Song of Darkness (Backyard Starship Book 12) Read online

  Copyrighted Material

  Song of Darkness Copyright © 2023 by Variant Publications

  Book design and layout copyright © 2022 by JN Chaney

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.

  1st Edition

  CONTENTS

  Don’t Miss Out

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Join the Conversation

  Connect with J.N. Chaney

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  About the Authors

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  1

  Calamity.

  That’s what they were calling the virus chewing its insidious way through the digital architecture of known space. After being deliberately released by Helem Gauss on Adoration, home planet of the so-called Enhancement Empire, it had been unknowingly carried by infected ships to other systems before they could be stopped and quarantined. Now, Calamity had erupted in three different systems, cancerous growths turning whole networks and everything attached to them dark.

  There weren’t any effective countermeasures, at least not yet. Calamity was an alien AI, one capable of analyzing, adapting to, and eventually overcoming any firewalls or other impediments put in its way. The best digital defenses available had slowed its spread, but nothing seemed able to stop it.

  Except for the thing now sitting on a console beside Funboy’s workstation in the Fafnir’s cockpit.

  “Almost 9 grand off the internet,” I said, opening the cover. “The best gaming laptop on the market.”

  Funboy peered closely at it. “Hello? What’s your name?”

  I winced. “Funboy, talking to it like you’re a tourist trying to converse with a local isn’t going to work because… well, first, that never works—and second, even if it did, it wouldn’t work here. It’s not voice activated.”

  “Wait, a computer that just sits there silently doing what it’s told? How do we replace Perry with one of those?”

  We all turned to the speaker—which had been Perry. He looked back at us. “Hey, just filling in for Icky while she’s, you know, not feeling it.”

  Torina and I both smiled, but they were sad smiles. Icky had taken the death of Zenophir, the Fafnir’s weapon engineer and general mother figure, pretty hard. We’d taken her back to her father aboard his freelance battleship, the Nemesis, to spend some downtime with him.

  Torina turned back to the laptop, crossing her arms and casting a suspicious eye over it. “So, you have to press those keys and move that—what’s it called? Vermin?”

  “Close. It’s a mouse,” I said.

  “Mouse. Right. You have to wiggle it around to interact with it.” She shook her head. “Seems pretty primitive.”

  “That’s exactly the point. It is primitive,” I replied. “Too primitive, in fact, to run Calamity at all. Perry and I have configured it to run a modified form of high-end security software—but stripped down so only voice and image data from the comm system pass through it. It’ll block anything else.”

  “A countermeasure that Calamity could easily defeat in some ridiculously small fraction of a second, except the virus can’t run on this machine at all. It would fill up the available computing resources with inert code, and that would be it,” Perry said.

  “So it can’t adapt itself to overcome your firewall,” Torina said.

  I nodded. “That’s the theory. It’s like being chased by a giant, unstoppable killer robot down a wide, straight corridor. Eventually, it catches up and grinds right over you. But put a sudden narrow section in the corridor, one big enough to let you through but way too small for the robot, and all it can do is sit there and glare at you through the gap.”

  “Anyway, we’ve got this cabled in between the Fafnir’s comm receiver and the console. It should mean we can safely receive voice and video,” Perry went on.

  “But not data. That’s still a no-no, as long as Calamity’s out there and we have no way of blocking it,” I said.

  Funboy moved the mouse experimentally, then blinked up at me. “Not being able to receive data is still pretty limiting. It means, for instance, that Netty won’t be able to receive nav or traffic control information.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s a bandage over a gaping wound. But better that than just leaving the wound open to bleed, right?”

  “Not necessarily. Sometimes it is desirable to allow wounds to bleed for a time—to remove local toxins or foreign debris, for instance—”

  “You Surtsi aren’t big on metaphors, are you?”

  A slow blink. “We have an entire field of art that is devoted entirely to metaphors, in fact.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I think it’s a refuse heap of misunderstanding.”

  I had to grin. “Irony, thy name is Funboy.”

  The laptop, top of the line consumer computing on Earth, was barely a slide rule compared to the systems that formed a substrate for the likes of Perry, Netty, and Netty-P, but it at least allowed us to talk safely to others via comm. Funboy was right. There was a lot of crucial functionality we still couldn’t risk, but it was better than nothing.

  We departed Anvil Dark to try it out, calling up Bester on a comm system that had been kept isolated and free of Calamity. His image came through clear enough, though with an annoying bit of lag.

  “Van, can you—”

  “Bester, how does—”

  We both paused.

