Dark Space Universe (Book 2): The Enemy Within

by Jasper T. Scott

  In a matter of minutes, Lucien reached the top of the tower and stopped to hover directly in front of the artificial moon, but it no longer looked like a moon. Light flowed in rivers from the tops of the two towers, racing in circles to form a swirling vortex. The gravity here was almost non-existent, but Lucien could have sworn he felt a subtle tug pulling him toward the light. He gazed into the vortex, momentarily mesmerized by it.

  The others came hovering up beside him.

  “Now what?” Addy asked.

  Lucien glanced at her, and then threw the silver ball as hard as he could into the vortex. It quickly vanished against the glare.

  “What did you do that for?!” Addy screamed.

  He had just enough time to question himself, imagining their one and only key to the gateway dropping straight down ten kilometers, and picking up speed on its way to shatter on the castcrete below.

  But then the swirling vortex of light rippled, and abruptly expanded to a hundred times its size, just as he’d seen it would do when he’d touched the key. Now a shimmering, translucent skin was all that remained of the artificial moon, giving them a clear view into a giant, spherically-distorted portal. On the other side of that portal lay the bridge of an Etherian starship.

  “Well, that’s new,” Garek said, sounding taken aback.

  “Yesss...” Brak agreed.

  Lucien understood those sentiments perfectly. This wasn’t a quantum junction that would teleport them from one place to another after making the necessary spatial and quantum calculations. It wasn’t even one of the antiquated SLS space gates that the Imperium of Star Systems had left littering the Milky Way before the Sythian invasion.

  This was an entirely new technology, a persistent portal from one place to another, a doorway that could be opened and shut at will—just as long as you had the key.

  Lucien turned to regard the others. “Ready?”

  “On three,” Addy replied.

  Lucien flashed her a grin. “On two—one... two!”

  And with that, they all boosted straight into the shimmering portal.

  Chapter 36

  Astralis

  The room was utterly dark. Chief Councilor Ellis sat in an armchair beside a real, floor-to-ceiling viewport in the outer hull of Astralis.

  And so, too, sat Abaddon.

  He’d booked this luxury hotel suite in District One under the guise of showing his support to residents who’d lost their homes and businesses when the Faros’ bomb had ripped a hole in the hull.

  Abaddon gazed out the viewport, surveying his kingdom. Countless bright specks of light gazed back at him, but he barely noticed. Most people looked out at space and saw the stars, their eyes drawn to those comforting specks of light, but when Abaddon looked out, all he saw was a vast sea of darkness, gathering to snuff out the light.

  Abaddon smiled—or tried to—the corners of his mouth refused to obey, twitching reluctantly as Ellis resisted, but that battle of wills only lasted for a second. He was in control of this body, just as he was now in control of Astralis. In just one day he’d gone from the glorified mouthpiece for Astralis’s bloated representative democracy to its sole ruler.

  It was almost depressing how easy it had all been, but Abaddon had to remind himself that the real challenge lay in defeating Etherus—not in subjugating this small band of humans.

  Now that Abaddon and his like-minded cohorts were in sole command of Astralis, they could proceed more openly with their plans.

  Just over an hour ago, Abaddon had ordered General Graves to head over to Hangar Bay 18, where the Farosien boarding shuttles were being kept; there he had Graves retrieve a portable long-range comms unit from one of the shuttles and deliver it here.

  The blocky unit now sat on the table beside his chair, its green status lights glowing—ready and waiting. Faro comms technology was a lot faster than the human variety. Unfortunately, it could still be jammed and detected, so Abaddon had needed to make a few arrangements before using the device.

  First, he got Admiral Stavos to turn off Astralis’s outbound comms jamming. Next he’d arranged for a power surge to take down the power in District One, so that his use of the device and the message he sent wouldn’t be detected by Astralis’s comms operators.

