Sanctuary's Soldier: The Darkspace Saga Book 1

by B. C. Kellogg

  “Maybe they should have sent you to the Academy after all,” he said. “And made you into a sniper.” He wished for a moment that he could tell her what Garrity had told him. That something was coming—something Sanctuary had to prepare to face. He leaned against the viewport.

  He thought he’d known what he was risking when he'd stolen the rickety training fighter he and Argus had shared: a life of honorable service in the Protectorate Corps. Everything he had worked for since the Corps had rescued him as a child. But now they were on a new mission—something even more important than being an officer in the Corps.

  Conrad watched as the red planet grew larger. Its surface was covered with wispy white clouds, a result of the terraforming that had been in process for the past three centuries. Somewhere underneath the clouds were billions of humans and aliens. Mars had the most exquisite cities; there had never been any question of humans living without technology on a world such as Mars, so the ExMach movement had never gotten very far beyond Earth. Martian cities climbed up so far up that the lowest levels of the cities saw no natural light. They were all dependent on the trade that passed through the Phobos portal between Sanctuary and all the inhabited solar systems in the quadrant.

  He wondered what the cities of the far quadrant worlds were like. The Corps had found him on a trading freighter. If his father hadn’t abandoned him, maybe he would have seen them.

  But something told him that he was never meant to live on any planet. I would have spent my life on that trading ship, he mused. Planet to planet to planet. Never stopping, never putting down roots.

  Conrad thought about the brief moment in the portal when it had felt as if the universe seemed to stretch wide open, like everything—and anything—was possible.

  “You and Argus would have gotten me expelled,” he heard her say. “It’s a miracle you both have most of your original body parts.”

  “Rose,” he said suddenly, “about what I said before. Remember why we used to leave the creche—why we’d head to the old stone house?”

  She hesitated. “It was because we were dumb kids,” she said. “Garrity let us go because she knew we wouldn’t get up to anything.”

  “We left because we wanted… more. More than they could ever offer us. Do you even remember what that feels like—to be free?”

  “No,” she admitted. “It’s only ever been the Corps for us, Con. Of course we could have left. Lots of other kids in the creche did. You made a choice to stay in—and so did I.”

  “It was the only way I could get to space.”

  “You could have joined the merchant marines,” she said. “Or taken up with a commercial enterprise. But you didn’t, Con, and I know why. It’s because you really do believe in the mission of the Corps, underneath all your doubts and idiotic swagger. You believe in the mission of Sanctuary—to be a force for good in this galaxy.”

  “You’re an idealist at heart, Rosie.”

  “So are you.”

  “Live your life while I’m gone, will you?”

  “Don’t be daft,” she said. “Let’s not talk about this.”

  “You know I’ll do my duty in the end,” he replied. “Besides, they only put us together because they thought you might be able to keep me out of trouble. Now that it’s clear that’s not true… ” He shrugged.

  “You come back,” she said to him. “Both of you. You promise me you’ll do all you can to return to Earth.”

  “I’ll do everything in my power to save Sanctuary,” he said.

  Even if that means I never come back.

  Argus growled as they settled into the cockpit of the PSS La Paz. It was an unremarkable ship, with all external Corps identifications stripped and replaced with commercial markers. Inside, it was equipped with two extra-long range fuel cells, and fitted with more hidden weapons ports than any trading ship in Sanctuary was legally permitted to have. It furnished with exactly two bare-bones bunks.

  “It’s not so bad,” said Conrad. “At least the life control system works. I think. That’s a nice change of pace, eh?”

  The Kazhad ran his paws over the instrument panel, rumbling under his breath.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Conrad asked. He studied the Kazhad’s facial expression, almost unreadable beneath all his fur. But they’d been together since Conrad was seven years old. He recognized the look of determination in Argus’s eye. “This is your last chance to turn back. Go back to Sanctuary. Graduate from the Corps with honors in a few years, and do everything you’d planned to do.”

