Dark Angels Rising Read online

  “Is she showing any response to our retreat yet?”

  “No, she’s still picking off the decoy ghosts.”

  “Good. This ought to get her attention, then. Raider, hit Darkness Mourning with both beams.”

  “Understood. Complying.”

  Comets were not generally armed. The Ion Raider was; not as heavily as Drake might have liked at a time like this, but she punched above her weight and carried a surprise or two.

  In addition to a range of missiles with different payloads for different purposes, her arsenal included two energy weapons; one particularly tight-beamed and lethal, which any warship might be proud of, the other considerably more unusual. Gleaned from the same Elder source that had given birth to the Dark Angels, the alien weapon had been christened by the crew ‘Dead Leg’. Essentially, it piggy-backed on the conventional weapon’s discharge and took advantage of any hole the tight beam made in a target ship’s armour to slip in and wreak havoc, disabling every system it encountered.

  Immediately the weapons were fired, the Ion Raider slipped behind the dead moon, using it as a shield against potential retaliation. Drake braced himself again as Jen used the engines to shed momentum. The moon’s mass wouldn’t be much help if Darkness Mourning responded with hunter missiles, but it would shield them from any energy weapons the Night Hammers might bring to bear. Of course, the hope was that they’d be in no fit state to mount any sort of response.

  The distances involved were small, the wait correspondingly brief.

  “Nailed her!” Jen declared. “No sign of a reply. In fact their weapons have cut out entirely. They’re not even taking pot shots at the ghost ship and its decoys any more.”

  All of which might be a ruse, but past experience had shown how effective ‘Dead Leg’ could be, and, besides, Drake wasn’t prepared to hang around hiding forever.

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s take a closer look.”

  As they moved out of the moon’s shadow and headed back towards Darkness Mourning, Leesa returned.

  “You might have warned me you were going to shed Gs,” she grumbled, rubbing her left shoulder dramatically.

  “Sorry,” Jen replied without glancing up. “I was busy. She looks dead, skipper,” she continued. “Minimal energy readings, no activity from engines or weapons. Her shielding is still sufficiently intact to prevent me from knowing crew complement or their current status, but we’ve definitely hurt her.”

  “Thanks, Jen.” Drake turned to Leesa. “No hope for the Rz drive?”

  She shook her head. “We’re stuck at sub-light until we can get replacement parts.”

  “I hate to state the obvious,” Jen said, “but if we need to go looking for parts the only settled world within reach is Enduril II.”

  “Not an option,” Drake said quickly, recalling his recent visit to Enduril. “That’s Saflik’s home territory.”

  “I didn’t really think it would be. Mind you, who said we had to ask them nicely?”

  Drake chose to ignore the comment. “Any reaction from our ghost ship?”

  “Not yet,” Jen said. “They seem to be sitting tight to see what develops.”

  “Why go to all that trouble, not to mention waste so much time limping over to Enduril II for parts, when there’s another source closer to hand?” Leesa asked.

  “You mean… Darkness Mourning?”

  “Exactly. We can strip whatever we need from her and let the Night Hammers do the limping back to Enduril, licking their wounds.”

  “Would that work?”

  Leesa nodded. “Should do. At a bare minimum, I need an inversion tube and a pulse governor, and they’re pretty generic – one size fits all, sort of thing.”

  “Okay.” Drake took a heartbeat to think that through. “If we’re going to go calling, we need Geminum.”

  “Mosi’s not up to it,” Jen said.

  “He’ll have to be. We’re talking about boarding a disabled Night Hammer ship and cannibalising its drive. Goodness only knows how many are on board or what surprises the crew will have cooked up for us by the time we put on EVA suits, get across there and force our way in. We need to catch them now, before they’re ready for us, and make sure they’re out of action before we pay them a visit. Geminum’s the only one who can do that.”

  “Captain, you do remember that slab of meat we dragged back to the Raider a couple of days ago, don’t you?”