  Now, with that done, Abaddon was ready to send his message. He turned and activated the comm unit. A holographic control panel sprang to life above the device, and he hurried to enter the coordinates for Mokar. When he was finished, he recorded his transmission.

  “Katawa, it’s Abaddon. What news do you have of your search for the lost fleet? I have a brief window to speak without being detected. Do not transmit more than once, and do not send a reply if it will arrive more than an hour after this one.” Abaddon sent the message.

  The comm unit estimated the arrival time to be just a little under fifteen minutes. That was remarkable considering the tens of billions of light years between Astralis and Mokar. That feat of near-instant communication wasn’t accomplished by the Faro’s superior technology, but by their application of it.

  Abaddon’s message would be relayed to Mokar along the quantanet, a network of relays with pre-calculated connections that provided a hyper-fast solution to interstellar travel and communications in the Farosien Empire. Of course, the quantanet was too dangerous to let just anyone have access to, so Abaddon reserved use of the network to himself and those he personally authorized.

  Barely half an hour later, the comm unit chimed with Katawa’s message, and Abaddon queued it for playback. Katawa must have seen his message and replied almost immediately. The little gray alien’s halting voice rippled out of the unit’s speakers moments later.

  “Abaddon. The humans became suspicious of me. I was able to strand them in the underworld. They reached the gateway and made contact with the guardians, who then found and removed the humans’ tracking devices just as you predicted. Two of the trackers survived removal, and I was able to detect the opening of the gateway. You were right about that as well. The guardians only attack when they read bad intentions in the minds of those who would use the gate.”

  Who needs bad intentions when you’ve got good ones? Abaddon thought, smiling. The road to the netherworld has to be paved with something.

  Katawa went on, “I do not understand how this helps you reach the lost fleet, but I have done my part. You will release my people now and grant them full citizenship in the empire. I await news that this has occurred. If it does not happen promptly, I will go down to the underworld and warn the guardians myself.”

  Abaddon’s lips curled into a sneer at the threat, but he had no intention of reneging on their deal. What did emancipating a few billion slaves matter? There were countless trillions more where they’d come from, and soon he’d have the Etherians to replace them, anyway.

  Abaddon hurriedly composed two more messages: one to Katawa, reassuring the spiteful little alien, and another to issue the emancipation order for the Grays, and to request that a ship be sent to Mokar to pick up Katawa.

  He sent both messages and then shut off the device. That done, he reclined his chair and folded his hands over his chest. Everything was proceeding according to plan. Now all he had to do was wait for the Etherian Fleet to come to him.

  It was a detestably passive plan, but thanks to the mind-reading ghosts guarding the gateway, there was no active way to reach the fleet. Until now, everyone he’d sent after it had been killed—Faros, Elementals, Abaddons, Grays, Mokari... It didn’t matter who he sent, the problem was that he’d sent them, and the guardians of the gate could tell.

  This time was different. This time, the people he sent weren’t working for him. Perhaps even more importantly, they were humans, and citizens of the Etherian Empire, so the guardians weren’t suspicious of them.

  But that would be their undoing. Abaddon knew Garek well enough from having looked into his mind that he’d use the fleet to come straight to Astralis, and as for Lucien, Abaddon didn’t even need to look
into his mind to know what he would do. He knew Lucien as well as he knew himself.

  Wipe a man’s memories and give him a fresh slate, and watch him slide back into his old ways. Abaddon, Lucien, the Devil... Ellis, Stavos, Graves... he went by many names, and all of those instances of his existence had a common body of experiences and memories to draw upon. All except for a few scattered individuals in human bodies.

  Etherus had told him what he was doing, recreating him in human bodies to see what they would do. When those people hadn’t turned into sociopaths, Etherus had shared the results of the experiment, as if to say, this is who you could have been.

  Abaddon sneered.

  Etherus thought he was proving a point with that, but it proved nothing. The experiment was still in its infancy. It had taken more than a billion years before he’d grown bored enough with paradise to rebel against Etherus.

