Nepenthe Rising (Stars in Shadow Book 1)

by John Triptych

  “Keo for sure,” Strand said. “He’s good with hand-to-hand combat. I just need to control his impulse for violence.”

  “You’ll have to bring Maeve with you, for obvious reasons,” Zeno said. “And Dr. Hayer wants to join in too.”

  “I don’t think I want her on my strike team,” Strand said. “She tried to escape her cell when we had her detained a few days back.”

  “She could be useful though,” Zeno said. “She knows about Institute security protocols.”

  Strand let out a snort. “How do we know she won’t turn my team over to the authorities the moment she gets a chance?”

  “Don’t give her that chance,” Creull said. “Have someone watch her at all times.”

  “This mission is risky enough as it is,” Strand said. “A possible element of betrayal will just make it even tougher.”

  “It’s your call,” the captain said.

  “She asked to come and see me yesterday,” Creull said. “Dhara wants to make amends towards Maeve, who volunteered to join us, so the girl’s loyalty isn’t in question.”

  “What else did she tell you?” Viniimn asked the ship’s executive officer.

  “She wants Maeve to be free,” Creull said. “Dhara admitted she felt guilty about bringing Subject Zero over to the Institute’s headquarters, but she never really had a choice—until now, that is.”

  “Alright, I’ll think about it,” Strand said.

  18 Bonding

  Inside the Nepenthe’s secondary hangar bay, the all-terrain vehicle had begun to take shape. The main chassis was suspended in zero gravity using a rotating harness, while the orbiting robotic assembly ring continuously added more components to its frame. The small fusion powerplant was the first to be attached to the undercarriage, followed by the engine and the suspension. The pre-fabricated body of the ATV was brought over by two engineering bots from the manufacturing deck, and precisely mated together with the skeletal framework.

  Duncan Hauk floated a few meters away, his eyes focused on the holographic blueprint displayed on his wrist smartcom. It all seems so easy, he thought. All I had to do was upload the schematics into the printer module and apply the necessary modifications.

  Engineer Soessq activated the mini-thrusters of her cyber-harness to position herself next to the boy. The nytini used her own smartcom to check for any mistakes in the assembly order and found none. “Most impressive for a beginner. You seem to have adjusted quickly to how our onboard manufacturing works.”

  Hauk shrugged. “I made a mistake when we built the wheels a couple of hours ago. They weren’t heavy duty enough, so I had to send them back for reprinting.”

  “Nevertheless, this is all quite impressive,” Soessq said. “Spacer Puteri was supposed to help supervise this build, but she decided to move on to another project when she felt you had the right grasp of things here.”

  “Yeah, we’re all sort of understaffed with so many things going on,” Hauk said. “I didn’t even notice her leave.”

  “When she told me this I had to come see for myself, and I’m definitely impressed. You seem to know about these types of vehicles, I gather?”

  Hauk blushed. “I used to steal prospector ATVs like these back on my homeworld.”

  “Do not feel any shame about your past,” Soessq said. “We’re all equals here.”

  The boy typed in a series of minor adjustments on his controller link to increase the radiation shielding on the vehicle roof. “I would wait for an opportune moment, then me and my mates would hijack one of the mining vehicles if they left it unattended, or even with just a single guard. I was the smallest in my gang, so I learned how to crack and drive these things while the bigger boys would fight off the miners.”

  “A dangerous profession, not unlike what we do now,” Soessq said. “You must have harrowing stories to tell.”

  Hauk nodded. “Yup. I nearly died a few times. The money was worth it though. Once we threw off our pursuers and got it to a shop, the fence would pay us pretty well and we partied for weeks, even booking rooms in one of the plush hotels. It all came to a halt when we killed someone important.”

  “Well, you’re with a different outfit now,” Soessq said. “I would say we’re a bit better than an undisciplined gang of younglings.”

  The boy tapped his controller to initiate the final assembly sequence. “I think I’m almost done.”

