Eight Ball (Starship for Sale Book 6) Read online

  EIGHT BALL

  STARSHIP FOR SALE

  BOOK 6

  M.R. FORBES

  Published by Quirky Algorithms

  Seattle, Washington

  This novel is a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Quirky Algorithms

  All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration by Tom Edwards

  Edited by Merrylee Lanehart

  CHAPTER 1

  The universe, as always, remained without mercy.

  I wanted to die.

  I didn’t get what I wanted.

  Time passed. My heart rate slowed. My muscles relaxed. The adrenaline flowed to a trickle. I remained awake the entire time, aware of my surroundings. Aware of my failure. The smell of death hung heavy in the air, Gia’s torn up body resting less than a dozen feet away.

  I still didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to live. We had failed. I had failed, and now everyone I cared about was so much worse off for it. I had never been so completely alone. Growing up, even without a father, there had always been someone around to lean on when things got hard. Mom, Matt, my siblings. There had never been a time where there was no one else for me to turn to. Even in Sedaya’s prison, Keep had appeared out of the shadows to help me.

  For the first time in my life, I had no wingman. No backup. I had only myself to rely on.

  Blorb’s words filled my head, reaching deep to pierce my soul.

  “...he’ll spend however long he has left alone, with nothing to occupy his mind beyond knowing that everyone he cares about in this galaxy is suffering more than he is.”

  Was the Aleal right? Would I spend the last days of my life curled in a fetal position on the floor, waiting for death? He had spoken those words to mock, taunt, and dishearten me. To cut me up with verbal barbs the same way he had ripped into Gia with physical blades.

  To turn me into a puddle on the floor, the way I remained even now.

  “...he’ll spend however long he has left alone, with nothing to occupy his mind beyond knowing that everyone he cares about in this galaxy is suffering more than he is.”

  The words repeated, over and over, a growing chorus of self-defeating chanting in my subconscious. Except the words couldn’t destroy me unless I let them. Sedaya, Sucaath, Blorb, whoever. None of them could destroy me unless I let them. Failure didn’t come from losing the battle.

  Failure came from giving up. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Right?

  I opened my eyes, miserable despair beginning to evaporate beneath the fire of my growing anger. Blorb’s sentiments rippled through my mind again. The words were the same. The meaning, completely different. Instead of letting them push me down, I used them to motivate me to get the hell up.

  A primal scream erupted from my mouth as I forced my body into motion, lifting my stomach off the deck and onto my hands and knees, and forcing myself to look at Gia. Deep cuts lacerated both cheeks. A hundred similar cuts slashed her arms, legs, and torso. A wave of nausea bit into me, along with an urge to drop back to the floor and rebury my head in the proverbial sand. I rejected the emotion, crying out a second time in anger, pain, frustration and determination.

  I put my hand on the glass wall beside me, using it for balance and some leverage as I pulled myself to my feet. Legs still shaking but more stable than before, I didn’t take my eyes off Gia. My last words to her had been filled with anger as I blamed her for betraying us, so confident she was the one who had given Sedaya our location.

  I'd been so completely and utterly wrong.

  Despite that, she had still come to the lab to save my life and had paid with hers. I owed it to her to do whatever I could to make sure her sacrifice wasn’t in vain. Even if it didn’t amount to anything, I owed it to her to keep fighting until my last breath.

  Upright once more, I finally looked away from her, turning my gaze to the room behind me. The etcher sat next to the chair, its robotic arm slightly extended, frozen before activation. The side panel hung wide open, like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, just waiting for a heart. Or in this case, more Gilded catalyst. Except I didn’t have any more catalyst, Gilded or otherwise. The machine was useless to me.

  Even so, I continued staring at it as I processed my situation. I was alone on a super secret base inside an asteroid in the middle of nowhere. I had to assume Blorb had taken the Star of Caprum from Head Case at the same time it sabotaged the guns. While the Royal Marines had installed a small backup power supply to transfer the ship from orbit to the ground, it probably wouldn’t get me very far, and it definitely wouldn’t get me into hyperspace. It might be enough to get me off the station and into open space where I could set off an emergency beacon. With any luck, someone would pick it up and stop by to check it out, even if only to see if there was any salvage they could claim or electro to be made. That had to be better than fulfilling Blorb’s prophecy.

  But it could take weeks for someone to pass anywhere near this lightly-traveled section of space. And right now, I had days to spare at most. Sure, I would still be fighting, but only just barely.

  It wasn’t enough.

  I leaned on the wall, using it to keep my balance as I made my way back to David’s desk and sat down. The wires that had connected his laptop to the station’s mainframe dangled off the edge of the desk. I followed them to the small outlet in the rear of the display, which remained active. Looking at the screen, my eyes narrowed in confusion. This was the pattern the etcher had been seconds away from cutting into my flesh. The restore sigil was there, majestic in its complex, dragon curve fractal. But while I had expected it to stand alone on the screen, contained within the hexagonal lines that composed the base activation algorithm, the version on screen was only a part of a larger geometric design.