  And how long had humans been around? Better yet, how long had they been immortal, with lives long enough to truly appreciate the fathomless boredom that he had suffered?

  No, Etherus hadn’t proved anything yet. Lucien Ortane and his father, Ethan, might have had all the same initial conditions as he, but they were missing the critical factor of his experiences.

  Give them the same life to live, and they’ll make all of the same so-called evil choices as I have.

  But where was the root of that evil? In the choices that he, Abaddon, had made? Or in the person that Etherus had created to command his army?

  The problem was simple: if Etherus was good, and God, and all-powerful, then how was it possible that he had created Abaddon, who was evil?

  It was nature versus nurture. If the flaw lay in Etherus’s creation and the initial characteristics of Abaddon’s being, then Etherus was to blame, but if the flaw lay in Abaddon’s choices, then Abaddon was to blame.

  But of course, then comes determinism to prove that free will doesn’t exist, and therefore good and evil don’t exist, so either way Etherus can’t judge me. Deep down he knows it. That’s why he and his people are all hiding in a corner while the rest of the universe burns. It’s impossible to lead a crusade without the strength of true conviction.

  In that moment the lights snapped back on, and the darkness fled. Blinking spots from his eyes, Ellis arched an eyebrow at the ceiling. Listening to my thoughts, were you?

  But he smirked at the absurdity of that thought. He’d long since stopped believing that Etherus was the almighty deity he claimed to be. Ghostly extra-dimensional allies notwithstanding, Abaddon was far more powerful than Etherus. Of the two of them, the only one who’d achieved anything close to omnipresence was him, Abaddon, with his billions of simultaneous instances.

  Yet another reason for you to hide in your corner, Abaddon thought. But you won’t stay hidden for long. I’m coming for you, Etherus.

  Chapter 37

  The Lost Etherian Fleet

  Lucien emerged from the portal a split second before the others did. The negligible gravity in the center of the underworld was suddenly replaced by a much stronger force, pulling him down to the deck of the ship. He tried to land feet-first, but ended up on his back, sprawled out against one of the bridge control stations. He watched as the others fell out of the shimmering portal, their arms and legs windmilling. Garek and Brak landed one on top of each other in a pile of tangled limbs and clattering armor, while Addy managed to perform a controlled somersault. She brushed off her suit and offered a hand to help Lucien up.

  He took her hand and stood up, surveying the bridge. It was a perfect circle with two levels separated by a short flight of stairs. A dome-shaped viewport lay overhead, revealing a vast sea of stars and space. Lucien felt as if he were standing on an airless platform, adrift in deep space. Unnerved by the sensation, he walked around aimlessly to remind himself that there was gravity. He noted the warm glow of lights emanating from control stations, and from the glow strips in the floor. Gravity and lights meant power, so they weren’t adrift in space. Looking behind them, Lucien saw the portal to the underworld shimmering, still open.

  “I don’t get it,” Garek said. “This ship looks as new as the day it was built. I thought it’s supposed to have been here for over ten thousand years?”

  Lucien nodded and looked away from the portal. Had they left the lights and gravity on all this time? Did Etherian ships have unlimited fuel in their reactors? Most ships that Lucien had encountered ran on fusion power, but even fusion required a ready supply of fusionable materials.

  “Do you think there’s anyone on board?” Addy asked.

  “There might be an easy way to find out,” Lucien replied, and went to the control station in the center of the bridge. It was on the upper level where they’d emerged, and he guessed it had to be the captain’s station.

  He took a seat there, and holographic displays sprang to life all around him, emitted from projectors in the floor. The alphabet and language was Etherian, but thanks to the translator band he wore under his helmet, he was able to understand everything perfectly.

  Lucien located the ship’s sensor display where a 3D star map appeared, crowded with green icons of friendly vessels. At the center of the map was a particularly large vessel, highlighted white. Lucien selected it, and found that the ship was called the Gideon. Ship schematics and technical readouts appeared on that screen. Lucien scanned through the information until he found what he was looking for.

