by T J Mott
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by TJ Mott. All rights reserved.
https://www.tjmott.com
First Edition
Cover artwork by Howard David Johnson www.howarddavidjohnson.com
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
The Prince's Revenge
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
The transport clunked loudly, almost violently, as its hyperdrive disengaged and kicked the vessel out of hyperspace. It shuddered side-to-side several times as it re-stabilized in normal space, indicating that perhaps its artificial gravity system was in dire need of a tuneup, and then its motion smoothed out. The sounds of whirring gears and buzzing servos filled the cabin. Outside the windows, radiator panels began to extend away from the ship’s body. They glowed a pale red-orange light as they bled off the heat accumulated during the jump from a nearby star system.
“This is your captain speaking. We’ve exited hyperspace above Ailon and will be re-entering soon. Please stay in your seats with your seatbelts fastened until we have landed at the starport.”
The passengers were uncomfortable, but they complied and resisted the urge to move around the cabin. The vessel was a short-range interstellar transport, packed full of rows of cramped seats like a bus, with no concern for amenities or comfort. Without cabins or sleeping quarters or showers, or even privacy, such transports rarely traveled more than about ten hours.
This one had taken fourteen to make its flight.
A planet was now visible through the windows, slowly growing larger as the transport approached. It looked like a fairly typical terraformed rocky planet, although it was on the dry side. Less than a quarter of the near side was covered in water, leaving it with one sprawling, interconnected landmass that formed a single contiguous continent on at least that hemisphere. And though there were sporadic patches of green foliage, the land’s color trended towards a dusty, pale yellow-green-tan color, except for the polar regions which were locked up in snow and ice.
The transport continued to approach, and now tall, snow-capped mountain ranges were visible. Some of the peaks almost seemed to stretch into space. A line of thunderstorms hugged one side of the range. Otherwise, there were not many clouds in the atmosphere, at least not today.
The planet now nearly consumed the view. Once again, servos kicked into action. Outside, the radiator panels shifted, reorienting themselves to be parallel to the transport’s direction of travel. They clicked into place, closely spaced to each other in an arrangement that was highly inefficient in the vacuum of space, but well-suited to atmospheric conditions.
The servos shut down and a new sound appeared before the cabin could fall into silence. It grew louder, turning into a blend between an intense roar and a medium-pitched whistling. The transport’s braking thrusters had engaged, slowing it down so it could enter the planet’s atmosphere without causing dangerous compressive heating or shearing off the radiators as the air thickened around them. But inside, nobody could feel the deceleration. The artificial gravity systems compensated for that, keeping the passengers at a constant, comfortable one-G force in the expected direction.
Several seconds later, a new whistling sound appeared. This was the sound of the radiators cutting through the planet’s upper atmosphere, resonating as the panels vibrated like reeds in the wind. The radiators’ dull red glow soon faded away as the cold air quickly stripped away their heat.
The transport continued to descend and slow down. Twenty minutes later, it hovered into place and touched down at a port in Orent, the planet’s largest city. A skybridge rolled into place and mated with the transport. The hundred-some passengers began to disembark, eager to finally stand up, stretch their legs, and move around.
One man grabbed his small carry-on luggage from the overhead bins and followed the weary passengers out. Disembarking, as always, took twice as long as it should have. Then he entered the starport and waited in line at the customs checkpoint, handing over his ID card when asked. “Chad Messier,” the customs officer said while looking him over and comparing him to the ID’s picture. “And what is your business on Ailon?”
“Relief work.”
“Hmm.” The customs officer frowned. “Do you have a voucher from the Ailon Relief Foundation?” The man then handed over a sheet of paper containing his voucher, which the officer studied intently. Then he laser-scanned the ID and the letter. “Everything checks out, Mr. Messier. Welcome to Ailon.” He handed everything back to the man, who exited the checkpoint and continued into the starport.
No problems entering, no problems with my fake ID. He frowned slightly. Remember. Your name is now Chad. Fortunately, Commodore Cooper had helped him put together his fake identity, picking a name close enough to his actual name that he would respond to it. And if he uttered his real name by accident while introducing himself, it would be easy enough to gloss over.
Chad, not Thad. Thad is not welcome here. In fact, Thad Marcell would probably be executed if he was caught here.
He looked around as he stepped past the customs checkpoint. The starport was pretty fundamental, lacking in decoration, facilities, or luxuries. Light from Ailon’s weak sun filtered in through the windows on the west end, looking pale and sickly in contrast to the bright sunlight from his own homeworld of Earth.
The people around him seemed to fall into only three categories. Most wore basic, well-worn utilitarian clothing, and were probably relief workers, Thaddeus guessed. Nobody came to Ailon for vacation. The second category wore either the dark green uniform of the Ailon Federal Police Force or the brown-and-tan uniform of the Avennian Army. Some of them patrolled the building, their faces hidden behind the darkened masks of their government-issue security helmets. Others stood around, casually keeping guard.
