The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  Ayala cocked her head, a flash of understanding chasing away the quick glimpse of confusion. “You think I’m her.” She ran her hands down her body in a clinical fashion. “This body.”

  “You’ll forgive the confusion,” Bayne said.

  “No, not really.” Ayala sounded mechanical in her rejection. There was no hint of sarcasm in her voice. “I don’t understand you.”

  Bayne seemed pleased by that, like a child reacting to an offhanded compliment as if it were genuine. “I am an eternal mystery. There never were many people who could sort me out.”

  “Not you,” Ayala said. “You.”

  Bayne looked around. “You’re still pointing at me.”

  Ayala shook her head. “The shell. You still don’t seem to grasp the difference between that and what you are now. I understand Drummond Bayne. He is a human like any other. Your ego pushes you to believe you are more, but I’ve observed humanity for longer than you can fathom, and I say with all certainty, you are not.”

  Dr. Elias stepped into the circle. “How long have you observed us? How could you have? As I understand it, your sentience has only peaked recently. Until we crossed paths, you were not sophisticated enough to monitor anything.” He fired off the questions in rapid succession, a rabid fan who’d cornered his celebrity crush in a crowded restaurant.

  Hep braced for Ayala’s response. He expected her to snap her fingers and wipe Elias out of existence. Part of him hoped for it. Instead, she turned toward him and regarded him like a dog nipping at her heels.

  “Your ego is the worst kind. Whereas one like Bayne’s or even the one once possessed by this shell pushed them toward pursuits some might consider admirable, yours drove you to dabble in things with which you had no business. You are a child who thinks himself a god. A man who dissected the most sacred fabric of the universe just to see what would happen and sewed it back together into a patchwork quilt not fit for the most weatherworn beggar sleeping in the filthiest gutter. Even now, I can see it clear on your face, as you are spoken to by a higher being, one that you proclaim to have always desired to meet, you don’t believe what I say. You are arrogant and ignorant, the most dangerous combination your species can be.”

  Elias fell back a half-step, staggered by his opponent’s vicious attack. But he was not knocked out. She was right. “You would call me arrogant? You can say what you like, but I know you exist because of me. The work I did in my lab, it was the first of its kind. I peered farther into the heart of existence than any other person ever has.”

  Ayala sneered. “You think man created god instead of the other way around.”

  “You’re no god,” Elias said.

  Hep wanted to believe him. He was not a religious person. He was not spiritual. He had never seen anything that would lead him to believe in a power that added order to the universe. The universe as he knew it was chaos. There was a natural order once, and, at times, it was still apparent in places left untouched by human hands. But where there were people, there was a breakdown of the natural order. Subjugation. A perversion of it. There was no better example of that than this man: Dr. Tobin Elias.

  “Such terms are created by your kind,” Ayala said. “Applied to things of great power that you don’t understand. Things that are beyond you.” The words were pointed and meant to cut. The look on Elias’s face said they did, at least a little. “In your desire to understand, your desire to reorder the universe according to your perception, you only created more chaos. Chaos on a scale that now threatens to annihilate your order completely. You’ve brought about your own destruction because you wanted to be a creator.”

  “You might be jumping the gun a bit,” Bayne said. “We aren’t annihilated yet. Last I checked, we took down your fleet, left you the last woman standing.”

  “Not the last,” Ayala said, her pale face cracking into a smile. “I still have a few soldiers left.”

  The colorful haze around the periphery of the clearing parted. Through it, several figures emerged. Hep felt Wilco tense even from feet away, drawing his attention away from the figures. Wilco began to tremble. He stumbled back, hands dropping to his side. His fingers relaxed, nearly losing their grip on his sword. Hep followed Wilco’s awestruck stare to two of the figures. They descended like angels, touching down on the deck with terrifying grace. One of them was lithe and nimble, and the other was a hulk.

  Kurda and Trapper Mayne.

  14

  The sword in Wilco’s hand felt unbearably heavy, like it would pull his arm from his body if he didn’t let it go. But something wouldn’t let him release, muscle memory, his body acting free of his mind.

