The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  “It wasn’t that much trouble.” Wilco cast a glance at Cloak, standing in the corner farthest from the rest. He couldn’t make out any discerning features let alone a gesture that may allude to Cloak’s intentions or desires but, at times, he felt like he knew what Cloak was thinking. An echo, a voice calling up to him from the floor below, reverberating through the ducts. “Yeah, I want you to kill someone. Rather, I want your help in killing someone. Think of yourself as a consultant. I tell you the target; you tell me how to kill her. You may appear a humble backstabber, but I’ve researched you extensively. I know of your black ops training and how you washed out of the Tek Corps on Randomar. It was intentional, yes? You got all the training you needed and then intentionally caused your own dismissal.” Shankar narrowed his gaze and clenched his jaw. “You use this bumbling routine to disarm people, causing them to underestimate you. This makes it easier for you to work around them or get close enough for the aforementioned backstabbing. Am I close?”

  Shankar looked over his shoulder at Trapper. A knowing look appeared on his face. “Your monk help you with that?” As he spoke, his face morphed from the quivering, old sap, beaten down by years of imprisonment into the face that matched the brutal, ruthless reputation of Husk.

  Wilco raised his hands defensively. “Neither am I a religious man nor a slaver, so he’s not my monk. He is good at reading people, but I didn’t need him to tell me that. You’re a snake. There’s no hiding it.”

  Shankar vaulted onto the bunk above Trapper and let his feet dangle in the monk’s face. “So you’ve found me out. But I’ve found you out as well.” Wilco spread his arms as if to suggest that he was an open book. “No man hides behind a mask if he’s got nothing to hide. I know who you are, Wilco. I’ve still got ways of keeping my ear to the ground. You sailed in Parallax’s fleet. You were taken in by Drummond Bayne for a time, rumor was you died alongside him at Ore Town. But here you are. So, we know each other. Now what?”

  “Now we move forward without illusions,” Wilco said. “You will do what I require you to do. Because if you’ve gleaned anything about me at all from having your ear to the ground, you know that I will take that ear then I will take your eyes, and then I will lock you back in a cell with nothing but your thoughts to accompany you while you wallow in the dark all alone.”

  Shankar’s face was blank, unreadable. Then it cracked into a smile. “That got dark. You’re a bit touched, right?” He waved dismissively. “Doesn’t matter. The best ones are. Anyway, give me the target, and I’ll tell you how to kill him.”

  “Her,” Wilco corrected. “I want to kill Colonel Maria Tirseer.”

  6

  Brekken Station was a last-gen mammoth waste of resources. It was greenlit by the previous administration, which was on its way out, as a favor to the Byers Clan back when they and the United Systems weren’t trying to obliterate each other. Byers supplied all of the resources for Brekken, netting them a ridiculous profit and earning the Navy a station that it didn’t need.

  It was the pinnacle of excess. More levels than it needed, so half of them were empty most of the time, but the power grid was arranged as such that all levels were powered all the time. The engines were inefficient. They burned more fuel in one klick than an entire fleet of destroyers traveling five times as far. The technology throughout was outdated and glitchy. Just three years after the approval of the project, a slew of new tech came out of the Navy’s R&D department that put everything on Brekken to shame, but to revise the building plans and re-appropriate funds would have been a bureaucratic nightmare, so they continued as planned.

  In hindsight, the project was a perfect encapsulation of the United Systems/Byers Clan relationship—a total cluster of disingenuous backslapping that resulted in useless hunks of space junk and a lot of rich people.

  The Royal Blue and Illuminate had been docked there for three days. Mao and Calibor were to meet with a source who allegedly had intel on the whereabouts of Hepzah Montaine. What they found when they arrived was a note from that source saying he’d be four days later than planned. Which left Mao to deflect Calibor’s judgmental attitude on a station that barely functioned. His only refuge was the bar on the fifth level.

