Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies)

by Jasper T. Scott

  “Probably calling in reinforcements,” Wheeler said.

  Ruso nodded. “We just plotted a jump to a nearby system. We’ve been waiting for you to arrive before we executed.”

  “Show me.” Wheeler nodded to the holo table.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Ruso turned to the table and made a pinching motion with her thumb and forefinger. The display zoomed out until the green wedge of Astralis disappeared, and a glittering map of nearby stars took its place. One of them was highlighted with the yellow diamond of a nav waypoint.

  Ruso selected that star and read the system summary. “Six planets, none habitable.”

  “Moons?”

  “Fourteen that we’ve detected so far, but there’s likely more that we can’t see hiding behind the planets.”

  “Without a spectral analysis there’s no way to be sure that they’re not habitable,” Wheeler mused.

  Ruso nodded. “And if one of them is habitable, it could support a Faro colony.”

  “Habitable planets, or not, they could still be there with a self-contained facility or space station.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Which means we’re not going to learn anything else from here. Execute the jump.”

  “Aye, ma’am—helm, execute jump!”

  “Jumping...” the nav officer replied.

  The bridge flashed white, dazzling Wheeler’s eyes. Details of her surroundings gradually returned, and she barked out, “Sensors, report!”

  “Clean sweep! No contacts!”

  Wheeler let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Good. Helm, get ready to plot another jump.”

  “Aye, where to, ma’am?”

  “Stand by...” Wheeler gestured to the holo table, zooming out and checking stars at random. She found one with just one planet and six moons at the edge of the galaxy where they were currently situated. The planet was too far from its star for it to be habitable. “System lima seven tango alpha mike november dash eleven,” Wheeler replied.

  “Aye, Commander... plotting jump,” the helm replied.

  “If this system is safe, why plot another jump?” Lieutenant Ruso asked.

  “Just in case we’re followed,” Wheeler replied. She turned in a circle to survey the bridge—her bridge. As the ranking naval officer on board, this was now her command, but she couldn’t help feeling like she’d stolen it. The admiral was dead, and with the Res Center gone, he wasn’t coming back—nor were General Graves or Chief Councilor Ellis, or any of the others who’d died.

  “Where’s Councilor Ortane?” Wheeler asked, turning back to Lieutenant Ruso.

  The other woman shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “See if you can contact her for me. She’s in charge of the executive branch now that Ellis is gone.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ruso replied, and hurried from the holo table to the comms station.

  “And someone get me my ARCs!” Wheeler demanded. She was starting to feel naked without them.

  “Aye, Commander!”

  Turning back to the holo table, she summoned a map of the system where they were now—L7RT-6. A system of six planets and their moons. Wheeler checked them one by one to find that they were all lifeless balls of rock, ice, and gas. The ice world might not be entirely lifeless, but close enough.

  She grimaced and shook her head. If the Faros didn’t show up, this system was going to be their home until they figured out what to do. Would the council decide to go back to their original mission of exploring the universe and risk more encounters with the Faros?

  Wheeler frowned. Whatever people said about Etherus, his deity or lack thereof, one thing was certain: he’d kept everyone inside the Red Line safe from the Faros. If it were up to her, Wheeler would take them all back to the Etherian Empire and never leave again.

  Chapter 51

  Astralis

  —TWO MONTHS LATER—

  Acting Chief Councilor Tyra Ortane stared at the woman lying on the bed beside hers—a woman with dark hair, bright blue eyes, and an intimately familiar face. It was the same face she saw in the mirror each morning. The woman lying beside her was none other than Captain Tyra Forster. She’d never taken Lucien’s surname, because she’d never married him. She was the captain of a ship that no longer existed, part of an expeditionary force that had been disbanded years ago.

