Dark Space Universe (Book 2): The Enemy Within

by Jasper T. Scott

  Lucien found Addy sitting on the edge of the bed, frowning at her reflection in a handheld mirror. She was as bald as he was, and her face was also more angular than it used to be. She looked up as he approached, staring at him with a face that was now only vaguely familiar. At least her eyes were still green.

  “I’m ugly!” she said.

  Lucien went to sit on the foot of the bed beside her. “You still look beautiful to me.”

  “Liar.”

  He placed a hand on her bare shoulder, and squeezed reassuringly. They were both wearing Faro robes. His was beige and just covered his shoulders, leaving his arms bare, while hers was white and purple and held itself with a strap around her neck.

  The robes were adaptive and surprisingly comfortable. When it was cold they expanded, growing long sleeves, pants, and hoods, and when it was warm, the garments retreated, becoming thicker, but shorter and more porous.

  “I mean it,” Lucien said, making a point of examining her. She was still beautiful, despite her lack of hair and her now-alien features.

  “Then you’re blind.”

  He held up his hands in surrender. “I give up. You can always turn off the disguise while we’re on board the ship.”

  “That’s not any better. At least this way I look alien enough that being bald isn’t so bad, but if I turn off the skin, I’ll have to wear a wig—and I don’t have one. How do you think they tell each other apart? The males and females?”

  “Not all of them have a gender. According to Katawa, Abaddon and the Elementals are all neuters.”

  “Yeah, they’re also half machine. I’m talking about the natural-born Faros, the ones we’re trying to imitate. Look at me! If their women are all this ugly, it’s no wonder the Elementals decided they could do without.”

  Lucien smiled and shook his head. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I’m going to the bridge,” Lucien said. “You coming?”

  “I guess I can’t hide in here forever.”

  The door opened for Lucien as he approached, and Addy slid her hand into his as they walked out.

  Katawa’s ship was old and run down. The corridors were badly lit and discolored with patches of rust and greenish stains that looked suspiciously like they might be alive.

  Lucien heard a water pipe drip-drip-dripping in the distance. The sound echoed through the ship, making it impossible to tell where the leak was.

  The deck thrummed and vibrated underfoot, setting Lucien’s teeth on edge and assaulting his ears with the constant roar of an over-stressed reactor and drive system. They walked beneath a rattling ventilation duct with a squeaky fan.

  “This ship is falling apart,” Addy said.

  Lucien nodded. “That should help keep us safe from pirates. No one’s going to bother boarding a piece of junk like this.”

  Addy snorted and rapped her knuckles against a bulkhead that had rusted straight through to the compartment on the other side. “And what’s going to keep us safe from the ship?”

  How do you get rust in space? Lucien wondered. “Might be a good idea to sleep in a pressure suit.”

  Addy gave him a rueful smile. “And here I was planning to sleep naked.”

  “Actually—sleeping in a pressure suit would probably be overkill,” he amended.

  Addy grinned. “Too late. You put the thought in my brain. On the bright side, it won’t be long before you can walk around without a holoskin.”

  Lucien shook his head. “How’s that?”

  “Because you’re going to turn blue all by yourself.”

  “Very funny.”

  They reached the bridge where they found Garek—also bald and blue—and Brak, a living shadow in his shapeless smock. It covered every inch of him, including his head. Lucien found himself wondering how the Gor could breathe—or see—in that disguise. Katawa sat cross-legged in the pilot’s chair, not yet wearing his shadowy garment. He still wore the same loose-fitting black tunic he’d been wearing when they met him.

  “Where are we going?” Lucien asked as he stopped behind Katawa’s chair and looked out at the handful of stars he could see from the cockpit. Out here, at the edge of the universe, they were so close to the Great Abyss that space seemed even more desolate and forbidding than usual.

  “To the Gakol System,” Katawa replied.

  “Where’s that?”

  “In the Gethari Galaxy.”

  “And that is...”

  “In the Tosivian Supercluster.”

  Garek shot Lucien a smirk. “I got the same runaround a few minutes ago.”

  “Maybe I should ask a different question,” Lucien said. “How far is the Gakol System from where we are now?”

  “More than five million light years.”

  “And how long is it going to take to calculate a jump there?”

  “Two hours.”

  “Five million light years in two hours. That’s...” Lucien trailed off as he ran the numbers in his head.

  “Over five times faster than Astralis’s jump tech,” Garek put in.

  “Incredible,” Lucien said.

  “And this bucket is apparently slow as far as Faro ships go,” Garek said. “Katawa was telling me one of their top-of-the-line destroyers can calculate more than two thousand light years per second. That’s seventy-five billion light years in just one year, which is about the distance from here back to the Red Line.”

  Lucien didn’t miss the meaningful tone in Garek’s voice. If they couldn’t find this lost Etherian fleet, taking one of the Faros’ ships and running back to Etherus for help was a good backup plan. Although, something told Lucien that if Etherus hadn’t already gone to war with the Faros to emancipate all the other sentient races that they’d enslaved, then he might be equally indifferent to the enslavement of a bunch of faithless human scientists. All of which raised the age-old question: how can a good God be so seemingly indifferent to suffering?

