Hollow Space Book 1: Venture (Xantoverse) Read online

  HOLLOW SPACE: VENTURE

  A XANTOVERSE NOVEL

  C.F. BARNES

  &

  T.F. GRANT

  ONE

  In the current climate, the hardest thing in the universe was to find a home. Sara Lorelle, chief navigator of the last human colony vessel, the Venture, stared at the screen in front of her and fought the urge to scream.

  Off their port side, space contorted and puckered. The shifting, matte-black nose of a Markesian battleship pierced the darkness.

  Dropping its cloaking shields, it fired three blasts from its disrupter cannons.

  It wasn’t alone.

  A swarm of smaller ships swooped out of the remnants of the cloak and attacked the damaged Venture.

  One moment Sara was plotting their course to the prospective colony planet Bauron B, admiring the stars and galaxy formations through the navigation screen, the next she was gripping the railing, wondering how space had so quickly erupted into the flashing drive signatures of Markesian fighters, frigates, and that damn battleship at the center of the attack.

  Under the Markesian barrage, the hull shook violently, knocking her from her station. Her head crashed against the grav plates on the deck. Lights blotted her vision like raindrops on a window. She shook her head and looked across the bridge, checking on the rest of the crew.

  Bookworm lay unconscious, face down. Margo and Murlowe, the Hentian twins, were on their knees, blood dripping from the eye of the latter. A dozen others made up a tangled mess of confusion, their faces masks of surprise, shock, horror.

  The Venture was the last ship—the last hope of humankind.

  And they had been discovered.

  The Markesian ships swept around, mercilessly firing their disrupters. Salvo after salvo smashed into the damaged colony ship, tearing her apart.

  Each subsequent blast sent a wave of pain through Sara’s aching head, but still she dragged her body up, clinging to her console as the wind of a hull breach tried to drag her into the cold emptiness of space. Behind her, the roar of air mingled with the screams of the ship’s crew and the warning sirens pealing uselessly through the remaining part of the Venture.

  “Severe damage to the ship’s integrity.” The digital voice of Telo, the ship’s AI captain, remained calm and entirely rational. “All crew and passengers to make their way to the bridge.”

  Screams and shouts came over the ship’s internal PA.

  “Please maintain decorum over the public address systems,” Telo said. “All living souls rally at the bridge.”

  “The stasis pods,” Sara yelled above the roar of the hull breach. “Telo, what about the stasis pods?”

  “I’m sorry, Sara.” Telo’s voice was coldly logical, but she could detect the hint of emotion under the digital timbre, the note of grief. “That section of the ship is no longer part of my inventory.”

  “No longer…” DeLaney, human vice-captain of the ship, screamed abuse at Telo’s glowing heart, a crystalline square in the center of the bridge. “They’re humans, you frecking machine. Humans.”

  Sara ignored DeLaney’s ranting voice. She staggered to the window, looked out, and saw the cargo holds, which contained the twenty thousand colonists still locked into their stasis pods, falling away from her, spilling the pods into space like rice seeds.

  “Automatic repair systems back online,” Telo said. “Sealing hull breach.” A vacuum seal of molten titanium healed the rupture, making Sara’s ears pop as it solidified.

  “We’ll hyperjump in fifteen seconds,” Telo said. Again Sara heard the note of emotion, though this time it sounded like fear. AIs couldn’t feel, everybody knew that, yet when she and Telo spoke in the dogwatches of the night cycle, she always detected something behind the digital voice, something… human.

  Was she going crazy?

  She should be identifying places of escape, but out here in the Freksic quadrant, the only destination was the planet Bauron B, their designated colony. The planet was obviously now under the control of the Markesians, who loathed the human race with a passion unrivaled in the annals of all the wars that the Crown had fought, or why would the Markesians be here, ambushing their ship?

  But then this was the last war the Crown would ever fight.

  Sara didn’t care that the mission to Bauron B would fail utterly. It was too late for that now. This was purely about the survival of the human race.

