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  “He turned on us,” Wilco said. “We never agreed to go down with his ship.”

  “So you were free men aboard the Black Hole?”

  “As free as any men can be, I suppose.” Wilco said.

  “Pirates,” Bayne added.

  Wilco shrugged. Hep turned the ball over in his hands. “We made our own rules,” Hep said.

  “Why not return to Parallax’s men in Ore Town when you had the chance?”

  Wilco chuckled. “We’re nobodies. Deckhands. Not like they’d recognize us or give a damn whether we live or die. You seem to, for some reason.”

  An eerie sense of déjà vu overcame Bayne, a feeling that he both resisted and welcomed. It took him out of the moment, a time when he needed to be wholly present and focused, but it brought him back to a time when he was happiest.

  Bayne cleared his throat and straightened his back, planted himself firmly in the present. “You two have saved my life and the lives of everyone aboard this ship. For that, you have my gratitude, and that is not an empty thing. I will leave orders with the XO that you two are to remain as guests aboard the Royal Blue for as long as you need. He will help resettle you in a place of your choosing. Perhaps a beach in the southern rim somewhere.”

  “You going somewhere, Captain?” Wilco said to Bayne as the captain walked out of the room.

  The captain did not answer.

  Patch waited by the shuttle, ready to fire it up and launch. He was disappointed, but not surprised, when Bayne ordered him to stand down. “This is a solo mission, Patch. Not that I wouldn’t rather you fly me through this mess.”

  Sigurd was a bit beyond disappointment. “A damn fool thing you’re doing, Captain.”

  Bayne squared up and put his clenched jaw to Sigurd’s ear. “I’ll remind you that I’m still captain, Chief. Show some respect.” His jaw slackened. “And I’ll remind you that these people look to you. Get yourself together.”

  Sigurd nodded and straightened into his most disciplined officer’s stance.

  Only Mao stood between Bayne and his departure now. The captain took his XO by the elbow and led him away from the crowd so the two could speak in private.

  “You understand your orders, XO?”

  “Understand, yes. Agree, no.”

  “To be expected. But you’ll carry them out regardless.”

  “Is that a question, sir?”

  “No,” Bayne said. “An acknowledgement of the officer you are.” Bayne put a hand on Mao’s shoulder. “It’s been an honor and pleasure, Taliesen.”

  Mao returned the gesture, somewhat uncomfortably, as fraternization between officers was a breach of protocol. “For me as well, Drummond.”

  Bayne stepped onto the shuttle and looked at his ship and crew for what he believed would be the last time.

  15

  Bayne refused to look at the Royal Blue as he sailed away from it. His ship, his home, the place he became the man he was meant to be, but also the place he became the man he was. He wasn’t always certain they were one and the same. In fact, he was sure that they weren’t, though he did his best to ignore it, to pretend that this was just a natural progression. Starving orphan to deckhand to crewmember to Ranger captain to Navy captain.

  Drummond Bayne’s life was nothing short of impressive. An outlier. No matter how many times he reminded himself of the fact, he could not shake the sense that he had veered off course somewhere. Maybe this moment was his life course correcting in a cruelly divine way, crashing him back into the life he left so long ago.

  Or, maybe, it was just as Mao thought that had led him to this moment—his reckless decisions. He had fought so long to suppress his desire for adventure and freedom that those desires emerged in other ways, through foolhardy choices that endangered himself and his crew.

  Whatever the reason for the steps he’d taken, those steps led him here, navigating a shuttle, alone, through a graveyard of ships to what was most likely his death. He no longer held the naïve belief that pirates, no matter how depraved, followed a code, or rather, the code of honor he long thought. They followed only one code—survival. It was all that mattered, and they would do whatever it took to ensure it.

  It had been longer then he realized since Bayne was at the helm. Several chunks of metal scored the hull before his reflexes and feel for the controls returned. He told himself it was the concussion. Once he felt comfortable, he still moved slowly through the field of dead ships, hoping to avoid joining their ranks.

