Darkness Rising Read online

  Darkness Rising

  Archangel Project. Book Five

  C. Gockel

  Contents

  About Darkness Rising

  Acknowledgments

  1. Luddeccea: Fallout

  2. Some Weere in the Republic

  3. The Copperhead

  4. The General Returns

  5. Luddeccea: Asymmetrical Warfare

  6. Sagan’s Secret

  7. Luddeccea: The Enemy Within

  8. Time Gate 33

  9. Trinity

  10. Luddeccea: Treasonous

  11. Shadows

  12. Dark Worlds

  13. Luddeccea: Last Nights

  14. Darkness Above

  15. Luddeccea: Stolen Light

  16. Nature Against the Machine

  17. Darkness Speaks

  18. Hell Fire

  19. The Merkabah

  20. Decontamination

  21. Four Against the Dark

  22. The Captain’s Weere

  23. Gravity’s Shadow

  24. The Most Dangerous Weapon

  25. The General’s Premonition

  26. Cracks in the Republic

  27. Starship Defiant

  Also by C. Gockel

  Contact Information

  Copyright © 2019 C. Gockel

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, subject “Attention: Permissions,” at the email address below:

  [email protected]

  PRINT ISBN: 9781093672114

  Created with Vellum

  About Darkness Rising

  At the edge of the galaxy, a Galactic Republic research station has gone dark…

  Volka, 6T9, and Carl Sagan are called to help in the rescue mission … A mission that triggers telepathic nightmares in their starship so terrifying battle hardened Galactic Marines breakdown and weep.

  They’re about to discover some nightmares are real.

  The Darkness is Rising.

  Acknowledgments

  This book wouldn’t be possible without encouragement and support of my friends, family, and readers. Kay McSpadden, a friend since my days writing Spock / Uhura fanfiction, and a Mailer Award winning short story writer, reread it twice. Fellow author, Ron Neito, helpfully a national of Spain, caught a misgendering problem in a Spanish first name (among other errors.) Melissa Flores-Hossman, David Rhodes, Sarah Easterly, and Gretchen Almoughraby all helped me hammer out consistency issues and areas that had the potential to be misunderstood. They also gave me lots of encouragement along the way.

  I got a lot of encouragement from my followers on Facebook, too…and I learned things from them. Elizabeth Higdon, there was a factual inaccuracy in this book that you helped correct. (There was a world-wide outbreak of bubonic plague when the steamboat was introduced. I had no idea!)

  Besides reading and buying my books, and giving me words of encouragement, you, my fans, have also shared them with your friends and family, in person, on Facebook and Twitter, and GoodReads. I couldn’t keep doing this without you.

  Thank you for hanging around to read my daydreams!

  1

  Luddeccea: Fallout

  Alaric gripped the bars of the cell window and pulled himself up so his chin was above the sill. The smoke billowing above New Prime’s prison bit into his lungs and stung his eyes.

  The penitentiary sat on a hill to the west of No Weere, the ironic name of the weere settlement. Weere were wolf-human hybrids, and he remembered his mother explaining, “It’s no weere a good man wants to be.” Weere and humans weren’t supposed to mix, and the weere’s animal natures and appearance were openly and frequently derided. Of course, they did mix. He remembered his fellow cadets in Guard training laughing while heading to “weere houses” exclaiming, “It’s exactly weere we want to be.”

  The smoke had been in the air since his return from his ill-fated mission to Libertas sixty-three days ago. He’d exited his ship, smelled the acrid scent, and noticed the black, curling trails just above the horizon. A moment later, four members of Luddeccea’s Local Security had stepped up to him and said, “Sir, you’re under arrest by orders of the Council.” They hadn't mentioned the charges.

  At first, the smoke had come from No Weere. There had been riots there when he’d been incarcerated. Cut off from the papers and radio, he didn’t know what set them off, but he’d watched weere and Prime security forces clashing in the street. Weere had thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails, but Luddeccean Security had shot phasers. The weere had fallen like toy soldiers, and then fires had consumed huge swathes of the settlement before the tail end of the rainy season showers had extinguished them.

  The smoke had returned after the rains, but now it came from the west. Whether it came from New Prime, or from the prison itself, he couldn’t say.

  Beyond the half-burnt remains of No Weere was the jungle basin of the exclusion zone. Once it had been Prime, the old capital of Luddeccea. There’d been a spaceport there directly beneath Time Gate 8. The time gate had provided faster-than-light travel to any other gated port in the Galactic Republic. But then had come Revelation, when it had been discovered that the giant computers within the time gates were self-aware. Unprovoked, Time Gate 8 had dropped fission bombs and chemical weapons on the city of Prime. After over a century of cleanup, fallout still lingered. Even from a distance, the trees and vegetation looked mutated and wrong. The basin was alarmingly green; the tree limbs were too large and excessively twisted. Fruit grew in the exclusion zone to enormous sizes but was inedible. Volka, his uncle’s maid and Alaric’s…well, his weere…had brought him back a bornut that she’d found near the zone’s edge. Normally the size and shape of a thumb, it had been as large as his clenched fist and shaped like a deflated balloon.

