A Dark Horizon (Final Dawn, Book 3)

by T W M Ashford

  Jack turned back to Minister Glessant. He was too busy to pay them any attention.

  “Erm, sure.”

  They stepped to one side, not that it would have made much difference.

  “What are you doing, asking for another assignment? I thought we just came over to tell the minister we were done.”

  Jack furrowed his brow.

  “Why would you think that? We came here to help.”

  “And we did. We helped. And now we’re going home.”

  Jack looked around their group of four. He expected Rogan to say something calming to Brackitt but was surprised to find her looking the most impatient out of all of them.

  “Is that how everyone feels?” he asked. “That we’ve done our bit and now it’s time to leave?”

  “Don’t say it like that,” sighed Rogan. Though her face was made of metal, she sounded exhausted. “We had an agreement, Jack. First we’d go to Earth, then to Detri. This was only supposed to be a quick detour. Don’t turn helping these people into a new crusade for you to fixate on.”

  “A new what?” Jack laughed in disbelief. “In case you forgot, we have a…” He looked around to make sure nobody was listening, and when he spoke again it was in a whisper. “We have a responsibility to put things right however we can. We need to help evacuate the people here in Proxima Delta, and then we need to head to Kapamentis and tell the Ministry everything we know.”

  “I’m with Jack,” said Klik. “Nobody else has any idea what Charon has planned. If we do nothing, he’ll get away with everything. I won’t let that happen again.”

  She peered up at Jack from underneath her hood.

  “Besides. I only just joined this crew. I don’t want to be kicked out of it already.”

  “This isn’t a democracy.” Brackitt crossed his mismatched arms. “And even if it were, we’d win. The Adeona agrees. A deal is a deal.”

  “Either come with us or don’t,” said Rogan. “It’s up to you.”

  Jack shook his head, his mouth wide open.

  “After everything we’ve done, with everything that’s going on right now, that’s it? You’re giving up?”

  “This isn’t our fight, Jack.” Rogan bowed her head sympathetically. “It never was.”

  “Great.” Klik gave the pylon next to her a moody kick. “So the choices are either go with you and get stranded on some rock out in the middle of nowhere, or become another refugee like everyone else in this stupid ship. Thanks for nothing.”

  “Forgive me for eavesdropping,” said a familiar voice, “but I might be able to help.”

  Jack glanced over his shoulder. Another black-robed emissary from the Ministry stood behind him. She was an Oortilian like Minister Glessant, with wide-set blue eyes and a pair of small slits for a nose. Unlike Glessant, however, this Oortilian stuck out her hand.

  “Minister Keeto, at your service,” she said.

  “You were the person we spoke to over comms when we first arrived.” Jack took her hand and shook it. “Nice to finally meet you. I’m Jack Bishop.”

  “Oh, I’m aware.” She smiled. “I was hoping we’d get the chance to speak again.”

  “Were you?”

  “Yes.” Keeto lowered both her head and her voice. “I ran your name through the Ministry’s records. You tried to warn us about somebody called Charon a few months back, did you not?”

  Jack swallowed hard. “That is correct.”

  “That wouldn’t happen to be the same somebody responsible for all this now, would it?”

  Jack tried to swallow a second time but his mouth was too dry. For all his talk about telling the Ministry everything he knew, he was finding it a lot harder now that the question was actually asked of him. Scara Li Ka’s death threat still loomed large in the back of his mind.

  He decided to err on the side of caution.

  “I suspect so,” he replied.

  Minister Keeto rose to full height and straightened out her robe.

  “The Grand Ministers are holding an emergency meeting about Proxima Delta’s star tomorrow. The next refugee ship headed for Kapamentis leaves in twenty minutes. I can get you in front of the council if you come with me. I guarantee it.”

  Jack turned back to face Rogan. He opened his mouth then quickly snapped it shut again. What was he supposed to say?

  Rogan took the opportunity to speak instead.

  “It’s okay if you want to go, Jack.”

