TREACHERY
Celestial Empires Book 2
Raymond Cooper
Copyright © 2017
Interstellar Press
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to historical places, events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter One
I told myself to suck it up and be strong. But, when I got my first look at Earth after being gone for so long, my eyes filled with tears anyway. For years, I'd dreamt of this moment. Of coming home. And there I was, so very close. Xavix, as always, was by my side, looking at me. And though, being a droid, he was not capable of expression, I would have had to say, he looked mildly curious anyway.
If he was curious, it was because, as he looked at me, he was probably trying to understand human emotion in general and my reaction in particular.
“Is everything okay, Gemma?” Xavix asked me.
“Yes, of course,” I said, wiping my eyes.
“Then why are you crying?”
“Sometimes humans cry when we're happy,” I said. “We don't cry only when we're sad.”
“Humans are a confusing species. Probably the most confusing I've met,” he said. “And I have met quite a number of different species. More than you can imagine.”
“I'm sure you have,” I said, chuckling a bit. “And I wouldn't expect you to understand.”
Xavix, my loyal and trusty companion all this time, looked down at the controls and then back at me.
“We should be landing right about nine in the evening, your local time,” he said. “I've already contacted the spaceport and they will have a landing pad clear for us to land.”
“Thanks, Xavix,” I said.
I turned my attention back to the planet before me. I stared down at the Earth and thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Once we landed it was going to be smooth sailing from there. All these years of scraping to get by, doing whatever I had to do to survive, fighting tooth and nail to get back home – and there we were. Preparing to land. On Earth. My home.
I was home.
We were landing at the spaceport situated near my hometown of Seattle, Washington. I had no way of contacting my mother to let her know I was home, so it would just have to be a surprise when I showed up. By the time I got home it was going to be late, so I hoped she'd still be awake when I got in.
As the ship descended, the fluttering of excitement in my belly grew and I was having a hard time sitting still. I was thrilled to be home and couldn't wait to see my mother's face again.
The descent and landing seemed to take forever. I knew it wasn't anywhere near as long as it seemed, but I was impatient and I still feared that something would go wrong. Ever since I’d left Earth, anything that could go wrong, usually did.
But not anymore. I was home, dammit.
I was lowering the ramp before we even touched down. And as soon as we landed, I practically jumped off the ship and took a deep breath of good, old fashioned American air.
“Welcome back, Ms. Sage,” A tall man in a military uniform said, greeting me with a perfunctory smile.
“Thank you. You have no idea how excited I am to be back,” I said.
The smile on my face was far from perfunctory. It was the real deal. In fact, it was probably the first genuine smile that crossed my face in years. Happiness and relief were flooding through me and I stomped on the ground beneath my feet, just trying to make sure this was all real. That this wasn't some fever dream or hallucination. I practically giggled though when my boots connected with the ground – solid ground. This was indeed real.
The way I looked at everything, even the ground, had the man watching me with a curious expression on his face – like he thought I was losing my mind right there in front of him. His training probably hadn’t included much guidance on how to deal with somebody with a case of the space crazies. He wore a military uniform but he wasn't a soldier. He was simply a spaceport rent-a-cop.
“Rough travels?” he asked, clearing his throat.
“You could say that,” I laughed. “I've been gone a very long time.”
“We know,” he said, his eyes growing dark. “We know all about your travels, Ms. Sage.”
“You do?”
Fear gripped me and a knot formed in my throat. What did they know? How could they know? Did they know what I'd been up to all these years? The bounty hunting? The illegal activities that helped pay for my trip home? How much did they actually know?
I bit my lip and said nothing, content to let him do all the talking. Not knowing what – or how much – they knew. The last thing I wanted to do was incriminate myself.
“Yes, everyone knows what happened on Acrov and with Hugo Kysos. The story's been around,” he said, a smile touching his lips. “Well done, by the way. You're a hero.”
Even though his words were congratulatory, the look in his eyes said otherwise. Though, I couldn't quite put my finger on it, there was something deeper behind his words. Behind his eyes. I wasn't sure if he approved of what I'd done, or not.
“Thank you,” I said, unloading my bag from the ship, suddenly wanting to be well away from there – and him. “Now, if you don't mind, I really need to get home to see my mother.”
“Of course,” he said, stepping aside to let me pass. “But please, be prepared for our staff to reach out to you for debriefing in the coming days.”
His words, and the way he looked at me, made me nervous all over again. A spike of adrenaline pierced my heart and the knots in my stomach tightened. I didn't want my actions and motives questioned by anybody. My fear was that the deeper they dug, the more they'd find. And they'd find a lot of things I didn't want found. Ever.
I'd done a lot of bad things to get by, but now that I was home, I wanted to put that behind me. I wanted to get on with my life and start a new chapter. Even though it was something I'd always wanted as a child, I never wanted to go into space again. I was over it. I'd had my fill.
