“On the other side of this door is a room filled with engine power cores. Dozens of them, maybe more.”
Hep’s head bobbed on the electric waves in the air. “That’s insane. If even one was damaged, this entire ship would be torn in half. Why would he amass so many? He just turned the Black Hole into a giant…”
His voice died with realization.
“Bomb,” Bayne said.
Hep felt like he was underwater. The electricity washed over him, raising the hairs on his arms, making his heart race. Urgency tightened his gut. “Why?”
“Blaze of glory,” Bayne said. “He always was the theatrical type. And poetic.” He pressed his palm to the metal door. “I’m wagering all these power cores were salvaged from the Ranger ships. Now Parallax aims to use them to avenge the fallen. Or just wipe everything out.”
“But the Black Hole is inside the Ore Town shield. If he was going to go out in a blaze of glory and take the Navy and Byers Clan ships with him—”
The monitor on the wall blinked on, and Parallax was suddenly looking down at them. A general transmission. He was transmitting to every ship within range.
“The pigs of the United Navy and Byers Clan have come to my doorstep,” Parallax said. “United in their disdain for what we have built here. A haven for the free people of the universe. Those who would sooner bloody their knuckles digging a life out of the mines than stain their souls sailing under banners of kings and barons.”
Parallax’s shoulders slumped, pressed down by some unseen weight. He shrugged it off. “Ore Town isn’t the first such endeavor the pigs have sought to burn down. The Rangers were a free people. They fought to unite this galaxy under the principles of freedom. After giving their blood to the cause, they refused to bend their knee. They were executed for it.”
The pirate lord turned his attention from the camera and nodded to someone offscreen. His mask-clad face was cold and emotionless, but the fury rolled off him.
Parallax stepped back to welcome a guest into the view of all watching. Jaxwell Byers was a portrait of fear. Sweat dripped down his brow and joined the tears spilling from his eyes. His lip quivered. His skin was varying shades of yellow and purple, fresh bruises painted atop old ones.
Byers looked into the camera. He looked directly into the eyes of every person watching the transmission. His father, presumably, was among them. And then his face burst forth with a spray of red and pink, a bolt of blaster fire punching into the back of his skull and forcing its contents forward.
Some of it splattered across the camera. It resembled a slowly-falling red rain.
Parallax was front and center again. “The pigs have taken from me. Now, I have taken from them. Come for Ore Town, and I will take everything.”
The screen went black.
17
He could still see the red dots dancing. Like staring into the sun then looking away. Mao could see them still when he closed his eyes.
The comms panel lit up immediately. “Incoming from command, sir,” Graeme said.
“Put it through.”
Jeska’s voice burst through like a cannon shot. “Damn it, Mao! What kind of mess did we step in?”
Mao didn’t answer. He couldn’t stop watching the red dance across the screen.
“Captain Mao!” Jeska’s voice boomed through the bridge. “I need a status report.”
Mao shook free from the hold the previous minute took of him. He was an officer again. A captain. “The Royal Blue is secure, ma’am. We are ready to move at your command.”
“Any word of Admiral Ayala’s status?”
“None. We’ve had no contact with Parallax or the Black Hole.”
Graeme twitched at his comm station. Broken words fell from his mouth like gears from a faulty clock. He raised his hand, trying to get Mao’s attention.
Mao ignored him. “Do you have orders, ma’am?”
“The Byers flagship is losing its mind presently,” Jeska said. “Understandably, Cantor Byers wants blood. He wants all of the blood. From the safety of the Byers command station, he ordered his ships to attack with everything they have.”
“Against that shield, everything they have won’t do anything,” Mao said.
Jeska raised her eyebrows as if to say, ‘Really?’ “I’m doing my best to calm him, but I won’t be able to keep him back for long. We need options.”
Graeme jumped out of his seat. He cleared his throat in a robotic fashion.
“I’ll do my best to think of some, Captain.” Mao signaled to end the transmission. “What is it, Officer Graeme?”