  “I don’t want to go,” he replied. “Not like this. What I want is for all of us to go together.”

  “We’re going home, and that’s that.” Brackitt carefully avoided saying Detri’s name in front of the minister. “You’re welcome to join us, but it sounds like your mind is already made up.”

  “Come on, guys…”

  “Eighteen minutes,” said Minister Keeto, checking the time on her data pad. “It’s now or never, Mr. Bishop.”

  “Fine. Fine! Pretend like all of this isn’t happening if you want.” Jack gave up and turned his back on the two automata. “I guess I’ll go clean up our mess on my own.”

  “Our mess?” Rogan’s face grew stormy. “Don’t you—”

  But Jack had stopped listening to her. He turned to Klik instead.

  “Are you going with them or coming with me?”

  “Let me see.” Klik kept her hood low so that Keeto couldn’t see her face. “Go sit on a lifeless rock with a bunch of robots forever or put a stop to the man who killed my father. That’s a hard one.”

  “Good choice. Lead the way, Minister Keeto.”

  The minister smiled and gestured to an empty transport shuttle on the other side of the hangar. Jack and Klik followed without so much as a word of goodbye, though Jack did cast one last glance over his shoulder.

  Rogan and Brackitt were already marching off in the opposite direction towards the Adeona. Brackitt’s mood appeared to have lifted now they were leaving, but Rogan’s hands were bunched into fists.

  Well, they’d made their choice. All of them had.

  They swung by an engineer’s workbench on their way to the transport shuttle. Jack quickly checked to make sure nobody was watching, then snatched a goggled welding mask as they passed.

  “Put this on,” he said, handing the mask to Klik. “I don’t think we’re going to be around friends again for quite some time.”

  Minister Glessant slowly looked up from his data pad as the two groups went their separate ways. He’d been paying far more attention to their conversation than he let on.

  Glessant had done a little research of his own, you see. The report filed following Jack’s previous appointment at the Ministry was buried deep in their records system, but it was easy enough to dig out if you knew what you were looking for… and Glessant had all the clearance he needed. It made for very interesting reading.

  Raklett pirate ships hijacking frigates for scrap. An interstellar warlord forcing automata to build a Dark Space superstructure. A battlecruiser blown up in the Ceros system. This Jack Bishop was one to keep an eye on.

  And now he and Keeto were en route to the Ministry with even more secrets to spill.

  That seemed… problematic. Maybe even dangerous.

  He sent an update to his superiors. They would know how best to proceed.

  5

  Pale Red Dot

  Rogan punched the button at the top of the Adeona’s loading ramp and watched it close.

  “Just us, then?” the ship asked.

  “Just us,” Rogan confirmed. She followed Brackitt up to the cockpit. Try as she might, she couldn’t get Jack’s infuriating comments out of her head.

  “Pity. I had rather hoped Jack would stay. I will miss him.”

  Rogan said nothing, only approached the hologram table and brought up a flight plan to Detri.

  “Ready?” Brackitt asked from his seat up by the dashboard.

  Rogan’s eyes drifted to the empty captain’s chair. She scoffed.

  “Ready. Let’s take Tuner home
.”

  The Adeona rose from the hangar bay and sailed out through the open forcefield.

  It would take at least another day to reach Detri. For somebody with a literal supercomputer for a brain, that was an awful lot of time to spend sitting and thinking.

  Rogan didn’t have a quarters on the Adeona to call her own. Jack and Klik did – or they had, at least – but the idea of privacy and property was a particularly “fleshy” concept, one quite alien to most automata.

  Tuner would have got it, though.

  Despite this, Rogan had chosen one of the empty quarters to house Tuner’s remains. There weren’t many. Most of him had been crushed into scrap by the toppled Krettelian statue and then burned to ash when the Mansa glassed their own moon. All she’d been able to recover was his little, cassette-tape shaped head – badly dented, barely recognisable, but for the most part structurally intact. It now rested on a velvet-draped chest – the sole item of furniture in the spare room.