  “I volunteered to go with you,” said Argus. “Commodore Garrity suggested that it was a good idea. She has a logical mind, even if you don’t.”

  “Teacher’s pet,” he muttered, just loud enough for Argus to hear.

  “Do you remember what happened the last time someone called me a teacher’s pet?” Argus said, scratching his claws on the panel.

  “You can’t hang me out the window upside down like you did to Johnson,” he said confidently. “These puppies don’t open,” he said, patting the viewport.

  He engaged the thrusters. There was something about speed, he thought to himself. Something about speed and the way a pilot entered the portal.

  “There it is,” he said, a little breathless to see it again.

  The portal glimmered in the distance, as mysterious as ever. Every hour of each day a long line of ships queued up to enter the portal, but the La Paz had special authority to transit during a maintenance period.

  “La Paz, you have permission to depart,” came the tinny voice of the Corps control station, five hundred kilometers away from the portal mouth.

  “Acknowledged,” he responded.

  Conrad took a deep breath as he fired up the thrusters. What would he see in the portal this time?

  If I could only hang onto that moment, he thought to himself. Stretch it out.

  “Fly on,” Argus said, shaking him out of his reverie. “Let’s go, Conrad.”

  The universe seemed to pause again the moment the La Paz entered the portal. Conrad reached—and then lurched back to reality. It was the same feeling he’d experienced before, but he fell out of it just as quickly. He exhaled, exhilarated and disappointed at the same time.

  Two jumps later they landed in the Proxima Centauri system. Two standard Earth days had passed in between portal transits, and they’d remained in the cockpit for most of that time, between trips to the sanitizer and their bunks. Conrad rubbed at the stubble growing on his jaw. “My god, that’s a sight to see,” he muttered, his voice hoarse from lack of sleep.

  Proxima Centauri’s single habitable planet, Centaura, floated before them as a small green dot. A cloud of trading ships gathered around it like a swarm of insects.

  They moved into the standard approach vector to Centaura, falling in line behind hundreds of other ships. The ships here were older models—the newest, sleekest designs always showed up first near Mars or Sanctuary.

  Argus made an excited noise, pointing with his paw at a ship a few hundred kilometers away.

  “Yeah, I see it,” said Conrad, leaning forward and gazing out of the viewport at an old gray dropship. “That thing’s right out of a history vid.”

  The name Nebraska had once been etched into its side, but it was now ancient and faded. Commercial enterprises had bought generations of the Corps’ retired ships, some dating back a century. Some had been dismantled for parts, but some were simply repurposed as massive freighters.

  There were alien ships here too. There were ships with the telltale patched-up exteriors of the Porcs, but there were also ships of makes and designs Conrad had never seen before. Most of them were traders, but there were bound to be aliens of every type and purpose. Travelers. Nomads. Pilgrims. Perhaps even mercenaries.

  Argus howled softly in amazement. It was the first time either of them had seen an inhabited world outside Sol’s system. “Do you think there are Kazhad here?” he asked, his voice betraying his longing.

>   “If they’re in this system, they’ll be on Centaura,” he replied. “And that’s exactly where we’re headed.”

  “And from there?”

  Conrad sat up straight with anticipation before he put his hands back on the controls. “Unknown.”

  Chapter 6

  St. Drake looked like a glittering spider web from above. It was the central port of Centaura—and therefore the entire system’s de facto capital. There were smaller ports in orbit around the planet, but St. Drake was the last chance for crews to go planetside before leaving for a long haul into deep space.

  The inhabitants of St. Drake were as diverse as the people and species that came through it. There were shipping barons who lived in aerial palaces dozens of kilometers above the port itself, and there were alien beggars who lived in the gutters near the docks. There were large luxury liners that glided through, and then there were ships with skeleton crews and automated pilots that crowded in at the common public docks. Some ships never flew farther than Centaura’s stratosphere, and some ships went far beyond any standard mapped route.

  That was exactly what Conrad knew they had to find: a ship on its way to an outer quadrant portal that would be willing to take on the PSS La Paz as cargo. It would be a dangerous, highly illegal run.