  “What’s the Gakol System like?” he asked, putting that troubling thought from his mind.

  “We will soon see,” Katawa replied.

  “You mean you haven’t even been there before?” Addy asked.

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know to look there for this lost fleet of yours?”

  “Because it is the last location where the fleet was rumored to have been.”

  “Ten thousand years ago,” Garek replied dryly.

  “Yes.”

  “By now that trail is colder than space,” Garek said.

  Lucien frowned. “You said you kept notes of your search. I’m assuming that most of them are rumors like this one.”

  “Correct.”

  “So how many rumors have you collected?”

  “The ones that I have been unable to investigate, or in total?”

  “The ones you haven’t already checked,” Lucien replied.

  “Five hundred and sixty-two.”

  “That many?” Addy blurted.

  “The guy’s been searching for ten thousand years,” Garek said. “That’s not a lot of leads considering how long he’s been at this.”

  “I was a slave for much of that time,” Katawa said, as if he felt the need to justify his lack of progress.

  “It could take us years just to follow up on all of these rumors!” Addy said. “At that rate it could be a century before we find anything!”

  “That would be wonderful,” Katawa replied. He turned from his controls to face them, his giant black eyes blinking and his small mouth slightly agape. “Do you really think you could get such fast results?”

  Lucien stared at Katawa. To him, a century was fast. How long was he expecting this search to take? A thousand years? Another ten thousand? Lucien’s heart sank. What have we gotten ourselves into?

  Chapter 21

  The Specter

  “Still think this was a good idea?” Garek asked, looking smug despite the alien features projected by his holoskin.

  Luci
en glanced at him. “Your objection was based on not trusting Katawa, not on the viability of his search.”

  “It was based on both, but you didn’t give me a chance to voice my concerns,” Garek replied.

  “Well, now you’ve got your chance. Voice away,” Lucien replied. They were all sitting in the galley at the back of the ship while Katawa finished whatever he was doing on the bridge.

  “Too late now,” Garek replied. “We’re at Katawa’s mercy, trapped on his ship. How do you think he’s going to react if we have a change of heart after all the work he’s put into our disguises? Assuming he doesn’t kill us, he might just dump us on the nearest uninhabitable planet and let nature take its course.”

  “He’s from Etheria, so he’s incapable of doing anything wrong,” Lucien said.

  “Assuming he told us the truth about that,” Garek pointed out.

  “This isn’t the time for I-told-you-so’s,” Addy put in. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do. We can’t spend the next few millennia searching for a lost fleet that might not even exist.”

  “No, we can’t,” Lucien agreed. “So what do we do?”

  “This is still a good opportunity to learn about the universe,” Garek said. “Your plan of signing on with a Marauder crew to find out where the slave markets are is even more workable now that we look and sound like Faros. We might even be able to legitimately purchase some of our people—assuming we can find a way to make enough money.”

  “That’s true...” Lucien said. “All right, new plan—while we’re following leads and rumors to search for Katawa’s lost fleet, we do some investigating of our own to find our people, and maybe find a way to make some money on the side.”

  Garek nodded.

  “Agreed,” Addy said.

  “Brak? Do you have anything to add?”

  The Gor stood in the far corner of the galley, a hulking shadow, easy to miss in the poorly-lit confines of the Specter. “I like this plan,” Brak replied, speaking barely passable Faro. He’d learned the language, but not the accent. He was posing as a Faro slave, so no one would expect him to be fluent.

  “We’re all agreed, then,” Lucien said. “We help Katawa as best we can, but we help ourselves while we’re at it.”

  Everyone nodded along with that. Lucien felt bad using Katawa, but in a way he was also using them. The trick would be making sure the little gray alien didn’t find out what they were doing.

  “Jump is calculating.”

  Lucien jumped at the sound of Katawa’s voice and turned to see him standing in the entrance of the galley. “Great,” Lucien said, with an innocent smile.

  “What were you talking about?” Katawa asked as he entered the galley.

  “We were trying to guess what we’d find in the Gakol system.”

  “Oh. Dangerous place,” Katawa said, shaking his over-sized head as he went to sit beside Addy in one of the galley’s two booths.

  “I thought you said you haven’t been there,” Addy said.

  “I have not. Others have. Much is written about Gakol in the ship’s databanks.”

  Lucien blinked. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “You did not ask,” Katawa replied, blinking innocently up at him.

  Lucien offered the alien a dry look. “Where can we access the ship’s databanks?”

  “In the data center.”

  Lucien stared a while longer, waiting for Katawa to anticipate his next request. When he didn’t, Lucien asked, “Could you take us there, please?”

  “Of course. This way,” Katawa replied, walking back through the galley.

  They all followed him to a small room with a data terminal and one chair. Katawa showed them how to use the terminal—by wearing a band much like the universal translator bands, and thinking their queries at the console. The console responded with holographic texts, holo-videos, and a variety of other multimedia.

