Dark Space- The Complete Series

by Jasper T. Scott

  And then Gina turned to Alara with a grim smile. “Next stop Obsidian Station.”

  * * *

  Alec Brondi stood aboard the bridge of the Valiant, down by the viewports, watching the countdown to real space from the HUD relay inside his zephyr’s helmet. He’d become even more paranoid since the incident in the med center, refusing to leave the designated “safe” zones, and refusing to take off his armor for any reason. It was starting to stink inside the mech, but Brondi considered that a small price to pay. His trip had been worth it. They’d successfully isolated Kurlin’s virus from the blood sample they’d taken. Now all they needed to do was get it aboard Admiral Heston’s ships, sit back, and let nature take its course.

  Brondi smiled behind his helmet and turned to Captain Thornton, who was now cloaked in a holoskin that made him look exactly like Overlord Dominic. “Are you ready?”

  The captain nodded. “I am,” he said, in the gravelly voice of the overlord himself.

  Amazing, Brondi thought. It sounds just like him! They’d managed to produce a decent vocal synthesizer based on recordings of the overlord’s voice. The only thing they couldn’t do was fake up an identichip for Thornton, but they wouldn’t need that to gain the admiral’s confidence. Showing up in the overlord’s flagship looking and sounding just like him would be more than good enough.

  The Valiant dropped out of SLS directly above Ritan, and Brondi smiled down upon the dark world below. “Gravidar, report!”

  “I have . . . nothing on scopes.”

  “What?” Brondi blinked. “What do you mean nothing?”

  “Wait, there is one contact. She’s small. Looks like a guardian-class destroyer. They’re hailing us.”

  “Good. That must be them.” Brondi turned to Captain Thornton. “It’s time for you to shine.”

  The captain nodded and turned to the viewports with hands clasped behind his back. He wore the white uniform of the overlord, recently tailored to fit his slightly taller frame. “Put them on screen,” the captain said.

  Suddenly their view of Ritan was replaced with the larger-than-life face of a very haggard-looking man. He appeared to be 50-something.

  “Supreme Overlord, what are you doing so far from home?”

  Thornton sighed. “It’s a long story.”

  The man on screen folded his hands on the desk before him and nodded. “I’m listening.”

  Captain Thornton dutifully explained the story they’d come up with. An outlaw fleet had attacked them with a devastating bio weapon—a virus. The Valiant had developed a vaccine before it was too late, but not before their now vastly-under crewed ship had been forced to flee Dark Space by the enemy fleet. Thornton was quick to point out the damage to their port side as proof of that engagement—damage which they’d actually suffered while fleeing Sythians.

  At the end of their long, sad story, Thornton revealed the good news. They’d saved some of the vaccine so that Admiral Hoff could inoculate his crew against the deadly virus—just in case it spread.

  “Well,” the man speaking with them sighed. “That’s unfortunate. Of course your crew could still be contagious, so we’re going to have to keep our distance, but you can jettison the vaccine in an escape pod and I’ll be sure that it gets to the admiral so he can distribute it to the fleet.”

  Brondi was upset to hear they weren’t talking with the admiral himself, but happy that it seemed like the man they were talking to had bought their cover story. He’s even going to spread the virus for me! Brondi thought.

  “We’ll be in touch, Dominic.” And with that, the holo call ended and Brondi was left grinning smugly out at space. Soon he’d have a whole fleet under his command! Now he just needed to find a crew for it. Perhaps he’d open recruitment offices when they got back to Dark Space. . . . Yes, Brondi nodded. Dreams of a truly free Imperium safely tucked away in Dark Space, patrolled and ruled by a powerful fleet under his command swirled through his head.

  Brondi turned from the viewports to address his crew—

  That was when the deck rocked violently under his feet. Brondi fell against the viewports. The thunk which sounded from that impact rang painfully in his ears, and then the lights flickered and went out. Suddenly Brondi felt his feet drifting free of the deck. He snapped on his zephyr’s floodlights just in time to see the ceiling rushing up to greet him. He bounced off with a hollow-sounding thud and then turned to see the rest of his crew floating above the deck, their arms and legs flailing as they cursed and shouted at each other. Brondi twisted his torso the other way to see Captain Thornton floating in a globular pool of his own blood. “Captain!” he yelled.