  Soessq activated her visor and began scanning the nearly completed ATV in front of her. “Most impressive. You have both reinforced and kept each suspension separate. This means even if one of the wheels gets severely damaged, there should be no immediate loss of speed. Also, you’ve managed to harden the vehicle body with extra radiation and shock protection without any serious increase in its mass.”

  “I learned about vehicle suspension the hard way,” Hauk said. “One time when I stole a prospector ATV and raced it down the streets of the capital city, I must have hit a stone curb and it just broke the axle. No matter how hard I hit the accelerator it just stopped moving. We bailed out just in time and got out of there.”

  “May your fortunes be better in the next instance,” Soessq said. “I can find no major faults in this assembly project. Congratulations. You have the makings of a future engineer.”

  Hauk made a slight hiss. “I don’t think so. I still get confused by the higher-order mathematics Sappho keeps sticking into my head.”

  “Those aspects of our work will come to you with more experience,” Soessq said. “I can recommend the captain to place you full time in our manufacturing bays. There’s less of a chance you’ll get killed than if you are assigned to Lieutenant Strand’s strike teams.”

  Hauk frowned while shaking his head. “No, I would rather stay as a strike team candidate.”

  “Very well,” Soessq said. “We each choose our own paths across time. If you should ever change your mind, let me know. I would love to have you as an assistant with the engineering team.”

  “Thanks for the offer, but I feel this isn’t really what I want to do,” the boy said.

  Maeve Lindros floated through the open corridor and peered inside. “I’m really sorry for bothering you both, but I’m kind of lost down here.”

  Soessq turned to face her. “Help is always available, child. Where do you wish to go?”

  The teenage girl held up a power module. “Everybody seems so busy, so I volunteered to help. One of the other spacers asked if I could take this over to Chief Engineer Viniimn. My smartcom told me he’s in one of those maintenance accessways, but I can’t find him. I’ve been looking for almost an hour now.”

  “Duncan, why don’t you help her out,” Soessq said. “Your work here is largely done, and you can take your break afterwards.”

  Hauk nodded. “Alright.” He pushed off with his legs and drifted towards the opened bulkhead. “I think I know where he is, follow me.”

  The boy led Maeve into another set of corridors. Hauk had learned that each passageway had a standard access duct which could be opened up for maintenance, so he took her on a shorter route. The handholds were more closely spaced inside the conduits, and he glanced back to make sure she was still following him. “You okay back there?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Maeve said. She strapped the module to her belt in order to use both hands to push off, and now she was beginning to get the hang of moving around in the null gravity.

  “Just takes a while to get used to,” Hauk said. “Once you get the general layout of the ship you’ll know where everything is.”

  Maeve grunted when the module on her belt bumped against the narrow accessway, nearly making her collide with the wall, but she was able to compensate in time. “Yeah, I’ve just never experienced moving around like this before. The first time I felt zero-gees in the liner, I nearly puked.”

  Hauk couldn’t help but smile. “Me too. I only started out as part of this crew a few weeks ago.”

  “You’re name’s Duncan, right?”

&nbs
p; Hauk nodded. “Yes, one of the newbie members of this bunch.”

  “So am I; I guess it makes two of us,” Maeve said. “The other one who is paired up with you? I don’t like him.”

  “Benno? Well, quite a few others feel the same way. We’re both from the same world.”

  “I see,” Maeve said. “You’re different though.”

  “Oh? How am I different?”

  She wanted to say he looked cuter, but her shyness overcame her attraction to the boy. Maeve also happened to be older than him, so she decided to be diplomatic instead. “It seems … you’re nicer than he is.”

  “My mommy taught me to be nice to the nice ones,” Hauk said.

  She decided to change the subject since the topic of parents depressed her. “I wanted to ask about Lieutenant Strand. I tried to look for him earlier but I couldn’t find him. Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine,” the boy said. “He’s outside of the ship—on a mission.”

