Helldive: Aeon's Legacy, #4

By Alexis Glynn Latner

Hidden inside the Starcross Nebula is a place of interstellar shipwreck. It's like a Bermuda Triangle half as old as time. It harbors malicious monsters and dangerous mysteries.

It's a hell of a place to attempt a rescue mission.

Captain Zilka Devreze and her crew on the starship Guardian Angel must race against time to find shipwreck survivors in mortal danger. They'll use Zilka's genius grasp of the intricacies of fast starflight to get in and back out again.
 

Mission specialist Jack Mistry was an accident investigator in the Solar System in his previous life. Abruptly revived from stasis in the starship Aeon, he agrees to join the unprecedented mission. When he fled from Earth on Aeon, what he expected to find on the other side of the stars wasn't an interstellar accident scene like this. Or a woman like Zilka.

Always as singularly alone as brilliant, Zilka discovers that this can change. But first she has to learn how to lead a very assorted crew. And Jack has to learn to follow his heart.

Soon all of them will discover how death and life, hell and hope, and danger and love intersect in the Starcross Nebula.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Avendis Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781942686088

Book preview

Helldive

Alexis Glynn Latner

Hidden inside the Starcross Nebula is a place of interstellar shipwreck. It’s like a Bermuda Triangle half as old as time. It harbors malicious monsters and dangerous mysteries.

It's a hell of a place to attempt a rescue mission. 

Captain Zilka Devreze and her crew on the starship Guardian Angel must race against time to find shipwreck survivors in mortal danger. They’ll use Zilka's genius grasp of the intricacies of fast starflight to get in and back out again.

Mission specialist Jack Mistry was an accident investigator in the Solar System in his previous life. Abruptly revived from stasis in the starship Aeon, he agrees to join the unprecedented mission. When he fled from Earth on Aeon, what he expected to find on the other side of the stars wasn't an interstellar accident scene like this. Or a woman like Zilka.

Always as singularly alone as brilliant, Zilka discovers that this can change. But first she has to learn how to lead a very assorted crew. And Jack has to learn to follow his heart. Soon all of them will learn how death and life, hell and hope, and danger and love intersect in the Starcross Nebula.

This is a sequel to the novel Star Crossing in the Aeon’s Legacy series.

Contents

CHAPTER 1—STAR VILLAGER

CHAPTER 2—DECISION TIME

CHAPTER 3—NEW CONSTELLATIONS

CHAPTER 4—STARCROSSING POINT

CHAPTER 5—HELLDIVERS

CHAPTER 6—MOONDANCE

CHAPTER 7—FIRST BLOOD

CHAPTER 8—THE UNSAID DOOR

CHAPTER 9—STAR STATION SHARD

CHAPTER 10—THE GARDEN OF ANGEL

CHAPTER 11—INVESTIGATION CIRCLE

CHAPTER 12—REVELATIONS

CHAPTER 13— THE UNSPEAKABLE WINDOW

CHAPTER 14—MOSAIC

CHAPTER 15—DIPLOMATIC CIRCLE

CHAPTER 16—STAR WELL

CHAPTER 17—JACK

CHAPTER 18—THE DAWN SONG FLOCK

CHAPTER 19—END TIMES

CHAPTER 20—WAR WAY

CHAPTER 21—NOVA

EPILOGUE—DAWN

WITHERSPIN CHAPTER 1—THE FAIR GAME

About the author

Acknowledgments

Credits

CHAPTER 1—STAR VILLAGER

ON HIS FIFTH DAY UP-and-Out, Jack Mistry concluded that he might have overreacted to his former situation on Earth. Granted, it had been a bad situation, with his marriage in a death spiral and his career in a dead end. But joining a starship mission to colonize a planet a thousand stars away had been an extreme reaction. It had also been extremely final. Jack had stayed in cryostasis—cold suspended animation—for centuries. Everyone he’d ever known on Earth was dead and long gone by now.

Now that he was Up from cryostasis, and Out of the Ship’s hospital, Jack didn’t like where he found himself. It was a place of harmlessness, cheerfulness, and artificiality—from which any obvious route of escape was closed.

It was called Star Village.

Jack had seen rural villages in his grandfather’s India and tiny towns in his mother’s Oregon. He’d visited the venerable, intermittent, riotously organic settlement called Burning Man in Nevada. He’d lived for a while in the tightly planned but unevenly maintained Luna City.

Those places had all been real.

Star Village wasn’t real.

Today he finally felt wide awake. Thoughts and memories swirling in his mind made him restless. He left his tiny apartment unlocked—his neighbors were harmless, his lack of possessions pronounced—and set off down Main Way.

