Quantum Dark: The Classic Sci-fi Adventure (The Star Rim Empire Adventures Book 1)

by R. A. Nargi

  “Incursion team, do come in.” The voice was Obarral’s.

  “Ana-Zhi, here. Have you heard from Yates or Galish?”

  “Negative, Captain.”

  “Keep trying them. Use the multiband. And let me know when you find them.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ana-Zhi used her scanner to try to locate Yates and Galish, but they weren’t coming up.

  “Something’s screwed here,” she said.

  “I think I know why Yates isn’t answering,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I quickly explained my theory about Yates intentionally leaving my father to die. At first Ana-Zhi thought I was crazy, but I could tell she was thinking about it.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” she said. “We need to get back. Find out what’s going on. And we need the sled to get Sean back to the ship.”

  We headed west past the four-way intersection back towards the depot room. Ana-Zhi kept trying to get Yates and Galish on the comm, but there was no answer.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” she muttered.

  But, to me, it made perfect sense. Yates knew we were on to him.

  Ana-Zhi led the way back into the depot with the hatch down to the gallery. Near the archway into the depot, something caught my eye. There were bootprints in the dust. Mine, Ana-Zhi’s, and then another set.

  “Check this out.” I shone my hand-lamp at the ground. There was a set of prints heading north. I pulled up the topo on my Aura to confirm my suspicion. “That’s Yates. He’s going for the Kryrk.”

  Ana-Zhi started to contradict me, then stopped. I think she was coming around to the realization that something wasn’t right with Yates.

  “Do you think Galish went with him?” I asked.

  “For his sake, I hope not.” She loosened the RB in her holster. “Let’s get him.”

  It was fairly easy to follow Yates’s tracks. They led west down the corridor for a hundred meters or so, then north into another depot room. This one didn’t have any machinery, other than some dead hover-carts, but it did have a dozen or so cargo tunnels fanning off to the north. We just followed the bootprints.

  It wasn’t long before we reached another gallery—the one where the Kryrk was located.

  Ana-Zhi double-checked her topographics. “This is the place.”

  Five minutes of searching led us to a vault with a half open door.

  The vault was empty.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ana-Zhi said. “He stole the Kryrk.”

  “We need to alert the ship.” I had visions of Yates—and maybe Galish—murdering Obarral and Chiraine. Unless the ship’s engineer was in on it as well.

  “Freya, come in.”

  There was no answer.

  “Freya!”

  Nothing.

  Ana-Zhi cursed. “We need to get back to the ship. What the fuck is going on?”

  We jogged back down the cargo tunnel, through the east/west corridor, and back to the depot room. Something had been nagging at me as we jogged and it finally came to me.

  “There were none of Yates’s bootprints going back this way,” I said.

  “What?”

  “We’ve been following his trail. He went to that other gallery, took the Kryrk, but didn’t come back.”

  Ana-Zhi looked confused for a second. Then she said, “He must have found another way down. The ship is on the level below us. Hurry!”

  We entered the access shaft and scrambled down the ladder. The hatch door at the bottom was open and the sled was still hovering below it.

  “Yates? Galish?” Ana-Zhi called.

  No response.

  She jumped down onto the sled, RB drawn. I followed her, fear clawing at my gut. This felt like a trap.

  “Anyone here?”

  Then I spotted something.

  It was a body, sprawled in a heap at the base of the pillar.

  “Fuck me.” Ana-Zhi keyed the sled’s thrusters down and we plummeted ten stories to the ground. Then we jumped off the bobbing sled. As we got closer I could make out whose broken body it was.

  No surprise. It was Hap Galish.

  “Check him,” she ordered as she dashed around the perimeter of the pillar.

  I didn’t really need to check Hap Galish’s condition. I saw where a judder knife had torn out his throat and most of his neck—right through his suit.

  My gorge rose and I barely got my visor open before barfing up everything in my stomach. I slumped back on the sled and it was a few moments before I realized that I shouldn’t really be breathing the air in here. It was frigid cold and there was a strong odor of ozone.