  “The ship’s sensors show exactly four lifeforms on board,” he said.

  Garek and Addy walked into Lucien’s periphery, appearing to either side of his chair.

  “What else can you see?” Garek asked, while peering over Lucien’s shoulder at the sensor display.

  Returning to the star map with all the green icons on it, he found a contacts panel in the top left of the display. A long list of contacts appeared, all of them green and friendly.

  “There’s one thousand and fifty seven friendly ships around us,” Lucien said, reading the total number of friendly contacts at the bottom of the contacts panel. Sensors indicate they’re all cloaked.”

  “Obviously not very well if we can detect them from here,” Garek said.

  Lucien nodded, still scanning the contact panel. “Most cloaking shields only hide ships from a distance. The fleet looks to be in a close formation...” Lucien trailed off. “These ships are all named after prominent figures in the Etherian codices.”

  “Makes sense, given where they came from,” Garek replied.

  Lucien selected the fleet as a group. It was called Gideon’s Army. A table with information about the fleet appeared, giving each ship’s name, range away from them, mass, ship class, shield strength, hull integrity, and crew.

  Lucien scrolled through the list and found all of the ships to be in pristine condition with hull integrity and shields at a hundred percent. He also found the active crew count for each of the ships to be 0/###. The second number varied, but the first was always zero and highlighted in red. All except for one ship—the Gideon. It had a crew count of 4/9750. There were just four people on board the entire fleet—the four of them. “The fleet really is abandoned,” Lucien said.

  “How big are the ships in the fleet?” Garek asked.

  Lucien turned back to the display. He tapped the top of the column labeled mass, and a set of alternative categories for size appeared—beam, draft, length, and tonnage. Lucien selected length and tapped the little arrow beside the column, assuming it would order the list by that category.

  It did. “The smallest ships are only a few hundred meters long...” he said, scrolling down again, “but it looks like most of them are over a kilometer long.” As he reached the bottom of the list he found more than a dozen ships that were even larger than that. “The biggest ones are over ten kilometers from bow to stern, and we’re sitting on the largest of those, the Gideon, at fourteen kilometers long.”

  Garek nodded. “Well, well, looks like Katawa held up his end of the deal, after all. We’ve got our
fleet: one thousand capital-class ships. I think it’s time we go find Astralis and take the fight to the Faros, don’t you?”

  Lucien turned to Garek. “The Polypuses were clear. They only let us get here because we agreed to take the fleet back to Etheria.”

  “And we’ll do that, but why not go get our people first? Then we won’t have to come back and rescue them later.”

  “Because we might be detected by the Faros while we’re out looking for them,” Lucien said.

  “We might also be detected along the way to Etheria. And if we are, it would be good to have these ships properly crewed so we stand a fighting chance.”

  Addy began nodding. “Garek has a point.”

  “The Polypuses wanted us to go straight back to Etheria. They showed us what would happen if the Faros found the fleet.”

  “And they showed me that Astralis escaped,” Garek replied. “They must have known how I would react to that. If they’re safe, then what’s the harm in us going there first?”

  “They showed you that they’re safe to put your mind at ease, so you wouldn’t think there was an urgent rush to go rescue them. We talked to the Polypuses about this. They clearly told us to go back to Etheria first.”

  Garek snorted. “Yeah... it was like having a conversation with a light bulb. How do you even know they understood us? Or that we understood them? What if they thought brighter was no and darker was yes?”

  “You’re deliberately confusing the issue,” Lucien said. “I get your personal stake in all of this, but we’re going to Etheria first. You want to do something else?” Lucien turned and pointed to the open portal behind him. “Go ahead. The door’s still open.”

  But just as Lucien said that, the shimmering portal vanished. “Someone must have heard you,” Garek said, smiling. “I guess they don’t want me to go back.”