The thief, p.1
The Thief, page 1
THE THIEF
A Cosmic Shores Novel
G. S. JENNSEN
2024
THE THIEF
Copyright © 2024 by G. S. Jennsen
Cover design by Ranid. Cover typography by G. S. Jennsen.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at:
Hypernova Publishing
2900 N. Government Way #89
Coeur d'Alene, ID 83815
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
The Hypernova Publishing name, colophon and logo are trademarks of Hypernova Publishing.
The Thief / G. S. Jennsen.—1st ed.
LCCN 9781957352251
978-1-957352-23-7
CONTENTS
* * *
PART I:
THE HESGYR
PART II:
THE MYSTERY
PART III:
THE MAELSTROM
PART IV:
THE GAMBIT
THE
THIEF
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PART I:
THE HESGYR
1
* * *
The half-false Ares sunlight bounced off the stranger’s irises like moonlight upon still waters—a flat, diffuse gleam refracting through a gauzy film.
Well, that was odd.
Eren Savitas slowed his steps and wandered out of the flow of pedestrian traffic to lean casually against the window of a tea shop and get a better view of the stranger. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and peered around, as if he were waiting for someone.
On closer inspection, wrongness radiated from more than the man’s eyes. His skin displayed a waxy, plastic sheen, and his facial expression looked oddly frozen. Almost like a mannequin.
Was it a synthetic artificial intelligence—an SAI—walking around in a doll? Nah, dolls tended to be of higher quality than this body. Also, whatever the figure might be, they were trying to appear anaden, not Human. The Advocacy had gingerly legalized anaden-created synthetic intelligences nine months ago, then immediately heaped a host of regulations atop them, including a prohibition on trying to appear organic. Seven hundred millennia of repression did not die overnight.
Regardless, he didn’t think the ‘man’ was an SAI; he couldn’t say why, but he trusted his gut.
Once the stranger passed, Eren pushed off the window to follow. A backpack was situated high on the man’s shoulders, with a strap secured around his waist. Someone didn’t want that backpack going anywhere. The man’s clothes looked as though they’d been purchased at the Olympia Transport Hub’s tourist shop: shiny silver loose pants and an ivy jacket over a black shirt with poufy cuffs that frilled out the end of the jacket’s sleeves. His excessively close-cropped auburn hair would only be deemed stylish on Epithero, the planet where style went to die, and the rest of the outfit lacked any of the fashionable flourishes currently popular on the more cosmopolitan worlds.
Eren checked behind him and triangulated where the stranger was coming from. His eyes passed over then returned to an unassuming synth-stone four-story building positioned between the far more ostentatious facades of an art gallery and a commercial tower. The Olympia Advanced Research Institute.
Objectively, both the gallery and the tower made for more likely origination points, since no one entered the Institute except for employees and credentialed visitors. But he knew the type of subjects being researched at the Institute, and they were far more interesting targets for nefarious deeds.
He reacquired the man’s path with greater urgency, his lunch meeting with a coworker forgotten. As the man headed toward the entrance to a levtram station, Eren sent a message to Institute security.
You may have suffered a security breach in the last hour. I recommend performing a quiet sweep of the building. Focus on possible explosive devices, hidden surveillance equipment or missing items.
—Eren Savitas
Advocacy Chief of Intelligence for Non-Anaden Affairs
What evidence did he have that this individual had committed a crime involving the Institute? None whatsoever. Only the kind of instincts that came from three centuries of walking amongst lowlifes, thugs and rebels.
The individual (Eren had stopped thinking of them as male, for he was now convinced the body was fake) exited the levtram on the outskirts of Olympia, at the final stop before the tram shot across the bleak landscape between cities toward Hestia. Six other people also exited at the stop, which unfortunately didn’t constitute enough of a crowd to conceal a tail for long. So Eren activated his Veiltech, now divorced from an external device and installed in his cybernetics. He gradually faded into invisibility as he stepped across the threshold onto the platform.
Why did you order a security sweep at the Olympia Advanced Research Institute?
Eren swore under his breath. Three-plus years on the job, and Nyx Praesidis still monitored every damn action he took, eagerly checking along behind him for anything she deemed to be a mistake.
Just a hunch. Might be nothing. Any results from the sweep?
Nothing yet. What kind of hunch?
I’ll tell you if it pays off.
The individual had strolled with awkward, stilted casualness into Ancippe Park, the last bastion of intensive ground terraforming in the region until Hestia. As soon as they reached the relative cover of the geoengineered catalpa trees, however, their gait turned strident. Not suspicious behavior at all.
What were they? The possibility that Shroud technology had leaked out of Concord Special Projects concerned him. It would eventually, of course—all government-developed tech was destined for the hands of criminals—but not so soon. If it had, though? This person could be literally anyone, of any species. Well, probably not Efkam…or Katasketousya? Would it work for them?