  Conrad moved quickly through the port, Argus following close behind. They were dressed in civvies, nondescript clothing they’d bought from back alley hawkers an hour after landing. The style was different from what was popular back in Sanctuary; here clothes were loose and billowy instead of tight-fitting, streamlined garb. The colors were dark, as if the traders and travelers passing through didn’t want to be noticed.

  That suited Conrad just fine.

  He pulled the hood of his coat over his head. “C’mon,” he said over his shoulder to Argus, who was gawking at a group of non-humans disembarking from a starship. “People have a tendency to stare back at whoever’s looking at them,” he said. “Let’s not try to blow our cover this early in the game, shall we?”

  “This is no game,” said Argus. “I’m merely—”

  “Looking for Kazhad?” Conrad finished for him. “Let’s go find a broker. They’ll get us a ship—and we can ask about your Kazhad if it’s only a few cred more.” Argus grunted in agreement and followed closer.

  Brokers were the unofficial heart of spaceports everywhere. There were official brokers backed by the local government and intersystem corporations, but their price was high and their knowledge was limited to mainstream trade routes and ships.

  Those seeking something unique had to find a black market broker. The best brokers worked in the shadows, dealing in illicit cargo, secret routes and ships crewed by beings with no history—or violent histories.

  Conrad scanned the hall before them, crowded with stalls selling food and drink and cheap knickknacks. Like most ports, St. Drake’s hawkers seemed to favor charred brown meat speared on sticks and mounds of cheap carbohydrates. His eyes came to rest on a steaming noodle stand ten meters away. There wasn’t a single customer eating at the stand—and more importantly, the alien standing behind the stall was an Aretian. He was taller than Argus and looked to be three times heavier than Conrad—and he was practically all muscle.

  In other words, he was selling something other than food.

  Conrad slid into one of the two rickety seats in front of the stand. “My good man,” he said, slapping down a fistful of creds. It was ten times more than a single bowl of noodles cost. “One for me and one for my friend here. We’re looking to do some business,” he said.

  The Aretian opened his mouth. Inside were nothing but sharp, vicious-looking canines. He pushed two bowls of translucent noodles in gray broth toward Conrad and Argus. “Business?” he hissed softly. “What kind of business, boy?”

  Conrad stirred his bowl. “The kind I’m sure your boss will be very interested in, considering what we’re willing to pay.” Aretians rarely worked alone, and they were rarely the brains of any operation.

  The Aretian looked left and right, then jerked his chin toward an alley a few stalls away. “Down there. Walk ten meters and wait at the doorstep where the orange flag hangs.”

  Conrad tossed another cred on the table. “Pleasure,” he said as he stood up. The Aretian ignored him, sweeping the untouched bowls of noodles into a cycling bin.

  “What a waste,” Conrad heard Argus complain behind him as he strode toward the alley.

  “There wasn’t any real meat in that soup, I can assure you,” he said.

  Argus made a noise of disappointment. “Don’t worry,” Conrad assured him, entering the dark, shadowy alley. The dirty orange flag was barely visible at twenty meters away. “Before we take off we’ll get you a nice order of barbecue. No guarantees that it’ll be anything but lab-grown or soy-based, but—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, he was cut off by a pair of handswrapping around his throat. He was yanked him sideways and back into the darkness. He dimly heard Argus’s roar of fury and surprise as he fell, landing on a hard, cold floor.

  He looked around as he scrambled to his feet. “Argus!” he shouted.

  The Kazhad was there next to him, also getting up from the ground, his fur bristling with anger.

  They were in a strange, dark den. He could still see the alley, but only through what seemed to be a thick, blurry window that went from ceiling to floor. He spun around.

  A heavyset man with a cigar sat in the back of the room in an overstuffed armchair behind a blood-red desk, his feet propped up on a pile of papers and books. The armchair was made out of some kind of leather—the skin of some unfortunate animal. Conrad took a closer look. It didn’t look like anything from Earth.

