Dark Menace (Space Raiders Book 3), page 1
Copyright © 2023 by Ken Lozito
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SPACE RAIDERS
DARK MENACE
KEN LOZITO
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
Author Note
About the Author
Also by Ken Lozito
CHAPTER 1
I stared as the ship’s scanners revealed a binary star system with the shattered remains of stars that had the unfortunate luck to become entangled. No planets orbited the stars, just rocky remnants strewn out from the center in clustered masses, as if the bones of the planets were trying to stitch themselves together to restore the magnificence of their former selves.
I’d seen worse places, a lot worse, and this celestial destruction looked to have happened quite a long time ago.
The edges of my lips lifted a little. At some point during my travels, assessing star systems had become something of a regular occurrence. What I once would’ve stared at in awe had become much more familiar. I still appreciated the view, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about it all that much.
I heaved a sigh and looked at Kierenbot. “Anything?”
“Negative, Captain. Still no response by either Raylin or Serena.”
Kierenbot is a humanoid robot that’s home to an artificial intelligence. He believes he’s the remnant consciousness of a being whose body died long ago. It was all a lie, but I couldn’t convince Kierenbot of that.
I’d thought it would be much easier to catch up to Serena and Raylin, but that all changed when I received that message. All the ways Raylin had instructed us to reach them had gone unanswered, which made me believe they were in serious trouble.
Raylin is an alien—a shapeshifter with a mysterious past. I knew she could handle herself; it was Serena I was concerned about. She’s Human, and when we were on the ship together, the crew looked after each other. It had been less than a year since we’d been abducted from Earth and all our lives changed, and I couldn’t help the certainty in my gut that Serena was in way over her head.
It should’ve been easy to catch up to them.
I was wrong.
Now, I just didn’t want to be too late. The man who’d saved my life had asked me to keep his daughter safe. It was his dying wish, and I was failing to live up to it.
I tightened my jaw, teeth clenching a little as I stared at the star system on the main holoscreen.
Thanks for saddling me with that, Flynn.
I sighed heavily. I’d asked her not to go, but she wouldn’t listen. We’d been on the trail of the Asherah, a civilization that predated all others in our galaxy, and it turned out that they weren’t even from our galaxy. I thought we were making the find of a lifetime, and we were, but we didn’t have much to show for it—just a lot of injuries and a whole lot of terrifying memories.
I rubbed my arm where the metallic tattoo had been from the Asherah artifact. It was gone, along with Larry—the being that helped us find the Asherah ruins. Sometimes my arm itched as if the artifact was still there.
If Serena had just waited instead of going off to search for the origins of the Human abductions, I wouldn’t be here right now, searching for her. She’d be safe. Instead, something was wrong. I knew it in my bones, and I had a pretty good guess as to who was responsible.
I’ve made some enemies. People like Flynn, my old mentor and friend, would say I have a talent for it.
“What about the other scan?” I asked.
Kierenbot turned toward me, and the red orb that tracked across a sensor bar on his face stopped while he considered. “Negative, Captain. No trace of Kael Torsin, either, or any other Mesakloren military presence.”
I lowered my chin once.
The door of the bridge opened, and Ben and Lanaya walked in. Ben is about an inch taller than me, and the thin frame of his twenty-year-old body has been replaced by a layer of athletic muscle and a confident gleam in his eyes. He’d come a long way.
Lanaya is something different. She’d been abducted from Earth as a little girl and was part of a secret operation that we were still trying to piece together. She looked to be about Ben’s age, with Nordic blonde hair, the kind that appears almost white, and deep blue eyes the color of ice that forms beneath the surface of the ocean. She had only vague memories of what happened to her, and it had been determined that her memories had been blocked somehow.
The different alien species I’d encountered could do some amazing things, but that also included things that were just wrong. Lanaya was clear evidence that the galaxy wasn’t representative of the golden age of civilization, despite the unbelievable technology the different species had developed.
Lanaya looked at me. “Is that it? Is this where the signal came from?”
I nodded.
Her eyes flicked back toward the holoscreen intently, and she pursed her lips. A few months ago, she’d received an anonymous message that triggered something in her brain. The message was just a few strange images, but then she spoke, and it appeared the message was for me.
Nathan Briggs, I have them. If you want them back, you’ll need to do something for me.
I don’t normally receive messages like that, and on that day, I’d gotten two of them. This was by far the more important of the two.