  He also took the opportunity to study the remains as he waded through them. None of them held Navy identification numbers. They were familiar, though. The coloring, what names he saw, the types of weapons, everything. They were Ranger ships. He hadn’t read of any Ranger operations this far from the center. They were mostly focused in the east and south, from what he remembered.

  The debris field opened up into a clearing of sorts, filled with the largest hunk of dead ship Bayne had seen yet. It was most of the front end of a mid-sized cruiser. Sleek in its day, to be sure. That much could still be seen beneath the devastation. It was a familiar scrap, reminding him of all the Ranger ships he’d seen, and the men sailing them, making their own rules.

  A shuttle had already docked with it. Parallax was aboard, waiting for him.

  Bayne’s head spun. Again, he told himself it was the concussion. Not fear. Not excitement. His brain had swollen.

  He pulled the shuttle as close to the bow of the ship as he could. He spied a sizable hole there where he could enter. As the shuttle’s lights shone on the dead thing, Bayne’s stomach tightened, and he resisted the urge to vomit. It’s the concussion, he repeated to himself. The concussion.

  With the shuttle powered down and mag-locked to the hull of the dead ship, Bayne stepped out. He allowed himself a moment of weightlessness before locking his boots to the hull. This was familiar ground. Even through the barrier of his suit, a barrier powerful enough to keep out the cold vacuum, he could feel that.

  He pushed the thought away and climbed through the hole. The lights mounted on his helmet cast a pale light over the inside of the metal coffin. There were still bodies inside, those who were strapped into their chairs when the ship was destroyed. Three of them. Bayne unlocked his boots and drifted toward the nearest body, sitting in the navigator’s chair. He was largely preserved. His body would have only decomposed as long as there was oxygen in his suit, which wasn’t long. Bayne could still see the scar on the young man’s forehead, the one that looked like a fat caterpillar.

  “I must say,” a voice said from the dark. “I’m not all surprised that you came.” It sounded like a ghost. Full of dead memories, empty of any feeling other than cold contempt. It moved like a ghost through walls. Through Bayne’s skin, into his bones, to the core, and out the other side, leaving him feeling hollow. The owner of the voice appeared from the dark. Not a ghost, but a demon.

  He wore a spacesuit, a custom one that was sure to have cost a small fortune. His mask shimmered with a holographic display. It bore strong resemblance to the Kabuki masks Bayne had seen in history texts of Old Earth. An ivory oval painted with broad red strokes to show the face of a monster. The face began as a tight swirl in the center. As it spread outward, it revealed the eyes that could see into your soul and the teeth that would rend it.

  The man wore a long, black trench coat over his spacesuit that hung open to reveal a black vest underneath. A silver watch chain hung across the man’s midsection. He took the time to look the part. A belt crossed his chest from shoulder to opposite hip, on which hung a pistol. A rapier hung on one hip, and a half-sword hung on the other. He held a long bundle wrapped in cloth.

  He moved through zero-gravity as if the force held no meaning for him. Pure grace, pushing off a torn officer’s chair and drifting like a dancer to a destroyed navigation console. No flailing for control, no reaching for a handhold, never questioning himself or his environment.

  “Your reputation is one—”

 
“Of a naïve and nostalgic fool?” Bayne said, cutting Parallax off.

  “I was going to say a man of action,” Parallax added. “A captain who does, rather than orders.”

  Bayne felt the urge to move but could not force his body to obey, be it from lack of gravity or will. He couldn’t focus. The most feared pirate in the system was speaking to him, but all he could focus on was the bridge where he stood. A place that should be teeming with energy and excitement, off forging its own path through the cosmos.

  “I can tell you have questions,” Parallax said. “Ask them. How could you hope to find your answers otherwise?”

  “What happened to this ship? What happened to the Supernova?”

  Parallax pushed off a spent console and drifted toward the center of the bridge, past a dead body strapped into the executive officer’s chair. “You are an officer in the United Navy now,” he said, voice tainted with bitterness. “Your commanders did not tell you? Or did you not bother to ask?”

