by Ian Whates
“Initially, despite not being as instinctively social as your species, many of us stayed in contact, using the long-established communications networks of our people. But as the centuries passed we grew further apart, more insular and reclusive. Slowly, we lost touch. My people are long-lived but not immortal. Over time, my fellows’ essences faded, their homes shrunk as things fell into disrepair, were forgotten and failed. These increasingly inward-looking individuals would gather the remaining ‘treasures’ more closely to them, until only the hardiest of technology survived in far smaller surrounds, overseen by mere fragments of the beings who had once lived there.
“The caches,” Drake said.
“Indeed. Each cache is a lingering remnant of a vast city, a culture, the concentrated echo of my people. They are the fossils of my race, surviving long after our bones have turned to dust.”
“So the caches were never a benevolent legacy from a long vanished race bequeathed to help their distant successors, which is what many of my own people have always argued.”
“No, not at all. They were for the comfort of our own stay-behinds, at least primarily. At the same time, we knew that these stay-behinds would age and eventually die, while many of our achievements were likely to outlast them. We also foresaw that the stay-behinds’ fading would offer an opportunity for a particular threat to arise. Among those who chose to remain were a number of individuals who were psychologically… unusual for my people. It came to our attention that one or two extreme individuals were attempting to ‘play the system’ by maintaining a greater degree of integrity over a longer period. Were they to succeed, there was a possibility one of them might come to dominate their fellow remainers and form a composite intelligence, thereby posing a threat to emerging sentient civilisations.
“This was by no means a likely scenario and there was only so much that could be done to counter such a threat – we were making provisions for a far distant future long after the Elder exodus – but we put in place what measures we could, against the day they were needed.”
“Lenbya and the Dark Angels.”
“Indeed. If a composite built from the psyches of several cache guardians were ever going to appear, it could only do so now, as the stay-behinds aged and failed, leaving them vulnerable. It would also be dependent on a specific set of circumstances, requiring an emergent race to be seeking out and exploiting the cache sites, in the process providing the necessary cross pollination of the scattered guardian entities.”
“And by taking Mudball with me on my missions for First Solar, I was the vector of that process,” Drake murmured, faced with the full implications of his actions.
“If not you, it would have been somebody else. The responsibility is not yours but ours, and we could not allow such an act to be our final legacy. Unleashing ancient tyranny on a young sentient species would be a contradiction of all that we believed in. Therefore we created Lenbya, a concentration of our technology and achievements that dwarfed any other cache. The scale was necessary in order to support and sustain an entity that would represent a far more complete and enduring echo of my people. Me.
“To safeguard the treasures stored here, we then removed Lenbya from known space, to be hidden within its own pocket of reality, a fold in the fabric of the universe that could never be discovered by accident.”
“How were we able to find it, then?”
“You were allowed to. In order for a composite being to form in the first place, and then to present a genuine threat once it had, this hypothetical monster would need allies among the emergent race. To combat that, Lenbya’s guardian would need allies of its own – contemporary sentients with certain advantages over the standard technology of their race, beings who could employ with a degree of skill and understanding aspects of our surviving technology, to defend Lenbya when needed.”
“So you deliberately created the Dark Angels to protect the legacy of your race from misappropriation,” Drake said.
“Yes, and to safeguard the development of your own race as a consequence. Unfortunately, my timing, though accurate in a cosmic sense, was sufficiently out that it proved necessary to pause the process. The Dark Angels were equipped and primed a decade ago but no adversary had shown itself. In such a situation, with all the advantages Lenbya’s technology afforded you, the Dark Angels could themselves have become a threat to the stability of your people.”
“So you manipulated us into disbanding.”
“Yes. It was necessary.”
Drake found he couldn’t resent the alien for that.
“Tell me, did the other team – our Xter counterparts – know all of this?
“No more than you did. I am having a similar conversation with the captain of the Demon’s Breath at this precise moment. Our civilisation was vast and its residue, the cache sites, is spread widely over an area that encompasses both human and Xter space and beyond. Your two races are at comparable stages of development. That alone is an extremely unlikely occurrence, given how rare the evolution of sentient life is, but inherent within the concept of ‘unlikely’ is the acknowledgement that it remains possible.
“What couldn’t be foreseen was in which region of space the composite being would arise, should it ever do so. Because of this, I deemed it prudent to recruit and equip teams of potential allies among both races.”
