Blackstar Command 1: Prominence

by A. C. Hadfield

  “Sure did,” Jannis said. She stepped aside to allow a group of tentacle-faced Podesians through. One of the lead aliens grunted something unintelligible and shook its body within its refractive silver robe, which Brenna had learned to be their way of saying thanks.

  Brenna nodded and walked on, wrapping the collar of her one-piece suit around her neck.

  Even though she had been stationed on Haleedez for the past six months, working with a group of informants—defected members of the Host—she still had yet to acclimatize to the outer-ring planet’s chilly temperatures.

  Even the blood-regulation drugs she had requisitioned from a black market source hadn’t helped much. All it did was give her night sweats. Her skin, if anything, had become even more sensitive to the biting winds, especially all the way up here amongst the towers.

  But none of that would matter after today.

  Once she had the information from the defected soldier, she’d be back on her ship and heading back to Coalition HQ on Capsis Prime.

  “So it’s a simple task of collecting the new data and trashing the old information?” Jannis said as they approached the end of the walkway and passed under a great glass archway.

  “That’s about the sum of it. As soon as the new data is confirmed, we can terminate the source and move on to the next project. I hear HQ has some great leads for us to work on. A really exciting economic opportunity for the company.”

  “That’s great to hear. I’m definitely excited to test myself with the bigger firms.”

  Brenna checked her contact lens HUD and followed the discreet augmented-reality directions. They were entering one of the main towers of the matrix. From the outside, it appeared translucent, but one couldn't actually see through them, the translucency being an illusory projection.

  Inside, the towers were glorified high-rise apartment buildings, subdivided into levels distributed from the poorest, and thus smallest homes, to the largest and most expensive.

  Unlike those on Capsis, the more expensive and desirable properties were on the lowest levels, closest to the planet’s actual surface.

  Although she hadn’t yet been there, Brenna had heard it was akin to paradise—if the locals were to be believed, but then the Haleedezians were a strange bunch, so who knew what their idea of paradise would be.

  Once inside the tower, all became quiet. Everyone else was on their way to work. Brenna had timed it right so they wouldn’t be disturbed.

  “You’ve done well,” Brenna said as she led her apprentice into a glass elevator and punched the number that would take them to level two hundred and five. She was referring to her disguise, something Jannis Fo hadn’t always got right in her training missions.

  Brenna felt a certain degree of pride that her tuition had brought out significant improvement in her protégé’s abilities.

  “Thanks. I found a good stylist and thought it’d be worth it,” Jannis said.

  “Do you have your analysis apps ready for use?” Brenna asked, the code being: is your weapon armed and ready.

  “Yep," Jannis said, tapping her flared thigh. "Just need the data, and we're good to go. Assuming it's there. Head office wasn't entirely convinced it would be where they said."

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Brenna said. “I checked the source myself.”

  Brenna thought of her source and felt a twinge of regret that she had to terminate him. But then, if the informant hadn’t run out on them and failed to make their last agreed meeting, she wouldn’t have had to resort to these kinds of measures.

  For three days she’d been led on a fruitless chase.

  Until this morning, when one of her leads checked out. The informant had been confirmed to be hiding out here in an empty apartment.

  When the elevator stopped, and the door opened, Brenna let her right hand drop to her hip, where her laser pistol was neatly holstered beneath the folded material.

  “We’re clear,” Jannis said, stepping out of the elevator and checking both ends of the corridor. Like the external view, the interior walls appeared translucent—video projections of the outside world that gave them the uncanny feeling of walking in the open.

  Only the warmer temperatures and the doors to the apartments convinced Brenna’s mind that she was actually inside a tower.

  “This way,” she said, leading the way to room 856.

  The door was already ajar. Not a good sign. All readings from her scanners told her that there was a single bio-signature inside and everything else read as normal. Brenna inched the door open, her pistol now in her hand, pointing into the space of the room.

  She stepped in slowly, quietly, her apprentice close behind, providing cover fire if needed.

  The apartment was sparse, fitting the Haleedez style, featuring just a single leather chair beneath a rotor lamp, the light hovering like a sentient bird.

  The light spilled from the lamp, showing indentations in the leather, indicating someone had recently sat there, corroborating the bio-signature and confirming her intel was correct.

  Jannis stepped around her and swept the five-square-meter room, but with just a projection wall and a few artifacts displayed on featureless plinths, there wasn’t much to check. A single doorway to the rear left of the room led to a short passage that Brenna knew from her research would provide access to a pair of bedrooms and a bathroom.

  The two spies moved across the room and into the passage with precise, quiet steps.

  Brenna’s scanner couldn’t pinpoint the location of the bio-signature, only indicate that there was one. They’d have to search each room. This in itself wasn’t overly worrying; many people wore scramblers to provide privacy.

  All part of the tech and counter-tech arms race. Thankfully, for Brenna, the engineers at the Guerrilla Tactics Unit were ahead of the game—just.

  They continued to move down the passageway toward the bathroom.

  Jannis stopped at one of the bedrooms to their left.

  Like the front door, it too hung ajar. “I’m going to check,” Jannis subvocalized over the near-field communications system.

