The Shadow Order - Books 1 - 8 + 120 Seconds (The complete series): A Space Opera

by Michael Robertson

  “I think we should split up, too,” Reyes said. “The quicker we search this thing, the better. I don’t know about anyone else, but I want to get off here as soon as is humanly possible.”

  A slight narrowing of his eyes, the WO appeared not to like the idea at first. But he didn’t argue with her and, after a few seconds, nodded. “Good idea.” He then went on to say, “I wish I could give us a plan beyond that, but I don’t know what we’re going to find. None of us do. Following Singh’s suggestion is better than waiting here doing nothing.”

  Chapter 18

  Like a sports teacher dividing the class, the warrant officer went through the pack of Marines and split them into two teams: eight on one side, nine on the other. When he put Reyes and Chan together, Reyes said, “Are you sure?”

  As curt and gruff as ever, her dad scowled. “Don’t question me, rookie. Unless you want to lead this mission? Q328 looks like it’s gone to your head. You made a lucky guess about those creatures; don’t think of it as any more than that.”

  Reyes took the berating. He had to be harder on her. Besides, she’d earned it. Again. Now he’d made his decision on what they were doing next, she had no right to question it. He only wanted input when he expressly asked for it. To avoid his strong glare, she looked away from him, making eye contact with Chan. The small Marine stared straight back with dead eyes.

  “You,” the WO said to Reyes’ group. He then pointed at the double doors on the far side of the dining hall, the ones that led to the corridor they hadn’t yet walked down. “You go out there.”

  They set off, following Reyes to the other side of the room. Before they got to the doors, the WO shouted across the high-ceilinged space, “Reyes, you lead that team. Chan, you respect that or we’ll send you out in an airlock. I don’t need your ego jeopardising this mission.”

  “My ego would never jeopardise a mission, sir. Any problem I have with Reyes won’t be detrimental to my professionalism.”

  Although Chan sounded almost convincing, Reyes had had two years of her bullshit and didn’t feel ready to trust her just yet.

  The warrant officer continued. “We’re going to move down the two corridors, searching them as we make our way to the next room, where the comms are. Hopefully we can get a signal out to the Crimson Destroyer and work out what’s going on with the rest of this ship. Any questions?”

  Reyes watched those around her to see if they’d respond. When they didn’t, she paired her team up. Patel, Singh, and Austin had been put with her. She gave each of them a partner, and she took Chan. No way could she drop that firecracker on anyone else. Besides, she needed to keep her in line.

  As she watched her dad lead his team out through the doors on the opposite side of the hall, Reyes turned to those with her. “We go down the corridor two at a time. Chan and I will lead. I want Patel and Lombardo at the back; are you two okay with that?”

  Both Patel and Lombardo nodded.

  “The scanners suggest this ship’s empty, but we need to keep our wits. Something’s not right on here, so stay vigilant. Plan for the worst …” She left her words hanging. They’d said it so many times her team could fill in the blanks. Also, she didn’t have much hope things would turn out for the best. Better to not say it than to lie. The conversation she’d had with her dad in the briefing room had stayed with her. His bad feeling now ran through her veins.

  All the while she spoke, Reyes felt the fierce burn of Chan’s focus directed at her. “Do you have something you need to say before we go into this? I know you’re a good soldier. I need you focusing on keeping us alive, not on your petty grudge.”

  “Petty?”

  “Look, whatever it is, you haven’t told me for the past two years, and I don’t care to know now. All that matters is whether I can trust you or not.”

  The small Chan straightened her back, standing that little bit taller than before. “Did you not just listen to what I said? Do you seriously think I’ll screw up a mission because I hate you?”

  “She’s not trying to argue with you, Chan,” Lombardo said. “Besides, you’re not doing a good job of proving we can trust you.” The rest of the team appeared to back her up, all of them staring hostility at Chan.

