Voyage Read online

  Shadow Eclipse: Voyage

  Ella Gale

  19/10/2019

  Shadow Eclipse: Voyage

  Prologue

  One Night in London

  A Solipsistic Nightmare

  And That’s Why You Should Pay Attention To Trees

  Tourist Information or Nearest Cultural Equivalent

  The Boundary Between Life and Death

  Ambush

  The Cuddly Side of Crime

  We’ll Just Have To Use These Then

  Space Mercs

  Wow, That’s a Lot of Stakes

  Starship Corridors’ Wet Tee-Shirt Competition

  Getting My Wings

  He Sounds Like Someone I Might Know

  Flow Like a River

  Did I Say Rude?

  Kreegle Pirates

  Worst Disguise Ever

  You’re Quite Poetic, You Know

  A Nasty Job

  Orcs Are Nothing Like Plants

  Are You Coming With Me?

  The Kuj Kuz-aj?

  With His Teeth, I Guess

  The Garlic Trap

  Silly B-Movies

  The Earth’s Hope

  The Worst Day Of My Life… So Far

  I Am Not A Pirate!

  What Is Your Opinion On a Little Ship Theft?

  Alucard

  You Can’t Steal Your Own Ship

  Never Drop Your Sword

  Dead, Deader Than Dead, Definitely Not Undead

  Brannigan

  A Credulous Doctor

  In Potentiality

  An… Interesting Event

  The Garlic Trap Coda

  Cover

  Table of contents

  Prologue

  He hadn’t signed up for this. He stroked his chin as he wistfully thought back to the days when being in the military had been easy: someone told you what to do, where to go, and as long as you could follow orders nothing would get blamed on you. And he was damn good at following orders. Now here he was, risking both his life and a dishonourable discharge, and to what end? To help take on the Solan Empire’s enemies on a clean field of battle? No, this wasn’t clean, it wasn’t soldierly–he was technically, and actually, he had to admit, a spy. And while he hoped he was working against mankind’s enemies, some days he wasn’t so sure.

  For the tenth time he checked the corridor. It was the graveyard shift and he’d rigged up sensors to let him know if anyone came nosing around, but he still checked. You never knew when one of those sneaky suckers might be around and he wasn’t sure they showed up on infrared sensors. A final glance at the time and then he turned off the ship-wide screening system that recorded all transmissions. He started the program that would encrypt his call, send it out via hyperspace distortion to her, and then delete the records and cover the whole thing up as ‘essential maintenance’. He’d not been caught thus far. He was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be. He’d always been shit hot on computers.

  Then it connected. She was already there and waiting. She looked at her watch, but didn’t say anything. He wasn’t late. It wouldn’t matter if he was, she would wait, but an over-concern with the seconds flying past was one of her traits, he’d noticed.

  She seemed relaxed. She was dressed casually rather than in the uniform of the pictures that had smiled down on him at the academy, but her pose was the same, back rigid, her black hair pinned into the same tight plaits on the top of her head. Maybe it was the surrounding foliage that softened her. She often took his calls in what he surmised was her garden. Her face was youthful and had a touch of the exotic beyond the contrast of blue eyes with black hair. She was pale even for a European, which seemed at odds with her bone structure, which reminded him of a Siberian native. He could easily picture her, skin leathery from sun and wind, riding across the steppes setting fire to huts and rustling horses. Maybe once that had been her life.

  “I hear you’ve been having a little trouble,” she said. It was something of an understatement given the content of his report. Ten dead in one attack. A ship crewed by a hundred could absorb such losses, but it wasn’t easy. He’d bet his wages that as soon as they made port the mercenaries they’d picked up would jump ship, making them even worse off.

  “You could say that, General Clarke.” He took in the line of her body. Superior officer she might be, mildly terrifying she might also be, but he was still a man and she was still curvaceous. He’d given up trying to fight his attraction. Now he just ignored it and hoped that the lapse in judgement that it undoubtedly caused wouldn’t lead to his downfall.

