Lords of the Dark: A Darkspace Saga Novella

by B. C. Kellogg

  As he felt it wrap itself around his mind his memories exploded, as if he was reliving every moment of his life all at the same time.

  Mother’s hand. The taste of salt. Flying in father’s aircar at top speed. The taste of a woman. The Academy. Bespiuhiri. The Lusus. Qloe…

  It was too much. The crushing weight of the Locc’s ravenous hunger overcame him, every neuron firing. He no longer had control of his body, and the last thing he felt before slipping into unconsciousness was Apta’s dead weight in his arms.

  Chapter 12

  He opened his eyes.

  “Am I dead?” he asked. Apta’s familiar face hovered over his.

  She smiled. “No,” she said. “You’re not dead.” She touched his face. Her fingers were warm and soft.

  “Are you dead?” he asked. It was an irrational thing to ask with her face above him at that very moment, he knew. But she had felt dead in his arms in what felt like moments ago.

  He hauled himself up slowly, aware of the ache in his body. He hurt too much to be dead.

  The woman above him considered the question. “Yes,” she finally said. “I suppose...she is.”

  The woman now kneeling next to him watched him, her eyes glittering in the same way that Apta’s used to.

  “Qloe?” he said.

  She smiled. It was a familiar smile. “Come with me, Lees,” she said.

  Lees. Who told this Nu that my name was Lees?

  “How long have I been out, anyway?” He followed her as she climbed up, cave after cave. They were headed towards the surface.

  “By standard Imperial reckoning...two full cycles.”

  He paused, his hands on the rocks. “Two full cycles?” he said in disbelief.

  “Yes. We transported Heik above ground. He was retrieved by his ship, and he left without revealing the presence of the Locc.”

  They continued to climb. There was no more opportunity to ask questions until they climbed out of the cave complex. It was dusk on the surface of the moon, as it had been when he first entered the cave. It was as if no time had passed, and yet Tarillion felt as if he had aged a hundred years since then.

  He followed the Nu out. Apta’s ship sat in the sand outside.

  “We have prepared it for departure,” she said, placing her hand against it. “So you may go and find the Lusus.”

  He gazed at the ship for a moment before looking back at her. “How do you know all this?” he said. “Who are you, exactly?”

  She approached him, her body language painfully familiar. When they were inches away he could swear that this was Apta—and yet he knew it was not at the same time.

  It was maddening.

  “Qloe died while you were in the grip of the Locc,” she said, her dark eyes blinking. “But before she did, the Locc consumed her soul. She did have a soul after all, Lees. And the Locc could not save her life, but it saved her soul.”

  He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “How…?” he couldn’t finish the question.

  “We have always served the Locc,” she said. “And in turn we know much of what it knows. Not all, but much. And it shared her soul and her memories with us.” She tilted her head.

  He dropped his hand. “So she’s still alive,” he said. “In a way.”

  She smiled. “As long as one of us exists,” she said, “Qloe Apta will always be alive.”

  No human or alien settlements on Thypso XXIV meant that there was no artificial light to pollute the sky. The brilliance of the stars shone brightly over the two of them, sitting on top of Apta’s ship, looking up.

  It would be the last time he would be with her—or this version of her—for a very long time, Tarillion knew.

  She leaned against him like the way she would when they were studying yet another useless datapiece back on the Lusus.

  “What happens now?” he asked.

  You will take the Locc on board your ship,” she said. “And return it to your admiral, as you were ordered to do.”

  “That’s not what I want anymore,” he said, suddenly fierce. “I made a promise. You remember it, I know.”

  The Nu leaned her head against his shoulder. “Now you are as I always knew you would be, Lees,” she said. “But this is important, now. You must take the Locc. She would not want you to be punished. The Locc wants to go.”

  “Why?” he asked intently. “You know what the promise was,” he said. I won’t serve the Empire.”

