Double Sharpe Read online

  Double Sharpe

  Raven Sharpe Chronicles, Book 2

  James David Victor

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2018 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  Bonus Content: Story Preview

  1

  “Raven, please. You have to help me.”

  “What?!”

  Raven Sharpe stared at the image of her ex-husband in the small console screen in front of her. He looked like someone had worked him over good, with dark circles under his eyes and black bruising around them. His lip was cut and bleeding, and there was a matching cut on one eyebrow.

  She gripped the side of the console, willing herself to breathe deeply and evenly because it would do no good to pass out.

  “Blake, what’s going on?” she demanded in as level a voice as she could manage.

  “I’m in deep shit this time, Rave,” he said, using a nickname for her that he hadn’t dared to utter since they separated. “Just look at me to get an idea how bad it is, and it could have gotten a lot worse.”

  Swallowing hard, she tried to not look at his injuries again or let her mind get lost in imagining what other injuries he might have. “Tell me what happened and where you are, and where is Nyx?” He had his own ship, she knew, so if he wasn’t just getting on board and flying away, something had happened to her.

  His eyes were glistening. “They took her! And Axel too, but at least I know where he is.”

  Raven blinked. “Silvanus, record this,” she said, the idea finally dawning on her that she might need to.

  “I’m already doing so, Raven.”

  Once again, Raven was reminded that she would be lost without her ship’s AI, which brought her sharply back around to Blake. He had to be losing his mind without his two companions. She had been cut off from hers for a short period recently, and it had almost killed her.

  “Tell me where you are, Blake,” she said firmly. She knew he had to be going crazy, so she needed to keep it together. That was something of a challenge, given the past few days she’d already had. Her adrenaline was still living close to the surface and it reared up in her mind again with frightening intensity.

  “I don’t…” he began, then hesitated and took a visible breath. He opened his mouth to start again, but something caught his attention. His head whipped to one side and his eyes widened as much as the bruising would allow. The image shook like they were losing reception. He turned back to her. “I don’t know where I am!” He spoke fast, almost too fast for her to follow. “They grabbed me right out of Banny’s Bar and then kept me out of it until I woke up to them beating me and asking questions. I’ve managed to escape, but—”

  The image blinked away.

  Raven gasped. “Silvanus, get him back!”

  “I’m sorry, Raven, but I am unable to do so. The transmission was cut off at the source and I cannot reinitialize the link.”

  Raven pounded a fist on the side of her console.

  ‘You just fixed that. Do you really want to break it again?’ Kyra asked from where she laid on the floor just behind her human.

  “How can you be so calm?!” she snapped at the big cat.

  ‘Does my being upset really help anyone?’ the cougar said pragmatically.

  Raven took a breath to reply to that, but stopped the words and blew the air out forcefully. She straightened up and ran both hands through her hair, gripping it at the scalp and pulling slightly. It hurt and helped to ground her as she forced another deep breath, in and out, trying to calm her racing thoughts.

  “Who would want to take Blake like that?” she asked out loud, not really expecting any answer from AI or feline companion. “I know that he was paid off at Halliwell and they stopped looking for him, but even if that weren’t the case, they wouldn’t take him, hold him captive, and beat him up. They’re not a back-alley business like that. He’s been worked over and that looks like definite underworld activity.”

  She started pacing, although the main cabin of her ship was not very large and she could only take a few steps before she had to turn and walk the other way. One of those steps had to be oversized to get her over the cat that refused to move.

  “I’ve never known him to be involved in any sort of criminal acts, though,” she said.

  ‘It has been some years since you two were together, or even particularly friendly,’ Kyra pointed out. ‘How much do you really know him now?’

  “Granted,” Raven admitted, “but I was married to him for several years and I don’t think people change their fundamental natures that fast. If he’s into anything shady, he can’t be in too deep, and I still struggle to imagine him knowingly being a part of anything like that.”

  Forcing herself to stop pacing, she sat down on the small couch in the main cabin.

  “Silvanus, can you try to trace the call back to where it came from?” The question had to be asked, even though she knew it was very unlikely to be possible.

  “I have been attempting to do so since the call terminated,” the AI replied. “However, as I’m sure you are already aware, it was a signal bounced through many ‘back alley’ channels, as you would call it. That makes it difficult to trace, if it’s possible at all. He didn’t want anyone knowing he was making the call but you.”

  “That would make sense,” Raven said unhappily.

  ‘You are more emotional than I would have expected,’ Kyra chimed in after a few moments of silence passed.

  “What do you mean?” Raven asked.