  Frustration bubbled over and seeped into Bayne’s blood. “Ask what?”

  “What happened to the Rangers who refused to join?”

  The question itself was like a key that unlocked a door in Bayne’s mind that he never knew existed. Once it opened, the garbage hidden away inside never stopped pouring out. He had never crossed paths with another Ranger since joining the Navy, other than those that also chose to join as commissioned officers. He just assumed they took great effort to make sure it was so. Bayne never believed his joining wouldn’t come with a fair share of bad blood. He realized now, again, how naïve he was.

  “Central Command enticed the holdouts with one last mission for the cause,” Parallax said. “A paying gig, no less. An opportunity to ensure everything they fought for survived, while also putting enough in their coffers to continue on forging their own destinies.” He pushed off the floor, continuing to drift toward the center of the bridge.

  “There was one last warlord who needed to be put down,” he said. “The dread sovereign of the Deep Black. A man they called Parallax. The Rangers assembled here, the beachhead for their liberation of the edge of space. They realized the truth all too late.”

  Bayne’s guts lurched. Bile bubbled at the back of his throat.

  “There was no warlord,” the pirate said. “No Parallax. There was only the threat to the new order that the Rangers presented. So the Navy arranged to have them all gather in one place, as far from watching eyes as possible, and shot them all down like dogs in an alley.”

  All sensation in Bayne’s body stopped. Numbness. Nothing. The void blossomed in his heart and swallowed him from the inside. A black hole opened in his chest.

  Parallax’s weightless ballet finally ended. He gripped the arms and pulled himself into the captain’s chair.

  Seeing the pirate in that chair. That demon face. Bayne’s body was still numb, but it acted with all the ferocity contained in its cells. He pressed his boots together, launching himself at Parallax. He drew the dagger he borrowed from Wilco.

  The pirate did not move or draw a weapon to defend himself. Instead, he reached up and grabbed the blade, stopping it with a metallic clang.

  Bayne could deny it no longer. “Captain Kyte?”

  “Aye,” the demon said.

  “That isn’t possible.”

  The demon chuckled. “Your refusal to believe it doesn’t make it less true.”

  The flippant dismissal sent Bayne’s body into another reflexive bout of violence. The pirate pushed him away with ease.

  “Such rage,” Parallax said, seemingly taking joy in it. “The Navy didn’t beat everything out of you.”

  “You don’t know me!” Bayne lunged forward, driving his head into the demon mask. As Bayne pulled his head away, the holographic display sputtered to reveal the man beneath. “It really is…” His voice stopped working.

  Alexander Kyte looked back at him from the captain’s chair where he had first showed Bayne how to chart his own course. Where he first proved to Bayne that he had a right to do so, that no one else in this universe could shackle him and drag him along a path he did not want to walk. But this was not Captain Kyte. This was Parallax. Pirate. Terror of the Deep Black. The man to whom the likes of Wex Shill and Jarmin Tetch pledged whatever loyalty they were capable of pledging. They could not be the same man.

  This man’s face was crisscrossed with scars. He pressed a button on the side of the mask and the display reappeared. “You know my secret now. This mask is equally a tool of fear as it is of vanity. Perhaps all of this is. If I can serve both with the same means, then why limit myself, yes?” Parallax rose from the captain’s chair, extending the bundle in his hand to Bayne.

  Bayne readied his dagger.

  Parallax laughed. “I offer you a gift and you threaten me? Did you take it as a sign of weakness? Have you considered the fact that you’re not dead already as an act of mercy on my part?”

  “I didn’t think pirates capable.”

  Parallax hung his head, swinging the demon’s face from side to side. “Your mind is as closed as it’s always been, seeing only one side of the coin.” He released the bundle, and the blue and black blades floated into Bayne’s hands. “Those served me well during the early days of Parallax, when I was just being born. I forged my path through a swath of bodies with them. I named them Benevolence and Malevolence. I gave those to Shill because he recognized something that most don’t, and he served my mission well because of it.”

  “What mission?” Bayne said, his voice quaking. “Murder and money? Your own little kingdom down on Ore Town?”