  “Because the Locc is dying,” she said, simply. “Because it tasted her death. It remembered how to die. And it’s leaving us. It will be dead in days—and of no more use to your admiral.”

  Tarillion was speechless.

  “When it consumed you, it was reminded of a love it experienced a long time ago,” she said. “In another lifetime. It wants this. And it has given you a gift, Lees. You do not know what it is—yet. But a time will come soon when you will use it.”

  Tarillion looked up at the stars, searching for the Lusus. “You’ve come to the wrong person for this,” he said.

  She lifted her head. “No,” she said. “This gift has come to the right person. My sisters and I have been alive for hundreds of years, Lees. You must trust me. Trust her.”

  “You always did want the impossible,” he said to her.

  She still kept her head resting on his shoulder. “You must bide your time,” she said. “Wait. Stay where you are. It will manifest at the right moment.”

  “What’s coming?” he asked.

  She closed her eyes and then opened them again, staring up at the stars. “War,” she said finally. “A storm that will change the course of the galaxy.”

  Preview: Sanctuary’s Soldier

  BOOK 1 IN THE DARKSPACE SAGA - Coming May 2017

  Conrad Redeker can hear the song of the stars echoing in his blood.

  Sanctuary was once called Earth. But now, it’s refuge for the last remnants of the human race. As the Sanctuary High Council searches for the few humans scattered and hidden throughout the quadrant, a threat looms on the horizon—a threat that only the Protectorate Corps can answer.

  Conrad was an orphan on a smuggler’s barge when the Protectorate Corps found him and took him in as one of their own. He vows to serve Sanctuary for life, but struggles to ignore the siren call of his mysterious heritage—one that drives him to reject the home, woman, and military rank assigned to him.

  Commissioned as a Protectorate Agent, he leaves the safety of the Sol System to seek his own destiny. As he encounters one alien species after another, the whispers in the dark are impossible to ignore: a powerful empire is coming.

  It’s coming for humanity.

  "If you don't come back now, you may never come back."

  Rose's voice rang sharp and clear in his ear, despite the fact that they were speaking on an illegal comm line. They'd used the line in secret ever since he'd started at the Academy. Conrad figured that it was fitting that they use it now, on the off chance that he died while doing what Rose called the-dumbest-thing-I've-ever-heard-of.

  Conrad tilted the starfighter up, relative to his current flight plane. The sun was a distant white white-gold speck out in the Kuiper belt, but he instinctively knew where it was, even in the vast expanse of the outer solar system.

  "Ah, Rose, you know I always come back," he said. "Commodore Garrity won't mind. She likes me."

  "Considering that you stole one of her fighters on a goddamn training flight, Conrad, I think she'll be wearing your guts for garters if you ever do make it back to base."

  Conrad grinned. "Did I ever mention how much I love that accent of yours, Rosie? Say it again. Guts for garters."

  "I'm not going to indulge you, you second-rate pervert." Her English accent became even sharper.

  "Hey—everyone at the Academy knows that I'm a first-rate pervert," he said, mock-offended.

  Conrad rattled the overhead panel and frowned as the life support indicator blinked and died. Everything on training ships tended to be old
and broken, and this ship was no different; Conrad remembered Argus patching up an engine with a plasma torch and a bucket of duct tape during their first year at the Academy back on Earth.

  "Anyway, if she asks," he continued, "I'm just doing what we were taught. Never leave a fallen comrade. No man left behind."

  "Argus isn't technically a man," she said.

  "He may be Kazhad, but he was found and raised by the Corps same as us. He may not be human, but he is a man."

  "The Corps would never abandon—" she began, but her voice was cut off by an incoming transmission. Conrad frowned. He thought he'd jammed it good—the last thing he wanted to hear was a string of threats from the official comm line.

  "Cadet," came Commodore Garrity's stony voice. "Return to base at once."

  "With all due respect, ma'am, you know I can't," said Conrad, tapping a series of override codes into the comm interface. Should've paid more attention in cryptography, he thought to himself.

