A Pale Light in the Black Read online

  Dedication

  For my nerds.

  Thanks for always having my back.

  Epigraph

  It is the mission of the Near-Earth Orbital Guard to ensure the safety and security of the Sol system and the space around any additional planets that human beings call home.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Sol Year 2435, One Day Post–Boarding Games

  T-minus Four Months until Prelim Boarding Games

  Chapter 3

  T-minus Fifteen Weeks until Prelim Boarding Games

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  T-minus Fourteen Weeks until Prelim Boarding Games

  T-minus Thirteen Weeks until Prelim Boarding Games

  Letters

  T-minus Twelve Weeks until Prelim Boarding Games

  Letters

  T-minus Ten Weeks until Prelim Boarding Games

  Letters

  T-minus Eight Weeks until Prelim Boarding Games

  Letters

  T-minus Five Weeks until Prelim Boarding Games

  T-minus One Week until Prelim Boarding Games

  Letters

  T-minus Forty-Six Hours until Prelim Boarding Games

  Preliminaries Day One, T-minus One Hour until Opening Ceremonies

  Preliminaries—Day One

  Preliminaries—Day Two

  Preliminaries—Day Three

  Preliminaries—Day Four

  T-minus Twenty Weeks until the Boarding Games

  Chapter 27

  T-minus Nineteen Weeks until the Boarding Games

  Letters

  T-minus Seventeen Weeks until the Boarding Games

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  T-minus Sixteen Weeks until the Boarding Games

  Chapter 34

  T-minus Thirteen Weeks until the Boarding Games

  Chapter 36

  Letters

  T-minus Ten Weeks until the Boarding Games

  T-minus One Week until the Boarding Games

  Chapter 40

  Letters

  T-minus Three Days until the Boarding Games

  Boarding Games—Day One

  Boarding Games—Day Two

  Boarding Games—Day Three

  Boarding Games—Day Four

  Boarding Games—Day Five

  One Week Post-Games

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by K. B. Wagers

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Sol Year 2435, One Day Post–Boarding Games

  The hardest part was the smiling.

  Commander Rosa Martín Rivas pasted another smile onto her face as she wove through the crowds and headed for her ship at the far end of the hangar. She and the rest of the members of Zuma’s Ghost had weathered the post-Games interviews with as much grace as a losing team could, answering question after question about how it felt to come within three points of beating Commander Carmichael’s SEAL team without ever breaking expression.

  That wasn’t entirely true. Jenks had slipped once, muttering a curse and giving the reporter a flat look. Nika had smoothly stepped in and covered for his adopted sister, giving the volatile petty officer a chance to compose herself.

  “Hey, Rosa?”

  She stopped, letting Commander Stephan Yevchenko—leader of the NeoG headquarters’ team Honorable Intent—catch up to her, ignoring the snide smiles from the naval personnel who passed by her. Yevchenko’s people had made up the other half of their group for these Games. And though the Neos had all performed admirably, it had been Rosa who’d let everyone down.

  The slender, brown-haired Neo stuck out a hand. “Next year, right?”

  “We’ll see.” It was the best response she could come up with, and something of her mask must have slipped because Stephan didn’t let go.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t spend a year convincing yourself it was.”

  “Too late for that.” The reply was out before she could stop it. Rosa muffled a curse when he smiled. Stephan was always good at getting people to say too much. “It’s all good. See you at the prelims next year.”

  “Likely sooner,” he said. “We’ve got a case building. I might need your help with it.”

  Rosa nodded, but didn’t press. Stephan’s work in Intel meant he’d tell her when he could and not a moment sooner. Instead she once again forced the smile she was really starting to hate and headed for the Interceptor ahead of her. The interior of Zuma’s Ghost was dead quiet when she boarded, a far cry from the laughter and conversation that usually dominated the ship. Rosa pulled the hatch shut behind her.

  “Take us home, Ma,” she called up to the bridge.

  “Roger that, Commander.”

  Rosa headed for the common area, taking in the downcast eyes and tight mouths of her crew. “All right, people.” She spoke with a firmness she didn’t quite feel, but if there was one thing she was good at, it was putting on a brave face for everyone else. “You’ve got the ride back to Jupiter to get it out of your systems. It’s just the Games.”

  “We lost, Commander.” Jenks’s mismatched eyes weren’t quite filled with tears, but there was a sheen to them and her jaw was set in a determined pout.

  “I know. We don’t lose out there, though, right? What are we?”

  “The NeoG.” The automatic reply echoed back from everyone, and this time Rosa’s smile was genuine.

  “That’s right. Don’t forget it.”

  T-minus Four Months until Prelim Boarding Games

  The battered ship drifted in perfect synchronicity with the asteroid as it passed across the face of Sol, for just a moment blotting out the G-type yellow dwarf almost five hundred million kilometers away.

  Upon visual inspection, the ship appeared as dead as the asteroid, its gray surface pitted and dulled by years in the black. It was, or at least appeared to be, a shitty early-days system jumper made for long-haul flights from Earth to the Trappist-1 system.

