Shadow Captain (Star Master Book 1)

  Shadow Captain

  Star Master Book 1

  By Mel Dunay

  Copyright 2020, Mel Dunay

  ISBN:

  DEDICATION

  To my parents, who taught me all the really important things in life. You showed me life on three continents, watched Star Wars and Star Trek with me, and you encouraged me to follow my dreams. Thank you. And a very special thank you for graciously agreeing to proof-read this novel for me.

  Contents

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  THANK YOU

  CHAPTER ONE

  Okay, hold the array just like that, Jetay heard his younger brother Khed say. Khed's voice sounded inside his head telepathically, because even the internal wireless network was down on their ship, the Vanner.

  All right, Jetay told his brother, also speaking mind to mind. Both of them knew how to armor their minds against unfriendly mind-readers, but their defenses were down right now, so that they could talk to each other.

  The communications array connected the Vanner's wireless network to the outside universe, and had to be hardwired into a node on the internal network. Khed was convinced there was a problem in the wiring, and wanted Jetay to hold the communications array steady while he tried to find the faulty wires.

  Jetay looked around him, bored by the task at hand. A tall, strong man in his mid-thirties, he had no trouble holding the communications dish upright, it just wasn't very exciting work. This starport sat just outside a town in the center of the main continent on Dahar. It was a dreary place, with no force fields or walls to protect a parked starship such as the Vanner from any thieves and troublemakers.

  The Vanner was parked in a flat, dirt field at the outer edge of the starport. Beyond the Vanner, Jetay could see a wide, flat prairie of scruffy brown grass under a twilight sky, with the stars just beginning to come out. There were no clouds anywhere, except for the haze on the horizon, and Jetay felt strangely exposed and vulnerable. As a child, he had been taught that there was a benevolent spirit, called an Akh, living in the bright furnace at the center of each star. Although his brother Khed scoffed at such ideas, on nights like this, Jetay felt as though the stars were watching him. He reached out with his mind forlornly towards them, but no one seemed to reach back at first.

  And then came the kind of answer he had encountered before: not so much a direct response as a kind of nudge, as if there was someone standing next to him and elbowing him in the ribs, trying to get him to look at something. His attention zeroed in on a large, bright object in the sky, larger than the fixed stars. It was moving fast, like an orbiting satellite, but he somehow knew it wasn't that. He continued to stare, and then realized that there were actually two bright, fast, objects: one bigger and brighter than the other. Faint flashes of light appeared between them.

  There is a fight going on up there, he thought. Those are starships, and those flashes of light are them shooting at each other.

  He found himself filled with a longing to help somehow. Don't be ridiculous, he told himself. If some psychic with the power to teleport people had transported you up to one of those ships, you wouldn't even know who to help or what to fight for.

  Okay, you can let go of it now, Khed's voice sounded in his head. I think I found the problem.

  You need me to move the array to a different position? Jetay asked him.

  Not right now, Khed told him. Give your arms a rest. In a moment, I will need you to shift that thing, but I need to fix something else first.

  Jetay carefully set the dish down next to the broken strut that was supposed to support it. He reached for his binoculars, but then he remembered that Ularti, the Vanner's owner, had taken them away and sold them for spare parts the day before.

  Jetay looked around. There were only a few ships parked at the dingy spaceport, and no one from their crews seemed to be outside except him. Even so, he turned his back on the spaceport and made sure he was facing the empty prairie before he made his next move. An act of will summoned a shimmering weapon, made of the energies of his mind, into his hand. His fingers closed around the hilt even though it had no physical existence.

  He no longer remembered who had taught him how to do this, but Khed had warned him not to let other people see him use his power. There was something shameful about it, something sinister about the people who had taught him how to do this. But on nights like tonight, with the stars looking down, the urge became overwhelming: the urge to form a weapon with the power of his mind, and use it.

  Jetay raised the weapon to his face, saluting the prairie before him. He moved into a fighting stance, working through the drills he had been taught, one after another. The more he practiced, the faster and more fluid his movements grew, and his mind seemed to grow faster and more fluid as well. He had already armored his mind against telepaths and mindbenders when he got up this morning, just as he had every morning, but he renewed his defenses now. It was a part of the fighting drills he'd been taught so long ago, by people he no longer knew.

  If I were up there on one of those ships now, I would know what to do, he thought confidently.

  Jetay? Is everything alright? Khed's voice sounded in his head. I've been calling you for three minutes now.

  The weapon in Jetay's hand vanished in a flicker of light.

  Sorry. I got distracted watching the sky, Jetay told his brother.

  Please tell me you weren't doing anything stupid up there, Khed said, still speaking mind to mind.

  There was a battle up in space, Jetay told him.

