Our Dark Stars

by Audrey Grey

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Authors

  Our Dark Stars

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ISBN print: 978-1-945519-17-8

  ISBN ebook: 978-1-945519-18-5

  Copyright © 2018

  http://audreygrey.com/

  http://www.krystal-wade.com/

  Cover design by

  https://www.wegotyoucoveredbookdesign.com/

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use materials from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permissions must be obtained by contacting the publisher at info@blazepub.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Blaze Publishing, LLC

  64 Melvin Drive

  Fredericksburg, VA 22406

  Visit us at www.blazepub.com

  First Edition: March 2018

  .

  Chapter 1

  3731 AD

  Will

  Will Perrault stared at the cluttered minefield just beyond the starscreen of the Odysseus and tried very hard not to crack a smile. Green-and-yellow blips pulsed along the radar, the soft murmur of his ship’s alarms trilling through the hollow metal corridors and bridge. Cracking his knuckles, he leaned back in the split-leather chair and stretched, contemplating his next move.

  “No, Will.” His ship’s guard, Leo, was propped in the copilot chair with his puke-green jumpsuit unzipped down to his waist, exposing what used to be a white undershirt. His boots were unscrupulously resting on the console, arms behind his head, one eye peeking beneath his long blond hair—the only man Will had ever seen who could pull off such a thing—the other still shut. “Don’t even think about it.”

  Will drummed his fingers over the console, charting the mines and searching for a navigable course.

  “No.” Leo closed his eye and went back to snoring, the final note in his tone meaning he didn’t think Will was crazy enough to do it.

  Will should have been asleep too, but the ship’s salvage containers weren’t even half filled. Which, if they wanted to eat anytime soon, meant not nearly full enough.

  Mines indicated something valuable lay just beyond. Someone, probably another tarnished captain stuck on scavenger duty, had either passed by and been too full to nab the treasure so they dropped the explosives to protect it until later, or something had purposefully been hidden there.

  With an aggrieved sigh, Leo opened his eyes. “I can hear your excited breathing, Will. That’s the sound of a man about to get me killed.”

  “I don’t know . . .” Will scratched at the stubble lining his chin and then patted the dash. “The old girl hasn’t had action in a while, and you know how she gets.”

  The grated floor rattled as Leo planted his boots somewhere they belonged. “Shit. I know that voice. You can’t be serious?”

  “Serious about what?” Lux asked, jogging down the stairs connecting the bridge to the rack room. The navigator was tiny, with bright-green eyes, warm-honey skin, and dark, lavender-streaked hair pulled into twists around her head. She reminded Will of a cat. Silent feet and deadly reflexes. The blaster at her waist flashed as she stopped beside Leo.

  “Oh, Will’s just trying to kill us,” Leo said.

  “Again?” Lux asked, stretching her arms over her head and not averting her gaze from Leo fast enough for Will to miss the longing there.

  A wide grin spread across Leo’s face as he stood to relinquish the seat. “Will you back me up if I have to restrain him, Lux?”

  “I’m right here,” Will grumbled.

  Lux flicked her focus to Will and then back to Leo. “Have I ever not?”

  “You always choose his side. And here I thought I was the captain of this ship. Maybe I should unzip my suit too.”

  “It’s not Leo’s fine physique that’s keeping me on his side. It’s self-preservation.”

  “Self-preservation?” Will arched an eyebrow. “You do realize I can have you space-tossed for disobedience?”

  “Yes, Captain,” they both answered simultaneously, performing mock salutes.

  He rubbed two fingers across his forehead. Insubordinate assholes. Just his luck he was stuck with the worst crew in the galaxy.

  The smell of bread filled the air as Jane entered the bridge, gray-shot hair cropped close to her head, a tray balanced on her left hand. Over six feet tall, the ex-captain turned co-pilot had taken to cooking recently, and she dipped the tray low, offering Will his pick of the black pastries. “Captain gets first choice.”

  “See how it’s done?” Will asked, tossing a pointed look at the others. Then he gently eased the tray their way. “No, Jane. I insist you offer that . . . whatever that is to the others first. I think Leo just mentioned he was starving.”

  Jane beamed. “A captain is selfless, always thinking of the crew first.”

  “Exactly.”

  Leo glared and then made a show of taking two biscuits inside his huge hand. He took a loud, tooth-cracking bite, face twisting as he forced a smile and spoke around a mouthful of what could pass as rocks. “These are delicious, Jane. Thank you.”

  Lux took one too, just as her brother, Dorian, scampered down the stairs.

  “Oh, good,” Leo called. “We’re all here. Just in time to discuss Will’s decision to kill us.”

  “Again?” Jane dumped the tray into Leo’s lap and shooed him out of her chair. Even sitting, she was almost as tall as Lux was standing. “A captain’s first directive is to protect the safety of his crew.”

