The Shadow Among The Stars: Book One of the Dread Naught Trilogy Read online

“Alright, then,” Bryluen said, clapping her hands. “Read this over and let me know when you’re ready, Vort.”

  5. The Prodigy and the Paradox

  The Listening Post on Ximenes was discovering firsthand why the initial colonization attempt of the world had failed. The Marines of the watch post had warded off the wildlife for quite some time with electric fields, sentry guns, and various other defenses, but now of all things a major incursion of the local insect population was occurring. As it happened, this specific insectoid life on Ximenes was nearly as large as a man. The colony-based creatures built great underground tunnels, and until now had stayed away from the Listening Post.

  A few minutes prior, seismic readings at the post intensified, culminating in a tunnel bursting open just outside the post’s exterior wall. The Marines had hurtled a dozen grenades into the hole, but the tunnel was too sturdy and wide to be collapsed by anything short of proper directional charges. A swarm of ponderous, beetle-like creatures were attempting to clamber up the exterior wall and attack the Marines with their chitinous beaks. Organized rifle fire had prevented melee contact so far, but it was only a matter of time until the bugs breached the defenses through sheer mass and insistence.

  Fortunately, the Listening Post on Ximenes had one asset most posts did not. The large front gate lowered with a rumble. Part of the swarm saw the opening and began to flow toward the gate, as the Listening Post’s ace-in-the-hole was revealed. Standing just behind the gate was a hulking exosuit two-and-a-half meters high, thickly plated with an imposing missile rack atop the cockpit. The suit resembled a headless weight-lifter with the proportions to match, its squared armor plates like slabs of muscle across its surface. A thick panel of transparent alloy in the suit’s upper chest allowed a hazy view of the pilot within, and an array of weapons were folded on the sides of the chassis where they could slide up rails to the suit’s brawny wrists. Currently, an oiled minigun inhabited each weapon mount, whirling idly.

  The X-1 Marduk, as the suit was known, was the harsh image of crude, unyielding power both coldly industrial and bombastically intimidating. The Marduk Project had been conducted based on a lofty goal: to create a form of military unit that could withstand the punishment and carry the payload of a Walker, without sacrificing the close combat skill and maneuverability of infantry. Unfortunately, in field tests the finesse required to best utilize the assistive technologies granting the suit its immense strength—as well as the focus and temperament required to use the suit’s visual-trigger and voice command systems under duress—had rendered it remarkably difficult to use. As a result, the project had been scrapped in favor of other research avenues. The existing suit—and the one jockey capable of manning it to its full potential—were now relegated to stop-gap tasks at outposts which found themselves temporarily under-supplied.

  The jockey of the X-1 Marduk was Sergeant Kirby Furcotte, an eight-year veteran in the Astral Marine Corps. She had received a commendation from her superiors to transfer from her Ninurta Assault Walker Squadron to the Marduk training program two years ago. She was a Polymath when it came to vehicles, and she had several of the highest Vehicular Proficiency ratings in the entire Corps, not to mention an unbroken top rank in Walkers. Her gifts for jockeying and natural fervor in battle made her sublimely dangerous in the Marduk, though this fervor seemed to abandon her when she left the exosuit's armored confines.

  The attacking arthropodal creatures, of course, failed to appreciate what made Kirby special and instead suffered the immediate brunt of her wrath. With a brief whine, the miniguns reached their maximum rotation speed and began to spray high-velocity rounds at a blistering rate of fire. Kirby panned each arm back and forth, sweeping the bugs back from the gate with the same casual disinterest with which she would have mopped a kitchen floor. Yellowish alien fluids splashed wildly in a one hundred eighty degree arc as Kirby strolled forward, allowing the gate to slide shut behind her. After several straight seconds of furious fire, she had cleared a large perimeter around the gate.

  Turning to her right toward the alien tunnel, she swapped weapons. The miniguns stopped their rotations, and tucked themselves down onto the weapon rail on each arm. Disengaging with a loud clack, they flew back up Kirby’s arms and folded neatly onto the sides of the thickly armored ammo case on her back. A pair of long blades shot out of the backs of her gauntlets. The blades’ blueish alloy glittered in the sun as Kirby picked up speed and closed on the alien host.

