Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Read online

  Dark Space Universe (Book 1)

  (2nd Edition)

  by Jasper T. Scott

  JasperTscott.com

  @JasperTscott

  Copyright © 2017

  THE AUTHOR RETAINS ALL RIGHTS FOR THIS BOOK

  Cover Art © Jasper T. Scott

  Acknowledgments

  Being a writer is hard work, and most of the time it’s a lonely job, which is why we create characters to keep us company. Having said that, there’s also dozens of people working behind the scenes to make each book a reality.

  As always, this book comes to you in partly thanks to my wife for her support, and it comes to you in its presently polished condition thanks to my editing team: Aaron Sikes, David Cantrell, William Schmidt, and Ian Jedlica. Thanks guys. You make the hard part of writing easy.

  Thanks also go out to my cover artist, Tom Edwards, for his fantastic artwork, and a huge thanks goes out to my team of advance readers: Bruce A. Thobois, Chase Hanes, Dave Topan, David Kramer, Davis Shellabarger, Diosdado Rivera, Gary Watts, Gaylon Overton, Gregg Cordell, H Huyler, Ian Seccombe, Jeff Belshaw, Jeremy Gunkel, Jim Meinen, Jim Owen, John Nash, Marten Ekema, Mary Whitehead, Peter Hughes, Philip Smith, Rafael Gutierrez, Rebecca Zalar, Richard T. Conkey, Ron Almstead, and Wade Whitaker. At least 50 typos are missing from this book because of these brave souls.

  Then there’s you, the reader. Without you, this book wouldn’t exist. With every book of mine that you buy and every review that you write, you ensure that I keep writing the best books that I can, as fast as I can, so thank you for your support.

  To those who dare,

  And to those who dream.

  To everyone who’s stronger than they seem.

  “Believe in me / I know you’ve waited for so long / Believe in me / Sometimes the weak become the strong.”

  —STAIND, Believe

  Departure

  Prologue

  —The Year 23 EE (Etherian Empire)—

  A cleric stood on a bench preaching in the center of the courtyard. A crowd had gathered to listen to his heresy, but so far no one was showing signs of hostility toward him.

  Taking that to be a good sign, Lucien Ortane allowed his attention to drift to the towering spires of the Etherian Palace. The dying rays of an artificial sun beamed down between the spires from the dusty, star-studded pink sky. But those stars were actually viewports in the floor of Level One.

  More than a thousand decks lay above and below the “surface” of this hollow world, cushioning it from the frigid vacuum of outer space. This was New Earth, or the Icosahedron, an ever-expanding megastructure made up of over half a million giant, triangular facets that slotted together to form the twenty much larger triangular faces of the Icosahedron itself. It was the only home Lucien had ever known, an incredible feat of engineering, and the sole surviving legacy of humanity’s previous ruler: Omnius—the AI who would be god.

  Lowering his gaze from the sky, Lucien spotted the giant crystal Star of Etherus glittering from the uppermost spire of the Etherian Palace. That star-shaped emblem acted like a prism, fracturing the artificial sunlight and casting rainbows over the courtyard. Out of the corner of his eye, Lucien glimpsed one such rainbow gleaming on the skull-like gray face of the Gor standing beside him.

  Ordinarily Brak was horrifying to look at, but the rainbow added a comical effect to his features. Lucien smiled.

  Brak had been his best friend for as long as he could remember. The two of them had gone through their Paragon training together, apprenticed together, and saved each other’s lives more times than Lucien could count. Most people feared the Gors and kept a wary distance from them, despite the fact that Etherus had granted them equal status with humans aboard the Icosahedron. So far they were the only sentient alien race to be given that privilege.

  Lucien elbowed Brak in the ribs—no small feat given that his ribs began where Lucien’s shoulders ended. “Where do you want to go for our first mission?”

  The Gor gave no reply. Colorful images flickered across his slitted yellow eyes as he looked something up on his augmented reality contacts (ARCs). Maybe he was looking through a list of available missions.

