Starlight (Dark Space Book 3)

by Lisa Henry

  I wasn’t the only one who watched Thomas with a worried frown on my face.

  “The thing is,” I said to Harry as he joined me for rounds one afternoon, “you know what you assholes in intel did to me and Cam back home, right?”

  Harry winced. “Yeah.”

  A glass cell in an underground room. They’d ripped us from our lives, from Lucy, and put us in total isolation against every rule in the book because they thought the Faceless were communicating with us again. Which turned out they were, but that didn’t mean we were traitors colluding with the enemy or any bullshit like that. We didn’t have any control over it.

  “Well what do you think they’re gonna do to Thomas?” I asked, dodging around something that in a regular ship might have been called a conduit, but here looked more like a pulsing vein. “You think they’re gonna let him out for days at the petting zoo?”

  Harry’s nose wrinkled. “Why would he want to go to a petting zoo?”

  Harry must have missed that conversation with Lucy.

  “Trust me,” I said, “he does. It’s his fucking life’s ambition right now to hold a baby goat. Or it was yesterday. He might have moved on to quantum physics by now. But my point is, he’s going to be locked up in some cage, isn’t he? And he’s going to be taken apart by our scientists, over and over again until there’s nothing left of him, and that’s not fair.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Harry chewed his bottom lip for a moment. “But it’s not like we can leave him with the Faceless, is it?”

  I thought of how Kai-Ren had killed the other hatchlings. Leaving Thomas with him might even be a mercy. At least it would be over quickly, however much the thought of it made my guts churn.

  “I guess not,” I said, but the thought of what would happen to Thomas continued to bite at me.

  He’d saved us. More than that, he was one of us, wasn’t he? He’d decided that our weird little group of humans was his hive. And maybe it was the DNA he shared with me that had stuck him with us to begin with, but now he was drawing pictures and learning to talk and figuring out how to smile when we did. He was teaching himself how to be human, not Faceless. And he’d never learn that in an underground cage.

  I took my concerns to Doc, to Cam, to Harry and to Andre. And then, when I couldn’t drag my feet about it any more, I took them to Chris.

  I found him at the bridge, like always, taking copious notes, like always. I looked around for Thomas, and saw that he was in one of the alcoves, the translucent walls closed around him as he did whatever the fuck it was he did to keep the ship going in the right direction.

  “Hey,” I said awkwardly.

  Chris looked up from his notebook. “Hey. What’s up?”

  I swiped my tongue over my lower lip. “What’s going to happen to Thomas when we get home?”

  Chris regarded me steadily. “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” I said. “And that’s not good enough. You gonna stand by and let them take him away? He’s a person.” I shrugged. “Well, close enough.”

  “I’m not going to let anyone hurt him,” Chris said.

  “Fuck off with that!” I rolled my eyes. “How are you going to stop it from happening? You can tell yourself something like that a million times, until you’re blue in the face. You can even believe it, but it doesn’t mean shit, because when it comes down to it, when some asshole who’s bigger than you gets in your way, there’s nothing you can do to stop it!”

  Chris didn’t get it. He hadn’t spent his whole life kicking against walls and getting fucking nowhere. He hadn’t been shut down constantly by arbitrary rules enforced by assholes who just didn’t give a fuck. The rules had never fucked Chris over because he’d never had to push back against them. Why would he? The rules were made by guys like him for guys like him. He’d never felt helpless because he’d never been helpless. But he would be. This time, he would be, because there was no way the military wouldn’t take Thomas away.

  I clenched my fists, wanting to throw a punch, but not at him. At everything. Story of my life.

  “Brady.” Chris took a step toward me, tucking his notebook into his pocket.

  I glared.

  “Hey.” He put his hand on my shoulders, jostling me so that I was facing him. His expression was open, earnest. His eyes were dark in the gloom of the bridge, but I remembered them from all the times I’d seen them in Cam’s dreams: a blue as deep as the sea when a sudden ledge dropped away underneath you. “Brady, I’m not going to let anything happen to Thomas, okay? I’m not.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not your choice though!”

  His mouth quirked. “Have you ever won a game of poker on a really shitty hand?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes. So?”

  “How’d you do it?” he asked me.

  “I dunno. I bluffed.”

  Chris grinned and released me. “Yeah, you bluffed.”

  What the fuck did that mean?

  He laughed at the look on my face. “Jesus. Brady, we just survived a battle with the Faceless, and you think we can’t protect Thomas? We’re got this, okay? We’ve got this.”

  Lack of confidence had never been Chris’s problem. And as much as I wanted to believe him, optimism had never been one of my strengths.

  “We’ve got this,” he said again, his voice softening.

  “Yeah,” I said, even though I didn’t believe it for a second, because the universe always found some new and exciting way to shit all over me. “Okay.”

  And then I turned and left before I couldn’t hold back that urge to punch something.

  ****

  There was a place at the edge of the universe where speed and mass collided and did weird shit with time. It was way beyond my fucking understanding, but what was new about that? Whatever the reason was, the days started to drag on longer and longer the closer we got to home, even with all our new duties filling them. I tried to explain it to Cam, that feeling like time itself had slowed, and he laughed at me, the fucker.