  “Huh.” Will droned out the words as his attention shifted again to the mines blinking on the radar. He’d never seen so many before. A glittering wall of dark-matter energy that would obliterate their shields and them in less than a second—if he hit them. Which he didn’t plan to do.

  “You’re staring at those mines like they’re a bunch of half-naked escorts,” Lux muttered, before adding, “No, Will.”

  Jane gave one of her long exhales—not exactly a sigh. Not a yawn. Some in-between gesture that meant she was about to remind Will of the past. “I am not captain now, but when I was captain, I would not have chosen this course.”

  Leo clapped a hand on Jane’s shoulder. “You were a great captain, Jane. A safe captain. I never crapped my pants when you were in command, nor did my balls ever shrivel with terror.”

  Will’s heart raced as he flipped on the shields; the purr of the energy thrusters warming up eased an
y doubts he might have had. “Gravity generators go off in five . . . four . . .”

  “Stars!” Leo raked a hand through his hair. “Will, you might be too ugly to care about this, but we’re a day away from the nearest waystation and I have girls waiting for me. Girls, Will. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen girls?”

  “A day?” Lux scoffed.

  Will snorted as he eased the thrusters forward. “I’m doing those girls a favor, Leo. Now strap in and enjoy the show. Three . . .”

  The Odysseus lurched forward, knocking Leo off balance. He grabbed a harness buckle, pulled himself upright, and strapped himself in. Clicks filled the bridge as Lux and Dorian buckled up beside him, the siblings closing their eyes.

  “Two . . .”

  Jane began checking off systems, but Will had already overridden her controls. Not that she noticed. Jane’s glitches were getting worse. If the crew made it through this, Will would find her a new body to jump into. No matter the price.

  “One.”

  A droning sigh hissed through the corridors as the gravity generator died. Jane’s cookies and tray rose into the air, bumping off Will’s shoulder as he floated up, only to be caught by the loose harnesses around his chest strapping him to his chair. The old girl was protesting.

  Well, let her. He knew her capabilities better than she did.

  Normally in a complex situation like this, a captain would need his co-pilot and his navigator to even stand a chance. But Will wasn’t normal. The hardware the mocks had put into his head, the technology that saved his life when he was thirteen, also allowed him to see time and space like a three-dimensional grid. He could take in the mines, create the safest route, and assess for damages all in the span of a heartbeat.

  Currently, he had them at nine percent shields. The margin of error was thirty-one percent. Anything less than ten percent shields would be catastrophic, so he was counting on that margin of error to save their lives.

  As their speed increased, the blips on the map joined together and a pattern emerged. Will’s heartbeat slowed, his breathing steadied, and all thoughts melted away to the yellowish-green lines on the screen. The sounds of the crew protesting—Jane calling out commands he wouldn’t follow, Leo demanding they stop, Lux yelling at him to shut up—all of it seemed to come from another room. Another time.

  When they were past the point of return, the crew abruptly went quiet. His fingers flew over the console as they raced past the first heavy barrage of mines in silence. The old ship groaned and creaked. A soft shutter wracked the hull, and Leo cursed under his breath. Another. Each time the ship’s hull trembled, Will checked the controls. Testing the mines’ strength and recalculating as needed.

  Will maneuvered the ship left and right, sideways. The mines grew thicker, the holes between them smaller.

  Two direct hits lit the starscreen with bright green.

  “Will!” Leo yelled.

  Another explosion, and the Odysseus screamed in agony, metal screeching and groaning as some hole was likely torn in the ship’s hull.

  “Will!”

  Tremors reverberated through the old ship as the oxygen was sucked out, and the force threw Will forward, the thick harness digging into his chest.

  “She can’t take this!” Jane cried. “The shields are giving up.”

  Will hardly blinked as he pounded his fingers over the controls. She could take it. She was tough. They had to make it.

  The shield’s integrity bar was dropping.

  Fifteen percent.

  Thirteen percent.

  Ten percent.

  Too much. Too fast.

  Perhaps he’d failed to account for the old girl’s age. The already compromised left shield.

  “Will!”

  One second, they were caught inside a whirlwind of explosions and light. The next, the dark calmness of open space unfurled over the screen. Odysseus stilled as red flashes lit the room, emergency beacons notifying the crew of needed repairs.

  But for the first time since they entered the minefield, the crew had nothing to say.

  Jane swiveled her chair to face Will. “Shields at nine point seven percent, Captain.”

  Will expected the crew to complain. Leo or Lux to say something hilariously inappropriate to break the tension. Instead, they unstrapped and took to their jobs without a peep, disappearing from the bridge to care for Odysseus. Dorian to check for hull breaches in all quadrants. Lux to map out the new star field. Jane to divert power to the sections that sustained the most damage.