  The cat didn’t reply right away, which was not uncommon when she was searching the proper words to describe something she felt. Although the cat had been enhanced with a neurological regimen and computer chip, sometimes it still took some time to put pieces together. ‘He is your ex-husband, and you were quite angry when you two split. You’ve all but hated him during the time between. Now he calls you for help and you seem…almost panicked.’

  Raven sighed, gripping her hair again and leaning her head back against the top of the little sofa. “We can’t just turn off our emotions, Kyra,” she said. “I loved him, very much, when we were married. I thought he and I would be together forever, and I was happy for that. Yes, I was angry. I even hated him, but the opposite of love isn’t hate, you know.”

  ‘Then what is it?’

  “It’s indifference,” the human said softly. “And no matter what I feel about him, I won’t ever be indifferent. He’s hurt, and he’s in trouble, and he’s asked me for help. Of course I’m going to help him. I can’t do anything else.”

  2

  It had taken over fifteen minutes for Silvanus to follow the digital trail of Blake’s dis
tress call, and by the end of it all they had to show for the effort was a very large, generalized area.

  Worse yet, it was also a densely populated area with many inhabited planets and moons, and any one of them could be the place they needed.

  “We have to narrow this down,” Raven muttered as she looked at the map Silvanus had produced on her screen. There had to be well over a dozen possible locations and she just didn’t have the time to check out that many, even if some of them were smaller colonies and not full-planet inhabitation. It was too much. They had to cut that number down.

  “I am pulling up my recording of Blake’s call,” Silvanus said, jumping two steps ahead of her human. “Isolating frames.”

  “Okay,” Raven groaned. “What if he’s on a ship? We’ll never find him then!”

  ‘Relax,’ Kyra said laconically.

  Raven rubbed the back of her neck as she looked at the enhanced image that Silvanus had put on the screen instead of the overwhelming map. Without being asked, the AI zoomed in on a spot in the background of the image.

  “A window,” Raven said out loud, leaning closer to peer at the screen. “With sky behind it and not stars. Not a ship. That’s a relief.” However, she looked closer and saw that the sky in that window wasn’t blue. It was…green. “What produces a green sky?”

  “Typically, high levels of industrial pollution from plants powered by Etanium Four-Two-Two,” Silvanus replied.

  Raven’s brows raised. “Well, that has to narrow some things down, right?”

  There was a pause. “Not as much as you would hope. There is an industrial corridor in our search area and the majority of them are powered by that substance in their, well, semi-primitive industries. It narrows it down to approximately thirteen possible locations.”

  The human groaned. “Alright, well, we can at least narrow it down to those.” She rubbed her eyes. “Am I crazy or did I hear a mechanical noise in the background of his call? I couldn’t make it out very well, but I’m sure that I heard it.

  “You are not crazy, Raven.”

  ‘At least not about that,’ Kyra interjected.

  “Thanks, Kyra.”

  “There was a noise in the background.”

  Raven tried to ignore her cat as she focused on the video as Silvanus isolated a segment of her recording where the noise could be heard, and then isolated that sound from Blake’s talking. She replayed that and Raven listened. She closed her eyes and listened again. It sounded like any generic manufacturing plant.

  “Presently searching my audio files,” the AI reported. “I’m trying to see if I can find a match to anything already known to me.”

  “Good, because I know I can’t. It sounds just like any sort of plant that makes stuff,” Raven said, leaning back in her seat.

  While Silvanus processed her information, Raven again attempted to settle her mental chaos so she could properly focus on the task at hand, but even as she tried to do so, Kyra’s comments jumped into her brain and joined the melee. She was reacting very strongly to all this, and she wanted to say that it was perfectly natural. Raven had meant what she had said to Kyra about love, hate, and indifference. Just because Blake had gone full-tilt idiot didn’t mean the feelings she’d had for him when they fell in love and got married had just vanished.

  She had just stuffed them down deep, jumping up and down on them with both feet until they couldn’t be seen anymore. But when Halliwell Bounty Hunters Service had hired her to find him because he had just vanished before paying off his debt… Well, he hadn’t seemed like quite the idiot he had before.

  What had happened?

  “I have it,” Silvanus announced, interrupting Raven’s journey down memory lane. “The sound is unique to machines that produce tri-processor main chips for the engine of the marauder-class small shuttle.”

  Raven blinked, pausing as she took in the extreme specificity of that answer. “And, um, how many plants in that industrial corridor produce the tri-processor…thing?”

  “Four.”