  All of Tuner’s files and memories were stored within the data core inside – the complex and unique code that made up his personality. Once that died, the essence of Tuner would be lost. Or corrupted, at any rate. The tiny red light on the front still blinked with the last of the core’s backup power, but there was no denying it – the light was definitely fainter now than it had been the day before.

  It made no difference, of course. Tuner was gone. To link his data core up to an external power source and run him off that, or to install his core in another unit altogether, was about as abhorrent an idea to an automata as a fleshy having his or her head lopped off and then reanimated in a vat of preservative.

  It was possible, sure… but it wasn’t done.

  Tuner wasn’t just a data core. He wasn’t just the ones and zeroes rattling around inside that little, rectangular head of his. Automata got parts replaced and updated all the time, but underneath their chassis – because of their chassis, even – they were still who they were… tiny, waddling, robotic frame and all.

  When they got back to Detri, everyone would have the chance to say goodbye.

  Everyone except Jack, that is.

  Rogan had spent the past two hours staring solemnly at her makeshift shrine, not in a daydream but in rapid, algorithmic thought. Now she broke her gaze and walked across to the quarters’ sole window. Nothing but the deep blue waves of subspace passed outside.

  She was still so very, very angry.

  How dare Jack suggest that this was somehow the automata’s mess. How dare he! As if they’d had any choice, any say in the matter. Yes, they worked on the Iris project for Charon. Yes, it seemed likely that the construction of the Iris superstructure and the theft of Proxima Delta’s star were two halves of the same whole. But it wasn’t as if any of them had asked for the job! They hadn’t volunteered! Charon stole them from the various cruisers and frigates his Raklett crews hijacked – many of whom had either bought, inherited or stolen the automata themselves – and put them to work against their will. It was either that or be thrown into a shredder, and even the most rudimentary automata has some survival instinct.

  Our mess. The absolute nerve.

  They’d been fine before Jack came along. Jack, on the other hand, would have suffocated to death in space if it weren’t for them. If it weren’t for Tuner.

  Yes, he’d helped them escape Gaskan Troi and reach Detri. They owed him that. But Jack owed them his life… and now he owed them Tuner’s life as well.

  Because Tuner would still be alive if it weren’t for Jack. If it hadn’t been for Jack’s desperately suicidal drive to find a way back to an Earth that no longer existed – no matter what the cost to his crew – they never would have agreed to do that stupid heist job for the Krettelian resistance, never would have brought the wrath of the Mansa Empire down around them… never would have stolen an empty Solar Core and accidentally let Charon escape with it.

  Our mess? It was Jack’s mess and Jack’s mess alone – just as it was Jack’s fault that the only other human in the galaxy had ended up with the means to steal a sun, therefore dooming an entire star system.

  Good luck cleaning that up.

  Rogan turned back to Tuner’s dented head and sighed. It wasn’t a particularly natural reflex for an automata – rather, it was something she picked up from her original master a long, long time ago.

  Tuner would have rushed off to help Jack, no matter what the risk. He was naive. Brave, loyal, always seeing the best in people… but naive. That’s what got him killed in the first place.

  Fleshies and automata. Tuner had always believed the two of them could live in peace together as equals.

  Rogan wasn’t so sure.

  6

  The Pelastar

  The Pelastar coasted through subspace towards Kapamentis. A C-Class Ministry frigate recommissioned for rescue operations, it made even the Adeona look like a luxury starship. Its rusty hull creaked and groaned under the stress of faster-than-light travel.

  Jack and Klik wandered through its dark, claustrophobic corridors. They were finding it hard to keep still.

  “Not their fight,” muttered Jack, grinding his teeth. “Like hell it’s not. It’s not their fault Everett forced them to build that Iris thing of his, but that doesn’t mean they can just run back home at the first sign of trouble. Some of us don’t even have homes to run back to anymore.”

  They edged around a waterfall of coolant water leaking from the exposed pipes running along the ceiling.

