Dark Space Universe by Jasper T. Scott Read online

  Supposedly he’d passed the probe, but the clerics were still treating him like a dangerous prisoner. As Lucien walked down the boarding tunnel, he wondered if they’d thought better of allowing him to join the mission, and this was his ride home.

  He reached the airlock to the ship on the other end of the tunnel and walked out into one of the familiar pentagonal corridors of a star galleon. The walls were all shiny white. Golden glow panels limned the bulkheads and tracked the ceiling.

  “Are we leaving Astralis?” Lucien asked.

  “I don’t have any information for you. My job is just to take you to meet the others.”

  “The others?”

  “The other Paragons.”

  Lucien nodded, but wondered why they were all meeting each other aboard a star galleon.

  The cleric took him up an elevator and halfway around the ship, but that only took a few minutes. At just two hundred meters from bow to stern, galleons were large, but not overly so, designed to carry between five hundred and a thousand crew.

  They arrived at the galleon’s forward viewing gallery, and the cleric waved the door open. Half a dozen others were already there waiting, all wearing identical black jumpsuits with red trim and the single crimson bar insignia of a champion third class. Not all of them, Lucien corrected. One was wearing the sleeveless gray tunic of a tyro, revealing the glossy black fur on her arms.

  Troo? Lucien froze in the entrance of the gallery. How did she… A hulking shadow stepped in front of him, blocking his view. Lucien looked up into the skull-shaped horror of a Gor’s face. “Brak?” Lucien shook his head, confused. “What are you doing h—”

  Brak picked him up and slung him over one of his broad shoulders. “We leave now,” the Gor said.

  Lucien sighed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Yes, you are. I carry you.”

  “Stop!” the cleric who had escorted Lucien said, stepping in front of them. Brak swatted the man aside with one arm. The cleric went flying, and his stunner clattered to the deck.

  Tyra appeared in the entrance of the gallery, blocking their way out and aiming a stun pistol at them. “Not another step! Put him down.”

  Brak put Lucien down and hissed at her.

  Tyra wore a form-fitting white uniform with black trim. Four black bars and a star marked her sleeves and shoulder boards, while a single golden star glittered on each side of her collar. Lucien’s brow furrowed at the unfamiliar insignia.

  Brak’s eyes darted from Tyra to the stun pistol that the other cleric had dropped.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Tyra warned. “Lucien is here because he wants to be. You are free to go if you’re having a change of heart.”

  The Gor hissed again, but said nothing.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to need an answer.”

  Another hiss, and Brak shot Lucien a glare. “I stay.”

  “Good,” Tyra replied. Her gaze left Brak to study the cleric that Brak had tossed aside. The man climbed to his feet and limped over to collect his stunner before joining Tyra in the entryway. He aimed his pistol at Brak and glared.

  Brak bared his teeth in an ugly grimace, and the cleric retreated a step behind Tyra. She glanced sideways at him. “You can leave now.”

  “But the Gor—”

  “Is more likely to attack if you’re here to provoke him.”

  “Yes, ma’am…”

  The doors swished open and shut as the cleric left. Tyra holstered her stunner and strode by them, to where the others were standing in front of the gallery’s double-story viewports. Lucien took a moment to appreciate the view. Astralis’s hangar bay was open, but shielded with hazy blue static shields to keep it pressurized, allowing ground crew to work around the galleon. Beyond those shields lay a dazzling array of stars adrift in a bright magenta streak of nebula. Lucien frowned. He couldn’t remember seeing that nebula before.

  “Have you all already been introduced?” Tyra asked.

  Lucien turned from the view to study the others. A few of them shook their heads. The Paragons were all keeping to themselves. There were four that Lucien didn’t recognize: two men and two women. He tried using his ARCs to identify them, but nothing happened.

  “Your ARCs have all been temporarily deactivated,” Tyra said, as if reading his mind. “They’ll be reactivated as soon as our techs finish adjusting your security clearance for our network.”

  “You mean there are some things we aren’t allowed to know?” Lucien asked.

  “Of course.”