  He squinted upwards. He could no longer see the pair of fast-moving dots of light in the sky. They seemed to have merged into one now, and there were no longer flashes of light playing around the single bright dot which remained.

  I think it's over now, he told Khed.

  Good to know, Khed replied. At least that way you won't get distracted during the next part of this job.

  Jetay sighed.

  What do you need me to do? He asked Khed, still speaking mind to mind. As Khed gave him instructions, the thought lingered in the back of his head: I was meant for more than this. Both of us were meant for more than this.

  Khed told his brother the angle and orientation he needed for the support strut, and asked Jetay to weld it into place. He had left the tools for the welding job up there earlier.

  Khed hoped Jetay had not knocked them off
the top of the ship while he was horsing around. But if he had, Khed knew that Jetay would not make a fuss about it, he would just climb down and collect the tools and get back to work. The equipment was sturdy enough that it probably wouldn't be damaged if Jetay had knocked them around.

  Khed knew perfectly well that Jetay had been practicing with his mindblade up there. He couldn't read thoughts that his brother didn't want to share with him, but he also knew the tone a message from Jetay's mind took on, when he was trying to hide something. It was just as obvious as if his brother had been trying to lie to him out loud.

  Blast it, Jetay, Khed thought to himself. Why do you have to be this way?

  The next moment, he regretted thinking like that, even if his brother could not hear those particular thoughts.

  It was not Jetay's fault that he was this way. The people who'd damaged his memory were the ones to blame, and they were far too powerful to take revenge on. The High Council claimed that all the mindbenders had been punished but Khed didn't believe that for a moment.

  That was why he and Jetay were in hiding, out here in the frontier worlds. It was how they had gotten into debt to Ularti, and how they ended up working for her. He had warned his brother not to use his mindblade. People would think Jetay was one of the mindbenders, and they would persecute him, maybe put him in jail. It would be worse if the mindbenders found out he was still alive, they would hunt Jetay down and kill him, and that was if they were feeling merciful.

  The only good news was that Jetay had gotten more cautious about practicing in recent years, and he had gotten better at not getting caught. With some luck, no one at the space port would have seen him, or if they did, they would choose not to meddle with creepy old Ularti and the men who worked for her.

  Khed was used to living with the idea that life could blow up in his face at any minute, so he squatted down on the deck and focused his attention on the wire work in front of him. He was a mechomancer, so now that he'd located the faulty wires, he used his talent to see exactly where the damage was, and which areas needed the insulation stripped off so he could cut and re-splice them.

  "Is it done yet?" He heard a woman's voice, shrill and raspy, behind him.

  "Almost done," he told Ularti, without looking up. "And in half the time any other engineer would have done it. You're welcome."

  "Is this array going to stay put?" Ularti demanded. "The last one fell off the moment we tried to lift out of an atmosphere."

  Khed took a deep breath. What he was about to say could get him in trouble, but Ularti needed to hear it anyway.

  Jetay, he told his brother telepathically. Don't come down here until I tell you. No matter what you hear or sense.

  Khed? There was a worried tone to his brother's thoughts.

  No, really. Stay put. If you come down here, you're only going to make things worse.

  "I can't make any guarantees, as long as you keep bringing me those cheap aftermarket struts," Khed said. "They can't withstand the same stresses the rest of the ship can, especially with those high-end engines you had me install two years ago.

  "Don't talk to me like that, you brat!" Ularti snarled.

  Pain blossomed in Khed's head, radiating outward from the indenture chip implanted at the back of his head. His hand shook and the tool he'd been holding dropped to the deck with a clank. The sound seemed far away, through the ringing in his ears

  Supposedly, the chip only told anyone who scanned it that Khed had been indentured to Ularti for seven years' worth of labor, and had four years left to go. But Ularti was a cybermancer, able to hack into most electronic devices with the power of her mind, and she had somehow found a different use for the chip. She could use it to trigger the pain centers in Khed's brain, whenever she got angry with him. She could do the same to his brother.

  Through the pain, he heard Ularti ranting: "You know blazing well the reason we can't afford better parts is because I'm paying down the loan on the new engines! And I wouldn't have needed to take out that loan if I hadn't paid your fine and your brother's, too, and gotten you out of jail on that space station three years ago! You two are nothing but a burden to me! I should just space you!"

  Khed...? I've been trying to reach you for two minutes, Jetay spoke to him telepathically. I'm coming down there.

  Khed tried to shove the pain to one side so he could respond. No! Stay put! If you try to intervene, she'll just torture you too.

  I don't care, Jetay retorted.

  In that case, she'll just torture me even more, because she knows it'll upset you, Khed told Jetay. It was true. Ularti had done it before.

  Besides, Khed added. She's easing up now.