  “Is there anything you’ve learnt since you sent your report? Anything to suggest this attack was related to the ship’s mission?”

  “No, sir, I don’t think so, this time it was just pirates out on the edge.” He paused. “It’s quite bad out here.”

  She nodded. “I know the region well. I suggest that you head to Ragnarok IV. You will find the necessary supplies there.”

  He frowned. “Uh, Jac-Be is closer to our position, sir, and it has a larger spaceport.”

  She smiled slightly. “Ah, but there’s essential kit you need on Ragnarok IV. I’m sure you can find some reason to head there.”

  “Ragnarok IV it is then, sir.”

  “Good. Is there anything else you want to mention?”

  He pondered asking for a reassignment. “No, General Clarke.”

  “Good. Keep me informed.” Then she broke the link, leaving him to wonder what he would find on Ragnarok IV as his code covered his tracks in the internal system.

  One Night in London

  Consciousness arrived like a hungover house guest sneaking in the back door. I thought I had opened my eyes. The room was dark enough and my head was fuzzy enough that I couldn’t be sure. I lay still on a bed whilst my thoughts frothed and foamed. I put my hands up to my eyes. They were open. I reached out to the side of the bed next to me. If I couldn’t see, I could at least touch my partner and maybe something would come back.

  There was no one there, just silk sheets. I lay still for a while, mildly curious as to why I didn’t seem perturbed to have no memory of where I was or how I’d gotten there.

  ‘Shit, did I take something last night?’

  I had a strange feeling then. A part of my brain was screaming at me, trying to tell me something, but the message couldn’t get through. However, I didn’t feel calm anymore. I started searching around in the darkness, knocking the pillows off the bed in my haste, then my fingers touched cold ceramic. I followed the shape down to a cord, found a switch and then light from the ceramic-bottomed lamp revealed my surroundings. I exhaled deeply; it was just a room, crammed with fancy furniture and a now-messy bed with black silk sheets.

  ‘Well, I’m not tidying it up.’

  Then I realised the bed was familiar as I remembered falling asleep saying, ‘Hold on, I still have more questions…’

  ‘That’s a damn strange thing to say during a one-night stand.’

  I shook my head and got to my feet to search for my clothes. They didn’t seem to be in the room. Then I looked at my watch.

  ‘Aren’t I supposed to be at Anna’s house? I’m sure I was supposed to meet her last night…’

  Then another flash of memory:

  ‘Hi, it’s me, I can’t make it,’ I said into my phone, all the time staring at the vampire, asking myself why I was cancelling on Anna. Then I walked over to him and I smiled, and only then did I realise that I was planning to go home with him.

  ‘I definitely took something last night.’

  I blinked a few times to try to pull up the rest of the fragment, then sighed and slumped down onto the bed.

  ‘’The vampire’?’

  I jumped up and looked around the room.

  ‘Did I go home with a vamp
ire last night? Wait, do vampires exist?’

  I shook my head and then I remembered a hot, white, delicious screaming feeling centred on my neck that then spread throughout my body. When he had pulled away I remembered seeing his extra-long canines in the flickering sodium light.

  ‘Oh, shit!’

  His teeth had retracted and when I had reached up to move his upper lip out of the way for a closer look, he’d said, ‘Don’t,’ in a strangled voice.

  ‘Why? Does it hurt?’ I had asked.

  He had shaken his head. ‘I… I just don’t like people looking at my teeth.’

  Now I stared at the walls, hoping more would come back.

  ‘Well, I suppose I didn’t sound very terrified.’

  I looked around the room again uneasily. Next to a large mirror, there was a tall mahogany wardrobe and a large chest: both big enough to contain a body.

  ‘I could just leave. There’s no need to wake him up if he’s sleeping or doing whatever vampires do during the day. But what if I turn my back and he flies out of the chest as a flock of bats or flows out of the wardrobe as a mist and–’

  ‘What? What could he possibly do to me that he didn’t do last night?’

  I chewed on my knuckle.

