Dark Space Universe by Jasper T. Scott

by Discover Sci-Fi Special Edition

  “We all know where Astralis is. If one of us is a spy, we could have given away their location a long time ago.”

  Tyra nodded gravely. “Yes, so if they’re still there, and they haven’t come under attack, it would go a long way to proving that we don’t have a spy on board.”

  “You don’t sound convinced,” Addy said.

  “We’ll find out what happened soon.”

  The timer reached zero, and everything flashed white as they jumped. Lucien blinked away the glare and studied the sensor grid at Tyra’s control station. It was crowded with inanimate gray blips, but no green friendly contacts or red enemy ones.

  He pointed to the gray blips on the grid. “Is that debris?”

  Tyra gaped at her displays and slowly shook her head. “Astralis is gone.”

  Chapter 28

  “What do you mean gone?” Addy asked. “Astralis was destroyed?”

  Tyra ran a scan of the debris field. “There’s a lot of debris, but not that much. It looks like both sides took heavy losses before they escaped.”

  Tyra brought up a visual of the debris field and Lucien saw the shattered hull of a star galleon drifting amidst clouds of glinting hull plates and lifeless fighters. There were also a few cigar-shaped derelicts in view.

  All eyes were on Tyra, waiting for her to say more, but she sat at her station wide-eyed and speechless.

  “Where do you think they went?” Addy asked.

  “There’s no way to know,” Lucien said. “Unless they send us a message with their coordinates—and they won’t do that for the same reason that we didn’t.”

  “So…” Addy prompted.

  “We’re cut off,” Tyra said. “We’ll have to wait for our timer implants to run down and kill us so we can be resurrected back on Astralis. We won’t have any memories of these expeditions, but maybe that’s for the best,” she said, lifting her stump of a left arm by way of emphasis.

  “We can’t do that,” Lucien said.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Tyra replied.

  “Why weren’t the Faros here waiting for us?” Lucien asked.

  “Astralis must have defeated their fleet before jumping out.”

  “Or the Faros followed them,” Lucien countered. “Check the debris again. There’s more of our derelicts than theirs.”

  “That’s not a surprise,” Jalisa said. “We already know their ships are stronger than ours.”

  “Still, what if they were followed?” Lucien asked.

  “How? Clearly one of us is a spy, and we were the ones that gave away their position,” Tyra said.

  Lucien shook his head. “We can’t assume that. One of the other teams might have met the Faros and led them back to Astralis.”

  “We jumped millions of light years to find them after watching an alien history that led us straight to them,” Tyra replied. “We found them in an entirely different galaxy. Unless this whole supercluster is overrun with Faros, I’d say the other teams never met them.”

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean Astralis won’t be followed—or get into some other kind of trouble,” Lucien said. “Look at the volume of debris. There’s enough there to suggest they might have lost pressure on the ground level, and if that’s the case, you can say goodbye to all of our crops. That will be hard for them to recover from, and they won’t be in a hurry to resurrect more people.”

  “What are you getting at, Commander?” Tyra asked.

  “I’m saying that maybe we shouldn’t just assume we’re going to be resurrected on Astralis when our timers run out. If we can find some way to disable those implants, we could meet Astralis at the cosmic horizon. We know their ultimate destination, and even if one of us is a spy, there’s no way the Faros are going to follow us that far.”

  “Have you gone skriffy?” Tyra asked. “Even if we could disable our implants, we don’t have enough supplies on board to last us eight years.”

  “So we all go into stasis,” Lucien said. “Leave Pandora at the helm. That also solves the problem of the spy, assuming we can’t figure out who it is before we go into stasis.”

  “And assuming that Pandora isn’t the spy,” Tyra said.

  “That seems unlikely since she volunteered to be shut off,” Lucien pointed out. “But we can run scans on her to be sure.”