  As Paragons and officers, recently graduated from tyros to champions third class, they had to choose where to go now. They could stay aboard the Icosahedron and help Etherus keep the peace among its trillions of inhabitants, but space exploration was the province of young and unattached officers like them, those not yet weighed down by the responsibilities of raising a family, or bored and jaded by long experience with the impossible vastness of space.

  To Lucien there was nothing better than contemplating the unknown, the thought of picking a star at random and traveling to it in the blink of an eye, discovering things that no other human had ever before seen or experienced. All of that lay ahead of them, and as officers they had plenty of autonomy. Hundreds of missions left New Earth daily, each one destined for some new corner of the Large Magellanic Cloud, where New Earth was currently stationed—or even for one of the other satellite galaxies of the Milky Way.

  “I hear Fornax is supposed to be nice,” Lucien said, suggesting a satellite galaxy at random. The Paragons’ mandate was to explore, colonize, and spread Etherian doctrines of peace, justice, and immortality to sentient species all over the universe. Of course, with the universe being as large as it was, that job would never end.

  “Brak? Are you ignoring me?”

  Now the alien turned his skull-shaped head, and the rainbow on his face swept across his sunken cheeks. The light from his ARCs disappeared, leaving Lucien to ponder the depths of the Gor’s fierce yellow eyes—a predator’s eyes. Animal rights being what they were aboard the Icosahedron, Brak didn’t have an outlet for all his primal instincts, and they simmered quietly just beneath the surface.

  “You look hungry, Brak. When was the last time you ate something?”

  “I am not hungry,” Brak replied.

  “Shh!” a woman standing beside them whispered.

  Brak turned his glare upon her and bared his black, dagger-like teeth.

  The woman paled and looked away, back to the cleric standing in the center of the courtyard.

  “That’s telling her, Brak!” Lucien said.

  “I say nothing.”

  Lucien grinned. “It’s not what you said, but how you said it.”

  Brak hissed quietly. “I never understand humans.”

  A large crowd had gathered in the courtyard. Lucien hadn’t bothered to listen to the cleric’s preaching. He and Brak were just here to keep the peace while the cleric preached his heresy of science. That was usually an easy job, because clerics tended to waste their breath on obscure concepts that no one but them understood.

  The presence of the crowd implied that this time the message was more readily digestible.

  “Does the universe have an edge?” the cleric asked. “To answer that question, first we must consider what we currently know about the universe.”

  The cleric held out his palm, revealing a small, glossy silver ball. A holo projector. The projector hovered up high above the square, and a hologram shimmered to life below it, rolling out overhead like an ancient scroll. Everyone looked up and the crowd oohed and aahed as a dazzling array of galaxies appeared spinning above their heads. A red circle appeared around those galaxies. The red line.

  Etherian law stated that no ship was allowed to explore past that arbitrary line, despite the fact that quantum jump drives were fast enough to get there in jus
t over six months. The boundary was programmed as a hard limit into the nav system of every ship ever built.

  “This is the portion of the universe that Etherus has decreed we are allowed to explore and settle,” the cleric said. “It encompasses the supercluster Laniakea, with an estimated one hundred thousand galaxies, and a diameter of more than five hundred million light years. This is a vast amount of space. To even explore a single galaxy in its entirety, with all of its billions of star systems, is a monumental task. Even after two decades of exploration, and nearly a billion probes, we are far from reaching such a milestone.”

  Lucien frowned, wondering what the cleric was building up to. So far he hadn’t spouted any of the heresy for which the Academy of Sciences was known.

  “That is why we have been content to station New Earth here in the Large Magellanic Cloud for the past twenty-three years since leaving the Milky Way. In that time we have established hundreds of colonies, and encountered countless alien species, but we have only explored a tiny fraction of the star systems inside the red line.

  “It seems pointless, then, to stretch ourselves more thinly and push out further. Etherus was wise to put a boundary on how far our curiosity should reach. What possible reason could we have to venture any further than Laniakea?”

