Amongst the echoes, she could just make out Flick’s voice.
“Distress signal twenty thousand kilometers away. Bringing visuals online.”
“Engage stellar drives,” Brenna said, the words croaking from her throat.
“ETA, five minutes,” Flick said.
Brenna used this time to take another shot of Equilibrium and to bring her heart rate back down. After a couple of minutes, she was starting to feel normal again. The headache remained, but she could cope with that.
Right now she just needed to be able to react and trust her training.
The video feed initially showed nothing but the deep blackness of space and the myriad stars. Flick recognized some of the constellations, which gave her a sense of their position. She controlled the camera, turning it through three hundred and sixty degrees.
The bright glare from the two opposing Crechzowski stars spun past. “Flick, magnify the source of the signal.”
The feed stopped its rotation, fixed on a point and gradually increased its zoom factor. Still nothing. Yet the signal was still being transmitted. “Flick, slow to ten percent of engine capacity. I don’t like this—where’s the freighter?”
“Scanning now, Agent Locke.”
The engines whined down, and reverse thrusters soaked up and reversed the momentum until they were coasting through empty space. Or at least, it appeared to be empty.
Before Flick could complete the scan for the freighter, which Brenna had a suspicion didn’t exist, two other ships appeared from the gloom on each flank. “There,” Brenna said. “Fore and aft, two ships. Zoom and scan for identification.”
The video feed split into two and zoomed in.
“They’re not freighters,” Brenna said, knowing now her suspicion was right and wishing she had listened to her intuition before dropping out of subspace. “It’s an ambush. Those ships aren’t Coalition.”
They didn’t look like Host-designed ships either.
They were unlike anything she had seen before: capsule like, featureless, and black. Only the light from the engines gave them visible form. And they were moving fast, closing in at frightening speed.
“Hail them,” Brenna said.
“I can’t,” Flick said. “Transmission channels are jammed.”
“Then get us the hell out of here. Activate subspace jump immediately.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. There’s some kind of interference. Subspace engines are offline and not responding.”
“Weapons systems?”
“Offline.”
Brenna swore and slammed her fist on the console.
The two ships were just a few hundred meters away now. Laser beams lit up the hull of Brenna’s ship, indicated by the thermal map on the screen above her. The lasers weren’t powerful, however. It was as if these other ships were measuring or analyzing.
Sizing us up for destruction, Brenna thought.
She was about to give more orders to the AI when the power of the ship went down, plunging the cockpit into a silent blackness. The engines cut out completely and Flick no longer responded.
Brenna swore again and realized that she was alone, with no means of communication, and two alien craft descending on her position.
In the blackness, she stumbled through the ship, trying to find the weapons locker, but realized that without power, she couldn’t access the maglock system. And the manual override required concentration and time she doubted she had.
The airlock opened. Footsteps came towards her.
Before Brenna could get her bearings, a pair of hands gripped her arms, pinning her in place. Something sharp jabbed into her neck. She couldn't scream, move, or feel her limbs as the drug shut down her consciousness.
Chapter 12
A day into the journey, Kai woke from a deep sleep and made his way to the mess room of the Piercer. Senaya was sitting with her back to the hull and looked up at him when he entered. She kicked the chair out for him and pointed to a steaming cup of coffee.
“You’re psychic now, eh?” Kai said, gratefully taking the hot beverage. He sipped the bitter but delicious coffee and hoped it would rid him of the brain fog that he always got when using Equilibrium.
“Nah, just thought you’d feel like crap too, and if you didn’t find your way here in time, I would have had two cups.”
“It’s a fair contingency,” Kai said with a smile. “So how are you feeling?”
Senaya shrugged her shoulders. “Weird. Confused. Excited. A mix of all three. It’s all a little unreal. The last couple of days have happened so quickly I’ve barely had time to make it all solid, you know?”
Kai drained half the coffee and winced as the hot liquid burned down into his stomach. It felt good, though. A kick to the system that he needed. "Yeah, I know. If someone had told me yesterday that I would be on a secret Coalition mission with the most feared smuggler in the quadrant, I would think they were having some kind of reality breakdown. And yet, here we are."
“But it feels like a blessing as much as it does a curse,” Senaya said. “If you can find your father, then it’ll be worth the weirdness, right?”
Kai stood and eased his way around the small table and poured another cup of coffee from the machine. He noticed Senaya's cup was empty and filled hers, returning to the table feeling like a whole new man.
Senaya smiled weakly as she took the cup. She looked far more tired than he felt. Her normally wide, bright eyes were half shut and looked red around the edges as though she hadn’t slept in a week.
“So," Senaya said, "about Bandar, what do you really make of him?" She kept her voice quiet and looked past Kai to the open door leading out into the main hallway of the ship.
Kai leaned forward. “I can’t decide if he’s a Coalition stooge or this terrible rogue that has somehow engineered his way into this situation for his own personal reasons.”
“I get mixed feelings," Senaya said. "Sometimes I think he's actually a decent creature beneath that frightening facade, and other times I believe it's entirely self-serving. But I guess we ought to judge him on actions, at least until we know him better."
