“That was over eight years ago.”
“Then perhaps you’ve forgotten how you felt. Don’t worry, it’s temporary. In just a few hours your wife should be her old self again—with the addition of some new memories from her time as captain of the Inquisitor.”
Tyra listened to that exchange with her heart pounding and palms sweating. She tried to fight her rising panic, but failed. None of this was real! “Doctor...” she trailed off, as dark spots swam before her eyes.
The doctor leaned into view, took one look at her, and called, “Nurse!”
“What’s wrong?” Lucien demanded. He sounded very far away.
“She’s having a panic attack. Tyra, I want you to focus on taking deep, slow breaths. Slow. That’s it... like that.”
The dark spots fled, and Tyra’s heart rate dropped, but every time she glanced at Lucien it sped up again, and her vision blurred once more.
“Deep breaths,” Doctor Fushiwa urged. Turning to Lucien, he said, “Mr. Ortane, under the circumstances I believe you should leave. We’ll call for you when your wife is able to receive visitors again.”
He nodded slowly, his expression troubled. He left Tyra’s field of view, saying, “Come on, Theola, let’s go see Uncle Brak...”
* * *
Astralis
Lucien gazed into Brak’s scarred face. His skin was shiny and off-color where it had been grafted in from other parts of his body. Where before Brak’s face had been horrifying because of its bony, skull-shaped appearance, now it was horrifying for all its misshapen lumps and asymmetrical appearance.
It was the best that Astralis’s surgeons could do on short notice. There would need to be subsequent reconstructive surgeries, but right now they didn’t want to risk it.
Lucien pulled up a chair beside Brak’s bed and listened to the beeping of a heart monitor and the sighing of the artificial lung that kept Brak breathing. Brak was in a coma, and had been for the past two months.
The doctors said he had extensive brain damage along with all his other injuries. They’d extracted what data they could, but even his AR implant had been damaged in the blast. A piece of shrapnel had scored an unlucky hit.
They wouldn’t know how much of his memory or personality had been affected until they could grow a new body for him, and that would have to wait until the Resurrection Center was rebuilt.
Brak’s old body was just about to be unplugged and thrown in the incinerator. They’d kept him on life support, hoping he’d wake up so that could tell them some new detail about what had transpired in Ellis’s final moments. Had he confessed to something? Had Brak overheard anything to shed light on the message Ellis had sent just before he’d killed himself?
The Faro prisoners had been impossibly little help. The Abaddons had all managed to kill themselves upon waking, and none of the others seemed to speak Versal, so they couldn’t translate a thing. Mind probes helped by adding to their alien vocabulary, but contextual analysis and translation was frustratingly slow, even with hundreds of specialists on the job. They’d only managed to decipher about a dozen words so far.
Theola struggled in Lucien’s arms, sliding down and making a break for the floor. She wanted to run around and explore, but Lucien pulled her back up. She batted him with her hands and started to cry.
“Shhh,” he whispered and kissed her on the head. He couldn’t let her run around in here. There was too much sensitive equipment. She’d probably unplug Brak and put him out of his misery before the doctors got around to it. When Theola’s struggles and cries grew too insistent to ignore, Lucien stood up with a sigh. “Let’s go, then.” He cast a rueful glance at Brak. “See you later, buddy.” He lingered a second longer, half-hoping to see Brak’s eyelids flutter at the sound of his voice, but of course that was just a fantasy.
“Let’s go check on your sister.”
“Agaga!” Theola said.
Lucien smiled wanly. “That’s right, Agaga.”
They reached the psych ward and Atara’s room just in time to witness yet another mind probe. They were forced to wait outside in the observation area and watch while a police detective questioned his daughter under the influence of the probe.
“What are the Faros planning?”
“I don’t know,” Atara said.
“Why did they infiltrate Astralis?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is your name?”
“Atara.”
“Your Faro name,” the detective clarified.
“Abaddon.”
That reply sent chills down Lucien’s spine.
“And you don’t know your own plans?”
“My transfer was interrupted.”
“And that conveniently excluded all of your memories?”
“It was not necessary for me to have any of those memories. Only my personality was transferred.”
“So you don’t speak any Faro.”