  “Ore Town was a test,” Parallax said. “A successful one, but if you can’t understand its purpose, then you aren’t fit to wield those blades. Not yet, anyway. I believe you will be, though.” He pushed away from the captain’s chair, back toward the shadows from where he’d emerged.

  “Where are you going? You’re just leaving?” Bayne immediately hated how much like a child he sounded, pleading after a wayward father. “Why did you bring me here if not to kill me?”

  “Kill you?” Parallax continued drifting away, slowly being swallowed by the darkness. “If I wanted to do that, I would have blown your ship apart days ago. I wanted to see firsthand the man you’ve become. Now I want to see the man you will be.”

  He faded away.

  Bayne was like the corpses of his past shipmates, mummified, frozen in the past, present, and future. He made his way back to the shuttle and left the Supernova, hoping to never again see its decayed innards.

  16

  The crew knew not to ask anything of Bayne upon his return to the Royal Blue. His shoulders took on that slant and his jaw that set that told them it was best to leave him be. Even Mao let him pass unmolested. He marched straight for his quarters, not uttering a word to a soul until he reached his room and locked the door.

  He stripped the swords off his hips and dropped them in a heap on the floor. With a sudden outburst, he kicked them. And then kicked them again and again. He soon realized that he was screaming. The realization didn’t make it stop. He kept screaming, a full-throated response to the previous few days of his life. Not just days, years. The years of his life that he spent thinking reality was one way when it was the opposite. The years he spent living in the image of a dead man, a man passed through hell to return a twisted demon. Years thinking himself a certain sort of man. Now only feeling more uncertain than ever.

  His rage was not spent but his body was after he’d kicked over everything not bolted down and put a hole in the back wall of his closet. He collapsed on the floor, bottle of rum clenched like a lifeline in his fist. He pulled the cork loose with his teeth, spit it across the room, and swallowed until the burning in this throat was unbearable.

  The institution to which he pledged his life had secretly murdered the institution to which his heart belonged.

  No, Bayne thought. No matter the man Kyte once was, he was a pirate now, and he knew a pirate’s word was not to
be trusted. He stood in the corpse of the Supernova, but that didn’t mean the story of its demise should be wholly believed. He had half the story. He needed the other half.

  Bayne radioed the bridge. “Mao, set course for Central. Launch immediately.”

  “Repairs on the hangar bay aren’t complete, sir. Protocol dictates—”

  “Damn protocol!” Bayne shouted, his words slurred. “Make it happen.”

  Bayne drank the remaining few fingers of rum and smashed the bottle against the wall. “Fair winds and following seas,” he mumbled to himself and the ghosts he left in the Deep Black.

  Captain Bayne

  The Deep Black, Book 2

  1

  He dreamt of demons.

  Red faces on black bodies, swimming through a sea of the dead, pushing them aside like driftwood. They circled him. He, a child just learning to swim, just realizing that he didn’t know how to swim, understood that he was going to be devoured in these deep waters.

  Captain Drummond Bayne woke with a panic, sweat matting his black hair to his forehead. A bubbling in his gut warned him that he had approximately thirty seconds to crawl out of his bunk and reach the toilet before the contents of his stomach came roaring out with a vengeful fury.

  He planted his foot, but in his haste and haze he fell flat on his belly, which did nothing for the volatile situation therein. He dragged himself across the floor like a snake, gripped the cold steel of the toilet bowl, and pulled himself up just in time.

  A night’s worth of rum came pouring out. Once he was empty, Bayne fell onto his back. He shook with a chill, but his face burned. Demons danced across his vision. They cursed in his ear, and then he fell asleep.

  He woke again to an incoming call from sickbay—Dr. Simmons reminding him that he would need to report to the Central Command doctor if he was to be excused from duty another day. Her personal notes would cut it no longer. A potent strain of dekaflu, she’d told them. One common to the Deep Black, but rare around the center of the system. Should it spread through Central Command, it could cripple the power structure of the United Systems for weeks.