  The place resembled the hole in the wall dive bars that he remembered from Earth, grungy places that stank of stale beer and body odor. They served drinks in dirty glasses, and the bartenders considered patrons to be burdens, but also cursed them if they didn’t tip well enough. An all-around unpleasant place. But Calibor did not drink. His parents were religious zealots. He’d since rejected the core principles of his upbringing, all the fire and brimstone and apocalypse theory, but some of the lifestyle stuck with him. Mao knew this and used it to his advantage.

  He ordered one drink and nursed it for as long as he could before the surly bartender would grunt at him and threaten to throw him out. Then he ordered another and did the same. After several drinks, he excused himself to the uncaring bartender and went on his way, hoping to make it back to his rented room before crossing Calibor in the corridor.

  Delphyne had left two days before. She booked passage to her new assignment on a private freighter that was docked when they arrived. Theirs was an unceremonious parting. Before he was captain, he was the XO for years. They’d known each other nearly a decade. He didn’t expect tears, not from her and certainly not from him. He didn’t expect grand declarations of gratitude and sorrow. But he expected something. She signed her orders after he signed them. She saluted, he returned it, and she left.

  Her leaving was as demoralizing a blow as Mao had suffered since his captaincy began. While he’d been the brain of the ship, she was the heart, and now the Royal Blue was flying without a soul.

  His body reached his room before his mind. He stared at the door knowing that it meant something to him, but he couldn’t place why. The cogs in his head soon clicked into place, and he remembered that he’d been sleeping inside for days now. Still, he hesitated to enter. The room smelled like feet. Before he began his stay, it smelled like feet. He claimed no responsibility for that. The lighting was abrasive, the art on the wall was manufactured rather than created, the bed was too hard, and the sheets were closer to plastic than fabric.

  The thought of spending another night there carved a hole in his heart. Or rather, it widened the hole that was already there. Still, he couldn’t stand in the corridor staring at his door all night. Even on Brekken, Mao was a Navy captain with all the responsibilities and expectations. With Calibor looming behind him, waiting to report on the slightest impropriety and have Mao’s commission revoked, he had to remain ever vigilant.

  As he stepped inside his room, he felt a sharp pain in his neck, and then the world went black.

  Mao’s head felt like it had been cracked in two. When he tried to touch his brow to check that his head was still in one piece, he found that his hands were bound. As clarity clawed at the inside of his skull, Mao saw a thin black cord wrapped around his wrists, tying them to the arms of the desk chair in his rented room. The abrasive light felt like an assault now. The smell of feet made him break out in a cold sweat as he willed himself not to vomit.

  A figure emerged through the blur of Mao’s vision. A bulky man dressed casually. Canvas pants, a button-down shirt. He looked like any of a hundred blue-collar workers that cycled through Brekken on their way to work assignments. Mao’s eyes fell to the man’s hand and the hypodermic injector clutched in it. A quick-action injector used by doctors to deliver vaccines at a rapid pace in high-volume clinics. From there, Mao’s eyes traveled up the man’s arms to eventually land on his face. A face Mao recognized.

  “Bigby?”

  Selvin Bigby had been a jovial man when Mao met him in the Naval Academy. A few years Mao’s minor, Bigby always seemed to look up to him, like a little brother. He trailed behind Mao, his eyes wide with wonder and intrigue. Even after rising to the rank of captain and getting his own ship, Selvin Bigby retained his sense of adventure. He beca
me one of the few captains who spent long tours in the Deep Black.

  That wonder was absent from his face now, replaced by a weariness not typically seen until a man had reached retirement. “Evening, Mao. Didn’t figure you for the sort to spend his nights in the local dive.”

  Mao tucked his chin to his chest, tensing the muscles in his neck to try and work out the tension building there before it spread into his shoulders. When he looked up, lights danced across his vision, further driving him toward passing out in a puddle of his own vomit.

  “Easy,” Bigby said. “That stuff I dosed you with is powerful. You went down like a bag of hammers.”

  “Dosed me?”

  Bigby chuckled. “Didn’t know it’d put you down so hard. She didn’t warn me about that.”

  Anger flared in Mao, burning away some of the haze. “She? Tirseer? She sent you?”