The sky was painted blue. Daylights blazing some seventy degrees from zenith signaled early morning. There was nothing wrong with that. As everyone in the Village—except a few dim-witted, star-burned unfortunates—knew well, the Village was tucked inside the big starship. The Way’s shallow concave curve matched the Ship’s spingravity. The artificiality and inescapability of Star Village were signified instead by the fact that the pedestrian ways didn’t go anywhere. They didn’t even end. Camouflaged by how apartment houses and other buildings were laid out, the ways twisted back into the Village.

The Village was laid out around its tallest building: the Science Institute. The white-jacketed scientists who worked there frequently mingled with Villagers in the ways and shops.

It was like the Alzheimers Villages of Earth. Those had been places where the demented functioned fairly happily inside a carefully constructed quasi-normality. Where they were closely watched, unobtrusively guided, and safely confined. Where they couldn’t get hurt. Nothing in Star Village had honest-to-God sharp edges that could hurt people. Jack craved edges.

Beside Main Way, Rollin the gardener was already at work, weeding a pot full of pale blue flowers—ghost marigolds—and fuzzy green tomato plants. Rollin offered Jack a red lump. Rollin’s eyes didn’t focus on Jack. The word in the Village was that he had a PhD in ecological engineering. On the journey across the stars, though, his intellect had drained out like water from a broken bucket.

Jack thanked Rollin and went on.

The tomato was misshapen. Word was that the Ship’s seed stocks had been strafed by interstellar radiation. The result was mutations including the ghost marigolds. Lumpy though it was, the tomato had a rich, tangy flavor. Jack ate it slowly and thoughtfully. Rollin had a good way with plants. Whatever he had been before the star flight, here he was a useful man. Some other Villagers had completely useless jobs. Ndele, for example, had been a brilliant mathematician on Earth. This morning she was already ensconced in her ground-floor office in the Institute, with her window open, her workstation humming in front of her. The Institute had asked her to solve a set of mathematical problems. She had shown them to Jack yesterday. Her mathematical expertise was orders of magnitude higher than his, but he’d followed her explanation of the equations well enough to comprehend that she was doing theoretical, fiendishly difficult, and entirely unreal cosmology. Einstein’s universe didn’t function like that.

Ndele spared Jack a glance. He gave her a wave. She nodded and her gaze snapped back to her workstation. Word in the Village was that she was only calm while working. Otherwise, she felt intolerable distress. In the Village, with her practical needs taken care of, Ndele was a perfectly happy mathematician, one who didn’t have to worry about real life.

That reminded Jack of how his life had taken such an unhappy turn that he left Earth forever. His work—dangerous, difficult, ranging from low Earth orbit to the asteroid Ceres, chronically disconnected from planetary days and night—had made him emotionally numb. That and long absences from home had let him tolerate a marriage that otherwise would have rubbed him raw. But he ran afoul of International Space Agency politics and was reassigned to an Earthside desk in the city of Los Angeles, where his wife lived in their large and expensive home. She was a beautiful woman with expensive tastes. She was angry about the pay cut that came with his Earthside reassignment, angry that he was at home every night, angry that she wasn’t happy, and took it out on him in episodes of rage. After a year the dead-end boredom at his ISA desk and conflict at home were more than he could take. He bolted for the stars, handing over half of his estate to his wife and the other half to the Aeon Foundation.

It was unfortunate that in its search for a good world to colonize, the starship Aeon had traveled far longer than the mission plan anticipated. That had not been good for the colonists languishing in cryostasis. Some of them had died. Jack might have narrowly missed a long, cold, insensate death himself. After coming Up from stasis he had been in the Ship’s hospital for months. He dimly remembered islands of wakefulness in a sea of induced coma while the doctors and their machines flushed the cryostasis chemicals and salvaged his body. Now that he was Out of the hospital, he felt pretty well, all things considered.

Even among the Up and Out, many showed signs of freezer burn. The most delicate human organ was the brain. Jack thought he was in better mental shape than his neighbors in Star Village. But if he were truly cognitively impaired, he might not know it. If his intelligence had dropped far enough, he wouldn’t be able to calibrate it accurately—he’d think himself smarter than he was. That was called the Dunning-Kruger effect, he recalled, and fervently hoped it didn’t apply to him.

The street sweepers of Star Village seemed to be the most impaired of anyone. One of them was sweeping Main Way. Jack passed by with the innocuous Village wave—a slowly lifted forearm with open palm. He got a flat stare back. The sweeper gave the impression of being a Pandora’s Box of psychological demons, lidded by drugs. Presumably the man hadn’t been like that before the star flight—or if so it had been too deeply buried for even the intrusive Assessment Interview to find it out.

