A Shroud of Night and Tears (Beyond the Wall Book 3) Read online

  Contents

  Praise for Lucas Bale

  Books by Lucas Bale

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  What Has Gone Before

  Epigraph

  C h a p t e r 1

  C h a p t e r 2

  C h a p t e r 3

  C h a p t e r 4

  C h a p t e r 5

  Five Years Later

  C h a p t e r 6

  C h a p t e r 7

  C h a p t e r 8

  C h a p t e r 9

  C h a p t e r 10

  C h a p t e r 11

  C h a p t e r 12

  C h a p t e r 13

  C h a p t e r 14

  C h a p t e r 15

  C h a p t e r 16

  C h a p t e r 17

  C h a p t e r 18

  C h a p t e r 19

  C h a p t e r 20

  C h a p t e r 21

  C h a p t e r 22

  C h a p t e r 23

  C h a p t e r 24

  C h a p t e r 25

  C h a p t e r 26

  C h a p t e r 27

  C h a p t e r 28

  C h a p t e r 29

  C h a p t e r 30

  C h a p t e r 31

  C h a p t e r 32

  C h a p t e r 33

  C h a p t e r 34

  C h a p t e r 35

  C h a p t e r 36

  C h a p t e r 37

  C h a p t e r 38

  C h a p t e r 39

  C h a p t e r 40

  C h a p t e r 41

  C h a p t e r 42

  C h a p t e r 43

  C h a p t e r 44

  C h a p t e r 45

  C h a p t e r 46

  C h a p t e r 47

  C h a p t e r 48

  C h a p t e r 49

  C h a p t e r 50

  C h a p t e r 51

  C h a p t e r 52

  C h a p t e r 53

  C h a p t e r 54

  C h a p t e r 55

  C h a p t e r 56

  BOOK FOUR

  Reviews

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Lucas Bale

  The Heretic was a SciFi365 Book of the Week

  Defiance was a Silver Medal Winner at the 2015 Independent Publisher Awards (Best Scifi/Fantasy/Horror Ebook)

  “Lucas Bale’s debut novel, The Heretic, is gripping, suspenseful science fiction. It seizes you right from the first word, and the chase scene at the climax of the story is some of the finest writing I’ve seen in the genre. Defiance is an excellent book. It’s classic science fiction written with skill and panache. But good as these are, I think that Lucas Bale is only just getting into his stride, and that the best of this series is still to come.”

  Alex Roddie, Pinnacle Editorial

  “World building is one of Bale's strengths and he has created something which draws readers in and hooks them for the next instalment. It's the easy familiarity of several other genre favourites, ranging from A Song of Ice and Fire to Farscape and Star Wars, alongside a wonderful Firefly vibe, and coupled with Bale's unique and ambitious take, that makes The Heretic an enjoyable and compelling read.”

  Michael Patrick Hicks, ABNA finalist author of Convergence and Consumption

  “One to watch.”

  Eve Seymour, author of The Last Exile and Resolution to Kill

  “An engrossing and tense post-apocalyptic adventure. Lucas Bale delivers in his exciting and brilliant debut that does justice to the Sci-fi genre.”

  Nadine Matheson, author of The Sisters

  “This is a gem. A fine science fiction adventure and a strong debut from a new author, may there be more to come from him.”

  Michael Brookes, author of Sun Dragon, Faust 2.0 and The Cult of Me

  Books by Lucas Bale

  Beyond The Wall

  The Heretic (Book One)

  Defiance (Book Two)

  A Shroud of Night and Tears (Book Three)

  Anthologies and Short Stories

  No Way Home (Stories From Which There is No Escape)

  Tales of Tinfoil (Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy)

  What It Means To Survive

  Chukotka

  New releases are always priced at promotional rates for the first few days of their release.

  To be notified of those future releases, get selected short stories for free, and apply to receive advance copies of Lucas’s work,

  sign up to his mailing list here: http://bit.ly/1yRjxRS

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  A SHROUD OF NIGHT

  AND TEARS

  Book Three

  of

  Beyond the Wall

  by

  Lucas Bale

  www.lucasbale.com

  A Shroud of Night and Tears

  by

  Lucas Bale

  Edited by David Gatewood

  Cover designed by Jason Gurley

  © 2015, Lucas Bale

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorised reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.

  This is a work of speculative fiction. Any similarity between real events, people or places is unintended and purely coincidental.

  Produced by Lucas Bale

  Dark Matter Publishing

  www.lucasbale.com

  To Alex Roddie

  and S.W. Fairbrother

  You always listened patiently

  Thank You

  W H A T H A S G O N E B E F O R E

  A Shroud of Night and Tears is the third book in a longer tale spanning four volumes, inspired by the classic science fiction I have always loved.

  In the first book, The Heretic, winter descends early on Herse, a border planet near the Wall, the cartographical boundary of the Republic’s known territory. A small, rural community are the subject of a brutal attack in the middle of the night. The catalyst for that attack is their harbouring of the preacher, an old man teaching a new religion, a practice forbidden in the Republic. The few survivors, including a young boy named Jordi, flee into the night, into a frozen forest, to wait for the preacher to come for them.