  Leo returned to the bridge, dragging a faded-red exosuit that should have been burned long ago behind him, and then suited up. As soon as he placed the helmet over his head, the locks clicked into place and air hissed into his suit, filling the legs and torso and fogging the curved plexi-glass that muffled his face. He reached out and tapped Will’s chest. “Whatever’s out there better be worth it, Will Perrault.”

  Will cast a quick glance over the starscreen, the whisper of a headache clenching his skull. Far as he could tell, there was nothing here, other than a few random bits of space trash. Unstrapping from his harness, he leaned against the edge of his seat, surveying the radar screen. Darkness. Could they have just stumbled into a random minefield offloaded from a damaged ship? No, these mines were high grade. And old, by the millisecond delay some of them took before igniting. They were put here on purpose.

  Perhaps someone had already been here. No, impossible. No one but Will could have brought a ship safely through this minefield. And there were no signs of wreckage from another scavenger ship.

  They had to be the first.

  Wait. He blinked at the radar as a tiny blip flashed. One single dot adrift in a sea of black.

  He’d expected the wreckage of an elite starship, maybe. Something that could be offered as a whole. Something worth billions of credits.

  What good was one item?

  Dorian, finished with the ship’s repairs, returned to the bridge in his emerald-green exosuit and barely stood waist high next to Leo by the hatch. Lux bit her bottom lip as she finished going over her safety checklist for both suits, cursing at each patched hole she discovered in Leo’s, the loose brackets connecting their hoses. Then she and Will left Jane in the bridge and followed them through the ship’s narrow, circular corridors to the cargo-hold. On the other side was the ship’s empty bay.

  “Boys, find us something worth all that nonsense back there,” Lux ordered Leo and Dorian. Then she and Will backed up as the hatch door closed and watched the two disappear into the airlock. From there, they would fasten themselves to tethers and collect the hopeful treasure. Once, they’d owned a retriever ship, but Will had to sell it three months ago to spring Leo from jail on the off-world planet Mitas.

  The airlock beeped, announcing Leo’s and Dorian’s entry into space, and Lux turned to Will. “Captain, since you took over Jane’s position on this ship six months ago, I’ve almost died”—she held up her hand, ticking off fingers—“hell, Captain. I can’t even count on one hand.”

  “How many credits did you nab last year with Captain Safety?” he asked. “How many tons of cargo? Any of you buy back jump status yet?”

  “Credits don’t matter if we’re dead. Neither does jumping.” Lux glanced toward the empty cargo bay. “And our hold is pretty empty now, too.”

  “Well, neither of us will have to keep eking out an existence in this rust bucket much longer. There’s something out there. I can feel it in my bones.”

  “You said that last time. And just so we’re clear, you get Dorian killed for some hypothetical score, and I’ll space toss you into oblivion.”

  Will cracked his neck and eyed the doors. “Point taken.”

  The wait wore on Will’s nerves. He focused on the image of that dot on the radar. It had to be something important. An anti-matter core or nuclear capacitor. He rattled off items in his head as they waited, Lux making a show of checking their oxygen levels on the computer while Will lean
ed against the wall, watching the door. He needed something big. Something that could buy his way off this salvage ship and back into his regiment. Something that could erase the sins of his past forever.

  But when the airlock mechanism clicked open and Leo and Dorian stepped through, Will’s hopes faltered. They carried a metallic, rose-gold item the size and shape of the coffins humans used to be buried in, before mocks decreed incineration for fleshers after death. The angles were sharper than the coffins he pictured, though, with five faceted sides. And whatever material this was made from, he couldn’t place it.

  Just when Leo and Dorian hit the center of the hold, gravity switched back on and the mysterious item crashed to the floor, sending a massive shudder racing through the ship.

  Leo ripped off his helmet and tapped it against the surface of the coffin. Then he tried to slide it across the floor. His muscles bulged beneath the thin, deflated suit, but the thing refused to budge. His hair fell over his eyes, and a curse slipped from his lips as he kicked the coffin and threw up his hands. “This was totally worth risking our lives for.”

  The sarcasm in Leo’s voice grated on Will’s nerves. He approached the find, slowly. Gold and silver sparkled inside the outer shell as he neared. The material was smooth and cold beneath his fingers. Not deep space cold. A different kind of cold that whispered of ancient human technologies.

  The entire surface was smooth. There were no lines or rough spots to indicate a way to open the thing—if it was even hollow, something Will was beginning to doubt. Other than the small, engraved symbol of a bird with strange dots, there were no markings.

  “Does anyone recognize this symbol?” Will asked.

  Lux shook her head. Dorian frowned but said nothing. Leo stared at the symbol the longest, the vein in his neck jumping. He was obviously still pissed, so Will let him be.

  Something inside him collapsed as Will backed away, ignoring the frustrated looks of the crew. He knew what they always did. Whatever this find was, they had absolutely no doubt now.

  This find was worthless.

  He’d risked all their lives for nothing.

  Chapter 2

  3631 AD