There was plenty of disturbing potential in the gut-wrenching realization of final separation from all friends and family left behind, and the reality of a strange, barren new world in place of Earth. Old Earth with its unstable climate, rising seas and wracking wars had been familiar, and familiar went a long way toward tolerable, as Jack knew well from his marriage. Here . . . the foundations of everything had changed. And that could destabilize someone. Word was that one Villager had secretly made a kind of knife and attacked somebody else, and the victim almost died from the resulting injuries.

Odd. Today Jack was putting two and two and two together in a way he hadn’t been able to do until now. He did not like the resulting sums. His nerves jittered and his memories swirled like a jarred snowglobe. He shook his head sharply. What he needed was a job to do. He needed work. None had been handed to him.

Fine, he would give himself a job: Get out of Star Village.

THE NEW WORLD COFFEE Shop had a dark back wall emblazoned with a globe of blue seas and barren continents. That was a real image from space, and the image changed in real time, with the day-night terminator sweeping across the face of the planet as seen from the Ship’s high orbit. Jack ordered tea, hoping for the best even though he knew that spaceship-board tea tended toward the worst. He needed the calming effect of drinking tea.

His server was new. I’m Tienlu, she said tentatively. I’m only just Up.

Welcome Up, Tienlu.

He was rewarded by a smile that firmed up the slackness in her face and made her pretty. Kim moved away, she told him.

You must be taking Kim’s place, then.

She nodded and dutifully turned away toward the kitchen, but her gaze lingered on Jack. He remembered that some girls found him handsome and liked to look at him. And that he liked looking at them. Kim had been intelligent—always an attracting factor for Jack—and tall and leggy—two more attracting factors. He wished Kim hadn’t always worn a tunic with loose leggings: he’d never seen her legs, and now she’d moved away.

Kim had struck Jack as one of the more functional Villagers. There was also someone he’d met his first day here, and found likeable, a black man named Timothy, who had also disappeared since then. If Jack proved himself functional, would he move away too?

He wasn’t going to wait to find out. The Village felt too much like an aquarium, all rounded edges and glass walls for the Institute scientists to look in through. His fellow Villagers reminded him of so many guppies. I am a man, not a guppy, he thought with conscious irony, and he pondered how to escape.

This particular chair in the Coffee Shop was positioned at the front window with a view down a side way to some air handlers and a grate that covered the entrance to a service chase. He’d noticed that yesterday, and thought it looked like a possible escape route. People were stirring in the Village—guppies swimming aimlessly—but no one had any reason to go down the side way. Flanked by a blank Institute wall on one side and a trellis of flowering vines on the other, it was deserted. For most of the day it would be in full daylight. There was a security light that was certain to be on at night. Near the end of the day, though, the side way would be in the Institute’s shadow. From her office window Ndele might notice anyone who wandered into the side way. But it was unlikely to register on her whether they came out again, or not.

Now he had a candidate exit route and a time at which to try it. To cover up his intense interest in the chase, he sipped the tea Tienlu brought him. It surprised him with a pure and distinctive taste that he didn’t recognize.

Jack made a plan. Inspired by the knife-wielding Villager, he would spend the balance of the day making a tool. There had to be some kind of material he could find to turn into a prying edge. Late in the day he would return with his tool to pry the grate off and get into the service chase.

Across the Way, a young woman exited the Institute. Wearing the white jacket of Institute staff, she was a small, compact blonde, even younger than Tienlu and with a much more energetic air. Jack’s attention riveted to her. Not because he found her attractive—hers wasn’t his favorite feminine body type—but because she was familiar from somewhere . . . and not from the Village.

She walked straight into the New World Café and approached Jack. Mind if I join you? She pulled an empty chair up to his small table. In case you don’t remember, I’m Dr. Steed.

I remember, he said slowly. She had given him an intelligence test while he was still in the hospital. That was the largest of his islands of wakefulness. It had been had been spent doing materials analysis—one of the skill sets of his former work. Worried about whether his brain had freezer burn, he’d worked so hard at it that it spent him. After that came the widest and darkest sea of hospitalized unconsciousness.

Until now Jack hadn’t remembered Steed’s name. He did remember thinking at the time that if she was really a psychiatrist, he was a small green lizard.