  “Four!” Raven sat up straight and clapped her hands. “That’s a big improvement over thirteen. Show me the map again and highlight those four locations.” She looked at her console and watched as Blake’s poor, battered face vanished and the map returned, this time with the region dimmed and four bright spots.

  Four was still a lot to go to, however, especially when there was a definite feeling of urgency. Whoever had taken him was undoubtedly looking for him now, and judging by the way his call had ended, they may have already found him.

  “Please highlight Banny’s on this map,” she said, referring to where Blake had been when he was abducted.

  The map zoomed out slightly to show the location of the bar on one of the seedier planets in the area. She looked at that spot and then the other four. Two were much closer than the others, and she decided that those were the best to try. With an abducted man and his wolf, not to mention the AI controlled ship that they had to be towing because leaving it behind would be stupid, she imagined they’d want to go to the closest places.

  “Alright, we’re down to these two,” she declared as she tapped the screen.

  “That would be Kona IV and the Caltos Moon Colony,” Silvanus said. The map zoomed in closer and showed those two. A short list of facts appeared on either side of the screen to tell her that Kona IV was a planet with a native population, and Caltos Moon Colony was—obviously—a colonized moon, the colony having been founded by a human expedition some time back.

  She idly wondered why a human colony based off a group advanced enough for space travel ended up sliding back to that sort of industry, but it didn’t matter just then.

  ‘So, how do we decide which one we go to first?’ Kyra asked.

  “Flip a coin?”

  3

  Caltos was a moon orbiting Ultor Prime that did absolutely nothing but make stuff and support the lives of those people who made the stuff.

  The “stuff” varied greatly. A quick glance at the list Silvanus brought up on the console screen was enough to give Raven the general impression that the answer to the ‘what do they make there’ question was, ‘basically everything.’ She really didn’t need to know any more than that. All she needed to know was that it made that one thing that they had identified.

  They chose to head to Caltos first for the simple reason that it was closer to their present location, since there wasn’t another factor to make one more likely than the other.

  “We are entering orbit of Caltos,” Silvanus announced as they arrived. It had been a long transit to get there from where they were, but Raven knew that it had felt even longer than it really had been.

  “Are we landing or do they have a transit down?” Raven asked, rubbing her eyes. She should have slept while they were traveling, but she hadn’t been able to. Her brain wouldn’t stay quiet long enough.

  “We will be landing,” the AI replied. “I’m communicating with Caltos Air Control now.”

  Raven thought she detected a hint of “don’t be so impatient, because I’ve got it under control” in Silvanus’s voice. The human knew better than to doubt her AI, but she couldn’t seem to stop second-guessing and double-checking everything.

  ‘Calm down,’ Kyra said. The big cat stretched out in her usual corner, looking like she was asleep although she obviously wasn’t. ‘Your mental static is giving me a headache.’

  “Sorry,” Raven murmured. “But you’ve noticed that humans don’t flip switches on their emotions very well to just turn them on and off. You’re stuck with them because you’re stuck with me.”

  ‘That can change, you know.’ The cougar still didn’t open her eyes.

  As she waited for Silvanus to do her thing, Raven leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. Part of her still wanted to sleep, but the rest of her disagreed with it.

  “We have clearance to land.”

  Silvanus’s voice startled her out of her half-dazed state and she jolted upright. Her head fel
t like it swam for a few moments from the sudden blood shift and she grabbed the side of it, squinting one eye.

  “Your vital signs are not ideal, Raven,” the AI went on.

  “I’m fine, Silvanus. I’m just tired and anxious,” she said. “Let’s just get this ship on the ground so I can start looking around. The sooner I find him, the better I’ll feel.” She pushed herself to her feet and walked to the food processor, pressing buttons until a glass of water appeared that she drank in one go.

  “I am beginning the landing sequence,” Silvanus announced. “It would be better for you to be seated for this, Raven. We have those restraints on the end seat for a reason.”

  “Yes, Mother,” the human muttered as she moved to the end seat of the sofa and pressed a button on the side. Small panels opened so she could pull out the straps and buckles. She fastened herself to the sofa for the bumpy descent through the atmosphere. Her ship’s stabilizers tended to keep her from feeling the worst of it so the restraints were just a precaution, but she took it.

  The ship began shuddering as it started down toward the moon’s surface. In theory, Raven would be able to direct the craft herself, but Silvanus had it all in her not-actually-existent hands. She guided the vessel better than any corporeal hands could, directing the ship like she would if it was her body, since it basically was. Raven just leaned her head back against the top of the couch and waited.

  The shaking began to ease up and then stopped. A few moments later, she felt the ship shift and bump against the ground.