  Lucien’s skin prickled with anticipation. Here it comes…

  The cleric gestured to the hologram of galaxies spinning above the courtyard, and suddenly the map zoomed out. The galaxies rushed toward the center of the hologram, and the red line became a solid red dot. At this scale, the galaxies themselves were mere pinpricks of light.

  “This is the entire observable universe. The red dot you see in the center is the red line and everything that it encompasses. It doesn’t seem so large anymore, does it?”

  The crowd fidgeted with a collective rustle of clothing, but kept quiet.

  “This is the part of the universe that we can see. It goes all the way up to the cosmic horizon, which is currently 46.5 billion light years away from us. This is an odd fact, since we know that the universe is only 13.82 billion years old. Why doesn’t the size of the universe agree with its age? Shouldn’t the cosmic horizon be no more than 13.82 billion light years away? The reason for this discrepancy is that space has been expanding like a balloon ever since the big bang. As the light from distant stars traveled to reach us, the distance it had to go just kept getting longer. Eventually it reached us anyway, but now those stars are lot farther from us than they were when the light from them first started shining our way.

  “The universe in its entirety almost certainly doesn’t have an edge, but the observable universe does, and the cosmic horizon is that edge.

  “What lies beyond the cosmic horizon? Maybe nothing, or maybe just more stars and space. Maybe if we go too far, we’ll find ourselves back where we started, having discovered that the universe is a sphere, or connected at the edges like a torus. We might even see an infinite expanse of other universes out there beyond ours. The truth is that we don’t know what we’d find.

  “Current evidence suggests that the universe is flat and infinite, but it could also be flat and finite. A third possibility is that the universe is so much bigger than what we can see, that it only looks flat. Just as a planet appears flat when you’re standing on it, but clearly looks round from orbit, the universe might be so big that we can’t measure its curvature within our observable portion of it.”

  The cleric gestured to his hologram, and a blue circle appeared, encompassing everything in the observable universe. Then the hologram zoomed out, and the blue circle became so small that Lucien could eclipse it with his thumb. Around that circle was an infinite sea of pinhole-sized lights, arrayed in repeating, thread-like patterns. The fabric of the universe, woven with stars.

  “This is the entire universe, based on current estimates of the minimum size required for it to actually be a sphere. It is two hundred and fifty times bigger than the observable universe.”

  As Lucien watched, the hologram of the universe warped into a sphere.

  “What use is it to know the shape of the universe?” a man in the crowd asked.

  The cleric stared at him in horror. “Knowing the shape of the universe is of great value! For one thing, it will tell us whether or not the universe is truly infinite! If the universe is infinite, then it always has existed and always will exist.”

  “Blasphemy!” someone shouted.

  The cleric went on blithely. “It could also be finite in size, but infinite in time, cycling endlessly from big bang to big crunch, reincarnating itself over and over again. In either of those two cases, the universe was never created.”

  “Heretic!” another added. “Etherus created the universe!”

  Brak dropped a hand to the stunner holstered at his side.

  “Not yet,” Lucien said, placing a hand on the Gor’s thick, icy wrist.

  The Gor turned to him, his skull-shaped face a horror of sharp angles and sunken shadows in the pale blue light of the cleric’s hologram. “He gets himself killed speaking like this!”

  “Our job isn’t to shut him up,” Lucien said. “Just to make sure that he doesn’t get hurt, or hurt someone else.”

  “Isn’t your religion based on testable theories?” someone shouted. “You can’t test what you can’t observe!”

  “But we can observe it!” the cleric insisted. “With quantum jump drives, we can travel to the edge of the universe in approximately one hundred years, counting all of the necessary stops to recharge our reactors and calculate new jumps.”

  “I thought you said the universe didn’t have an edge!” another person said.

  “By edge, I mean the cosmic horizon, but the universe could even have a real physical edge. If it’s flat, finite, and the edges aren’t connected topologically, then there must be an edge. Perhaps if we travel past that edge we’ll fall off into a fourth spatial dimension that will allow us to become gods just like Etherus.”

