“You’re dismissed,” Conrad said. “Clear the deck. Get every crewman out of this bay.”
“Milord, you surely can’t be thinking of flying this ship now,” the officer said. “We haven’t received clearance from the captain.”
“You have your orders,” snapped Conrad. “Out.”
The officer bowed again nervously and gestured to his crew. Then his eyes came to rest on Argus.
Conrad cursed inwardly. Argus was carrying a gun.
The officer reached for his own weapon but moved too slowly.
Conrad reached out and grabbed the man by the throat. The officer clawed at his hands. Conrad shoved the muzzle of his gun into the man’s side.
“All I want to do is get on my ship and go,” he said. “Tell your men to back down, or you’ll force me to use this.” He pressed the gun in a little harder. “And I don’t know how this thing works, so I might just use a setting that you wouldn’t like.”
Conrad walked backward toward the open gangplank of the La Paz. Argus had his own gun in his paws and made for the ship.
Seven more steps, Conrad told himself. Seven more steps and we’ll be on board…
There was the sound of a muffled blast. Conrad heard a gurgling noise.
He looked down. The officer was slumped against him, his chest charred and black.
In the distance stood Captain Heik, holding a small but vicious pistol. There was no emotion on his face. His blue eyes were trained on Conrad.
“Don’t think you can use my men as hostages,” said Heik. “They are sworn to die for the Empire, as I am. It is an honorable end, and I harbor no compunction about doing what needs to be done.”
Conrad could hear the blood rushing in his ears. What kind of captain kills his own men?
Heik moved forward toward him as Conrad took a step back. “You cannot be Satori,” he said, his aim never wavering. “It is impossible.”
Conrad took two more steps back, lifting his own weapon up and aiming it shakily at the captain. He was beginning to feel faint—even adrenaline couldn’t keep him going for much longer.
“I have no idea what that means,” he said. “I’m just a soldier. Nothing more.”
Heik stared at him, his eyes never blinking. “You’re more than that. How did you fake that bloodprint? What are you?” he demanded.
“Tired of this conversation,” said Conrad, and pulled the trigger.
Heik ducked, the blast nearly singeing the top of his head.
Next to Conrad, Argus roared as he fired. The captain was blown backward by the impact, his body skidding across the deck.
Conrad turned and ran up the gangplank of the La Paz. Argus followed close behind, the smell of burnt ozone in the air.
The gangplank lifted behind them to the sound of gun blasts hitting the back of the ship. They rushed into the cockpit, guns clattering to the floor.
Argus rumbled in frustration to find his instrument panels altered.
“All we have to do is get off this ship,” said Conrad, dropping his gun on the floor. “We can figure all that out later—just get control of the weapons system!”
“The ship guns draw on the fuel cell,” said Argus. “They’ve replaced the fuel cell with a power source I’ve never seen.” The La Paz rocked, and Argus grabbed his seat. “How do we get out of here?” he growled. “They’re firing on us!”
The cockpit window was aimed at the hangar bay doors, and they were being fired on from behind. Conrad ran a quick sensor sweep. Mercifully, there was no interior shielding on the doors, and if Argus could figure out the guns…
The La Paz shook again. Conrad gritted his teeth when he saw droplets of blood on the instruments. He reached up to touch his head and his fingers came away damp, with a red smear. The wound had reopened.
He looked down to see what appeared to be a larger, more complex version of the same console that had freed them from the sick bay. There was the same faint circle in its upper right corner. Conrad laid his finger on it and felt the same familiar pinprick.
Voice commands, he remembered the officer saying.
“Turn on engines,” he said, in a loud, clear voice, struggling to ignore the pounding pain in his head. “Prepare for takeoff.”
The ship began to hum. Conrad switched on the controls for the 3D sensor display, holding his breath until it blinked on, as if reluctant to come online.
“Retract landing gear,” Conrad ordered the La Paz.
The Kestrel hovered above the floor of the docking bay. The guards in the bay were forced to briefly retreat, away from the heat of the levitating ship.