You do good work, she said. It took a lot out of you, and we’re sorry about that, but your help turned out to be very important. Interrupted by Tienlu, Steed asked for coffee black as sin. Tienlu blinked. Steed said, Triple strong and no cream or sugar. To Jack, she continued, You identified several weld samples as having a compromised formulation and likely to rupture under flight loads. You were right. Sabotage was going on. We caught the saboteurs in the act, and the welding got back on track. The construction of the new ships resumed and now they’re ready for the deep space mission they’re designed for.

Should he play along or not? He didn’t feel like playing along. Steed, with a reason to find him, had known exactly where he was this morning. It irritated him intensely to have been observed like a guppy in a fish tank. That’s good considering it’s all make-believe, he retorted.

She gave him a long considering stare. A lot of this is. Ready for reality?

He set his tea cup down with a sharp clink. The golden tea almost spilled. Try me.

Tienlu brought a mug of dark, thick coffee. Steed took a long swig. OK. You’re a space accident investigator, and not just a back-office analyst of black box recordings and materials samples, though you’re damn good at that. You’re a hands-on investigator who worked as a corporate agent before you signed on with ISA. You’re ethical and, witness a couple of accident scenes where the accident hadn’t finished happening, you’re brave and altruistic.

It sounded like she had read a transcript of his Assessment interview. Giving nothing away, he drank more of his tea. Darjeeling-like in both its taste and its winy fragrance, it was not quite Darjeeling, but quite nice in its own right. He found himself savoring it.

The upcoming deep space mission is to an accident scene to rescue survivors. We could definitely use the kind of expertise you represent. Want to sign on?

Wait—what? As an intelligence test, this was getting elaborate.

But it might be standard operating procedure to up the ante for the Up-and-Out, give them increasing challenges not just to intellect and reasoning but also to executive function and impulse control. Back when I did corporate accident investigation, I never took a job without knowing what I was getting into. I won’t start now.

Excellent. She drained the mug. Toward the bottom that coffee was probably strong enough to wave a spoon at them. Jack suppressed a fastidious shudder and finished his own exquisite beverage.

Like that tea?

It’s a variety I’ve never had before.

It didn’t exist before. She gestured toward the New World on the back wall. See that green dot a third of the way up from the south pole along the terminator? That’s a highland terraformed region. They developed Darling from something called Darjeeling.

Jack carefully put his tea cup down. You know, I happened to have read the botanical manifest for the Ship. Darjeeling wasn’t there.

That list was roughly ten thousand items long.

I read it.

"There were more Starships after ours. One named Genesis ended up here a few centuries ahead of us. And Genesis happened to have Darjeeling tea seeds."

Sheer incredulity made Jack’s blood pound in his ears.

He didn’t believe a word of that.

Yet he liked her company. Steed was edgy—like an angelfish among the guppies. He wanted to spend additional time with the angelfish, even if she were presenting him with an increasingly elaborate test of his faculties. I’d like to know more about the upcoming accident investigation.

I was hoping you’d say that. Come with me!

Steed walked so briskly that even with his longer legs Jack had to expedite to keep up with her. Outside Ndele’s office window, Steed gave Ndele a thumbs-up gesture. Then Steed turned down the air-handler side way. You’re with me, so Margaret won’t report you missing.

He was definitely having trouble keeping up with her. Margaret?

That’s Margaret Ndele. She was born in an African town called Ndele. Like a lot of other people, she now uses the name of her home on Earth for a surname. Reaching the grate, Steed touched a fingerprint recognition pad. The grate silently released. This way. You could say it’s an insiders’ short-cut.

IT WAS A NORMAL SPACE habitat service chase; it even had sharp edges. Suddenly Jack felt more calm and sure of himself. He knew space habitats.

Steed’s voice echoed. "The first place our Ship stopped was the original Mission target but it turned out that wasn’t a suitable planet to terraform. It didn’t have a large moon and wouldn’t ever have had ocean tides or stable seasons. The Ship went on looking for a better destination. Its programming may have been flawed. It seemed to think better meant perfect. So, and in a way not intended by the planners who named the Ship Aeon, it looked for a thousand years and then found a world with a largely botanical ecosystem and a big ocean moon."

He frowned. That’s not what’s in the New World Café.

No, it’s not. We couldn’t stay at the ocean moon world either. She sounded bleak. "I’ll tell you about that trouble a little later. Anyway, Aeon set out again and found this planet. Genesis had discovered it first. The descendants of the Genesis colonists are very happy about our arrival. Their terraforming went badly from the outset—so bad that they called their world Go-to-Hell. Just like ‘Darjeeling’ got worn down to ‘Darling’ through time, Go-to-Hell got worn down to Gotayel, and that’s the name of the New World. With Aeon’s terraforming help, looks like it won’t go to Hell after all."

