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  Galaxy’s End

  Future House Publishing

  Cover image copyright: Shutterstock.com. Used under license.

  Text © 2019 Future House Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Future House Publishing at [email protected].

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-944452-97-1 (paperback)

  Developmental editing by Erin Searle

  Substantive editing by Sara Ansted

  Copy editing by Abbie Robinson

  Interior design by Sarah Jensen

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  Contents

  PART ONE: Pica

  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

  PART TWO: Gamma

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  PART THREE: Pinnacle

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  About the Author

  PART ONE: Pica

  Chapter 1

  The Tactum was the subspace communication link between a thousand worlds. And ever since it had joined one solar system to another over five hundred years ago, the Tactum had carried the voices of the citizens of the Cooperative across the vast expanse between stars instantaneously. It enabled the colonization of the galaxy.

  And it had never gone silent. Until right now.

  So when the lights began to fall from the sky, Dax was . . . mildly perturbed.

  “Tai,” he said, turning to his second, who was on the tactical console, “I think our T-receiver is acting up.” He tapped on a silhouette on the ship display. “I am not receiving an albedo body from the Luxuria.”

  “Acting up?” Tai said, not looking up from her console. “That would suggest that our T-receiver was ever acting—.”

  “Acting down?” Dax suggested.

  “Acting nominally,” Zeph said from his navigation console. “The word you want is ‘nominal.’”

  “Thank you, astrogator,” Tai said. “Nominal. Which would mean that you would actually need enough money to fix it or buy a new one. Who ever heard of a transport ship without a spare receiver?” She paused. “Or any ship, for that matter.”

  “We could afford a new receiver and as many spares as you’d like, if we didn’t have to shell out on extravagances like crew pay, or food, or—”

  “Or O2 scrubbers,” Tai said. Still not looking up from her tac console.

  “Yes, extravagances like breathing oxygen. If we could otherwise skip all of those, yes, we could afford a new receiver.”

  “And spares,” Zeph said.

  “Well, it’s not the receiver,” Tai said. “This time,” she added. “I just ran a diagnostic and the reason you aren’t seeing an albedo body is because she isn’t reflecting one. At least not one we are picking up.” Albedo bodies were a very useful form of navigation, even if they were light minutes or hours old. Within the system they acted as extra points of reference to the local stars and planets.

  “Well it’s not like she just magically cloaked herself,” he said. “I mean, she can’t right?”

  “The Luxuria is an Aphrodite class star line cruise ship.” Tai said, looking at the screen more closely. “She most definitely does not have stealth capabilities.”

  “Okay, so she went somewhere.” Dax tapped his chin. “Zeph, give me positions, last broadcasted.” They were going to crash into something, knowing their luck.

  “On it.” Zeph keyed in a sequence on his console, the blue bridge overhead lights contrasting with the orange glow of the console. “What the—wow.”

  “I don’t like that wow.” Dax walked over to Zeph’s seat. “That’s not a good wow.”

  “Well, I just tried pulling the last known local storage from Kyrie’s memory into the navcom.” The navigation computer had one of the most powerful processors on the ship. “And I couldn’t.”

  “Wait, we lost the data?”

  “No the data is there, it just can’t be pulled into the navcom.” Zeph squinted at his screen for a moment. “I’m going to hardwire it.” He got out of his seat. “Tai, you sure the T-receiver isn’t down? This is just like when it went down two runs ago, when the—”

  “I’m pretty voiding sure it’s working. The reason that we aren’t seeing her albedo body is because it just ain’t voiding there.” She threw her readout on the main display. “Look for yourself.”

  There was a pause as Dax tried make sense of what he was seeing. And not seeing.

  “Uh, Tai, unless every ship, station, and planet in the system just learned how to turn their albedo down to 0, something is odd here.” He turned to Zeph. “You slaved the ship memory to navcom yet?”

  “Wires! What, we back in the petroleum age now? We gonna start burning fossil fuels to drive combustion engines to . . .” his voice trailed off to a muffle as he got farther into the navcom’s chassis.

  Moments later, his head popped up. “There we go, I plugged it into the rest of the ship. With wires. Like a peasant.” He patted the navcom fondly, though, before closing up. “But, I guess we’re lucky this ship is basically an ancient relic. Hardwired main systems? In another ship, you’d be dead in the void if the receiver went down.”

  Tai said, “I told you the receiver isn’t down!” the same time Dax said, “You knockin’ my ship, Zeph?”

  The Kyrie had been a light military transport before it was converted to just a light transport. A very old light military transport.