  “And yes,” Jack continued, “it was my plan to visit your father and it was my choice to steal the Solar Core that Everett then used to harvest Proxima Delta’s star. But they went along with it! They supported me! They can’t just… they can’t just stop taking responsibility when they feel like it!”

  Klik had so far been following Jack and his rant in silence. Her tattered, brown cloak covered most of her body, and her face was hidden behind the mask Jack had snatched from the engineering workbench. It made her look like the kind of raider one might expect to find lurking out in Dark Space. Finally, she spoke.

  “Are they cowards?” she asked. “You know them a lot better than I do.”

  Jack paused in the deserted maintenance gallery as he contemplated the question. Then he carried on walking.

  “No, they’re not cowards. Tuner was probably the bravest person I’ve ever met.” He shook his head. “He wouldn’t be giving up.”

  “Then what?”

  “They’re tired, I guess. They’ve been treated like property for years – legally or illegally. They probably see this as a ‘fleshy’ problem. If Rogan and Brackitt didn’t share some of the blame for all this, I could see their point. Why fight for the same people who refuse to recognise automata rights?”

  “That’s rubbish,” said Klik. “Just because the galaxy doesn’t care about you doesn’t mean you should stop caring about the galaxy. My people are slaves and I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Sure. But you’re after revenge.”

  Klik shrugged and clacked her thin mandibles together behind her mask.

  “That’s not all I’m after. I want freedom. I want a place where I belong.” She fidgeted with a loose thread on her cloak. “I had hoped I might find it on the Adeona… but I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere now.”

  “Yeah. I guess we both will.”

  Jack went to scratch the side of his nose. The fact that he succeeded made him stop dead in his tracks.

  “Oh, goddammit. I left my helmet back on the ship! Fat lot of good this spacesuit is now…”

  Klik gave his armour a curious poke.

  “I dunno. Seems pretty sturdy to me.”

  “Sure, but it’s got no way of regulating oxygen or heat without the helmet. What if I end up getting sucked out into space?”

  “Do you plan on stepping outside an airlock any time soon?”

  “No,” sighed Jack, “but it has a habit of happening to me anyway.”

  “Well, we’re headed for Kapa
mentis. Maybe you can buy a new one when we arrive.”

  “With what money? All our credits are back on the Adeona, too.”

  They continued through the maze of dim, metallic corridors, squeezing past iron girders and copper tanks, pretending not to hear the clanking of the Pelastar’s pipes. Jack felt as if he was in an underwater city and the walls were buckling in. They weren’t, of course. When travelling through the cosmos, the greatest threat was the lack of pressure outside the frigate’s walls rather than an abundance of it. The Pelastar was just really old and poorly maintained, that’s all.

  Nothing to worry about.

  “Where are we actually going, anyway?” Klik prodded a bolt in one of the bulkheads. It fell out and disappeared down through the grates in the floor. “Cockpit? Galley? Oh! Is there a rec room?”

  “Nowhere. Just away from everything else for a bit.” Jack thought back to the streams of refugees they’d seen surging through the rescue ship’s airlock doors. There must have been a hundred thousand faces in that crowd – all lost, penniless and afraid. “I’m not sure my conscience can survive seeing everyone right now.”

  The doors at the end of the corridor grunted open. Klik laughed nervously.

  “Well, great job. You’ve managed to bring us full circle.”

  Thousands of survivors were packed into one of the Pelastar’s many halls. Unlike Jack and Klik, they hadn’t been given free roam of the ship. The chaotic menagerie of species brought together from Proxima Delta’s two planets didn’t appear to be adjusting to their newfound industrial environment particularly well. Many of them favoured more aquatic climates. Ministry officials made their way down the rows of stretcher-beds, diligently and emotionlessly filling out displacement forms on their data pads.

  Jack sighed and considered the circumstances in which he found himself – being bussed through space in a rickety old ship with zero idea of what would happen next.