  “I do, but Mosi’s our only play. Besides, that was then. His wounds were extensive but superficial, right, Raider?”

  “Indeed.”

  “We reached him before any real damage was done, and he’s been recuperating since.”

  “Don’t forget the ghost ship’s still lurking out there,” Jen said. “What if whoever they are decides to take advantage of the situation and blow their tormentor to bits while Mosi’s still on board?”

  “Or I am,” Leesa added.

  “We’ll talk it down, establish communication before we commit,” Drake said. “Raider, is Mosi still in the sickbay?”

  “No. He recently entered the artefact room.”

  Drake and Jen stared at each other. Both knew there was only one reason for Mosi to go there.

  “Well,” Leesa said, “I guess that settles it.”

  From the moment he awoke and realised where he was – accepted that he really was back on the Ion Raider – Mosi had been itching to go to the artefact room. It drew him like a siren’s call, demanding his attention and precluding all other thought.

  He knew they were in RzSpace – he could sense that from the moment the captain roused him – but the lure of the artefact room transcended even Rz’s deadening influence. Nor could he blame his injuries for his reluctance to head straight down there; he was pretty much healed. It was nothing physical that stopped him. It was as if, in some perverse way, he savoured the anguish caused by holding back, as if he felt at a deep-rooted level that he deserved to suffer. For abandoning Naj. For Taylor’s death. For surviving them both.

  Then came the emergence from Rz and the world juddering violently around him, almost flinging him to the floor.

  “The ship has emerged in the midst of a conflict, nature unknown,” Raider explained in answer to his query.

  Mosi knew then that he had delayed too long. Hours had passed since he woke to find the captain waiting for him, and he had yet to get up. He had just lain there, resisting the urge to reclaim his past. Now he was forced to wait a little longer still, as acceleration pushed him back into his sickbed. Presumably the Ion Raider was getting the hell away from the shooting.

  As soon as the pressure eased he acted, hauling himself to his feet, glad at how reassuringly steady his legs felt. He left the compact sickbay, heading along a walkway and down the steps to the cargo deck, part of which had been sectioned off to form the artefact room.

  He didn’t hesitate at the threshold but plunged straight in. Now that he was actually here he couldn’t wait to reclaim the torque, to become Geminum again, and wondered why he had procrastinated in the first place.

  He barely registered the presence of the mannequin that confronted him as the door slid open, despite it mimicking Cornische so effectively. Instead he turned smartly to his left, following the antiseptically white wall to where a short, stubby plinth stood unobtrusively in the corner.

  He stopped before the plinth, holding out his right hand to hover with fingers splayed just above the plain surface. It was all he could do to keep the hand steady as his excitement mounted. Almost immediately, the top of the plinth began to change, seeming to melt as the surface flowed to either side. Something solid and metallic rose from the plinth’s interior, rising up on a pseudopod platform to meet Mosi’s flat hand.

  A crescent of silvered metal, flat on the inside of the curve, embossed with elegant and indecipherable designs on the outer. The metal was warm to the touch, and the moment his fingers closed around it Mosi imagined he could sense her
. The torque, which formed a sort of too-broad half collar, had always felt alive like this, from the very first time he had picked it up.

  Without hesitation he reached back behind his head and pressed the crescent to the nape of his neck. It fitted snugly, as it always had, despite not appearing to be the right shape to do so. Mosi held his breath, waiting for the gentle sting that signalled the torque melding to him.

  He felt it like a kiss and she was there, filling his mind, his awareness.

  “Hi, bro’, what kept you?” said Najat, the voice that had haunted his dreams for a decade.

  “A thousand things, none of them reason enough.”

  “Does this mean we’re back in business?”

  “So it would seem. Are you ready?”

  “Hell, yeah. You know me.”

  He sensed her smile, her joy at being woken. The years that had passed since they were last joined melted away. She didn’t ask to be updated and he didn’t offer. He was whole again. That was all that mattered.