  “It has nothing to do with relativity, Brady,” he told me. “This is like December.”

  “What?”

  “When I was a kid,” he said, making some mark in his notebook as we walked along the glowing corridors of the ship, “the longest month in the world was December. My parents put the tree up on the first, and I had a little advent calendar and everything, and I was looking forward to Christmas Day so much that it took forever. I wanted my presents so badly!” He laughed at the memory. “December was so slow, but January? With school right around the corner? That flew right past.”

  The only thing I’d ever counted down was how many years, months and days I had left in my military service. I’d done it first just trying to make the numbers work for me—would Dad live long enough to support Lucy until I could get home?—but they never did add up right.

  My chest ached. I wished Dad had known that Lucy was safe. I wished he hadn’t died thinking I’d failed. He must have been so scared for her at the end.

  “Hey,” Cam caught my hand. “You okay? We can do Christmas when we’re home. With a tree and presents for you and Lucy.”

  “Yeah, I don’t care about Christmas.” I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “I was thinking about Dad. About how he didn’t know Lucy would be okay.”

  Cam, to his credit, didn’t offer me any bullshit platitudes. He just pulled me into a hug. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m just being dumb for no reason,” I said, leaning my head on his shoulder. “Just…whenever things are going right, I have to start thinking of all the bad stuff or something, I don’t know.”

  “That’s okay,” Cam said. He ran a hand down my back. “Because guess what, Brady?”

  I straightened up so I could look him in the eye. “What?”

  “You’ve got a whole lifetime in front of you to figure out that getting something good doesn’t mean something bad is just around the corner.” He leaned in and pressed our foreheads together. “And I’m gonna b
e there with you all the way, giving you as many good days as I can.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “That’s not fair.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “It is fair, Brady, because you make all of my days better just by being in them.”

  “Even when I’m being an asshole?”

  Cam smiled. “I knew what I was signing up for.”

  I huffed out a laugh at that. “Oh, no rebuttal on the asshole thing? I’m not the only one in this relationship, I guess.”

  “You’re really not,” Cam agreed. His smile faded. “I told myself I missed the starlight. I told myself my fear at coming back onboard this ship was irrational. I told myself that what Kai-Ren did to me didn’t matter. And I told everyone else that too. And you’re the only one who called bullshit on that. You’re the only one who knew I was lying.”

  I laid my hand against his cheek.

  “I think, when this is done,” he said, his voice so soft I had to strain to hear him, “that I’ll do all my stargazing from our balcony.”

  “Yeah,” I breathed. “That sounds like a good plan.”

  Home.

  We were going home.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Defender hung in space, a speck of gray against the black. It seemed so tiny and inconsequential. It seemed peaceful too but the moment our ship had appeared, blocking out the stars, the guys on board must have been frantic with activity, like ants in a jar that had just been shaken up. And then the Hawks came, buzzing past us like insects. They weren’t firing though. Maybe they were honoring the treaty with Kai-Ren, even though they couldn’t have known this was his ship. We’d taken radios with us when we left, but the batteries had long since corroded. Andre had tried for hours to get one working again, and in the end he’d just tossed it aside and said, “Fuck this.”

  So the Hawks weren’t firing. Maybe because of the treaty, and maybe because they knew from experience that an attack on a Faceless ship was a suicide run. Years ago now, a formation of Hawks had seen off a Faceless ship. Knowing when I knew about the Faceless now, I wondered if they’d just got bored and left. Or maybe it had never happened like that at all, but someone in the military had decided that we all needed the morale boost of believing that it had. I thought of the poster of Cam’s face, and the footage of his capture that was never shown in its entirety on Earth.

  Jesus fuck, I hated the Defenders and the military and everything they stood for, but I didn’t even have the words for the sheer amount of happiness that bubbled up inside me as we drew closer to that rusty tin can spinning slowly in the black.

  The guys on the Defender weren’t the only ones as busy as ants. I had shit strewn all over the floor of our room that I had to pack into my footlocker, and so did Lucy. She was just a kid. I didn’t have that excuse. I threw everything in, not even caring to check if it was mine, and left Lucy sorting through her drawings—why, I have no idea since all she needed to do was put them in her footlocker—and went and helped Doc start packing up his medical bay. It was his books mainly, their pages soft and fragile with the moisture they’d sucked up from the air around us.

  “I never really thought this would happen,” I admitted as I stacked a bunch of books in a plastic crate.

  Doc threw me a sidelong look, his caterpillar eyebrows tugging together. “And you think you’re the only one?”

  I considered that for a moment. “I suppose not. Hey, they’re not going to shoot us out of the sky before we get to them, are they?”

  Doc snorted. “Not unless we’ve made leaps and bounds in weapons technology in the past couple of months, they’re not. Now stop worrying and get packing.”

  I grinned. “Sounds like a plan, Doc.”

  It took another hour or so to reach the Defender, Doc’s wind-up clock counting down every painstaking minute.

  “Okay,” Chris said, when the Defender was looming up close enough that we could make out the tubes on the Outer Ring. “When we dock, they’re going to be on high alert. So I’ll go out first, and I want everyone to stay back. Thomas especially.”