  In less than ten seconds of combat, their under-armed colony ship had suffered terminal damage. The Markesians, having hidden within the orbit of a passing asteroid, got the jump on them and struck with a devastating attack they could never recover from. The Venture was not a fighter; it was the last of a convoy. The same convoy the Markesian swarms had whittled down over the previous month, chasing them from one part of the quadrant to the next.

  This mission was destined to be the last, she thought. They needed it to succeed. But somehow, they knew. The Markesians knew, knew the Venture’s course.

  “Didn’t I say this was folly?” Sara shouted as she got to her knees, tears streaming down her face.

  The rest of the crew said nothing, catatonic with fear and shock. Five passengers, in their Venture-issue casual clothes, stood against the circular railing, their attentions trained on the projected window surrounding the bridge.

  Sara followed their gaze, watching in barely controlled horror as the other half of the Venture fell further away into space, spilling its precious cargo. The stasis pods, the spores of humanity, floated away on individual trajectories to their personal dooms.

  Telo said something over the PA, but the words fell on deaf ears.

  The image on the screen demanded Sara’s attention: the Markesian ships, layered with spinelike shields and colored like the carapace of a scorpion, weaved a death-dance between the debris, their individual laser guns destroying each stasis pod.

  One by one, Sara watched the last of the human race exterminated.

  The main Markesian battleship turned to face the remaining section of the Venture. The two ships glided through space, opposed like gunslingers. Sara closed her eyes, held her breath, and waited for her destruction.

  The main disrupter cannon on the front of the Markesian ship glowed a bright orange. Its reactor lit up like a miniature sun. It grew brighter still: the blinding white light of full power. This is it, thought Sara. It’s all over. My time has come to an—

  The ball of white winked out.

  Space contorted around the Markesian ship, a blanket of darkest velvet pulled taut over a ball, and then the edges started to tear. Sara’s internal organs seemed to want to independently remove themselves from her body.

  They were making a jump!

  Telo’s calm voice echoed coordinates throughout the hull, the AI’s words elongated and distorted by the weird tunneling effects of a faster-than-light jump.

  The screen ahead of Sara showed the now familiar stretching of light. But something was wrong. A regular jump would only take a matter of moments. The stretching of light was fleeting, and then they would stop in a sudden lurch—but not this time.

  The distortion of the light changed and started to spin. Pain squeezed around Sara’s body. She was stretching, twisting; she screamed. The pain tore at her insides. Too long, they were too long in the jump.

  She couldn’t say how long they remained in the FTL jump when they finally got to the other side. The image on the screen ahead of her stopped spinning, stretching. It had become darkness—with no stars. Where were the stars? Ahead of her, there was only a void.

  She leaned over the railing, squeezed her eyes shut, and waited for the dizziness to stop.


  “Unknown location,” DeLaney said, watching the charts on the screen.

  She shook her head, not understanding, and looked round the bridge at the crew. So few were still able to move. The rest lay in tangled piles of comatose forms on the deck plates.

  Bookworm had dragged himself to a stool at one of the control stations. Margo and Murlowe steadied each other by the central quantum core: a glowing blue Phelentech crystal that made up Telo’s central processing unit. A series of fiber-optic rods held the tubular crystal so that it appeared to float within the middle of a waist-height, glass cube.

  She caught Bookworm’s gaze. His eyes, ice blue behind a pair of tiny, square spectacles, picked up the overhead white lights of the bridge, glittering like jewels, but they betrayed his fear: his usual sneering, sarcastic expression gave way to terror.

  Margo and Murlowe wore the same look.

  “What the freck’s going on?” Sara asked, unable to stand the quiet any longer. “DeLaney, what the hell do you mean ‘unknown location’? Where’d Telo jump us to?”

  DeLaney just shook his head while pointing to his screen. “Uncharted… no reference… anywhere.”

  Sara turned to Bookworm at the navigation station. “Bookworm, where are we? Tell me something.”

  He didn’t answer, just stared right ahead at the screen.

  DeLaney leaned forward and squinted. “Magnification to four thousand,” he said, not realizing that the computers, Telo, and all the systems weren’t responding.

