” Tanik pressed.

  “All androids are like me, just as all humans are like you.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Gatticus cocked his head to one side. “Then what did you mean?”

  Tanik’s eyes narrowed fractionally and he held Gatticus’s gaze for a long moment. His right hand twitched beside the sidearm holstered at his hip. “Nothing. Let’s go.”

  Gatticus nodded agreeably and went to join him by the door. Tanik turned to leave, and Gatticus saw his chance: Tanik’s back was turned, and his weapon was within reach.

  Gatticus’s newly re-attached arm snapped out and snatched the sidearm from Tanik’s holster.

  The man spun around inhumanly fast, before Gatticus even had a chance to retreat. He knocked the weapon out of Gatticus’s hand, and it went flying through the air, bouncing off a viewport in the far wall of the room.

  Gatticus turned and ran to recover the weapon, but he felt himself picked up and held in place, his feet floating a foot above the deck. He mentally dialed his mag boots up to maximum power, but that did nothing to bring him back down. He felt himself slowly turning back to face Tanik, and that was when he realized Tanik wasn’t the one holding him—at least, not in any conventional way.

  Tanik’s arm was stretched out, his hand clutching at empty air, his fingers curled like claws.

  And Gatticus was caught in an invisible web, inexplicably frozen and floating above the deck. “How...” he trailed off and shook his head, unable to comprehend what was happening.

  Tanik held out his other hand, and his sidearm went sailing into it with a meaty slap.

  “My mistake was assuming that one shot would be enough to kill you. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”

  “But you didn’t shoot me. Lieutenant Reed did,” Gatticus said.

  “So, you recovered
your memories,” Tanik said with a snarling smile. “But you’re wrong. I did shoot you.

  “Ask yourself, Gatticus, why would Banshees bow to a human? And why would Captain Okara, a loyal officer, try to steal the Deliverance?”

  Gatticus frowned. “What are you saying? That you somehow took control of them?”

  “Not just them. Two Banshees could never kill a crew of thousands of armed Union officers, unless perhaps, the crew was unable to fight back.

  “How?”

  “I summoned the Deliverance to Hades. I made the captain and Lieutenant Reed do my bidding. I put the crew to sleep, and I had the Banshees kill them.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Things are only impossible until they’re not. When I was done I had Lieutenant Reed turn off the reactors to keep the ship hidden until I could arrive; and then I made him step out the nearest airlock. No point exerting myself more than necessary to keep him under my influence.”

  Gatticus blinked in shock. “But you didn’t kill the Banshees. Why?”

  “I didn’t need to. I made them hibernate. Besides, I like pets. It’s just a pity you killed them.”

  Gatticus didn’t know how any of this was possible, but he wasn’t going to waste any more time asking questions. He remotely activated the ship’s intercom, and said, “Code Re—!”

  But a blinding flash of light cut him off in mid-syllable.

  Chapter 39

  Darius woke up in the data center, in the same reclining chair that Dyara had indicated for him to sit in an hour ago. He tried to get up, but the chair’s safety harness held him down.

  “Dya?” he asked, straining his neck to look around the neural-mapping room for her. He found her seated in a chair beside his with a safety harness engaged and the silver band of a neural mapper around her forehead. Her eyes were shut, but roving rapidly behind their lids, indicating that she was busy downloading a data module of her own. Darius felt around for his harness release lever and pulled up on it.

  Pushing the two interlocking halves of the padded harness aside, he stood up on stiff legs and took a moment to stretch out his cramping muscles. Apparently sitting for long periods could be uncomfortable even in zero-G. Just as he was wondering what to do while he waited for Dyara to wake up, her eyes fluttered and cracked open.