  “All right, let’s say we make it, and we meet up with Astralis at the cosmic horizon,” Tyra said. “Then what? We go say hi to our clones on Astralis? They’ll have accumulated eight years of memories in our absence. We won’t even recognize ourselves. You and Addy will probably be married with kids by then!”

  Lucien caught a smile from Addy with that prediction. He mirrored that smile as he nodded to Tyra. “Doesn’t sound so bad to me. We’ll integrate our memories and put our spare bodies in stasis for future use. Then we’ll get to keep both sets of experiences.”

  Tyra snorted. “There are other possibilities that you might find less appealing,” she said.

  Lucien shook his head. “We can process our new lives and memories when the time comes. Right now, we lose nothing by trying, and at least this way we’ll have some insurance. If Astralis doesn’t make it to the cosmic horizon, maybe we will, or vice versa.”

  “He’s right,” Jalisa put in. “We should at least try.”

  “I agree,” Addy said.

  Garek was silent, his brow furrowed, no doubt thinking about his daughter back on Astralis.

  Tyra regarded each of them in turn. “All right, fine, but good luck disabling those implants. They were built to be tamper-proof.”

  “As in…?” Lucien asked.

  “As in, if you tamper with them, they go off early and kill you.”

  Lucien winced. “And I suppose you don’t have some kind of deactivation code?”

  Tyra shook her head. “No.”

  “Great. Garek—”

  “I’ll get right on it,” he said. “Who wants to be my first test subject?”

  No one volunteered.

  “I vote we use the Gor,” Jalisa said.

  “So he can rip my head off when I poke him with a needle?” Garek asked. “Bad idea.”

  “We’ll choose someone at random,” Tyra decided, already busy entering their names into a list for the ship’s computer to select one. When she was done, she ran a random algorithm that spat out Jalisa’s name.

  “Figures,” she said. “See you all back on Astralis.”

  Lucien watched her leave, hoping Garek wouldn’t accidentally fulfill that prediction.

  “I’m going to plot a jump out of here in case the Faros come back,” Tyra said. “Meanwhile, Lucien, Addy—you’re dismissed.”

  “What? Why?” Addy asked.

  “We still haven’t been followed, which means one of us likely is a spy. I’ll let you know if anything changes, but until then, you’re all off duty indefinitely.”

  “What are we supposed to do with ourselves?” Addy asked.

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Tyra replied dryly.

  Lucien frowned. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said Tyra was jealous. He watched her a moment longer before standing up from his control station and walking down to Addy. He nodded to her. “How about some caf and eggs?”

  Addy smiled. “I guess a vacation won’t be all bad.”

  Lucien smiled back, but as they walked off the bridge together, he felt a surge of apprehension. If Astralis was destroyed, and they couldn’t disable their timers, then they’d all be dead within a month, and no one would be around to resurrect them.

  They’d be gone forever.

  In a universe where death had long since lost its sting, the thought of it coming back for them with a personal vengeance was terrifying.

  Chapter 29

  —Twenty-nine Days Later—

  “I’ve tried everything,” Garek said, shaking his head.

  Lucien stared at the medic across the table where they were all seated in the Captain’s Ready Room.

 
; “You haven’t tried surgical removal,” Lucien pointed out.

  “That’s sure to set off the timer,” Tyra said, waving her recently attached arm to dismiss the idea. Garek had grown new appendages for both her and Brak and reattached them in the past week. Now they were both fully functional again, just in time for their timer implants to kill them. Irony is a kakard, Lucien thought.

  “We may as well face it. This is our last day aboard the Inquisitor,” Tyra said.

  Lucien didn’t bother to point out that it might be their last day anywhere. They had no way of knowing if Astralis was even out there anymore. They couldn’t send or receive vector-based comms without knowing each other’s coordinates, and it would be idiotic to use omni-directional comms that would light them up like a beacon and bring the Faros running for millions of light years in all directions.

  “What are the chances that Astralis was destroyed?” Addy asked.

  “Impossible to say,” Pandora replied.