  “Well?” Dax gestured to the main screen. “What do you got for me?”

  “I don’t know boss. Last broadcasted is at least a few minutes old now.”

  “Cap, something strange here.” The tone in Tai’s vo
ice sent a small shiver down Dax’s spine. “I’m not receiving any visual telemetry.”

  “So she went invisible and silent?” Dax asked.

  “No, I mean I am not receiving any visual telemetry from anything. In the system.” Tai locked eyes with Dax.

  “Hammers,” Dax responded. Tai usually reserved that look for extremely bad situations. Which was pretty much any time Dax was involved in whatever local system’s variant of poker was available. “Tai, extend our receivers. I want raw visual feed on the display.” He turned to Zeph. “Give me interpolation, last known. Don’t worry about when the live data cuts off, just calculate from the last two hours of the feed.”

  Kyrie’s main display went dark just as the bridge went silent. The only sound was the navcom’s ALU crunching the data.

  The screen lit up.

  “What in the voids,” Tai said.

  Dax framed an albedo body with his fingers and pulled his hands apart to expand on the image. There was a nav marker labeled Luxuria but the red hash marks encircled empty space where there should have been star liner.

  From where they stood, just a little over thirty light seconds away from Pica 3, she was simply a white albedo body against space’s dark background.

  “She’s falling into the gravity well,” Tai said. They waited a few more moments, watching the body of reflected light move slowly closer to the planet. “With her mass, very soon she’ll be so deep down Pica 3’s well that she won’t be able to escape without planetary tugs”

  “Something must be wrong,” Dax said. “Zeph overlay comms. What are they reporting? Engine failure? Hull breach?”

  “I have no signal. It’s all static.”

  “Bounce off the nearest sat relay, get the comm data from there.” Dax pointed to the relay’s nav marker on screen.”

  “No boss, you don’t understand. It’s all static. I’m not getting a single ping or bounce from anything.”

  Dax turned to look at Zeph, the disbelief turning into acid in his stomach. “That’s impossible.”

  Zeph nodded. “Nothing.” There was a slight hint of panic in Zeph’s voice.

  “Look—no escape pods, no stabilizers or retro thrusters firing . . . nothing.” Tai was using their accrued visual feed from the last few minutes to compile an upscaled image. “It can’t be structural, there isn’t any atmo venting. They’re just free falling.”

  “Not just the Luxuria,” Zeph said.

  There were several other bodies on the display that were accelerating to nearby gravity wells. It hadn’t been apparent before, because they were light minutes and hours further away, but it was clear now.

  “What’s happening to them?” Tai asked. “And why isn’t it happening to us?”

  “Tai, you said for sure that our T-receiver wasn’t down.”

  “For the last time, Cap,” Tai started.

  “And Zeph, still nothing over comms?”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you, boss.”

  Dax looked at the display. No updated visual telemetry. No updated navigational telemetry. He turned to look at their navcom. And the fiber optic cable that Zeph had ran from computer to the ship.

  “No voiding way.”

  Chapter 2

  “Zeph, what did you say again, about being lucky?” Dax pointed at Zeph while snapping his fingers.

  “Usually I’m talking about us being unlucky,” Zeph said. “Like, extremely unlucky. Which is ironic if you consider that one third of the crew has a gambling addiction.”

  “No, you said that ‘it was lucky that the ship . . .’” It was on the tip of Dax’s tongue. “. . . Something?”

  Zeph thought for a moment. “Lucky the ship is an ancient relic?”

  “Hey—”

  “Classic?”

  “Lucky how?”

  “Because the main systems are hardwired. Which is great because you never get a spare receiver for the Kyrie, and one day we’re going to—”

  “Why is that lucky?” Dax said, cutting Zeph off. “More importantly why does it make those other ships unlucky?”

  “A ship the size of the Luxuria can’t wire all its systems together. Voids, a ship the fraction of the size couldn’t: that would be hundreds of miles of wire. And you can’t use radio or other electromagnetic frequencies if you want to operate near jump speeds. So they piggyback off the Tactum to allow the different systems to interface with each other.”

  “How about redundancies, fail-safes?” Dax asked.

  “You just reroute,” Zeph said, “through an adjacent T-network. Or, if needed, cross over to a T-network in parallel.”

  “Okay,” Dax said, still playing this mind game, still watching albedo bodies on the display slowly drift into gravity wells. “What if their T-receivers go down?”

  “No, I don’t think you understand,” Zeph said. “Ships of a large enough size, the whole ship is one Tactum receiver and transmitter. That’s why it’s so convenient. No wires at all. Instant transfer, total coverage.”