  A moment before Kirby reached the aliens nearest the tunnel opening, the rocket pods atop her cockpit fired off an even spread of small munitions that cleared a hemispherical space with a bright flash. She then fell upon the aliens with broad, scything arcs of her wrist blades that sent chunks of bug rolling away in a series of meaty slaps. The bugs’ advance on the wall ceased as Kirby engaged in close combat, allowing the Marines to begin pushing the bugs back toward the tunnel. Within a few minutes, the creatures had been corralled back into their entry point at which time Kirby’s rocket pods clanked loudly as they loaded a new form of ammunition. Stepping to the lip of the hole, she aimed for a moment, before carefully spraying a series of rockets evenly around the inner circumference of the tunnel. The breaching munitions sunk into the walls and flashed indicator lights showing they were ready for detonation. Kirby dutifully stepped back and triggered the with a wry smile.

  The tunnel collapsed evenly inward with a muffled roar, drawing a cheer from the marines along the outpost walls. None of them had seen meaningful combat for nearly three months and, like most marines, had distinctly felt its absence. Their adrenaline-rush wore off as the last creature was put down, and the garrison soon fell into a chorus of groans as the realization set in that they were required to begin cleaning the outpost grounds of the copious mass of insectoid corpses left behind. Around three hours later, as the majority of green blood and shards of chitinous material had been swept away, Bryluen arrived within the listening post perimeter via shuttle. The commander of the Marine garrison had rushed out to meet the operative, but Bryluen had perfunctorily waved her badge and asked where she could find Sergeant Furcotte. Kirby was outside her suit, silently finishing post-action repairs and diagnostics as she always did in the Listening Post vehicle depot.

  In a number of ways, Sergeant Kirby Furcotte was the incarnation of a detached shrugging motion. She had a long face and was lanky, with terrible posture and pale skin. She was thin nearly to the point of scrawniness, the visual impression all the more exacerbated by her height. Wherever she wasn’t awash in soot or oil, she was awash in ruddy freckles. Even when isolated in sealed facilities on lightless planetoids, she seemed to be eternally nursing sunburns on her face, neck, and shoulders. Her mint-colored eyes bore a yellow tinge around the rim of the irises, and a pair of dark patches had taken up permanent residence beneath them long ago. Her long auburn hair was eternally kinked from constantly being tied back and stuffed under a cap.

  She currently wore the fitted olive fatigues of an Astral Marine jockey, though she had removed her jacket and tied it about her waist while working due to the oppressive tropical humidity. Beneath, she wore a white tank top which by this point was thoroughly dabbed in patches of various vehicular fluids. Like many Marines, Kirby was swathed in tattoos of various provenance and quality. The numerous designs were in a mostly solid mass down her back, each shoulder down to her elbow, her shins almost to her ankles, and across her stomach and hips. A stand-alone design was tucked behind her left ear.

  Bryluen approached and leaned one hip on a nearby work table. She had eschewed her own jacket due to the rainforest climate, instead wearing a breezy white shirt and fitted jeans with her metal CSOE badge clipped to her waistband. Bryluen spoke in Kirby’s native English, though as a Marine Kirby could speak in both Modern Standard Mandarin and Modern Standard Arabic, and as a jockey in particular was familiar with French.

  “Sergeant Furcotte, I need to speak with you.” Kirby turned from her work, surprise evident on he
r narrow face. A thick, ragged scar started at her right collar bone and ran across her chest at a downward angle where it disappeared beneath her tank top. Tattooed flames wreathed the dramatic tear.

  She sniffed, blinking hard and twitching her sharp nose. Kirby’s voice bore a thick, lazy drawl that stretched out her vowels. “Uh, yes ma’am?”

  “Dame Bryluen Branok, CSOE.”

  Kirby instantly snapped to attention, her posture straightening and her combat boots thumping together as she saluted. “Sergeant Furcotte, Dame. What can I do for you?”