  He remembered Volka’s wolf-like ears being curled down as she presented it to him, her eyes, outlined with naturally dark pigmentation, averted shyly. Her black fingernails had been glossier than the nut’s shell…

  Alaric’s arms started to shake, and he eased himself down until his bare feet touched the stone floor. Wiping his face, his hands strayed in the two months’ worth of beard—he hadn’t been allowed a razor—and gazed around his cell. It was sparse, the bed only a metal slab that hung from the wall, but there was a polyfoam mattress and a wool blanket. There was also a toilet, a sink, soap, and three brand new copies of the Three Books—the revised versions of the Torah, Bible, and Koran that Luddeccean society was based on.

  It was an officer’s prison, and no one had laid a hand on him since he’d arrived. Far better than what would have befallen Volka if he had arrested her. The screams of captured weere echoing up from the basement were a testament to that.

  His jaw got hard. He’d saved her from this place but failed to rescue her from the Galactic Republic’s android agent. Alaric had seen how disposable humans could be to the machines. He’d picked through the shattered, bloody bodies of women and children left behind by the Republic’s android spies. He also had intel on the outer rim sections of the Kanakah Disk, the closest Republic outpost. The Republic treated its poor worse than Luddeccea treated its weere. Would the machine that had brainwashed Volka toss her aside and leave her to drift down to the outer levels of some desolate space station?

  His jaw clenched at the memory of the android throwing out its arms and facing Alaric’s craft, as though trying to draw their fire. He shook his head. It was
a hallucination. It had to have been. He’d also hallucinated about being aboard the strange Republic craft with Volka, her werfle, and a ghost of the machine.

  He should have killed Volka. He regretted that.

  He also regretted not destroying the ship she and the android had escaped on. His failure would embolden the Republic. They would think they could intrude on Luddeccean space with impunity.

  He regretted not being able to see his sons. He knew they would face hardships without him, but those would make them stronger, and his wife Alexis, more than any woman, had the spine to raise two boys without the help of any man. Still, his boys had been a wonder to him— their transformations from helpless infants to beings who understood larger and larger pieces of the world were among his life’s greatest joys. He regretted that he would miss their transformation into men.

  But he didn’t regret not turning Volka in to be interrogated, and so he could not regret being in prison. He could only extrapolate that was why he was here. He still hadn’t been formally charged. He hadn’t been given a legal representative. Nor had he been allowed a visit with his wife Alexis. The daughter of a colonel, she’d have some gossip of his case.

  Alaric rapped the flat of his palm against his thigh. He knew he’d face a firing squad, that his trial would be a mere formality, and yet he wished they would get to it. Most of his crew had been killed in a surprise attack by rebel forces on Libertas. His trial would be on public record, and he needed his sons to know he had sworn upon the Three Books that he hadn’t been involved in the attack, and that he had not betrayed his crew.

  Somewhere down the hall, he heard someone whisper, “Doctor…I need a doctor…” The sounds of retching, and then of someone falling to the floor followed. Many of his fellow prisoners had gotten sick in the past few days—a particularly bad strain of the rainy season flu, he suspected. Alaric had seen them being carried past his cell on their way to the infirmary.

  For lack of anything to do, he walked over to the door, peered through the bars of the tiny window there, and waited for the guards to come and take the man away, silently counting the seconds. At 1,200 seconds he began again, but rustling in his cell made him pause. He turned his head and saw a rat in the corner. Not native to Luddeccea, the small, adaptable rodents had brought as much devastation to the local flora and fauna as Time Gate 8’s fission bomb. He looked around the cell for something to kill it with.

  A shadow in the outer window made him glance up. A werfle was poised there, bewhiskered nose shifting between Alaric and the rat. Werfles were one of the few native species that could eat the vermin. Alaric’s shoulders softened, and he almost smiled. He’d always liked the ten-legged, weasel-like creatures. This one was wild and probably venomous, but as long as he made no sudden moves, he’d be safe. “It’s yours,” he mouthed silently, as though the creature could read his lips and understand. “I’m not that hungry.” The food had gotten sparser the past week—just a few bites of beans or grits thrown in a bowl. He was hungry and not above eating rats, but the thing was most likely carrying the flu. A few minutes of a full belly wouldn’t be worth the pain later and would be counterproductive. “And your physiology is different enough that its bugs won’t hurt you,” he added, as though that would assuage the werfle’s hesitation.

  The creature stared at him a long moment and then slithered down the wall, its ten claws clutching the cracks between the stones with surprising ease. Before Alaric could blink, or the rat could squeak, the werfle had dispatched it. Instead of clasping its prey in its middle claw pairs and climbing back up the wall, the werfle began eating, keeping its eyes on Alaric.

  Careful to keep his movements slow, Alaric sank to the ground and drew his knees to his chest. In boredom, he found himself talking to the werfle. “Well, Solomon, what can you tell me of the outside world?”

  Lifting its head, the werfle studied him, bloody whiskers twitching.

