by Barry Solway
GHOSTS
Gauntlet Prime: Book 2
by Barry Solway
Copyright © 2020 by Barry Solway. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.
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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
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Chapter 1
Mel’s eyes snapped open, pulled towards the lumpy mound on the floor covered in a blanket. The background hum of the ship faded as memories flooded back. Tearing her gaze away, she shook off the grogginess and sat up.
They had discussed what to do with Sharon’s body, but no one was willing to make a decision. In the meantime, they had wrapped her in a cryogenic blanket that kept her body near freezing. They were used by alien races that preferred colder temperatures and Mel thought of it like a heating pad in reverse. But it made that corner of the ship colder than the rest of the cabin; every time Mel walked past Sharon she felt like she was passing through a ghost.
Mel wished they could preserve her body and return it to Earth for a proper burial. Funerals weren’t something she had cared about in the past, but she did now. Sending the body into space or burying her on an alien planet seemed wrong, like there would be nothing of Sharon left to mourn.
In the end, Mel knew she wasn’t ready to let go. She couldn’t believe Sharon was dead. It was the same with Jeff. And Rob and Evan. Evan had disappeared when a city street collapsed on a planet she couldn’t even remember the name of, his body gone forever. But at least Jeff and Rob were still back on Kathor’s ship, their bodies frozen. They wouldn’t come back to life, but it gave her a sense of comfort she couldn’t explain.
Come back to life, she thought grimly. Like me. Every conversation in her mind over the last day had ended at this place. She was a clone. Not just a clone, but the third clone since her original body had died. Mel the Fourth. Her mind had been transferred from one clone to the next, in theory at least. But she felt like an alien, even to herself. Was she still the original Mel, or someone else? It was all very confusing.
She looked around, still groggy. Riley was curled up on the floor, asleep. Beats sat on the floor, his eight-foot-tall frame too large for the seats. Beats held a tablet, reading a book or catching up on recent news. Something they hadn’t been able to do while prisoners on Kathor’s ship. Gorgeous curled up on one of the cabin chairs, like a cat. Jon wasn’t in the room. He might be in one of the smaller cabins. Or in the cockpit, talking with Anna. Or trying not to talk to Anna. Jon grew steadily more detached every day. Really since the first training incident, when he had run away instead of trying to protect Mel. She tried not to blame him, although she had been severely injured protecting Gorgeous. It was just his way of coping with something that none of them were equipped to handle. Reviewing her mental checklist, she felt like she was forgetting someone. Jon, Riley, Beats, Gorgeous, and Anna. Right. She was forgetting Sharon. Because Sharon was dead.
Mel stood and stretched, trying not to wake the others. She nodded silently to Beats, then walked to the front cabin. They should at least put Sharon in the smaller back cabin, she thought. They had that discussion too, but no one wanted to touch her. Too much emotional exhaustion after escaping Kathor’s ship. Mel still couldn’t get over being forced to shoot Anna. Even though Anna was an android and had transferred her mind into another device, it had been traumatic to pull the trigger. Reminding herself that it had been Anna’s plan all along only helped a little.
She entered the cockpit to see Jon slouched in one of the pilot chairs, staring at the stars against the blackness of space. They glowed vividly, even with the windows that adjusted for the brightness of the local sun. Especially the expansive clouds that Anna said were other galaxies. It was breathtaking.
Mel dropped herself into the seat next to Jon. They sat in silence for a bit; Jon didn’t even register her presence. Tapping her finger against her forehead lightly, she wondered how long she had slept.
“How are we doing, Anna?” she asked.
A hologram of Anna’s head emerged over the console in front of them. “Well enough. As you know, this ship doesn’t have interstellar capability. We’re an hour from the closest gate.”
“You still think getting through won’t be a problem?”
“Kathor won’t have reported anything, but I’m sure the game architects have. They would likely have arrived at the closest inhabited city on Agprith hours ago. I confess I’m not sure who they would call in this kind of situation. Hijacking a spaceship is basically unheard of. But I can easily fake the ship’s records, so they won’t know it’s us when we get to the gate.”
Hijacking the ship had been easy because Anna was an advanced AI that was more than a match for the technology of the alien federation called the Order. Mel pondered Anna’s statement that she didn’t know who the architects would report a stolen spaceship to. She had come to think of Anna as omniscient. It was both a relief and unsettling that the artificial Anna didn’t know everything.
Another hour before they could get to a hypergate that would allow them to travel through hyperspace to another solar system. Away from Kathor and away from the architects. The first step to figuring out how to get back to Earth.
Anna had been surprised to find out the architect’s ship didn’t have an interstellar drive. Kathor’s ship, the Insight, had one, and Anna had assumed any large ship would. That had nixed their original plan to use this ship to get back to Earth.