  Sara couldn’t blame him for a lack of comprehension after what had just happened. They weren’t cut out for this kind of work. The ship’s AIs should be handling all this. But they appeared to be offline for some reason.

  “Holy freck,” Bookworm whispered as he stepped closer to the screen.

  Margo and Murlowe turned to face the screen, their mouths dropping open.

  Sara squinted, cleared her vision. “Are they what I think they are?” Outside of their ship, a small, cool sun off to the starboard side lit a multitude of objects in the dark of space. Like pinheads in a blanket, they shone. As each second went by and her vision adjusted, she saw more of them.

  Ahead of the Venture and stretching out as far as they eye could see were thousands of ships: dead, decaying, disintegrating ships. And to their port side, kilometers below, the dark shadow of a planet. A dwarf planet at that, and surrounded with an orbiting debris field.

  “There’s no stars,” DeLaney said to Telo’s crystals. “Where are we? Telo!” DeLaney struck out with his foot, kicking the glass cube as though all the AI needed was a physical prompting.

  The light from the crystal died.

  The bridge lights followed.

  “Telo,” Sara wailed. “No!”

  DeLaney sneered at her weakness. She turned her head away before she did something she might regret. A flash of something displayed on the screen—a glimpse of a structure unlike the thousands of hulks slowly decaying ahead of them. It looked like… the screen went blank.

  A space station! But beyond it was nothing, just a complete blanket of darkness.

  No stars, she thought. DeLaney was right. Beyond the graveyard of dead ships, there was utterly nothing. Where the hell were they? The ship’s chart rang in her head: Not in the known universe.

  TWO

  Steam hissed in the shadows of the cavernous loading deck, and Tairon Cauder wondered how he was going to get out of this one.

  Steel-glass portals were strung along the outer wall of the deck, showing the bleak blackness of space without stars. Not that Tai knew what stars looked like firsthand, he had spent his entire twenty-something life within Hollow Space, but he assumed they looked something like ship’s engines flaring in the dark.

  The portals weren’t shuttered, even at this late hour, but it was still the deep end of the night and not many witnesses. Which was just the way a nocturnal creature like Felek liked it. Unfortunately, the vul moneylender had not been stupid enough to come down to the loading deck alone to track down Tai. He had brought two bodyguards with him.

  Linus, a blond, blue-eyed human enforcer so large that the carbine looked like a toy in his hands, drifted out to one side of Felek, keeping the barrel of the rifle pointed at Tai. He had a wry smile on his face and calm eyes. Tai had no doubt that Linus would squeeze the trigger without regret and then get maudlin drunk at Tai’s memorial service.

  A dalgef shifted his bulky bipedal body out from the other side of the vul. His wrinkled skin hung in folds of flesh beneath his black overalls. Tai couldn’t tell if he was just overly fat for a dalgef or carrying extra weapons in the folds. He wielded a sawn-off shotgun in one clawed hand and a nasty-looking short sword in the other.

  Tai could never tell members of that particular species apart, so he had no idea if they had never met before, or if he had upset this creature, or if they were friends on the wrong sides of a deal. Not that it mattered much right now.

  That Felek had only brought two bodyguards to face Tai was almost an insult, until Tai looked into Linus’s calm eyes and noted the dalgef’s solid stance. They meant business and had clearly been given a nice bonus to take out the infamous Tairon Cauder. Being the son of the Red Cauder had some benefits, being a prime target was not one of them.

  “The debt is due,” Felek snarled impressively, on account of the overlong canines and the feral glint in his eyes.

  “I know,” Tai said. He’d thrown the dice, took his chance on a deal, and come up short. Not the first time that had happened, but this had seemed like such a sure payday.

  He thought back to the excitement he’d felt three cycles ago when he secured a top salvage job. It should have set him up to get out of debt with his mother, the most notorious gang boss on Haven.

  All was going just great—until they breached the hatch and saw inside the hulk. A plum, that’s what the Scholars had called it, a plum job.