  Lucien snorted. “And you got upset because Etherus wouldn’t tell us everything he knows. Ironic.”

  Tyra favored him with a thin smile. “Not quite the same thing, but we don’t have time to argue.” Tyra stopped beside the first of the four strangers and rested a hand on the man’s shoulder.

  “This is Garek. He’s the veteran on our team, with more than twenty years of experience as a Paragon.”

  Lucien studied him: shaven head, black stubble, an angry ridge of scar tissue running down one side of his head and face, hard brown eyes, and a crooked jaw. He looked like a veteran. He even looked old, with crows’ feet around his eyes and a worn look to his features. With all the technology available to correct those flaws and prevent aging, it was surprising that Garek hadn’t bothered to do so.

  “Our team?” Lucien thought to ask, as something Tyra had said filtered through to his brain.

  “I thought you would have guessed by now,” Tyra replied. “You’re all going to be serving on the same ship together—this ship, my ship, the Inquisitor.

  “I suppose we don’t have any say in that?” Lucien asked.

  “No. Now, as I was saying, Garek is our veteran. He was one of the very first crusaders, but he lost his rank after an incident in Andromeda. He is the team’s medic.”

  “What incident?” Lucien asked.

  Garek sneered. “Why don’t you ask your parents, kid?”

  Lucien blinked, taken aback. What did his parents have to do with it?

  “Moving on…” Tyra indicated the man standing a few feet over from Garek. “This is Teelo—”

  “You can call me Tinker,” the man interrupted. “I’m good with my hands,” he added, glancing at the two female Paragons as he said that. The blonde-haired one smiled, but the other one rolled her eyes.

  Tinker was tall and good-looking, with short dark hair, and a mischievous sparkle in his bright blue eyes.

  Tyra sent him an admonishing glance. “As his nickname implies, Tinker is our ship’s engineer, as well as our field engineer.”

  Tyra indicated Troo next, telling Lucien things he already knew about her and Fossaks in general. Troo glared at him throughout her introduction, clearly still holding a grudge against him after he’d stranded her on that balcony. What he wanted to know was how a minor had been allowed to leave New Earth and join the mission.

  “Troo will be our comms officer and translator,” Tyra finished. “She’s also one of our three scouts, and the junior member of this team.”

  Lucien blinked, shocked by that revelation. “Have you spoken to her?”

  Tyra turned to him. “Yes, why?”

  “You haven’t noticed something about the way she talks?”

  “I is talking perfection!” Troo hissed.

  Brak barked out a laugh that boomed through the gallery. “Even I speak better than her.”

  “I rest my point,” Lucien said.

  “How many alien species have you met?” Tyra asked.

  Lucien shrugged. “Four sentient. A few hundred animal. Why?”

  “And how many of them spoke Versal?”

  “Well… none.”

  “Then it shouldn’t matter how badly Troo mangles it. We don’t need her to communicate with humans. We need her to make first contact with aliens before they agree to use a visual communicator or help us to calibrate our verbal translators.

  “Being a so-called psychic gives Troo a unique advantage when communic
ating with other species. Much the way that Gors can communicate among themselves telepathically because of nanite implants passed on at birth, Fossaks can communicate with everyone the same way, but naturally, and over much shorter distances. Troo will be able to communicate by projecting images directly to other beings’ minds and reading their replies. I trust that answers your concerns, Mr. Ortane?”

  Lucien nodded. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Garek glaring at him. He turned to the veteran with his eyebrows raised, but the medic scowled and looked away.

  “Good. Moving on…” Tyra went to stand beside one of the two women. She was small and slight of build, with green eyes and long blond hair tied up in a bun at the back of her head. “This is Adalyn—Addy for short,” Tyra said. “She’s our scout and sniper.”

  Without skipping a beat, Tyra turned to the next woman. She had black skin, dark violet eyes, and dreadlocks. “Jalisa is our demolitions expert, gunnery chief, and one of our best pilots.”