So much of that was so incredible that Jack just blinked.

She pushed open a narrow door in the chase. They stepped out into a bright, busy, corridor with a slightly concave floor—a highly recognizable spingravity corridor. People in coveralls or motley shorts and shirts were coming and going. They had the purposeful air of those with places to go and jobs to do. Jack took a deep breath. This was much better, resembling any of several orbital platforms he’d seen, places he’d worked in the Solar System.

He wanted his work back so bad he could taste it. Accident scene? he prompted.

Beckoning him to follow, she strode down the corridor. He soon noticed that everyone recognized Steed and gave her a respectful berth. In her wake, he didn’t have to dodge people; they maneuvered around him as well as her for good measure.

She led him to a tall, narrow window that showed him the spinning of the Ship as the stars wheeled by. After a minute or so, she pointed. See the cloud?

It was a conspicuous pink and blue patch of nebulosity on the starfield. Dark dust rifted glowing gas that swathed at least one brilliant star. Jack’s eyes widened. No naked human eyes on Earth had ever seen see such a sight in the night sky. Nothing like that was so close to Earth.

The accident scene is there.

First check, he thought dourly—the first sign that this job offer was too good to be true. Or even if improbably true, it had a major drawback. Ten or twenty lightyears away? he guessed. The idea of crossing lightyears again, in cryostasis again, made him feel sick.

"The thing is, Aeon went so long and so far that in the meantime, on a colonized planet close to Earth, they discovered a kind of fast starflight. Fast starships have radiated out ever since. By fast starflight the Starcloud is only a few days away."

His mind reeled. Did she really expect him to believe that? Or did she expect him to object to it like any sane space-experienced person would?

Actually, she didn’t sound expectant. She sounded like somebody who had stated a fact and had a more important point to get to. I’ve got a crucial question for you. If you join the mission to contribute your investigation skills, you’ll be coming in with officer-specialist rank, and you’ll have to fit in with a command structure that’s fairly informal. Some of our colonists want things more authoritarian, as in military. Some of them want that more than they gave anyone reason to expect in Assessment. She scowled. Jack guessed that some colonist candidates had turned out to be too rigid to function in what was—if even a fraction of what Steed had said were to be believed—a mind-bendingly unexpected future. Are you OK with collaborative command?

That’s the best kind, Jack answered.

You know, that’s the first positive statement you’ve made yet.

It’s something I’m sure about. Authoritarian command is too inflexible and too risky, because it doesn’t take into account the knowledge, the experience, and the input of people lower on the chain of command. That may be fine in the military when people are disposable. Not for civilian purposes where safety is paramount. Not for aerospace exploration and transportation.

She nodded. It’s a command structure that I’m a part of. I’m Commander Steed but my first name is Stasia, and first names is what we go by.

Fine by me. I’m Jack.

Steed, make that Stasia, gave him long, direct, and considering look. You strike me as a man who can stick a tumble.

In weightlessness it was easy to miss a handhold or hit an obstacle with a misplaced foot and bounce off in an inconvenient direction. Someone who could stick a tumble would snare another handhold or toss a tool to send themselves floating back to the nearest wall—anything to stop helplessly tumbling. You’re right. I am.

That is excellent.

Her approving tone made Jack think wingwoman. Startled, he considered the possibility that she was sizing him up on behalf of someone else for romantic purposes. Encounters like that had happened to Jack in his Earth-distant past. It was the new last thing he expected here and now. He wondered what kind of a woman—or man?—she could possibly be wingwoman for.

Let’s go introduce you to my Captain. She set off at her rapid clip.

Seconds later, though, a voice behind them called, Stasia!

They turned just as the new world’s sun shone through the tall window.

A woman approached them. She was tall and slender. Sunlight from the window outlined the side of her face—a long elegant curve of cheekbone—and backlit her hair with brilliant auburn notes.

She dazzled Jack.

Stasia said, We were just going to find you! Zilka, this is Mr. Mistry. Jack, this is Captain Zilka Devreze.

She had a quizzical expression. Mr. Mystery?

Not usually, but some days it’s Mis-try.

She got the joke; the corner of her mouth quirked up.

Mistry is a Parsi Indian surname from my father.

I have my father’s surname too. Odd for her to say that: it was a common naming convention—or had been on Earth. Stasia, I was looking for you because we’ve got a wedding to go to.

Stasia’s eyebrows shot up. We do?

"Yes, and it’s yours! It will be in the Shipyard Chapel. It’s just been