  The crowd erupted in chaos, with everyone screaming at the cleric. They began chanting: “He-re-tic! He-re-tic! He-re-tic!”

  Somehow the cleric managed to raise his voice above the volume of their screaming. “If I am a heretic, then it is because I am wrong! So prove me wrong! The only way to do that is to send a mission to the cosmic horizon, but Etherus will not authorize any ship to go past the red line. We must petition him to send this mission, or else the doubt will always exist, and people will be able to question Etherus’s deity forever!”

  That was the final straw. The crowd erupted in a frenzy. Lucien was glad there weren’t any rocks in the courtyard that they could throw at the cleric, but they could still beat him to death with their hands and feet. A ghostly blue sphere rippled around the cleric, keeping the crowd at bay, but the man was surrounded, and his shield wouldn’t hold forever.

  Making a snap decision, Lucien activated the grav boosters in his boots and leapt high over the crowd’s heads. Brak joined him in the air a split second later. They applied a few braking blasts from their grav boosters to clear a landing area. People scattered to make way. They landed with a boom, and a cloud of dust rippled out around them.

  The crowd hesitated as two Paragons suddenly appeared in their midst, but then they began pressing in again, shaking their fists at the cleric.

  Lucien drew his stunner and fired it in the air with a loud crackle and a bright flash of blue light. “That’s enough! Everyone settle down!”

  No one heard him, and the crowd gave no sign of yielding. Lucien was about to start stunning people at random when Brak stepped to the fore. He hissed loudly and bared his black teeth at the crowd.

  That worked. Suddenly everyone quieted and stopped pushing toward the cleric. Lucien glanced back at the man they were defending and saw the cleric safe behind his shield, smiling faintly, as if amused by the ruckus he had caused.

  “There’s nothing more to see here,” Lucien said. “Either sign the cleric’s petition, or be on your way.”
>
  “If Etherus doesn’t want us to go past the red line, there must be a good reason for it!” a man near the front of the crowd said, his eyes wide and nostrils flaring.

  Murmurs of agreement followed that statement.

  “I’m sure you’re right, but you’re not going to convince a cleric of that. Move along,” Lucien said.

  The crowd began to disperse, grumbling as they went.

  “Don’t you want to know the truth?!” the cleric screeched as the crowd departed. “My questions deserve an answer! We must send a mission!”

  Only a handful of people remained in the courtyard, frozen with uncertainty. The cleric’s shoulders slumped, and he held out a hand, calling the hovering holo projector back to his palm. He stepped down from the bench that had served as his pulpit, shaking his head.

  “Only fools must shout to be heard,” Brak hissed.

  Lucien glanced at the Gor. “Not if wisdom falls on deaf ears.” He turned and strode toward the cleric.

  “Where do you go?” Brak asked.

  “To sign the petition,” Lucien replied.

  The cleric regarded him with wary suspicion as he approached.

  “I’ll sign your petition,” Lucien announced, drawing shocked looks from the remaining people in the courtyard.

  The cleric’s gaze abruptly widened. “A Paragon advocating disobedience? And a champion, no less!”

  “Not disobedience,” Lucien corrected. “Reconsideration. Your ideas are absurd, but you were right about one thing: this blasphemy deserves an answer, and the only way to answer it is to send the mission that you propose. Besides, it is only a petition. Etherus will have the final word, and in His wisdom, He will know how to answer it.”

  The cleric smiled, and held out his holo projector once more. A document appeared floating above his palm, and Lucien read the title at a glance.

  Petition to Send a Mission to the Cosmic Horizon.

  “Where do I sign?” Lucien asked.

  “Here…” the cleric made a gesture, and the document scrolled rapidly by a list of countless thousands of prior signatures. Lucien was shocked by the sheer number of people who had already signed. From the reactions of the people in the courtyard, he’d assumed this heresy was as unpopular as any other. But with over six hundred trillion people aboard the Icosahedron, sheer probability dictated that even the most obscure ideas would be shared by a large number of people.