  Before Brenna could confirm, however, Jannis stepped into the room and then immediately stopped—by the quiet thump of a rail gun pistol.

  Jannis’s body flew back into the passage, her limbs outstretched, her face contorted in surprise and pain. She struck the opposite wall. Her head slammed hard, the skull cracking before her body hit the ground, lifeless. A pool of blood oozed from her chest, staining her beige jacket.

  Brenna’s trained muscles reacted first before thought, sending her into a low roll away from the angle of view into the room.

  A shadow shifted on the periphery of her vision.

  Her heart rate kicked up a few notches and her muscles tensed. Out of the roll, she came up to one knee, raised her weapon and tracked the movement, her thoughts now coming through, telling her to be calm, be professional.

  The familiar, deadly whir of a rail gun pistol broke the silence.

  A projectile smashed through the thin wall material and flew just millimeters by Brenna’s ear, making her twitch away long after the fact.

  With the flight of the projectile still fresh in her instinctive mind, she raised her pistol and shot three times through the wall.

  Green laser fire from her gun flashed like a club’s neon strobe light for a brief second. The superheated air assailed her flared nostrils with the smell of burned dust and particulate.

  There was a grunt shortly afterward and the sound of something clattering to the floor.

  Brenna launched up and forward, diving into the open door and raising her laser pistol to where she had mentally modeled the sound to have come from.

  Her partner’s murderer lay still at the foot of the bed.

  A scarlet smear streaked down the white wall.

  On the bed, a second shape caught Brenna’s attention. Her brain’s pattern recognition kicked in and told her it was their informant—now clearly dead, the cream-cultured
sheets turned a sickly brown.

  The informant had been bled out, tortured, for hours.

  Brenna slowly approached the other figure on the floor, her pistol trained on the form. She rolled the body over with her foot. Two of her three shots had struck successfully—one to the chest, the other to the temple. The lack of bio-signature on her scanner confirmed the death. The carbon dioxide levels of the room had dropped, confirming the lack of breathing.

  Brenna kneeled at the foot of the murder and torturer. The informant’s blood on his gloved hands confirmed their role in this gruesome tableau. He wasn’t human. His near-pupil-less eyes and grooved hairless head were that of a Gratellian—a species under the protection, and manipulation, of the Host.

  He hadn’t just been sent to assassinate the informant; he’d been sent to extract information. But what that might have been, Brenna now had no way of knowing.

  The brain was too damaged for postmortem analysis.

  Whatever neurons were firing before taking a laser shot were now lost forever.

  Brenna stood and threw a drone camera in the air. The fist-sized cube flittered around the room, taking stills and video from all angles, along with temperature readings, chemical analysis, and projectile trajectories. While that was processing, Brenna made to move toward the passageway to deal with her partner.

  She took one step and stopped.

  A deep thrum vibrated throughout the whole building.

  The walls shook, the floor shook, and the atmosphere took on a tension that made Brenna’s skin crawl with dread.

  The light spilling through the diaphanous curtains darkened. She rushed over and peered through the window. Another thrum vibrated up through her feet. Her stomach lurched with the building. The scene outside seemed to tilt with her. In the sky, the orbiting battle-station grew larger—far larger than it should.

  It was coming toward the planet.

  And it was not the only thing.

  A long shadow descended over Somos. A thin fragmented line of clouds obscured the shape initially, but when the pointed, matte-black nose of a ship pierced through the cloud layer and smashed through the tips of distant towers, Brenna knew what was happening.

  The Host had returned.

  Somehow, they had managed to take out and bypass the battle-station defensive system. The very system developed among these outer-ring planets to provide a defensive early-warning shield against any potential return of the Host.

  Not that anyone suspected they’d attack now.

  The modeling from the Coalition HQ had predicted they wouldn’t recover their losses from the war a decade previous for at least another twenty or more years.

  She spun to regard the assassin. It all made sense now.

  The Gratellian was a Host agent. He must have been here to get intelligence from the informant regarding the defensive shield of Haleedez. Brenna smashed her hand against the window. How could she not have seen this before?

  She had no time to lay blame. The Host battleship was coming lower. Laser and ballistic fire burst from its gun pods, destroying everything in its path. The walkways smashed like brittle candy, sending citizens toppling to their deaths. Their screams were audible over the terrible sound of the ship’s engines.

  For a brief moment, Brenna was paralyzed with awe and fear. But she practiced her mind-focusing techniques and after a few moments had got a grip of her mind; she had work to do.

  She pocketed the drone camera, the device having completed its task, and sprinted into the hallway. Next, she activated her remote ship command instruction. It would take approximately fifteen seconds to arrive. She plotted the coordinates so that it would hover outside the window. There was no time to travel through the levels of the tower to the landing pad.

  Her ship confirmed the instruction via a flashing green dot on her contact HUD.

  While the ship was making its way up the tower, she lifted Jannis's prone body up onto her shoulders and carried her into the bloodstained bedroom.

  The light of day had turned to night. The Host destroyer completely obscured the binary suns with its black bulk. Below her current level, her ship cast its own shadow until it hovered just outside the window.