  “I have something to ask you, Sergeant,” Bryluen casually waved a hand to tell the jockey to be at ease, causing Kirby to slowly relax into her standard posture. “I am forming a strike team to engage a new threat to Human space. Both mobile ordnance and a skilled pilot like yourself would be an enormous boon. Joining up means a long-term assignment with assigned housing—including a workshop for any alterations or improvements to the Marduk you wish to make.”

  The last point caused Kirby’s wispy eyebrows to raise in interest. If nothing else she had a penchant for all mechanical endeavors, but had so far been disallowed from altering the Marduk to her liking. “This is a CSOE task force, or a Marine assignment directed by the CSOE, Dame Branok?”

  “CSOE entirely. You’ll be honorably discharged from the Marines and will be bound by the CSOE code of conduct under deferred legality—basically just don’t commit war crimes or spit in the faces of important people, pretty easy stuff. The boys and girls here on Ximenes get a courtesy group of patrol drones while you get to wear what you like, lounge about under lax personal behavior requirements when off-duty, and enjoy a set of proper amenities with pay. Moreover, you’ll have a chance to make a big difference against what could be a major threat—in fact, a woman like you could end up helping write the book on engagement practices,” Bryluen spread her hands. “Then again, you could just stay here and bug-hunt if that seems like too much.”

  Kirby smiled. “No, ma’am, a task force assignment sounds mighty fine.”

  ◆◆◆

  The dense taiga stretched out for thousands of miles in each direction across the surface of Glenn’s World. The small village of Thales was nearly forty-five kilometers to the northwest of Bryluen’s current destination in the woodlands. She was bound in a thick black coat with a neat fur trim to insulate against the bitter, marrow-freezing cold outside. The shuttle buffeted quietly on the arctic wind as it neared the drop-off point. Despite the warmth of the shuttle interior, Bryluen repeatedly flexed her gloved fingers as she considered both the intensely frigid exterior temperatures and the nature of the final person she hoped to acquire for Dread Naught.

  Despite Vort, this last recruit may likely have been the most inscrutable Bryluen was going to contact. Nicadzim Alexievich Kuzmako had been under casual surveillance by the CSOE for years. He was, to all intents and purposes, scientifically unexplainable. The essential characteristic of what made Nicadzim special was that reality misbehaved in his presence. He knew things he couldn’t have known and spoke of experiences he couldn’t have had in orders they couldn’t have occurred in, all while bizarre things happened around him. Gravity distortions, isolated instances of objects in time loops, and numerous other impossibilities were the norm around Nicadzim.

  He seemed to occasionally ignore some essential rules of Time and Space himself, allowing him to alter his location in a way that wasn’t possible. He also appeared to have difficulty interacting with events and people in a chronologically-consistent fashion, reflected in the tenses of his speech. In the brief contacts the CSOE had with him he spoke of other planes of existence and impossible beings, and it had been clear the oddities of his presence were not entirely under his control.

  More pertinently he had at times demonstrated the ability to call up some forms of abstracted weaponry from the recesses of his mind, and such an instance is what initially drew the CSOE’s attention. Regardless, it had been determined Nicadzim was ultimately harmless and mainly desired to be left alone. The CSOE had since directed inquiries and other bothersome types away from him. As such, he had been informed of Bryluen’s visit a day prior so as not to overly disturb his peace.

  Nicadzim lived in a spartan wood and stone cabin he had erected with his own hands. Food and other supplies were most often delivered to his remote home, but Nicadzim would occasionally go into town for special occasions. When Bryluen’s shuttle came in for a landing outside the cabin, Nicadzim was sitting in an old chair on his porch waiting. The mysterious man seemed around Bryluen’s age. He had a bald head with bushy eyebrows and a thick, dirty blonde mustache run through with gray and silver. He was subtly tanned and had beady eyes the color of swirling Mediterranean waters. He was a massive wall of a man that must have weighed at least seventy kilograms more than Bryluen. He was barrel-chested with hairy, tree-trunk arms and legs that could prop up a court house. Had he been standing, Bryluen would have only come up to his chest. A broad bulge above his belt line brought some much needed reality to his titanic bulk. Nicadzim wore thick jeans and despite gales that would give an exposed person frostbite in less than fifteen minutes, wore a short-sleeved brown shirt. Overall Nicadzim heavily resembled a Strongman from an old circus and could almost certainly perform the part.

