Sanctuary's Soldier: The Darkspace Saga Book 1

by B. C. Kellogg

  “How did you know I was Satori?” Conrad asked.

  “Look at yourself,” Baltasar said. “The casual observer may not notice, but for those who were really paying attention, it’s obvious. That black hair of yours. The face. You may as well have walked out of the palace on Albion Prime yesterday. No one would examine the likes of you and think you’re anything but Satori—at least in part. A prince among princes.”

  “You used my blood to enter the storehouse,” Conrad observed. And it was my blood that let us escape the Secace.

  Baltasar nodded. “Every captain in the Fleet has a drop or two of Satori blood,” he said. “Every admiral, too. The High Admirals are all either pure Satori themselves or married to part-Satori descendants. And the Imperial family is, of course, purest Satori, Lords bless them,” he said, making faint gesture on his chest. It seemed to be an action performed out of habit.

  “The blood’s the key to it all,” he continued. “You can open any storehouse anywhere. If you were Satori enough you could take command of any ship’s AI with your bloodprint. Blood command,” he said. “That’s what it’s called. All Fleet ships are programmed to respond to Satori genetic markers.”

  The lift halted suddenly. There was a slim white panel next to a leaden metal door. Baltasar nodded to Conrad.

  He placed his hand on the panel and felt the same recognizable pinprick. He waited three seconds before moving his hand away.

  The door opened smoothly, revealing an all-white room inside. Baltasar was the first to jump off the lift and dart into the room. Conrad and Argus followed cautiously.

  Conrad’s eyes widened as he took in what was inside. There was a ship sitting in the middle of the room—a stunning, gleaming silver vessel. It was beautiful.

  Apparently, Baltasar thought the same thing.

  “Lords, what a stunner,” he muttered to himself, jogging lightly around the room, taking in the ship in all its glory. “Have you ever seen such a gorgeous ship?”

  Argus made a gurgling sound. Even he was impressed.

  Baltasar had finished his lap and was coming back to them, his eyes wild. “A real beauty,” he said again.

  “They left a ship down in the storehouse?” asked Conrad. It was only slightly larger than the La Paz. He wondered how big the storehouse was, if it was massive enough to house a ship in just one of its rooms.

  Baltasar ignored the question as if the answer was obvious. “Come on, your majesty,” he said to Conrad. “Your bloodprint, please.”

  Conrad followed Baltasar to the back of the ship. He laid his hand on an external panel. The ship seemed to tremble for a moment before the gangplank lowered, and the external lights on the tips of its wings flared on.

  “This ship flies as perfectly in atmo as it does in space,” said Baltasar, seeing Conrad look at its wings. “Does the best tricks. Only time I’ve seen one of these is when some admiral decides he’s going to fly in some parade or go meet with a Satori nobleman. Never been this close to one before,” he said, eyes glittering. “Much less flown in one.”

  “Are there other ships here?” rumbled Argus. It was a good question. Perhaps there was something in the storehouse that wouldn’t attract quite so much attention, once they got off-planet.

  “’Course there are,” said Baltasar. “I was planning to leave ’em for the others up on the surface. This one’s got the best long range capacity. And I take it you two aren’t planning to stay on Pac Ishi.”

  Argus and Conrad looked at each other. “No,” said Conrad, speaking for them both. “We aren’t.”

  Baltasar was already halfway up the gangplank. “Then let’s go,” he called behind him. “The storehouse sent out a signal to the Fleet the minute we got inside. If we want to leave before some local guardship decides to come and investigate, then we’ve got to get out of here now.”

  Chapter 16

  “The Oro Yurei,” said Baltasar worshipfully, running his hand along the ship’s interior. “That’s her name.”

  He turned to Conrad. “The ship’s coded to your blood now,” he said. “You can talk to her. Tell her to fly or hand over piloting to me or your hairy friend.”

  Conrad walked toward the cockpit. There was something about the ship that almost reminded him of the Nu ship. It was designed with curved hulls and bulkheads, but this ship also had sharp exterior points in its construction, like the tips of knives.

