“Oh, I don’t think that will be a problem,” came a voice full of swagger from behind them. “I think everyone knows who’s running this show.”

  Mao and Delphyne locked Wilco in their combined death stare.

  “You, of course,” Wilco said in exaggerated deference. And then, in apparent seriousness, he said, “Congratulations, XO.”

  Mao studied for sarcasm in the words but found none.

  The bridge soon filled with every member of the crew. They gathered around Mao in a semicircle. He felt a sudden rush of heat wash over him. The tips of his ears burned. A fire sparked in his chest. A nostalgia so pure flooded through him that he found himself fighting back tears. For the first time in what felt like years, he felt like a captain again. Then he realized, it was not the first in a long time. It was the first ever. Promoted to captain after Bayne’s defection and presumed death, there had always been a shadow over Mao’s position on the Royal Blue. Even without the specter of Drummond Bayne, there was the looming threat of Colonel Maria Tirseer. Like long, black fingers snaking out of the dark, she touched everything he did, whether by direct order or through his reaction.

  Now, with the eyes of these people whom he respected, mostly, upon him, standing again on the bridge of the Royal Blue, a ship that felt like home, Taliesin Mao felt like he’d earned his right to be there. And he felt the freedom that came from captaining a ship without the eyes of a tyrant on him.

  “This is a defining moment,” Mao said. “Not just for me and you and this ship. Not just for the Navy or the United Systems. This is a defining moment for humanity. This threat we face, the Void, it is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. It represents every deep fear we as a species have had since we left Earth. The unknown. Those shadows that lurk just beyond the borders of the Deep Black. And a fear of ourselves. Of what we’re capable of creating, and what we’re capable of doing to each other.

  “We took something we didn’t understand and we turned it into a weapon, like we’ve done countless times throughout our history. We’ve warred over it. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, we’ve burned down planets, we’ve wiped out cultures and ways of life, and now we war some more. But this time, we do it together. We fight on the same side, against a common enemy. We have a chance to redeem ourselves. I mean for everyone on this ship to take advantage of the opportunity.”

  Energy thrummed through the bridge, bouncing from person to person, tying the crew together. They cheered and slapped each other’s backs and shook hands. Even Wilco smiled beneath his mask.

  “You have your crew assignments,” Mao said. “Get this ship ready to sail.”

  “Good luck,” Jeska said, her voice sounding omnipresent over the comms on the bridge.

  “To you as well, Admiral,” Mao said.

  The Royal Blue launched out of the Mjolnir’s hangar bay, plotted a course, and rocketed into a hard burn. They wasted no time. No detours. No more side paths. The Shallows. That was the only destination.

  It was a short trip with a full burn. Two hours without complications. With Akari in engineering, there would be no complications. Hep watched her work. He used to think she was rigid, robotic, but now he saw more grace in her than he’d ever noticed. She was an artist, highly disciplined.

  She was so good at her job as head of engineering that Hep’s presence there was wasted. He held a passing knowledge of ships’ critical systems, enough that he could be of use in a pinch, and there was a time he thought he’d pursue engineering, that it was his ticket onto a ship and out of the perpetual awful situation that was his life. But his talents grew in other areas.

  He wandered the ship, letting the smells carry him back to older days. He would have said more innocent days, but he didn’t remember having innocent days. He and Wilco had never had the luxury. The others aboard, as far as Hep knew, had perfectly normal childhoods. Hep and Wilco were set apart in that they never had any childhood. Survival had been their only objective for as long as he could remember.

  Hep’s nostalgia was interrupted by an alert over comms.

  “Coming out of hard burn,” Delphyne said. “Brace yourselves.” The ship came to an abrupt halt. The sudden change in velocity didn’t have the same impact as a car slamming on the brakes, but it did leave passengers feeling nauseated and dizzy. The emergence from hard burn was usually more gradual.

  “Forward team to the airlock,” Delphyne said.

  Hep took off at a run. He was on the opposite end of the ship and a floor down. Wilco was already suited up and waiting by the time Hep arrived a few minutes later. They exchanged a knowing look. Hep wanted to say something, to address the altercation on the Mjolnir, but they were interrupted.