  Frost buffeted inward as the transport's loading ramp lowered, and as Bryluen strode downward she could already feel ice crystals accumulating on her eyelashes. Her senses remained ever-sharp from years of experience and training, so in less than three seconds she had noted an entire litany of oddities in the environment.

  Firstly she felt the wildly unsettling sensation of every hair on her body shifting about thirty degrees to her left, as if pulled by some unseen magnetic force. The heavy snow fell to the ground at a gentle angle—an angle almost perpendicular to the direction of the harsh winds. A hissing sound arose from the cabin as snowflakes that would otherwise settle on Nicadzim’s roof simply slid off, falling faster than they should at an angle too shallow for their apparent trajectory. A cigar nestled in an ash tray behind Nicadzim’s chair puffed smoke in time with his breathing.

  The huge man paid these things no mind, and as Bryluen approached him she showed no outward concern for her environment. His face was difficult to read as he surveyed the Operative. He rose slowly to his full, impressive height and extended a hand. Bryluen felt her own hand enclosed in his warm grip, and she shook firmly despite the fact she was still three meters away from Nicadzim with her arm hanging downward. Her sharp eyes spotted the indentation in Nicadzim’s hand where her fingers should be.

  He spoke, his voice low and thick with an accent of hard consonants and harsh vowels. His speech possessed a percussive cadence that drove his words along with solemn certainty. “Greetings, Dame Branok; I was aware this day would one day come. In what manner may I have assisted you?”

  The CSOE had found almost no meaningful records of Nicadzim. Even his origins were unclear; though he had been heard to speak only English, his accent was indicative of a Slavic native language. “Good afternoon, Nicadzim. I apologize for the intrusion, but I have something very important to ask you. Nothing like studies or research you’ve refused before.”

  Nicadzim gazed silently at her, his expression unclear. Bryluen paused as long as was appropriate before continuing. “People are in danger. I’m putting together a task force to fight against a new threat that we know very little about, and you would make an amazing addition the team.”

  The large man shook his head. “Madame, I will inform you that I am not performing acts of violence.”

  Bryluen sniffed and rubbed her ever-reddening nose. She would be unsurprised if icicles were growing in her eyebrows. “We both know that’s not true. You’re good at many things, but lying does not seem to be one of them. We know about both the attempted mugging and the T’hròstag attack at Aldrin’s Peak. Or rather, the attack that never actually happened because you got there first. If we didn’t know about you, we wou
ld be clueless to this day about what had wiped out an entire raiding party. We know that you risked your life to thanklessly save many, many others for no reward or acknowledgment.”

  Nicadzim’s expression shifted into a thoughtful cast but he still said nothing. The snow aligned with the wind once more, as the cigar behind Nicadzim became sopping wet. A group of birds fluttered from—or perhaps into the trees given each was flying backwards. Bryluen felt her coat begin to float on her body.

  The Operative waited again for Nicadzim to speak for a few seconds before resuming. “I’ve read the reports, watched the tapes, heard the depositions, parsed the theories. All my career I’ve learned to read between the lines, so if I know anything it’s that you are secluded in these woods neither because you don’t care, nor because you’re afraid. I believe that you’re out here because you don’t want others to worry. Not because you’re a danger to others, or to avoid being misunderstood. You’re here because you care enough about the anxieties of people you’ve never met that you would consign yourself to a lonely existence just to grant others one less possible concern in their lives.

  “You are a kind man, Nicadzim. I’m not going to try and tempt you by promising any positive end to this endeavor. But what I can promise is that joining me will be the best opportunity you will ever have to do as much good for others as possible. I am only taking up your time today because what I am asking of you is so important that I would not think to bring it before someone who couldn’t make an enormous difference. You do the impossible, Nicadzim. You are the ultimate clutch-hitter, and we are going in blind.”

  The huge man breathed deeply with all the import and restrained power of a sleeping dragon. He nodded slowly. “Your logic and reasoning will be, as I imagine you will become aware, quite sound. You indeed possess the necessary information to best understand the implications of my condition. Therefore I will review the contract and, assuming I do not take issue with any of the particulars therein, I will accept.”