  “Oro Yurei,” he said. “I am temporarily relinquishing command.”

  “I’m your pilot, milady,” said Baltasar, his voice warm. “The name’s Balt.”

  Argus looked at the medic-mechanic. “Does the ship understand names?”

  “Ah, not technically. But I think they do,” said Baltasar, sliding into the pilot’s chair in the cockpit and patting the controls affectionately. “If a ship’s around long enough it starts to get a sense of the universe, you know. If its memory banks aren’t wiped, it starts forming a personality. There’s a reason bad captains get their ships’ banks wiped on the regular. Ship starts to form a bad opinion of ’em.”

  Conrad peered through the cockpit windows. They were wider and taller than the La Paz. Outside the ship he could see blank white walls. He heard a deep mechanical groan.

  The ceiling above began to move, even as the floor beneath them began to lift. Argus grinned and ran his hands over the controls. “On our way out,” he said, “let’s send that parting gift to Oya and her friends.” He tapped a few lines of text into the computer. “If they come and take the other ships here—which I’m sure they will—then whatever Imperial guardship comes this way will have more than one target to hunt down.”

  The lift beneath them began to accelerate toward the surface of the planet. Baltasar started the engines. “Best pay attention, friend,” he said to Conrad, “if you’re planning to fly this thing sometime.”

  Argus slipped into the seat next to Baltasar. Conrad stood behind them, looking up. There was a bright point of light above them. As they approached it the light grew wider and brighter.

  The Oro Yurei soared out of the storehouse and into the snowstorm above.

  Baltasar looked over his shoulder at Conrad. “Where to now, prince?”

  A small hologram of the Oro Yurei floated in front of Baltasar, above the ship’s main instrument panel. Instead of a yoke or some other piece of hardware, the Imperial approach to piloting was comparatively complex: A pilot could manipulate the hologram with his hands to fly the ship.

  Conrad had watched Baltasar fly and quickly learned the hand gestures and tics that guided the ship’s course. The flicker of a single finger could spin the ship around a hundred and eighty degrees. It was a strangely elegant language, he thought. If you could judge a people by its ships, then the Satori were advanced indeed.

  At the moment, there was no piloting to be done. The ship traveled on a pre-programmed path.

  “If you ask me,” Baltasar said, “where we ought to head is Seo. There’s an Imperial presence there, sure, but it’s far enough out that the local authorities aren’t likely to ask many questions, if you know what I mean.”

  Argus was sleeping in the back of the ship. Still under the influence of shiroppu, Conrad was wide awake. They were coasting away from Pac Ishi at sublight speed, toward a portal Baltasar had traveled through before.

  “Do you have to avoid the authorities, Baltasar? Why were you on Pac Ishi?”

  The man smiled. “Why does anyone end up on a planet like that? I crossed the wrong people in the Fleet.”

  “You’ll have to tell me more than that.”

  He grinned again. “It was an accident. I was running a harmless little experiment. Let’s say I might have blown out the engine on a destroyer while one Attilio Karsath was on board.” He sat back smugly, as if waiting for a response.

  “Should I know who Attilio Karsath is?”

  “You really don’t know anything, do you?” Baltasar said, shaking his head with disappointment. “What happened to you and your f
riend Argus there? How did you end up on Pac Ishi?”

  Conrad studied the man, wondering how much information he could safely share. Not much, he decided.

  “We’re on an exploratory mission from our home planet,” he said, carefully. “An Imperial ship caught us. We escaped, and we crashed on Pac Ishi.”

  “You escaped?” Baltasar’s eyes looked as if they were going to pop out of his skull. “How? What was the name of the ship?”

  “The Secace, if I’m remembering correctly.”

  Baltasar was almost out of his seat. “Secace—captain’s name is Heik?”