  Tyra walked up to Lucien and Brak next. She nodded to the Gor first. “And this is Brak, our melee and hand-to-hand combat specialist. Like Addy and Troo he’s also a scout, and like all Gors, the nanite implant he was born with allows him to cloak even without an exosuit. Of course, we’re unlikely to ever go exploring without our exosuits, but you never know when technology is going to fail you.”

  Tyra looked away from Brak, and her gaze settled on Lucien. “Finally, this is Lucien Ortane, son of the famous crusaders Ethan and Alara Ortane.”

  Tinker and Jalisa nodded appreciatively, and Addy gave him a sultry look that warmed Lucien’s cheeks, while Garek’s glare became more intense.

  “Lucien is our best pilot, so he’ll be the one piloting our shuttle for away missions. He’s also the ship’s executive officer and security chief.

  “Any questions about these assignments?”

  Lucien stuck up a hand.

  “Yes, Mr. Ortane?”

  “What about the others?”

  Tyra arched an eyebrow at him and looked around the room, as if searching for someone she’d missed. “What others?”

  Lucien hesitated. “You’re acting like we’re the only crew on this ship…”

  “Besides the members of my science team and a few enlisted crewmen, you are the only crew on this ship.”

  Lucien blinked. “Galleons take a crew of nine hundred and sixty-two, of which almost three hundred are usually marines and fighter pilots. How are we supposed to defend ourselves with less than a dozen Paragons to fill those roles?”

  Tyra frowned. “Ideally, we’ll be avoiding conflicts, so we won’t need to defend ourselves—”

  Lucien’s cheeks bulged with an objection.

  “—but if we can’t avoid conflict, our marines and pilots will be able to defend us.”

  Lucien shook his head. “I’m confused. What marines and pilots? I thought you just said we’re the only crew besides a few clerics?”

  “Scientists,” Tyra corrected. “And that’s not entirely accurate. We have bots to fill all the extra crew positions on our galleons.”

  “Bots,” Lucien repeated. “Mindless drones aren’t going to be much good in a fight.”

  “Technically, they’re AIs.”

  Lucien blinked in shock. “Artificial intelligence has been illegal ever since we defeated Omnius!”

  Tyra smiled. “Not on Astralis.”

  “You fools,” Garek growled. “You’re repeating history.”

  “There are multiple security measures in place to prevent our relatively weak AIs from evolving to the point where they might replace or enslave us. And that will be the last time you patronize me, Mr. Helios. I might seem young and inexperienced compared to you, but I’m your captain, and your superior officer, and you will refer to me as such—that goes for all of you,” Tyra added, looking around the room.

  Garek grunted and looked away.

  “Speaking of rank,” Tyra went on, “all of you have been re-designated as lieutenants junior grade, which is equivalent to the rank of champions third class, which you held in the Paragons. My rank of captain is equivalent to a crusader, while Mr. Ortane is a lieutenant commander, or champion first class, and Troo is an ensign.”

  Lucien nodded to Garek. “Why isn’t he your XO? He used to be a crusader or captain, as you call it. I’m sure he has more experience than me.”

  “Oh, he does, but the incident that lost him his rank prevents me from fully trusting him with a position of command, and the probe reports indicate you are best suited for a leadership role, so it’s yours—for now. Are there any other questions?”

  No one else spoke up.

  “Good. Then lets head to the bridge and get underway.”

  Lucien shook his head. “Get underway? Don’t we have to wait until we jump away from New Earth to start exploring?”

  Tyra smiled at him. “We already have.” She nodded to the magenta nebula visible from the gallery viewports. “Does that look like the Large Magellanic Cloud to you?”

  Chapter 8

  “We already jumped? Where are we?” Lucien asked.

  “We’re in uncharted space, just past the red line,” Tyra replied.

  The scarred veteran chimed in, speaking in a gravelly voice that perfectly matched his marred appearance: “You knew Etherus would grant the petition.” Lucien struggled to remember the man’s name—Garek. The Veteran. He’d be easier to remember that way.

  “How do you figure?” Jalisa asked.

  Jalisa… she was the ship’s gunnery chief and demolitions expert. Guns, Lucien decided.

  Garek nodded to Tyra.

  Tyra the Tyrant, Lucien thought with a smile.