  “Van, I’ll—”

  “Bester, try—”

  We both paused again, then I raised a finger. “Bester, if you want to say something, raise your hand.”

  “And don’t chew gum unless you bring enough for everybody,” Perry added.

  Bester stared. “What?”

  “That’s just Perry putting the ass in smartass. Anyway, I gather you can hear us, and we can hear you.”

  Bester raised a beefy hand. I waited.

  He just sat there, silently. I wondered if the image had frozen.

  “Bester?”

  “What?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “You said raise my hand if I wanted to talk.”

  I made myself not sigh. “Yes, but—” I shook my head. “Bester, go ahead, speak to your heart’s content.”

  “Right. I have a message for Perry.”

  “For Perry. From who?”

  “Hey, this might be a personal call, you know,” Perry said.

  I shrugged at him. “Sorry, bird, but for the time being we’re effectively screening all of our calls.”

  “What kind of personal call would you get, anyway?” Torina asked.

  “I have a life, you know,” Perry replied and turned to the screen. “Who’s calling?”

  “He says his name is Gorix. At least, I think that’s what he said. The message went through a few analog relay steps, so it’s pretty messy.”

  “Gorix. You sure?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Huh. Interesting.”

  “Interesting how?” I asked.

  Perry looked at me. “Oh. Right. Gorix was the Conoku engineer who worked on my intelligence matrix back at the time of my inception.”

  “So he’s like your father,” Torina said.

  “Sorta, I guess. That’s not the interesting part, though. The interesting part is that he’s probably dead.”

  The message to Perry was cryptic, partly because it was written that way, but also because of the poor quality of the comms. It was voice-only and essentially asked Perry to meet Gorix in a remote system, yet another red dwarf star just outside the boundaries of known space.

  “Yeah, that’s not suspicious,” Torina said.

  I turned to Perry. “Was that Gorix?”

  “Yes? I mean, it sounded like him, but I’m only able to do voice-pattern matching from the very few brief encounters I had with him after my inception and that garbled, static-laden mess we just listened to.”

  “Perr
y shared his voice samples of Gorix with me to do a cross-check, and I’d place the confidence level that that was actually him talking at no more than sixty-five percent,” Netty-P put in.

  I tapped the armrest of the pilot’s seat. “Great. So that means a one third chance that it’s not him.”

  “I suspect a trap,” Funboy put in.

  I looked at him. “Uh… yeah, that’s kind of where I was going with that.” I turned back to Perry. “So if we assume that Gorix is still alive—”

  “Which is possible. He’d be pretty old, but Conoku do have a long lifespan,” Perry said.

  “Duly noted. So if he is alive, do you have any idea why he’d want to see you?”

  “Well, my sparkling personality and devilish good looks aside, no idea.”

  “Who would want to trap us, Van? I think people across known space have more pressing issues than a vendetta against a Peacemaker,” Torina reasoned.

  I sighed and crossed my arms. “Two things to never underestimate—the power of boners, and the desire for revenge. Both will make people do stupid things.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, each chewing on this development. On the face of it, it made no sense to go chasing after someone with whom our connection was tenuous, at best. Even Perry didn’t consider him anything more than the guy who’d helped build him many decades ago. Our priority should be finding whatever Gauss had inevitably established as his safe space, where Calamity couldn’t touch him, and extract any countermeasures he mightt have developed to protect it. He wasn’t suicidal. He’d made a determined effort to escape after releasing the virus, after all, and had only been stopped by Zeno sacrificing herself, bringing a miniature nuclear bomb down on both of them.

  But something about this plucked at me. It was just too… odd. Also, too convenient, sure. But if someone was going to set a trap for us, why make the bait an obscure engineer even Perry barely knew? Why not someone more likely to bring us running? It had been a call for Perry to come and help, yes, but it didn’t even have the urgency of an actual distress call. It was more of a, hey, I could really use a hand here kind of message.

  “I think we should go check it out,” I finally said, breaking the silence. “There’s just something about it—”

  “Right?” Perry bobbed his head. “If it’s a trap, it’s a weird setup.”

  “Perhaps the weirdness is the bait,” Funboy said.

  “Yeah, maybe. But there’s only one way to find out,” I replied.

  “And what about our search for Gauss’s safe house?”

  “Most of the Guild and the GKU are already on it. Us taking a couple of days to check this out ultimately isn’t going to make that much of a difference.”