  The expeditionary forces had almost been reformed and redeployed thanks to Chief Councilor Ellis, but after everyone had learned who Ellis and the others really were, all of their decisions had been cast into doubt. No clones would be sent out to explore ahead of Astralis, and all the recent changes in legislation had been repealed—including the judiciary department’s early ruling that Captain Forster and Councilor Tyra Ortane were distinct individuals and allowed to remain as such. The ruling was seen as a dangerous step toward whatever the Faros had been planning.

  That was what brought both Tyra and Captain Forster to this probe room in Winterside General, waiting to be integrated. Of the two, Captain Forster was in better shape, so her body had been chosen to house both sets of their memories, a fact which made this whole process doubly unsettling for Tyra.

  “It’s going to be fine,” Lucien said, squeezing her hand.

  “Mama!” Theola declared and pointed to Captain Forster. The captain flashed a troubled smile. Lucien shook his head and redirected Theola’s finger to point at Tyra. “No, that’s Mama,” he said.

  “Not for long,” Captain Forster added ruefully.

  “You’ll both still be you,” Lucien insisted, glancing between them. “You’ll just have a bunch of new memories that you never knew you had.”

  “I know,” Tyra said, “but it’s still unnerving.”

  “Tell me about it,” Captain Forster said.

  Lucien nodded and looked away. Councilor Tyra followed his gaze to watch as probe technicians scurried around, checking readouts on their equipment. Doctor Fushiwa came over and nodded to her. “We’re ready to begin, Councilor.”

  “Are you sure this is safe?” Councilor Tyra asked.

  He nodded, blinking his orange eyes and smiling. “Perfectly safe.”

  She regarded him dubiously. This was the same doctor who’d first performed the mind probe on Atara a few months back. Following the analysis of that probe, he’d subsequently cleared Atara of any suspicion. That didn’t instill a lot of confidence now.

  Tyra winced at the memory of what had happened to her eldest daughter. If Doctor Fushiwa had dug just a little deeper with that probe, Atara wouldn’t be sitting in the hospital’s psych ward right now. They would have been able to restore Atara immediately from her backups in the Resurrection Center—backups that no longer existed thanks to the late Joe Coretti.

  Despite rigorous searches of the Coretti brothers’ apartments, homes, and business establishments, Joseph Coretti was nowhere to be found. If he had somehow built his own resurrection center as Lucien believed, authorities had yet to find it—or Joe. So far it looked like he’d actually plotted to kill himself, or at least, that the bomb had gone off by accident, but Tyra agreed with Lucien. Joe was out there somewhere, probably with a new face and a completely different body, having just pulled off the perfect crime.

  “Councilor?” Doctor Fushiwa prompted. “Do you need a moment?”

  Tyra shook her head. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The doctor nodded and turned to the other bed. “Captain?”

  “What she said,” Captain Forster replied.

  A probe technician walked up beside Captain Forster’s bed and injected a sedative into her arm. He injected Tyra next. She squeezed her husband’s hand hard as the needle went in, and he smiled reassuringly at her. She took that smile with her as her eyes closed and darkness fell inside her mind.

  The next thing she knew, she was waking up in another room, under a warming blanket, with Lucien sitting beside her and Theola running around the room giggling.

  Tyra struggled to sit up. Memories sw
irled, pieces of a life she’d never lived. Her time on the Inquisitor felt real. All her memories leading up to that felt real. But the life on Astralis with her husband Lucien and her two daughters felt like something she’d watched in a holovid. The memories didn’t feel like hers.

  “Tyra?” Lucien asked, jumping up to stand beside her bed and grab her hand. “How do you feel?”

  She frowned up at him. “I feel fine, Commander Ort—” She stopped herself there. “Sorry. I mean, Lucien.”

  His brow furrowed with concern. “You don’t remember me.”

  “I do, but...” she trailed off, unable to express the confusion she was feeling.

  The door to her room swished open and Theola stopped running around to watch as Doctor Fushiwa walked in.

  “I see you’re awake,” he said, smiling as he approached.

  Lucien turned and jerked a thumb at her. “That’s not my wife.”