  There was a suit, too, a costume that went with the Geminum identity, but unlike Hel N’s silvered skin this wasn’t integral to his abilities. It was nothing more than camouflage, a prop to maintain the wearer’s anonymity. He grabbed it on the way out, but only as an afterthought.

  “Welcome back, Geminum. The others are waiting for you in ops,” said Raider as he left the artefact room.

  His was no smartsuit like Leesa’s, it wouldn’t flow up or down his body at his whim but had to be pulled on the old fashioned way. He stopped to do so before continuing, leaving his head bear for comfort’s sake. Then he continued to ops.

  They were all there – Cornische, Hel N, Shadow, and a dark-skinned girl he didn’t recognise at first. She had some sort of robotic dog by her side, which watched her intently.

  “I made a mistake, and I don’t know how,” the girl was saying.

  “We don’t know that for sure, yet,” Jen replied.

  “Oh, I think we have a few clues,” Leesa said. “Being shot at, for example. Don’t beat yourself up over it, though, Saavi, we’re all human. Well, mostly.”

  Saavi? That young girl was Cloud? He could see it now, in her eyes, her posture. Someone would have to explain to him later how the woman he remembered had become the child who now stood in her stead. These were the Dark Angels, after all: weird came with the territory.

  Cornische spotted him hovering in the doorway, grinned and nodded as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Glad you could join us, Geminum. Your timing is impeccable.”

  Jen gave him a quick hug, Saavi too. Leesa didn’t but smiled and said something reassuring – she never had been the touchy feely sort.

  Despite the welcome camaraderie, the implication of the captain’s greeting hadn’t escaped him. “How can I help?”

  “There’s a crippled ship out there, which we need to raid, cannibalising its Rz drive for parts to get Raider’s back on line,” the captain explained. “It’ll be easier to do so if we know the crew are out of action before we board.”

  “I can do that!” Najat said. Mosi had to smile at her eagerness, though he knew he was the only one who could hear her. “We’re good to go,” he said aloud.

  “One thing,” the captain added. “It’s a Night Hammer ship.”

  “Ooh… This should be fun,” Naj said in his head.

  Mosi nodded. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “We’ll get suited and ready,” Jen said, heading out of ops with Leesa close behind. “Give us five minutes, Mosi, and then do your thing.”

  Mosi used the time to get as much information as he could from Raider regarding the target, which proved to be precious little. Current distance to the Night Hammer ship and its outer dimensions, that was about it. Darkness Mourning was too heavily shielded for Raider to tell how many were on board or even confirm the ship’s internal layout. They called up schematics dating from when she was built but that didn’t take into account any subsequent modifications – anyone basing expectations of the Ion Raider on the original layout would be in for a shock once they stepped aboard.

  “Hel N and Shadow are ready,” the captain told him.

  Mosi nodded, and sat down in a vacant chair. He then pulled the mask up over his head – a purely symbolic action, but it did help him to feel that he really was Geminum again.

  “Over to you, little sis,” he said in his thoughts.

  “Gotcha!” and she was gone.

  He had tried to explain to the other Angels what it felt like. The closest he could manage was, “There’s no sense of loss; it’s not a severance as such, more a stretching. The link is still there, but it’s as if I’m watching her race away from me down a long tunnel of light that goes on forever, receding with every heartbeat. Then she arrives and I snap back to her in an instant, as if tugged by elastic.”

  For the split second he felt his sister leave him, Mosi was reminded of that attempt at an explanation. As descriptions went it was woefully inadequate, but he had yet to come up with anything better. He just about had time to revel in the return of this familiar and much-missed experience before Najat reached her goal and his consciousness was pulled towards her. Quick as thought, he sped through a tunnel limned with silver lightnings, the merest suggestion of energies that danced past without ever touching, left behind before he could fully register their presence. Then he arrived, drawing breath and marvelling, as he always did.