  “Enemy ship!” Delphyne yelled. “All hands, brace for impact!”

  11

  The Royal Blue banked hard to starboard, knocking several people off their feet. Alenna Byrne was at the helm. She had a reputation for being an extraordinary pilot, but no one ever said she was subtle. She rolled hard and kicked the engines like they owed her money.

  Two ships had been waiting for the Blue when they exited hard burn—two small cruisers, both wearing Elmore Syndicate tags.

  The cruisers let loose a barrage of fire as soon as the Blue appeared. Byrne was able to dodge one, but the second attack struck the bow.

  “Shields won’t last long against those two,” Horus said.

  “I can keep them off for a minute or two,” Byrne said, “but those cruisers are fast.”

  “Horus get on the forward guns,” Mao said. “Bigby, you take the mounted cannons. You just need to buy us time to get in place.”

  The two launched into action. Horus disappeared into an often-forgotten compartment beneath the front panels. The forward guns were usually run on an auto-targeting system, so the manual compartment was left to gather dust. But that auto-targeting system had a difficult time understanding the subtleties of warfare. It aimed to kill. Horus strapped into the seat and activated the guns. He sprayed the space between the Blue and the two cruisers, his goal to make them swerve and prevent a target lock.

  Bigby did the same with the cannons, which he controlled from a console on the bridge. He blasted off the bows of both ships, strategically firing at locations close enough to knock both cruisers off their mark.

  Focusing on one ship, trying to land kill-shots, would open them up to attack from both cruisers. Killing the enemy wasn’t the goal here. Escape was.

  “Forward team, this isn’t going to be as easy a jump as we planned,” Mao said into his comm.

  Hep clamped his helmet into place. He checked his sword again, ensuring it was strapped securely to his hip. He and Wilco stood at the airlock. They looked at their hands, then each other.

  “Ready to go swimming?” Wilco said.

  Hep nodded.

  “Then let’s get wet.”

  “Just get us close enough,” Hep said to the bridge. “We’ll dive.”

  Byrne pulled the ship around, cranking on the starboard thrusters and firing the stabilizers. The Blue spun like a top. “Approaching the drop.”

  Hep and Wilco stepped into the airlock. They readied like horses in the gate, waiting for the starter pistol. Wilco’s fist hovered above the button. Staring out the window as the galaxy spun around them, the Shallows suddenly came into view. The beauty of it was startling. The shimmering light was like a rainbow had spilled into the vast blackness, the place from which all rainbows were born.

  “Now or never!” Byrne shouted.

  Wilco punched the button. A sudden rush as all the air was sucked into the void. Hep and Wilco used the momentum to slingshot forward, propelled even further by the rockets on their boots.

  Hep felt a tingle of energy course through his body, seep into his bones, like grabbing onto an electric fence.

  “That old man give you any idea how this is supposed to work?”

  “No,” Hep said. He straightened his body, turning himself into a missile as he launched toward what could be his very unpleasant death. The energy in the Shallows tore ships apart, short-circuited the most advanced systems known. He did not want to think about what it would do to his body.

  Hep drew his sword. “He just said that the two metals reacted in a way that disrupted the energy.”

  Wilco drew his sword. They crossed their blades. Nothing. “Maybe they’re broken. Or maybe that old man was just a crazy old man telling you a crazy story. I can’t believe we came out here on nothing more than the word of some senile bastard living out his last days in a retirement home.”

  Hep kicked Wilco in the chest, sending them both arcing away from each other.

  “What the hell’s gotten into you?” Wilco said. “Now’s not the time to—”

  “Come at me.” Hep altered his course, veering back toward Wilco, his blade held like he was ready to attack.

  Wilco smiled. He raised his sword and steered to cross paths with Hep. They rocketed forward, getting closer to the edge of the Shallows, feeling the heat grow inside their suits like they were being cooked. The energy flowing into their bodies set their hearts racing at dangerous speeds, but Wilco could hardly be bothered with any of that. All he saw was Hep, sword raised, moving at a path that would intersect his in a matter of seconds.

