Dark Space Universe (Book 2): The Enemy Within

by Jasper T. Scott

  “Okay... I’m sorry, Atara.”

  She glanced at him, then broke into a grin and wrapped him in a fierce hug. “It’s okay. I forgive you.”

  Something melted inside of Lucien, and suddenly he felt bad. Maybe he was imagining things. Maybe Atara hadn’t tripped him. Maybe he’d tripped over his own feet. And maybe her opening the window and freezing Theola hadn’t been deliberate. Maybe it was all in his head and he was the problem.

  Theola started crying again as the hug lingered and invaded her personal space. Lucien eased away and took Atara’s hand to lead her back through the hospital. As they went, Atara skipped along beside him, looking like any ordinary five-year-old.

  I’m definitely imagining things, he decided, but his instincts said otherwise. He decided to put them to the test. Any good police officer knows how to coax a confession.

  “You know, Atara,” he said slowly, his tone as mild as he could make it. “I know you tripped me by accident. You were just scared to tell me, weren’t you?”

  Atara stopped skipping and looked up at him, her eyes wide.

  “You can tell me. I won’t get mad. I promise.”

  A sly look crossed Atara’s face at that. “You promise?”

  He nodded, smiling. “I promise.”

  “No matter what?”

  Lucien’s instincts were screaming again, but he tried not to let it show. “No matter what, sweetheart.”

  “Okay. In that case, it wasn’t an accident.” Atara went back to skipping again.

  Lucien’s hand felt suddenly cold and numb. Her hand went sliding out from his as he stopped walking. “You did it on purpose?” he asked, frozen in shock.

  Atara stopped and turned back to him, her brow knitted, and lips pressed in an angry line. “You promised you wouldn’t get mad.”

  He nodded woodenly, and then switched to shaking his head. “I’m not mad... why would you want to trip me?”

  “You’re always yelling,” Atara explained. “You hurt my feelings. I wanted you to hurt, too. I’m sorry now, though.”

  “Why’s that... why are you sorry?”

  “‘Cause now you’re being nice.”

  Lucien nodded as if that made all the sense in the world.

  “Let’s have ice cream!” Atara said.

  “Maybe later,” Lucien said, walking on in a daze, and reaching for Atara’s hand again.

  “No, now!” Atara screamed, and punched his leg.

  Lucien took a deep breath and counted to three. It took all of his will to smile sweetly at Atara and hide what he was really feeling. His instincts had been spot on, but now they were telling him something else: his daughter was a sociopath, and you don’t challenge a sociopath until you’re safe from reprisals. “Okay. Let’s go get ice cream.”

  “Goody!” Atara grabbed his hand and tugged on his arm, pulling him along behind her. They left the hospital without further incident. A blast of frigid air took Lucien’s breath away as he exited the ER, but it was nothing compared to the cold he felt spreading inside of him. He withdrew his hand from Atara’s to hug Theola close and keep her warm—and safe.

  They crossed the hospital parking lot with Atara skipping again, once again looking like a normal, carefree five-year-old. Anyone watching them would have seen exactly that.

  But Lucien knew the truth.

  The Faros had done something to her. There was no more room for doubt about that. Lucien bit down on his lip to the point of pain, clamping down on the wave of misery and despair that thought sent coursing through him. He would find a way to bring her back.

  He had to.

  Chapter 35

  Mokar: Underworld

  The Polypuses hovered, their luminous bodies peeling back the night with a dim blue-white glow. Their hair-like tentacles waved in a breeze that only they could feel.

  “What are they doing?” Addy whispered.

  “Waiting for something,” Garek said.

  Lucien stepped to the fore. “Thank you for your help,” he said via his suit’s external speakers, and subsequently wondered if they would understand him. He was wearing one of the Faro translator bands, but none of them were.

  “I don’t think they can hear you,” Addy said. “They exist in a higher dimension.”

  “But they can obviously still interact with our dimensions,” Lucien pointed out.

  One of the four Polypuses floated out to greet him. That’s progress, he thought.

  “We don’t mean you any harm,” he went on. “We want to know more about you and your species.”

