Blade of the Reaper: An Intergalactic Space Opera Adventure (The Last Reaper Book 3)

by J. N. Chaney

  Had Byron Thane II possessed a code? His father’s perhaps? Who had granted him access to the Reaper facility where he’d been fitted for the mask? I sought out the images the mask had implanted on my nerve-ware, and for once, I couldn’t see the mystery woman I suspected was calling me ever onward.

  "We are preparing to enter the next slip tunnel," Jelly advised.

  "Thanks," I said, my voice gravelly from disuse.

  "Elise is on her way to the bridge," Jelly said. "May I say something, Captain?"

  "Of course." I was confident the ship computer wouldn’t ruin the mood.

  "I am glad to have people on the ship again.” Jelly sounded sincere and content, if such a thing was possible for an artificial intelligence.

  It was good to have companions on the ship. Elise in particular calmed me without a word. In fact, we usually did better with less talking. X-37 advised me we normally took ninety-seven seconds to begin arguing. What was weird was that I looked forward to it.

  I trusted the young woman to speak her mind, which was a quality I valued in people.

  When she entered, she was slightly out of breath, as though she’d been running.

  I shouldn’t have left her on Greendale. We were kindred spirits. Us against the Union. And the galaxy. And fate.

  "Did I miss it?" she asked, falling into her seat like only a teenager could.

  "You have not missed our entry into the slip tunnel," Jelly assured her.

  Elise looked at me for a hard two seconds. She did this from time to time, some kind of nonverbal test. I wasn't sure exactly what it meant.

  Still, no matter how often I wanted to throw her off the ship, I knew I would die to give her a better life.

  "Stand by to enter slip space," Jelly said. "This will be a relatively short trip, only a few hours. Then we will need to decide on which of the coordinates we discussed with Tom and Mr. Henshaw. Shall I consult the Lady Faith for this jump?"

  I thought about it. "By all means, but leave us out of it. Consult with the Lady Faith and her crew, but don't connect to my bridge without checking with me first. And make sure there is no reason to check with me. I'd like to enjoy this one without worrying about Henshaw."

  "I don't like that guy," Elise said.

  I didn't disagree. He might be a brilliant scientist, even a former Union officer with multiple advanced degrees, but he was also a gambler and a fast-talking salesman. I didn't trust him, and I didn't like putting the lives of my crew in jeopardy because of his double talk.

  An opening appeared in space, edged with green and flows of energy. The Jellybird moved into it and soon we were staring at flowing green walls of power. It never ceased to amaze me how dynamic the slip tunnel looked from the inside.

  "It's beautiful," Elise breathed.

  "I always feel like the inside of the slip tunnels are their own universe. It's like we're meant to be here but could be banned from using them in a moment," I said.

  Henshaw's yacht, the Lady Faith, entered the slip tunnel a few thousand meters behind us without hailing us or asking where this one was going, thanks to Jelly hitting the mute button.

  Elise played with her hair for a second, an oddly feminine gesture I hadn't seen before.

  Not wanting to ruin our moment of relative peace, I didn't speak.

  "Are you going to do anything, or just sit here for the whole slip?" she finally asked.

  "I'm good," I said, pressing back even farther into my captain's chair.

  Elise imitated the posture and cast me a warning glance. "If you stink up the place with that cancer stick, I'm out."

  "Fine with me," I said.

  "Fine," she said without real malice.

  “Fine."

  "That's what I said," she pointed out.

  I lifted the cigar, tucking it into the corner of my mouth but not lighting it. Speaking around it, I cast a warning glance. "You can stay, but if you annoy me, I'm putting fire to this thing."

  “Whatever,” she said.

  We sat in companionable silence watching the magic of the slip tunnel. It was probably the best three hours of space travel I had ever experienced.

  Elise and Path put away the game they’d been enjoying for the last hour while I prepared myself for another confrontation with the ocular engineer. “Who won?” I asked.

