Starless: Half Light

by Alyssa Rose Ivy

  Part 9

  Caspian

  18 Caspian

  I cleared my mind enough to finally focus. It didn’t take me too long to find a way into the Andrelexa system through a backchannel. I had full access to my files, but I could also move into the mainframe. “I’m in.” I called Gardenia over. The sooner she explained exactly what she wanted me to do, the sooner we could move on and protect Rachel.

  She hurried over. “What took you so long?”

  “How about some recognition that I managed to do it at all?” I knew it was like talking to a wall, but I could try. I still didn’t quite understand how she’d convinced the crew to mutiny against our father and support her. I was almost afraid to find out.

  “I’ll give you recognition when I’m Emperor.” She straightened up and raised her chin.

  “I think you’re jumping a few steps ahead.”

  “A few?” She grinned. “More than a few. But at least one step is done. Now shut it down.”

  “Shut which part down in particular? Defense alerts? The receiving port?”

  “All of it.” She sat down on the edge of the table.

  “You want me to shut down the full coms for Andrelexa?”

  “Didn’t I say that before? I’m not getting your confusion.”

  “You did say it, but I guess I didn’t really think you meant all of it. That’s going to be noticed. Quickly. They’ll figure out a workaround and catch us before we can get in.”

  “Not if you do it right.”

  “Trust me, Gardenia. There are backups of everything. Fail-safes for fail-safes. It’s better for us to shut down the parts we need access to, or wait until we’re closer if you are determined to do an all-out shut down. Why show our hand now?”

  “Because this is just a distraction.” She sighed. “Really, brother. Sometimes I worry about you. How could Father have thought you’d be a good Emperor?”

  I didn’t let her words sting. It didn’t matter. “If shutting down the coms is a distraction, what is the true goal?”

  “We have men inside who will take out Father. Then we will slip in and move on to the next step.”

  “Take out Father? As in capture him? Force him to abdicate? Because that’s not going to happen if I’m not there. I’m the only one he might listen to.” I felt foolish that only days ago I’d believed he’d willingly turn over the reins to me. Now I realized it was going to take a lot of persuasion, if it happened at all.

  “He doesn’t have to abdicate if he’s dead.”

  “Oh? You’re going to kill our father?” Was I really asking my sister this? It seemed absurd.

  She turned so she was looking right at me. “I was hoping you would, but if you won’t, I will.”

  “You expect me to kill him?” I pushed my chair back from the computer. “Our father?”

  “After what he did to Rachel. Yes.” She folded her hands in her lap. “You know he deserves that fate.”

  “You don’t care what he did to Rachel.” Gardenia may not have harbored ill will to the woman I loved, but she didn’t truly care for her.

  “Yes, but you do.” She pushed a finger into my chest. “You care a whole lot.”

  “I’m done.” I rose to my feet.

  “The coms are down?” Gardenia frowned. “I haven’t been alerted.”

  “No. I’m done being manipulated. If it’s not our father it’s you. I’m over this.” I’d made a mistake surrendering. I couldn’t have predicted Gardenia would be at the helm, but she was. I needed to infiltrate the palace and find a solution. Talk about murdering my father was extreme. Besides, all it would do was set off panic among the people. Things had to be handled calmly and systematically. I may have been the more emotional of the two of us, but Gardenia had gone off the deep end.

  “He’s never going to leave her be. He’ll kill her or sell her to the highest bidder. The only chance you have is if he’s dead.”

  “And what about all the others he’s mobilized? Have you thought of that? He controls the forges. He controls the armies of how many planets? They aren’t going to suddenly start following our orders. They followed Father because of the fear he instilled.”

  “So we create the same fear.”

  I slammed my fist on the table. “You are being short-sighted. We need to force Father to do our bidding. We need him to call things off. Killing him prematurely will destroy everything.”

  “Oh and then you’ll kill him? When you have what you need?”

  “I won’t need to kill him. He will be our prisoner.”

  “You know what he did to her, don’t you? The years of modifiers? Lying about Earth? He had Telton steal her from her home planet.”

  “Yes. And yet he did all of those things for me. Yes. He may have been doing it to manipulate me, but I fit into his plan. Which means I just need to make him fit into mine.”

  “You are out of your mind.”

  “No. You are. You want to act recklessly. We were taught to evaluate a situation before striking.”

  “No.” Gardenia stepped toward me. “You were taught that. I was taught to sit pretty and study classical subjects. Don’t pretend we were ever treated equally.”

  “I already told you I’d let you lead if you can prove to me you are up to the challenge. Being the Emperor is a serious position. It can’t be done out of a quest for revenge.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” She put her hands on my shoulders. “Take down the coms. It’s time.”

  “Let me have a pod. I’ll slip in. I can do this.”

  “Not a chance. We need him on our turf.”

  “We need him in the palace. We have to make it look like everything is all right. I’m telling you. Otherwise no one outside will believe the orders are his.”

  “It’s going to take longer. That means it will take longer to get Rachel back.”

  “This isn’t about getting her back as much as it is about protecting her. This is the right way.”

