Magnitude: A Space Opera Adventure (Blackstar Command Book 2)

by A. C. Hadfield

  “This is General Hominos,” he said as soon as someone came on the line. “I just sent you a recording of the recent engagement with the new Host technology.”

  “Yes, sir, I see it now,” the analyst said.

  Hominos gave the woman a brief rundown of all he knew about this strange new alien technology.

  “I need something to counter it,” he said after the quick briefing. “We need to know how it works and how to stop it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is your Number. One. Top. Priority,” the general said, punctuating each word with a stabbing finger. “Anything else on your agenda can wait until we have the means to counter this weapon. Those who died to get us this footage will not die for nothing. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll get on it right away.”

  “You’ll get on it sooner than that.”

  Hominos cut the connection and played the recording back again. It was in the hands of his experts now; best to put it out of his mind until they came back with any insights.

  He hailed Captain Mathieson and then silently chided himself for not using his secretary for these tasks. He didn’t have to wait long for a reply.

  “Yes, General,” Mathieson said. Her long white hair was braided and fixed into an intricate tower above her round face.

  “How goes the GTU’s mission to infiltrate the Host worlds?” he said. “Give me some good news, Alisa, I could use it right about now.”

  “Yes, sir.” Her muddy brown eyes seemed to look directly into the general’s, as though he were sitting in front of her and not on the other end of wireless connections and computer screens. “We have an agent, Musa Miles, inside the Host embassy on Gaszla II.”

  “Why there?” Hominos didn’t know the particulars beforehand, he just wanted things done.

  “Well, sir—we believe that is where the Host are receiving orders from their new ally.”

  “Orders?” That was new to the general. As far as he knew, the Host didn’t take orders from anyone.

  “Yes, sir.” Mathieson took a pad from someone offscreen, glanced at it and nodded before continuing. “According to Miles, they are due to meet with this new faction—whoever they may be, we still don’t know—later in the day. My man is in a good position to learn more. I’ll forward any and all pertinent details to you once I have it, later in the day.”

  “Excellent, Captain,” Hominos said with a nod. “Right now, we need anything we can go on.”

  “I informed Miles that extraction might prove… difficult,” Mathieson said. “Though, impossible would be more like it.”

  “But he knows the importance, right?”

  “He said it was worth the risk, that the information could prove far too valuable to pass up.” She paused and cleared her throat, and she wore an expression as though she had more to say but stopped herself. It was just a fleeting micro-expression, but in his heightened state, Hominos caught it immediately.

  “Just say what’s on your mind, Captain.”

  “Sir, I’m not comfortable sending my people on suicide missions. And that’s what this is probably turning into. Miles knew this, but still. It doesn’t sit well.”

  “He sounds like an honorable and dedicated agent,” Hominos said. “He understands his duty to the Coalition and seems willing to do whatever needs doing. What’s the problem, exactly?”

  Mathieson looked uncomfortable, glancing away from the screen. She looked back at her commanding officer and said, “There is no problem, sir.”

  “Good to hear, Captain.” Although Hominos knew there was more to it. He thought briefly of demanding she explain herself but decided to let it lie for now. The mission was more important than one person’s opinion.

  “Is there anything else, General?” she asked.

  “Yes, one more thing.” He leaned forward and once more engaged his intense stare. “You need to step up the GTU’s efforts in finding the good General Amelia.”

  “Sir, we have been trying—”

  “No, Captain,” he interrupted her. “I don’t want to hear about trying. You need to do everything you can, turn over every rock, run every source, whatever needs to be done to get this completed. You have the power and weight of the entire GTU at your disposal. Use it—in whatever means possible. We need to find Amelia. I want her head on a pike. Do you understand?”

  Mathieson nodded. “Any means necessary it is, sir.”

  He stabbed the connection closed and planned to chase up the analysts within the hour. For now, he prepped a status update for the presidents. They’d no doubt want an up-to-the-minute report of events, and he wanted to prove that he was managing the situation as best as possible.

  Chapter 13

  BRENNA SPLASHED water on her face to wake up. She was still tired from the lack of proper rest since this entire adventure began.

  Ten years ago she could have gone days at a time with no sleep, and it wouldn’t even have slowed her down. But every day she was getting older, and she just couldn’t hack it the way she once did. She wished she had a common street stim or, gods forbid, even an Equilibrium shot, just to fight off the fuzzy-headed feeling. But she didn’t, so coffee was going to have to do.

  On her way to the kitchen, she passed Marella going the other way with a steaming cup of something delicious. She nodded and smiled at the Lantesian and continued on her way into the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. She drank it black—her nose crinkling at the bitter taste—because she didn’t want anything getting in the way of the caffeine boost.

  She thought about the information on Kendal’s location that Marella possessed. She claimed to have gotten it from the ship’s logs, but that didn’t feel right. Brenna’s keen nose for disinformation, honed over the years by her spy craft, was twitching. She trusted it more than she trusted that the sun would rise over Capsis Prime every day. And she wanted to find out why. She finished her coffee in three long pulls and headed for the crew quarters.

  Brenna buzzed the door and Marella answered.

  “Hi,” Brenna said, her tone light. “Mind if I come in?”