The individual walked straight up to a collection of boulders nestled against the shore of a sparse pond overrun with lilies—and vanished into the rock.
Eren sprinted forward to reach the boulders in three seconds. He pulled up short and felt along the surface; like most of the stone in the park, the boulders were relocated volcanic basalt rock from the days before they’d terraformed Ares.
To his utter lack of surprise, he felt not rock beneath his fingertips, but metal. It was an illusion masking…he’d bet his life on it being a ship.
He’d love to spend a few minutes gloating about having been right about the person being wrong, but if it was a ship, it was liable to take off any minute. So he worked his way along the tactile surface until his hands met open air. His toes edged forward until his shin banged into something. Steps, fantastic.
One, two, three…. The fifth step continued on to level flooring—and the illusion dissolved. He was inside.
The image that popped into Eren’s head was of walking into a junk shop in a low-rent neighborhood of Menaris. Nothing about the interior matched anything else. The jump seat across from the airlock was a tan leather equivalent and sported two tears in the seat cushion, while the fold-out couch farther back in the cabin was upholstered in a shiny gray-and-white marbled material. One set of storage cabinets was chrome metal, while right next to them hung cabinets of a different height and sculpted of muted onyx. The cockpit dash was a jumbled collection of sophisticated-looking virtual readouts, clunky analog dials and levers, and some manner of reactive foam.
The alien sitting in the cockpit chair had to be the individual he’d followed here, as the shirt the alien wore matched (the pants had mysteriously disappeared, revealing beige undergarments). But the disguise was already melting away…and it wasn’t a virtual projection at all. As Eren stood there transfixed, the semblance of skin morphed to reveal an exoskeleton of bony gray cartilage. The alien grunted as if in pain when several curved spikes extended out from the skull behind actively mutating ears. Whatever they were, it wasn’t a species known to Concord.
A faint vibration rippled through the floor as the engine came to life. Eren glanced at the open airlock. He should arrest the alien before they lifted off, no? It would make certain things easier. But arrest them for what? Parking a starship outside an official spaceport? Impersonating an anaden, badly?
The airlock closed. A rumble beneath Eren’s feet signified the ship lifting off, he assumed, but there was almost no sensation of motion. If he was going to act, he should act now.
The backpack rested against the interior hull near the cockpit chair. His gut told him the alien had pilfered something, and said gut was on a winning streak today. If he was wrong, he’d apologize profusely and bet on the alien not knowing how to complain about government mistreatment to the local press.
He stayed silent and hidden.
A stronger vibration rattled the hull as they ascended into the thickest part of the atmosphere. But again it wasn’t so rough a traversal as he’d have e xpected from the ramshackle interior of the ship. Appearances weren’t everything.
In another minute, the last wisps of atmosphere outside the cockpit viewport faded away to reveal the blackness of space.
The alien swung the chair around and stood, and Eren got a good look at their face. Zeus almighty, they were ugly! They stood a fair bit over two meters in height, and under the ill-fitting remains of anaden attire, their body was covered by the gray cartilage. Or almost, as periodically, the cartilage stretched into long strands of sinew, with hints of their true flesh beneath covering vital organs. Large, olive green eyes jutted prominently above sunken cheeks and narrow white lips. The spikes decorated a bony, hairless head.
They passed less than a meter from Eren on their way to a cabinet tucked into the rear wall of the cabin. The alien pulled off the anaden-style shirt and tossed it to the floor, then reached in and removed some fabric. A cream fitted shirt went over the alien’s head, followed by a black mesh vest. Darker beige pants of a soft material came on next, and finally slider boots.
Dressed again, the alien descended a ladder and disappeared below.
Eren swiftly moved to the backpack and knelt in front of it. He unfastened the top and removed a small box. Nothing else was inside.
The box was definitely of anaden manufacture. He opened it and found a…he didn’t know exactly. Expensive technology, by the design of it, but he’d never seen the device before—
The sound of boots ascending the ladder warned him of the alien’s return. He dropped the box in the backpack, closed it up and stepped away as the alien reentered the main cabin.
They retrieved a metal cylinder from a refrigeration unit and turned it up to their lips as they moved to the cockpit. After scrutinizing two screens of data displayed in an unfamiliar language, the alien sank one hand into a blob of reactive foam.
A pinpoint of green light materialized in front of the bow, then expanded to form a disc that encompassed the ship. For a second, all light vanished from the universe, and they were consumed by a pit of eternal blackness—then stars winked back into existence.
Wormhole tech for certain, but it bore little resemblance to portals created by any Concord species.
The ship reemerged in notably empty space, with nothing but an ordinary red dwarf star shining dimly in the distance.