  “No sign of Yates,” Ana-Zhi said, returning to the sled. She activated her comm unit and sent a warning to Obarral and Chiraine. “Obarral, if you can hear me: Yates has gone rogue. He’s murdered Galish and is heading back to the Freya. Lock the ship down. If you see Yates, shoot on sight.”

  Then she turned to me. “You okay, junior?”

  I nodded and spit to clear my mouth. Then I sealed my visor once more. The suit’s D/O converters notched up and soon I was breathing safer air. But it didn’t make me feel any better. Neither did the fact that my suspicions about Yates had been confirmed.

  “Back to the ship,” Ana-Zhi said. “Pronto.” She started to move, but I grabbed her arm.

  “The LVX,” I said. It was still right here on the sled. That meant Yates wasn’t worried about security bots. “Can you operate it?”

  She shook her head. “Not quickly enough. We’re just going to have to take our chances. But that reminds me. We need to go dark, you and me.” She was referring to our exosuit beacons needing to be deactivated. It was against all kinds of rules and safety protocols, but unless we killed our beacons, we’d be lit up like Christmas trees on Yates’s scanner.

  With that taken care of, we took the sled and hustled back down the cargo tunnel, retracing our steps through the first depot towards the big hall with the murals. It was a longer distance than I had remembered.

  “I just hope to Dynark…we get there…before Yates,” Ana-Zhi wheezed. She looked worse than just out of breath.

  “Me too,” I said. “Has this ever happened to you before?”

  She stopped and caught her breath. “What? Have one of my crewies go psycho? No, this is a first.”

  In order to keep a lower profile just in case Yates was in the area, we had to ditch the sled. We hid it in a maintenance bay outside of the depot. Then we made our way through the big entrance hall with the dead maintenance bots, stealthily going from shadow to shadow. Once we got close to the airlock I chanced a peek out of one of the big observation windows to the landing deck.

  Outside the Freya stood, parked peacefully where we had left her. There was no movement anywhere near her. Maybe Yates hadn’t arrived yet.

  Ana-Zhi was probably thinking the same thing I was. “We need to stake out the area,” she whispered. “He’s got to come back this way.”

  We split up and I hid behind some empty crates, while Ana-Zhi found a spot behind a low wall that acted like a corral for a line of the hover-carts. We both had good views of the hallway and the landing deck through an observation window.

  I checked my RB and tucked myself into position. I generally hated to wait for anything. Waiting for a murderer to show up was even more stressful. I tried breathing deeply to get beyond the pain in my chest and the pounding at my temples, but I was wound too tightly.

  Images kept playing back in my mind. My father—left for dead by Yates, as good as murdered. Then Hap Galish—his broken body, his butchered throat. The blood…

  These thoughts weren’t helping. And probably would end up getting me killed. With some effort, I pushed them away and tried to focus.

  I kept alternating my view, back and forth, between the window and the hallway. I cranked up the sensitivity of my external audio sensors even more and thought I could hear Ana-Zhi Agrada’s heart beating fifteen meters away from me. It was my imagination, o
f course. I could barely see her in the gloom, let alone hear her.

  Just for a second I dared to glance down at my Aura’s scanner, hoping that Yates had forgotten to turn off his beacon. The scanner’s display was blank, just as I expected—

  But then a faint blip popped on the screen.

  It was down by the other airlock.

  Shit! He was escaping to the landing deck through another door.

  I sprang to my feet and ran towards Ana-Zhi. “The other airlock!” I cried.

  “What?”

  I gestured to the east, as I sprinted towards her. “He’s circling around us.”

  During the next few seconds, time seemed to slow.

  I remember my boots kicking up dust as I ran.

  I remember glancing out of the observation window to see if I could spot Yates approaching the Freya.

  I remember seeing something hovering in space beyond the Freya. It was red. A red ship. In the distance. And then—

  Sizzling bolts of energy shot into the Freya.

