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  Night Raiders

  Memories of Earth, Book 3

  James David Victor

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 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

  Prologue

  1. 35’6’01011

  2. Deregulated Space

  3. Ozymandias Station

  4. The Voider Vaults

  5. Outer Debris Field I

  6. Outer Debris Field II

  7. The Meat Grinder

  8. Ozymandias Vector

  9. Bonetown

  10. Service Tunnel

  11. Death Palace

  12. Gantry

  13. Doorway

  14. Ozymandias Field Control Hub

  15. Before the Bell

  16. Sanctum

  17. Deathmatch Revisited

  18. The Chamber

  19. Blooded Floor

  20. Console

  21. In Front of the Hungry Crowds

  22. Transmitter Room

  23. Holding On

  24. Stairs

  25. Ansible Link

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  Prologue

  Benevolent

  “I am…disappointed,” the holo of Commander-General Cread said, his usually handsome face drawn into a snarl.

  Not as disappointed as I am. The genetically-created assassin surprised herself with the thought. The edge of her mouth pulled down slightly at her own misdemeanor. Where had that come from?

  The woman known as the Black Rose stood a little under six foot, with skin like alabaster and waves of red hair that she had shaken out from her braid. She wore her usual black mesh, tight-fitting combat suit with its many pockets, filled with the tools of her trade. Around her was the shattered mess of Holding Facility 12, the large containment tubes broken or cracked, their precious cargo gone.

  Behind Black Rose worked the Throne Marines—none of them wearing Throne Marine colors of course, but all of them in general fatigues and part-armor that was nonetheless several thousand credits better quality than the ones the Benevolent mercenaries wore.

  The holo of her superior officer, Commander-General Cread himself, was regarding her intently. His attention made her feel unsteady, but she always felt discombobulated after a fight. It’s the adrenaline, she told herself, before wondering why she had to remind herself of that fact at all.

  “Is there any reason why you were unable to complete your mission?” Cread appeared to turn, walking away to pick up something from an invisible desk and returning with a tumbler of liquid.

  He’s enjoying this, Black Rose thought. She knew that he always enjoyed interrogations—or ‘meetings,’ as he liked to call them—but it had never bothered her before. Maybe because she had never been at the receiving end of one.

  Black Rose considered what had happened, and how Lieutenant Corsigon, the Ilythian, and the PK youth had gotten away.

  “There were greater numbers,” she started by saying, which was true. The targets had been surrounded by members of the New Dawn, a dissident terrorist group who had already committed dozens of acts of piracy and sabotage against Golden Throne resources and facilities.

  “That has never been an issue before. Can you explain why it was this time?” Cread asked slowly.

  “You’re right,” Black Rose granted him. She had been dropped from drone-copters into the centers of pirate camps and had fought her way out before. She had snuck into gangster casinos, right into the heart of their operation, and been the only one to walk out, smoke still rising from her laser pistol and blood on her combat boots.

  “That wasn’t the issue,” Black Rose said, “Commander-General, sir,” she added, before taking a breath.

  It was that voice, wasn’t it? Her eyes strayed to the burnt-out control console at one end of the room, just like the ansible link on distant Barakar where it had first come through. Both times she had heard it, the force of the voice’s PK abilities had knocked her to the floor and had blown out the transmitter it had been using.

  A girl’s voice. A young girl. Black Rose’s highly-trained mind scrabbled at the facts, but the experience was like a mirrored surface—she could gain no purchase with which to strategize and extrapolate from.

  A young girl who had sounded lost and scared, and yet somehow resonated PK power through data-space…

  “Then what was the issue?” the commander sighed, setting the tumbler down in front of her, for it to disappear from the image. The assassin saw him cross his arms over his chest, and she knew he was close to losing his temper.

  “Once again, there was an intercession from the unknown actor I described in my previous report, sir,” Black Rose said. “The voice.”

  She saw the holo of the man who was perhaps the closest person to her—apart from the Architrex of the Gene Seers, the leader of the laboratory that had created her—flinch.

  “What did it say,” he hissed. Black Rose saw him making gestures in the air, obviously activating or deactivating various holo-controls around his personal ready room as the result of this new information.

  “It gave the dissidents a set of coordinates for one who would give them aid in Sector 8,” the Black Rose said.

  “Sector 8?” Commander-General Cread’s eyes narrowed. Everyone knew that Sector 8 was more or less a euphemism for everything beyond this side of the Milky Way Galaxy. The place where the stars were so few that they could be counted, and where the night seemed to stretch on forever.

  Beyond the edge of the Milky Way itself—the Void.

  “What were the coordinates?” the commander-general asked tersely.

  “35’6’01011,” Black Rose recalled easily. Another advantage of being the product of a laboratory was having an enhanced, perfect, working memory.

  “Go,” Cread snapped. “Don’t bother to apprehend them. Full neutralization, at any cost!” he said, making a cutting motion in the air as his holo winked out, leaving the Black Rose looking at the small, portable transmitter unit she had set on the floor.