That’s when Anna had informed them that hypergates were typically used to travel between solar systems. Ships had to request permission to jump from one place to the next and it allowed the Order to track and control travel. The next question was whether there was a hypergate near Earth. Anna doubted it, because she couldn’t find any evidence anyone but Kathor had been to Earth. Mel was concerned that their plan to return home had already run into such a major obstacle, but she pushed that worry aside. There would be other challenges, they would just have to figure out how to solve them one at a time.
“Wait a second. What’s that?” Jon said. He pointed out the window at a light in the distance. Glowing like a star, it moved sideways with obvious speed.
“Hmm,” Anna replied. “It’s a ship. It’s not close, but appears to be heading towards us. Let me see if I can identify it.”
“Why didn’t you see it coming?” Jon
asked.
“I was talking to you and Mel,” Anna snapped. “And forging new identification codes for the ship. And actually flying the ship and thinking about ways to get back to Earth. I’m sure that’s hard to imagine when your idea of multitasking is to slouch in a chair and scowl at the same time.”
“Why don’t you stop telling us how amazing you are and figure out who’s chasing us?” Jon retorted.
“She’s trying to, Jon,” Mel said. “And we don’t know they’re chasing us.” Jon was being an ass, but Anna’s reaction surprised her.
“Thank you, Mel,” Anna said. “It’s a government ship. I don’t recognize the class. It’s not covered in this ship’s onboard library or the public databases I’ve looked at in the past.”
“I’ll bet money they’re chasing us,” Jon said. “We stole a ship and killed at least one of the architects.”
“It was in self-defense,” Mel said.
“Bull. It was in the act of stealing a spaceship. Self-defense wouldn’t fly on that even in Florida. Stealing a spaceship has got to be on the same level as hijacking an airplane. At least. These people don’t know anything about us, except that we’re armed and we’re okay with killing people.”
Mel gave Jon a weird look. “Who said we’re okay with killing people?”
Jon rolled his eyes. “They think we’re gladiators. Of course we’re okay with killing people. That’s all they know. Unless Kathor told them something worse.”
Jon was right. She had thought many possible things about what contacting aliens aside from Kathor might mean, but she hadn’t thought about how this would look from their perspective.
“Anna, any luck figuring out who they are or what they want?” Mel asked.
“I’m getting better visuals and I’m trying to do a complete scan. I think I’ve found the band they are transmitting on, but it’s heavily encrypted and they’re using a channel-hopping algorithm. I should have the sequence—”
“Jesus, Anna, no one cares,” Jon said. “You already know it’s a government ship. We know what they want. Are you going to wait for them to blow us up to do something?”
Mel really wanted to tell Jon to go somewhere else, but she didn’t want to get into an argument with him. “I care,” she said. Rather lamely, she thought. “Um. Look, Jon, getting angry at Anna isn’t helping, so can you just chill out? If this is too stressful, you can go back into the cabin. No one will judge.”
“I’ll judge,” Anna cut in. “You’re a useless, flaming asshole. My preference is that you go into the bathroom in the back cabin. There aren’t any cameras back there, so I can actually get away from having to look at you for five seconds.”
Does that mean there were cameras in the main cabin bathrooms? Mel wondered, but she suppressed the question. Jon was about to yell at Anna, when Mel pointed out the window.
“Look, the ship has changed course,” she said.
“I’m aware of that,” Anna said. “It’s heading to the hyperport.” The holographic image of her head popped out of existence. Mel thought she sounded stressed. “I’m turning off the holo-image to save computing power. The ship is of unknown type, but I have a few comments, if Jon can resist interrupting. I’m going to assume this is a classified ship with military or law enforcement capabilities. The interesting thing is that it’s not coming from the direction of the nearest hypergate. So that means it was already in this system, or it has its own hyperjump technology, like Kathor’s ship. As Mel said, if they are chasing us, which is looking very likely at the moment, it seems they’ll want the ship back in one piece. So I don’t expect they’ll start shooting at us without warning.”
“You don’t know that,” Jon said.
Anna paused and Mel thought her reply was a bit slow. “It’s a logical conclusion,” Anna said. “They think we won’t get permission to jump at the port. There’s nowhere else for us to go.”
That brought Jon up short. It made sense. But it left the obvious question.
“So, how are we going to get through the gate?” Mel asked.
A pronounced delay from Anna, and slow, drawn-out speech patterns made her sound drunk. “My… scintillating… brilliance…” she said. “Leave me… alone to… figure… it… out.”
Mel realized what was happening. Anna had turned off the holo-image and her speech had slowed. She was routing all her processing power into figuring out how to get through the hyperport.
A few moments passed. “Ha… cracked the encryption,” Anna said. Seconds later audio played from the other ship, quickly translated to English by the translators that Kathor had implanted in their heads months ago.
“—vessel Utopia. We are in pursuit of recreation class six vessel, Spirit of Valor. This vessel has been compromised and is strictly forbidden from hyperjump access. Repeat. Agprith hyperport three-dash-one-five, this is the OPS Utopia—” The transmission cutoff as Anna’s holo-image popped back up.