  “Oh, okay,” Maeve said softly. “I hope he isn’t in danger or anything.”

  Hauk chuckled. “Danger is his middle name.”

  Maeve was confused. “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, he thrives on danger,” Hauk said. “I’ve never seen anyone act so cool when death is all around him.”

  Maeve’s curiosity was piqued. “Did you do a mission with him?”

  The boy nodded as they rounded another accessway that opened up into a large corridor. “Sure did. I had to run some interference on him using an asteroid as a sort of shield.”

  “Wow, how dangerous was it?”

  “It was pretty dicey,” Hauk said. “I was able to get to him and the others just before the ship he was inside blew up.”

  “Gosh, it was that close?”

  “Uh huh,” Hauk said. “I didn’t even think how dangerous it all was until long after we were done.”

  Maeve followed him into a large chamber. The dimly lit area seemed colder than the usual temperature ranges found in the rest of the ship. Right at the center was what looked like an embedded jet-black cube the size of a small room. The strange object glowed with a bluish incandescence while surrounded by wisps of smoke. A slight humming sound could be heard emanating from it.

  The teenage girl felt a chill running through her spine while staring at the device. “What is that?”

  Hauk made it across the other side of the chamber. “It’s just the t-drive.”

  Maeve couldn’t help but be entranced by the sight of the device. “The tesseract drive, right?”

  Hauk got to an alcove which led to another maintenance accessway. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I-I thought it would be something else,” Maeve said softly. “How does it work exactly?”

  Hauk shrugged as he used his smartcom to open the hatch leading into the maintenance tube. “I’m not really too sure myself. I think the ship needs to be inside or near a shadow zone in order for it to start up.”

  “Why do they call it a tesseract?”

  The boy tried to recall what the ship’s AI had implanted into his brain a mere four days before. “Let’s see … I think a tesseract is a four-dimensional equivalent of a cube.”

  “Four dimensional?”

  “Yeah,” Hauk said. “Think of it as a cube within a bigger one, and their angles are connected to each other. The hypersurface has eight cubical cells.”

  Maeve was still confused. “What does all that mean?”

  “All I got from my learning modules is the basic explanation of how the whole thing works,” Hauk said. “I think when the t-drive is activated, the ship is encased in a tesseract made of dark energy or matter, I’m not really sure which.”

  “Okay, then what happens?”

  “Seems to me this tesseract then moves by shifting its dimensions, and since we’re inside of it we move too, but the whole thing happens faster than the speed of light,” Hauk said.

  Maeve kept her eyes on the cube. “So we move across space inside this four-dimensional square?”

  “I think so,” Hauk said, “but it seems even our best scientists don’t know how it does this. Some theories say the ship goes into another dimension before popping up in another shadow zone. Others have said the dark matter fields the t-drive uses are gateways to this other universe. Nobody really knows because it all happens in the blink of an eye.”

  Maeve remembered the Nepenthe’s recent jump. She had strapped herself down on an accelerator couch and less than a second later, she had sensed they were all somewhere else. “I read a little about this. Researchers said the t-drive is sort of like a time machine.”

  “It sure feels like it,” Hauk said. “Every time we do a jump I look at my smartcom afterwards to see how much time we took, and it looks like only half a second elapsed when we initiated the drive until we ended up at the next shadow zone.”

  “What did the AI say?”

  “Sappho? She doesn’t say anything about it other than to welcome us to our new destination,” the boy said. “I asked her about it once and she never gave me a straight answer.”

  “I read stories about the shadow zones,” Maeve said softly. “A few religious people say the spirits of the antecessors are inside of them, and they inhabit our bodies as we pass through their universe while using the t-drive.”

  “That’s creepy,” Hauk said.

  “It is. I also read about stories from people who say they were wide awake while passing into this dark dimension,” Maeve said. “They said there were visions of ghost ships in this other universe and everything was inverted, like anti-matter.”