  “I did, because he refuses to cheat,” Elise said.

  “Maybe you should be disqualified,” I suggested.

  “Whatever,” she responded, bouncing out of her seat with an excess of youthful energy. “It’s just a game. You cheat when we play.”

  “If I did, you wouldn’t catch me,” I said. “Can you believe this kid, Path?”

  “Her cheating isn’t the best,” he said, surprising me and Elise, or so her expression suggested.

  “Are you trying to hustle me?” Elise asked. “Pretending you don’t know the real rules so I let my guard down?”

  “Would that be a good way to win the contest?” Path asked, his face unreadable.

  Elise was still deciding how to respond when Henshaw appeared on the viewscreen. He looked tired and hungover, as though three days and as many slip tunnels hadn't passed since our escape from Roxo III. If he was showering on a regular basis, I didn't see evidence of it. He was a man struggling with an obsession and no one to pull him back from the brink.

  We first met James Henshaw in his mansion where he was surrounded by dozens of beautiful people, some of them hired help and others from the wealthiest families in the Roxo system.

  The man had appeared to be not only somebody who had bathed frequently, but someone who seemed to spend his leisure time in lavish spa treatments and getting manicures. His hairstyle had been unruly chic, the popular avant-garde style of Roxo at the time.

  Since then, he’d had a propensity for complaining about his lack of wardrobe options and the limited menu available during space travel, even though his luxury yacht provided an opulent variety of foods compared to what Jelly could provide.

  “We’re at the slip tunnel,” Henshaw said without preamble.

  “We are,” Jelly agreed.

  “Our estimated time of departure from this tunnel is one minute and forty-seven seconds,” Lady advised. “Transit to the next tunnel will take two hours, at which point someone will have to make a choice as to our direction.”

  "Wake me when we’re ready to make a decision," Henshaw said. As soon as his words were completed, the screen went dark.

  "What a jerk," Elise said.

  I fired up my imitation Starbrand and pondered it. Something was amazingly wrong with it.

  Elise picked up on my expression. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing's wrong," I said, holding the cigar at arm’s length to look at it. "I think this is a real Starbrand."

  "The way you talk, I didn't think those actually existed," she said.

  "I stole it from Henshaw when we were at his mansion," I said. “I’d assumed this was just another fake and had it at the bottom of my humidor.”

  The screens came back on about the time we exited slip space. According to Tom’s research and what Henshaw had reluctantly admitted to during several bridge-to-bridge interviews, there were two tunnels at hand. One was charted, the other wasn’t. The second was also hidden in a naturally occurring debris cloud that had been here for some unknown amount of time. The only reason we could see it at all was that Tom's extensive research had given us an exact location to check.

  "Well, Jelly, is it there?" I asked.

  "It is, Captain," Jelly answered as she maneuvered the Jellybird closer to it.

  Henshaw came back on the screen, this time with Tom sitting beside him.

  "I can't believe it's actually there. You were right, mechanic," he said to Tom.

  I ignored the ocular engineer and focused on the sensor readings. "Jelly, can you tell me where this one goes?"

  "I cannot, Captain. I can only affirm that it is at the coordinates Tom gave to me," Jelly said, "and that it goes s
omewhere."

  "What do you think, Tom?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "My research was convincing but theoretical. There must a secret Reaper laboratory someplace. The location of this slip tunnel was hidden impressively well, which tells me it might be what we’re looking for.”

  “You’re saying it leads to the Reaper facility we’re after?” I asked.

  “If you were going to hide a lab like that, using a tunnel inside a debris field and omitting its location from public star charts might be the way to go about it,” said Tom. “Don’t you think?”

  I thought about the ramifications of being wrong. This wouldn't be the first time I'd gone through a slip tunnel without knowing where the exit was.

  Still, in those instances, the worst case scenario had been a wasted trip. This time? The gods only knew.

  "Take us into it," I said, crossing my arms. “It’s either that or we get out of here, and I’m not ready to pack it in just yet.”

