Chapter 1

Space was the goal.

Space had always been the goal for mankind, ever since we realized that the sky wasn’t just a dark bowl with pinpoints of light shining on it. We realized that we could get out there somehow, we could explore somehow, see what glorious wonders lay beyond this ball of dirt, water and gas that we called home.

We did it, of course. Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, the first three Space Stations, the first Lunar Colony, a madman’s dream of a colony on Mars that succeeded against all odds. Eventually we even settled on Io, Europa, and Ganymede, the largest moons of Jupiter. But, despite all the signals we beamed into space, the massive telescopes we built to scour the infinite vastness of space, there was no sign of intelligent life beyond our own.

Until the Callisto Discovery. In late 2100, we founded our sixth colony on Callisto, second largest moon around Jupiter. Days later, the colony announced the most startling discovery in human history after fire. The Callisto Colony had located a spaceship outside the colony, half buried in debris.

It was not human. There was finally confirmation that there really was, or had been, other life in the universe before us, that we were not alone. But even then, we had no idea who built it, why it was left behind, or where it had come from.

We sent our best scientists to Callisto to study the ship and found that it was strangely easy to learn about, almost as though it had been built to be taken apart and studied. Humanity advanced in leaps and bounds in the following decades, unlocking genetic secrets that we had dreamed of for as long, or longer, than we had dreamed of the stars. Telepathy, telekinesis, medical miracles to cure disease, faster than light communication and travel, we had it all.

We established colonies out across the stars, as far away as Centaurus, and even established a council to rule it all. But we still hadn’t encountered alien life other than cattle. Things were peaceful. Oh, there were some out there who enjoyed piracy, but not many. Just when it seemed we had conquered our basest impulses and created a galactic utopia for ourselves, it all came crashing down.

You see, we had taken every system from the Callisto Discovery and improved on it. We thought we understood the engineering, the physics, the way it all interacted with itself enough to make improvements. After all, we’d learned so much, so fast. We knew everything about it, and saw room for improvement, and so we did. We took the Callisto Drive and treated it like a hot rod, tweaking and tuning it until we thought it had reached perfection, replacing parts like you’d change out spark plugs or an air filter.

Even today, records are scarce about what happened, but something did. Every ship equipped with a star drive based on our own improved versions of the Callisto Drive, was suddenly lost in fiery explosions, and humans being humans, we did what we always do when something violent and unexpected happens.

We lashed out at each other, with weapons that made the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like party poppers. The toll of the dead still isn’t known, but entire colonies were lost. And then, everything else came unravelled. Our communication nets imploded, burned out and were useless. Every attempt to bring the new Callisto Drives back online ended in fiery explosions, and after Mars was reduced to half a planet in the midst of an asteroid field of one of our earliest colonies, it was finally abandoned and made illegal to modify the Callisto systems. You could tune them, but you couldn’t swap in or out different parts. Some people still tried, and they still died in fiery explosions.

We had to return to the original Callisto Drives, the unmodified technologies we had so confidently upgraded. Now, a trip between Earth and Vandar, one of our major colonies near Lynga 7, took almost a month as opposed to the day it took before. And Earth to Aeria, at the far edge of the Perseus Arm? Two months, if you’re lucky. Forget a fast trip to our Centaurus colony. A four-month trip, and on the other side you’d be lucky if you weren’t attacked by bandits and raiders with ships of their own.

Because, of course, some colonies who had survived the war had turned to lawlessness or redefined it to suit their own needs. Slavery, kidnapping, murder, theft, all the worst human traits reemerged in these places, and created bands of roving animals hellbent on taking whatever they could.

That’s the world I live in.

My name is Edward Garrick. Basically, I’m a starship captain, in command of the Shadowhawk, a sleek cargo transport with only myself for crew. The ships’ artificial intelligence runs the complex systems, life support, engineering, and sensors mainly, while I focus on flying the ship. For the most part, the flying part is easy. Once you enter a jump, you’ve basically thrown the ship out of a slingshot towards your target. Flying in system is easy too. Amanda, the avatar for the ships’ AI I put together to give me someone to talk to on long trips, handles the sensors and lets me know where the major hazards are so I can avoid them. It isn’t like flying a plane either. You have to plot a course well ahead of where you are, because at the speed ships move, no human can react fast enough to avoid those hazards.

Aside from being a starship captain, I’m also among the most powerful telepaths humanity has ever produced. That sounds like a brag, I know, but it’s true. Believe me, telepaths and telekinetics are monitored closely by what’s left of the Council worlds because we can cause havoc if we don’t. Telepaths all must be registered with the Council. You can’t just forget either, because all identicards are genetically coded, and it turns out that there are very specific genes that control telepathy and telekinetics, so you really can’t cheat it, and people have tried. I’ve seen some powerful tepes, short for telepaths, hand wave their way past a customs officer, scan their identicard, which of course also knows how much money we have, later to pay for a meal and set off so many alarms you’d think that it was an alien invasion. Everything we do is tracked. Even people from non-Council worlds like Proxima and Orion have genetic identicards because otherwise they can’t enter Council worlds or stations.