  But Thornton didn’t respond.

  * * *

  Roan heard the distant boom of the explosion, and he grinned inside his helmet. The lights went out, and then the gravity failed but Roan could manage in zero G just fine using his armor. His suit auto adjusted its grav field to keep his feet rooted to the deck and simulate a steady 1.25 G’s, which was the gravity on his home world, Noctune.

  Roan had done everything he could to take back the Valiant, but they had finally made it impossible for him to hunt any more. After being almost killed by mines—twice—while trying to get to the surviving crew members, Roan had finally understood that there was only one option left, and he had thought back to the plan Tova had laid out for him to sabotage the ship before reinforcements arrived. They’d asked him to shut down the main reactor and destroy the IMS—which is exactly what he had done.

  Tova had warned him that the humans would eventually use grav guns and field emitters to regain their footing, but without power on the ship, they’d have to venture out to fix the reactor and the ruined IMS, and that was what Roan really wanted. He’d laid a few traps of his own along the approaches to those areas of the ship.

  Roan hissed inside his helmet and bared his teeth. It was time to hunt again.

  * * *

  Alara, Gina, and Delayn fell into a routine, the hours blurring together with the same dull monotony of napping, eating emergency rations, and taking turns to stay awake and nursemaid the Rescue. Someone had to constantly watch the reactor’s coolant levels and core temperature. If the coolant dropped too low, or the core temperature rose too high, they would have to make an emergency stop to let the reactor cool. In between watching the reactor, they studied the time till reversion. The SLS timer was like the timer on a bomb—which was exactly what it felt like. It felt like they were riding inside a giant bomb. In her mind’s eye Alara saw it explode in a magnificent flash of light and sound which could be seen streaking across the night sky, clear from one side of the galaxy to the other.

  And then, that was exactly what happened. Alara saw the flash of light and heard—

  “Wake up, Kiddie!” Someone was shaking her. “Wake up!”

  She groaned and sat up to see the maddening, bright swirl of SLS fade to a much more tolerable pattern of tiny pinpricks of light.

  “Where are we?” she asked, suddenly disoriented. Gina stopped shaking her, and Delayn answered her question.

  “The core was getting too hot, so I dropped us out to let the reactor cool. Meanwhile, we can see if we’re close enough now for Tova to contact her fellow skull faces. “Tova?”

  “I try . . . wait.”

  They held their breath, and then Tova’s gleaming black helmet turned to them. “I cannot. They are silent.”

  “What do you mean they are silent?”

  “Their voices too far for me to hear.”

  “So we’re not close enough yet.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Gina nodded and she and Alara got up to stretch their legs while they waited for the reactor to cool. They spent the time pacing around the small bridge, periodically checking on the core temperature while Tova sat still and silent at the gravidar station. Half an hour later the temperature had fallen enough for them to risk another jump. Alara sat down with a sigh, and when the stars dissolved into star lines and streaks of light once
more, she had to swallow a scream. This had gone on too long. “How far away are we?”

  “Three hours,” Delayn answered.

  “Let’s just finish the trip. Tova can try to contact her people again when we arrive—or not—I don’t care. I need to get aboard Obsidian Station and out of this ship soon or I’m going to go skriffy.”

  “Sure,” Gina said.

  Alara tried to calm her racing heart enough to get back to sleep. Eventually, with the timer running down from two hours, she managed to do just that. She dreamed of a faceless army of black-armored soldiers marching across a dark field of equally black glass. Their glowing red eyes turned to her as one, and then they began shooting deadly purple stars at her. As the missiles swarmed toward her, the aliens began to chant in a deep, computerized voice, “Ten, nine, eight, seven—”

  Alara woke up, suddenly realizing that what she was hearing was the countdown to real space. “We made it?”

  The timer reached one, and they watched the star lines return to pinpoints of light. Alara’s gaze dipped to the star map, searching for the station, but all she could see was a clump of asteroids marked in gray icons on the grid.