  Brenna kicked aside the latch and slid the glass pane to one side.

  Her ship’s engines whined, barely audible over the sound of crashing towers. A laser bolt from the nearby Host destroyer smashed into the building, a few floors up. A fireball burst into the air above her, greedily burning up the surrounding oxygen.

  She turned away from the heat and held her breath.

  Her ship’s AI extended a platform to the window. She lurched across and ducked inside, dumping Jannis’s body into the hold. Using the cargo straps, she secured Jannis and then rushed into the cockpit.

  “Authorize,” Brenna said aloud, dashing through the narrow corridor.

  “Agent 717 authorized,” the AI said.

  “Contact HQ immediately. Activate evasive maneuvers. Full power to shields and planet drive. Get us into orbit over the third parallel.”

  “Orders understood.”

  Brenna entered the cockpit. The lights were low in the small room to allow her holoscreen display to be more easily seen. On her left, the status screen scrolled through a series of alerts while the middle screen showed video feeds of her surroundings.

  The Host ship appeared even bigger when seen from all angles.

  The city below it was in ruins, with flame and smoke obscuring anything below the fiftieth level. A government warning siren blared in the distance, and a message for calm ticked across her status screen.

  Somewhere in the distance, a good two hundred klicks away, fragments of the battle-station burned through the atmosphere, turning the world orange and black.

  “Engaging engines,” the AI informed her. “Shields at full.”

  “Patch me through to HQ,” Brenna said as she strapped herself into the seat.

  A few seconds later, the voice of Captain Cranston Lopek barked over the secure comms channel. “717, what’s your status?”

  The ship lurched upwards, choking the words in Brenna’s throat. It spun and sped through the air, away from the Host vessel. Other ships were trying to escape, too, and to Brenna’s gratitude and disgust, provided cover for her escape.

  “Agent Locke, you called me. What’s going on there?”

  “Captain… it’s all gone to shit. The informant is dead. Jannis is dead.”

  “Slow down, explain.”

  “Patching video to you now. It’s the Host, Captain; they’re back. And they’ve taken out the defensive shield here.”

  Captain Cranston Lopek went silent.

  While her ship piloted her away from danger and then out of the atmosphere, taking her into low orbit, Kopek’s voice returned. “We’re hearing of other attacks to the outer-ring defense system. It’s just three of the twenty. There’s no evidence yet to suggest the Host are back in their former capacity. This could just be a scouting mission. But return to HQ immediately, we need to debrief and find out how they breached the defense system.”

  “I’m on it,” Brenna said. “Preparing for subspace jump now.”

  “Good. I’m being told reinforcements were scrambled ten minutes ago. Your role there is done. Radio silence until you arrive unless there’s an emergency,” Lopek replied.

  “Wait, if I don’t make it back for some reason, get word to my son, Kai. He’s on Zarunda.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be sure to let him know if anything happens.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Radio silence now. Over.”

  “Over.”

  Brenna slumped in her chair as the AI took over the subspace jumping sequence. She watched the video of the planet shrinking behind her, the Host ship still visible over the bright blue planet, a dark, insidious shadow crawling across the surface.

  The battle-station lay just over the outer edge in broken fragments. Her ship’s shields managed to deflect the debris as
the subspace engines whined up to speed.

  Before they made the jump, she saw three points of light flare beyond Haleedez.

  A trio of Coalition destroyers pierced through the veil of subspace and brought with them a sense of hope—and vengeance. The Host might have had a head start and destroyed the defense system, but it would face a real fight now.

  Her own ship became dark and silent. The subspace jump was underway. The familiar but never-not-freaky sense of being nowhere and everywhere at once permeated her very being, and she entered the dreamlike state knowing that despite all the deaths on Haleedez, the Host vessel wouldn't escape.

  But a more worrying thought occurred to her: they would have known that.

  They were prepared to sacrifice themselves.

  This was a very different Host to what they faced a decade ago.

  Chapter 4

  Senaya handed the tetrahedron back to Kai and retrieved her twin laser pistols from her myriad pockets. Kai just had time to drop the object into the footlocker and reach for his rifle.

  “Don’t you kids even think about it,” a deep, rumbling voice said. “Put those little toys away, girl.”

  Kai spun around, one hand still reaching for the Petchen & Glaz. There in the doorway was every Zarundan’s nightmare—enigmatic criminal Bandar Trace. And he was well armed with a smoldering short-block flame blaster in his hands, the liquid ignition fluid dripping menacingly from the wide aperture barrel.

  Trace stared at them, his cold eyes barely visible through the dusty translucent mask that obscured his heavily scarred face. A sand-covered leather duster and a bandolier of proximity grenades only added to the criminal’s intimidating presence.

  Kai had only seen him once in public, and the half-dozen dead bodies around his feet had told Kai then all he needed to know: Trace was to be feared, or at the very least respected.

  He should have known the hyped rumor of this downed ship would have caught Trace’s attention. Hell, he doubted anything escaped his attention. It was just a case of whether or not Trace felt like coming out of hiding and taking what he wanted.