Sanctuary's Soldier: The Darkspace Saga Book 1 Read online

  Sanctuary’s Soldier

  The Darkspace Saga Book One

  B.C. Kellogg

  Blueshift Press

  Contents

  Love space opera?

  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

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Thank you!

  PREVIEW - LORDS OF THE DARK

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2017 by B.C. Kellogg/Blueshift Press.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Love space opera?

  Join B.C.’s mailing list and receive a free copy of The Admiral’s Cage, a novella set in the Darkspace Saga universe!

  http://bckellogg.com/mailing-list/

  Admiral Attilio Karsath is the Empire’s most dedicated servant. When he comes across a weapon that could change the course of the Empire, he’s forced to violate the sacred Dictates that govern a soldier’s life. As he prepares a covert mission under the cover of a standard annexation, he must dare to destroy the principles of the Empire in order to serve it.

  Chapter 1

  "If you don't come back now, you may never come back."

  Rose's voice rang sharp and clear in his ear, despite the fact that they were speaking on an illegal comm line. They'd used the line in secret ever since he'd started at the Academy. Conrad figured it was fitting that they use it now, on the off chance that he died while doing what Rose called the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.

  Conrad tilted the starfighter up, relative to his current flight plane. The sun was a distant white-gold speck out in the Kuiper belt, but he instinctively knew where it was, even in the vast expanse of the outer solar system.

  "Ah, Rose, you know I always come back," he said. "Commodore Garrity won't mind. She likes me."

  "Considering that you stole one of her fighters on a goddamn training flight, Conrad, I think she'll be wearing your guts for garters if you ever do make it back to base."

  Conrad grinned. "Did I ever mention how much I love that accent of yours, Rosie? Say it again. Guts for garters."

  "I'm not going to indulge you, you second-rate pervert." Her English accent became even sharper.

  "Hey now—everyone at the Academy knows I'm a first-rate pervert," he said, mock-offended.

  Conrad rattled the overhead panel and frowned as the life support indicator blinked and died. Everything on training ships tended to be old and broken, and this ship was no different; Conrad remembered Argus patching up an engine with a plasma torch and a bucket of duct tape during their first year at the Academy back on Sanctuary.

  "Anyway, if she asks," he continued, "I'm just doing what we were taught. Never leave a fallen comrade. No man left behind."

  "Argus isn't technically a man," she said.

  "He may be Kazhad, but he was found and raised by the Corps same as you or me. He may not be human, but he is a man."

  "The Corps would never abandon—" she began, but her voice was cut off by an incoming transmission. Conrad frowned. He thought he'd jammed it good—the last thing he wanted to hear was a string of threats from the official comm line.

  "Cadet," came Commodore Garrity's stony voice. "Return to base at once."

  "With all due respect, ma'am, you know I can't," said Conrad, tapping a series of override codes into the comm interface. Should've paid more attention in cryptography, he thought to himself.

  "We will retrieve Cadet Nimitz. Listen to me, Redeker," she snapped. "You do not have the security clearance to be in this area—"

  "Security clearance?" Conrad's eyebrows rose. "What was Argus doing out here that he'd need any kind of security clearance?"

  "Cadet!" A few years ago, that tone would have put the fear of God in Conrad. It still did, but he was in too deep this time. There was too much at stake.

  "Ma'am," he said slowly. "Are you telling me there’s a portal out here?"

  There was only static on the com line for a long moment.

  "Yes," came the reply. "And if you value your life, cadet, you'll stay the hell away from it."

  Argus Nimitz had disappeared two weeks ago into the darkness of space while on a standard run off the Academy's satellite base on Europa. The official word was that search and rescue was being conducted, but Conrad knew it wasn't enough after a week of silence.

  He had tried hacking into the incident file, but the encryption was seven layers thick and overlaid with the most vicious booby traps he'd ever seen. Even Rose couldn't drill down into it more than a single level.

  Conrad switched on the comm control again, now that the official comm line was safely jammed. "Rose?" he said.

  "Are you getting court-martialed?" she asked.

  "Yup."

  "No less than you deserve," she said.

  "Probably."

  "Don't be an idiot, Con," she said. "Do you even have enough fuel? Where the hell are you going?"

  "Rose," he said. "Look something up for me, will you? The location of the closest portal."

  There was a pause. "There are no operative portals that far out."

  "That's not what Garrity said."

  "Conrad," she said urgently. "If there's a portal out there, and Argus went through it—you can't follow him through."

  "Why not?" Conrad slammed the base of his palm into the blinking panel above him and cursed under his breath.

  "You don't know what's on the other side," she said. “When portals are closed or de-mapped, Conrad, there’s a reason why.”

  Conrad adjusted his scanners. He knew what a portal looked like—every human being and alien living in the solar system did. They were hundreds of kilometers wide, and rippled as if filled with black water. For all that life depended on the portals, they remained a mystery.