  “Solomon is what I called the werfle who lived on our farm when I was a boy,” Alaric explained. “Like Solomon the Wise.” He idly remembered Volka saying that weere believed that werfles were possessed by demons, but when he’d last seen her, she’d had a pet werfle.

  The werfle before him sniffed in what sounded like a laugh and resumed its feast.

  From down the hall came the sound of more retching. As a cadet, Alaric had taken a barrage of psychological tests. His mentor had suggested that he go into intelligence. “The results indicate that you’d tolerate isolation, imprisonment, and interrogation well.” Alaric had been tempted, just to test himself, but charting courses at lightspeed and seeing the solar system had been more tempting. Still, over the course of his imprisonment, Alaric had noted with a sort of detached amusement that the test seemed to have been accurate. He hadn’t panicked, hadn’t tried anything desperate in order to escape, and when he lay down his head at night, he slept.

  Down the hall, he heard more retching, and what sounded like someone losing their bowels. The hairs on the back of Alaric’s neck rose. He noticed—or imagined—a note of decay mixed with the odors of vomit and feces drifting from beneath the door. His mind began whirling over the mystery of the smoke cloud, the way the meals had been getting poorer and poorer, the lack of a guard, that he hadn’t had word from Alexis, and that he had no idea if his boys were safe. He shivered and took a shallow breath. Down the hall, someone whispered, “Doctor…I need a doctor.”

  The werfle sniffed again, and again it sounded like a laugh. Lifting its head, it gazed at Alaric, whiskers twitching as it feasted.

  Alaric was transfixed by it. He couldn’t say for how long.

  “Please…” a prisoner whispered.

  The whisper snapped Alaric to alertness, and it was like a fog in his mind had cleared. What was wrong with him? Humans around him were sick, possibly deathly so. Springing to his feet, Alaric began banging at the door and shouting, “Doctor! We need a doctor!” With each pound, his heart rate increased and his fists stung, but he couldn’t stop. Another distant part of him noted, So this is panic.

  He was distantly aware of the werfle hissing. He heard boot steps in the hall and pounded harder. “They’re dying!” he shouted, suddenly sure that he had smelled decay. “Dying!”

  A face emerged at the other side of the door. Alaric almost shouted, “What took you so long!” but the man wasn’t prison personnel. He wore the black uniform of a private security guard, and around his right arm was an orange and green ribbon, the colors of the house of Abraham. Drawing away from the door, Alaric remembered Volka’s tale about Counselor Abraham murdering his half-weere child, its mother, and the weere who’d known about the baby. The counselor had tried to murder Volka, too. All that blood to protect his name from the scandal of a half-weere offspring. A moment after those thoughts entered his mind, Alaric found himself staring down the barrel of a phaser pistol.

  In the corner of the cell, the werfle’s hiss increased in volume.

  Alaric’s panic fled, and his fists curled at his side. They knew Volka had saved him from the wreckage of the rebel attack, and they knew he knew about the baby. They were tying up loose ends.

  Fury washed over Alaric in a wave that turned his vision red. He’d never get to testify. His lip curled, his skin heated, and he felt that if it was possible, he would self-combust.

  The man holding the pistol began to shake. He was sweating profusely, his breathing rapid and shallow, his skin was pale, and dark circles underlined his eyes.

  “What are you waiting for?” Alaric demanded, leaping forward and shaking the bars. Falling back, he pounded his chest. “Hurry up and shoot!” Alaric had failed his homeworld, failed his sons, and he’d failed Volka. Were any of them safe? Were his children safe from Abraham? Was Volka being abused in some dingy oxygen-depleted hovel in the Republic?

  Down the hall, someone said, “They all have the flu, Jong.”

  The security guard, who might have been Jong, coughed.

  The werfle hissed, and Jong’s eye
s slid to it. For the first time, Alaric noted the blueness in his lips. Jong’s pistol sagged, and he backed away. “He has one of them in there.” He gasped. “He’s as good as dead.”

  “Shoot him and let’s get out of here,” said the man out of Alaric’s eyesight.

  Jong’s pistol clattered to the floor and he began heaving bile in the hallway. The smell was so rancid it flushed away Alaric’s anger, and he backed against the far wall, holding his arm over his face. He heard a thump and retreating footsteps. Holding his breath and peeking through the bars, he saw Jong had collapsed in his own vomit.

  In the corner, the werfle laughed.

  2

  Some Weere in the Republic

  “Hurry up!” the voice made Volka’s ears swivel, but she didn’t hear it so much as feel it like a flutter of tiny pterys in her stomach.

  “I’m...going…as fast…as I can…Carl Sagan!” Volka panted, protesting the werfle’s demands, jogging through Copernicus City’s immense passenger spaceship terminal. It was wide as a four-lane roadway. The ceiling was several stories high and made of clear plastic. The sky was blue, and clouds were white at this level, but here and there, between the people and hover cabs passing on either side, she’d catch glimpses out the side windows and see the yellow sulfur clouds that the city floated above.