  That part was also true. Ularti tended to lose focus as she ranted, and as her voice got louder and less coherent, the pain in Khed's head faded.

  See? He told Jetay. It's gone now.

  This is no way to live, Jetay told him grudgingly, and then went silent. He had probably gone back to work on the welding job, knowing that the fastest way to placate Ularti would be to get the job done.

  As Khed worked, the thought came to him: this is no way to live. Not for Jetay and not for me.

  The trouble was that he couldn't see any way out of this mess, especially not with those indenture chips Ularti had implanted in their heads. The thought came to him: there is always a way out.

  Khed shoved that idea away, and focused on the work at hand.

  There is no way out, he told himself. Not this time.

  Up on the deck of the Swan, Lady Lanati lunged forward with her collapsible spear. She paid no attention to the jhamool fighting at her side, but focused on disabling the four troopers who charged at her with boarding pikes. She knocked them back with graceful sweeps of her chosen weapon, and struck at the seams in their armor with quick jabs. This was the toughest fight of her life, all twenty-eight years of it, but she was determined not to let her desperation show in the face of the enemy.

  She knew that Menevis stood behind her, with his baton in hand, but that was a weapon of last resort for him. He was a beast handler, and his main weapon was Annut, the jhamool he commanded. The jhamool resembled two exotic beasts brought from the long-lost Homeworld. His body was that of a large brown bear, but he had a falcon's beak instead of a muzzle, and he fought more ferociously than either of those creatures.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Annut knock a trooper down. The jhamool jammed his beak into a chink in the man's armor, and the trooper stopped moving. Lanati dispatched the last one still standing with a slashing stroke from her spear.

  "We're lucky they want us alive," she said.

  "Oh really?" Menevis replied. "I find that difficult to believe, my lady."

  "If they had wanted us dead, they would have just blasted our ship out of the sky and been done with it," she told him. "The Swan doesn't have the firepower to stand up to even a privateer-grade frigate like that one."

  "That part I had noticed," Menevis grumbled.

  "Because they want us alive, they had to send a boarding party to the Swan, and they couldn't use projectile weapons or plasma weapons for fear of hitting the wrong part of the ship and blowing themselves up along with us."

  "And...?" Menevis prompted, as if he couldn't quite see what she was driving at.

  "And...so we have a chance."

  "I'd feel better about our chances if I were sure they weren't going to take us alive," Menevis said sourly. "You know what they're going to do to us when they catch us."

  "You need to focus on all the possibilities, Menevis," Lanati told him cheerfully. "Not just the bad ones. Remember: the best possible outcome is that we will actually manage to make it to the escape pods."

  "And then they will blow us up the moment we launch in one," Menevis grumbled. "Or snatch us up with a tractor beam."

  "Don't worry, I have a plan for that too," Lanati said as she led him and the jhamool around the corner and down another corridor.

  "And does your precognition
tell you that this particular plan is going to work?" Menevis asked.

  "No, it doesn't," Lanati admitted. "People like me are trained to see abstract possibilities, possible branchings in history. Glimpses of our personal futures tend to be brief and unpredictable."

  Just then another squad of troopers rounded the corner and Annut screamed in their faces, a high-pitched sound like a woman being murdered. The troopers barely flinched, but Lanati lowered her spear and went to work. Annut did the same, guided by Menevis' telepathic commands. A few minutes later, they had reached the escape pods, leaving six more dead bodies behind them.

  She pressed a button on her spear, and the fins of the spearhead retracted into the haft, so that the weapon looked like a staff. She held down the other button, and the weapon collapsed until it was just a baton, no longer than her forearm. She hooked it to her belt and went to work on the controls of the escape pods.

  She set two of them to launch empty with a forty-second launch delay. Then she ordered Menevis to get into the third one. It took a moment for Menevis to telepathically order Annut into the pod, then secure the creature on the acceleration couch and adjust the harness to fit him. While he was doing that, Lanati was disabling the launch delay on their own pod. Then she closed the hatch, strapped herself in, and slammed her hand down on the launch button.

  For a moment she was afraid that she had timed it wrong, but then the pod lurched free of the ship. On the display above the control panel, she could see the other two pods launching beside hers. The two empty pods were between the enemy frigate and her pod. Her hands hovered over the controls. The pods were rugged, simple craft, with primitive rockets for maneuvering thrusters as their only means of maneuvering once the Swan launched them.

  Her only option required perfect timing. A pair of pale blue tractor beams lashed out from the frigate, reaching towards the pods. The moment they touched the two empty pods, she slammed all four maneuvering thrusters simultaneously. Her pod jumped away from the empty pods and the tractor beams, plunging down into the atmosphere at an alarming speed.

  Annut squawked, and Menevis cursed under his breath as the fragile pod lurched downward, out of range of the tractor beams.