  All that was known about them was that the portals were discovered at the end of the 24th century, as mankind dared to explore space in the aftermath of the last global war. When the first aliens arrived in the solar system, they had come via the portals. It was just a single P'orcian ship at first, a freighter filled with junk that emerged near Phobos. The slow-moving, quill-covered P'orcians had come to hawk rusted-over scraps, and had instead revealed one of the greatest secrets of the universe: Sentient life was an absolute requirement for the portals to function.

  When humanity found the portals on the edge of the solar system, everything changed. These stretched even further, to uncharted star systems within the galactic quadrant, some with alien races never before seen by humanity.

  "Guess it's high time we find out what’s on the other
side," he said, setting his scanners to look for the telltale plasma trail of a Kestrel-class starcraft.

  "There," he said, as his display screen lit up. Half a hundred thousand kilometers away was the first clue to Argus's disappearance. "I've got it."

  "Con," came Rose's voice. "He wouldn't want you to get kicked out of the Corps. You're being impulsive. What you’re doing is irresponsible. Argus wouldn't want you to do this."

  "I know," he acknowledged. "He was always a goody-two-shoes. But he doesn't know what's good for him. Never did, ever since he was a pup on four legs back in the Corps creche."

  "He's smarter than you are."

  "By a long shot," he agreed. "But he’s two years younger than me. I promised him I’d watch out for him when he entered the Academy. Which is why I've got to get him back. Everything will fall apart without him."

  "You're not his big brother, Con."

  Conrad didn't respond. The plasma trail was growing hotter and denser by the second. It had to be Argus.

  "I'll be back, Rose," he said. "I promise."

  The fighter was rattling, shaking so hard that Conrad swore he could hear the metal groaning. Still, he pushed the two-man fighter even harder.

  No point in holding back now, he figured. He'd either find the portal or the fighter would shred itself apart trying. He fired the ship's short-range thrusters in short bursts as he pushed the sublight engine to its limits. It was an old, dangerous trick for getting top speed out of a fighter.

  Of course, the maneuver ran the risk of causing the entire ship to crack apart at the seams.

  "First thing," he muttered to himself. "First thing when we get back—we'll duct tape that damn engine together again."

  He looked up and tensed. There it was—the dark circle of the portal, hidden behind an icy planetesimal.

  As drove his ship toward it, his sensors alerted him to the presence of a slim, smooth antenna clinging to the planetesimal. It was a beacon. On the other side of the portal there would be a matching beacon. Messages couldn't go through a portal but they could be relayed by a beacon to ships passing through it. As the ships exited the portal, the beacon on the other side received the messages from the ship.

  He transmitted an activation signal to the beacon. It blinked on, a small white light in the darkness. "Tell 'em where I've gone," he murmured as he passed it.

  Conrad took a deep breath as he aimed the nose of his ship at the heart of the portal. He'd never gone through one of the portals alone before. Cadets en route to outer solar system bases always traveled in troop transport ships, and sitting in the windowless belly of those transports, he'd never seen or felt a thing when they passed through the Phobos portal.

  "Here goes nothing," he said, as the ship rattled around him.

  The shaking stopped. For a moment Conrad felt as if his body was weightless—as if he were suspended in a pool of warm, suffocating water.

  He opened his eyes. He hadn't even realized he'd squeezed them shut.

  His ship was flying at full speed out of the portal, as if it had never slowed down for a single nanosecond.

  He grabbed at the controls, decelerating as smoothly as he could. The ship's nav computer beeped once and then went blank.

  Conrad swore loudly in Kazhadi. Fighter ships—never mind training fighter ships—had minimal nav function anyway, since they weren't meant for long range missions.

  The stars seemed to spin for a moment. Conrad shook his head and looked behind him, then swung the ship around back toward the beacon. It blinked on as he downloaded its last payload. It was only a few lines of metadata, but it was enough.

  Alpha Aurigae.

  There were no planets or asteroid belts in this system—only burning stars. Nothing to strip or mine. No planets meant no species could make it a home, which meant it was a dead system.

  "Where the hell have you gone, Argus?" He ran a scan of the surrounding area. The plasma trail lit up on his display more sharply than it had in the Kuiper belt.

  Conrad eased his ship toward the trail. He glanced at his fuel gauge. He had enough to go a few hundred kilometers. Argus's ship didn't have that much more range than a fighter. "Enough to get there and back," he said aloud, wondering if he was trying to convince himself.

  The plasma trail was a smooth arc in the darkness. Alpha Aurigae shone brightly in the distance. It was more than twice the size of Sol.

  Conrad gazed into the burning disc of the star and squinted.

  There was something black silhouetted against the brightness of the star. His hands tightened on the yoke.