  The SJs had been made well before the days of wormhole tech and instantaneous travel. Their names were painfully incorrect, as they didn’t jump anywhere but instead took the long, slow path thirty-nine light-years across the galaxy. Their inhabitants trusting that they’d go to sleep before launch and wake up a long way away from Earth on a brand-new planet.

  Lieutenant Commander Nika Vagin watched as his little sister, Petty Officer First Class Altandai Khan of the Near-Earth Orbital Guard, put her hands on her hips and stared up at the ship from the asteroid’s surface. “That’s it. Ship 645v, aka An Ordinary Star. Launched on June 17, 2330. Carrying three hundred and fifty-three popsicles—”

  “Jenks.” He let the threat in her nickname carry over the coms.

  “Sorry,” she said with a grin, clearly unrepentant even through the dim glare of the star on her helmet. “Three hundred and fifty-three people.”

  She wasn’t wrong about them being popsicles, though. These poor bastards froze themselves for nothing. The Voyager Company developed wormhole tech just before the last wave of transport ships left Earth. When they were sure it was going to work, Off-Earth sent in larger freighters via wormhole to scoop up the SJs and take them on to the Trappist system.

  Correction: they picked up the ones they could find. Nika shuddered a little at the thought.

  Some were destroyed by system failure or space debris and nothing was left but rubble floating in the black. And some had simply vanished into the great nothing—no signal, no trace. All
told, there were still a few dozen registered vessels missing, and a double handful more unregistered ships carrying a few desperate families who hadn’t realized or hadn’t cared that there was one—and only one—company with the legal ability to ship humans off-world.

  “I’m getting no life-sign readings at all,” Nika said, staring up at the ship. “There had better be someone on that jumper. If there isn’t and I hiked my ass halfway across this surface when we could have just called the station and had an Earth Security Cutter tow them in, I’m going to chew out someone’s ass.”

  “Relax, Nik.” Commander Rosa Martín’s voice was crisp over the com. “There are people. Though the ones on ice are probably freezer burned and the ones who aren’t have everything locked down so tight we can’t see a single thing from out here.”

  “I still don’t see why we couldn’t have just used the EMUs straight from Zuma’s Ghost.”

  “Because she’s noisy on the radar,” Jenks said, “and then I wouldn’t get to do this.” She took off running with that low-gravity bounce, did a handspring over an outcropping, and launched herself into the starlit blackness beyond.

  Nika cursed, his ears ringing from Jenks’s whoop and the laughter of the rest of the team as he followed her. His helmet display gave him the necessary trajectory, although he was sure his little sister had done it on nothing but faith.

  He launched himself off the asteroid’s surface, flying through the vacuum toward the mysterious ship. Jenks soared through space ahead of him, kicking in the thrusters on her EMU to slow her approach at the last second so that she made less noise than a piece of space debris when she hit the hull of the ship. The name was faded and pockmarked from dust impact but still read clearly an ordinary star next to the door.

  “This is an older model of SJ, Jenks.” Ensign Nell Zika’s cool voice came over the coms as the readings from Jenks’s scan scrolled across her terminal back on their ship. “One of the last waves from 2330. It’s registered, though, legal and everything. Huh—that’s weird.”

  “What’s weird, Sapphi?” Rosa asked the ensign. “Tamago and I just connected with the back end of this beast.”

  “We see you, Commander. Did you know that there were twenty-seven missing ships in total? And twenty of them were from the last wave?” Sapphi asked.

  “I did not know that,” Jenks replied. She didn’t look up as Nika made contact with the ship next to her. “How many were in the last wave?”

  “Only thirty,” Sapphi replied. “The wormholes were the big news story and people wanted to wait and see what would happen with them.”

  “Yeah, I get that, but a sixty-seven percent loss for a single wave seems like a really high failure rate for Off-Earth Enterprises, and it was never in the news?”

  “How do you know that?” Nika asked.

  “I read the briefing.”

  Nika reached out and tapped the side of his sister’s helmet once, hard enough to push her into the ship.

  “Okay, maybe I read more than the briefing,” she said. “It was interesting. People were flipping their sh—”

  “Focus, Jenks, you had your fun. Time to work,” Rosa ordered.

  “That’s on Sapphi, Commander. We’re just hanging out in the middle of a deadly vacuum, waiting. Gotta do something to distract Nika here, or you know his noodle gets in a twist.” She grinned at Nika’s glare. She knew he hated space work and teased him about it mercilessly every chance she got.

  But, in a way, she had a point—what fool pursued a career with an Interceptor crew when they were terrified of being out in space?

  You. You’re the fool, he thought.

  “Give me two hundred seconds and you’ll be in.” Sapphi’s voice was soothing on the com.

  The timer in the corner of Nika’s vision started ticking down as the ensign turned her brilliance toward the lock on the outside of the ship.

  “Nika, if things go sideways in there you grab Jenks and get the fuck out, copy?” Rosa’s order came straight to him rather than broadcast on the team channel.

  “You expecting trouble?” He turned in toward the ship so Jenks couldn’t spot his lips moving. His little sister had an amazing ability to read lips that she exploited mercilessly.