“There is an incoming transmission, sir,” Graeme said. His voice rarely carried any emotion, but it was rife with anxiety now. “From Captain Bayne. Former Captain Bayne, I suppose.”
Mao stared at his comms officer as though the man was insane. “He’s calling from the brig? How is that possible?”
“It isn’t, sir. He’s calling from the Black Hole.”
Every fiber of Mao’s body convulsed. He was suddenly a statue, frozen in this infuriated posture for the rest of time. He spoke through a clenched jaw. “Put it through.”
Static filled the bridge. Bayne’s voice pierced the white noise. “Funny story.”
“How the hell did you get off this ship?”
“No time for that right now.”
“If there are any collaborators left on the Blue, I will throw them in the brig and drag them before a court martial.”
“Shut up!” Bayne sounded like a captain again. Not a Navy captain, wrapped so tight in regulation and expectation that he couldn’t breathe. He sounded like a Ranger captain again, like when Mao had first met him. “We don’t have time for this. I assume you watched the Byers kid just now? You can’t react.”
“Your captain just executed the son of one of the most powerful men in the galaxy. A man who controls an armada to rival the Navy. And you think he won’t react?”
“He isn’t my damn captain!” Bayne shot back. “I have no captain. That execution was a show. Parallax is baiting you. He wants you to attack.”
“So he’s suicidal,” Mao said. “Not that it matters. With that shield up, there’s nothing we can do. Jeska won’t command the fleet to sail into a wall.”
The monitors lit up again with a flurry of activity. All of the monitors. Comms. Energy readings. Radar.
“Sir?” Graeme’s voice was like a needle in Mao’s ears. “You should see this.”
The screen blinked on. The Ore Town shield shimmered and then a portion of it faded away.
“What the hell?” Mao’s lapse in decorum perked Bayne’s attention.
“What’s happening?” Bayne asked.
“They opened the shield,” Mao said. “Are they attacking?”
“No movement, sir,” Graeme said.
“He won’t,” Bayne said. “He’s waiting for you to come to him. You can’t let the happen.”
“I’m not in command of this fleet,” Mao said.
“Damn command, Taliesin. This is so clearly a trap. He’s blinded you all with emotion and opened the door. Once you’re in, he’ll slam it behind you.”
“And trap himself inside with a fleet determined to kill him,” Mao said. “I’ve heard nothing to dissuade me. If he wants to die, I will oblige him.”
“He’ll take everything with him,” Bayne said. “He’s turned the Black Hole into a bomb. One big enough to obliterate your fleet. Probably big enough to crack Ore Town in half.” Bayne explained about the dozens of engine cores. “Alexander Kyte was an idealist. Parallax is a zealot. He wants to burn it all down. If you fly inside that shield, he will.”
Mao hadn’t seen Delphyne and Calibor enter the bridge.
“I take it you’re aware that our prisoner has escaped, then?” Delphyne said.
“I’ll alert Captain Jeska,” Calibor said.
“Wait,” Mao commanded.
Tension laced the ensuing silence. Calibor—who had never served with Mao and had lit
tle to no knowledge of the Blue, its crew, or their history—was confused. He did not understand the need to wait, when informing his captain, the superior of everyone on this bridge, was obviously needed. He could not comprehend what necessitated deliberation. And he was not a man who liked waiting.
“I won’t,” Calibor said. “Forgive me, Captain Mao, but Captain Jeska needs to be informed of this immediately.”
“Bayne is right,” Mao said.
A choked laugh sounded over the comm, Bayne’s audible disbelief.
“There will be no stopping the Byers ships from attacking,” Mao continued. “Bayne knows Parallax better than anyone.”
“Because he’s a pirate,” Calibor said.
Mao didn’t acknowledge the comment. “I see no other reason for Parallax to invite us in. He is audacious, but he is also strategic. Opening a path for the fleet makes no strategic sense if not to lure us into a trap.”