“Well, if we’re going to do that, we can safely say he’s a thief after stealing the artifact from us.”
“That’s a fair point,” Senaya said before draining the rest of her coffee in quiet contemplation. “But on the other hand, he did help us escape the inquisitors, and he has kept and restored your father’s ship.”
“I don’t know what to think of that,” Kai said. “But there’s one thing I know,” he added, leaning closer again and lowering his voice to barely above a whisper. “I feel drawn to the artifact. Ever since we made the jump, I’ve felt a pull to it. But I don’t know how much that is to do with the effects of subspace-weirdness.”
“Well, how is this feeling manifesting?” Senaya asked. “I mean, you say you feel drawn to it. Can you describe that?”
Kai closed his eyes for a moment and focused on the feeling, trying to find the words to describe it. “I guess… it’s like I can sense a vague notion of where it is and an almost magnetic-like force connected to me, but it’s super weak, almost as if it’s not quite there.”
“Gravity is weak too, and look how that messes with things,” Senaya said.
Kai opened his eyes. “What are you suggesting?”
“Don’t fight it—follow it, and see what happens.”
“I suppose I could do that, although it doesn't take some weird connection to know where it is; we are aware Bandar has it, after all. And I doubt it's too far from his person."
Senaya stood up and stretched her short limbs. “Well, I’m heading to the workshop to plan an approach to these guild exams. Perhaps you should experiment and see where it takes you. We’ve got at least another standard day before we arrive at Parsephus; might as well entertain yourself in the meantime.”
Senaya patted him on the back as she left the mess and headed down the hallway to the workshop. Kai finishe
d up the last of his coffee and did as Senaya suggested.
He closed his eyes and stilled his mind with some basic breath meditation so that he could more easily close in on that ephemeral force. The more he focused on it, the stronger it became. He could feel its presence squirming around in his guts, so he opened his eyes and walked, following this strange intuition.
It was no surprise that it led him to Bandar’s cabin, which used to belong to Kai’s father. Bandar was snoring deeply inside. Kai tried the door, but, as expected, it was locked. He tried the manual override using the code that popped into his mind after so many years of him not thinking about it and it slid silently to the side.
Kai smiled at the thought that the great Bandar Trace hadn't known about the manual override codes because if he did, he'd surely have changed them.
The cabin was shrouded in darkness with only the pulsing green light of the sleep monitor giving the room any illumination. It took a minute or so for Kai’s eyesight to adapt.
He stepped inside and glanced at the prone form of Bandar. His chest was rising and falling at a slow but steady rate. A tube attached to a port on his left arm snaked over the bed and into the sleep monitor.
It didn’t surprise Kai that Bandar had resorted to chemical sleep to pass the time of the subspace jump. The older man struck Kai as someone who used chemicals to aid his existence wherever possible.
Given the prosthetic face and leg, he supposed Bandar had pain or adaption issues to deal with. Kai had known a couple of guys back on Zarunda who struggled to cope after a full cybernetic limb replacement. It took the brain some time to adjust. The cybernetic, no matter how good, could never entirely replace the muscle reaction of a real limb.
Not wanting to waste any time, Kai followed his gut feeling and moved around the bed towards a built-in cabinet. His hand hovered between drawers. He focused on the feeling and opened the bottom drawer. An interior amber light clicked on, bathing the contents in orange light. Kai rummaged through the cargo pants and towels until he found it.
The artifact was there, wrapped in a pair of socks.
It wasn’t the only thing Kai found, however. Wrapped in cloth, at the rear of the drawer, were two photographs in thin metallic frames. They both showed Bandar Trace as a much younger man and dressed in a Coalition infantry uniform. The other man was instantly recognizable: Kai’s father, Kendal Locke.
In one of the images, Bandar and Kendal were standing side by side, both smiling and carrying assault rifles. Behind them was the colossal wreckage of a downed Host destroyer on some desert planet.
The second image showed Bandar and Kendal at an award ceremony. The pair of them smiled for the camera. There was an inscription on the photography, but the frame obscured it. Kai considered stealing the image, but he heard Bandar mumble something in his sleep.
His heart rate jumped and his muscles tensed. He remained deathly still and hoped he hadn’t made too much noise. Bandar continued to mumble in his sleep, the words unintelligible, but Kai was sure one of them was Kendal.
Kai decided he’d risked enough and, still gripping the artifact, quickly replaced the photos, carefully slid the drawer shut, and crept out of the room, closing the door behind him with the same override code.
Kai took a deep breath when he heard no sounds of movements from with the room.
He decided to go back to his own cabin and investigate the artifact, mostly to take his mind off the photos and what they might mean, which he couldn’t yet grasp. It wasn’t a huge surprise to see Bandar and his father together, though—that would at least explain how Bandar got the Piercer.
But the fact that Bandar hadn’t yet told Kai that he knew his father during the war left the question of why. What would it have mattered? What was Bandar hiding from Kai? And did his mother know? If so, why didn’t she say anything?