  The light emanating from the creature dimmed and then brightened a few times, but there was no way to know what that might mean. Maybe it was some kind of visual language? If it was, his translator wasn’t picking up on it.

  Lucien shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  The creature brightened and dimmed once more, then it began drifting closer.

  “Lucien...” Addy said, her voice rising in warning.

  “If they wanted to kill us, they could have done it a long time ago,” Lucien said.

  He waited for the Polypus to reach him. As it did so, it reached out with a pair of tentacles. They skittered over Lucien’s face, raising the hair on the back of his neck. Lucien took deep breaths to calm his racing heart while he waited for the creature to finish its examination.

  “Ask it to remove our tracking devices,” Garek suggested.

  Lucien’s eyes darted to Garek. One of the creatures was creeping up behind him, while the other two appeared to be circling around behind Addy and Brak. Four Polypuses for the four of them. Somehow Lucien didn’t think that was a coincidence.

  “Why don’t you ask them yourself?” Lucien suggested, and gave a shallow nod to indicate the alien creeping up behind Garek. The Veteran whirled to face the creature, both arms snapping up to track the threat with his laser cannons.

  Brak drew his sword and faced the Polypus approaching him, while Addy began retreating slowly from hers.

  “Our weapons won’t do anything to them,” Lucien said. “Besides, they’re not going to hurt us.”

  “You don’t know that,” Addy said. “They might be what killed all of those Faros we found.”

  “I bet they are,” Lucien said, as his Polypus went on examining him with its tentacles. “But we’re not Faros, and we don’t have the same intentions that they do.”

  “These guys might not know that,” Garek said, but his arms fell reluctantly to his sides.

  Brak swiped his sword at the Polypus that had chosen him, but the blade passed right through the creature and out the other side.

  Meanwhile, Lucien’s Polypus crept closer still, completely filling his field of view with its light. Lucien saw swirling currents and patterns in the light, but that brightness quickly swelled and overwhelmed him, making it impossible to see anything but blinding white. Lucien felt a spreading warmth and a profound sense of peace course through his entire being.

  The brightness faded dramatically, and images began flashing through his mind’s eye; he saw Abaddon. The Faro King was seated on a throne, his glowing blue eyes sharp, his regal features stretched into a broad grin.

  Lucien recognized that throne and its surroundings. It was Etherus’s throne from the Etherian palace in the facet of Halcyon, back on New Earth. Lucien shook his head, but he couldn’t feel the movement. It was as though he was no longer in his own body.

  “What is this?” he asked aloud, but the words reverberated back to his ears a hundred times, echoes piling on top of echoes.

  The image faded, and Lucien saw another place he recognized: a clear blue sky overhead, and white cobblestone streets sparkling in the sun below. The street was lined with picturesque cafeterias, restaurants, and shops, and colorful blossom trees from a dozen different worlds spreading intermittent shade. Hover cars landed and took off from rooftops almost-soundlessly in futuristic ballet, and Etherian families strolled lazily down the street.

  Th
is was the city square on Ashram, the planet in Etheria where his half-brother, Atton, lived with his family.

  While Lucien watched, the scene flashed white, as if from an explosion. Details gradually re-emerged, but now the blue sky was black and clogged with smoke. Ash fell like snow, dusting the pristine white cobblestones. The blossom trees were on fire, and so were the buildings to either side of the street. Etherians lay dead and dismembered under thickening blankets of ash, while groups of Faros in black robes picked their way through the carnage, their transparent swords drawn and shimmering. Elementals. Up ahead a familiar gray-robed figure stood on a mound of bodies. He raised his sword and pumped it in the air, shouting, “Vengeance is mine!” The crowd of Elementals stopped and cheered, pumping their swords in the air, too.

  Lucien felt a growing sense of bewilderment and despair as he watched the Faros cheer. This couldn’t have already happened. The Polypus was showing him the future, or at least a possible future.

  Lucien felt a comforting warmth spreading through him with that thought, as if to confirm it.