Drake could appreciate the logic in that. “And, as things turned out, it’s just as well you did.”
“Indeed. It was unfortunate that the Mudball composite managed to ally itself with such a well-established and effective organisation as Saflik. All our resources were needed to thwart its ambitions.”
“Why me?” Drake wanted to know. “Why did you choose to reveal Lenbya to us, to my ship and crew, out of all those who must have come looking for it?”
“It would be simple to say that you were in the right place at the right time, but there was a great deal more to the decision than that. You are quite correct. A number of vessels came here in response to the carefully seeded rumours, clues and legends of Lenbya that have been spread throughout your culture.”
“So you deliberately cultivated the myth,” Drake said. He’d always wondered. In order for tales of the ultimate Elder cache to have become so embedded in spacer lore, somebody must have been here before, or had contact of some sort with the place.
“Yes. That seemed to be the most effective method of attracting and sustaining interest without revealing irrefutable proof of Lenbya’s existence.”
“Interest from the greedy and the gullible, perhaps,” Drake said.
“It brought you to me, didn’t it? As you doubtless appreciate, my race perfected technologies which are far in advance of your current level. What is preserved here represents a fragment of what we were, but it includes sufficient resources for me to infiltrate ships’ systems without alerting the crew, and examine the records pertaining to previous actions.”
Drake recalled how adept Mudball had been at doing much the same thing, which had proven invaluable on more than one occasion over the years.
“This enabled me to examine and reject several vessels and their crew as unsuitable candidates, prior to your arrival.”
“Really? What had we done to merit your faith, then?”
“I found in your ship’s data systems details of an incident that occurred in the Saeka 7 system, involving a ship called the Belmont Star.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that. You sacrificed potential profit – a significant profit at that – in order to aid a stricken vessel. You saved lives at the cost of your own self-interest.”
“It wasn’t really that altruistic,” Drake insisted. “The owners of the Belmont Star compensated us generously for our losses.”
Their cargo had been time-sensitive, the delay caused by the need to get injured crew from the damaged ship to the nearest medical facility ensuring that the goods perished before delivery.
“But t
here was no guarantee that they would,” Raider said. “You acted as you did because it was the right thing to do.”
“Anyone would have done the same.”
“I can assure you that is far from the case and that not all would have done.”
“And you selected us to become the Dark Angels because of that single well-intentioned act? Despite other examples you must have come across which would have cast us in a decidedly less favourable light?”
“All very true, but the Belmont Star incident showed you to be capable of compassion, of thinking and acting contrary to your own advantage if need be, which set you apart from the other crews I’d evaluated.”
Drake wasn’t sure what to say. It had never occurred to him that stopping to rescue the Belmont Star – an event he had all but forgotten about – was directly responsible for so much of what had followed, both in his own life and the lives of his crew.
Who was it that said no good deed ever went unpunished? Apparently, some did.
Jen:
The electric bike purred to a stop as Jen pulled up outside a sleepy taverna just off the beach. Azure sea, golden sands, and sunshine: a combination that was hard to better. Especially for someone whose horizons had been limited to a ship’s bulkhead in recent times. As she stepped off the bike and stretched her cramped limbs and back, a soft breeze blew in off the water, taking the edge off the late summer’s heat.
A man stood up from a table on the taverna’s terrace and strode across to meet her. He wore faded shorts and a white cotton shirt, and looked a little broader about the waist than she remembered. They embraced, and kissed.
“You look as if you’ve lost weight,” he said as they separated.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been getting a lot of exercise. You, on the other hand, look as if you’ve put a bit of weight on.” She patted his stomach.
“Yeah, well, when it comes to exercise…” and he gestured towards a mostly-consumed platter of seafood on the table he’d just vacated. “I haven’t.”
“I don’t know, take the farmer away from the farm, and he goes to seed.”
“Guilty as charged.”
They strolled across the sand towards the ocean, his arm draped around her shoulders, hers around his waist, stopping at the boundary so that the bolder waves just reached far enough to lap at their toes. They didn’t say much – they didn’t need to – stories and explanations could wait until later. For now, it was enough that they were together again. Jen had forgotten how calming Robin’s presence could be, how right it felt to be with him. How he made her safe.