  "We will retrieve Cadet Nimitz. Listen to me, Redeker," she snapped. "You do not have the security clearance to be in this area—"

  "Security clearance?" Conrad's eyebrows rose. "What was Argus doing out here that he'd need any kind of security clearance?"

  "Cadet!" A few years ago, that tone would have put the fear of God in Conrad. It still did, but he was in too deep this time. There was too much at stake.

  "Ma'am," he said slowly. "Are you telling me that there is a portal out here?"

  There was only static on the comm line for a long moment.

  "Yes," came the reply. "And if you value your life, cadet, you'll stay the hell away from it."

  Argus Nimitz had disappeared two weeks ago into the darkness of space while on a standard run off the Academy's satellite base on Europa. The official word was that search and rescue was being conducted, but Conrad knew it wasn't enough after a week of silence.

  He tried hacking into the incident file, but the encryption was seven layers thick and overlaid with the most vicious booby traps he'd ever seen. Even Rose couldn't drill down into it more than a single level.

  Conrad switched on the comm control again, now that the official comm line was safely jammed. "Rose?" he said.

  "Are you getting court-martialed?" she asked.

  "Yup."

  "No less than you deserve," she said.

  "Probably."

  "Don't be an idiot, Con," she said. "Where the hell are you going?"

  "Rose," he said. "Look something up for me, will you? The location of the closest portal."

  There was a pause. "There are no operative portals that far out."

  "That's not what Garrity said."

  "Conrad," she said urgently. "If there's a portal out there, and Argus went through it, you can't follow him through."

  "Why not?" Conrad slammed the base of his palm into the blinking panel above him and cursed under his breath.

  "You don't know what's on the other side," she said. “When portals are closed or de-mapped, Conrad, there’s a reason why.”

  Conrad adjusted his scanners. He knew what a portal looked like. They were hundreds of kilometers wide, and rippled as if filled with black water. For all that life depended on the portals, they remained a mystery.

  The portals were discovered at the end of the 24th century, as mankind finally dared to explore space in the aftermath of the last global war. When the first aliens arrived in the solar system, they came via the portals. It was just a single P'orcian ship at first, a freighter filled with junk that emerged near Phobos. The slow-moving, quill quill-covered P'orcians came to hawk rusted-over scraps, and had instead revealed one of the greatest secrets of the universe, revealing that sentient life was an absolute requirement for the portals to function. When humanity found the portals on the edge of the solar system, everything changed. These stretched even further, to uncharted star systems within the galaxy quadrant, some with alien races never before seen by humanity.

  "Let’s find out," he said, setting his scanners to look for the telltale plasma trail of a Kestrel-class starcraft. "There," he said, as his display screen lit up. Half a hundred thousand kilometers away was the first clue to Argus's disappearance. "I've got it."

  "Con," came Rose's voice. "He wouldn't want you to get kicked out of the Corps. You're being impulsive."

  "I know," he acknowledged. "He was always a goody-two-shoes. But he doesn't know what's good for him. Never did, not even since he was a pup on four legs back in the Corps creche."

  "He's smarter than you are."

  "By a long shot," he agreed. "But he’s two years younger. I promised him I’d watch out for him when he entered the Academy. Which is why I've got to get him back."

  "You're not his big brother, Con."

  Conrad didn't respond. The plasma trail was growing hotter and denser by the second. It had to be Argus.

  "I'll be back, Rose," he said. "I promise."

  The fighter was rattling. It was shaking so hard that Conrad swore that he could hear the metal groaning. Still, he pushed the two-man fighter even harder.

  He'd either find the portal or the fighter would shred itself apart trying. He fired the ship's short short-range thrusters in short bursts as he pushed the sublight engine to its limits. It was an old, dangerous trick for getting top speed out of a fighter.

  Of course, the maneuver ran the risk of causing the entire ship to crack apart at the seams.

  "First thing," he muttered to himself. "First thing when we get back—we'll duct tape that damn engine together again."