“A few words.”
“What words?”
“Hello—Sheeva. Goodbye—Heeva.”
“That’s it?”
Atara just smiled.
Lucien scowled and turned to the security guard sitting at the desk in the observation area. “What’s the point of this? They’ve asked all of these questions before.”
The security guard shrugged. “They made some adjustments. This probe is supposed to go deeper than the others.”
“Well it’s getting all the same answers.”
The guard gave no further comment. Lucien tapped his foot impatiently, waiting for the probe to end so he could go in with Theola. Atara continued stone-walling, casting the effectiveness of the probe into doubt, and Lucien’s attention drifted to a holoscreen hanging above one corner of the security guard’s desk.
A holonews story was playing about High Court Judge Cleever being taken into custody on suspicion of being a Faro spy. The screen was muted, but Lucien could read the subtitles clearly enough. Cleever had been identified as a potential Faro after being subjected to an AI-driven screening test. The test involved downloading and scanning every bit of data in a person’s brain for suspicious thoughts or motives. Tyra and Captain Forster had both been tested and cleared, along with all the other councilors. Now the representatives of the house and the judges of the judiciary were being screened. Apparently Cleever was the first to be caught.
Unfortunately, the news report didn’t mention anything about useful intel being uncovered in Cleever’s thoughts, but that wasn’t strange. Atara had also been identified as a Faro by the test, and she didn’t seem to know anything useful, either.
Apparently, the Faros had infected different people to varying degrees, giving some of them memories and pieces of the overall plan, while others appeared to know nothing but their newfound allegiance to the Faros.
Apparently Judge Cleever fell into that category. Lucien wondered if that meant she and others like her could be brought back. The transfer of consciousness was obviously less comprehensive with them. Lucien glanced back at his daughter, Atara, and a small, desperate hope clawed inside his chest, even as a lump rose in his throat.
He looked away, back to the holoscreen, and watched as Judge Cleever was pushed into a waiting police hover car. Theola squirmed and wriggled in Lucien’s arms, making a break for the floor so she could go explore. Lucien let her go this time, but kept half an eye on her to make sure she didn’t do anything dangerous.
Cleever. The name rang a bell in Lucien’s brain. Then he remembered why—he and Brak had seen a lookalike for her dead son, Titarus, on their stakeout at the Crack of Dawn. Lucien struggled to make a connection, but there wasn’t one to be made. Even if that lookalike really was her son, somehow brought back illegally from the grave after being convicted of murder, why would the Faros bother to possess him? He was a ghost who couldn’t show his face for fear of being discovered.
A ghost that might lead to Coretti? Lucien wondered. That was the connection his brain was searching for, a lead worth fo
llowing. If Titarus was alive, finding him would lead straight to Joseph Coretti’s illegal resurrection center, and then to Coretti himself.
“All right, you can go in now,” the security guard announced, interrupting Lucien’s thoughts.
Lucien cast about for Theola and found her sitting on the floor under the guard’s desk, playing with a garbage can. He walked over and grabbed her by the hand to hoist her up. “Come on, Theebs.” He tried to pick her up, but she insisted on walking by herself, holding his hand for support.
Lucien nodded to the security guard as they reached the entrance of Atara’s room. The guard opened the door, and they walked in just as one of two probe technicians raised Atara’s hover gurney to a sitting position. Her gaze found Theola, and she gave a chilling smile.
“Agaga!” Theola said, pointing to her sister as they drew near.
Lucien stopped walking before they could get within reach, but Theola tugged on his arm.
“Agaga!” she said again.
“Nice of you to visit me, Dad,” Atara said with a sarcastic smile.
“I don’t care what you say, or how you say it, Abaddon, my daughter is still in there.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Mind probes don’t lie. They’ve found traces. Memories. Thoughts.”
“Even if you’re correct,” Atara said. “What makes you think I’m going to let her go? I’m in control. Not her. Your doctors already tried to bring her back. They failed. You think you can defeat me? You can’t. You won’t.”
“You look pretty defeated from where I’m standing. Your stuck in the body of a child, locked up in the pysch ward of a hospital.
Atara laughed at that, and smiled smugly at him.
“You know something,” Lucien said.