  We’re not going to let this happen, Lucien said. He felt another flash of warmth from the Polypus, and the scene faded to a new one. He saw a vast fleet of hundreds of starships floating in space with nothing around them, and barely enough light from the nearest sun to illuminate their shining silver hulls. Those mirror-smooth, highly-reflective hulls were a trademark of Etherian starships. The lost fleet, Lucien thought, marveling at the sight. As he watched, the ships vanished, having engaged some type of cloaking shields.

  Lucien shook his head at that, but again he felt no movement to accompany the gesture. We need to get to that fleet, he thought. We have to take it back to Etheria so the Faros can’t find it.

  Another flashed of warmth. The Polypus seemed pleased with that idea.

  The scene of the fleet faded, and back was the blinding white light of the extra-dimensional alien. The light retreated slowly, and once again Lucien saw currents and patterns in the Polypus’s radiance. Once the creature had retreated to about an arm’s length, something small and metallic fell out of it.

  Lucien bent to pick it up. He examined it in the light of the creature hovering before him and saw what looked to be a small disc-shaped microchip, no bigger than the tip of his pinky. He rubbed it between his fingers and found that it was flexible, easily deformed into different shapes. It would have been easy to swallow something like that in his food and not notice.

  “Looks like they found my tracker,” Lucien said. He turned to find Garek and Addy each examining matching microchips. Brak either didn’t have a tracker or hadn’t bothered to pick his up after the Polypus had extracted it.

  Garek snorted and dropped his microchip to crush it under the heel of his boot.

  Addy tossed her microchip aside, and Lucien did likewise.

  “Did anyone else just experience some kind of vision?” Addy asked.

  “Yesss,” Brak hissed. “I see the Faros reach New Earth. I see them round up the Gors and take them away as slavesss.”

  “I saw my parents in Etheria,” Addy put in quietly. “The Faros killed them. And everyone else.”

  “They showed me Astralis,” Garek put in. “It was surrounded by Faro ships, but then it somehow managed to jump away and escape.”

  “I wonder if that’s what actually happened?” Lucien mused.

  “What did you see?” Addy asked, nodding at him.

  “I saw Abaddon in Halcyon, sitting on Etherus’s throne, and then I saw a city from Etheria. It was in ruins with Faros standing over dead Etherians and cheering.”

  They spent a moment trading solemn looks with one another, while the four Polypuses hovered just a few feet away, waiting.

  “What does all of it mean?” Addy asked.

  “I think they were showing us the future,” Lucien said. “Except for Garek. He might have seen the past.” Lucien turned to the Polypus in front of him. “I’m right, aren’t I?” The creature grew momentarily brighter.

  “How do we know if that’s a yes or a no?” Addy asked.

  “Good point.” Facing the Polypus, he said, “Yes is brighter. No is darker.”

  The Polypus glowed brighter once more.

  “So they can predict the future?” Garek asked, sounding skeptical.

  Lucien considered that. “If they exist outside of time, or can somehow see the future, it would make them gods.”

  “Then maybe they are gods,” Addy said. The creature in front of her glowed darker. “Or not...” Addy amended, glancing at the Polypus.

  “Gods or not, their extra-dimensionality makes them a force to be reckoned with,” Lucien said. “Maybe Etherus sent them to guard the lost fleet?” The Polypus in front of him glowed brighter at that.

  “What are you?”

  “I don’t think that’s a yes or no question,” Garek said.

  “They can show us things in our minds,” Lucien replied. “They could explain with pictures. Show us who or what you are,” Lucien suggested, trying not to sound too demanding.

  The creature in front of him grew darker.

  “I think they’re done with explanations,” Addy said.

  Her Polypus glowed brighter.

  “Then what are they waiting for?” Lucien asked.

  “They want us to decide what we’re going to do about what we saw,” Addy suggested.

  Again, her Polypus glowed brighter.

  “I told them we wouldn’t let what I saw come to pass,” Lucien said, “that we’d take the fleet back to Etheria to make sure the Faros couldn’t use it.”