  “No?” The doctor turned to her. “You don’t remember your life here, Councilor?”

  “I do, but it doesn’t feel like my life.”

  “Ah. I understand.”

  “So explain it to me,” Lucien demanded.

  “She’s in a fugue state, not uncommon after this type of procedure. A similar period of confusion follows resurrections. You surely remember something like it when you were resurrected, Mr. Ortane?”

  “That was over eight years ago.”

  “Then perhaps you’ve forgotten how you felt. Don’t worry, it’s temporary. In just a few hours your wife should be her old self again—with the addition of some new memories from her time as captain of the Inquisitor.”

  Tyra listened to that exchange with her heart pounding and palms sweating. She tried to fight her rising panic, but failed. None of this was real! “Doctor...” she trailed off, as dark spots swam before her eyes.

  The doctor leaned into view, took one look at her, and called, “Nurse!”

  “What’s wrong?” Lucien demanded. He sounded very far away.

  “She’s having a panic attack. Tyra, I want you to focus on taking deep, slow breaths. Slow. That’s it... like that.”

  The dark spots fled, and Tyra’s heart rate dropped, but every time she glanced at Lucien it sped up again, and her vision blurred once more.

  “Deep breaths,” Doctor Fushiwa urged. Turning to Lucien, he said, “Mr. Ortane, under the circumstances I believe you should leave. We’ll call for you when your wife is able to receive visitors again.”

  He nodded slowly, his expression troubled. He left Tyra’s field of view, saying, “Come on, Theola, let’s go see Uncle Brak...”

  ***

  Astralis

  Lucien gazed into Brak’s scarred face. His skin was shiny and off-color where it had been grafted in from other parts of his body. Where before Brak’s face had been horrifying because of its bony, skull-shaped appearance, now it was horrifying for all its misshapen lumps and asymmetrical appearance.

  It was the best that Astralis’s surgeons could do on short notice. There would need to be subsequent reconstructive surgeries, but right now they didn’t want to risk it.

  Lucien pulled up a chair beside Brak’s bed and listened to the beeping of a heart monitor and the sighing of the artificial lung that kept Brak breathing. Brak was in a coma, and had been for the past two months.

  The doctors said he had extensive brain damage along with all his other injuries. They’d extracted what data they could, but even his AR implant had been damaged in the blast. A piece of shrapnel had scored an unlucky hit.

  They wouldn’t know how much of his memory or personality had been affected until they could grow a new body for him, and that would have to wait until the Resurrection Center was rebuilt.

  Brak’s old body was just about to be unplugged and thrown in the incinerator. They’d kept him on life support, hoping he’d wake up so that could tell them some new detail about what had transpired in Ellis’s final moments. Had he confessed to something? Had Brak overheard anything to shed light on the message Ellis had sent just before he’d killed himself?

  The Faro prisoners had been impossibly little help. The Abaddons had all managed to kill themselves upon waking, and none of the others seemed to speak Versal, so they couldn’t translate a thing. Mind probes helped by adding to their alien vocabulary, but contextual analysis and translation was frustratingly slow, even with hundreds of specialists on the job. They’d only managed to decipher about a dozen words so far.

  Theola struggled in Lucien’s arms, sliding down and making a break for the floor. She wanted to run around and explore, but Lucien pulled her back up. She batted him with her hands and started to cry.

  “Shhh,” he whispered and kissed her on the head. He couldn’t let her run around in here. There was too much sensitive equipment. She’d probably unplug Brak and put him out of his misery before the doctors got around to it. When Theola’s struggles and cries grew too insistent to ignore, Lucien stood up with a sigh. “Let’s go, then.” He cast a rueful glance at Brak. “See you later, buddy.” He lingered a second longer, half-hoping to see Brak’s eyelids flutter at the sound of his voice, but of course that was just a fantasy.

  “Let’s go check on your sister.”

  “Agaga!” Theola said.