“And if you think that’s true, then let me relay that to Jeska,” Calibor said.
“So she can relay it to Cantor Byers,” Mao said. “And so he can do what? Stand down? Do you know something of the man to suggest he would do such a thing? He will charge ahead, and Jeska will have no choice but to follow.”
“Then what do you propose?” Delphyne said.
Mao paced the platform on which rested the captain’s chair, the thing he’d longed for though he never allowed himself to acknowledge how much he truly wanted it. Now it was his. And the first thing he planned to do as acting captain might mean he never sat in it again.
“Set a course for the opening in the shield,” Mao ordered. “Then turn hard to port. Put us between Parallax and the fleet.”
Calibor roared. “This is mutiny.”
“I’ve received no orders from the Captain Jeska,” Mao said.
“What happens when you do?” Calibor said, stepping toward Mao with his chest out.
Mao did not flinch. “You have a decision to make, Officer Calibor. You can return to your ship before we get underway, or you can join us. I could use an experienced warrior like you on the away team.”
“Away team?” Calibor asked with caution.
“Admiral Ayala is being held prisoner aboard the Black Hole, the very ship Bayne claims has been turned into a bomb. A bomb that Parallax seems determined to detonate. I will not leave her to that fate.”
Calibor bristled.
Delphyne’s hand crept toward her sidearm.
“Fine,” Calibor said. “But when the dust is settled, and you’re court martialed, I want it known that I objected to all of this.”
“Understood,” Mao said. He turned to Delphyne. “Assemble an away team. Where’s Chief Sigurd?”
“Recovering in med-bay,” Delphyne said. “But I think I can speak for him in saying he’s recovered enough.”
“Good. Make it happen.”
Delphyne led Calibor off the bridge.
“I assume you heard that?” Mao said.
“I did,” answered Bayne, surprised. “I’ll get to work.”
18
The energy pent up inside the engine cores seemed to have seeped into Bayne’s blood. It pumped into his heart and flooded his body with urgency. Sweat rolled down his brow, stinging his eyes.
He wiped it away along with the mental image of Mao sitting in his captain’s chair and barking orders to his crew. He was happy for his old friend. And he was deeply angry to lose his ship. But there was no time to wallow.
“Get this door open and do what you can to make sure Parallax can’t detonate those cores remotely.”
Hep’s jaw fell open. “No big deal or anything.”
“Can you do it?”
Hep studied the door and the locking mechanism. “I can get the door open. I don’t know about the rest. I’ve never worked with the cores directly. They should be straightforward enough, I guess.”
Bayne clapped Hep on the back. “Good, then get to it.”
“Hey,” Hep called as Bayne marched away.
Bayne stopped but didn’t turn around. He felt Hep’s eyes burn into his back.
“What do I do after?” Hep asked.
“Find a way off this ship.”
“No, I mean, like, after.”
Bayne looked at the boy and saw that he wasn’t so much a boy anymore. Still, he wasn’t exactly a man either. He was in that in-between phase of life, still finding his way. But he was moving, which was more than Bayne could say for when he first pulled Hep off that ship.
“I suppose you’ll need to figure that out. No one’s telling you what to do anymore.” He flashed Hep a smile before turning and walking away. “That is the point of all this.”
Bayne’s neck strained, his muscles trying to mutiny and force him to turn and look back at the kid one last time. He broke into a run, putting as much distance between him and Hep as he could, and closing the distance between him and Parallax.
His blood ran cold. He touched his hip, checking that his swords were there though he knew they were. They were as much a part of him as his arms. He had tried to deny that, and it made him incomplete. He was whole now. And he was ready to use his arms.
The elevator door slid open to reveal two pirates. Their faces were pale and covered in sweat. Bayne recognized the fear. It froze them in place. They were running. Abandoning their posts, their ship, their captain. They just wanted to leave, to get on a drop-ship and burn as hard and fast away from there as they could.