  Freed of their shared form and having reached her destination, Naj took on a body of her own, or so it always seemed to Mosi when he joined her. He knew that was largely illusion and the truth was far more complex, but he felt as if he occupied a physical form much like his own but proportioned in unfamiliar ways and… different; a woman’s form rather than a man’s.

  Whereas in his own body he was the dominant partner and Naj’s persona a constant but subordinate presence, effectively a passenger, here the roles were reversed. Naj held the upper hand and he was the subsidiary, on hand to observe and advise but not much else.

  Mosi had no idea how the Elder collar did it, what arcane tech it utilised to bring his sister back – an adult version of her at that – presumably by plumbing the recesses of his own memory and extrapolating from there, but it always felt a great deal more than that. This really was Naj, he felt it in every fibre: how she would have been if she had survived to reach adulthood rather than dying as an adolescent on Coates World. She possessed much the same phobias and anxieties his sister had harboured, but progressed and matured, and also the quick wit and the joie de vivre that he had never quite been able to find in himself after she had gone.

  He asked Raider once, about how real she was, afraid that he was deluding himself, but the computer had assured him this wasn’t the case. The torque operated on quantum levels that humanity had yet to grasp, drawing on more than one reality to breathe life into Naj’s aspect. In every sense that counted, this genuinely was Naj reborn. Mosi was content with that. To him, she was utterly real, and that was all that mattered.

  “Are you with me, bro’?”

  “All the way,” he assured her.

  Five

  There was no disguising the moment Mosi departed. His face went blank, features slack, while his body became a rigid statue as consciousness fled, tugged irresistibly in his sister’s wake. The rigidity was why he generally chose to sit down – returning to a body that had toppled over and broken a limb wasn’t something he relished, apparently.

  Of all the talents gifted to them by scavenged Elder tech, Mosi’s was by far the most remarkable in Drake’s opinion. He’d heard explanations of quantum dabbling but essentially had no idea how the Geminum torque resurrected a credible semblance of Najat, or enabled Mosi to project her over such distances irrespective of physical obstacles. More than once, however, circumstances had given him cause to be grateful that it did.

  “Captain,” Raider interrupted his reveries, “the ghost ship has shut
down its decoys.”

  “Thank you, Raider.”

  “Maybe they’ve decided to trust us now that we’ve kicked the Night Hammers’ collective ass,” Saavi said.

  “Maybe,” Drake said; or perhaps it was just that generating the decoys sapped too much energy and they couldn’t maintain them for long. Still, the disappearance of the ghost’s ghosts could only be interpreted as a good sign. “Let’s find out, shall we? Raider, open a channel, audio only.

  “This is the independent trader the Blue Angel calling cloaked vessel. Please show yourself. The danger has passed, the Night Hammer ship has been disabled and is no longer a threat.” And you’re making me nervous.

  No response.

  He tried again. “Blue Angel to unknown vessel: we are not your enemy. Please do not give us cause to believe that you may be ours.”

  As veiled threats went, Drake reckoned that was fair enough. They didn’t have time for niceties. Despite the need to get their engines back online, he wasn’t about to commit Leesa and Jen to an EVA crossing without assurances that the ghost ship wouldn’t try to finish off Mourning Glory while they did so. Caught in the open like that, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Whoever was in command of that ship had to be considering their options. If, as Drake suspected, maintaining the decoys had been a drain on their energy reserves, surely whatever they were using to generate an instrument-foxing cloak must be another, especially if it was related to the Ptarmigan device Pelquin had employed on their jaunt into Xter space.

  As if on cue, the ‘ghost’ materialised. Smaller than he would have anticipated, and of a type Drake – who knew a fair bit about ships – had never seen before. The matt hull seemed designed to absorb light, and, even without the cloaking system, the ship would be difficult enough to spot in the vastness of space if its engines were cold and you didn’t know where to look.

  “Trading vessel?” said a man’s voice – deep toned with a nasal accent that Drake struggled to place. “Since when did any Comet class trader carry enough firepower to disable a warship, let alone a Night Hammer ship? Who the hell are you really?”