After a few minutes spent in contented silence, they headed back to the taverna, holding hands. They arrived just as another bike drew up alongside Jen’s.
As the rider dismounted, Jen let go of Robin’s hand and ran across to the other woman, embracing her, laughing. Jen then brought her across to where he waited.
“Lees, this is Robin, my husband. Robin, this is Leesa, my dearest friend. We lost touch for a long while, but that’s not going to happen again.”
Leesa shook his hand in a strangely formal way, saying, “So you’re the man Jen considers worth committing her life to.” Her broad smile smoothed away any edges from her words. “Pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise,” he replied. “And no, I’ve no idea what she sees in me either.”
The two women took seats at the table on the terrace – the plate of shellfish debris having been spirited away during the stroll down to the water’s edge – while Robin went inside to organise some drinks.
“He’s got a really good feel about him,” Leesa said.
“Is that your way of saying you like him?
Leesa grinned. “Probably.” She gazed back and forth along the beach. “So, this is where you’ve made a home, then.”
“Pretty much. Our farm was further inland, away from the coast, but the vibe here is much the same.”
Leesa nodded, staring out to sea. “I envy you. I’ve never really settled down, never just kicked back and relaxed, not even in the decade in between…” Her words trailed off, and Jen guessed she was thinking of the captain; as she did, frequently. “There was always something to do,” Leesa continued, “something to achieve, something to chase.”
“You should try it some time,” Jen said. “Just let go.”
“I’m not sure I’d know how to.”
“Hang around here with us for a while and we’ll show you how it’s done. You never know, you might surprise yourself.”
Leesa didn’t say anything for a while. The two women sat in comfortable silence, contemplating the ocean. Laughter drifted to them from inside the tavern. Jen recognised Robin’s voice and suspected they might have to be patient where the drinks were concerned.
At length, Leesa said, “Do you mean it?”
“Of course I do.”
“You know, I might just take you up on that.”
About the Author
Ian Whates lives in a quiet cul-de-sac in an idyllic Cambridgeshire village, with his partner, Helen, and a bonkers cocker spaniel called Bundle. He writes science fiction, fantasy, and occasionally horror, and has been known to edit the same. Dark Angels Rising is his eighth published novel, tenth if you include two that were co-authored. In addition to novels, his novella The Smallest of Things appeared from PS Publishing in 2018 and he has seen some seventy of his short stories published in a variety of venues. Many of these have been collected into four volumes, most recently 2019’s Wourism and Other Stories (Luna Press).
Ian has edited more than thirty anthologies, and his work has been shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award and on three occasions for BSFA Awards. In 2019, he was honoured with the Karl Edward Wagner Award from the British Fantasy Society and was also shortlisted for the SFW Author Award. His novel Pelquin’s Comet, first of the Dark Angels trilogy, was an Amazon UK #1 best seller, and his work has been translated into Spanish, German, Hungarian, Czech and Greek.
In 2006 Ian founded award-winning independent publisher NewCon Press by accident, and has now published over 130 titles via the imprint; a fact that continues to bemuse him.
www.newconpress.co.uk
https://ianwhates.co.uk/
The Dark Angels Trilogy
Pelquin’s Comet: In an age of exploration, the crew of the freetrader Pelquin’s Comet – a rag-tag group of misfits, ex-soldiers and adventurers – set out to find a cache of alien technology, intent on making their fortunes; but they are not the only interested party and find themselves in a deadly race against corporate agents and hunted by the authorities. Forced to combat enemies without and within, they strive to overcome the odds under the watchful eye of an unwelcome guest: Drake, agent of the bank funding their expedition, who is far more than he seems and may represent the greatest threat of all.
The Ion Raider: As Corbin Drake receives his most unusual assignment for First Solar yet – one which he suspects is a trap but knows he can’t refuse – his former crew, the notorious brigands known as the Dark Angels, are being hunted down one by one and murdered. Determined to find those responsible before they find her, Leesa teams up with Jen, another former Dark Angel, and together they set out to thwart the mysterious organization known as Saflik, little dreaming where that path will lead them.
“A good, unashamed, rip-roaring piece of space opera that hits the spot…” – The Financial Times
“A natural story-teller, Whates works his material with verve, obvious enjoyment, and an effortlessly breezy prose style.” – The Guardian
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