  Tyra had reactivated her a week ago in anticipation of leaving her at the helm while the rest of the crew went into stasis. They’d scanned the bot multiple times since then, but not a single line of code was out of place, and so far the Faros hadn’t shown up, so Pandora appeared to be above suspicion—which was more than Lucien could say for the rest of the crew. Everyone else was a suspect in an ongoing investigation that had yet to yield any meaningful results. Their mind probes and body scans had all come back clean.

  “I doubt it’s been destroyed,” Tyra said. “Facets are heavily armed and shielded. Let’s not assume the worst. Meanwhile, I suggest you all figure out how you’re going to spend your remaining time on board. Dismissed.”

  Lucien stood up from the table and walked out with Addy. Garek and Jalisa walked out ahead of them, also a couple.

  “Nine hours and counting,” Addy said. “Any ideas about how we should spend them?”

  Lucien thought about that. There wasn’t much to do on board that they hadn’t already done, and they weren’t allowed to explore nearby systems.

  “Drink ourselves into oblivion?” Lucien suggested.

  “Sounds depressing.”

  “Let me amend that,” he said. “We take a bottle of the ship’s finest wine to my quarters and spend all day in bed.”

  “Less depressing,” Addy said. “I’ll go steal some chocolates from the mess to go with the wine.”

  “It’s a date,” he said.

  They met up at his quarters as planned and spent the day indulging in wine, chocolate, and each other.

  All-in-all, not a bad way to go out, Lucien thought hours later as he lay pleasantly buzzed and exhausted. Addy’s head rested on his chest, her body curled against his, warming the persistent chill running through his veins. He stroked her hair, watching shadows swirl as the room spun.

  He used his ARCs to check the time. Just two more hours before their timers ran out. If they did wake up on Astralis, Lucien vowed to hunt down the cleric who had invented those implants and choke the life out of him to see how he liked it.

  “We’re not going to remember any of this when we come back on Astralis,” Addy whispered.

  “No,” Lucien said. “We won’t.” A frown creased his brow. It would have been a simple matter to back up their memories and consciousness and then pulse the data in an omni-directional burst for Astralis to intercept, but by now they were probably out of range, and even if they weren’t, the data could be intercepted and read by anyone for millions of light years in all directions. Given that the Faros already seemed to know all about transferring consciousness to new bodies, Astralis might not be the only place where they were resurrected.

  “You think some people are destined to be together?” Addy asked. “Like maybe even if you could go back and change it so that you never met, you’d find some other way to meet them and end up together, anyway?”

  Lucien thought about it. Romantic ideas like those were common among people their age, but older generations were more pragmatic about love. Most of them had already been married several times.

  Marriage licenses came with an expiration date for a reason, despite Etherus’s insistence that marriage should last forever. Lucien couldn’t think of many examples of people who’d been married for more than twenty years—his parents, but they were unusual.

  “We probably will end up together again,” Lucien decided. Even pragmatically speaking it was a good bet. Addy had shown she knew how to catch a guy’s attention, and she’d baited him more than a few times before he’d jumped on the hook. Her interest in him was dogged enough to survive a sudden case of amnesia.

  “I’d like that…” Addy trailed off in a sleepy voice.

  Lucien’s eyelids felt heavy, but he resisted, determined not to die in his sleep. Addy, however, had asked him not to wake her if she fell asleep.

  So he didn’t.

  “Sweet dreams,” he whispered, stroking her hair again.

  Time passed like water dripping from a faucet, each second grating on his nerves as it passed. But before he knew it, seconds were all he had left, and he was left wondering where all the time had gone. Maybe that’s how it used to be, he thought. Time passed slowly in the moment, but looking back, everything seemed to have happened in the blink of an eye. Lucien eyed the countdown on his ARCs.