  So this was the broker they were looking for.

  “You’ll have to excuse my associates here,” he said, indicating the lean, faceless white robots surrounding him. “They’re so fast that no one sees ’em coming. They should’ve been more gentle with you. You did give Bixt there at the stall a good tip, after all.”

  Conrad felt a chill come over him as he stared at the broker’s bodyguards. Those were neutered ExMach robots, banned in Sanctuary and every other civilized planet. Technically they were banned everywhere, but there were always rumors that black market traders smuggled the salvaged, memory-wiped robots to far flung solar systems where the influence of the Protectorate Corps was weak.

  This was a dangerous man indeed.

  The man studied Argus and puffed on his cigar. “Don’t see many Kazhad out here,” he said. “And you sure don’t see many Kazhad out of the company of their own clans. Hanging out with a corpsman, no less.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Ah, sonny, don’t lie to me,” said the broker. “You should know better than that.”

  Conrad straightened his spine and brushed his hood back. “Your pardon,” he said, knowing that the last thing he wanted to do was to insult the man’s intelligence.

  The broker waved it off. “You’re a raw one, I can tell,” he said. “Straight out of the Academy, am I right? Strange they’d let one of you come all the way out here, out of uniform and all that. To talk to a man like me. No mistake, I respect our men and women in the service,” he said. “I done a few favors for an officer or two in St. Drake. It more generally had to do with the kind of food they wanted to eat—chocolate, caviar, moldy cheese. You know, things that’d never get past quarantine.”

  “That’s not what I’m here for,” said Conrad. It was best to be direct with brokers. If theygot a person talking, there was no telling what kinds of things they could pry out of the conversation.

  “I figured you were here for something more… interesting.” He lowered his cigar. “Your ship came out of the portal a day ago. Stripped down Kestrel, if I’m not mistaken—too clean on the outside to be anything but a Corps vessel. You docked at St. Drake two hours ago and you head straight for a broker. You’re not here for a vacation or a piece of chocolate, that’s for sure. What can I
do for you?”

  “We’re looking for transport out of this system,” said Conrad. He didn’t bother asking how the broker knew the details of their landing and docking.

  The broker folded his hands and leaned back in his chair. “Plenty of transports coming in and out of Centaura every night and day,” he said, twiddling his thumbs. “From here you can go to Guina, Octavis, Ippoino, all the end-point systems,” he said. “But everyone knows that.”

  “We’re looking to go further than the end-point systems,” said Conrad, bluntly.

  The man sat up. “Further!” he exclaimed. “You can’t go any further. That’s what the rules say.” But there was a glint in his eye.

  “I wouldn’t be here if I cared about the rules,” said Conrad.

  The broker chortled and put down his cigar. “Not something I’d expect a corpsman to say,” he said. “So what happened to you, boy—did they kick you out? You on the run? If you’ve got training in combat or cryptography I could arrange a contract for you right here on Centaura. Or maybe they sent you here,” he said, his eyes studying Conrad and missing nothing. “Yes, yes… that seems more likely. Why did they send you all this way?”

  “Is it possible? To get past the end-point systems? Are there ships that go that far?”

  “Anything’s possible,” said the broker. “And there are plenty of sublight species that go beyond the end-point systems. You’d be the only human aboard, but with the right kind of pay—”

  “I’m not interested in a long haul sublight trip,” said Conrad. “We want to travel by portal.”

  The broker paused, then raised an eyebrow. “It was the Corps that shut ’em down, you know,” he said. “Funny that they’d be sending you that way now. There must be a reason,” he said, searching Conrad’s face. “What’s the reason, sonny?”

  “I don’t know,” said Conrad. It was an honest answer, he figured. It wasn’t a complete answer, but it was honest.

  The broker laughed out loud. “They’re getting rid of their rejects by sending them straight into the nearest black hole, eh? Without so much as an explanation? No, no, no. Tell me what you know. That’s the deal. You’ll get no further with me unless you tell me why they sent you.”