Ben stood next to Lanaya, displaying the young couple’s unspoken deference for each other. Since the three of us were the only Humans on the ship, that made me the odd man out in the love department. Not that I was searching for it or anything like that, but sometimes it just hit me between the eyes like the proverbial bullet to the head.
Ben wrapped his arm around her and rubbed her shoulder. “We’ll find who sent it.”
Lanaya nodded. She had no memory of the message. Luckily, the cameras on the bridge had recorded the event, and I showed Lanaya the recording. Since then, she’d been determined to recover her memories and had become much more independent.
Ben looked at me with his eyebrows raised.
I shook my head. “No sign of them here.”
We looked up as Kaz and T’Chura joined us.
Kaz glanced at the screen. “That makes sense. There are places like this all over.”
“What are they?” I asked.
“It’s an info-hub. It probably started out as a deep space outpost, but once the resources started being mined, it grew to what we see here.”
“Deep space, far from any enforcement agency but itself,” I said.
Ben frowned. “So, what does that mean?”
“It could be dangerous in there. Local authorities only.”
“Not to worry, Captain,” Kierenbot said. “I’m aware of the local customs, so we’ll be able to avoid most of the danger.”
Kaz chuckled and I raised an eyebrow toward him. He shrugged. “Somehow he always underestimates the trouble you manage to get yourself into.”
“What can I say? He’s got a blind spot for me.”
“Should I take us in, Captain?” Kierenbot asked.
“One minute, Kierenbot. Are you able to isolate where the signal is coming from?”
“I cannot access the info-hub’s internal communication systems from here. We’ll need to do that once we’re inside. I’ve installed a new application to your combat suit that will allow your suit computer to scan for it while we’re there.”
I tilted my head to the side and frowned. “Uh, combat suit? Won’t that make us stick out?”
“I hadn’t considered that,” Kierenbot said.
Sometimes the robot could account for every tiny detail, and other times he missed the forest for the trees.
I looked up at T’Chura, which was to say that my neck ached sometimes when the giant alien, somewhat akin to a Sasquatch, stood nearby. He has a broad forehead, high cheekbones, and skin with a slight dark-mustard tinge to it. His large brown eyes regarded me calmly as the thick, ropy layers of muscles strained against his black shirt. His long brown hair hung past his tree-trunk-sized neck. At first glance he appeared brutish, but he was among the most honorable beings I’d ever encountered—definitely someone I could count on to watch m y back.
“What do you think?” I asked the nine-foot-tall Noorkonian brute.
“Small armament is acceptable at places like these. I’m afraid combat suits would just draw attention to us,” T’Chura replied.
“Agreed,” Kaz said.
Small armament was a relative term when it came from aliens. Size normally mattered when it came to these things, but not all the time.
“All right,” I said. “Kierenbot, send your tracking application to our omnitools.”
“Done,” he replied.
I glanced down at my omnitool and saw the small notification that indicated a new application had arrived.
“Since we have no idea where the message actually came from, we’ll need to split up,” I said.
Aliens and people had a lot in common, kinda like opinions. Most of them started to speak at once, except T’Chura. At least he knew I was right about this.
I raised my hands. “Look, you can pair off if you want,” I said, and looked pointedly at Ben, “but we need to cover as much ground as possible as quickly as possible. We can’t afford another dead end. This is our only lead to finding them.”
Kaz exhaled through his nostrils. “Nate, Raylin knows how to take care of herself. Serena couldn’t have a better traveling companion.”
I felt the weight of the others on the bridge watching me as I looked at Kaz. “Then why haven’t they contacted us? They left, expecting that we’d quickly regroup with them. It’s been months, and not a word has been sent. The only thing we have is the message that came to Lanaya.”
There was an edge to my voice, and I didn’t care.
“You don’t know what Raylin is capable of. Believe me when I tell you that she is the most dangerous person on the ship, and that’s saying something given the crewmembers.”
I looked at T’Chura and the Sasquatch nodded once. I shook my head. “Anyone can be overwhelmed. Anyone. Even Raylin.”
I looked away from the others. “I shouldn’t have let them go. They could’ve waited a few days and then we could’ve searched for the people who had Lanaya.”
I lifted my gaze toward Kaz and he looked away. That small bit of acknowledgement was all I needed to see.
“Well, what are we waiting for then?” Kaz said.
“Kierenbot, take us in,” I said.
The ship flew toward the deep space outpost. Large, rust-colored swaths of gaseous clouds reflected the starlight. They were remnants of the large gas planets I imagined were much like Jupiter. They made the star system appear almost ethereal. It was remarkable, but all I focused my attention on was the outpost.