  Reyes looked across the dark dining hall to see the doors close behind the WO and his team as the last of them walked out of the room. The sound of her dad’s voice came through the radio in her helmet. “You don’t need a mother’s meeting, Reyes. Get moving.”

  “Roger that, sir.” Reyes spoke while watching Chan to see the same scowl she’d grown used to. Her blaster raised to her shoulder, she flicked on the torch at the end of it and led her team out into the dark corridor. A momentary flashback from their night-time escape on Q328 slammed into her mind. She saw one of the rock creatures growl at her and flinched. It nearly halted her progress. A quick shake of her head to banish the memory, she pushed forward. As long as she kept moving, her trauma wouldn’t catch up to her. She didn’t need to be dealing with it right now.

  The corridor had the same organic twist of metal as the first one they’d walked down. It looked as if the tunnel had been burrowed rather than engineered. The same lighting ran down it, red glows punching from seemingly random points. Everywhere the crimson bulbs tried to illuminate the way, they lost their battle to the shadows. The same ghostly silence lurked in the darkness up ahead.

  The glow of more torches from behind her, the white beams bouncing off the black obsidian-like shine of their surroundings, Reyes edged slowly towards the next set of doors farther down. Only a ten-metre walk at the most, she arrived at them without incident. Despite being at the entrance to the control room, she continued to stare down the corridor into the darkness, her pulse fast and her throat dry.

  Patel’s voice came at her from the back. “We’re all here, Reyes.”

  Reyes pressed the microphone button on the side of her helmet. “WO, we’re ready when you are.”

  “Good,” his gruff voice came back. “Let’s go in, in three … two … one …”

  On one, Reyes slammed her palm against the button to open the door. The crack of it ran both ways down the dark tunnel. Despite the card reader next to it, it opened without the need for any extra security.

  A titan of a creature unlike any Reyes had seen before stood in the centre of the room. Bipedal, it had six arms, white eyes the size of tank tyres, and thick red skin. Its deep roar shook the ground, and the walls hummed with the vibration of it. Over fifteen feet tall, it had to hunch because its head nearly touched the ceiling.

  When a shot ran over Reyes’ shoulder from one of her team behind, she pointed at its head. “Shoot up. The other team are opposite us.”

  While unloading into the creature’s face, Reyes watched the thing turn and look down at her. The horns of a ram spiralled from either side of its ugly and angular head. Eyes of fire, it opened its wide black mouth. What looked to be embers burned in its throat as it inhaled. It gave off the charred reek of a smelting furnace.

  Reyes flinched away, expecting to be smothered in fire, but the hot rush didn’t come. Instead, a green laser blast burst from the beast’s right leg.

  Reyes didn’t react quickly enough. Were it not for Chan shoving her aside—knocking her to the hard metal ground—the green blast that sailed past her would have scored a direct hit. Instead, she watched the shot strike Lombardo, knocking the Marine down with a burst of blood. Reyes and Chan stared at one another for the briefest of seconds, both of them panting, both of them wide-eyed.

  Before Reyes could say anything else, another shot came through the creature. She dodged it again and watched sparks explode from the wall behind her when it hit. While pressing the microphone button on the side of her helmet, she shouted, “Stop firing. The shots are going straight through it.”

  Reyes’ team had already stopped shooting, and after her warning, the WO’s team did the same. The creature in the centre of the room looked from side to side and roared again. But they
held their nerve and none of them fired on it.

  Julius’ voice then came through the headsets. “It’s a projection. The ship’s in defence mode. It’s a poor attempt at scaring would-be attackers away. That creature’s not real. It can’t do us any harm.”

  While looking down at the dead Lombardo, a seared hole through the centre of her face, Reyes said, “It already has. Lombardo’s down.”

  “Down?” The warrant officer’s voice replied this time.

  “Dead,” Reyes said. She shook her head as she stared at her friend. “She took a shot to the face.”

  Chapter 19

  The creature that had looked so intimidating just moments ago shimmered and then vanished. It revealed the WO on the other side of the room as he walked towards Reyes and her team. The tight lock of his thick jaw looked like he could chew through steel. A heavy frown, he fixed on his daughter, moving with the same awkward limp from a body that carried too many injuries.