  ‘If only I could remember exactly what we did do last night…’

  I walked over to the wardrobe and then, steeling myself, I threw the door wide with a bang. Suits, shirts, stuff like that, all on the formal end of menswear.

  I looked at the chest. It was an odd thing to have in a bedroom. It was richly carved in an oriental style, antique maybe, and large, very large. It was in the darkest part of the room, as if the lamp had been placed deliberately to keep it in the shadows. The chest seemed to be crouching, lying in wait…

  I opened the door to the bedroom and peered out. The rest of the flat was in gloom. I couldn’t hear anyone out there, just distant traffic and birdsong. I looked back at the chest uneasily.

  ‘I could just leave, no need to piss him off…’

  I tiptoed over to the chest and then threw the lid up. Shirts, folded-up tee-shirts, the sort of stuff rich people wore when they were trying for smart-casual.

  ‘Jesus, how many clothes does this guy have?’

  I looked around the room. There was nowhere else he could be hiding.

  ‘What exactly did I do here last night?’

  I left the bedroom. I walked forwards until my fingers found a thick velvet curtain. I swept it aside, allowing tiny shafts of light in from around some thick wooden shutters. I pulled on the shutters. They moved but were locked.

  ‘I’m sure I remember these being open when I saw his teeth: windows open, curtains pulled back, nets blowing in the wind and the only light the street lamps outside.’

  There was enough daylight now to enable me to find a light switch. I was standing in a rather large, rather neat living room. Nothing too odd here, no black candles or dismembered heads, just a blue glass coffee table with sheet music dumped on it, a modern-style sofa, a wide-screen TV, a large keyboard and stand, history books on reinforced glass shelves and an expensive Apple laptop.

  In the corner was my overnight bag and most of the clothes I had been wearing yesterday. I padded over.

  ‘Gah, my top’s ripped. And where’s my scarf?’

  I dressed quickly in a fresh pair of black combats, red tee-shirt and a thick comfy jumper. I even put on those stupid high-heeled boot things that I had thought would be good for hanging out at Anna’s, although I suspected that they were less useful for running away from evil children of the night.

  I couldn’t find a weapon of any sort, but grabbed one of the heaviest-looking books–a tome on samurai art–and explored the flat. There was nothing: no vampire, no note for me and no coffee in the seemingly unused kitchen.

  ‘Do vampires not need to eat?’

  I gave up both my searching and my fear and dropped the book on the white leather sofa.

  ‘Minor species identification issues aside, it seemed like a normal one-nighter. What I can remember of it, anyway.’

  I padded back into the bedroom and crouched before the mirror to pull my curly hair into some semblance of my normal style, two plaits pinned on top of my head. And then, like fragments of a dream resurfacing, I recalled something else: I was naked and on the bed, the vampire was explaining something.

  ‘It’s like this.’ He mimed walking with his fingers along the bed. ‘You go through your life perfectly normally, and then’–he smashed his other hand into his fingers in a way that I thought was supposed to be a car crash–‘you die, and then next day you wake up’–the walking again–‘as good as new.’

  I stared at my reflection in horror.

  ‘What the fuck did I do last night?’

  I shut my eyes and counted to ten.

  I massaged my temples as if I could make myself remember anything else at all, even just his name. And then:

  ‘What’s your name?’ I had asked dreamily, as we were walking along by the cold river. He looked amused.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ I had thought.

  ‘No, I guess not,’ I had said.

  And that was it, all I could recall about that bloody evening. I chewed on my finger and pondered why I couldn’t remember anything and why I had said something different from what I had felt.

  ‘Well, how do you feel now? Fucking freaked?’

  I launched myself up off the floor and packed everything back into my bag. As I did so, I glanced at the door–

  ‘What if I’m locked in?’

  I ran over and pulled the front door wide. A short corridor, a skylight, pink marble stairs under burgundy carpet, brass stair rails polished to gleaming.

  ‘Well, I pulled a rich vampire. Go me.’