  Conrad nodded. Baltasar scratched his head. “That can’t be right,” he mumbled. “Heik’s at least four systems away from Pac Ishi. He might be floating between five or six systems, but somewhere closer to Albion Prime than the cesspools out here on the edge of conquered space. There’s no direct portal from there to here. You must be mistaken. Besides—Heik’s a legend in his own right. I find it hard to believe a man and his alien copilot managed to get off his ship on their own. Are you sure you’re not just making this up?” Baltasar looked at Conrad suspiciously.

  Conrad raised his finger. “My bloodprint’s how I got off that ship,” he said.

  “Are you sure you don’t know that you’re Satori?”

  “No one’s ever told me. I never even heard the word Satori, till I met you.”

  “Ahh,” said Baltasar. “I see, I see.” His face grew serious. “Your planet’s in trouble,” he said. “If they caught you, they’ll figure out that there’s an unconquered system. Friend—you should go home and warn them. Tell them to surrender right away and turn over your royal family or oligarchs or whoever’s in charge. Save a few billion lives that way, if you care about that kind of thing.”

  “That’s exactly why Argus and I are headed home. We’re not interested in going to Seo, or anywhere else in this quadrant. We can drop you wherever you like, and then we’re on our way.”

  Baltasar leaned back in his chair. “Ah, but let’s not be too hasty,” he said. “There’s lots you can do while you’re out here,” he said. A mercenary gleam appeared in his eyes. “Lots you can do with that bloodprint of yours.”

  Conrad began to say no, and then paused. They were adrift in the middle of space no one from Earth had ever explored or even seen. There was no chance the starmaps from the La Paz’s scorched memory core would tell them how to get back to the portal they’d first entered through.

  There was another mystery to unravel—the question of how there were humans so far away. Something occurred to him. “We need starmaps,” he said to Baltasar. “Does this ship have them?”

  “Navcharts, you mean?” Baltasar’s fingers moved over the control panel. “Sure she does. All the standard systems are here.”

  A map with stars in bright yellow displayed on the cockpit window in front of them.

  “Can you pull out?” asked Conrad.

  Baltasar complied. “Further out,” said Conrad. “Even further.”

  The map now showed the corner of the Milky Way galaxy. It was strange to see it this way, Conrad thought, when he’d seen the Milky Way from the perspective of Sanctuary his whole life. But Argus had been right. They really were on the far side of the galaxy.

  “Does this map show portals?”

  Baltasar adjusted the map. A sprinkling of green dots appeared. Conrad frowned. There were none that were indicated to jump anywhere close to Sanctuary’s quadrant.

  “Surely there must be more portals,” he said.

  “Of course there are,” said Baltasar. “Dead portals are everywhere. And newly discovered ones too. The dead ones and the new ones aren’t going to be in these charts. The Satori keep those away from the unwashed masses—and even from most of the Fleet.”

  “Where can we find them?”

  Baltasar snorted. “The only place you’ll find information like that is in the pits of the Imperial Archives on Albion Prime,” he said. “Right below the palace. No one’s allowed there, except the Imperial family itself.”

  Conrad raised his finger again. “I liked that nickname you gave me,” he said. “What was it again—prince?”

  “Dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of,” grumbled Baltasar, his hand still on the controls.

  “You’re not the first one to say that about an idea of mine,” Conrad said with a lopsided grin.

  Argus chuckled next to Baltasar, his paws moving fluidly over the controls. It hadn’t taken him long to adapt to the Oro Yurei. In the two days since they’d flown away from Pac Ishi, Argus had learned the finer points of operating the sleek ship, marveling over the sophistication of its components. Its speed was twice that of the fastest Corps ship.

  They were flying to Albion Prime, in the exact opposite direction from what Baltasar had proposed.

  “Even if you get past all the security,” he said, “what if you run into a member of the royal house? They know each other by sight. They’re not going to be fooled by some good-looking idiot who looks like them.”

  “Good-looking? Why, Balt, I’m flattered.”

  “It’s Baltasar,” the medic-mechanic said saltily. “I’m just pointing out the flaw in your plans.”

  “I’ll just be a long-lost cousin,” said Conrad. “The Empire’s a big place, isn’t it? There’s got to be more than one blindingly handsome man in the entire quadrant.”