  All four Polypuses glowed brighter at that, and more of the extra-dimensional aliens came drifting down from the sky, out of the silver-treed forest, and through the seamless black walls of the tower beside them. Now the Polypuses were a dazzling sea of light everywhere Lucien looked.

  “I think they like your idea,” Addy said slowly.

  “What about Astralis?” Garek asked.

  “You saw them escape, right?” Lucien said.

  “Right...”

  “Then they’re safe for now. We need to return the fleet to Etheria before we go looking for them.”

  All of the Polypuses glowed brighter at once, making Lucien’s eyes ache. His faceplate auto-polarized in response.

  “And after that? How do we get back to rescue them?” Garek demanded.

  “We can ask Etherus to help us,” Lucien suggested. Again the Polypuses glowed brighter.

  Garek snorted. “By sending another fleet that could be traced back to Etheria? Sounds like going in circles to me.”

  The Polypuses darkened.

  “Maybe Etherus will ask New Earth to send a rescue fleet instead,” Lucien said.

  The aliens glowed brighter.

  “These guys seem to know a lot about what Etherus would and wouldn’t do...” Garek said. “How do we know we can trust them?”

  “They saved our lives once,” Lucien pointed out. “And they saved mine twice.”

  “Maybe they saved us so we could come here and relieve them of guard duty,” Garek said. “I’m sure extra-dimensional aliens have better things to do than hang around here, waiting for Faros to show up.”

  “There’s no way they could have planned for us coming here,” Addy said. “That was Katawa’s doing. And probably Abaddon’s.”

  Another flash of brightness from the Polypuses.

  “It doesn’t matter how we ended up here, or why,” Lucien decided. “If we don’t take the lost fleet back to Etheria, Abaddon might find it, and then the future we saw will come to pass. There are trillions of lives at stake in Etheria and the rest of the Etherian Empire, and only a few hundred million on Astralis.”

  “Fine. You win,” Garek said. He turned in a circle to address the waiting aliens with an open-handed shrug. “So? How do we get to this missing fleet?”

  One of the Polypuses bobbed to the fore and dropped something at Garek’s feet. It hit the ground with a thunk, and rolled
to a stop at the tip of his left boot. It was a glossy silver ball, just big enough to hold comfortably in one hand.

  That done, the Polypuses began swarming back up into the sky, streaming toward the blue-white ball of light at the top of the tower. Lucien watched them go, marveling at how many of them there were. At least a thousand. Probably more.

  Garek bent to examine the ball at his feet, but made no move to pick it up.

  Lucien walked over to take a look, and Addy and Brak joined him. Soon they were all standing over the device, trying to figure out what it was.

  “That must be the key to the gateway,” Addy said.

  “You sure about that?” Garek asked, arching an eyebrow at her.

  “Pretty sure. What else could it be?”

  “If it is a key, then how do we use it? And where is this damn gateway, anyway?” Garek replied.

  Lucien reached out to touch the silver ball. As soon as his fingertips grazed the mirror-smooth surface of it, an image flashed into his mind’s eye of him flying up to the top of the tower and throwing the ball into the light source at the center of the underworld. Moments later, the artificial light exploded to a hundred times its size, becoming a shimmering, spherical portal—a window into the bridge of a starship, an Etherian starship, if the familiar glossy white deck and the simulated, dome-shaped viewport above that were anything to go by.

  “I know what to do,” Lucien said, and snatched up the silver ball.

  “Yeah?” Garek asked, sounding more skeptical than ever. “Did one of your extra-dimensional squid friends whisper something in your ear?

  “Follow me,” Lucien said, ignoring Garek’s sarcasm. He triggered his grav boosters at max thrust and shot into the air. Glancing at his sensor display, he noticed the others were flying up after him.

  “Where are we going?” Addy asked over the comms.

  “Through the gateway to the lost fleet,” Lucien replied, as if that should be obvious. He looked up, keeping his gaze fixed on the blue-white orb of light overhead. The smooth black sides of the tower raced by, faster and faster as he picked up speed.

  Thanks to their grav boosters, they didn’t need to get inside that tower to use the key. The Polypuses must have known that, because they hadn’t bothered to show them a way inside.