  “Um, I’m kind of busy with a task at the moment,” Marella said.

  “It’ll only take a minute.” Brenna took a step closer to the open door. “I need to talk to you about something, and I’d rather not do it in public.”

  Marella glanced over her shoulder then turned back and nodded. “Sure, come on in.”

  “Thanks.” Brenna walked in, and the door slid shut behind her. Marella picked something up off a table that looked like it might be a holoscroll and set it down on the floor next to her chair.

  “Please, sit down,” Marella said. Brenna nodded and took the seat opposite. “What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “What did you find in Kendal’s journal?” Brenna asked, getting it right out there to avoid any pointless small talk.

  Marella’s eyes widened a fraction and changed color. She blinked rapidly, and the color returned to normal. Although it all happened in a fraction of a second, Brenna was watching for her reaction and saw what she expected.

  That was the problem with Lantesians. No matter how good they were, they always had a few tells they couldn’t control.

  “Excuse me?” Marella asked, trying to recompose herself.

  “I know you didn’t get Kendal’s possible location from the ship’s logs. Kai bought that line, but I don’t.” She paused and folded her hands on the tabletop. “And neither does the AI.”

  “I don’t… that is…” Marella was clearly flustered. Her fine hair stood on end.

  “Look, I know Kendal much better than Kai does. And one thing that he always did was keep a journal. I should know, I have several hard drives full of them at my apartment.”

  Marella looked to Brenna like she was ready to bolt, but there was nowhere to run on a starship, even one as big as the Blackstar. All the tension drained from her body, and she sat back in her chair, deflated.<
br />
  “Yes, I found Kendal’s journals,” she admitted.

  “Why did you lie to Kai about them?”

  Marella ran her hands through her hair and Brenna wondered if she’d picked that particular tic up from Kai since being in his presence.

  “I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything bad in them,” Marella said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Marella said. “You know how Kendal is; he’ll do anything to complete a mission, and sometimes those things aren’t very nice.”

  Brenna knew very well what she was talking about. When her husband was into something, he was single-minded about it and would pull out all the stops until he completed his task.

  She wasn’t pleased that this girl knew that, though. Not at all.

  “And what does that have to do with Kai?” Brenna asked.

  “I didn’t want him to perhaps get the wrong idea about his father,” Marella said.

  “So you were, what, protecting my son, after knowing him for a week or so?”

  “Yes.” Marella met Brenna’s eyes directly for the first time with an almost defiant look. “And I don’t see the problem with that.”

  Brenna wondered why this stranger, who had only known her son for a week or so, would care that much, but she let it go for now.

  “That’s commendable,” Brenna said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She leaned her elbows on the table, and her shoulders slumped again. “Plus, there’s some fairly crazy stuff in there. Things I don’t fully understand yet.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t even know if I can explain it properly,” Marella said.

  “Try. You might find me a little sharper than I appear.” Brenna could do the steely-eyed gaze as well.

  “Kendal talks about something called the Darkarahn, an unimaginable cosmic horror.” Marella cocked her head to one side as if remembering something. “Funny.”

  “What is?” Brenna asked.

  “Kai used the same words to describe it as Kendal did—almost verbatim.”

  Brenna didn’t like the way in which she said her husband’s name. There was a sense of a feeling there, under the surface.

  “Like father, like son, I suppose,” Brenna said.

  “I think it might be more than that,” Marella said. She shook her head. “Never mind.”

  This young lady has all sorts of secrets, Brenna thought. What fun it would be extracting them from her.

  “What did the journal say about the Darkarahn?”

  “A massive cosmic horror, the stuff of nightmares, imprisoned by the Navigators long ago.” Her eyes had a faraway look like she was reciting directly from a passage instead of memory.

  “Imprisoned how?” Brenna was a spy, but she was not a fan of riddles. Unless they were of her own creation, of course.

  “Kendal didn’t know, or he just didn’t say,” Marella said. Her eyes focused on Brenna again. “But it’s getting stronger, apparently.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” Brenna said. “Do you?”

  “I’m not really sure,” Marella replied. “And Kendal didn’t understand it either, not completely.”

  “Wonderful,” Brenna said.

  “But what he was rather explicit about is that the Navigators are actually stuck in their slumber state,” Marella said. “They’re trapped, and Kendal suspects that’s the Koldax’s doing. They have free reign on Azelia.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Navigator home world. To free the Navigators, someone has to go to Azelia and destroy the Koldax. Or chase them off, at the very least.” Marella took a sip of her tea.

  “So all we have to do is assault a world that we know nothing about that is being held by a hostile alien force. With one ship.” Brenna had to laugh just to break the tension she felt building in her shoulders.

  Marella smiled at her over her cup. “But it’s a Navigator ship.”

  “Yeah, well, the Navigators didn’t seem to do so well against the Koldax.”

  “Actually, they held them at bay for centuries,” Marella said and set her cup down on the table, centering it in front of her so the handle was on the right side.

  “I know.” Brenna rubbed her eyes. The caffeine rush was already wearing off. Gods damn getting older. “So what about Kendal’s location?”