  “It’s only been a month since the petition was granted,” Garek explained. “Tyra is talking about a jump that should have taken at least six months to calculate.”

  A small smile graced Tyra’s lips. “Try twelve days.”

  Garek blinked, taken aback.

  “How is that possible?” Lucien asked.

  “AI isn’t all bad,” Tyra explained. “We estimate reaching the cosmic horizon in eight years rather than the ninety-six indicated by our petition. We couldn’t publicize that, of course, without admitting to breaking the law by using AIs to speed up our jump calculations.”

  “Can we send messages back to our families and loved ones to let them know we’ll be home sooner?” Lucien asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Tyra replied. “As I said, AIs are illegal, and our use of them is classified information. Let’s go take a look at what’s been found beyond the cosmic horizon so far.”

  Brak stepped in front of Tyra, blocking her way. “What do you mean by this? We do not reach cosmic horizon yet. How can we see past it?”

  “We don’t have to reach it to see beyond it,” Tyra explained. “It’s like the horizon on a planet. It moves as you move. And since we just jumped two hundred and fifty million light years, we can now see that much farther than we could before. Of course, the prevailing wisdom and prior observable evidence suggests that we’ll just end up seeing more of the same, but who knows?”

  Lucien shook his head. “Now I’m confused—how can we have traveled two hundred and fifty million light years and still only see more of the same?”

  Tyra regarded him with a smile. “I mean we’ll probably find that there’s more stars and galaxies beyond the old cosmic horizon. That’s a logical deduction, because otherwise Lankiakea would be at the center of the entire universe, and that would be an odd coincidence. We also think the universe might be connected to itself—multiply connected, we call it. And if that’s so, then it means if you travel far enough in any one direction, you’ll end up back where you started.”

  “You mean if the universe is a sphere?” Addy said.

  Addy the sniper/scout… what’s a good nickname for you? Lucien wondered. Scout, sniper, sexy… Triple S.

  “No,” Tyra replied. “Scientists don’t think about the curvature of the universe that way. We thi
nk of curvature in terms of geometry. That is, for a flat universe, if we draw a triangle in space, it’s angles should always add up to exactly one hundred and eighty degrees. For a spherical universe, the angles will add up to more—just like they do on the surface of a planet—and for a negatively curved universe, the angles will add up to less than a hundred and eighty degrees. Current evidence supports a flat universe.

  “Topology, on the other hand, tells us how space is connected to itself. This is what laymen mean when they talk about curvature. A torus topology, for example, is flat, but connected to itself at the edges. You can visualize this if you take a sheet of flexiplast and curl it into a cylinder; if you bend the ends of that cylinder to meet each other, you’ll have a torus, or a donut shape. That’s one possible topology for a flat universe.”

  Lucien snorted. “So, you think the universe could be a flat donut? And you wonder why we call you clerics.”

  Tyra sighed and turned away from him. “Everyone, follow me to the bridge and report for duty.”

  * * *

  The bridge was decagonal with 10 floor-to-ceiling viewports, and it was situated at the top of the ship, such that it provided a 360-degree view of space. Even the domed ceiling had viewports in it—although those were more decorative than functional, arranged as they were in the pattern of a six-sided Star of Etherus.

  “It’s beautiful,” Addy said, staring out at the view.

  Lucien had to admit, wherever they were, it was breathtaking. The 360-degree view from the bridge revealed the magenta nebula they’d seen earlier in even greater detail. Fluorescent pinks, fiery reds, and deep purples all mixed together in a vibrant swirl of color, while countless stars shone brightly through the clouds of stellar gas.

  “Welcome to the Perseus-Pisces Supercluster,” Tyra said. She gestured to the nearest viewport, and a series of overlays appeared. A pair of yellow brackets highlighted one of the stars inside the nebula, and a number beside the brackets denoted the range—5.6 ly.

  Tyra pointed to the star. “That’s where we’re headed.”

  “Why there?” Lucien asked.

  An androgynous robotic voice replied, seeming to come from everywhere at once: “Because it is one of the nearest star systems considered most likely to support alien life.”