  At any cost? She looked at the inert, black, spider-like transmitter for a moment longer. “Do you mean my life too, sir?” she whispered, before blinking several times.

  Of course it meant that. She had always understood just what the nature of her assignments were. She had always known that she was an expendable cog in a larger machine…

  Then why am I feeling this… The woman struggled for a word to describe what this new emotion was. Failure? Sadness?

  She crouched to pack up the transmitter, and one of the Throne Marines approached her, dragging behind him a drowsy, semi-conscious woman with dyed blonde hair and ridiculously-red lipstick. Even despite the heavy welts and bruises around her temples, and the blood trickling from a cut just under the hairline, and the jagged tear that ran down her arm, the woman still struggled.

  “We apprehended this one at the air-fields,” the Marine coughed. “Looks like she was either just about to flee or stayed behind…”

  “You’ll never get them…” the captive mumbled as her Marine guard forced her to her knees in front of the Black Rose.

  “You are the leader of the New Dawn?” Black Rose stated. She tapped one of the nodes on her neck and a small holo of information appeared in the air about the suspect.

  “Melania Adams, or Murial Y’Coals, or Miranda Petrova, presumed Sergeant Adams of the Proxima Republic, suspected of being one of a subversive infiltration unit,” she read out.

  “This
is Benevolent,” the woman managed to open the one eye that wasn’t swollen and gummed with dried blood. “This planet is Proximian. You haven’t got any authority…”

  Black Rose let out a small sigh. “While the Proxima Republic is recognized by the Golden Throne, that does not mean it has sovereignty,” she stated. It was a long-running bone of contention between the two human factions. “And besides which…” She looked at the woman with apparent pity. “I’m sure you know how this goes, Sergeant. The sort of work that people like us do—it was never about authority or sovereignty, was it?”

  The woman was silent, her head threatening to slump forward just a little.

  “Tell me what you were doing here,” Black Rose said. “Tell me what aid you gave to the Golden Throne criminal, Lt. Anders Corsigon, and the Ilythian spy…”

  “Screw…you,” the woman said, wobbling in place.

  Black Rose looked at the woman for a moment longer before shaking her head. It was almost a shame that such fanaticism was always directed toward a losing cause.

  “Take her away.” She waved her hand, just as the sergeant did decide to talk.

  “Don’t you even care!?” Sergeant Melania Adams cried as the Throne Marine grabbed her under the arms and started hauling her back. “They were farming children here! Doesn’t that touch even your icy heart!?”

  Black Rose paused where she had turned. It was what that strange little girl’s voice had said too. That the Golden Throne was farming PK-latent children and growing them in the very containment tubes that were shattered all around her.

  And it was true, Black Rose thought, because she had seen them as she had attacked Lt. Corsigon and Adams’s New Dawn cell.

  “You’ll never get the ones we got out! They’re gone—gone!” Adams was still screaming as she was dragged up the ramp to the main body of the Facility 12 warehouse above.

  But Black Rose wasn’t even listening. Instead, she was looking around at the broken containment tubes, each of which had held an adolescent until very recently.

  I was grown in a tube like one of these. Black Rose stepped to the nearest, reaching up with a black-gloved hand to almost touch its surface.

  For the briefest of moments, a shiver of emotion passed over her face. It was too fast for anyone else to register—but if anyone had, they would have said that it had looked like anger.

  1

  35’6’01011

  Sector 8 (Near Territory)

  The throne clipper Nova slammed into normal space in a burst of purple and white warp-fire.

  “Holy Stars…” the ex-military policeman, now Golden Throne outlaw, Lieutenant Anders Corsigon swore.

  Which was kind of ironic, really—because the area he was looking at, in all of space, wasn’t filled with stars.

  “Q’atra. The Great Darkness,” the alien woman beside him in the copilot seat breathed. She had a slightly elongated face and high cheekbones, flaxen hair that was almost a platinum white, and dazzling eyes of the softest turquoise. It was no wonder that the Ilythians were considered unnaturally beautiful by the humans of the Golden Throne and referred to as ‘elves’ for their tapered, pointed ears. Dchllyiealoparisaan of the Sixth Family of Ilythia was an alien agent, covert operative, and spy for the race that the Golden Throne was currently at war with.

  Anders called her Dalia for short.

  “We have arrived at our destination, sir,” said the smooth, cultured voice of Moriarty from the Nova’s control panel.

  “I guess we have…” Anders grimaced as he unclipped his control seat’s X-harness. “Although, I have no idea how you can tell this patch of Void from any other.” The man leaned up and looked out of the clipper’s viewing windows. Darkness, for as far as the eye could see.

  It made Anders uncomfortable, and for the first time in his interstellar career, he suddenly got a sense of fathomless vertigo.

  “I dare say that even the Void conforms to the principles of galactic astro-coordination, sir,” the simulated intelligence replied.