  Lucien smiled wanly. “That’s right, Agaga.”

  They reached the psych ward and Atara’s room just in time to witness yet another mind probe. They were forced to wait outside in the observation area and watch while a police detective questioned his daughter under the influence of the probe.

  “What are the Faros planning?”

  “I don’t know,” Atara said.

  “Why did they infiltrate Astralis?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Atara.”

  “Your Faro name,” the detective clarified.

  “Abaddon.”

  That reply sent chills down Lucien’s spine.

  “And you don’t know your own plans?”

  “My transfer was interrupted.”

  “And that conveniently excluded all of your memories?”

  “It was not necessary for me to have any of those memories. Only my personality was transferred.”

  “So you don’t speak any Faro.”

  “A few words.”

  “What words?”

  “Hello—Sheeva. Goodbye—Heeva.”

  “That’s it?”

  Atara just smiled.

  Lucien scowled and turned to the security guard sitting at the desk in the observation area. “What’s the point of this? They’ve asked all of these questions before.”

  The security guard shrugged. “They made some adjustments. This probe is supposed to go deeper than the others.”

  “Well it’s getting all the same answers.”

  The guard gave no further comment. Lucien tapped his foot impatiently, waiting for the probe to end so he could go in with Theola. Atara continued stone-walling, casting the effectiveness of the probe into doubt, and Lucien’s attention drifted to a holoscreen hanging above one corner of the security guard’s desk.

  A holonews story was playing about High Court Judge Cleever being taken into custody on suspicion of being a Faro spy. The screen was muted, but Lucien could read the subtitles clearly enough. Cleever had been identified as a potential Faro after being subjected to an AI-driven screening test. The test involved downloading and scanning every bit of data in a person’s brain for suspicious thoughts or motives. Tyra and Captain Forster had both been tested and cleared, along with all the other councilors. Now the representatives of the house and the judges of the judiciary were being screened. Apparently Cleever was the first to be caught.

  Unfortunately, the news report didn’t mention anything about useful intel being uncovered in Cleever’s thoughts, but that wasn’t strange. Atara had also been identified as a Faro by the test, and she didn’t seem to know anything useful, either.

  Apparently, the Faros had i
nfected different people to varying degrees, giving some of them memories and pieces of the overall plan, while others appeared to know nothing but their newfound allegiance to the Faros.

  Apparently Judge Cleever fell into that category. Lucien wondered if that meant she and others like her could be brought back. The transfer of consciousness was obviously less comprehensive with them. Lucien glanced back at his daughter, Atara, and a small, desperate hope clawed inside his chest, even as a lump rose in his throat.

  He looked away, back to the holoscreen, and watched as Judge Cleever was pushed into a waiting police hover car. Theola squirmed and wriggled in Lucien’s arms, making a break for the floor so she could go explore. Lucien let her go this time, but kept half an eye on her to make sure she didn’t do anything dangerous.

  Cleever. The name rang a bell in Lucien’s brain. Then he remembered why—he and Brak had seen a lookalike for her dead son, Titarus, on their stakeout at the Crack of Dawn. Lucien struggled to make a connection, but there wasn’t one to be made. Even if that lookalike really was her son, somehow brought back illegally from the grave after being convicted of murder, why would the Faros bother to possess him? He was a ghost who couldn’t show his face for fear of being discovered.

  A ghost that might lead to Coretti? Lucien wondered. That was the connection his brain was searching for, a lead worth following. If Titarus was alive, finding him would lead straight to Joseph Coretti’s illegal resurrection center, and then to Coretti himself.

  “All right, you can go in now,” the security guard announced, interrupting Lucien’s thoughts.

  Lucien cast about for Theola and found her sitting on the floor under the guard’s desk, playing with a garbage can. He walked over and grabbed her by the hand to hoist her up. “Come on, Theebs.” He tried to pick her up, but she insisted on walking by herself, holding his hand for support.