I just wanted to get a job locally and live a normal life again. Maybe I'd wait some tables. Go back to school. Hell, maybe I'd even meet a nice boy and fall in love. Or maybe not. But at least be able to take care of my mom. It might not be easy or exciting, but I'd had enough excitement for far too many lifetimes already. I just wanted to be home. I wanted to be normal again.
ooo000ooo
“Mom? It's me, Gemma! Don't freak out, but I'm home,” I said, giggling and bursting with excitement as I entered our trailer.
It had been a few years, but our home was in even worse disrepair than I remembered. It was almost literally falling apart around me. It was starting to look like an old, derelict trailer. What surprised me the most though, was not the disrepair, but the fact that the front door was unlocked. My mom never left our doors unlocked – and in that neighborhood, for good reason.
Seattle wasn't what it used to be – especially our little slice of the community. Poverty had hit our area hard during the recession of 2090's. Well, long before that truth be told, but things had gotten really bad before I left. Poverty had led to crime
and crime had led to violence. Seattle had once been a mecca for the prosperous – now, it was home to the poor and the criminals.
But, it's what I grew up in. It's all I knew. So to me, it was home.
The stench inside our trailer was horrendous and made me want to gag. I stepped over a trash can that had been turned over on its side, rotting food falling out onto the floor. I looked at the garbage on the floor and saw that some of it was fresh – well, relatively fresh, anyway. At least she'd had food recently, so that was good.
But the smell – as well as the condition inside the trailer – threw me off. Had my mother gotten so ill that she couldn’t even clean up after herself? Her becoming incapacitated was something that I'd long feared - and I was afraid that it had come to pass. My aunt Myka, my mother's sister, had lived with us and was supposed to be taking care of her. Where was she? How could she have let this happen?
“Mom?” I called out again, expecting to hear her voice coming to me from her bedroom down the hallway – instead though, there was nothing but silence.
“I don't have a good feeling about this, Gem,” Xavix said from behind me.
“I doubt that,” I muttered. “You don't get feelings, you're a robot.”
“Be that as it may, something doesn't seem right,” he said. “In fact, based on what you've told me about your mother, something is very off.”
It didn't take his computerized brain to tell me that. Something was very, very off. It had been years since I'd been home, sure, and I imagine a lot had changed. But this – this was too much. This was – wrong. Very, very wrong.
As I searched for answers, for a brief moment, I tried to convince myself that perhaps I'd accidentally stumbled into somebody else's house. Maybe, while I was gone, my mom and Myka had sold the place. Maybe they'd moved. Or maybe my mom had been placed in a hospital. Not that we could afford that, but maybe something had come through for them.
But then reality set in as I looked around and saw all the familiar trappings of my home. The photos on the wall were the same as they'd always been. Many of them were of my mom and me, with me in pigtails and a toothy grin. The last photos we'd had taken together were from when I was around four or five. Technology had changed a lot – especially the way we stored and viewed our memories.
As I walked around the room, I noticed that there was a vase turned over, water had spilled all over the floor. A table had been turned over too. The more I looked at the area, the more it looked like there had been a struggle. Or perhaps a robbery. And I was starting to get more than a little worried.
Rushing through the trailer, I called out for my mom as I opened every door in the place, ultimately finding that it was empty. There was nobody there. Absolutely no one was home. The house looked like a bull had rushed through it and had knocked everything over in the process. The place was trashed.
Something was definitely wrong. Even more wrong than I'd originally thought.
“Xavix, can you search for any information about 516 Marauder Way or a Cecily Sage,” I said, my voice tight. “See if there's anything about them in the news or the hospitals – ”
“Already on it, Gem, and there's nothing,” Xavix said.
Damn. The knots in my stomach were twisting and I was trembling. I had no idea what was happening – or what had happened – and I was terrified. I happened to glance out the side window and saw that our neighbor was watching the trailer. There was something about the way he looked at it – almost like with concern or regret on his face – that made me think he knew something.
“'I'll be right back,” I said. “You stay here, Xavix. Folks around here aren't too keen on droids and they don't exactly trust them.”
“I understand.”
Xavix did exactly as he was told as I walked out of the trailer and over to the neighbor, an older man I recognized but whose name escaped me. I knew he'd been living there forever, but for the life of me, I couldn't put a name to him.
People didn't move out of the trailers on Marauder Way – they lived there until their very last breath. The trailer park was a place of desperation. A last ditch effort to cling to some semblance of humanity. It was the last place people could go before they ended up on the streets. And once that happened, they would undoubtedly be scooped up by the authorities and sent off to work camps, never to be seen or heard from again.
“Gemma? Is that you?” the man said, squinting his eyes as he looked at me.
“It's me,” I confirmed.
“You've been gone for years,” he said. “We all thought you were dead.”