Ben frowned. “For being such an out-of-the-way place, there are certainly a lot of ships traveling to it.”
“It’s like finding the only rest area on a long stretch of road. Everyone stops here because who knows how far the next place will be,” I said.
Ben snorted a little and shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. You just have this way of putting things in the simplest of terms. It’s like the fact that we’re so far away from anything remotely like civilization has no effect on you,” he replied.
I shrugged. “I left the city a long time ago, kid. You hadn’t until recently.”
Ben glanced at Kaz for a second. “Yeah, I’d planned to leave, but I never planned on traveling through space.”
Kaz rolled his eyes. “Seriously, you guys need to get over this. We’ve been through it so many times, and look at how things turned out,” he said, gesturing around the bridge.
Ben, Serena, and I share ownership of the Spacehog. Kaz lost the ship because of the substantial debt he’d incurred.
I arched an eyebrow and looked at Ben. “He’s right. We should probably let it go.”
Ben looked at me, slightly amused.
“But then again, where’s the fun in that?” I said and looked at Kaz. “You know what? I don’t think I will let it go.”
Kaz sighed. “Are you done yet?”
“I think I made my position on this quite clear. I’m not done. I might never be done, Kaz.”
“I don’t have to take this from you,” Kaz warned.
“Is that right?”
Kaz nodded. “Yeah, that’s right. I don’t have to stay on the ship anymore. Do you want me to go?”
I regarded him for a few seconds. “Poor baby is upset. It’ll be a good six months or more before the overhaul is done on Griff’s ship. Even then, they’ll only release it after they’ve been paid. So, unless you plan on staying out here for a very long time, I suggest you just go with it.”
Kaz owned the salvage claim on his former mentor’s ship. It was supposed to be repaired by the maintenance bots while we searched for the Asherah homeworld, but something must have gone wrong. When we came back for the ship, the maintenance bots were gone, and someone had pilfered several critical systems from the ship. Kaz then asked me to bring that ship to a repair dock he knew about. Since I was first and foremost a capitalist, I negotiated a fair price for this service. Kaz didn’t think it was fair, but that’s because he wanted me to do it out of the kindness of my heart, to which I replied that it was that attitude that had landed him in debt in the first place. You don’t get something for nothing. The Spacehog required fuel and provisions. That was the reality of the situation.
“I thought we were friends,” Kaz said.
“We are. This is what being friends on Earth is like.”
Kaz glanced at Ben for a moment to see if I was lying to him. Ben nodded.
“I thought Humans were better than this.”
“Says the guy who abducts people from planets,” I said.
Kaz glanced at Lanaya, looking a little guilty. “Not like that, I assure you.”
“I know what happened,” Lanaya replied. “You were searching for someone else and that’s when you had to take them off the planet. You probably saved their lives.”
I felt my mouth slacken, betrayed. “Whose side are you on?”
She frowned at me.
“You heard her,” Kaz said, not missing a beat. “I saved your lives. If I hadn’t plucked you off Earth, chances are that Kael Torsin would’ve found you instead. Tell me, who do you think you were better off with, him or me?”
“Yeah, you’re a real saint.”
I turned back to the screen, thinking about the outpost again and that it must have some kind of name, or at the very least a unique identifier, but I didn’t know what it was.
Kierenbot flew the ship to a docking port.
A message appeared on my omnitool. It was the docking authority wanting to be paid for the privilege of coming to the outpost. I glanced at the payment request and authorized that amount. It wasn’t much, which surprised me a little bit since there weren’t other options in the area for provisions, but they’d likely get their pound of flesh some other way.
I looked at the others. “We’re going to need all hands for this. Ben, you and Lanaya go get Crim and meet me at the airlock.”
They left the bridge.
T’Chura looked at me. “How do you want to divide up the outpost?”
I considered it for a few seconds. “Whoever sent the message used the communications systems.”
“They could be anywhere,” Kaz said.
“Yes, and that’s why we need to split up. Use the tracker Kierenbot gave us and see where it leads. As long as we have regular check-ins, we’ll be fine,” I said.
“Captain,” Kierenbot said, “I’d like to use my other chassis for this. You know, just in case.”
Kierenbot’s other chassis was a modified battlebot that he could offload his consciousness into. It was quick and powerful and had no shortage of tricks available.
“Okay, but remember, we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. We get in, find out who sent the message, and then get some answers. Once we find them, let the others know and wait for backup.”