  "Right away, Captain," Jelly said.

  The opening was the same as any other tunnel. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but I did feel a sense of relief at the sight of the green lightning as it formed inside the rift.

  An hour passed, once we had gone through it, and we let the slipstream take us on its current. The travel time was a mystery, and we had no way of finding out when we’d arrive. Every tunnel on record had never lasted for more than a week, so most ships stocked enough supplies to make it through that length of time or longer. Part of me feared this one might somehow be different. There had been no record of it, after all, so who was to say where it ended?

  "This is sketchy, I said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

  "Is that one of my cigars?" Henshaw accused.

  "Maybe it is," I answered, not even looking at his screen. The readouts were strange. Fluxuations in the walls. Larger than normal lightning bursts. I was starting to get worried.

  “What is it?” asked Henshaw, giving me a knowing look.

  “Well,” I said, taking another drag off the cigar. “Seems like this tunnel might be unstable. I’m sure it’s fine, though.”

  "I can't believe you stole from me," Henshaw said, ignoring what I had just said.

  "If you're asking me to apologize for stealing the cigar you swindled from somebody else, don't hold your breath," I said. "Now, you ought to work with your ship AI. Something is wrong with this tunnel."

  Henshaw frowned at me but turned his attention to the slip tunnel readings. “It’s unstable but I’ve seen worse. You worry too much. We should be fine.”

  “Famous last words,” Tom said.

  Almost two days later, the Jellybird and the Lady Faith were still crawling through the tunnel.

  "Is this unusual, Jelly?" I asked.

  "Not in the least," Jelly answered.

  "Keep me updated," I said, then went to the training room for my next session with Path, who’d been working with me on my sword competency. The man’s martial prowess was truly amazing. I held my own with the training swords he’d fabricated in the maintenance shop, but each time I upped my game, he thrashed me to prove a point.

  I’d thought I knew how to fight with an edged weapon. The Union had trained me with several versions, from bayonet to entrenching tool, and I had continued to practice long after I joined the Reaper Corps. The blade in my augmented arm had always been effective, but Path was showing me new ways of doing things.

  What impressed me was that he never got angry or excited. He just moved faster and hit harder. I wanted him to get mad and lose his cool, but he never did.

  "Perhaps we should start at the beginning," Path said. “I'm amazed you survived your confrontation with Uriah."

  "Never mind that. Where did you learn to fight?" I asked. There were certain elements to his style that suggested he had received Union training—the way he gripped the hilt of the weapon, the way he checked right, left, right, then glanced over his shoulder for adversaries to avoid being surprised. Scan small, then scan big, my firearms instructor used to say, never let ‘em creep up behind you. A fight isn’t a good place to get tunnel vision. You have to push your awareness outward, maintain your situational awareness no matter how hot the fight gets.

  I remembered my lessons from basic and advanced infantry training. He was so fluid, however, that I might have been imagining the similarities. When he checked over his shoulder for undetected enemies, it barely looked like that was what he was doing. The man was a natural, born to be a warrior even before life trained him in a variety of deadly skills.

  He wasn’t the type to shout oorah and pump his fist in the air. Grigori “Path” Paavo was a quiet professional through and through, an artist of violence waiting to come out.

  "I did my share of service to the Union," he said. "Let's just leave it at that."

  Part of my job as a Reaper was to read people, make predictions about what they might or might not do, and understand their emotional hooks. My new friend, if that was what he was, had done things in his past he wasn't proud of. I recognized a slight intake of breath when he admitted his Union service. I saw the direction his eyes flicked when I asked the question—down and to the left. A normal observer wouldn’t have seen any of it. His pain and regret was hidden far below his calm exterior.

  I was familiar with the problem. We all had our regrets. The trick was not to dwell on them and move forward instead. Easier said than done, of course, but if I could do it, anyone could.

  "We should start by standing still," Path said.