  “One more jump and we’ll be there,” Baltasar said mournfully. “I never thought I’d be back. I should be floating in a hot spring on Seo San right now, but instead I’m flying to the capital planet where everyone wants to kill me.”

  Conrad clapped his hand down on the man’s shoulder. “Ah, it’ll be fun,” he said. “See the sights. It’ll be like a vacation.”

  “A vacation that’s going to get the lot of us executed or exiled to Damron,” he replied. “You know I’m doing this for one reason and one reason only.”

  “I’ll get you the complete replica of my bloodprint once we’ve got the starmaps,” Conrad promised. “What’s Damron?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Baltasar assured him.

  Conrad was about to ask again when he saw the distant gleam of ships through the cockpit window.

  “And there’s the queue for the portal,” said Baltasar. “Are you sure you want to do this? We can still turn back. Hot springs and blonde-haired beauties are waiting for us on Seo… ”

  “It’s decided. Besides, Argus is enough blonde-haired beauty for me.”

  “Dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of,” Baltasar grumbled again, as the Oro Yurei aimed at the portal.

  They hit the portal and Conrad exhaled sharply.

  He’d been practicing every time they went through a portal. At first it had seemed as if the universe had turned inside out when he entered, and that he had no control; it was all he could do to stop himself from choosing a path at random and spinning the Oro Yurei toward some unknown destination. If he held himself back, the portal would spit them out where they’d been expecting to go.

  But he was stretching out the time within the portal now. Even if he didn’t touch anything with his mind, he could linger there longer than ever.

  They’d traveled to Pac Ishi by portal as a fluke. It should have taken them back to Xin Caledonia. But he’d chosen a passageway at random, and it had taken the La Paz to Pac Ishi.

  It’s me, Conrad thought. I’m responsible for where the portal takes us!

  The realization had shaken him to his core. But how to choose the right passageway? How to ensure they weren’t taken someplace dangerous? Was there a way to use a portal—any portal—to take them all the way back to the portal near Phobos?

  He recalled what the Nu had said about what the Locc had given him. A curse and a gift.

  The gift was clear. But the curse…

  He opened his eyes. The breath he’d taken in didn’t seem to need to go out again. Am I breathing? He forced himself to push breath out of his lungs, and then sucked air back in. Ye
s. But I don’t need to.

  He was inside the strange, mesmerizing world within the portal again. The first times he’d paused within the portal, he hadn’t known how describe what he saw. A maze. A lattice. A web. Now he knew he could see any of those things—or one of those things. There was no real form here—only what his mind chose to see. His mind translated whatever was inside the portal to some kind of visual representation for him to grasp.

  Guess I have the Locc to thank for that. This time he chose to see the world inside the portal as a nest of threads. He could sense the Oro traveling along one thread. I could change it if I wanted to… I only…

  Conrad held himself back. The thread they were traveling on grew and grew, until it was bigger than him, bigger than the Oro, and his consciousness blinked out.

  He swayed, his knuckles white as he gripped the backs of Baltasar and Argus’s chairs.

  “Look,” said Baltasar, pointing straight ahead. “Albion Prime.”

  Chapter 17

  In the dark of space, Albion Prime shone like a glittering diamond. It almost burned his eyes to look at it.

  Conrad stared at the planet, mesmerized. It reminded him of an old custom Garrity used to keep in the Corps creche—she’d put up a fresh-cut pine tree one month out of the year, and hang exquisite globes and toys on its branches. Ornaments, she’d called them.

  The memory left Conrad aching, if only for a moment. Then he focused again on the planet ahead of them. It was the key to their mission—and the key to their return.

  He remembered what the captain of the Pride of Centaura had told him about the portal. They’d left it open for them to return… and in the meantime anyone—and anything—could come through it. His jaw tightened. They had to get back to their own quadrant.

  “The white jewel, they call it,” said Baltasar. “The Imperial capital. The beginning and the end. The alpha and the omega.”