“I think I’ve got control of the guns,” Argus shouted, his claws gripping the instrument panel.
Suddenly, everything went blurry. Conrad swayed. How much blood did they take?
“Conrad,” he heard Argus saying through the haze. He grunted and forced himself back into consciousness.
“Aim the guns at the doors and shoot,” ordered Conrad. “And pray that they don’t have tractor beam tech.”
The La Paz’s weapons system whirred softly as Argus aimed the guns. The first blast landed squarely in the center of the doors, the shot’s firepower dissolving into the air a second after impact.
“It’s not working,” Argus shouted. The sensor display blinked on, showing a swarm of armed guards pouring into the bay.
Conrad cursed. Sooner or later the guards would bring down the La Paz, and then they’d be trapped inside this damn ship.
Of course, he realized. This damn ship—the Secace.
He grabbed the console. “Connect to the Secace,” he commanded. “Interface with the ship AI.”
Acknowledged.
“C’mon,” he muttered. “Hurry up.”
Bloodprint command authority verified.
“Secace, open the docking bay doors. And turn on all alarms in the bay,” he ordered. “Give ’em a chance to get out,” he said to Argus. “No sense in killing ’em all when the airlock blows.” He thought of how easily Heik had killed the deck officer and felt a wave of disgust.
The lights inside the bay turned crimson red and began to flash. Conrad watched as the guards retreated.
“Secace,” he said, as the bay doors began to open. “Disable all your short and long range weapons systems indefinitely.”
Acknowledged.
“La Paz,” he said, sitting in the pilot’s seat, leaning forward and looking into the freedom of space ahead. “Switch to manual control.”
He seized the yoke and throttled the ship forward.
The La Paz shot out of the bay. Conrad watched as the Secace faded behind him on the display.
A chill came over him. The ship was black, almost disappearing into the background of space. Only its internal lights signaled its presence.
Black ships. Beware the black ships.
He turned to Argus. “It’s not over,” he said grimly. “The ship AI can’t hold them forever—they’ll be coming for us. Soon.”
Chapter 13
Conrad slumped into his seat, feeling the exhaustion seeping into his bones at the thought of confronting the Secace again.
He felt a gentle, concerned paw on his shoulder. “Con—you’re bleeding,” said Argus.
Conrad brushed his forehead, looked at his hand, and grimaced. “At least I’m not leaking brains,” he muttered. “I hope. Can’t afford to lose any.”
Argus handed him a self-sealing bandage. Conrad smoothed it over the wound, his hand shaking.
“We need to return to the portal,” Argus said. “You need medical attention, and the Corps needs to know what’s out here.”
“What are we going to tell them?” Conrad demanded. “We have more questions than answers. We have no idea where this system even is.”
“We know they are a threat. That they torture their prisoners. That they have enough power to destroy a Vehn ship. Conrad—we must go back through. We must close the portal. Or they will find it.”
Conrad leane
d his head against the back of his seat and closed his eyes for a moment. “I suppose there’s no time to rest,” he said.
“I will fly,” Argus said firmly. “You are injured.”
“No,” Conrad said, pulling himself up. “You’re right, Argus. We have to get back to the portal, and we have to get back as fast as we can.”
Argus purred his concern in response.
“I’ll be fine,” Conrad said, brushing off Argus’s paw, his hands finding the yoke. Its familiar shape was comforting. He stared into the darkness ahead.
“We’ll have to see if we can triangulate the portal’s location based on the ship’s travel logs,” said Argus. “Retrace our path. If we can find a plasma trail… ”
“The beacon,” Conrad said, the realization shaking him out of his daze. “We can search for the beacon we dropped for Hogarth. No one else here will be trying to ping messages to a beacon like that—just us. If we can get it to respond, then we can find our way back.”
Argus nodded in agreement. He moved his paws over the comms panel, creating a packet of junk data and a simple script to ping its astral coordinates back to the La Paz. In the event that the Secace or some other ship intercepted it, they would find only gibberish.