  Kurda and Trapper looked the same. And completely different. Like Ayala, they were pale, skin and eyes tinted blue, but they were the same skin and eyes Wilco had looked to for years as he set out on his own, cutting his own path for the first time. They were the same eyes that silently told him he was about to make a mistake. The same hands that gripped his shoulder and pushed him forward when he hesitated. The same hands that hefted an ax or staff and cut down those who would stand in his way. But there was something else in those eyes now. A coldness.

  That same coldness infiltrated Wilco. “What is this?”

  “Your failures,” Ayala said, seeming to take pleasure in it.

  Hep screamed at Wilco. “Get your sword up!”

  Wilco couldn’t move. He felt disconnected from his body. His mind had drifted back to the days when he and Kurda and Trapper schemed and planned their next job, when they studied a mark and executed a perfectly-planned grift, when they hijacked a shipment of ore from the self-righteous Byers Clan only to turn around and sell it back to them on the black market. He fell back in time to when he was happy. But the present crushed down on him, this shattered mirror showing him a broken reflection of his happiness.

  “They’re not… That isn’t…” Wilco couldn’t finish his words.

  “Your guilt is noxious,” Trapper said. Unlike Ayala, his voice was his own. He sounded like he always had—righteous, indignant, a real pain in the ass. “It’s catching in my throat. Good, I hope you choke on it.”

  “You’re not him. You’re just…a body.”

  “Like you? Or him?” Trapper pointed to Bayne. “I’m as me as I’ve ever been. Maybe more. I’m finally part of something I believe in. Not the monks. Not you. The Void. No anger. No hate. Just…nothing. It’s bliss.”

  Wilco shook his head. His breath came in quick, ragged bursts. Spots of light began to dance across his vision. Heat blossomed in his chest.

  “You’ll love it,” Trapper continued. “You can finally stop pretending that you want to be free.”

  Kurda walked toward Wilco, a massive glowing ax in her hand. “You’ll never be free.”

  Wilco’s eyes fixed on her axe. It was solid one moment and like a wisp the next, flickering between here and there, real and not. Everything felt like that now. A blink between reality and madness, between existence and nothingness, order and chaos. Wilco shut his eyes. He told himself that everything he ever did was so that one day, he might live beholden to no one, nothing, no system. He could fly where he pleased and stay for as long as he cared. He would be free. But that was a mask. He sought chaos. Disorder. He wanted to burn the world down just to feel the heat on his face and watch the embers dance. This feeling in his gut, like the poison he’d swallowed, was burning a hole through him. This was real chaos. This moment, the dead walking and telling him of his failures, a being with the power to create and destroy at will. There were no rules anymore, and he was unmoored. Even a lover of anarchy operated within a certain set of rules. There were always rules. They knitted the universe together.

  The universe was coming apart at the seams. He couldn’t stand to be part of it anymore. He waited for Kurda’s ax to split him open. The scream that followed was not his. He opened his eyes to see Hep with his sword hilt deep in Kurda’s side. She bellowed but did not fall. She swatted Hep away like he was nothing.
He took his sword with him as he soared and crashed to the deck several meters away.

  With the nuisance out of her way, Kurda continued as though there were not a hole in her side. Though, as she neared, Wilco noticed that the hole closed on its own. A meaty fist slammed into Kurda’s face, knocking her back a half-step.

  “A damn shame to do such a thing to such a fine face,” Horus said. “But I’m afraid I can’t let you stomp him to paste. As much as it pains me to admit, it ain’t half-bad having him around.”

  Wilco tightened his grip around on the grip of his sword. “So kind of you to say.” Watching Kurda shamble forward, her wounds healing, he remembered the moment she died. Pressing forward across the command deck of Central, Tirseer’s black ops agents peppering her with blaster fire. She continued on, her body being torn apart. This thing before him was not her. It took her body, her voice, but it did not take her spirit. It moved without regard for valor, no respect for the fight, because it could not die. A good death was the only thing Wilco ever saw Kurda pray for.