  Sixty seconds…

  Fifty-nine…

  Fifty-eight…

  A ghostly flicker caught his eye, distracting him from the countdown. It was a snaking tentacle of light. He tracked it through the room, his heart pounding in his chest. It came floating down through the ceiling…

  Revealing a hundred more tentacles of light attached to a bright, bulbous body.

  It was the creature they’d encountered in the subsurface ocean on Snowflake. How could it possibly be here? And how had it just passed through the deck above him?

  He remembered the mysterious light he’d seen in the bar with Addy almost a month ago, and he shook his head in disbelief. Either I’m dreaming, or I’ve lost my mind, he thought, watching as the luminous creature floated impossibly toward him, heedless of artificial gravity. Its bulbous body streamed hundreds of glowing tentacles, like hairs on a disembodied head. It reached for him with one snaking tendril of light, and Lucien recoiled from it, backing up against the wall behind his bed.

  Addy fell off his chest and sat up suddenly beside him.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Then she saw the creature, too, and she screamed.

  The monster thrust out its tentacles, poking them through their eyes in a blinding flash of light.

  And with that, Lucien screamed, too.

  Chapter 30

  The blinding light vanished, and the creature was gone.

  The timer on his ARCs was all flashing red zeros, but somehow he was still alive.

  “What the frek was that?” he whispered.

  “How are we not dead?” Addy asked, her eyes wide as she searched his quarters.

  Lucien mentally dialed up the brightness of the glow panels in his quarters, and swung his feet over the side of the bed to go looking for the alien they’d just encountered.

  As he stood up, he felt something prick his foot. He glanced down and saw a tiny microchip, no bigger than a crumb. He bent down to pick it up, and found another one lying beside it. He picked them both up and held them up to the light.

  “It removed our implants…” he whispered.

  “By reaching through our eyes and pulling them out?” Addy asked. “We should have holes where our eyes used to be!”

  Lucien shook his head slowly. “I don’t get it either. Maybe we fell asleep and this is a dream…”

  Addy stood up and slapped him hard across the cheek.

  “Ouch! What the frek was that for?” he demanded, holding a hand to his stinging cheek.

  “I guess it’s not a dream,” Addy decided.

  The comms crackled to life. “This is Captain Forster. All crew are to report to the main ready
room immediately. I repeat, all crew report to the main ready room immediately.”

  Lucien and Addy looked at each other.

  “Apparently we’re not the only ones who didn’t die,” he said.

  They got dressed and reported to the ship’s main ready room as ordered. Half of the crew was already there by the time they arrived. They were all standing around, arguing amongst themselves.

  Lucien led Addy to a row of empty seats at the back of the room and sat down. He spent a moment listening in on other people’s conversations. They were all discussing the same things—luminous creatures passing through walls and reaching into their heads to remove their implants.

  The doors to the room swished open and shut with a constant stream of crew filing in. Lucien hadn’t met most of them—they were civilian clerics from Tyra’s science teams and a few enlisted personnel who’d never had a chance to mingle with officers on the upper decks.

  “Everyone settle down and take your seats!” Tyra ordered in an amplified voice as she stepped up to the speaker’s podium at the fore of the ready room. “We all want to know what’s going on, but first—Pandora?” Tyra asked.

  “All crew present and accounted for, ma’am,” Pandora said, her voice reaching Lucien’s ears from somewhere nearby. He found the bot standing in the shadows at the back of the room, right beside the doors.

  “So they saved all of us,” Tyra said, nodding.

  “Who did?” an enlisted crewman asked.

  “We don’t know. We’re calling them polypuses,” Tyra replied.

  “We met them in the ocean on the last planet we explored,” Lucien said.

  “Pandora told me the same thing,” Tyra replied.

  “One of them reached through the viewports and wrapped a tentacle around my wrist,” Lucien added.

  Addy shot him a look. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I thought I was imagining things. Obviously I wasn’t.”

  “We all thought we were imagining things,” Tyra said, “But this is real. It happened, and we’re the living proof, as they say.”