Eren pinged his internal location reference…then had it rerun the calculation.
Supercluster Complex: Pisces-Cetus
Supercluster: Leo
Cluster: Abell 1185
Galaxy: NGC 3550
He’d expected to have traveled outside of Concord territory, but they were located some 135 megaparsecs from Ares, well into space scientists labeled with letters and numbers rather than flowery names.
Intellectually, he understood how when one traveled by wormhole, distance simply was not a factor. You could in theory travel from a Point A to a Point B situated on the literal opposite edge of the universe in a single jump. No one made a habit of doing so, however, because special relativity meant that from where you stood at Point A, you had no idea what Point B looked like in the present day, or even if it still existed in any meaningful way.
On a universal scale, he supposed they remained ‘in the neighborhood.’ But the brain could only comprehend so much scale, and so far as he knew, he’d now traveled farther than any Concord citizen. Any corporeal citizen, at least; a Kat or two had presumably gone farther, as the ethereal, supradimensional bundles of lights made the cosmos their playground.
He forced his attention back to the cockpit and its viewport. While he’d been waxing philosophical and attempting to reorient his mind to radically new space, his alien pilot had been proceeding ahead in the direction of the red dwarf with all due speed. The star now shone brightly enough to light the cabin in a strong amber glow that took the edge off the antiseptic artificial lighting—
Then suddenly they were not alone in the stellar system.
2
* * *
‘Space station’ was the only term that could be applied with any accuracy, but the megastructure they were approaching put to utter shame any station Eren had ever seen.
It was a city floating in space. Or perhaps a dozen cities linked together by a maze of winding tunnels. It had no uniform shape; it wasn’t circular or oval or rectangular, but rather all those and more. Edifices jutted out in every direction: tall, scraper-like buildings, stacked oblong enclosures, shining circles. Spires and pyramids and bowls and vast stretches of flatness.
To Eren’s fairly well-trained eyes, it looked as if every section had been bolted onto the adjoining ones with no thought given to architectural consistency or even structural integrity, creating a patchwork of clashing motifs, materials and skylines. It was grotesque! And yet, somehow beautiful in its audacious defiance of all accepted norms of how one was supposed to build a proper space station.
Much as he wanted to focus on the spectacle before him, this was no time for gawking. They were evidently headed for the structure, so now he needed a plan. He’d thought he would have more time.
He considered revealing himself now, while they remained in space, but decided there were a nearly infinite number of ways the alien could kill him out here in the black, many of which he’d be unable to defend against. Once they were docked, however, the alien would need to be cautious, right? Possibly. Also possibly not, but it was all he had to work with.
Eren stretched his arms and legs, worked his neck and rolled his shoulders while he ran through mental shortcuts to prepare for the coming confrontation. His gaze never deviated from the viewport.
As they drew near, the true scale of the station began to make itself known. It wasn’t a dozen cities, but a hundred or more, and at its longest point, the station must stretch for something like a thousand kilometers. The only stellar body he’d ever seen that compared in size was Earth’s in-progress artificial moon replacement, Luna, but it was mostly empty space on the inside. He imagined the Ourankeli’s stellar ring had a greater surface area, but the Rasu had destroyed it centuries ago.
This structure, though, looked to be jam-packed to bursting with purposeful activity and, one supposed, people.
This wasn’t what he’d expected. A rough-and-tumble smugglers’ den carved into an asteroid, maybe, or a black-ops style research facility hidden beneath the surface of a frozen planet, but not an entire civilization floating in space. These aliens, whoever they turned out to be, were going to require a great deal of attention. He briefly considered sending a message to Nyx, but decided to wait until he had a better picture of who and what he’d discovered.
The ship approached an array of docking ports ‘underneath’ the station. The ports lacked the dramatic elegance of Concord HQ’s sprawling pinwheels, but they were definitely a more efficient use of space. Rows upon rows of berths were sandwiched together and stacked fifty high, except for the bottom few rows, which were spread out spaciously to allow for larger cargo ships to dock.
Given the size of the station, this couldn’t be the only point of entry, but there must be room for ten thousand ships here. How many people lived on this station? His brain refused to calculate a guesstimate.
The pilot eased their ship into an empty berth two-thirds of the way up and near the edge. A thud signaled a docking lock, and they began what he assumed were shutdown procedures.
Eren unlatched the collapsed handgun from his belt, extended it, and crept forward—
The alien stood and left the cockpit, headed directly his way. He swiftly shifted to the side to flank the alien and raised his weapon.
The alien’s head jerked, their claw-like hands coming up in a defensive posture. “Powy sadd yana?”
So excellent hearing, then. Eren swept around a few more centimeters, enough so the alien would be able to see him clearly, and deactivated the Veiltech. “Hi. Kindly freeze and keep your hands in the air.”