  I grabbed my bag and ran down the entire height of the building. I was about to step off the stairs and onto the marble floor when I paused. It was quite late in the morning and the light was falling straight down the atrium. Sunlight, pure sunlight, with motes of dust floating dreamily on sun-warmed zephyrs.

  ‘What if…’

  “You all right, miss?” A voice from behind me. I turned and saw a doorman in one of those stupid uniforms. I nodded and he walked across the floor.

  ‘What if I step into that light and I burn? Or dissolve in a thousand pieces, or turn into dust, or–’

  The doorman had turned to look back at me.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, miss? You look pale.”

  ‘Pale?!’

  “I’m fine. Just fine.”

  ‘Just step forward, Clarke.’

  For a second I was aware of the sound of a quiet TV in the cubicle off the side of the corridor, cats meowing and someone saying the pointless things people tell cats, a distant rumble of air con. The scent of brasso, exhaust, tea and cinnamon cigarettes seemed to come from nowhere. Then it vanished again as I looked around me in surprise.

  The doorman was still watching me. I looked back at the patch of sunlight and gulped.

  ‘I just…’

  I stepped forward into the sunlight, gritting my teeth. Nothing happened and I grinned.

  “I’m fine.”

  The doorman plainly thought I was crazy, but as this was an exclusive block of flats, he just said, “That’s good then,” and shuffled back to his post in a small room off the corridor to the front door.

  I walked out, my heels clicking on the marble. I paused at a large gilt-framed mirror. I didn’t think I looked any paler than usual, but the doorman was watching me again, so I gave him a cheery wave and walked out of the flats.

  I had no idea where the river was, but I turned left with a certainty that surprised me. Then I realised I must be almost in the Thames, I could smell it, silt and garbage. A tree rustled right next to my head. I turned around, expecting to see someone walking along with a tree, or twigs or something, but there was just the usual garden potted variety. Birds chirped in a hedge in a garden. I pau
sed and crouched, finding them even amongst the tangled branches. The birds froze seeing me.

  ‘I wonder if I could grab one?’

  I held my breath. Keeping my torso very still, I reached out with my right hand towards a bird. It flew away. I knew its path even though I wasn’t looking at it. The other birds flew off as well, weaving braids in the air. I stared at the house. I could hear someone on the phone, smell the scent of a freshly made cup of tea, Earl Grey, but I couldn’t see them. Then a woman wandered in front of the window, phone balanced between her ear and her shoulder, stirring a drink.

  The woman moved out of view. I straightened. I could tell somehow that the bottom flat contained the tea-drinking woman and a dog, upstairs there were two people, one a baby, and milk was being warmed, above them students, perhaps. I knew that they smoked marijuana and burned incense. I blinked.

  The woman in the downstairs flat, still on the phone, jerked up her kitchen blind and stared at me. At that point I realised that I had just spent five minutes watching her house. I turned, my hands in my pockets, and sloped off. Twelve steps later I stopped abruptly.

  ‘Clarke, just what the hell were you going to do with that bird if you’d grabbed it?’

  Shaking my head at myself, I walked. I seemed to know things I couldn’t see: who or what was in a walled garden, what TV shows were on behind double glazing twenty feet away. Then, abruptly as it had come, it vanished and everything was back to normal.

  My stomach crunched with a familiar sense of dread: that sort of regret that poisons everything that went before and turns your future into ash; the regret that is only surpassed by the joyful relief when you get a clear test back from the doctor.

  ‘Only this time, I’m pretty sure I won’t be getting a negative.’

  I chewed on my knuckle as I walked, taking my time, and detoured along the cold streets by the river.

  ‘What will they do to me if I go to the doctor? I never knew vampires existed, and I know medical students, so I doubt that they’d have a clue what to do.’

  I frowned at the turgid river as I pondered various medical interventions–full-body blood transfusions, stomach pumping, unnecessary surgery, my imagination drawing on every B-movie I’d ever seen to fill my head with Technicolour horror.