  “Ha.” Anders made a face. Even though Moriarty wasn’t a true A.I.—those threatening things were outlawed by the Eternal Empress of the Golden Throne herself—Anders was sure that the personality overlay that sat on top of a set of tactical and police investigative subroutines was messing with him. The lieutenant had ‘inherited’—or stolen, if he was honest—the intelligence when he had been unfairly dismissed from the Military Police Bureau.

  “And this is where our contact wanted us to go?” Anders frowned.

  ‘Contact’ was a very loose description for the powerful psychokinetic who had been helping them since Barakar. The lieutenant, the Ilythian, and the third member of their group—a young PK psychic himself—had never met the voice in the flesh.

  But she’s somehow high in the esteem of the empress, Anders surmised. Enough to know that the Eternal Empress was turning PK-latent children into psychic batteries and cloning them to power some new sort of apocalypse weapon.

  And, rather disturbingly, the voice had always sounded like a girl.

  Just like Sibbi had once sounded. Anders blinked as he stared into the eternal night. No. Don’t think about her. He couldn’t think about it now.

  “Captain?” a voice disrupted his dark train of thought before it could spiral any deeper.

  It was the pale, owlish face of J-14—or Jake, as the lieutenant had named him—whose eyes Anders always thought were too haggard for a youth of what, fifteen? Sixteen?

  “Lieutenant, please.” Even though Anders technically was the captain of this boat, he still didn’t know if his basic training counted. “I know, Jake, all this nothing freaks the living crap out of me, too,” Anders continued gruffly.

  “No, it’s not that—” J-14 was shaking his head. “It’s…”

  The boy with the fuzz of a shaved head and the ill-fitting clothes, who had recently lost the only mentor he had ever known on Benevolent, looked up in alarm.

  “Something’s coming, and they’re angry,” the boy said, just as the Nova’s proximity alarms started to wail.

  Something emerged from the darkness in front of the ship, and its forward lights refracted and caught the dark fractal shapes of hull panels.

  It was a craft, but unlike anything Anders had ever seen before. For one thing, it was larger than their clipper, a great segmented cone shape that didn’t appear to have any lights or windows—or even engines.

  It was entirely made out of different sections of the same black material, not sleek and shiny but matte and light-absorbing. Against the backdrop of the Great Darkness, it looked as though a piece of the Void had come alive.

  And, as the Nova’s targeting alarms blared, it became obvious that the thing was about to fire at them

  “Scanners detect weapons activation, sir,” Moriarty’s smooth voice said as Anders sat back into the piloting chair and grabbed the flight handles.

  “How did our sensors not pick that thing up?” the long-faced man snapped. “Brace!” Anders shouted as he threw the Nova to one side with expert ease. There was a thump and a startled sound from behind him. Jake must have not been as braced as he could have been.

  The shadow-ship finally emitted light, but it wasn’t the sorts of light that made Anders in any way comfortable. Ports opened near its front and bursts of fire and steam released rockets as the Nova spun and swooped downward.

  The Nova barrel-rolled under and away, and the twin arcs of the enemy craft’s rockets swept through the space where they had been.

  Well, that was easy… Anders was thinking as Dalia beside him snarled in cat-like fury.

  “I can’t get a lock!” The Ilythian had both hands on her own flight handles, and Anders could see that she was trying to secure a lock that kept on jumping and shuddering from one side to another.

  That was because there was nothing to lock onto—the digital display of the enemy vessel kept on glitching, doubling, and phasing out of view.

  “The hull of the enemy vessel has
some kind of refracting properties, sir,” the intelligence’s voice announced. “It scatters our sensor pings and mimics the background radiation of the Void, which is why our sensors didn’t pick it up, and why we can’t secure a stable lock.”

  “Noted,” Anders growled as Dalia swept her long-fingered hands over the commands on her armrests.

  “Switching to manual targeting,” she said.

  “Wait!” Anders cried. Maybe it was the old policeman in him, but he believed in procedure. “Moriarty, open a channel to that thing.”

  “Ah, sir, maybe you didn’t hear me before. The craft’s hull properties make it impossible to target with any sensor, scanner, weapons or communications.” Moriarty said. “But I can perform a wide-beam broadcast, sir.”

  “Then do it already!” Anders said. He brought them up in a fierce arc around the far side and could see why they hadn’t seen the glow of the thing’s engines. A splayed skirt of the same matte-black metal extended outward around the dull orange and yellow glow of the thing’s field generators.

  Orange and yellow? The sight caught Anders’s eyes oddly. Most Throne ships—even their old-style clipper—had been updated to the 18G ‘blue’ field generator technology. This meant that their rear engines glowed an eerie, eldritch blue haze when in use. Anders could perform tighter and faster maneuvers by firing the archaic positioning thrusters that were actual combustion jet engines, located on the clipper’s splayed X arms.

  But no one’s used the old 17G ‘orange’ fields for what…fifty years?