  The shaking stopped. For a moment Conrad felt as if his body was weightless—as if he was suspended in a pool of warm, suffocating water.

  He opened his eyes. He hadn't even realized that he'd squeezed them shut.

  His ship was flying at full speed out of the portal, as if it had never slowed down for a single nanosecond.

  He grabbed at the controls, decelerating as smoothly as he could. The ship's nav computer beeped once and then went blank.

  Conrad swore loudly in Kazhadi. Fighter ships—nevermind training fighter ships—had minimal nav function anyway, since they weren't meant for long range missions.

  The stars seemed to spin for a moment. Conrad shook his head and looked behind him. He swung the ship around back towards the beacon. It blinked on as he downloaded its last payload. It was only a few lines of metadata, but it was enough.

  Alpha Aurigae.

  There were no planets or asteroid belts in this system—only burning stars. Nothing to strip or mine. No planets meant no species could make it a home, which meant that it was a dead system.

  "Where the hell have you gone, Argus?" He ran a scan of the surrounding area. The plasma trail lit up on his display more sharply than it had in the Kuiper belt.

  Conrad eased his ship towards the trail. He glanced at his fuel gauge. He had enough to go a few hundred kilometers. Argus's ship didn't have that much more range than a fighter. "Enough to get there and back," he said aloud, wondering if he was trying to convince himself.

  The plasma trail was a smooth arc in the darkness. Alpha Aurigae shone brightly in the distance. It was more than twice the size of Sol.

  Conrad gazed into the burning disc of the star and squinted.

  There was something black silhouetted against the brightness of the star. His hands tightened on the yoke.

  It was a ship. A hulking, massive ship.

  He'd seen that ship before in his xeno-anthro courses. Never with his own eyes, and never did he expected to see it in his lifetime.

  It was a Nu ship. It was built with alternating ribs of silver and black, as if warning predators away. The creatures that crewed the gleaming, beautiful ship were the stuff of legend.

  He opened his comm line, activating his universal translator. "Good day, ladies," he said, easily. "I'm just a man looking for his friend. Wonder if you could lend me a hand."

  The ship turned in his direction. It was terrifyingly agile for a vessel of its size. Conrad t
ugged at his sweat-stained collar. "You'd better be aboard and still in one piece, Argus," he muttered. He flew towards it as steadily as he could.

  Garrity had always taught her cadets that the way a pilot flew told his opponent everything—if was an easy kill. Conrad picked up speed.

  If what they say about the Nu is true—there are worse ways to go, anyway.

  The ship had a slit of a mouth for its central hangar bay. The Nu ship had no shields; or if it did, they were disabled. There wasn’t a single electromagnetic flicker as he passed through. Either the Nu’s technology was so advanced that their shielding was light years beyond anything that the Corps possessed, or they were so confident that they didn’t even bother with shields.

  Conrad swallowed dryly as the fighter entered the bay. He wondered how often ships with men aboard flew towards the Nu willingly. The stories said that the Nu used tractor beams—powerful ones, so strong that even a ship's crew was frozen like insects in amber. The rumors spread by trans-system traders and pirates whispered that the Nu were predators—a very particular kind of predator.

  The hangar bay was empty of all docking equipment. There were no shuttles, small fighters, or even a single grease stain. Conrad hovered for a moment above the sleek gray floor before initiating his landing sequence. There was artificial gravity on this ship, rated precisely for humanoid life forms.

  Conrad set the ship down in the center of the bay. He disentangled himself from his cockpit and climbed out of the ship, lowering himself slowly down the side before leaping down.

  Eight figures were waiting in the shadows, in the far corner of the bay. They were tall and slender, and as he approached them his heart began to pound.

  "It's all true," he muttered to himself. “I’ll be damned.”

  The Nu were beautiful—and they were exactly identical. Each Nu looked like a human woman, with a head of long, brown hair, rosy lips and soft black pupils.