And the remainder, the third category of people, wore simple one-piece cyan jumpsuits made of a thin, cheap fabric, with restraints around their wrists and ankles, shackled up in groups of ten which were led around by men wearing either police or army uniforms. Thaddeus shuddered.
He mentally recalled the maps of the starport he’d studied intently before making the last leg to Ailon, and tried to orient himself to his surroundings. The Ailon Relief Foundation had its own office at the north end of the building, and that was where he needed to go.
He didn’t need to wander around for long. Not many frontages existed within the starport and so the Foundation office was very easy to find. Most starports had travel agencies, vehicle rental companies, shuttle services, tourist attractions,
hotels, along with a slew of restaurants or other stores. But the Orent Starport had almost none of that. If you were here willingly, you were either part of the armed forces which kept the planet on lockdown, you belonged to the government agencies that controlled Ailon’s resources and production, or you were a relief worker with ARF.
Thaddeus entered the office and stepped up to the line of agents. A few of them were busy dealing with other arrivals, but the office was relatively empty and one agent motioned at him to approach. He walked up to the window and again presented his fake ID. The agent took his ID and laser-scanned it. “Chad Messier,” he said. His eyes darted from side-to-side as he read something on the computer screen which faced him where Thaddeus could not see it. “Welcome to the Foundation. It looks like you’ve been assigned to Clinic 12, currently stationed at the outskirts of the city.” He handed a stack of paperwork over to Thaddeus. “Sign here…and here…and here…thank you, sir. We have a car ready for you in the back. If you’ll just take your things and proceed to Car…” he paused to look at his screen, “ARF-87, the driver will take you to your destination. And thank you for volunteering with the Ailon Relief Foundation.”
Thaddeus nodded but said nothing, grabbed his bag, and proceeded to the side exit the agent pointed to. It led to a hall that exited the starport. Outside was a cramped parking lot where several small cars sat waiting. All of them were painted a glossy orange and coverd in livery declaring them to be unarmed humanitarian vehicles belonging to the Foundation. Their designations were part of the design, highly visible in bold, black-bordered white letters that ran down the cars’ sides, and so he found ARF-87 quickly. The driver stepped out and stowed Thad’s bag for him while Thaddeus examined his surroundings. The air was chilly, very dry, and breezy. Layers of dust coated everything in sight, and he figured it had been a very long time since the starport had seen rain. To him, the light levels suggested that the sun had already set and night was approaching, but the dim, red-tinted sun still hung well above the western horizon, painting the cloudless skies a pale reddish-pink color that was both beautiful and strange.
The driver finished stowing his bag and the two seated themselves in the vehicle. “So, Mr. Messier, what brings you to volunteer with ARF?” the driver asked as he pulled the vehicle onto a highway. Its motor whined intensely for several seconds as he brought it up to speed.
Thaddeus felt a lump form in his throat and tried to swallow it away. “I’m on a sabbatical,” he said. “I wanted to get away from things for a while, and decided to do some humanitarian work somewhere.”
“Well, we certainly do appreciate that, Mr. Messier. Are you familiar with Ailon’s history?”
Thad nodded grimly. More familiar than you will ever realize. He looked down at his prosthetic left hand and forearm, made of a skeletal frame of matte-black alloy, and flexed his fist a few times. It had been nearly four months since he’d lost the hand, but it still ached from time to time. It was a painful reminder of who he had become, the humanity he’d given up, and the people he’d harmed on his obsessive, relentless search for Earth.
The driver continued as if he hadn’t seen Thad’s nod. “Seventy years ago, Avennia finished terraforming Ailon and had established a mining colony here. Ailon grew, but the people were never given the rights of full Avennian citizens, and after decades of seeing the fruits of their labor all go towards advancing the lives of those elsewhere, Ailon declared independence. That was five years ago. Avennia sent troops here. It was a brutal war, and Ailon was about to be overrun. The rebels desperately arranged for a shipment of munitions, but the convoy was raided by pirates and never arrived. Now, Ailon is no longer a colony of free people, but an enslaved world where basic survival is a struggle. Shortly after the war, the Ailon Relief Foundation was created by a group of Ailonian expatriates who were appalled at how the people were treated, and wanted to provide aid for the slaves here. Now, the Foundation is the biggest relief organization here and is responsible for most of the basic necessities needed for the slaves to survive. Food, water, shelter, medical care…all of that comes not from Avennia, but from ARF. Without us, the people would die.”
Thaddeus gulped. He looked out the window as they took the highway across the Orent Starport, and watched a shuttle as it descended from space and landed. It settled down on the tarmac, its thrusters kicking up a cloud of loose dust, and came to rest maybe a hundred meters from the car. A convoy of bus-like ground transports painted in the brown-and-tan color scheme of the Avennian Army drove up to it. The shuttle’s ramp descended, and soon hundreds of slaves in cyan uniforms disembarked. Two squads of armed soldiers watched on, but even from this distance Thaddeus could tell the slaves had no fight in them. They were all thin, weak-looking, and many didn’t even wear shoes. They moved slowly and several of them stumbled and fell, dragging down their neighbors by their common shackles and chains.