  A massive explosion of light and a roaring sound eclipsed all my senses. I was thrown to the ground as a shockwave hit. In the blink of an eye the observation window’s hyaline rapidly darkened in response to the nova of light—as did my visor. At the same time, my suit instantly cut out my external audio sensors, and its armor bulked and hardened to help protect my fragile body.

  With most of my senses cut off, all I was aware of was a faint high-pitched whine in the darkness and the ground rumbling and jumping beneath my feet. This went on for a half a minute at least and I felt myself curling in a ball on the floor, instinctively trying to protect myself.

  Once my suit’s sensory grid stabilized, and I realized that I was still alive, I sat up and examined what was going on around me. I could see something had affected the stability of this part of the station. Cables swayed, lights flickered, glow tracks winked out and then back in. Dust and dirt, dislodged from gantry girders, fell in delicate streams from above and hung in thick clouds below.

  Through the observation window I saw all kinds of bots swarming the outer landing deck, spraying foam on the blackened husk of a destroyed ship. But what I was seeing could not be possible…

  “Jannigan?” Ana-Zhi Agrada’s voice crackled over the comm link. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, what the hell was that?”

  “Something blew up the Freya.”

  Even as she said it, I knew what I had seen. We were attacked. A red ship armed with void cannons.

  The Mayir.

  Before I could even begin to process what had happened, a voice came on the comm channel. A female voice.

  “Hello? Anyone there?”

  “Chiraine?”

  It was her voice, but how could this be?

  “Yes, Jannigan, are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where the hell are you?” Ana-Zhi asked.

  Then a figure stepped out thirty meters away at the far end of the corridor. She waved gently.

  Chiraine had escaped from the Freya just a few minutes before the ship was attacked. Or, according to what she thought, was intentionally scuttled. The blip on my Aura was her, not Yates.

  I quickly explained about finding my father and Yates’s betrayal. Chiraine hadn’t heard any of our comm broadcasts.

  My father…

  The thought of him lying amidst those machines hit me hard. With the Freya gone, how was I going to safely get him out of hibernation?

  “I think Obarral was in on it,” Chiraine said. “Likely with the Mayir.”

  “Someone certainly shut down the Freya’s proximity plates,” I said.

  “Start at the beginning,” Ana-Zhi said.

  “Soon after you left, Obarral sent me down to the hold to check on a wonky status light. I didn’t find anything and then I realized that he had locked me in the hold. I tried to contact you, but he also took control of the comm array.”

  “Obarral was in communication with us,” Ana-Zhi said. “I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t think anything was wrong on his end.”

  “What did you do?” I asked Chiraine.

  “I mostly tried to get out. When that didn’t work, I tried to initiate a secondary communication array—which also didn’t work. My final idea was to get into an exosuit and use the its comm unit to alert you guys. That’s when I saw the Mayir ship.”

  “What was it doing?” I asked.

  “Just sitting there. Like it was monitoring us. I couldn’t hear anything going on over the comm, of course, so I had no idea if Obarral was talking to them. I started to get a little paranoid about being locked in the hold, so I decided to try to get out of the main airlock and go and find you all. Luckily, Obarral hadn’t thought to lock down the exterior hatch.”

  “Why did you think Obarral was working with the Mayir?” Ana-Zhi asked. “He must have been killed as well when the Freya was destroyed.”

  “Right before I left the ship I saw a life pod eject,” Chiraine said. “I think Obarral was on it.”

  “He flew a lifepod out of a parked ship?” I asked.

  “That’s a difficult maneuver in gravity,” Ana-Zhi said. “He would have to clear the landing deck.”

  I knew what she was talking about. Life pods had minimal propulsion systems. It was a tricky move, but an engineer like Obarral could probably pull it off.

  Ana-Zhi crossed her arms. I could tell that she had been blindsided by this betrayal.

  “What I want to know is what happened to Yates,” I said. “Did you see him?”

  Chiraine shook her head. “No. After Obarral left in the pod, I just wanted to get away from the ship.” She pointed down the hallway. “I went in that airlock and hid.”

  “I think I know where Yates went,” Ana-Zhi said. She brought up Bandala’s topo on her Aura. “This isn’t the only landing deck. There’s a bunch. The closest is on the other side of Bandala, up six levels.”