  “What if the Tactum was to magically . . . I don’t know . . .” Dax couldn’t believe he was going to say this. “What if the Tactum went down?”

  “The Tactum . . . ?

  “Went down,” Dax finished. “Stopped existing.”

  “That would be like assuming that magnetism magically stopped existing. Or gravity. Or some other force of nature.” Zeph looked really perturbed. “I mean, it’s like Tai said. They piggyback off the Tactum, the entire ship network. Every other system in the ship would be unable to communicate to any other. Wedge drive to telemetry. Life support to habitat control.”

  “Navigation to engines,” Tai said, gesturing to the slowly falling albedo bodies.

  “So what about doing what you did?” Dax asked, gesturing to Zeph. “Ad hoc hardwire?”

  “You got a mile a fiber optic just lying around? Who knows, maybe the Luxuria does. Either way it would take them hours to lay it down.”

  “So if the Tactum is really down . . .” Dax paused. He couldn’t go down that line of thinking right now. “So what can we do?” Dax asked.

  “About what?” Zeph looked at him quizzically.

  “About that!” He gestured to the scene unfolding on the display screen in front of them. “We have to do something!”

  “Do what?” Zeph said. He pulled the specs of the Luxuria, and then for good measure, threw the specs of the Kyrie next to it. “We’re a percentage of a fraction of the ship’s mass tonnage. And how many people could we even hold? Not to mention life support, which I should remind you we are trying to replenish.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” How could he explain it to Zeph, who had never spacefared out of the set routes they traveled? “When it all goes to hell out here, there’s isn’t Cooperative or Republic, inner systems or rim. There’s only the Void and us.”

  He turned to Tai. She nodded. “I’m prepping tight beam. Maybe we can communicate that we are trying to render assistance.” She keyed commands to her console. “Zeph, let’s receive on wide range, see if anyone is broadcasting in the clear.”

  Zeph shook his head. “Wide Range. Tight Beam.” More head shaking. “Jeezawow. It’s a testament to this ship’s . . .” he gave a pause as Dax tried to shoot him the coldest warning glare he could muster, “‘classic-ness’ that it still even has those, uh, classic devices.”

  “Just, do what you can. I’m going hands on.”

  Zeph shook his head again, muttering something about “hands-on”, “combustion engines” under his breath.

  Tai leaned in from her console. “Dax, obviously we have to do what we can, but what if, and this strains all credulity to say, but if the Tactum is really down and this isn’t just a solar system wide fluke, we are going to have bigger problems to deal with.”

  “Then we’ll deal with it when we know for sure that there isn’t anyone we can help on that whole cruiser.” Dax gripped the ship controls. “I’m going hands on.”

  The ship came to life. She had been drift
ing aimlessly when the positional sats stopped broadcasting navigational telemetry. It felt particularly odd to Zeph to be hands on inside the solar system’s main axis.

  “Zeph, give me interpolation on screen.” Zeph keyed his console, and the main view window was now superimposed with interpolation data using last known details of ships, planets, moons, and other notable bodies in the solar system, even if they were outside visual range. “Hopefully we’ll be able to get some visuals on anything before it’s too late to get out of its way.”

  “Blind leading the blind here,” Zeph said.

  Dax prepared himself for some very stressful light minutes.

  Chapter 3

  Except for the planets and moons, most of the ID tags circled empty space, the ships have either left, or captured by a nearby gravity well. As they got closer to the Luxuria, they started seeing the albedo bodies of some smaller ships that were light minutes away.

  “Any hails on the open frequencies?” Tai asked.

  “None, but that doesn’t surprise me. Most smaller ships don’t have any long-range transmitters that aren’t the T-kind.” He read some data off his console. “But in a few moments, we should be within tight beam range.”

  “Zeph, can you give me their telemetry on screen? I want to get us to relative stop with her, if not synchronous orbit.” Matching velocity would be hard enough without trying to match rotation as well.

  Zeph complied, and Dax finessed the Kyrie into drifting at a rather steady 2000 kilometers from the star cruiser.

  Tai pointed to a slowly forming albedo body on the screen. “Is that another ship?”

  Zeph squinted at the screen. “I’m going to attempt a tight beam.” In absence of the Tactum, they would have to depend on the line of sight data feed. Zeph fingers flew across the console. Dax couldn’t imagine the on the fly adjustments Zeph was making, trying to guess the position of a ship from only the after image of reflections light seconds away. After a few tense seconds, Zeph grinned. “I got a ping. I’m going to send a handshake request!”