  “Something feels off. I know Off-Earth wants any SJs recovered intact and there may be live passengers on board—though you and I know the odds that anyone on ice for as long as these folks have been not having freezer burn is atom small—but why would someone be hanging out in the belt with a derelict ship? I don’t like it, and regardless of what Off-Earth wants, I’ll blow that ship to pieces before I risk living, breathing people on a piece of space junk.”

  “I thought you wanted to space Jenks yesterday.” He couldn’t resist the tease, and Rosa chuckled.

  “That’s a daily occurrence, but I know you’d miss her, so I let her keep breathing.”

  “Eh, today you’re right.” Nika smiled as Jenks continued to worry over the problem of the ratios on a sixty-seven percent failure rate for a launch. “Intel said one, maybe two pirates and no more than five for a boat this size. I think they may actually be right—the ship’s not big enough to handle a crew of more than five, and I doubt they’d expend that much personnel on something like this. Jenks and I will handle the front end. But yes, if things go wrong we’ll double-time it out. Hand to Saint Ivan.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears. Be careful in there.”

  “Same to you, Commander.”

  “Will do.”

  The airlock opened. Jenks looked at Nika with a smile. “You got my back?” she asked, thumping her chest twice with a gloved fist.

  He grinned, swinging his own arm out, tapping the back of his fist against hers before grabbing her forearm and leaning in to bump their helmets together. “You’ve got mine.”

  “Let’s do this.”

  The pair slipped into the airlock and pulled it shut behind them. As he watched the numbers cycle, Nika debated whether they should take their helmets off. If they did, leaving them here in the airlock would be safest, but it also meant they’d have to get back to this spot in order to get off the ship.

  “We’ve got air. This can’s been refilled,” Jenks said. “There’s definitely someone walking around in here. Helmets off, Nik?”

  The fact that she even asked him meant Jenks was already in battle mode—focused, unassailable. She’d keep with the jokes, but she’d do what he told her without question.

  “Yeah, take it off. We’ll stash them here.” He hit the release on his own and pulled the dome loose. He shoved it into a spot behind the old suits hanging in the airlock, surprised they didn’t crumble to dust when he touched them.

  “I wish Off-Earth would hurry it up with those new prototypes. I’m tired of lugging this thing around.” Jenks set her helmet next to his and tugged her skullcap off, revealing the bright shock of orange hair running down the center of her head.

  “I’m as excited about a helmet that folds into our suits as you are, but I saw those failure tests,” Nik replied. “I’d rather they take their time and make sure they figure out what the heck happened with the seals so we don’t die out there. Speaking of not dying . . .” He jabbed a finger at the door behind them.

  “Come on, Nik, live a little.” She winked her blue eye at him and reached over her shoulder. The magnetic clamps released the moment Jenks’s palm touched the sensor, the microsheath flowing away from the tip and down into the hilt.

  Guns on spaceships were bad news, and no one yet had the lock on a reliable handheld laser weapon, a fact that Jenks regularly bemoaned even though she was more likely to settle something with fists than with her sword anyway.

  The matte black blades of the NeoG weapons were ten centimeters at the widest point and thirty-five centimeters long, with the handle making it an even fifty. A wicked-looking hook curved back toward the hilt a handful of centimeters from the end point.

  Nika’s favorite trick with that during the competition f
ights was to hook his opponent’s sword and send it flying. In real combat, though, it was equally effective in making folks more concerned about keeping their guts in than fighting him.

  Jenks preferred to slap people with the flat of her blade, which Nika felt was an accurate representation of how each of them approached the world. Jenks would kill if there was a need, but she didn’t like it and avoided it right up to the line of endangering her own life.

  He hoped neither one of them had to put their philosophies to the test today.

  “Tamago and I are on board,” Rosa said.

  “Copy that, we are proceeding forward,” Nika replied, and then turned off his com with a thought. “Jenks?”

  She paused at his call, hand hovering over the entrance panel. “What’s up?”

  “Be careful in there.”

  “You think it’s going to turn into a muck?”

  Nika shrugged and reached back to pull his own sword. “It might.”

  “Can do, then.” She blinked twice. “Readings inside are showing three life signs in the front section, two more in the back end by the commander.” She highlighted their locations on the shared map. “Front two are just off the engine room and one up on the bridge. The ones in the back are with the pop—uh—people.”

  “I see them, Jenks,” Rosa said. “We’ll deal with these two, you and Nika take the trio.”

  Jenks looked at Nika, one eyebrow raised. The question—How do you want to do this?—was floating unsaid on the air. Nika gestured at the door and Jenks opened it.

  It was a risk either way, because the commander would kill him if they split up. He’d put either of them in a two-on-one fight, but he also knew it was dangerous odds. Anything could go wrong. But if he and Jenks stayed together and went for engineering first, the one on the bridge could vent the ship if they heard a commotion.

  Or engineering could blow the ship if they thought something was up.

  He hated this. Snap decisions weren’t his forte. Too many things to sort through, too many things that could go wrong. It paralyzed him every damn time, no matter how hard he worked on it. You are a hell of an officer, Vagin, he thought bitterly.