“Prove it.”
The probe technicians traded glances with one another, and the detective who’d been asking Atara questions stepped forward. “You’re talking like you know something.” He glanced at each of the two probe technicians. “Could she be hiding something?”
They both shook their heads.
“Then what’s she talking about?”
“It’s a game to her,” Lucien said. “She enjoys toying with us.”
“Or maybe I know more about encoding memories and thoughts than you know about reading them.”
This was the reason Atara had been subjected to a dozen mind probes in the past two months. She kept hinting at something she knew, some hidden knowledge that they somehow couldn’t access inside her head, but each time they probed her it was the same old story.
The policeman in charge of the interrogation blew out an irritated sigh. “I still say we should beat it out of her.”
Lucien turned to the man with a sharp look. “That’s my daughter you’re talking about. A child.”
“Yeah? She doesn’t sound like one to me.”
Before they could argue any further, a call came in over Lucien’s ARCs. It was from Tyra. He turned away to answer it.
“Tyra, how are you feeling?”
“Better, thanks. I’m on my way to the bridge.”
“That’s great—the bridge? They discharged you already?”
“They didn’t have a choice. Duty calls.”
“Right,” Lucien said, frowning. In her new role as Acting Chief Councilor, Tyra had forgotten all about her promise to resign from office. She said it was just a delay, that she’d resign as soon as a new Chief was elected, but Lucien wasn’t sure about that. Something occurred belatedly to him. “Why are you going to the bridge? Is something wrong?”
“No, quite the opposite. The rest of my crew is back. The survivors anyway, and they’ve brought a fleet of Etherian ships with them. You’re one of the survivors, Lucien—you, Addy, Garek, and Brak. You might want to be there when we welcome them aboard.”
Lucien shook his head slowly, his mind racing to catch up. “They brought a fleet with them?”
“About a thousand ships.”
That sparked a connection in Lucien’s brain. He remembered watching Chief Councilor Ellis’s memories in the records room of the Res Center, hearing him talk to someone named Katawa about a lost fleet and how he was going to get it back.
“It’s a trap...” Lucien whispered.
“What?” Tyra demanded. “What are you talking about?”
“The Etherian fleet. This is why Abaddon infiltrated Astralis. He wanted to get that fleet, and used Astralis as the bait!”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Don’t you remember the memories we uncovered in the records room? One of Ellis’s memories was about exactly that!”
“If that’s true, then there should be a Faro fleet descending on us right now, but there isn’t.”
No sooner had Tyra said that than emergency klaxons split the air, followed by an announcement over the ship’s intercom: “Red alert! Red alert! All hands to battle stations! This is not a drill. I repeat this is not a drill. All hands to battle stations!”
“Tyra—”
“I heard it!” Tyra replied, sounding out of breath. “Get Theola someplace safe!”
Lucien glanced over his shoulder, back to Atara.
She was smiling broadly, her green eyes wide and bright with fervor. “They’re here,” she said.
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Dark Space Universe (Book 3)
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OTHER BOOKS BY JASPER SCOTT
Suggested reading order
New Frontiers Series
Excelsior (Book 1)
Mindscape (Book 2)
Exodus (Book 3)
Dark Space Series
Dark Space
Dark Space 2: The Invisible War
Dark Space 3: Origin
Dark Space 4: Revenge
Dark Space 5: Avilon
Dark Space 6: Armageddon
Dark Space Universe Series
Dark Space Universe (Book 1)
Dark Space Universe (Book 2)
Dark Space Universe (Book 3)
Coming November 2017
Early Work
Escape
Mrythdom
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jasper Scott is a USA TODAY bestselling science fiction author, known for writing intricate plots with unexpected twists.
His books have been translated into Japanese and German and adapted for audio, with collectively over 500,000 copies purchased.
Jasper was born and raised in Canada by South African parents, with a British cultural heritage on his mother's side and German on his father's, to which he has now added Latin culture with his wonderful wife.
After spending years living as a starving artist, he finally quit his various jobs to become a full-time writer. In his spare time he enjoys reading, traveling, going to the gym, and spending time with his family.
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Dark Space Universe (Book 2): The Enemy Within Page 39