Blackstar Command 1: Prominence

by A. C. Hadfield

  Closing her eyes, Brenna willed herself to relax, comforted to know that Kai was alive and on Kendal’s trail. Despite the war now under way, she had confidence that he would succeed.

  However, if he failed…

  She tried not to think about that. Instead, she reverted to her training and ran as many potential scenarios of her rescue as she could, visualizing how she would tackle each one.

  Sweat pooled on her forehead. The pipe a few inches above was cascading warmth into the claustrophobic space. It wasn’t ideal, but she couldn’t risk trying to find somewhere more suitable to hide. No, here she would stay and wait, and then she would act when the time came.

  Chapter 19

  Over a day of deep sleep later, Kai woke up in his bunk, feeling refreshed.

  The ship’s complement of nanite health recovery modules helped ease his aches and pains. Sadly, even they couldn’t do anything to help with the shock of losing Bandar. His actions to allow Kai, Marella, and Senaya to escape proved that the old rogue was more than just his reputation.

  Kai thought back to the photos he’d seen of his father and Bandar celebrating their victory in some battle with the Host. It appeared, all along, that Bandar Trace was more than just someone to be feared; he was a legitimate hero who had earned all the respect in the world.

  Kai certainly appreciated what he had done.

  And he was determined not to let him down now.

  He had sent a message to Lopek with a report of what had happened and a request for an update of his mother and the situation with the Host. The reply still rattled around in his head. Although it was the written word and therefore a little difficult to read someone’s emotional state, it still felt cold to him in light of what had happened. It read:

  It’s imperative you reach Oberus and continue your search for the Blackstar. Trace's sacrifice will be remembered, but it's not the time to let sentimentality divert your attentions. Your mother is safe and on a classified mission. I'll have an update for you in due course. The war is now officially started. Three fronts have opened up across the Lasides Quadrant peace zone.

  The Host’s forces are significantly larger than our intelligence had us believe. Capsis Prime is under threat; a shrain agent was recently apprehended. The fear is our defensive capabilities have been compromised. The severity of which is currently being ascertained. Host ships have entered Capsis space.

  It is crucial, Kai, that you succeed in your mission. If the Blackstar is as powerful as we believe it is, you can turn the tide and provide us with the power we need to win this war. Without it… we can only hope our superior strategic training will stand up to the Host’s greater numbers and alliance with the shrain.

  Report in with me as soon as you have anything concrete.

  — Captain Lopek

  The odds seemed against the Coalition, but one thing Kai had learned from his racing days was that a plan only lasted as long as the first ship got shunted out of the track. Sure, it looked like the Host had got the jump on the Coalition, but there was a long way to go yet.

  He had the tetrahedron in his pocket, and for some unknown reason that gave him an inner confidence. It didn’t mean he would find the Blackstar, and even if he did, it didn’t mean they’d be able to use the Navigator technology to win the war. But there was something about having an object that ancient on his person that made him sense he could yet have an effect on the outcome.

  What that would be, he didn’t know.

  He was no soldier like Bandar or his father, and he was no agent like his mother.

  But perhaps that was to his advantage.

  Either way, he was clearheaded in what he had to do, even if he didn’t know exactly how to go about it. Like everything in his life up until now, he’d just have to wing it and figure it out as he went.

  It had gotten him this far.

  It had gotten him Marella Maio and a luxury cruiser to take them to his father’s last known location. He felt it in his guts that he was getting closer.

  Kai left his bunk and traveled along the corridor to the recovery bay, experiencing none of the usual side effects of subspace travel. The ship’s superior tech provided outstanding dampening, as he had hoped.

  The door to the recovery bay opened and he stepped inside.

  A calming diffused light illuminated cream panels along the walls of the five-meter-square room. The hygienically active polymer floor was warm beneath his feet.

  Marella and Senaya were sitting in comfy-looking leather armchairs. Two steaming cups of coffee sat on a glass table between the chairs.

  “Hey, you're up," Senaya said, dashing over to him and throwing her arms around him. He hugged her back for the first time in a while and smiled. He let her go, and she stepped back. "It's good to see you again. We thought you might never wake up," she said.

  He shrugged. “I guess the nanites needed time to do their thing. How are you two doing?”

  “I’m good,” Senaya said. “The ship is ridiculously luxurious. It’s even got laundry services.”

  Her familiar multi-pocketed outfit did look a lot cleaner than normal, and she no longer smelled of machine oil and grease.

  “And you?” Kai said, looking over to Marella. “How’s the…” He gestured to her stomach.

  “Almost healed,” she said, avoiding his gaze, her bashfulness surprising him.

  “Come and sit and have some coffee,” Senaya said, grabbing his arm and dragging him to the chairs. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do. We’ve been strategizing. Bandar’s sacrifice can’t be wasted, right?”

  “Indeed," Kai said, taking a cup of coffee and inhaling its bitter scent. He looked over the rim at Marella, and she finally caught his eye, giving him a kind of half smile. "But first, before we get to that, let's have a chat. I've got questions."

  Marella must have sensed he was talking about her. She sat back, folded her hands in her lap and nodded. “Go on, ask me anything,” she said. “Then I have some questions for you two.”