They waited, the mood in the cockpit tense.
“Hey,” Conrad said, sagging back into his seat. “In case we don’t make it back… tell me something. What do you think my chances are with Rose?”
“If we don’t make it back, your chances are exactly zero,” Argus replied.
Conrad took a swig from an emergency water ration he’d pried out of the cockpit’s survival kit. “You know what I mean,” he said, wiping his mouth. “If… if I’d stayed. Like I thought about doing. So we could have a life together on Sanctuary like she wanted.”
“Rose always knew what kind of man you were,” Argus said, thoughtfully. “She knew you could never stay earthbound for long.”
Conrad finished the water ration. “I told her not to break up with that jerk—what was his name? Holt. Her boyfriend, right when the Academy put us together for the whole, y’know, marriage thing.”
“I liked Holt.”
“You just liked him ’cause he always fed you, ya big oaf.”
“You or Rose could have rejected the assignment,” Argus observed. “But neither of you did.”
Conrad said nothing, just studied the comms panel.
“Permit me to ask,” Argus said. “When we get back—if we get back—will you tell Rose that you love her?”
At that moment the comms panel chirped.
The beacon was active.
Messages from the beacon appeared on the screen, line after line of astrometric data. First was their own initial data dump, dropped with the beacon as soon as they exited the portal. Then came the data from Argus’s script.
“Can you read it?” Conrad asked. “It doesn’t look familiar to me at all.”
“Cross-referencing with the starmaps Garrity had loaded into the La Paz’s memory banks.”
“She gave us everything?”
“Every starmap the Corps had to offer.”
“And if that doesn’t match up to this data?”
“Then you’ll never have to worry about Rose again,” said Argus ominously.
Conrad watched as the ship’s computer processed the data. Vision’s getting hazy again, he thought. I just need to stay conscious until we can get to the portal.
“C’mon,” he heard himself mutter. “Not much longer now…”
Argus roared. “It’s working!”
Relief washed over Conrad like a cool wave. “Inputting coordinates now,” he said. The ship shifted its direction, adjusting to the newly programmed coordinates. “If we find the plasma trail then we’ll know for sure we’re headed the right way,” he said. “My god—we just might get out of this alive.”
Argus studied the data. “Conrad,” he said, slowly. “Are you seeing what I see?”
“What are you talking about?”
Argus grabbed his arm. “The starmap data was old and incomplete,” the Kazhad said. “It might be wrong. But if it isn’t…” He ran the analysis again, as if in disbelief.
“Argus?”
“Conrad—it says we’re on the opposite side of the galaxy.”
Conrad looked up, wondering if he was hallucinating. I couldn’t have heard that right.
“Galaxy?” Conrad exploded. “No. No portal in the history of modern spacefaring has ever gone that far.”
“I’ve checked the program myself,” said Argus. “The results are correct. It superimposed a map of the known galaxy over the automatic surveys performed by the La Paz. Corps maps for this quadrant are bare-bones—they only identify the most obvious star systems—but the overlap is unmistakable. We’re not in our quadrant anymore.”
Fatigue warred with disbelief in Conrad’s consciousness. “I’ll make a record,” he finally summoned the energy to say. “And whatever we’ve surveyed—encrypt everything. We’ll transmit it to the beacon on our side as soon as we get through the portal.”
He folded his arms, his eyes fixated on the shining dots of the stars in the distance. Never in his wildest imagination had he contemplated where the portals would take him, or what would be waiting for them on the other side of the galaxy.
Even when humans had only traveled as far as their moon, they’d suspected the universe held more intelligent beings than just themselves. Conrad had just expected them to be—well, more alien.
“They’re human,” he said, distracted. “Whoever it was that captured us. Not just humanoid—they were human.”
Argus hooted softly. “How?”
