Chapter 1

The man opened his eyes to blackness.

It was so dark that he wasn’t sure, if it was an absence of light or if he was blind. He squeezed his eyes closed, saw bright yellow spots reflected off his eyelids and he guessed it was a residual memory on his retina.

He’d been able to see before he got to wherever here was. He opened his eyelids and peered around again, it didn’t make any difference, he still couldn’t see a bloody thing. He had felt the transition start and then felt searing pain, freezing cold and blackness.

He started categorising what he did know. He was still cold. The surface he lay upon was chilly and hard, and it was covered in some sort of sharp sand. He moved his fingers and could feel the grit; a thick layer of oily dust with sharp little rocks mixed in.

A finger found a little indent, and he traced it, left, up, right, down.

Tiles, he was lying on dusty, cold tiles. Small and not all of the same shape. This made sense to him. He had been in a transporter room in the city called Futura, on the continent called Jahnville, which was on the planet Utopia.

He had been on his way to a transporter dais that was in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, Earth. ‘What the bloody hell did you do to me, Lee?’ he thought. Instinctively, he knew that this place wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He had been to the Brisbane transporter room before and this place neither smelt nor felt right.

‘Bloody Queen Wizard Lee, sending me to Earth to spy, of all things,’ he thought. She had been bloody convincing but he still had to laugh. He wondered if she knew why he had been on the starship Fortune, or that he had been sent to spy on her, and to eliminate her before she got to Utopia.

He was pleased that Gerald or rather, Mage Jahn was dead. There was no way Lee would have gotten him to come back to Earth if that bastard was still alive. He still shuddered to think of the day he had met that prick. The look in Gerald’s eyes the day they met was not that of a man who appreciated one such as him.

He was a man of no race and no real home. Despite his name, he wasn’t a true African. His biological father had been in the service of the Queen of England. His father had never lived with his mother and him. He didn’t remember him much at all. His mother had hinted that his father had been a spy and had to leave Australia under the threat of deportation.

His mother had lost her job in Canberra under a cloud of suspicion. At the tender age of fourteen, she had moved him to Brixton in England to follow his father. Moving to a new country had been an eye-opener. He had got into a lot of trouble in Brixton.

His mother was part Australian Aboriginal and his father part African even though his ancestors hadn’t lived in Africa for centuries. He knew that his father was tall with skin a little darker than his, which resembled lightly tanned leather. Only the Gods knew what else he had in his genes.

All the same, as far as looks went, he didn’t think that he’d done too badly. He scraped in at 188m (6’ 2”), and his 85kgs was simply, muscle over bone these days. He was built like a runner and running was something he had become very good at. It had saved his life on more than one occasion.

He knew he had a lot of Caucasian mixed in and it explained his strange, dark blue eyes with the even darker ring around his irises. In some light, his eyes appeared to be totally black. They were wideset and offset his long, yet broad nose. His wide mouth didn’t have fleshy lips like his father but more than one of his lovers had said they were very kissable.

They found other parts of his anatomy pleasing as well but this wasn’t the time to dwell on that. His forehead was high and square and he had been told his ears were large. However, his curly black hair hid them for the most part. When the tight curls started falling down his back he got a haircut but he didn’t need to do so very often.

His thoughts returned to how he had met Gerald, as he rested on the cold tiles with his eyes closed. In Brixton, he had been sucked into a gang and he had become a drug runner. During a sting, he had been caught red-handed and the Judge gave him two options, Juvie or the Military.

Since his birth certificate said that his dad was British, even though he didn’t know him from a bar of soap, he could serve, so he did. At just fifteen, he had found himself doing Basic Training and then they put him through a barrage of tests. He still hadn’t reached his full height and he was pretty skinny in those days.

The Brits were running a program, like the Aussies, to train young people for space and before he knew it he was learning about space flight. His one problem was that gangs have a bad habit of not letting you get away from them. At least he did make his mum proud when he got his Pilot’s Wings.

He ended up as a Shuttle Pilot and he was assigned to the Moonbase as part of UNSEC. When he was approached by a chap with the old gang handshake, he knew he was in trouble. He had been clear and free of the gang for four years and he loved his new life. What perturbed him most was that this chap was in the British Military, very high up in the Military.

As far as most people knew, he died. For him, it had been a very intense time. He was trained to be an assassin and a spy for the government. He wasn’t sure how he felt about being an assassin at the time but spying didn’t bother him.

The training was exciting and he had even surprised himself. He was agile and fast. One of the reasons he excelled at pilot training was his ability to think on his feet and he had phenomenal reflexes. He was also very apt at picking up languages and could alter his accent with ease. He could also be personable when required.

He could fire just about any weapon you put in his hands, and he was an accurate thrower of sharp and deadly instruments. He also learnt to cover his tracks should he have to leave the scene suddenly and quieter ways to kill. He learnt cypher algorithms and even how to hack computers. He couldn’t even remember half of the jobs they sent him on during those four years.

His last assignment for the Brits had killed his military spying. He had been assigned as a private pilot to an American Ambassador who was based on the Moon. The man was hooked up with others on the Moon and it was later determined that he was involved in a smuggling operation. He was supposed to learn who was in the gang.

He wasn’t sure if it was his questions or the Ambassador’s greed but their ship was tampered with. He had to take the Ambassador to a meeting in Washington and he was the only one who survived the trip down. He got the pleasure of spending six months in an American hospital’s burn unit. The scaring on his left shoulder, neck and calf was still painful but he had learnt to live with it.

He was pensioned off as a high risk and since he had acquired an American passport for the job, he stayed. He had met Gerald through the Ambassador, since his company ran the Armstrong Moon Space Station. When Gerald approached him in the hospital and offered him a job, he had taken it. He didn’t trust the man but he needed work if he was to stay in America.

He didn’t know how Gerald knew of his past service to the Crown or even some of the jobs he had done but he did. As long as he did what Gerald wanted, he had promised that he wouldn’t dob him in to the Americans. He had been working for Gerald for two years, mostly spying on the man’s competitors when Gerald told him that he had a special job for him.

To say that he was surprised that Gerald wanted him to undertake a starship voyage as one of the Pilots for the Explorer ship, Future, was an understatement. He had agreed mostly because many of the jobs Gerald had him doing were not to his liking. He was also more than happy to be free of Gerald’s influence for two years.

He also loved the idea of getting back into space as he had missed flying. He had hoped that somehow he wouldn’t have to come back to Earth. He’d not become what he was by choice but by circumstance.

He still regretted tampering with Lee’s space poles and thruster pack. At the time, it had seemed to be a good idea. His fear of Gerald sometimes made him do strange things. It was only later that he worked out that Gerald had used magic on him and had performed compulsion spells on him to act in ways that he normally wouldn’t.