  Restore rested like a heart in the center of the overall pattern. The lines that branched out from it reminded me of veins, splitting and overlapping. The negative space between them allowed me to recognize additional embedded sigils. Push, of course. Pull, absorb, negate, enhance. Those were the easiest to recognize. But there were more I knew I had seen before in the slides of the Grimoire. Staring at the whole thing there had to be at least a dozen sigils in total, each line from restore an activation thread for multiple effects. In one place, the lines were so tightly overlapped I nearly missed the smallest sigil hidden among them. Leaning in and squinting, my mouth opened when I recognized the pattern.

  Calmed-to-death.

  At such a small size it wouldn’t be powerful enough to work instantly, but just the fact that David had put it into his construct surprised me. Keep had warned him multiple times about offensive sigils, and every time David had promised he would never let them see the light of day. Obviously, he had lied. And with David in Sedaya’s hands, Keep’s worst fears were sure to come to pass. But maybe that was why David had included it in the construct. To give me the power to end his life if he was ever so compromised.

  Or, with restore able to extend my life, maybe to give me the power to end it all. A power Keep’s wife hadn’t initially given to him.

  Another small sigil appeared above calmed-to-death. A complex web of equation lines I wasn’t sure was even a sigil at all, I had never seen it before. I was certain of that much. Either way, David never told me he planned to print an entire arsenal of symbols into my skin. Keep probably hadn’t known either. I doubted he would have approved of the idea.

  I leaned back in the seat and sighed. None of it mattered now. I didn’t have any catalyst. The chunk of ore Bill and George had given me was the only reason I had com
e so close in the first place, and now the cupboard was dry.

  Weeks to even have a chance at getting help and only days to live. The situation seemed impossible. Fresh despair pushed against the edge of my resolve. My gaze shifted from the display to Gia, partially obscured by the dentist chair. I couldn’t give up, even if it was impossible.

  There had to be a way.

  I looked at the screen again, tracing the geometric construct once more. For whatever reason, something Druck, of all people, had said popped into my mind.

  “We’re getting quite a collection of that crap, aren’t we?” he had said in relation to the sleeve I took from David’s mother.

  I got up so fast I had to brace myself as a wave of dizziness crashed over me. Waiting it out, I moved more deliberately out of the room, stepping gingerly over Gia on my way from the lab.

  Maybe it wasn’t the catalyst I wanted. Maybe it would kill me. But I had to try.

  CHAPTER 2

  A few days earlier, it had taken me fifteen minutes to walk from the lab to the hangar. Today, between rounds of dizziness, coughing, and general weakness, it took me nearly an hour. The simple journey felt epic by the time the inner bay doors slid open in front of me, revealing the eerily silent hangar and Head Case parked alone inside. My gaze immediately focused on where Admiral Lyke’s ship had landed. The skid marks were still visible where they had disturbed layers of dust. The gun Lyke melted with sigiltech had hardened to the deck, and the rest of Team Hondo’s guns remained scattered across the space. Taking it all in left my jaw clenched in fury, my resolve crystallized.

  I hobbled across the gap between the hangar door and the ramp leading up into Head Case, and up into the ship to the elevator. I went to Deck Six first, needing only a minute to confirm the Star of Caprum was gone. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Sedaya had Dominator built with a place for the power source already included. If he had, that space was undoubtedly occupied by the Star right now. Thanks to Alter’s earlier lessons on ship maintenance, it only took me a few more minutes to also confirm the guns had indeed been sabotaged, the linkage undone between them and the primary battery.

  My heart pumped a little bit harder when the elevator passed Deck Five. I knew Alter was dead, or absorbed, or however one Aleal consumed another, but I wasn’t ready to move past denial just yet. Losing Gia was like being hit in the face by a brick. Accepting that Alter wasn’t coming back was more like a cannonball. The thought of Matt as Sedaya’s prisoner, being choked by the scarf or otherwise tortured for who-knew-how-long felt like a freight train rumbling down the tracks with me lashed to the rail. Not that Quasar, Druck, or Shaq in his hands was much better.

  I didn’t really worry about Keep. He had been on his own for a long time and could take care of himself.

  Returning to Deck Two, I crossed to the armory as quickly as I could, the thoughts of my crew’s fate filling me with a greater sense of urgency. “Levi, open the armory doors.”

  The doors slid open ahead of me, and I panicked as I stepped through. What if Blorb had taken all of the catalyst regalia we’d collected, too? The sleeve, the earrings, the rings. It could have tucked it all away in its body like a pack mule, smuggling it away to prevent its use. I only exhaled again after I opened the crate where we stowed the items, finding it all still there. I grabbed every last bit of it, stuffing the earrings and rings into my pockets and carrying the sleeve in my free hand. I picked out a sniper rifle there too, not bothering with ammo but using its extended length as a makeshift crutch, giving me a third leg to balance on. It helped speed up my movement through the station and I returned to the lab in half the time.

  Entering the assembly room, I was surprised to immediately find myself inside the assembler, standing between the plates where the molecules would be recombined into new material. The machine was primitive compared to what we had on Head Case, but at the same time more advanced in its ability to create catalyst. A simple chute provided a feed for the raw materials, and I dumped everything in. Since it was already a finished product, I assumed everything it needed was already there, it just needed to be melted down.