  It was a ship. A massive, hulking ship.

  He'd seen that ship before in his xeno-anthro courses. Never with his own eyes, and never had he expected to see it in his lifetime.

  It was a Nu ship. It was built with alternating ribs of silver and black, as if warning predators away. The creatures that crewed the gleaming, beautiful ship were the stuff of legend.

  He opened his comm line, activating his universal translator. "Good day, ladies," he said easily. "I'm just a man looking for his friend. Wonder if you could lend me a hand."

  The ship turned in his direction. It was terrifyingly agile for a vessel of its size. Conrad tugged at his sweat-stained collar. "You'd better be aboard and still in one piece, Argus," he muttered. He flew toward it as steadily as he could.

  Garrity always taught her cadets that the way a pilot flew told his opponent everything. Conrad picked up speed.

  If what they say about the Nu is true, there are worse ways to go, anyway.

  The ship had a slit of a mouth for its central hangar bay. The Nu ship had no shields; or if it did, they were disabled. There wasn’t a single electromagnetic flicker as he passed through. Either the Nu’s technology was so advanced that their shielding was light years beyond anything the Corps possessed, or they were so confident that they didn’t even bother with shields.

  Conrad swallowed dryly as the fighter entered the bay. He wondered how often ships with men aboard flew toward the Nu willingly. The stories said that the Nu used tractor beams—powerful ones, so strong that even a ship's crew was frozen like insects in amber. The rumors spread by trans-system traders and pirates whispered that the Nu were predators—a very particular kind of predator.

  The hangar bay was empty of all docking equipment. There were no shuttles, no small fighters, not even a single grease stain. Conrad hovered for a moment above the sleek gray floor before initiating his landing sequence. There was artificial gravity on this ship, rated precisely for humanoid life forms.

  Conrad set the ship down in the center of the bay. He disentangled himself from his cockpit and climbed out of the ship, lowering himself slowly down the side before leaping down.

  Eight figures were waiting in the shadows, in the far corner of the bay. They were tall and slender, and as he approached them his heart began to pound.

  "It's all true," he muttered to himself. “I’ll be damned.”

  The Nu were beautiful—and they were exactly identical. Each Nu looked like a human woman, with a head of long, brown hair, rosy lips, and soft black irises.

  "Greetings," said one of them. She looked him over with those soft ebony eyes and her mask of a face suddenly broke into a warm, inviting smile. "You are welcome here, sojourner."

  Conrad smoothed down the front of his jumpsuit. "I'm looking for a friend," he said. "About two standard meters tall. He’s Kazhad, and his name’s Argus Nimitz. Lots of fur. All over his body—white and tan fur. Same uniform as me. He's my copilot, and I'm responsible for him. Always have been. I came out here on my own and I’m hoping you might have seen him or his ship."

  Conrad realized he was babbling and dimly wondered why.

  The lead Nu's smile widened even more. "We are pleased to have you," she sang. Her voice was musical and hypnotic, low and soft. "We wish for you to stay with us."

  Conrad paused. She was speaking Earth standard. It was formal, but real standard; his translator wasn't worki
ng at all. They must have come across humans before; they looked like humans themselves. He could barely look away from the lead Nu, but a sudden realization shook him out of his paralysis.

  It’s true. Pheromones. It had to be pheromones, like all the stories said. They were sirens, ensnaring the males they came across. What happened to the men they captured was unknown. Some said they were eaten alive, like the Vehn devoured humans; other said the Nu held them in thrall for the rest of their lives.

  He stood up straighter. There was no denying their beauty, but he decided to think of the least attractive thing in the universe. Argus. Big, hulking, droopy Argus, who smelled like a cross between a Labrador retriever and a wet, dirty sock.

  "I'm here searching for my friend," he said again, less foggy now. "Do you have him?"

  His determination seemed to perturb them. "You are a human male," she said. “Of planet Sanctuary. Once called Earth.”

  "I am," he said. "Are you a human female?"

  The smile returned to her face. "Mostly. Would you like to find out how female I am?"

  Conrad decided not to push his luck. He called on his Academy training, thinking of Commodore Garrity.

  "No, ma'am," he said, trying to picture the Nu as his superior. No matter how gorgeous the woman, there was no way in hell a cadet would ever be so stupid as to proposition an officer.

  She cocked her head. "You are fixated on this alien friend of yours?"

  "Is he aboard?" asked Conrad, bluntly. "Have you got him?"

  The Nu paused, turning her head to the other women. None of them spoke—at least not aloud.

  "He is not on this ship," she said. "But he is with us. He does not serve our needs."

  Conrad studied them and made a snap decision. "Do I serve your needs?"

  The lead Nu smiled. "Are you offering yourself to us, human?"

  "A trade," he said. "If you find me to your liking." A first-rate pervert indeed, he thought to himself.