  “I will have his blood.” Her hands balled to fists at her sides. “And I will have his head.”

  “What happened to you, sister? When did you become so vindictive?”

  “I could have killed you.” She leaned back on her hands. “I could have had you killed the moment you boarded. Everyone on this ship is loyal to me.”

  “But you already said you needed me. I have to become Emperor and abdicate.”

  “I could find another way.” She stood up.

  “How did you manage to turn the crew to your side?” Not wanting to hear the answer or not, it was an important question. Gardenia was persuasive, but not with trained Lexas.

  “I have my ways.”

  “Ways that involve death?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No one but Father needs to die in this war.”

  “But you know many more will die. No matter how we play this, there will be bloodshed.”

  “But I won’t enjoy the deaths of any others.”

  “You have to let me do this my way. I won’t sell every last ounce of my soul for you.”

  “Of your soul?” Gardenia laughed dryly. “You have been spending time with Earthlings… I can’t be too surprised. Although I do wonder what they are like.”

  “What they are like?” I looked around the room, looking for anything I could use to my advantage. We weren’t in the main command center—this was a systems room. “As if you care.”

  “I never said I cared. Only that I wondered.”

  “They don’t need modifiers. Otherwise they are similar to our people.”

  “Then maybe you’re human. Maybe that’s why you don’t need them.”

  “We both know that’s not true. My difference stems from something entirely different.”

  “Oh yes. Because you’re one half of a starmate.” She laughed. “How could I forget.”

  “Don’t make it sound so unimportant.” My entire existence tied into the term. The future of my people hung in the balance.

&
nbsp; “What good has it done for you? How has finding your starmate helped? It hasn’t. It’s not real. Don’t you get it?”

  “It didn’t work because she was modified. That’s the only reason.”

  “Unless she’s the wrong one. She’s meant for another.” Gardenia pulled her hair back and secured it with a golden clip. “You have to admit that’s a possibility.”

  “No she’s a feeder. I can tell. And I’m a feeler. Don’t even try to deny that.” I’d always been different. My parents had figured out my destiny as soon as I was born.

  “You are wrong about something. You have to be. Modifiers alone don’t explain it all. She might be meant for another feeler.”

  “There have never been two sets of starmates at once. It’s impossible.”

  “What if there are two feeders? Maybe Rachel isn’t meant to have a starmate of her own. Or two feelers. Maybe you are destined to be alone. You don’t know. None of us know.”

  Destined to be alone? Never. I was destined to be with Rachel. “Give me a pod. That’s all I’m asking for.”

  “So you can undermine my plan? Why would I ever go along with that?”

  “Because inside you know I’m right. You understand we need our father alive and at the palace for any of this to work.”

  “I’m not handing over control to you. I refuse it.”

  “Who said anything about control?” I would be in control once I got in, but right now I had to focus on calming her down. She was going to make a mess of things if I didn’t intervene.

  “Shut the coms down.” She pointed at the screen I’d just vacated. “Shut the coms down and you get a pod.”

  “Not until we’re closer. I need that cover.”

  “I can have someone else do it. Now that I have access.”

  “Oh yeah? I’d like to see you try that. You think I left my credentials unlocked? I’m not that stupid. Someone else could break in through my portal.”

  “This has to work, Caspian. We both lose everything if it doesn’t.”

  “Then we do it my way. I can sense it. My way is right.”

  “Some things aren’t about feelings. Some things are about the smart decision. The right decision.”

  “Well, then mine is the right decision. The only one that’s going to work. I will shut the coms down when I’m close. I will take control of the palace, and we can work together from there.”

  “I’ll find Rachel. You might not think I care, but I do. And she’s wearing the medallion. Any number of groups will want to take her.”

  “I am well aware of the danger she’s in. Does this mean you will give me a pod?” She was giving in easier than I expected. Maybe she realized she had no other choice.

  “Yes, but if you double cross me, I’ll kill her.”

  “Don’t you dare threaten me.” I stared Gardenia down. “Don’t you dare.”

  “I don’t want to do it, but I will do what I have to do for survival.” Her eyes were cold. I saw nothing in them.

  “Survival? You mean power.”

  “My survival depends on power.” She turned her back. “You better not be trying to trick me.”

  “There is too much on the line for games.”

  “I’ll get a pod ready.”

  The screens all went dark.

  “What was that?” I tried the console I’d just left. No response.

  “Are the coms down?” She fiddled with the watch. “Is that possible? Could they have discovered you’d accessed the system?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Not the way I did it. This is unrelated. Maybe they figured out how to get into your systems on the ship. They are all Andrelexa technology.”

  “Yes, but the ship is fully severed from the main system. I made sure of it.”

  “That doesn’t mean someone couldn’t reverse it.”

  This was weird. Seriously weird. We’d just been ready to take down the coms for Andrelexa, yet someone took down ours first. Was someone watching us from inside? Either way, our mission became ten times harder.

  “Then get moving. We don’t have any time to lose.”

  “I know.” I started for the door.