  Of course, this catalyst wasn’t the same as Gilded catalyst. I couldn’t just press a button and have it do the conversion. It took me some time to find the interface to the machine and then more time to gain access to the operating system. Fortunately, it ran on similar future Java to Asshole, making it easy for me to dig into the source code to see its recipes.

  It was a good thing I didn’t need to change the recipe.

  The ingredient lists were composed of minerals and compounds with scientific names I could barely read, nevermind identify. All I had to do was tell the assembler to create the normal hemolytic catalyst in a liquid state. Even so, the changes took me nearly six hours, broken up by bouts of dizziness, coughing, and general fatigue, to complete. The fatigue left me napping on and off inside the machine, not that it mattered where I slept with no one here to complain.

  The sense of purpose compounded my resolve, fueling the fires of my anger and determination. Looking back at how I had been ready to die after Blorb left with David, I only felt embarrassed by the pathetic show of weakness. Mom had taught me never to give up, and after everything that had already happened—from the Persophon Penal Station to Sedaya’s dungeon—I should have known better. Maybe it was the worst hit I had ever taken, but it was still only one hit. I refused to be KO’d so easily.

  I had to set a timer on the assembler and step out of the machine to wait for it to produce the newly formulated catalyst. I tasked it to make only an ounce of the stuff to start, just to make sure it came out as a liquid. Even with all the sigiltech stuff we had collected, its combined volume when melted down had come out only slightly more than the Gilded catalyst.

  Even such a small amount needed nearly an hour to make. I used the time to set about the grisly task of removing Gia’s body from the lab. It had already started to smell, making me gag every time I entered that section of the facility. Quasar had found a small morgue next to the station’s sickbay, and I retrieved a body bag from there, laying it out ahead of Gia and slowly dragging her into it. I cried as I closed the zipper, her face vanishing beneath the thick material, along with the stench.

  I wasn’t strong enough to move her to the morgue, so I pulled the bag out to the atrium in the center of the lab and left it in one of the dead flowerbeds. It wasn’t the end she deserved, especially considering her fame in the Spiral, but it was the best I could do at the moment.

  Returning to the assembler, the outer display showed its countdown timer pinned to zero, the production of the recombined catalyst complete. Entering the machine, I found the small glass vial waiting on the bottom plate. A quick examination proved the process had worked. I wanted to feel elated by my success, but after what I had just spent the last hour doing, I was in no mood to celebrate. My smoldering fury rekindled into a five-alarm blaze. I dropped the liquid catalyst, vial and all, back into the assembler and reset the machine to make a full batch. Since it had to break down the prior material again, the timer ran close to two hours.

  I left the machine, slumping against the door as soon as it closed and locked. Activities that wouldn’t have registered as the least bit tiring a few weeks ago had left my body completely exhausted. The gentle vibration of its functioning helped ease some of my tension, quickly putting me back to sleep.

  I awoke with a start, angry with myself when I saw the machine had finished. Every extra minute I wasted here was another minute Matt and the others were out there with Sedaya or his lackey Lyke doing who-knew-what to them. I pulled myself roughly to my feet and entered the assembler, scooping up the vial and practically running it back to the etcher, stopping to cough before circling the table to the mainframe interface. With no easy way to start the process and sit in the chair at the same time, I had to hope I could make it to the seat before the etcher started doing its thing.

  Pulling off my shirt, my heart immediately bega
n racing with anxious anticipation. Not being Gilded catalyst, there was an extremely strong chance the silver liquid metal I was about to use would either kill me or leave me horribly scarred, with the etched sigils completely inoperable. It was a risk I had to take. A risk I wanted to take. Even in the worst case, at least I could match my physical pain to what the others were either already going through or would soon be going through. At least I wouldn’t die a coward’s death or take the easy way out.

  And if it actually worked?

  Maybe I would live long enough to save them.

  CHAPTER 3

  I swallowed hard, trying to control my ragged, nervous breath as my finger hovered over the button that would start the etcher. I had already planned my route to the chair. Now I just needed to keep from getting dizzy on the way so I could make it into the seat before the clamps snapped closed and the machine started.

  Cheating by taking a step forward, I reached back toward the keyboard, ready to initiate the process. I stifled a cough, took one last breath, and mashed the key down. The etcher’s arm began moving while the vibrating hum of a pump pulled the catalyst up through a clear tube. I lunged forward, throwing myself into the chair. The ankle clamps caught my legs, but I was too slow to get my arms clamped down, leaving my upper body with freedom of movement.

  I pressed myself back against the padding, wrapping my hands around the armrests and gripping them tightly. David already warned me how bad it could be if any of the sigil lines came out wrong. No matter how much it hurt, I had to remain absolutely still.

  The robot arm swung forward in front of my face, swiveling and bending from its many joints before lowering the rotating platter of tools sliding into position. The first one emitted a red grid across my upper body, which remained as a second blue grid joined it. They started out skewed from one another, slowly converging until they became a single, solid green. The grid shut off then, the platter spun to a second pair of tools.