  He ducked under a sweeping blow from Kurda’s ax. He slashed at her calf, hoping her legs would buckle under her sizable frame. She stumbled, but only until her muscle tissue knit itself back together, which was seconds at the most. She grunted as she hefted her ax overhead and looked down at Hep, still squatting beside her. Her face disappeared in a burst of blue-tinted blood.

  Bigby yelled for Hep to move. He had blasted Kurda right between the eyes. She was blinded by pain and rage and, well, a total lack of eyes, but that only caused her to swing wildly. She slammed her ax into the deck. She stomped and screamed. Hep rolled to one side and then the other, barely dodging attacks but unable to get to his feet and put space between them.

  Like two rhinos colliding, Horus slammed into her. She dropped her ax and they crashed into the deck, a rolling ball of anvil-sized fists. Horus’s blood sprayed into the air, mixing with the blue-tinted stuff in Kurda’s veins, if it could still be called blood.

  With a moment’s respite, Wilco helped Hep to his feet. And then both of their feet were swept out from underneath them with one swipe of Trapper Mayne’s staff. Trapper swung his staff around so quickly that he was able to slam down into their guts before they hit the deck. Both gasped for breath.

  “I hated the violence,” Trapper said, standing over their writhing bodies. “I hated the anger. But that was all I could ever sense from you. You hated so much.”

  Wilco rolled onto his back. “Couldn’t have been so bad. You stuck around a while.”

  “Maybe I thought I could change you.”

  “No, I was your mask. A reason for you to feel your own anger.” Wilco hopped onto his feet with unexpected speed and slashed at Trapper’s knees. The monk blocked with the staff. “You were just as mad as me. You were just too righteous to acknowledge it.”

  Wilco slashed again in a downward arc, then up, building into a flurry of attacks. Some of them broke past Trapper’s guard, slicing his arms, but, like Kurda, he healed too quickly for it to have an impact. Hep joined the assault, charging at Trapper’s blind spot. He pierced Trapper’s side with a quick jab, opening the monk up for Wilco’s continued attacks.

  In the center of it all stood Bayne and Ayala, unmoving, like two stone statues, each waiting for the other to crumble. Elias crept around behind Bayne, an anthropologist observing a moment in history.

  “You are a momentary impediment,” Ayala said. “You set me back. Others have set me back before. Yet, I am still here. I will always be here, and I will eventually succeed. There is no stopping me. I am the end of the arc, the final destination, a place of total order, of balance.”

  Bayne held both hands out to his side. Identical blades materialized in each. Cutlasses, large curved blades that looked capable of hacking a body in two with one swing. “You say you’ve been observing humanity for a while. But you don’t sound like you’ve learned all that much. You speak of absolutes and balance in the same breath. You are not the end of the arc. We are. Together, we are balance. Chaos and order. Two sides of the coin. I’m just the more fun side.”

  “You are in my way.” Ayala rushed forward at blinding speed. No human eyes could follow her movement. Bayne disappeared in a flash. The two became blurs occasionally accentuated by bursts of light where they clashed.

  Wilco forced his attention away from the fight amongst gods and back to his present situation, in which he was in very real danger of being murdered by his dead former colleagues. Kurda had thrown Horus off her. Wilco and Hep managed to jump out of the way just before being crushed by the large man. Bigby and Sigurd held back Kurda’s charge with a relentless barrage of blaster fire. Chunks of her flesh flew from her body and turned to ash before falling. They were quickly replaced by new flesh born from pure energy.

  Wilco and Hep circled around Horus. Bigby and Sigurd backed up to them. They let off the trigger so they could talk to the others.

  “Thoughts?” Bigby said.

  “So many,” Horus said. “Very confusing thoughts. If I’m more attracted to Kurda now, does that mean I’m into dead people? Is she still technically dead?”

  “Gross,” Hep said. “He means helpful thoughts.” A series of cracks like thunder echoed around them. Bayne and Ayala. “Nothing we do has any effect on them. They heal as fast as we hurt them.”

  “Then we have to hurt them faster,” Wilco said. “A barrage so fast and devastating that the Void can’t keep up. Bigby and Sig’s blaster fire is wearing Kurda down. It takes her just slightly longer to heal each time.”