So, I can honestly tell you that I am one of the most powerful telepaths we’ve had records of, at least back to discovering that telepathy was a real thing and not a side show scam. My rating, because we humans love to rate and classify everything, is a TPC10R3. Telepath Controller Grade 10 Restricted 3. What that word salad means is that I am the highest grade of Telepath, powerful enough to rewrite and bend minds to my will, and I’ve done it. Some by accident, some on purpose. Because of that, I have a Restricted 3 rating, which means that the Council will allow me to literally Capture up to three people at a time and do whatever I want with them, so long as they’re criminals or from the poorest strata of society.

And I have. I’ve taken street whores, convicted killers, raiders and even a mother and her two children from their lives, reprogrammed them to be whatever I wanted and when they stopped being fun, or entertaining, or interesting, I turned them loose. Some back to where I found them, others back into society with better chances to make it, and others out an airlock in space because, despite space being infinite, they were a waste of it. Right now, I have two women out cold in my stateroom who tried to raid me, only to find out that they’d picked the wrong target.

This doesn’t mean I’m some kind of god. Some tepes can fight back, push against my control and will, but it’s an uphill battle. I still work for a living, sailing between colonies though the vast beauty of space, trading goods from one place to another to earn my way. I have a healthy amount of money in my account, but the Shadowhawk is my home, and I’ve never settled down, and probably never will.

I sat in the pilot’s chair of Shadowhawk on the small bridge. I say small, but for a cargo ship bridge, it’s actually spacious. There are two stations forward, the pilot and the navigator seats, and one behind on each side, for the communications and sensors. Aside from my seat, the bridge was empty. Aside from two women confined in a stateroom aft, Shadowhawk was empty of lifeforms.

Ah yes, Shadowhawk. She’s an old ship, how old I’m not sure. Her internal registry marks her as a Solar Dynamics Zepplin-Class Cargo Ship. I’ve never been able to find much information on the Zeppling, except that it never sold as well as their other designs which were larger and better proven. Hell, according to a specification comparison, the Charger-Class is newer, faster, and can carry three times as much cargo. I could afford two of them for what I paid to buy and refit Shadowhawk to suit my needs, so why did I buy a second-hand ship that was destined for the scrap heap?

I like it. She has an angular, almost coffin shape, narrow at the bow, broad shoulders and a graceful taper to the aft, where her engines sit. Inside, she has two decks. The upper deck is the bridge, my stateroom, the XO or Executive Officers stateroom, and six smaller staterooms aft of those, separated by the airlocks. Just outside the bridge are ladders to travel between decks, and at the aft end of the hallway is a wide set of stairs. Don’t judge about the “primitive” interdeck travel options. It’s only a single deck. The lower deck has the engine room, medbay, armoury, and both cargo bays.

I suppose you want to know about me as well. I stand at six feet tall, with shoulder length black hair, steel grey eyes and olive skin. I work out in the armoury on long Jumps, but I also take care not to get heavily muscled. On board Shadowhawk, I just wear an environment suit and my mag-boots, which isn’t what you might imagine from old sci-fi vids. It’s just a black bodysuit, with metal accents at the neck, chest, wrists, waist and ankles. Those accents are for micro-tech extensions to cover the head, hands and feet in the case of sudden depressurization or some other loss of atmosphere.

Right now, I’m heading from Sol to Aeria, hauling a load of cryo-stored seasonal produce that the Aerians go absolutely wild for. They can grow their own, but it isn’t the same as that from good old Earth. Their peaches are blue and poisonous, bananas are impossible to grow, and their berries are primarily poisonous, so the Aerians grow food in large hydroponic bays on Starbase Three. That was my target, where I would off load my cargo and then find a new contract to move more goods someplace else.

I had been two months in Jump Transit from Sol and had come out near the edge of the Aerian System. It’s standard protocol to come out of Jump at the edge of the system, where there’s less traffic to avoid collisions. Jump Transit is difficult to explain if you’ve never done it before. The Callisto Drive emits a whine that’s heard throughout the entire ship, and then, if you have a window to the outside, you can see the world stretch and turn a pure dazzling white that fades to a deep rich blue. I highly recommend it at least once. If you don’t have a view, you can feel the world stretch, and then snap back to its proper shape. Some people say that time is meaningless in Jump, but it has meaning. It always does. Timepieces and chronometers tick away at the same rate, and outside the windows is that rich blue, interrupted only by streaks and pulses of brighter blue and pure white.

Once in Jump, though, you’re helpless. You’re a stone thrown across the galaxy in a tunnel of soundless light, and all you can do is kill time. Some people use sleeper tubes in medbay and sleep the entire trip, other prefer to be awake and study or train, which is my preference. I hate sleeper tubes. They’re cramped, and leave me with a headache, not uncommon among telepaths. Most tepes don’t like sleeper tubes, even if we take suppressants for our telepathy beforehand.