  I sat up. “Netty, let’s set up a rendezvous with the Nemesis. I want to bring Icky along, if she’s willing. And then, I’ve got a couple of other calls I want to make.”

  We retrieved Icky without incident. She was still down, lacking her usual snappy edge, but the time off had done her some good. She’d obviously undergone some introspection during her break.

  “I’ve spent most of my life alone, except for my dad, of course. So I never really got close to anyone. With Zeno, I did. And then I lost her.” She gave a soul-weary sigh. “That was something else I never had a chance to get used to—losing people close to me.”

  I put my hand on her arm. “Trust me, big girl. It’s not something you ever get used to. Or, you shouldn’t, anyway. If you ever get used to it,” I said, making air quotes, “then it might be time to think about your life priorities.”

  “You still miss your grandfather? And your father?”

  “Every single day. Oh, it’s not as constantly there as it once was, but it’s still there.”

  “So it never goes away, the missing someone part?”

  “Icky, let me ask you this—do you really want it to go away? For you to just stop missing Zeno?”

  “Yes,” she said, then frowned. “But also, no. So, yeah, I see your point.” Her frown persisted, though.

  “What?”

  She gave a desolate shrug. “I still don’t get why Gauss was allowed to leave after his trial in the first place. They knew he had that damned virus in him. If they’d just, I don’t know, kept him in a cell, we could have avoided all of this. Why’d they let him go, Van?”

  I shrugged, then put a hand on her massive shoulder. She leaned into me, and I realized, not for the first time, that she was still young.

  I’m not exactly a gray eminence, but Icky was… innocent. Still. Despite her hammer falling without remorse, she was innocent. She was, in a sense, the purest of us all.

  And I’d asked the same question, of myself and of Gerhardt. Why did we let that bastard go? Gerhardt had been evasive, but in a tone that hinted that he hadn’t agreed with it either, and hadn’t been given a choice. Could someone have wanted to infect the Enhancement Empire with Calamity, and just hadn’t appreciated the potential risk? Did they think Calamity was controllable? A vainglorious idea that would now cost untold lives if we ultimately failed?

  Or had somebody just wanted to let the virus loose? If so, why? I didn’t get the sense at all that Gerhardt or any of the other Masters had anything to do with it, and Valint and my mother had been just as outraged by what had been allowed to happen. But if that was the case, who exactly was calling the shots when it came to the Guild and the GKU if it wasn’t them and the Masters? Was there another layer that I wasn’t aware of?

  I resolved to confront Gerhardt about it the next time I met him face-to-face. I needed to know that the Guild and the GKU really did have my back—or if they didn’t.

  With Icky aboard and the Fafnir fully fueled thanks to a stop at Spindrift, we prepared to twist to the location Gorix had given in his message. This fueling event had been a particular exercise in annoyance. Calamity hadn’t reached the station, not yet, and the Spindrift authorities intended to keep it that way. The quarantine measures on arriving ships were onerous in the extreme, and even pulling rank as a Peacemaker hadn’t budged them. We had to establish a data link with an isolated satellite, then wait for them to determine whether or not it had been infected. If it wasn’t, we were allowed to proceed, but all comms thereafter had to be analog, and we had to do all of our flying manually—which made me deeply thankful for Netty, who could fly the Fafnir through the eye of a needle.

  “What if it does get infected?” I asked Spindrift traffic control. “For that matter, has anyone infected it yet?”

  “Yeah, five times so far. We just tell those ships to get the hell out of our system. A few laser shots across their bows generally convinces them we’re serious. In any case, we wipe the satellite’s systems completely and reinstall all the software after each ship we test, whether we find the damned thing or not.”

  To say it was an abundance of caution was putting it mildly. But I got it. Spindrift was an orbital, a construct that was entirely dependent on computers to maintain it as a livable environment. If Calamity managed to infiltrate it, there’d be little choice but to completely abandon the place. And that would mean thousands of people would go—where, exactly?

  For that matter, I wondered what happened to the ships that were infected. Presumably, Calamity would eventually render them derelict. Were there such ships out there right now, hanging in the void without power or life support because no one was willing to take them in? I’d heard stories from Earth’s past about plague ships, vessels infected with some virulent disease, turned away from every port and eventually rendered down to drifting hulks crewed only by corpses.

  The thought of it made me shiver.

  We finally twisted away from Spindrift and made an intermediate stop at Wolf 424 for a nav fix, then carried on to the lonely red dwarf that was our destination. As soon as we’d twisted into its system, we fired up the active scanners.