  Lucien sat at the terminal first to peruse the data on Gakol. There were seven planets, of which three were inhabited by three different sentient alien races, each of them more barbaric than the last. They lived in hostile environments where everything was constantly trying to kill them, so of course they’d evolved with the same killer instinct. Their cultures were obscene, and they’d apparently escaped slavery to the Faros by offering their services as mercenary soldiers and assassins. Making matters more complicated, none of the three alien species were humanoid.

  The lizard-like Deggrans from Deggros lived in burrows underground, never seeing daylight on their scorched desert planet. The Mokari from Mokar, were avian, and had their nests high in the mountaintops overlooking the plains where they hunted. And the third species was even less relatable: the Kivians from Kiva were Crab-like monsters that stood on two legs, four, or six. Each of them was the size of a hover car, and they could live interchangeably on land or in the tropical waters of their archipelago planet.

  None of the three races liked each other, but since all three depended on the Faros for high technology like spaceships, they’d been unable to go to war with one another.

  Lucien asked the obvious question after scanning through all the data. “How can any of these species know about a lost fleet of starships if they’re not independently space-faring?”

  “There are legends on all three worlds about small gray gods from the sky.”

  “If the fleet went there, wouldn’t the Faros have captured it?” Addy asked.

  Katawa shook his head. “Ten thousand years ago they had not yet discovered Gakol. I believe the fleet stayed here for some time before the Faros arrived.”

  Lucien nodded, trying to hide his disappointment. According to the ship’s databanks, the Faros didn’t have a colony in Gakol. That meant no slave markets.

  “Even if the fleet was here, what makes you think we’ll be able to find any clues about where it went next?” Lucien asked. “They probably left in a hurry once the Faros arrived.”

  Katawa inclined his head to that. “I believe that is what happened, yes, but the Mokari have a song about one who flew among the stars with the gray gods from the sky. This legend is much more recent. Only one hundred and sixty years old.”

  “A song?” Lucien asked.

  Katawa nodded. “That is how they tell their legends. In song.”

  “Bird songs,” Lucien pressed.

  “Yes,” Katawa replied.

  “So you think the fleet took one of the locals with them and he came back to tell about it?”

  “Correct.”

  Lucien had to admit that was a lot more promising as far as rumors went.

  “You think that Mokari will still be alive?”

  “They are immortal.”

  “Then it sounds like Mokar should be our first stop,” Garek said.

  “It is,” Katawa replied.

  “The bird people are hunters,” Brak put in. “I shall enjoy hunting with them.”

  “We’re not going there to sample the local cuisine,” Lucien said.

  Addy turned to him. “Maybe not, but we’ll need to make friends if we’re going to find this Mokari who flew among the stars with the gray gods from the sky. And to do that, it’s not a bad idea for us to look for things we might have in common.”

  “I think there might be an easier way,” Lucien replied. “They’re all immortals, so they should recognize your species, Katawa—assuming the gray gods that visited them really were your people.”

  “They will have forgotten, but perhaps they will recognize me from their songs.”

  Lucien frowned. “What do you mean they will have forgotten? How do you forget first contact?”

  “No one can possibly remember everything that happened over ten thousand years,” Garek said. “Immortal or not, biological beings only have so much capacity to remember things. That’s part of the reason we take backups of our memories and keep the old ones in storage.”

  Addy sighed. “So we have to find one bird in particular on a planet of millions by askin
g about a hundred and sixty year old bird song that may or may not even be true.”

  “Why would the Mokari lie?” Katawa asked.

  “Not lie,” Lucien explained. “But over time and countless re-tellings, some details of the events might have been altered.”

  Katawa nodded. “This is possible. Let us hope enough details remain factual for us to find the fleet. I will leave you now. I must rest before we arrive. Feel free to stay here or use any of the other facilities on my ship.”

  Lucien nodded. “Thank you.”

  After the alien left, he turned to Garek and said, “If he were hiding something, he wouldn’t let us wander around his ship without supervision.”

  “Hiding something?” Addy asked. “Like what?”

  Garek shrugged. “He’s lying about something.”

  Lucien shook his head. “And you’re basing this on what exactly? A gut feeling?”

  “How about this: Katawa offered to give us an entire fleet of a thousand advanced warships in exchange for our help in finding them. Does that sound like a fair trade to you?”

  “That depends how long it takes us to find the fleet,” Addy replied dryly.

  Garek waved that concern aside. “I’m telling you, he’s up to something. He’s got shifty eyes. Maybe he wants us to help him find the fleet so he can take it for himself and sell it to the highest bidder?”

  “It’s possible,” Addy admitted.

  “The point is, we only know what Katawa’s told us, and without being able to verify his story, the truth could be very different. He might not be trying to get back to Etheria at all.”

  Lucien nodded, his lips pressed into a grim line. “Fair enough. We’ll keep our eyes open. Is that good enough for you, Garek?”

  He grunted. “No, but it’ll have to do.”

  Chapter 22

  Astralis