  “Jeska sent me.”

  Mao cursed himself for being stupid. “Of course. I’m an idiot. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted her. Just tell me this: is Jeska just following orders, or is she in league with Tirseer?”

  Bigby sat on the edge of the bed. He looked at the needle like he’d just realized he was holding a dead rat and threw it across the room. “Neither. She sent me to make contact with you without alerting Calibor.”

  Pain flared behind Mao’s eyes. “But she’s the one who sent Calibor with me on this mission.”

  “To keep up appearances. How would it have looked to Tirseer if Jeska sent you off on your own to collect the man you let get away?”

  The details were a soup in Mao’s head. The more he focused on them, the more they seemed to melt together into a mess of disparate information. “You… Jeska… She isn’t acting on Tirseer’s orders?”

  “Jeska has been moving cautiously since becoming admiral. She knows something is rotten in Central. She saw what went down at Ore Town and everything that’s happened since: the war with Byers, Central moving to concentrate its power.”

  Mao sat up straight at that.

  “You didn’t know about that,” Bigby surmised. “Doesn’t surprise me, been happening behind the scenes. The only reason I know is because Jeska filled me in. But once you know what to look for, you can’t stop seeing it. It started after Ayala disappeared. Tirseer was head of Centel, technically a wholly separate division of the United Systems military, and it didn’t have operational control of any of the standard military units, just black ops and intelligence units. But after Ore Town, Tirseer used the anger and mistrust among the congress to take control of the Navy. They handed her the reins.”

  “I thought it was an interim appointment.”

  “It was supposed to be, but then the war started, and they didn’t want to change leadership. Plus, most of them approve of how she’s handling it.”

  “They don’t care that she started it?”

  Bigby fell back on the bed like he wanted nothing more than to fall asleep. “I don’t know. I don’t know what any of them want or think or how they take their coffee. And I really don’t care.”

  The fog in Mao’s head had finally begun to clear. “Wait, so you’re working under orders from Admiral Jeska, who is not acting under the direct orders of Colonel Tirseer. Jeska at least partially believes me that Tirseer is acting against the interests of the United Systems, and I’m assuming you’re here to assist me in some way. So why the hell did you drug me?”

  Bigby shot up like an irritated teenager being roused in the morning. “I don’t know! I’m not a damn spy. I’m a Navy captain. I don’t know how to do all this cloak and dagger…whatever. Jeska gave me a syringe and told me to use it if I had to. I assumed you’d click on the lights, freak out, and punch me in the face. I fight from the comfort of my captain’s chair. I don’t get punched in the face, and I don’t want to.”

  Mao couldn’t help the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  “And now you’re laughing at me. I should have dosed you with more of this.”

  “Hell, Bigby, this is some fine mess.”

  Bigby produced a switchblade from his pocket. “Never thought I’d be one to long for the quiet, but I want to go home and put on my robe.” He cut the cord from Mao’s wrists. He replaced the knife and dropped back on the bed.

  Now free and his head clear, Mao could see just how tired Bigby looked. Worse than he remembered from their teleconference days earlier, Bigby’s once-youthful eyes now looked like yellowing eggs sitting in knotted and gnarled nests. His lips were cracked, and his hair had gone gray. Hopelessness had doused the vibrant spark that once lit his features.

  Feeling guilty for pushing him further, Mao said, “Fill me in. I want to know everything. What is Jeska planning?”

  Bigby’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t know that she’s planning anything at all right now. Mara is cautious, you know that. She’s gathering information before she makes any decisions. She needs to know who the players are and their motivations. She needs to know what the stakes are. Hell, she doesn’t even know what the game is, especially after what happened at Inferni. What was that?”

  “I don’t know.” Now, Mao felt hopeless. “Inferni was…something we’ve never encountered before. Something no one has encountered before from what I can tell. I’ve scoured the archives for any mention of something similar, but there’s nothing.” His eyes fell to the floor.

  “What? You’re not telling me something.”

  “When Bayne was captain, he had Hepzah Montaine steal some files from Centel.”