“Not dead, although it felt like it some days. I was working on a planet in a different system though,” I said.
I wiped the sweat from my brow, realizing that it was hotter than I remembered it ever getting before. It was evening, but it still felt like it was a hundred degrees. It was uncomfortable, to say the least.
“Anyway,” I said, “do you know anything about my mom or aunt? Where they might have gone? The place looks trashed – like somebody rampaged through there and I'm a little bit worried about them.”
The man looked nervous and scratched his head, avoiding my eyes. He looked everywhere he could to avoid looking at me, finally looking at something beyond me, looking as if he really didn't want to be there. As if he really didn't want to be anywhere near me.
I continued to search my brain, trying to remember his name, but came up blank.
“I uhh – I shouldn't be talking about that, Gem,” he said. “Sorry, I have to go. Glad you're not dead or anything like that.”
I grabbed his arm and spun him around to face me. Then his name hit me – as well as why I remembered him so vividly.
“Donal, wasn't it? I remember you now,” I said. “You and my aunt used to have a thing together.”
“Yeah, we did,” he said softly. “I loved her, too.”
“Loved? As in past tense?”
Donal shrugged, but still wouldn't say a word, so I tightened my grip on his arm and stared at him intently, trying to will him to speak with my eyes. But, even with me staring at him, he wouldn't speak. Just stood there with a beaten down expression his face, looking as if he just wanted to die and be done with it all.
“Donal, listen – did someone take them? I need to know,” I said. “I need to know what happened to my mother and my aunt.”
I couldn't bring myself to ask if maybe someone had killed them. Knowing that they were killed, because I wasn't there to protect them, would have been too much for me to handle in that moment.
“Look, I really shouldn't – ”
“Donal!” I snapped. “If you really loved Myka, you'll tell me what happened. Did somebody take them?”
He hesitated, regret flooding his eyes as he looked at me. Slowly, he nodded, looking away from me quickly, as if he was ashamed of himself. But knowing that somebody had taken them sent a dagger of fear into my heart and I tightened my grip on his arm.
“Who took them?” I asked. “Did you see them?”
“I - I saw something but I honestly don't know what I saw,” he said. “All I can tell you is that they weren't human. That's for sure. Once I saw them, I – ”
His voice cracked and tears rolled down his eyes. He scrubbed them away quickly, a dark look of shame mixed with embarrassment crossing his face.
“You, what?” I asked.
“I hid, Gemma” he said, squeezing his eyes shut. “Like a coward, I hid. I didn't do anything to try and protect them, Gemma. I let them get taken and didn't do a damn thing. I'm sorry, Gemma. I'm so sorry. But the aliens who took 'em were just too – they were scarier than shit. I pissed myself when I saw them. ”
My heart was thundering in my chest and I was trembling – both with fear for my family, and anger at the man standing before me. I was angry that he let them be taken. That he did nothing to help them. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down. This wasn't his fault. I told myself that if he'd tried to interfere, he likely would hav
e been killed himself. And if he'd been killed, he wouldn't be here to tell me what happened to my mom and my aunt.
It wasn't a great lead, but it was a lead.
“What did they look like, Donal?” I asked. “The aliens.”
“I only saw the one,” he said. “And he had a bunch of eyes. It was creepier than hell the way they looked all around at the same time. I think one of them almost saw me, but I stayed hidden. That's all I noticed, Gem, I'm sorry I can't be more help – and I'm sorry I didn't do anything to help them. If something happened to them, I'm gonna have to live with that for the rest of my life.”
As much as I wanted to scream and yell at him for not doing anything, for letting them be taken, I knew it wasn't his fault. I knew the people of my area. They weren't fighters. And because we didn't deal much with aliens in our neighborhood, the mere sight of them was liable to send people into terrified fits. The people of Marauder Way had no experience dealing, let alone fighting with anyone who hadn't been born on Earth. And most wouldn't even know how to kill an alien.
Hiding was what most humans in my neck of the woods did when confronted with a species they knew nothing about. Many aliens had abilities and powers you couldn't even begin to fathom. And unless you knew what species you were dealing with, they could overpower you in a heartbeat. Kill you in less than that.
One thing about Donal's description stood out to me, though – the multiple eyes. In fact, there was one person from my very recent past, that came to mind. I let go of Donal's arm and without another word, turned and walked back toward my family's trailer. Xavix was waiting for me inside where I'd left him.
“Can you send a message to Hugo Kysos for me, please?” I ask.
“Sure thing, Gem,” he said. “What would you like to say?”
I paced the small living room as I composed myself and tried to organize my thoughts. My insides were a maelstrom of emotion and I was having trouble focusing.
“Tell him – I believe Boygan is alive and well,” I said. “And that he's come after my family here on Earth. Tell him that I need his help to find them.”
Treachery: Celestial Empires Book 2 Page 1