  If Chris was volunteering to be the guy shot by a nervous marine, that was fine with me.

  “We carry our own stuff off,” Chris said. “We don’t let them aboard.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because we’ve got five Faceless in the pods who, at the moment, are entirely at our mercy,” Chris said. “And we don’t need the brass to know that and make some decision that will fuck everything up for everyone.”

  He glanced at Thomas when he said it.

  “What’s your angle?” Harry asked, lifting his chin.

  “I’m still working on it,” Chris said. “I just need you guys to back me up.”

  Harry nodded. “Yeah. Of course.”

  When we’d left months ago, we’d been guys in uniform with military haircuts and—for the rest of them, anyway—at least a nominal respect for the command structure. And now I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard anyone use rank, let alone seriously try to pull it on someone else. The military weren’t going to recognize the scruffy barefoot assholes about to walk through the walls of their Defender. I kind of liked them though. Turns out they were my sort of assholes.

  The Faceless ship hit the Defender like jelly. There was no real impact, and if there was we didn’t feel it. The ship didn’t crash into the Defender—it yielded to it, and then clung like a limpet. The stench of burning metal drew us to one of the higher decks of the ship and we reached it just in time to see the Faceless ship’s skin opening.

  A blast of dry air hit us, and it felt so fucking good.

  Behind that blast I saw the gray metal walls of the Defender. Echoing through them, above the sound of a wailing klaxon, I could hear boots ringing on the floor. I grinned and held Lucy’s hand tightly.

  The boots stopped—guys getting into position. Chris gave them a moment to get a handle on their nerves, and then stepped into the breached wall.

  “My name is Captain Chris Varro,” he called in a loud, clear voice. “Place your weapons down, please. You’re not under attack.”

  There was a moment of silence, then harsh, whispered conversation, and then a man wearing a marine’s insignia walked into view. “Captain Varro?” He gave a salute. “Welcome to Defender Three, sir.”

  I exchanged a wide-eyed look with Cam, and almost choked on a laugh.

  What were the fucking odds?

  ****

  Chris was serious as hell about not allowing any Defender personnel onto the Faceless ship. He was also a good liar.

  “Not my rules, Commander Leonski,” he said to my former C.O. as soon as the guy appeared. “Battle Regent Kai-Ren has been very clear on the protocols.”

  I exchanged a look with Cam as we walked after them.

  Our grubby little party was flanked by marines. Their boots rang on the metal floors. Our bare feet squelched and squeaked as we trailed Faceless goo behind us. What a fucking sight we must have been. We were scruffy-haired, our damp haphazard uniforms stuck to us, and the stench rolling off us was no small thing either. We’d grown immune to it on our months onboard the Faceless ship, but nothing inside that ship had exactly smelled of roses. It was way too biological for that.

  Thomas, walking behind Chris, was twitchy. He didn’t need to be connected to these guys to smell the fear and hostility coming off them. We should have made him wear Faceless armor, I thought. Might have been better to leave his face up to their imaginations. Thomas was never gonna win any beauty pageants on Earth, was he? That made two of us, I guess.

  We were escorted from the Outer Ring to the Inner Ring, which was mostly made up of sleeping quarters and rec facilities. The Outer Ring was for docking, the Inner Ring was for personnel, and the Core was for the real business of the station. Ops, the medbay, the Dome, administration, and underneath everything else the reactor that kept the Defender running. We didn’t stop in the Inner Ring, of course, because Commander Leonski’s prioritie
s didn’t include getting us showers. We blew right though it and headed for the Core of Defender Three.

  It was there, in a bland gray-walled conference room, that Chris made his play. And what a hell of a play it was. It was simple and at the same time breathtakingly audacious.

  “This is Thomas,” Chris said, staring Leonski right in the eye. “He is the chosen ambassador of the Faceless battle regent Kai-Ren.”

  And just like that Thomas was saved a lifetime of captivity getting poked and prodded by scientists. If the military thought he had Kai-Ren’s protection, they wouldn’t dare touch a hair on his weird hybrid head. And with Kai-Ren safely tucked away in stasis, who was going to tell them that the Faceless thought Thomas was an abomination? Who was going to tell them what had happened to the other hatchlings?

  The rest was anticlimactic. Doc shook Leonski’s hand, clapped him on the back like they were old friends—they were, I guess—and told everyone in the room exactly how many people he’d be willing to kill for a shower, a clean uniform, cigarettes and food. A little while after that we were in the officer’s rec lounge, clean and pink and dry, sitting around a large table and watching Thomas poking curiously at a bowl of oatmeal. Because as much as we all wanted to rip into steaks, Doc had decided that after months on a liquid diet we needed to pace ourselves. The oatmeal was good, so I didn’t even complain much, especially when I got a soda for the first time in months, and the bubbles and the sugar rush almost made me come right then and there.

  “So,” Doc said, lowering his voice so that the marines by the door couldn’t hear us. “Chosen ambassador of the battle regent Kai-Ren, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Chris glanced at Cam, and his mouth quirked. “Turns out there really isn’t a good way to explain the unexplainable to the military. So you fudge the translations a little.”