  They’d offered him an untouched hulk on the long side of the graveyard of dead ships, out beyond the normal salvage runs. Clean and unlooted, hardly any decay on the hull. It should have been easy in, easy out, lots of booty, no competition, and no hassles.

  Right.

  Tai had paid up front for the location from the Scholars. He’d brokered an extension on his loan with Felek to pay the fee. He’d taken the chance, the only play he had left, and come up empty.

  It took Tai’s ship, the Mary-May, twenty hours to reach the hulk. A long way out for such a small cutter. The hulk floated in a tangle of other dead ships. Hard to see, but once you saw her, oh man, what a delightful sight. Clean and lovely, the silver skin of the hull wasn’t even tarnished. Spick and span as a newly minted bullet. It had strange lines, angular and streamlined, like it was meant to enter atmosphere.

  “Not a configuration I’ve seen before,” Kina said when they approached. She studied the hulk through the cockpit window, leaning her slim body forward to get a closer look. “Let’s be professional about this one,” she said. “Could be golden.”

  “You do the professionalism, Ki. I’ll do the reckless; it’s a win-win combination that’s worked since we were kids. Why stop now?”

  “Sure, as long as I don’t have to fix your shit. Now let’s find a way in, shall we?”

  It took Tai half a cycle to find the main airlock on the hulk, burning precious fuel in a spiral search until Kina sang out, “There, that shadow, change our orientation, bring the lights to a different angle.”

  Tai adjusted the Mary-May’s orientation with the directional jets, and the airlock hatch glimmered in the dark, reflecting the angular light from the ship’s lights. The light of the sun was blocked by the shadows of the graveyard as the rays split their way through the field of rotting hulks.

  “Need to use the lance,” he said.

  “Yup,” Kina agreed. “I’ll wake the kronacs.”

  Tai’s crew chief had a kronacian name that no human could hope to pronounce, so he went by the more pronounceable moniker of Tooize.
He had lost one of his three eyes in a barroom brawl. Even with his four strong arms, the big kronac had got caught out by a now ex-assassin’s stiletto blade.

  Tooize guided Tai into the airlock as Lofreal and Scaroze, the other two kronacs on the crew, sorted out the baffles.

  Kina sat in the right-hand seat, watching the instruments as Tai flew the Mary-May blind, relying on the kronac’s instructions delivered in their whistled language that Tai could understand, even though he could not pronounce it, and despite the lack of recognizable human words.

  “Ten meters. Forward two,” Tooize whistled.

  “Jets clear. All green,” Kina said.

  “Stop burn. Five meters. Drifting up. Adjust.”

  “Fuel line three is overheating.”

  “Switch to backup six,” Tai said, interrupting Kina and Tooize.

  Kina spun the valve. “Engaged. All green.”

  Tooize’s feathers bristled on his massive shoulders. “Thrusters only. Slow and gentle. Three meters. Two. One. Stop thrust.” He pointed with two of his four arms at the target location on the ship.

  A soft shudder of impact rumbled through the cutter as they touched the hull of the hulk.

  Tooize grinned, a satisfied expression on his lizard-like face. “Keep her there. Engaging seals.” A hiss echoed through the Mary-May as the seals locked the two ships together. “Seals engaged. We’re locked.”

  Tai shut down the engines and thrusters.

  Time to go to work.

  Kina unpacked the cutting lance as the kronacs clicked the baffles into place around the Mary-May’s hatch. The three arboreal kronacs moved with economy and speed, swarming around the baffles, making sure all the connections were tight and solid.

  Larger scavenger ships had proper two-door airlocks, but the Mary-May was designed to be small, nimble, and fast to the target, able to get into places that the larger ships could not, so she did not have the space for a full airlock. The baffles, concertina boards to absorb any pressure differential, were used instead.

  It did, however, mean that the ship’s atmosphere had to be evacuated before the hatch could be opened. No way of knowing what was on the other side of the hatch, and good air was expensive. So everybody put on their spacesuits. Kronac suits were not the most complicated ones made on Haven, but they came close.