  “I heard someone say that we pass through either heaven or hell whenever we use the t-drive,” Hauk said.

  “I read about that theory too,” Maeve said.

  “Plenty of theories but no real answers,” a voice coming from the accessway said.

  They both turned around, startled by the sudden intrusion.

  Chief Engineer Viniimn poked his long snout out of the open accessway hatch. “Sorry for surprising the both of you.”

  The shuttlecraft carrying Garrett Strand and Ripoll Keo began her deceleration at the edge of the asteroid field. The Nepenthe was over a hundred million klicks away, still partly hidden in the gaseous clouds of dark matter after arriving in the LV-246 system. Unlike the more settled regions, this vast area near the neutral zone was largely uninhabited, and served as a natural rendezvous point for all manner of clandestine business dealings.

  Sergeant Keo sat on the pilot’s chair in the small cockpit. The shuttle did have some weapons, but he felt they weren’t as well armed as a battle drone. Nevertheless, he kept his right hand close to the cargo bay command switch, ready to release the four warbots nestled inside the hold in the event of trouble.

  Lieutenant Strand noticed the youth’s hand hovering too close to the release controls. “Easy there, kid. We don’t want to alarm him.”

  Keo withdrew his hand. “Sorry, LT. I was just trying to be ready for anything.”

  “There’s really no need for it,” Strand said. “He wouldn’t have sent the proper coded message if he wasn’t coming to meet us here.”

  “So why bring the bots then?”

  “I didn’t want to,” Strand said. “But you know Commander Creull, always a stickler for procedure.”

  “Approaching the outer edge of the asteroid field,” Keo said while checking the readouts on his console. “Sensor readings are negative in regard to a ship in the area. All I’m getting are lidar and radar pings on rocks and more rocks.”

  “Anything on the heat sensors?”

  “UV and IR optical spectrometers both negative, LT,” Keo said. “Looks like he didn’t show up.”

  “He’s out here,” Strand said confidently. “He’s just showing off his stealth capabilities.”

  “So he shut down his engines and radiators after he got into the system? He must have been waiting for days on minimal power and using his heatsinks then, just like you taught us,” Keo
said.

  Strand nodded. “He was the one who taught me. I’m sure he’s still got some other tricks up his sleeve.”

  Keo gave him a surprised look. “He taught you, LT? Who is this guy anyway?”

  “His name is Xander Gunhardt, former Star Force Special Forces operative.”

  The young sergeant couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Oh yeah, what unit?”

  “VIPR,” Strand said.

  Keo’s eyes widened further. VIPR stood for Variable Infantry Point Recondo, and this elite unit was one of the most feared in the galaxy. “Jesus Antecessor. I didn’t know you were trained by a VIPR.”

  “I sure was,” Strand said. “In fact, I served for almost two years in a VIPR team.”

  Keo let out a deep breath. “And I thought you were just regular Spaceborne Infantry, LT. How come you never told me this before?”

  “You never asked.”

  The young sergeant chuckled. “I guess not. How tough was the training?”

  “Pretty much impossible,” Strand said. “Sometimes I still wonder how I made it through.”

  “I can now see why you never get stressed out whenever we’re on a mission,” Keo said.

  “Yeah, the VIPR selection and advanced training course was so tough it kind of makes everything else you do in life easy,” Strand said.

  “So this guy was like, your instructor?”

  “Sort of,” Strand said. “That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

  Keo turned his attention back to the console. “Okay. So how long are we going to stay out here?”

  Strand leaned back on the co-pilot’s chair. “Run the AI for a drift analysis of all nearby asteroids. Link up with Sappho for extra processing power so we can get this done faster.”

  Keo thrust out his lower lip while typing in new commands on the console. “You want to chart how all these space rocks move? What’s that gonna achieve?”

  “Just do it.”

  “Okay, LT,” Keo said. “Sappho is still linked with us but there’s a slight delay because of the distance. Do you want full analysis on this?”