  “Wait.” She grabbed my arm. “Don’t show him more mercy than he’d show you.”

  “He wouldn’t show me mercy.” I had no illusion of that.

  “You realize that, yet you don’t wish to kill him?” There was a look of genuine puzzlement on her face.

  “You shouldn’t lower yourself to the level of your opponents.”

  “You should when it’s your life or theirs.”

  “I don’t care about my life.” I’d figured that out when I surrendered. It was Rachel’s life I was concerned with.

  “But I do.” Her eyes were dark.

  I wondered if she cared at all beyond what I could do to help her in her quest for power. Was there any familial love? It was impossible to know. “I’ll survive.”

  “You better.”

  “Find Rachel.”

  “I will. Bring me Father.”

  “I will. Let us hope the coms come back up soon.”

  “Can you still take theirs down?” She asked.

  I nodded. “If I can get ours back up and running.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I’m going to need a lot more than luck to make this work.”

  19 Caspian

  The coms were still down even as I neared Andrelexa. I wasn’t entirely sure who was working the systems on Gardenia’s ship, but if it was a routine outage caused by hacking, anyone worth their weight should have had it fixed by now. This was no simple outage. And that worried me.

  Father wasn’t our only suspect. Andrelexa had many powerful allies. And plenty of powerful enemies. Depending on who knew Gardenia’s ship was not in line with the Andrelexa force, the culprit could have belonged to either of those camps. As the pod fed directly into the ship’s system, I assumed Gardenia was dealing with complete coms blackout as well. That meant she’d have no shot at locating Rachel on North Star. Things were a mess.

  On top of the com failure, the automatic navigation features were also offline. Luckily I had no problem with manual navigation, but if the systems fritzed out completely, I’d be in real trouble.

  I tried not to worry too much about Rachel as I neared Andrelexa. But it was a hard task. I’d spent nearly every waking hour of my life for thirteen years thinking about her. Everything I did and thought was about her, even if at its core it was for me. I wouldn’t play the martyr when I’d kept information from her and had let my own selfish desires motivate my actions, but I’d known who she was from the beginning. My starmate. I pushed the thoughts away. I couldn’t go backward. I could only move forward, and I couldn’t hope to show her the truth unless I accomplished what I’d set out to do.

  According to my screens, Andrelexa was dark. Completely dark. Even the moons let off no light. Something was wrong. Could the screens be broken? I couldn’t leave the navigation on its own for long, but I had to make sure I wasn’t being shown the wrong image. I hurried over to the one set of windows on the pod. There was nothing but darkness.

  Even with the coms down there should have been light. And what about the moons? Was something blocking them? I pushed away the panic brewing inside me. Was the com outage part of an even larger problem? It had to be. This was a full-on power failure. Plus the moons. Something was going on, and I didn’t like it one bit. I needed to touch base with Gardenia. To see if she’d learned anything else, but without the coms that was impossible. I’d have to land and figure out everything else from inside.

  I returned to the controls and set to work landing manually in complete darkness. The whole time I waited for an attack. Just because the coms were down didn’t mean no one would notice—especially because my landing was clumsy and had to be done in one of the general landing zones. The private areas required automatic systems to limit who had access.

  My pod was equipped with basic protective shielding. I’d be ab
le to fend off most initial attacks. But I didn’t have to. Nothing approached as I slowly brought the small pod down into an open pad. I had no weapons on me. No way to communicate with anyone, and I had no idea what anyone knew of where I’d been. All I could do was hope my position bought me enough leniency or importance to reach my father.

  I opened the doors and stepped out, expecting to find a weapon pointed at me. There was none. Instead the landing zone was completely empty.

  Odd. There were always guards stationed here. My unease grew as I walked away from the pod and further into the landing area. I prepared to scan my way into the main section of the palace, but the sensors were inoperable. I tried the door, and it opened. A pit grew in my stomach something was terribly wrong. Those doors were always locked.

  The interior halls were just as empty. Not a single guard. Not a servant. But no dead bodies. That was some relief. Perhaps everyone was in hiding. My father wouldn’t run. He’d never leave the palace unsecured. I headed up the front stairs, glad I knew my way well enough that darkness was no problem. I went into the throne room first. That was the most likely spot to find him. It was empty. Next I tried the ballrooms, they were built as safe rooms. I tried his bedroom. The atrium. The observatory. Each spot was as empty as the last. My other senses worked overtime to make up for my lack of sight. I’d been through months of sensory deprivation training to handle situations with this. With my added gifts of sensing others, I wasn’t at too much of a disadvantage.

  I headed down to the back stairwells. I already assumed the lifts wouldn’t work, and even if they did, I wouldn’t risk getting closed in. Something told me to go down the secure research labs. Although not official safe rooms, they could withstand most intrusions. Plus, outsiders didn’t even know they existed.

  The last time I’d ventured down I’d been searching for answers about Rachel’s disappearance. This time I was looking for answers again but about a wholly different disappearance.

  The entry door to the labs was locked shut. With the systems down my only choice was to open them manually. I was strong, but it would be a hard task to break the lock.