  “We focus on one enemy at a time,” Hep said. “Everything we’ve got all at once.”

  Horus grunted. He pulled a satchel that hung on his back. From it he removed what looked like an anvil. He drew a metal rod the length of Hep’s torso from a thin sheath that was also strapped on his back. He screwed the rod into the anvil, creating a massive war hammer. “Gonna be a damn shame smashing that pretty face.”

  “Move!” Hep dove and rolled just as Kurda’s ax gouged a crater in the deck. With her attention on Hep, Wilco darted behind her and slashed at the backside of both of her knees. She dropped, but before Wilco could follow up his attack, she was already beginning to heal and rise again.

  Bigby and Sigurd planted themselves in front of her, just out of her reach, and opened fire into her chest. Flesh tore away to expose muscle. Muscle burned away to bone. As fast as they blasted it away, it repaired, like scooping water out of a sinking ship. Hep hurled his sword, sinking into Kurda’s exposed heart. Her screams were swallowed by blaster fire.

  Horus stepped forward, hoisting his hammer over his shoulder. Bigby shifted his fire from Kurda to Trapper, keeping the monk back just long enough, while Sig kept his focus on Kurda. Horus hefted the hammer, planted his foot, and swung. Kurda’s head disappeared.

  Wilco didn’t allow himself to look. He’d come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t the person he knew, but a meat puppet. Still, he didn’t want to see her like that. He followed the arc of Bigby’s fire. Trapper twirled his staff so fast that it blurred into one solid-looking object, like a shield, deflecting most of the fire. A few shots made it through, but they barely registered as an irritant.

  If any calculus ran through Trapper’s head, Wilco did not see it play out on the monk’s face. Trapper let down his guard, allowing the barrage of blaster fire to reach him. Still, he was fast and agile enough to dodge some of it. His left arm turned to a pulpy mess before he pivoted to the right. Wilco didn’t register what the monk was doing until it was too late. He tried to slow his forward momentum, but ran straight past Trapper, leaving nothing between him and the others.

  Trapper threw his staff like a javelin, and with the monk’s supernatural strength, that was exactly what it became. It cut through the air, speeding toward Sigurd like it had a debt to pay. Maybe the Void was angry that it had let Sig slip through its fingers, that it had lost a powerful weapon, one of its soldiers. Whatever its reasons, Trapper’s targe
ting of Sig was deliberate. But the attack never reached its target. Because Bigby stepped in its path. The staff slammed into Bigby’s chest, cracking his armor and his ribs and everything inside him.

  Hep and Wilco both yelled. They charged Trapper, swords drawn. In that moment, more so than any other moment of their lives, they were united. Two opposing forces, usually pushing and pulling each other until they felt they might tear apart, now working together toward the same goal. Hep cut low. Wilco went high.

  Trapper’s legs dropped out from under him, no longer attached to the rest of his body. His torso was nearly cut clean in two. As Trapper fell in separate pieces, Hep and Wilco continued their assault, unspeaking but sharing the same drive: total destruction. They slashed and cut and stabbed until there was nothing left to regenerate. For good measure, Horus slammed his massive war hammer down on what remained.

  Exhausted, devastated, Hep and Wilco dropped to their knees on either side of Selvin Bigby. He did not gasp or suffer, the damage done to him was too extensive. He was dead. His eyes, like in life, were wide open, desperate to see all they could. Wilco removed Bigby’s helmet. Hep closed Bigby’s eyes. And then they turned their attention to the battle still being fought.

  15

  Something changed. Bayne felt a shift in the air, in the ether, in the makeup of the universe. Subtle, but significant. The drop in air pressure before a storm breaks.

  He stopped when he heard screams. He felt them. Hep and Wilco knelt over the body of Selvin Bigby. Bayne’s chest tightened, but he did not allow the loss of a good man to throw him off course. That was not the shift he felt. He needed to know what it was. He needed to know, because somehow he knew that it was the key to everything.

  “What was that?” Ayala voiced what he felt. “Something…” Her voice dropped off as her eyes fell on Hep and Wilco standing over the body. Then they went wide with understanding. She shot forward, eyes fixed on Hep and Wilco.