  “That’s only fair,” Senaya said. “It’s all been a bit of a whirlwind.” And then to Kai, “We’ve only been awake for a few hours, so we haven’t really got into anything heavy. We thought we ought to explore the ship first and see what we’ve got access to.”

  “That's good thinking," Kai said after downing half the mug of coffee and relaxing back into his chair. "Okay, Marella, first of all, we know a little about you from your time with my father. Captain Lopek gave us an intel file, but beyond that, I guess I just want to know what it is that you know about the Navigators and how you ended up traveling with my father."

  She leaned forward and took a breath. “Well, it all started about eight years ago when I completed my doctorate in space history. By then I was a bona fide expert on what we knew about the Navigators. In truth, it’s not a great deal more than what the general public knows; we’ve very little to go on beyond a handful of artifacts and written documents.”

  Senaya asked, “So it’s true that the Navigators were the ones who created the barrier to the two inner galactic rings of planets and were responsible for our subspace tech?”

  “Yeah, that’s true. Or at the very least is the main theory. There’s little to suggest otherwise.”

  “Okay,” Kai said, now conscious of the tetrahedron in his pocket but wanting to question Marella first before showing it to her. “So you finish your studies, you’re regarded as an expert and then… my father. How’d that happen? How’d this discovery of the Blackstar’s existence come about?”

  “Your father found a Navigator artifact after a battle on a distant moon out near the veil,” Marella said. “He didn’t know it was such a thing at the time. It was only when I was on my travels to the same moon to research some ruins there that he realized.”

  “These ruins,” Senaya said, “were they Navigator ruins?”

  Marella shook her head. "That was a bust, unfortunately. After a few days, I identified it with an old race belonging to that
system. Their lack of historical evidence made it more mysterious than it ultimately turned out to be."

  “So this object,” Kai said, “what did it look like?”

  “A small three-sided pyramid. Your father thought it was just some random object, perhaps even part of a child’s game. A counter or a token. But one night, we were talking in a bar—he was helping to provide security to the dig, that’s how we first met—the conversation turned to the Navigators, and we did what everyone does after drinks.”

  “Sleep with each other?” Senaya said, shocked.

  Marella gasped. “No… I meant we speculated about the Navigators.” She looked away for a moment, but then returned her gaze to Kai. “I want to make it absolutely clear that I had no relationship other than a professional one with your father, Kai.”

  “I believe you, but that’s really none of my business,” he said. “Go on… you were speculating, and then what happened?”

  “Well, Kendal had the object in his hand, just fiddling with it absentmindedly as we talked and drank the night away when the thing flashed. Symbols appeared on the sides."

  “And did it stay that way?” Kai said, inching forward on his chair.

  “No, as soon as we saw them, they faded to black. But in that short time, I was convinced I recognized some of the symbols. Later, we managed to make them appear again, and I cross-referenced them with my research. It was undeniable. What we had was a Navigator object, but not only that, we knew that it was a key to something much larger."

  “The Blackstar?” Kai asked.

  “Yes. In the same place, we also found a fragment of a Navigator data cache that ultimately confirmed it. There was a partial schematic of the Blackstar, and the little pyramid was a key to access it. There was also a set of coordinates."

  “To our current destination?”

  “Yeah, a moon known to the Coalition as Oberus. A nothing rock with almost nothing of interest on it at all, apart from one thing: an ancient Navigator facility.”

  “There’s one more thing,” Kai said, fishing into his pocket and pulling out the tetrahedron. “I have the artifact.”

  Marella smiled, and a focused eagerness sharpened her eyes. "Your father got it to you! That's great news. I think this is going to work out well."

  Chapter 20

  Exactly ten hours later, Kai, Senaya, and Marella were forced back in their respective seats as their cruiser dropped out of subspace travel.

  The ship’s internal dampening technology created a field around the vessel, reducing the often-jarring experience of subspace exit, but the momentum still hit Kai hard, squeezing his internal organs and crushing the air from his lungs.

  A moment passed; Kai lurched forward, coughing, spluttering, and heaving for breath. To his right, Senaya was doing the same. Behind them, Marella gripped her stomach and grimaced.

  “Are you okay?” Kai called out.

  She nodded while keeping her eyes shut against obvious discomfort.

  “Approaching destination,” the ship’s AI blurted out, the sound echoing around the expansive, luxurious cockpit.

  “On screen,” Senaya said between coughs.

  A curved screen appeared on the cream-colored wall at the front of the cockpit. Kai looked up and took in the dull moon of Oberus. It hung in orbit around a swirling gas giant without an official designation. The system’s sun was classified as a white dwarf, but like its orbiting gas giant, it too had no official name.

  “Has this ship got planetary scanners?” Kai asked Senaya.

  “Yeah,” she said, sliding her seat forward so that she was more easily able to manipulate the holographic console. “I saw mention of it in the equipment inventory when I was snooping around. I’ll stabilize our approach first and then get the scans up and running.”

  “I can tell you that it’s pretty warm down there,” Marella said. She stood from her seat and stretched her arms above her head, and something in her neck clicked. “That’s better.”

  “The stomach staples holding up?” Kai asked.