  "You want to just stand here looking at each other?" I asked. “I had this lesson a long time ago.”

  “Are you too good for it now?” Path asked.

  “What if I say I am?” I responded.

  “I would call you a fool. Stand still. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Forget all that you have learned and all that you have done. If you cannot exist in this moment, you will learn nothing.”

  I let out a long sigh with no attempt to hide my frustration.

  "Do you have something better to do? Perhaps the slip tunnel is opening and Jelly neglected to tell us," Path said.

  "Is sarcasm part of the training?" I asked.

  Path didn't answer. He stood facing me, and I immediately realized he was ready for anything. By anyone's standard, I was an expert in martial arts. I knew how to fight and I was mean enough to win every time. Reapers succeeded where others failed because we were ruthless and knew how to eat our own pain.

  But this unassuming man with his crazy hair and weird glowing body piercings knew what he was about. I couldn't describe any single factor of the way he stood there, only that there were warning bells going off. If I attacked him, he would be ready, having already planned my defeat.

  I imitated his stance, feet about shoulder-width apart, and my body relaxed.

  "Do not relax too much," he said, noting my movement.

  "That doesn't sound like something a meditation master would say. Shouldn't you be telling me to be one with the galaxy?" I asked.

  "If that does it for you, then by all means, seek the center of the galaxy and the coldness within," he said, repeating a popular training phrase among hand-to-hand gurus. “Or just be present, know your environment and yourself, and prepare physically and mentally for conflict. That does not mean smoking cigars and shooting everyone."

  "Maybe it should," I said.

  He didn't respond.

  Without any further instruction from my new teacher, I fell back on what I knew. I controlled my breathing and examined each muscle group in my body for tension. Most of the time, I relied on deep breathing exercises to relax, but once or twice, I adjusted my body alignment and gently flexed.

  "That is much better," Path said. "We will work more on all of this, but now we should begin the next phase of our training."

  "What will the next phase be?" I asked.

  He smiled. "The part where I hit you on the head with the stick."

  15

  I kicked back in
my captain's chair, feet up on one of the terminals.

  Elise read from her tablet. She’d picked up some fiction about a young woman who saved the galaxy. The main character was five or six years older than her, and it seemed to me that Elise had adopted her as someone to look up to. There were also some romantic overtones in the story, which I stayed away from. After one or two conversations about the book, I concluded it was better just to let her read it and butt out.

  She looked up. "Are we there yet?”

  "Not exactly," I said. "Captain's log, star date get-me-out-of-this-godsdamn-tunnel.” I cleared my throat. “My crew is holding up well, except for the young woman who I had high hopes for. She's become moody and difficult, like a teenager. I’m considering the airlock solution."

  "Ha, ha, ha. You think you're pretty funny?" Elise asked. "Why don't you add to that log that the made-up captain isn't a real captain.”

  "You probably got me there," I said, then lowered my feet to the deck slowly, aches and pains from Path’s instruction restricting my movement. “Ship driving isn’t my specialty.”

  Elise put away her tablet then stood and stretched. If she'd been hitting the gym a lot before, now she practically lived there. We were all trying to stay busy. The ship had never been in better repair.

  We'd managed to shuttle Tom back and forth from the Jellybird and the Lady Faith several times. He put his ship engineering skills to good use. From time to time, even James Henshaw was helpful.

  He’d added his advanced programming and biomechanical knowledge to what Tom had already done. I was starting to think my arm, at least, was better than when I had full Union support for my Reaper gear. What he couldn't help me with, and wouldn't talk about, was the prospect of X-37 going off-line without a proper update.

  "We need to ration supplies," I muttered, trying to remember how many slip tunnels we’d been through on this odyssey. We were up to something like ten or fifteen slip tunnels now, probably going in three dimensional circles around the galaxy—or far beyond the Deadlands. The long trip frustrated me but also reassured me we were on to something. A secret Reaper facility should be hard to find, I thought.