  I looked at my own topo. Like Ana-Zhi’s it was incomplete, with different areas grayed out. I could make out another landing deck, but it appeared to be nearly a kilometer away from where the Kryrk had been stored.

  “What I don’t understand is how he got past the security bots,” I said. “He was paranoid about having the LVX and clearing the zones. Then he just left it and made his way across the whole length of the fortress? How?”

  “He must have known something we didn’t,” Ana-Zhi said.

  “Maybe the upper levels don’t have bots,” Chiraine said.

  “Maybe,” Ana-Zhi said.

  I could tell she was thinking about something.

  “Are we sure that Yates escaped?” Chiraine asked.

  “There’s only one way to be sure,” I said. “We have to track him.”

  “And you’re positive that he has Kryrk?”

  “Yes. Unless the vault you found was already empty.”

  “This is bad,” Chiraine said, sitting down on a cargo crate. “Very bad.”

  “What’s bad is the fact that we’re stuck in this godforsaken place,” Ana-Zhi said.

  It finally sank in. We were trapped—trapped on an abandoned orbital fortress — with eighteen hours to go until the Fountain opened. It would only stay open for a few hours while the ships returned. And that would be that. In the best-case scenario, we’d be trapped here for seven years. Worst case: twelve. Or more.

  “No,” Chiraine said slowly. “If the Mayir get their hands on the Kryrk, it’s worse. Much worse. For the entire galaxy.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ana-Zhi asked.

  Chiraine looked away, unable to meet Ana-Zhi’s gaze. “The Shima didn’t tell you why they wanted the Kryrk,” she said quietly.

  “Sure they did,” I said. “It was part of the briefing. It’s a holy artifact. It has religious significance to the Shima.”

  “Did your briefing include anything about Tanak the Elder?”

  “Who?”

  “He was a Shimese prophet. The Sword of Menaheth
o. Speaker of Flames. The Dreamrager.”

  “They did mention a prophet,” I said. “But I didn’t get his name.”

  “It was Tanak,” Chiraine said. “He’s a major figure in their history and religion.”

  “Yeah, didn’t this guy Tanak find the Kryrk?”

  “He didn’t just find it. It was bestowed upon him by Isennefre, the all-seeing goddess.”

  “Okay.”

  “And Tanak used the Kryrk to smite the Atlanene, who were the biggest threat to the Shima at that time.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I remember all this. The prophet used the Kryrk to rain fire down on his enemies. No, wait. Wasn’t it an asteroid?”

  “Yes, it was an asteroid. And it destroyed an entire continent and basically caused the Atlanene civilization to crumble.”

  “Okay.” I wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

  “It’s all real,” Chiraine said. “Documented.”

  “What’s documented, the asteroid strike?” Ana-Zhi asked derisively. “There’s nothing mystical about an asteroid strike.”

  “I agree,” Chiraine said. “But we’re not talking about a single asteroid strike. Over the 3,000 years the Kryrk was in the possession of the Shima, they used it hundreds of times against their enemies.”

  “They only mentioned the one time to us,” I said.

  “That’s because the Shima wanted you to believe that the Kryrk’s power was a myth. It’s not. It’s real. And I’ve seen the documentation. The Kryrk is a weapon. And whoever wields it can destroy entire planets.”

  “How could it be a weapon?” Ana-Zhi scoffed. “It’s a golden crescent yea big.” She moved her hands a half meter apart.

  “If we had recovered it, I would have been able to study it, and then maybe give you an answer.”

  “I just don’t buy it.”

  “Do you really think the Shima would be paying what they’re paying for a mere holy trinket? Think about it.”

  16

  No one said anything for a long time. We were all lost in thought. Or in shock. Or both.

  Could it be true? Could the Kryrk be some sort of ancient planet killer? I shuddered to think of such a thing falling into the hands of the Mayir.

  But the more I thought about the Kryrk and the Mayir, the more I realized that there wasn’t anything we could do to about it while we were stuck here on Bandala.