  “Yeah, seems so. My whole body is protesting, but it’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before.” She smiled at Kai, a gesture of reassurance that he appreciated. He didn’t need something else to worry about as he followed in his father’s footsteps.

  “Scanners up and running,” Senaya said. “Should have a report in a few moments.”

  “Thanks, Sen. Marella, what’s the atmosphere like? Gravity?”

  “Gravity is a little higher than Capsis Prime—makes it tiring to walk but nothing too strenuous. The atmosphere is thin but not toxic. The oxygen levels are relatively even, but we had air tanks when we visited anyway just to be safe.”

  The screen scrolled a list of findings as the indistinct brown rock of the moon grew larger on the video feed. A countdown timer indicated they would enter the atmosphere within a few standard minutes.

  “Looks pretty barren and uninteresting from the data,” Senaya said. “All as Marella said. The temp is a bit warm, but nothing worse than what we’re used to during a Zarundan summer.”

  “Water? Signs of life?” Kai asked.

  “There’s a water table, some bodies of water on the south pole, and precipitation in areas around the moon.”

  “Great, we come all this way to find that it’s raining.”

  “Same as when I was here,” Marella said. “Made the going a bit tricky with the mud; it gets real slippery in places. The dirt clings to the rocks like mucus.”

  “You’re really selling it to me,” Kai said. “No wonder this crappy place has gone mostly unknown for all this time. What about life-forms? With an atmosphere, suitable temperatures, and water, there must be life there, right?”

  “Yeah,” Marella said. The shade crossed her face again as though recalling some terrible previous time.

  “Don’t tell me there are giant spiders,” Senaya said. “I hate spiders.”

  Marella laughed. “No, nothing as bad as that. Just some small predatory mammals with bad tempers and some, well, squid-like things in the cave pools. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  “Whenever someone says that, it often turns out to be the exact opposite,” Senaya said. “I’m taking as much weaponry as I can carry just to be on the safe side.”

  “Ditto that,” Kai said. “I’m beyond taking anything for granted anymore. We go expecting the worst. And given we’re landing shortly, I suggest we get tooled, tanked, and suited up right away.”

  Marella had provided Kai with a rough map of the area where she had last seen his father. Given the terrain, the closest they could land was a half-hour trek away. With three hours left of its day cycle, this would give them plenty of time to explore before having to turn back.

  Despite the ship being luxurious in almost every aspect, it didn’t have an accompanying ground vehicle, requiring them to traverse on foot.

  It wasn’t a huge issue; their suits were light and easy to maneuver about in, and their air tanks were good for more than three hours as they mixed the supply with the surrounding air.

  An internal communication network meant they could remain in touch even if they got separated. Kai’s HUD overlaid the map as well as the ship’s, Senaya’s, and Marella’s locations. If one of them got separated, as long as their transceiver wasn’t damaged, he’d be able to find them and vice versa.

  “Testing,” Kai said as he stepped off the ramp and onto the moon’s rocky surface. “Can you guys hear me okay?”

  “Sure can,” Senaya said, her voice filling his helmet in full high-definition sound.

  “Yeah, I can hear you both okay,” Marella said. “You getting me?”

  Kai confirmed and then made sure his P&G was fully loaded. A backup pistol was securely in a hip holster. An electrified extendable baton hung on his left to counter the weight and provide him with a melee option if it came to it. “Sen, your weapons ready to go?”

  “Always. Just point out what I need to shoot, and I'll pull the triggers."
r />   “Marella? You okay with that rifle?”

  “I might be a science historian, but life on Parsephus gave me some new skills. You don’t have to worry about me. I know my way around a Kanellikof assault rifle. But let’s be careful; we don’t need to shoot everything that moves. Most things here are harmless to us.”

  “Most?” Senaya said, joining Kai.

  Marella stepped to the other side and smiled at them both. “We were only here for a short while, so I can’t rule out everything. What we saw was nothing to worry about—but who knows what’s out there really?”

  “Okay, enough of the scare stories,” Kai said. “Let’s move. I’ll take the lead. Marella, you advise me if I start to head in the wrong direction or something.”

  “Will do.”

  "Sen, can you instruct the AI to raise the ramp and keep its planetary drive operational. Oh, and change the security codes in the unlikely event there's someone here who wants a simple way off the surface."

  Kai couldn’t take any chances; not when he had come this far.

  “I’m on it, Kai,” Senaya said before communicating with their ship’s AI.

  Using the HUD map for directions, they set out. Kai led while Senaya and Marella stayed close by, chatting softly about their observations.

  Kai, however, remained focused. He studied the geography as he walked, looking at the ground and on the tops of rocks to see if he could spot a glove or footprint that might have belonged to his father.

  Ten minutes into the trek, rain dripped down his face mask, activating the automatic wiper and the internal heating element to prevent fogging. At least it brought the temperature down, so it wasn’t so stifling.

  “Look at that,” Senaya said, pointing ahead of them. “Above that mountain, looks like dark green and blue phantoms twisting in the sky.”

  “We saw those last time,” Marella said. “Kendal mentioned that they were just electrical interactions with the magnetic field around the moon.”