  “That was in his last journal entry,” Marella said and got that faraway look in her eye again. “They found a Koldax outpost on Azelia.”

  “They? Who are they?”

  “Kendal and a small group of Patari,” Marella said.

  “Patari?” Brenna jerked forward in her seat, wide awake once more.

  “Apparently, they aren’t all religious zealots,” Marella said. “Anyway, he wrote that they were headed to this outpost. The Koldax set up some sort of force field generators that are somehow tampering with Azelia’s energy fields.”

  “I can’t believe he went with the Patari.” Brenna just couldn’t wrap her mind around teaming up with the aliens that wanted to feed her to a giant bird.

  “Kendal theorizes that whatever the force fields are doing to the energy fields is what is keeping the Great Ancients trapped and entombed in their crystal coffins.”

  Brenna wondered again just what the hell they’d gotten themselves into. This sounded like the stuff of fantasy stories, but she trusted Kendal’s word implicitly.

  “And that was it?” Brenna asked. “There was nothing else?”

  “Nothing,” Marella said. “Like I stated, that was the last journal entry.”

  “I’ll need to see the entries for myself, you understand?” Brenna said.

  “I’ll forward them to your terminal right away.”

  “Thanks. I guess we’re going to Azelia after we find the Spearhead,” Brenna said.

  “That would be the likely course of action. But we really have to find Kendal.”

  Brenna looked sharply at Marella. There was that tone again. Could it be that she and Kendal…?

  “Tell me, Marella,” Brenna said. “How well do you know Kendal?”

  “Very well, Brenna.” Her eye color flashed again, and her light hair rippled, as though disturbed by a summer breeze.

  “Do you love him?” Brenna’s tone was blunt.

  “What? No,” Marella said. She lifted her mug, took a sip, and set it back down, centering it once more.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing you’re not telling me?” Brenna asked, one eyebrow cocked.

  “Yes. Kendal is a great man. A good friend and mentor. I admire him greatly, but I assure you I do not love him.”

  “So then what is your interest in all this?”

  “I know how it seems to you; he’s your husband, and I wouldn’t want to get in the way of that. You see, when I first met Kendal, it was our shared desire to know about the Navigators that initially bonded us, but then we went to Oberus, and I was left behind… it’s not Kendal that I miss or desire, it’s the knowledge he had access to.”

  They locked eyes then, fully taking the measure of one another. After several long moments, Marella blinked once and looked down at her mug on the table. Gotcha again, Brenna thought.

  “Okay, Marella,” Brenna said and stood. “Thank you for talking to me. It doesn’t answer all of my questions, but it did clear some things up.”

  “Think nothing of it, Brenna,” Marella said and started to rise.

  “Don’t get up.” Brenna held a hand out, motioning her to remain seated. “I’ll see myself out.”

  She left Marella’s cabin and headed for the bridge. The Lantesian wasn’t entirely forthcoming, and Brenna wanted to know why. She mentally vowed to keep an eye on her.

  Brenna stepped onto the bridge and saw Kai and Senaya finishing up a very animated conversation.

  “Am I interrupting?” she asked.

  Kai spun to look at her, his eyes hard. “No, I was just about to call you and the others.”

  “Why, wh
at’s happening?” Brenna asked, stepping up to the command couch.

  “We just received a distress signal through the subspace channel,” Senaya said.

  “Its signature matches that of the Spearhead,” Kai said. “And it doesn’t sound good.”

  Chapter 14

  THE BLACKSTAR DROPPED out of the wormhole into a sector of space between systems, and Kai’s stomach cramped. The sudden shift in velocity forced the strap to tighten around his body. Pain flared through his shoulders, making him wince.

  As great as the Navigator technology was, they could have made the furniture and support more sympathetic to a human’s experience of pain—especially as the craft appeared to be made for humanlike species.

  Senaya and Brenna both grimaced and squirmed against the straps holding them securely to the crash couch next to him.

  The panoramic screen resolved as the ship’s cameras swept through a full rotation. The AI tagged elements of interest but said nothing. Even its holographic face, floating in the middle of the cockpit, remained impassive, waiting for orders.

  Kai slapped the central button over his chest to free himself from the harness. It slid back into the couch, and he slumped forward. He rested his forearms on his thighs and took long, deep breaths. His lungs hurt with each inhale, but experience had told him this wouldn’t last. A part of him, the cognitive element rather than the physical, was getting used to these effects. The same part suggested he preferred the immediate pain and discomfort to the long-term sickly effects of subspace.

  At least this way, he reasoned, he wouldn’t have to shoot up with Equilibrium to be functional. A little pain didn’t get in the way as much as having one’s entire brain fogged with powerful pharmaceuticals.

  “That wasn’t at all fun,” Senaya said, standing from the couch and stretching her limbs. “I’d like to take a look at the dampening field generator at some point, see if I can make it a bit smoother.”

  “It wouldn’t take much to improve,” Brenna said, clutching her ribs. “That’s worse than being wrestled by a ganik bull.”

  “Must be because of the extra mass we’re carrying with the Rapier and micro-hauler docked,” Kai said. “Anyway, let’s see where we are. Sen, can you hail Bandar and Marella? Ask them to come to the bridge.”