He couldn’t piece it together with anything satisfying, so like most Coalition business, he put it to the back of his mind and planned to find out more when they got to Parsephus.
In the meantime, he entered his cabin and sat on his bed. He held the artifact in his palm and closed his eyes. He no longer felt that compulsion in his gut. He had the item and all was well, but what did it mean? Was it just a psychosomatic effect of subspace travel?
Was the item warm in his hand, or was it just the effects of breaking into Bandar’s room still lingering? It seemed lighter than he remembered too. Which was, of course, stupid. The gravity on the ship was equalized via the momentum soaks to match that of Zarunda, so there was no reason for a piece of solid matter to have changed weight.
Kai opened his eyes and switched on a lamp to investigate it further. It looked exactly as it did when he had found it in the crashed Host ship. He rotated it and inspected the matte black surfaces. There were still no marks of any kind on any of the four sides.
One thing he did notice, however, was that one of the sides was smaller in total area than the other three. Namely, the base of the object. The other three sides, which made up the pyramid element, were slightly longer so that it seemed as though the object had a right way up. If he held one of the longer surfaces flat on his palm, it just seemed a bit off with the base being on the side.
A quick measure with a holoscroll app confirmed it.
The base surface was exactly nine percent smaller than each of the other three sides. He placed the base on his palm and continued to analyze it to see if there were any other small secrets to be found.
After a few minutes of not finding or thinking of anything else, he gave up and placed the artifact on the nightstand next to his bed. He sat back and rested against the pillows, letting his mind ponder what the Blackstar device might have done. If his father was tasked to find it, Kai assumed that it was probably a weapon or something that could be used as such.
Thoughts came and went as his mind considered a variety of ideas, some more absurd than others. Then he starting thinking about what lay beyond the veil and why the Navigators cut those planets off from the rest of the galaxy.
What if it wasn’t to prevent anyone from getting in, but rather to stop something from getting out?
The instant that thought came to him, the tetrahedron buzzed for a split second and then the three longer sides briefly glowed with symbols Kai didn’t recognize. Before he could reach for it on the nightstand, they turned black again, and the artifact appeared as though nothing had happened at all. Was it just a subspace hallucination?
When he closed his eyes, he could still see the residual ghost images of those glowing yellow symbols, until, like the device itself, they faded to black, making him wonder if they were real or imagined.
Bandar opened his eyes the moment Kai left the room and smiled to himself.
Kai had proved that he was connected to the artifact. Despite Brenna and Lopek’s doubt on the topic, Bandar was right; the tetrahedron did belong to Kai in some intangible manner. Brenna would be relieved.
This was an encouraging development, and Lopek would be satisfied with the progress. Things were going to plan despite a few setbacks.
Bandar just hoped that Marella Maio was still alive.
Chapter 13
In the darkness and sitting on the cold steel surface of a cot, Brenna stretched her arms and legs as far as the restraints would allow in order to get some blood to her numb extremities.
Her back ached, and her legs felt heavier than normal. A sharp pain pulsed behind her eyes, and her whole body vibrated with a toxic mix of Equilibrium and whatever her assailants had injected her with. To make things worse, the semi-incorporeal feeling of subspace travel permeated every cell of her body.
Whoever had taken her, they were not hanging around the scene of the crime.
The restraints were made from some kind of carbon weave and tethered her to a featureless wall. They allowed little movement beyond permitting her to sit up or lie down on the unfurnished cot.
Metallic clasps around her wrists and ankles featured no obvious loc
ks or mechanisms.
She shivered but couldn’t tell if this was due to the temperature of the room or her body trying to cope with the situation. Although she had been exposed to torture training, there was only so much one could prepare for.
She ran the scenarios through her mind, as per her training, but nothing useful came to her. While she was here, restrained, there was little else to do other than get her bearings, so she took an inventory.
The room was chillier than nineteen degrees—typical for her ship.
Various smells came to her, many of which she couldn’t identify other than stale sweat and the coppery scent of blood, probably hers from the assault.
The room hummed with the distant purr of subspace engines.
Her own breath sounded loud in her head. Her chest rattled with each inhalation—a side effect of too much Equilibrium. That wasn’t much of a concern, though. She had bigger things to consider, like her escape—if there even was a way out.
The room, although dark, wasn't completely black. Even with her vision receptor upgrades, she couldn't see much of interest. The walls were smooth with no windows or visible sign of an exit. Dark patches blotched the floor's surface. Her imagination suggested blood as the likely culprit, but it could well have been excrement or any number of other alien excretions.
As she swept her attention across the room, looking for anything that might give her a sense of place or, at the very least, a clue as to who kidnapped her, she heard a quiet ruffling sound.
Brenna held her breath and listened.
The ruffling noise came again. This time she got a sense of where it had originated and spotted movement on the other cot. Someone—or something—was there.
Brenna’s body stiffened. She continued to hold her breath until her lungs hurt. She let out the air long and slow, remaining still, focusing her vision on the other cot.
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