The driver seemed to notice Thad watching. “That’s a moon shuttle,” he explained. “Some of the richest platinum mines in the system are on Ailon’s moon. Avennia mines it heavily to support their tech industry. But they don’t take care of the facilities. The atmosphere and gravity controls up there are not reliable, and slaves seldom last long there. Those are the survivors who are too weak to continue working there, but for every person you see there, three others died in the mines.” The driver looked forward again. “The Army brings them back to Ailon, and Foundation medical workers treat them. Those who recover will eventually be sent back into work.”
Thaddeus shook his head. It didn’t seem right for ARF to treat the slaves only to send them back to work.
He looked down at his artificial hand again. He clasped his hands together in his lap, rubbing his fingers together slowly, feeling the still-alien sensations from the crude touch sensors which gave him a new sense of feeling that his mind had not yet adapted to. And he remembered being chained up and held for auction at the Cadrian Casino while his enemies—no, some of them were his victims, he reflected bitterly—spent hours describing the pain they’d gone through because of the way he’d been willing to trample over anyone on his quest to locate Earth and present her with a stockpile of stolen weapons and technology to defend herself from the rest of the galaxy.
And then those people had bid on him. Yes, he’d been auctioned off, with bidders hoping to execute or torture him—or even worse—for what he’d done.
One group of bidders had been Ailonian refugees and expatriates. The world had lost its war for independence because of Thaddeus’s careless meddling—the pirate raid Thad’s driver had briefly mentioned—and the Ailonian bidders had wanted him tried and executed for his actions.
Another person there had been an elderly lady who claimed Thad had paralyzed her son during one of his raids, although he couldn’t even guess at when or where or even for what purpose that had happened, a sad note reminding him of just how many raids—against anyone, government, military, even civilian—he’d conducted during his time. And the elderly lady hadn’t even attempted to bid, instead merely asking for punishment according to her world’s laws. And the auctioneer had agreed to it, quickly arranging and carrying out the penalty: amputation of a hand. They’d cut it off right then and there, just below his elbow, on the auction block in front of all the bidders and spectators. They did just enough to keep him from bleeding out, offering no painkillers or bandaging or anything before continuing on and leaving him in agony for the rest of the event.
The experience at the Cadrian Casino had changed something within him. He’d returned home a very different man, in ways he still didn’t understand.
He squeezed his hands together, noting how well the prosthetic was calibrated in order to match the strength of his flesh-and-blood hand, and tried to ignore the sinking feeling within him. But it continued to grow, and he looked back out the window towards the slave shuttle as his car drove away from the starport. He watch from the distance as hundreds of weak slaves, many barely able to stand, were ma
rshaled aboard the buses by Avennian Army soldiers. Tears formed in his eyes, but evaporated quickly in the dry air.
I’m sorry. This is my fault. All of it.
Chapter 2
Commodore Cooper, the commanding officer of Marcell’s Gray Fleet, stood in his new office and looked out the window. The view made him wonder why its design even bothered with windows. He was in Marcell’s Headquarters base, which was built upon a rogue deep-space asteroid. The main operations building was not enclosed in any of the base’s domes, those domes were reserved for the residential areas. Hard vacuum existed only a few centimeters in front of him. Outside, he could make out very few features, since his window faced away from the rest of the base. There were no surface lights, and the portions of rock he could see were just barely lit by the light which escaped from windows like his own. The asteroid received very little natural illumination; the nearest star was ten light-years away and looked just like any other star in the sky.
Still, the starfield outside looked brilliant, almost as brilliant as if he were in deep space aboard his flagship, the Phantom, in his cabin with all the lights out, a view that continually enticed those who’d chosen to make their careers among the stars. There was no atmosphere to distort the view and the base itself did not generate much light pollution. Yet the bottom half of the starfield was missing, an unsettling black void where the rest of the rogue, unlit asteroid blotted out its view. With time, if he’d had the office lights out, his eyes would actually adjust well enough to faintly see the brighter parts of certain nebulas and galaxies.
The office was only temporary, though. He had his own office in the Gray Fleet groundside facilities elsewhere on the asteroid, but Admiral Marcell had left him in overall control during his sabbatical. And that meant he needed to be in the main ops building, where he could easily coordinate with the top administrators of Marcell’s Organization.
He heard the door open behind him and he knew exactly who was entering by the sounds of their footsteps. The first was Senior Captain Abano, Gray Fleet’s executive officer, whose gait was even and very soft. Like Cooper, Abano had once been a field agent, and he still moved in a way to remain quiet and unobtrusive, just like a good intelligence agent in enemy territory who did not want to draw attention to himself.