  Bigby clapped his hands over his ears. “Oh, dammit, I don’t want to hear this.”

  “There was a mention of something called the Void. A mission from years ago. It was scarce on details, but I was able to glean a little by reading between the lines. Its main objective was to locate an alien intelligence.”

  Bigby’s mouth hung open for a long moment. Mao thought he’d fallen asleep until he burst with exuberant laughter. “Aliens? You think this is all about aliens? You’ve been out in the Black too long, Taliesin. You need to dock somewhere for a while, get your head right.”

  Mao wasn’t swayed. If anything, he grew more steadfast, feeling defensive. “You think it’s a ridiculous proposition? Then how do you explain what happened at Inferni?”

  The laughter died in Bigby’s chest, and Mao felt suddenly guilty for being the one to kill it. “There is a lot of unexplained phenomena in the universe,” Bigby said. “I’ve seen plenty of things I still don’t understand. I just file my report and continue on because it’s not my job to understand everything. And I wasn’t there at the cluster, so I don’t pass judgment on things I don’t see with my own eyes.”

  “I’ve seen plenty too, Selvin. I can tell you with all certainty that I’ve never seen anything like what happened.”

  Bigby rubbed his eyes. They looked more bloodshot than ever when he took his hands away. “Let’s find Hepzah and Sigurd. Once I get a look at him, then I’ll pass my judgment.”

  Mao stood, forgetting that he still had drugs coursing through his system. He steadied himself on the arm of the chair and waited for the room to stop spinning. “We don’t have the luxury of just filing our report and continuing on anymore. The top tier of our government is compromised. Tirseer has us in a war so she can get control of Sigurd and whatever the Void is. Knowing her, she will push the United Systems to the brink of annihilation to get it, and if she does get it, then she’ll push the rest of the universe to the brink until it falls in line. Yes, we need to find Hepzah, but we also need to know what Sigurd is.”

  “Yeah, fine, I’m not making the rules here.” Bigby’s frustration mounted. “Jeska sent me here to support you. That’s what I’m doing. So, how may I support you?”

  Mao shuffled to the sink near the entrance of his room. Catching his reflection in the mirror, he realized how awful he looked. “Don’t ever drug me again. Let’s start there.” He splashed water in his face. “I need to get a message to Admiral Jeska. I assume you can deliver it
?”

  “I’m your rabbit.”

  “Good. Then I need to lose Calibor.” He sipped water from a cupped hand. It was cool and refreshing and burned like he hadn’t had a drink in days. “I think I know how you can help with that as well.”

  The hint of a youthful smile returned to Bigby’s face. “What do you have in mind?”

  7

  The Shayle moon was cold, which was the only thing it was known for. It appeared in sayings like “It’s colder than Shayle” or “You’d have a better chance at lighting a fire on Shayle.” It was wholly unpleasant. That was why Hep had chosen it as a rendezvous and temporary hiding place. None, including him, were happy about it. He just figured he’d add that to the growing list of things he was unhappy about.

  Dr. Hauser met Hep on the landing platform of the derelict mining station where they’d established their makeshift base. Over a hundred years ago, the moon was discovered to house rich mineral deposits. It was promptly dug dry and abandoned. Even the miners, universally regarded as hardy folk, wanted to be gone from Shayle as quickly as possible.

  “How is he?” Hep asked the doctor.

  “Same. He hasn’t spoken since we landed and moved him into his new cell. Hasn’t given us any trouble though, either.” Hauser’s body shivered, but Hep didn’t know if it was from the cold or the thought of Sigurd.

  Hauser gestured for Hep to follow her inside the mining station, eager to be out of the frigid winds that never stopped blowing. The heavy doors, large enough for mining trucks to drive through, slid open just enough for them to walk through, then slammed shut behind them. It was only slightly warmer inside, but the lack of wind offered some relief. The main chamber was little more than a cave. Scaffolding rose along the walls and catwalks crisscrossed between them, connecting administrative offices built on stilts and providing access to the ventilation systems.