“We should be good now,” she said, her voice sounding normal. Maybe a bit smug.
“What did you do?” Jon asked.
“I broke their encryption so I could hear their transmissions to the hyperport. As you heard, the Order starship Utopia is chasing us. We’re less than thirty minutes from the port now. The Utopia is traveling faster than we are, but we’ll still get to the port an hour ahead of them. They can likely go faster, but there’s no reason for them to hurry, so I’m not going to speed up either. They think they have us trapped.”
“Tell me they don’t have us trapped,” Mel said.
Anna laughed. “No. I have their channel sequence, encryption, and identification codes. I’ll send a message to the port when we get closer to give us clearance. I still need to come up with new codes for our ship, but I’ve got plenty of time for that now. Sorry for the small panic there. The encryption codes were a beast to break.”
“You did a great job, Anna. I’m really appreciating how impossible this all would have been without you,” Mel replied. “I’m going to go back and tell the others what’s going on. You two try not to kill each other while I’m gone.”
“She’s already dead,” Jon muttered.
“Why did we bring him along?” Anna replied.
“He’s our asshole,” Mel said, slapping Jon on the shoulder. Jon grunted and ignored them both.
Mel walked back to the main cabin and told the others what had just happened. As they gathered around the windows to look at the ship chasing them, Beats pointed to a planet about the size of a tennis ball with a small potato-shaped moon off to the side. A diamond-like cluster of glowing lights floated to the side of the planet. Mel would have thought they were stars, but Beats indicated this was the hyperport.
“Does Anna really think she can fake ID codes?” Gorgeous said. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
“My impression,” Mel replied, “is that Anna is way more advanced than normal technology around here. Just like Kathor’s ship. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it seems true. Have you ever heard of an android like her?”
“No,” Beats replied.
“Rise of the Unliving was about these cars and phones and computers taking over the world and brutally killing people. Didn’t you see that?” Gorgeous asked Beats.
Beats nodded his head, which for his species meant no. “My tastes don’t run toward horror. It’s all very superficial and predictable. And Mel is talking about the real world, not fiction. I’ve never seen robots that look like living, sentient people. Robots that are smarter than people.”
They approached the hyperport and everyone stared nervously out the window as they got closer. Mel excused herself and walked back to the cockpit to see how Anna was doing, not realizing until she got there that everyone had followed her. Given Beats’ size, they all had to crowd around the door.
“How’s it going, Anna? Anything you need us to do?” Mel asked.
“Yes. Don’t interrupt me,” she replied.
“Right, sorry.” Mel turned
back to everyone else. “This is it. It’s in Anna’s hands now. Figuratively speaking, of course. We either get through or we don’t and then we’ll deal with whatever happens. Okay?”
“Beats and I don’t really have anything to worry about,” Gorgeous said. “We’ll just tell them you kidnapped us.”
“Thanks, Gorgeous,” Mel replied. Gorgeous scowled at her, but the translators immediately told Mel that a scowl meant Gorgeous was laughing and she returned it with a smile of her own. As they drifted closer to the hyperport, Anna began a running update.
“I’m jamming the signal between the Utopia and the dock. I’m patched into both, so I’m pretending to be the ship for the dock and pretending to be the dock for the ship. The channel hopping actually makes it easier, because I was able to get the dock to switch to a different sequence, so they aren’t even transmitting and receiving on the same bands.” Anna sounded smug again.
A hissing voice translated in Mel’s ear. “Agprith three-one-five hailing recreation vessel Spirit of Valor.”
“I’ll play my transmissions to them,” Anna said. She switched to speaking Asadharan, which was Kathor’s native language, but Mel’s translator allowed her to follow along. “Hyperport three-one-five, this is recreation class six vehicle Spirit of Valor. Transmitting ship ID and authorization credentials. Request for immediate jump to Dayalu.”
“Hmm,” Beats said. “I thought we were going to Satir.”
Mel shrugged, as Anna cut in. “I’m planning multiple jumps under different identifications. Otherwise, the ship may be able to track us.”
Mel nodded, impressed that Anna was able to imagine all those scenarios. A moment later, the dock replied, “As you say, Spirit of Valor. ID and authorization approved. You are cleared to jump in four minutes.”
“Damn. I was hoping we could get through faster than that,” Anna said.
“Is it a problem?” Mel asked. “The other ship is still a ways out.”
“They sped up twenty minutes ago,” Anna replied. “I guess they were in a hurry after all. We’re still a few minutes ahead. I’ve pretended to be the dock and told them that our ship isn’t cleared for hyperjumps. I even faked a communication between us and the dock, making it sound like the dock had denied us permission. But they can see us still drifting into position. At some point, they’re going to get concerned about it. I also expect them to hail us and tell us to stand down. In about two minutes, actually. Which means we’ll have to delay them for over a minute.”