  Gina punched her star map. “Frek you!” she screamed.

  “Where is it?” Alara asked. She shook her head, unable, or unwilling, to understand what she was looking at. “What is this?” She pointed to the gray icons on the star map.

  Gina turned to her, a solemn look on her face. Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Neither of them could. After coming all this way, exhausting all their fuel and taking all of the hopes of the Defiant’s crew with them, they’d finally made it to Obsidian Station.

  What was left of it.

  The gray contacts on the grid weren’t asteroids, they were drifting chunks of debris. Gina dialed up the throttle to get a closer look, and as they drew near, they saw the gray bracket pairs resolve into dark, jagged pieces of the station. The larger pieces were riddled with holes.

  “They’re all dead,” Alara whispered.

  “Yeah, and so are we. We have 6% of our fuel left,” Delayn said.

  Alara shook her head and tears sprang to her eyes. “We came all this way for nothing!”

  “Well, we’re here now, and there’s no going back, so we’d better see if there’s anything we can salvage from the wreckage,” Gina said.

  “Like what?”

  Gina met Alara’s gaze as Tova turned—the red eyes of her helmet glowing ominously as she gazed up at them from the gravidar station. “Like a chance of survival,” Gina replied.

  Epilogue

  —THE YEAR 0 AE—

  The shell fighter set down on the surface of the exoplanet not far from an active volcano with a river of glowing magma running down the side. Destra let out a long breath and scowled at the inhospitable landscape. She’d set down on a dark field of ice, which glittered like black glass. Between the fiery magma flows and the ice fields, the world was bound to be either too hot or too cold, but never anywhere in between.

  Destra shook her head and abandoned the cockpit to go check on her patient. By now he should have been waking up, and if not, she’d have to wake him. They both needed to eat something. Destra felt her stomach growl painfully at just the thought of food, and she stumbled along the darkened corridors of the fighter to find the officer she’d rescued.

  She ended up bumping straight into him in the dark and both of them fell over. Destra winced at the pain which shot up through her spine as she hit the deck. The man cried out and began panting heavily from the much greater pain of his injuries.

  Destra sighed and searched for him in the dark. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I . . . I don’t know,” he wheezed. “Where am I?”

  She found his hand in the dark and squeezed it in an attempt to reassure him. “You should have stayed on the gurney,” she said.

  “Who are you?”

  “I saved your life. Don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  “I’m Destra,” she said. “Destra Ortane.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’m . . .” he panted once more, obviously struggling to catch his breath. “Hoff,” he said. “Admiral Hoff Heston.”

  “Admiral?” Destra blinked and she recoiled from his hand as though it were a snake.

  Hoff chuckled, but it came out as a wheeze. “Yes, not that it matters. An admiral needs a fleet to be an admiral, does he not?”

  Destra frowned. “I . . . I suppose so.”

  “Where are we?” Hoff asked with his next available breath.

  “I don’t know. Some barren rock in the middle of nowhere. We’re out of fuel. I stole a Sythian fighter and escaped Roka to come here, but we didn’t get far.” Now it was Destra’s turn to laugh. “It looks like we’d have been better off on Roka with the Sythians.”

  “Hmmm,” Hoff grunted. “Well, let’s see, shall we? Does this fighter have a cockpit?”

  “Yes, but it’s almost as dark outside as it is in here.”

  “Lovely. Help me up, would you?”

  Destra found the man’s hand once more and hauled him to his feet. She helped him along the corridor, letting him lean heavily on her as they walked to the cockpit. As they emerged in the transparent dome, the admiral let out an appreciative whistle, his head turning every which way to study their surroundings. “Well, you’re right about one thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’d have been better off on Roka. I believe you’ve landed us on Ritan. I can’t think of a less hospitable place to be stranded.”

  “You know where we are?”

  “Don’t get too excited. It’s habitable, but only just, and only if you have a nice bio dome to live in. The temperatures are consistently twenty below, which is balmy considering the planet’s distance from the nearest sun. The ice fields are riddled with rictan burrows, and the skies are filled with giant, carnivorous bats. They feed on the rictans and the ice walkers which roam the surface looking for edible moss growing up near the geothermal vents.”