  When he got to about a metre away from them, his eyes lingered on Reyes for a second longer than felt natural. His stare might have appeared impassive to most, but it spoke volumes to her; she shouldn’t have come on this mission. He then dropped his attention to the fallen Lombardo and released a hard sigh. “What a damn waste.”

  Despite the years her father had spent in the job, Reyes saw how hard he took the loss of every single Marine. If anything, as she’d watched him get older, she would have said he felt them more deeply. Another life lost to a never-ending war born from so many species and planets trying to share the same galaxy. A futile battle, the only quantifiable marker came from the amount of headstones in the countless cemeteries. A glaze of tears covered his eyes as he continued to look down at the dead Marine before he pointed over to a shadowy corner. “Put her over there. We’re taking her body back with us when we get off this damn ship.”

  Patel and Chan bent down to pick up her body.

  Reyes watched Patel lift Lombardo’s shoulders and turn his head to the side so he didn’t have to look at the hole seared through her face. She turned back to her father. People died; she needed to deal with it. It didn’t mean Lombardo’s passing didn’t matter, but it didn’t matter more than those who were still alive. She had to shelve her hurt for now. She cleared her throat. “I’ve never seen anything like that monster before. Is it something that exists in real life or a fantasy created to ward off strangers?”

  The WO’s eyes were still glazed. For a second, he didn’t speak, breathing through his nose because of the strong clench of his teeth. He then moved so close to Reyes she could smell the sweat on his skin and feel his breath in her ear. When he spoke, he kept his voice low so only she could hear it. “You wouldn’t be here if you’d listened to me.”

  “It wasn’t my fault Lombardo got shot. I would have gladly taken the hit in her place. I’d take the hit for any Marine here.”

  A slight crack in his voice as his composure wavered. “That’s the problem. If you’d have just listened to me, you’d be on the Crimson Destroyer away from this bullshit.” Although Reyes wanted to respond, he pulled away from her and barked across the room, “Julius, get to the computer and see what you can do.”

  Now the projection had gone, Reyes looked around the space. It stretched as wide as the dining hall from door to door. From the look of the schematic Julius had shown them, all the rooms were the same width. The ceiling stood as high as the apex of the dome in the canteen. However, the control room looked like an altogether more functional space. Rectangular in shape, but the surface of the shiny obsidian-like metal still had the same erratic layering and twist to it.

  As Reyes looked up at the ceiling again—the entire room cast in the red glow of emergency lighting—a more apt comparison for the metal’s aesthetic hit her. Not so much roots or veins, it resembled seriously damaged skin—skin that had been melted and grafted back together again. Stretched lines of livid flesh from where it had healed in an attempt to reconnect and reclaim its original form. Instead of turning the wound into nothing but a memory, it offered a horrific approximation of what the skin had once been, an ugly reminder of the searing trauma. The Faradis might have been made from a metal of sorts, but the longer she spent on the cursed ship, the more it made her think of a failed genetic experiment. Like something a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein would dream up in a dark lab on a remote planet free from codes of conduct and regulation. The kind of place where they stitched moonjab rodents together, arse to mouth, just because they wanted to observe their reaction.

  When Reyes saw the Marines opposite them fan out, she used her hands to instruct those behind her to do the same. They might have come onto The Faradis more relaxed than they would for a normal mission, but they had to be on high alert now. A life had been lost; they needed to make sure they didn’t lose any more.

  The WO had walked off ahead to meet Julius at the large screen in the wall on Reyes’ left, so she jogged to catch up to him. Before she realised it, she had Chan beside her.

  While Julius pressed the large screen to bring it to life, Reyes looked at her old man. At first he returned a heavy scowl, but his face quickly relaxed. Whether he wanted her on this mission or not, he couldn’t change it. Besides, he’d chosen her as his second in command, so he obviously trusted her. He needed to put his personal feelings aside and use her to make this mission a success.