Bayne drew his swords before they could and drove the blades through the pirates’ guts. Blood spilled from their mouths ensuring their pleas never did. There was no hesitation in him now. Or guilt. He was who he was meant to be.
He stepped over the dead bodies into the elevator. And rose.
He remembered the beginning. Not the days others would say Drummond Bayne began, but the days after Alexander Kyte plucked him off the streets and made him a Ranger. The days when he really began. When he was a child living with his parents.
They were barely a memory now. More of a feeling. The echo one has when waking from a dream. Through the fog of nostalgia, it would be easy for Bayne to say his parents were good people, that they did the best they could with what little they had.
But he didn’t. Because they weren’t. They were neglectful, spiteful, occasionally abusive. Bayne was only five when they were killed, but he remembered feeling a sense of relief when he finally realized he would never see them again. Underneath the relief was a guilt a child couldn’t understand.
It was those moments that began Bayne’s journey to being the man riding that elevator, bloody swords in his hands, wanted for treason, stripped of his rank, ship taken from him, and never more sure of himself. It was then that he learned to rely on himself. To do for himself. To carve his future out of the universe with his own hands and blades. It was then that Drummond Bayne realized the only future worth fighting for was one in which he was beholden to no one, not a person or idea or institution.
It was then that the elevator door opened on to the bridge of the Black Hole, and Parallax stood facing him.
19
Hep never felt so lost as when he had the entire galaxy in front of him. He was suddenly cut free, his ties severed to the Navy, the pirates, to Bayne. He could go anywhere. But he felt adrift without an oar.
Bayne told him to choose. But the choices were limitless and overwhelming.
Just take one step.
That was something Wilco had told him when they first met. When they were both children, what felt like a lifetime ago. Their home was freshly devastated by the war between the warlords and the alliance that would become the United Navy. The battle in orbit was beautiful. Until ships started dropping from the sky.
Hep’s neighborhood ceased to be in the blink of an eye. It was pure chance that he survived, and his parents did not. Days later, Wilco found him whimpering among the rubble and bodies.
Wilco was barely older than Hep but seemed to possess an understanding of the w
orld that came with more years. In different circumstances, Hep would have called it cynicism. At that moment, it seemed like wisdom.
Paralyzed by the sudden loss of everything, Hep sat atop the rubble that was his life. Wilco climbed the mound and sat next to him. Hep remained frozen. Wilco tried to get him to move. Told him that they needed to go, if they stayed put much longer, they’d die. Hep wouldn’t move. It was all too much.
“Just take one step,” Wilco said, taking Hep by the wrist. “Then another. Soon enough, we’ll be someplace else.”
They had been together since that moment. If it wasn’t for Wilco, Hep would be dead on the rubble of his old life. Now, he was standing on the rubble of his new life, facing the burden of limitless choice.
After he rendered these engine cores inert, anyway. Who knew if he’d still be burdened with the decision an hour from now. The canisters seemed nonthreatening after a cursory glance. Simple-looking metal tubes, they could easily be mistaken for a throwaway piece of scrap. Save for the energy that tingled on the air.
His head swam as he disassembled the first one. The simple design betrayed the complexity of the reaction occurring inside. He understood the basic mechanics of the device, but nothing of the chemistry or physics that made the cores one of the most important advancements of the modern age, and the reason for the current deadly predicament.
The reactions were volatile, which resulted in explosive and seemingly limitless amounts of power. A direct hit to an engine during a dogfight would destroy the ship and possibly any nearby ships, depending on the engine size. It was why the debris fields like the ship graveyard from the Ranger massacre were largely left alone by scavenger teams. The risk of accidental detonation was too high.
Hep tried not to think about the risk as he sat in a room full of cores.
The mechanics were designed to be simple and easy to deactivate because of the core’s volatility. Remove the casing. Disconnect the ignition switch from the fuel source. Done and done. They could no longer be detonated remotely. They were still volatile and would explode on impact, but Hep took the win.
The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set Page 36