Conrad shook his head, dizzy with confusion. “I don’t understand how,” he said. “It’s impossible. Unless human evolution on Earth was a lie, and all humans everywhere miraculously speak some form of Standard. How could that be?”
“And yet there was no sign of anything familiar or recognizable beyond that,” said Argus. “That ship and their tech was beyond anything I’ve ever seen. The components of their tech on this ship will be useful to dissect, but we may not understand how half of it works. Such as, for instance, why you of all people can control their own ship’s computers.”
Conrad wanted to say something insolent but couldn’t find the words. I’m really losing it, he thought. “It has something to do with blood,” he said, touching the sore spot on his fingertip.
Argus growled softly. There was nothing he hated more than not knowing.
Conrad swallowed. His mouth was still dry. He turned his head to stare at Argus. “The captain said he served an empire,” he said. “Not just some local pirate king or small-time smuggling operation. That ship of theirs—” He rubbed a hand over his chin. “I don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with here, but we have to get back to Sanctuary and tell them to close off the portal. Forever.”
“There it is,” said Argus, shaking Conrad out of his thoughts. “The portal. It worked. The coordinates are correct.”
Conrad saw the beacon on the sensor display, a ray of hope waiting hundreds of kilometers away.
“I’m destroying it,” he said, his hand curling around the yoke.
Argus gave him a questioning look.
“I won’t leave it here for them to find,” explained Conrad. “Sure, all it’s got right now is junk data, but I’m not giving them a damn thing. Not even junk.”
Argus warmed up a single gun. Conrad trained the gun on the beacon. “Sorry, Hogarth,” he muttered to himself. “We’ll see if we can’t bring you back some other souvenir instead.”
The beacon shattered into a cloud of dust as they flew past it. Ahead, the portal loomed, a dark circular maw that reminded Conrad of the skeletal mouths of Sanctuary’s extinct cetaceans.
Under Conrad’s hand the La Paz picked up speed. He closed his eyes as he felt the ship beginning to accelerate. It was reassuring, that in a few short moments they would be back in known space. Even if it was
crawling with thousands of Vehn.
The only thing worse than a predator is the creature that preys upon the predator. The black ship had destroyed the Vehn that had pursued them through the portal and into unknown space. Heik had recognized the Vehn.
Eyes closed, he could feel the ache in his skull. It was almost overwhelming, the way it took over his mind until he could feel nothing but the pounding of his heartbeat and the searing pain of his wound.
Conrad heard Argus speaking as if from a vast distance. “Almost there,” he realized the Kazhad was saying. “Conrad, are you awake?”
He forced his eyelids open. It seemed they’d been open for a million years. It seemed so unnatural to use his eyes…
The universe slowed down. Time stretched and stretched until it seemed to stop, even though he knew the prow of the La Paz had barely entered the portal.
The La Paz was in a place of darkness. Of shades of black and white rippling, like a flag caught in a breeze, like strange, alien rivers.
The fabric of the universe, he remembered Garrity saying.
Yes. I can see it now, he thought. The lattice, the maze.
And…
Passageways.
Endless paths to everywhere and nowhere.
It was dizzying inside the portal. Nothing was fixed; everything seemed to be in flux. The lattice seemed to pulse with an energy that felt like a heartbeat.
So many pathways. They could go anywhere.
He focused on one piece of the lattice. The more he looked at it, the more it seemed to become more real, more solid.
It grew. Conrad reached with his mind.
The single pathway contracted at his touch, then expanded. It swallowed up the La Paz. It burst. It exploded until he could see nothing else.
Conrad plunged in as if he were diving into a deep and bottomless river.
Chapter 14
“He’s not dead.”
Conrad winced at the sound of the thin, reedy voice. God, I feel like I might be more comfortable if I were dead.
“I’d know,” the voice said cheerfully. “I had some basic medic training, you see. Back when I was with the fleet. I know a dead man when I see him, and this one’s alive. Oh yes. Most definitely alive.”
Sanctuary's Soldier: The Darkspace Saga Book 1 Page 8