  “So the air is breathable, then?”

  “You might choke on sulfurous fumes, but it is breathable, yes.”

  Destra sighed. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  Hoff shot her a skeptical look. “You might not still be saying that after you’ve been outside.” He nodded to the viewports as another spurt of magma shot high into the sky from the volcano they’d landed beside. “If there’s an uninhabitable class of habitable planets, then Ritan’s it, and lucky you, you’ve found it! The only thing which would make Ritan worse would be if the Sythians have already discovered it. They’d love this place. Cold, dark, filled with deadly creatures to make good sport for their hunts. . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. “Perfect for the bug-eyed kakards.”

  Destra turned to look out at the dark, malevolent vista of Ritan. “How would we know if they were here?”

  Hoff turned to her with a smile. “Well, that’s just it—you wouldn’t. We never did see them coming. It was The Invisible War.”

  “And we lost,” Destra said, shaking her head.

  “No,” Hoff wheezed. He turned to her with a mad sparkle in his eyes, which was just visible in the dim light. “The war is only over when we’re all dead. That’s what they were after,” he said, nodding as his gaze slowly drifted away from hers. They won’t have won, and we won’t have lost until they’ve killed every last one of us, and I have every intention of out-living them. I’ll do it,” he said, nodding once, defiantly. “Even if I have to put myself in stasis for a thousand years.”

  “Strong words for an injured man stranded on Ritan.”

  “Injuries heal. And we can make Ritan work for us until a rescue comes.”

  “A rescue?”

  “My fleet will be looking for me. I got cut off from them during the evacuation and had to eject from my corvette, but when I don’t arrive, they’ll come looking.”

  Destra snorted. She didn�
�t voice her opinion on the likelihood of a rescue out here, on a barren rock off the space lanes. Lightning flashed on the horizon, briefly illuminating the icy surface of the world, and Destra thought she saw a dark silhouette fly by overhead. Her thoughts turned to the predators Hoff had spoken of—the rictans and the bats, and she grimaced, thankful at least that they had the Sythian fighter for shelter. But sooner or later they’d probably have to venture out. Even if only to find food. Her mind cast back to Digger’s pet rictans and she wondered absently what they’d taste like, and if it would come to that.

  It probably will, she thought.

  It was going to be a long wait for a rescue.

  As if voicing her thoughts, Hoff turned to her and said, “We should take stock of our supplies. We’re going to need weapons, armor, and masks to filter out the soot and ash. I hope this fighter of yours came well-equipped.”

  Destra frowned, her eyes still on the distant horizon as it flashed with lightning once more. “So do I, Hoff.”

  So do I.

  DARK SPACE III:

  ORIGIN

  (3rd Edition)

  by Jasper T. Scott

  http://www.JasperTscott.com

  @JasperTscott

  Copyright © 2013 by Jasper T. Scott

  THE AUTHOR RETAINS ALL RIGHTS

  FOR THIS BOOK

  Reproduction or transmission of this book, in whole or in part, by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or by any other means is strictly prohibited, except with prior written permission from the author. You may direct your inquiries to JasperTscott@gmail.com

  Cover design by Jasper T. Scott

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, places, and incidents described are products of the writer’s imagination and any resemblance to real people or life events is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my family, friends, and my beautiful wife, all of whom believed in me and encouraged me even when I would have rather stuck my head in the sand. You all made the journey worth the effort. And a special thanks to my team of editors for this book—Andrew Bissessar, Brandon Worth, Carmen Romano, Damon Trent, Daniel Eloff, Dascha Paylor, Dave Cantrell, Davis Shellabarger, Dick Jackson, Dwight Hall, Ian Jedlica, Ian Seccombe, Jay Gehringer, Jeph Yang, John Nash, John Rowles, Peter Hughes, Phillip Jones, Rob Dobozy, Sandra Roan, Tony Wilsenham, and Victor E. Biedrycki.