  They were feet apart now. Both inhaled and held, tensing their bodies. They slashed downward as hard as they could in the zero-gravity environment. There was no noise in the void. They felt the blades clash. They felt the energy build, like a bomb held in their hands that was about to explode. They saw the light. Like a shard of glass, snaked through with tiny fissures held to the sun, fracturing it into waves of color. It radiated out from the swords.

  As the waves hit the edge of the Shallows, the shimmering sea of energy reacted. Like a living creature, it drew back, fluctuating as if in pain. Hep and Wilco continued together, soaring forward. The energy field around the Shallows parted, opening a path for them and revealing more energy, like the waters of the ocean opening only to show more of the infinite waters. But the oceans were not infinite. And neither were the Shallows.

  Hep dared a glance back to see the path closing behind him. He feared this had become a one-way trip. Through the sheen of the energy field, he could see the dogfight, the Royal Blue diving and rolling like a hawk after prey, and the two cruisers closing in on it. He forced his eyes forward and shut his mind to the happenings behind him.

  The shimmering energy continued to open a narrow path. Hep and Wilco fought to keep their grips tight, straining to hold their blades together for fear of what would happen if they parted. The burning in Hep’s chest told him that he had not taken a breath in too long. He inhaled the recycled air in his helmet.

  Then the last of the energy parted. The scene before them would have frozen them in their place, if they weren’t drifting weightlessly forward. A cavernous space, a bubble of air inside the sea of energy. But it was more than just empty space. So much more than Hep and Wilco could not begin to understand. It looked like they had passed into another world entirely, like that small tunnel through which they came was really a portal into another existence. A beautiful existence. Peaceful. Pulled from a book or the imagination of someone like Thornton Mueller.

  In the center of the space hung an island. A tropical island like one would see on Earth. Rimmed with glistening sand and covered with lush palm trees, the center of the island was a sharp-peaked mountain. A stream ran down from the peak, growing in width and intensity until it fell over the edge of the island like a waterfall, spreading into the space below and drifting off like rain.

  Wilco nudged Hep. Looking at the sensor on his wrist, Wilco said, “There’s oxygen in here. Breathable air.”

  Hep just now noticed that Wilco had sheathed his sword. Hep did the same. “How is that possible?”

  Wilco didn’t answer. He activated his boot thrusters and pointed himself toward the island.

  “Wait,” Hep said. “We don’t know what this place is. Whether it’s safe or not. And we have no reason to assume Bayne is on that island. I think we should move with caution here.”

  Wilco laughed. He pointed to the island, at the thing cresting into view as it moved around the far edge of the island toward them. “I think it’s safe to assume Bayne is on that island.”

  Hep followed his finger. Sailing around as if to greet them was a ship. Not a ship like any he had seen. Not a ship like any living person had seen. It was a schooner with two masts, one of which flew a skull-and-crossbones flag. It looked to have sailed off the page of a story, out of the Golden Age of Piracy. As impossible as its existence was—the fact that it moved through space without thrusters, its sails taut with wind born of an atmosphere that shouldn’t be—nothing seemed as extraordinary as the man standing on the bow.

  Drummond Bayne greeted them with a smile. “Figured you two would be along soon enough.” He held up his hand, and the ship stopped just in front of Hep and Wilco. “Come on, then. Drag yourselves out of the drink.”

  Hep and Wilco stared in confused amazement. Bayne stepped back away from the edge of the ship and disappeared from view. They ignited their boot thrusters and flew up to join him. They found Bayne sitting atop a throne of sorts, a regal chair in the center of the deck, seeming out of place, but in exactly the place Bayne needed it. He waved his hand and two more chairs appeared—none as regal as his, of course.

  Hep and Wilco sat.

  “What…” Hep’s mouth failed him.

  “The hell is all this?” Wilco finished.

  Bayne looked from one to the other, his eyes lingering on each of their swords. “This,” he said, gesturing to the serene and impossible scene around them, “is quite a story. But, first, let’s discuss your reason for visiting. I assume you need my help saving the universe?”

  Thank You For Reading

  Thanks for reading Deep Shallows, book eight in The Deep Black series. You always knew Drummond Bayne was gonna be the key didn’t you? Now it’s time to see what that means.

  The next story in the series is called Bayne of Existence and will be available soon.

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