  Never one to apologise, he let Reyes back in by speaking to her with less aggression than before. “I need you to make sure you and your team are on high alert. We need to find out what the hell’s going on here, and we need to make sure no one else dies.”

  Before Reyes could reply, Julius turned to face them and said, “Okay, this computer is as locked down as the tablet. The only information I’ve managed to get out of it is there are three sections, two of them are locked to us—”

  “Which we already know,” the warrant officer said.

  “But,” Julius replied, “I now think the other sections are closed down because the power’s on standby rather than anything more malicious than that.”

  Chan spoke before the others could. “Then what was the jump to hyperspace about?”

  As much as Reyes wanted to pull her in line for the outburst, she didn’t. The WO could if he wanted to, but Chan had a point. And she’d saved her life not more than five minutes previously, so she’d earned the right to speak.

  At first, Julius shrugged. When no one else spoke, she said, “I don’t know. But from looking at the ship now, I’d say this vessel is in hibernation. Maybe the jump was a malfunction.”

  After he’d looked around at the Marines in the dark and twisted room, the WO turned back to Julius. “How long do you need to get the power back up?”

  Several more taps against the screen, Julius shrugged. “Ten minutes, maybe a little bit more. I reckon I’ll have control of the ship’s comms by then too.”

  “So even if we can’t use my computer to contact the Crimson Destroyer …”

  “I should be able to do it from here,” Julius confirmed. “I’m hopeful I can get a distress signal out at the very least.”

  The warrant officer pressed the button on the side of his helmet, Reyes flinching as she heard him both in front of her and amplified through her headset. “Julius needs ten minutes. Simpson, come here.”

  Simpson ran over to them, halting in front of the WO and stamping her foot with a hard slam while saluting him. “Yes, sir?”

  “I want you to stay here with Julius. Keep an eye out so she can focus on the computer.”

  Another stamp on the floor, she saluted him again and moved next to Julius. Her semi-automatic blaster in a two-handed grip, she pressed her back to the wall and faced out across the room.

  The warrant officer pressed the button on his headset again. “The rest of us need to search this place. We still have a library, dry food store, briefing room, and sports hall to check out in this main section. While Julius works on getting us off this ship, I want to find out as much as
we can about it. Remember, there’s no place for speculation. We don’t need to be telling each other ghost stories while we deal with searching this vessel. Stay in the same teams. Reyes, you take your seven down the same corridor you just walked down. I’ll take mine the other way, and we’ll meet you in the library.”

  Although Chan turned and walked away, before Reyes could follow her, her dad clamped a heavy hand on her shoulder and squeezed it with a hard grip. So tight, she almost twisted away from it. “Lombardo’s death wasn’t your fault. Those lost on Q328 weren’t your fault either.” Maybe he knew how much she’d needed to hear that. “I believe in you,” he said as he gently shoved her away from him. “Now go and do what you’re best at.”

  Reyes nodded as he turned his back on her. She would have replied were it not for the lump in her throat.

  Chapter 20

  Now they were back out in the organically twisted corridor, Reyes took the lead with Chan beside her. It felt strange to be so close to the feisty Marine without them sniping at one another. Although the tension hung so thick between them, the slightest spark could usher the status quo back in.

  Despite having a torch on the end of her gun—which Reyes thrust out ahead of her, viewing the corridor from down the barrel of it—it didn’t make much difference. The red emergency lighting gave off enough of a glow to negate the torches’ effects, but not so much that it afforded them a clear view of where they were heading. They had no way of knowing if anything lurked in the darkness in front of them. But like her father had said: they didn’t need to be creating problems that didn’t exist.

  With so much of her attention in front of her and squinting to see into the gloom in case anything burst from it, Reyes didn’t look behind. But she didn’t need to. She listened to the pad of the Marines following her as Patel took up the rear again. Of all of them, she trusted him the most with her life.