  Raine Shepherd, a freighter-tramp and smuggler, arrives on Herse to deliver illicit medical supplies on a black market contract. Interstellar travel is strictly controlled and only through the Bazaar, the black market, can he find work that pays. He finds the people of the principal township huddled in fear at the impending arrival of a Consul, a formidable representative of the Quorum, the inner council of the Consulate Magistratus. The village to whom it was intended he deliver, Jordi’s village, has been sequestered. Shepherd aims to leave, but his freighter is badly in need of repair. A boy, who unbeknown to Shepherd is Ishmael, Jordi’s brother, dupes the smuggler into believing he is a mechanic. With Ishmael’s help, the preacher overpower Shepherd and renders him unconscious.

  While attempting to scavenge food and equipment from the ruins of his village, Jordi discovers proof of the betrayal that led to the attack on his village. He is very nearly captured, but flees. He escapes by hiding in the banks of a freezing river, but is injured and almost loses his life.

  Shepherd wakes in a camp. The preacher is there, and it transpires that he is the one who negotiated the black contract and brought Shepherd to Herse. S
hepherd is then blackmailed into helping the preacher—the inducement being the return of his freighter, Soteria, which is currently in the hands of the Praetor, Herse’s governor, at the planet’s spaceport.

  Jordi wakes from a fever and, feeling betrayed by the preacher who lied to him, runs away to find his brother, who has gone missing. Shepherd and the preacher pursue Jordi, fearing a trap. Of course they are right. Ishmael has been murdered and his body strung up in the street.

  Shepherd and the preacher recover Soteria and spirit away Jordi and his people. As Soteria flees pursuing gunships, Shepherd discovers there is more to his ship than he ever knew. When the ship is threatened, Soteria itself takes over and initiates defensive systems Shepherd never knew the ship possessed. They escape and seek sanctuary, at the preacher’s direction, on a planet way beyond the Wall, designated only as FN-1657.

  In the second book, Defiance, we meet Weaver, a Caestor—a man of the law. Yet he is also a man riven by the Caesteri’s mental conditioning, fighting to keep their voice in his head at bay and hold on to the thin thread of his humanity.

  The murderer is a woman, Natasha. She is one of the “navigators”—a hunted people who possess an almost supernatural ability to see the fabric of space-time that comprises the tunnels through which interstellar travel is possible. She is violent, unpredictable, and full of rage, as well as a prostitute and stim addict, haunted by memories of a past life she desperately wants to escape.

  Through information given to him by an informant named Elias, Weaver traces Natasha to the Bazaar on Jieshou, a lawless planet the Magistratus has abandoned. She has been summoned there by a black marketeer named Skoryk, with whom she has a history. She refuses his offer of work—a contract to take a salvage ship called The Labour of Pronos beyond the Wall. But when Weaver appears on Jieshou, Skoryk uses the Caestor’s arrival to force Natasha into taking the contract in order to stay ahead of her pursuer.

  As Weaver is about to leave Jieshou, he receives a message from a colleague in the Core that the Seneshal—the poisonous laser scalpel of the Magistratus—are looking for him. He attributes their search for him to the secrecy surrounding the salvage Natasha has been sent to by Skoryk. So he heads to meet Skoryk, to force answers from the Bazaar’s man, but a privateering company ship blasts through the atmosphere of Jieshou and attacks the city. Weaver narrowly manages to escape, but only with Skoryk’s help.

  What Weaver does not know is that he is being manipulated. Elias, the informer who led him to Jieshou, is in fact a spy—a practitioner of the conscientia, a clandestine art—for the newly elected Third Consul. However, Elias is himself being blackmailed into spying against his own master. To secure his position, he conducts an investigation into the events on Herse. He discovers the involvement of Shepherd and Soteria, and he begins to wonder why another Consul should be interested in that planet. It quickly becomes clear to him that his own master is involved in a heresy against the Republic, and he determines to know more.

  Natasha and the crew of The Labour of Pronos arrive at their salvage: a ship lying dead in space far out beyond the Wall. It is in orbit around an exceedingly rare terrestrial—a planet with a naturally occurring, life-sustaining biosphere. The crew board the salvage ship, leaving Natasha behind, but she quickly loses contact with them, and it seems as though something on board may have attacked them. She boards the mysterious ship herself and sees evidence of tremendous butchery—human effigies hung from the ceilings, bloodied and flayed. A man, brutally scarred and wearing a curious ochre cast to his braided hair, attacks her. But she escapes in a lifeboat and heads down to the terrestrial.

  Weaver arrives at the derelict salvage ship and docks with it. The scarred men attack him, but he manages to kill them. The men responsible for this atrocity have now taken over The Labour of Pronos, and they have set the derelict ship to self-destruct. Weaver narrowly escapes in Skoryk’s damaged freighter. As the book comes to a close, Weaver is plummeting down to the terrestrial, with little or no control over the ship he flies, while Natasha watches his ship’s descent from the planet below, not knowing who is on board.

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds and shall find me unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate,

  I am the captain of my soul.

  Originally known as “Out of the Night that Covers Me”

  Later entitled Invictus

  William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

  C H A P T E R 1

  THE ONLY interruption to the silence of the dark came from the steel walls of his cell—a low, sonic hum that never faded. It had been his perpetual companion, an enduring reminder of where, and who, he was. There was no such thing as night or day in the depths of this ship. Time lost its meaning down here. He had chosen the dark, because with the lights on, he couldn’t ignore how tight the walls were.

  But now, in the silence, he lay waiting for the illusion of freedom to summon him. And he was afraid of it; of what it meant to him.

  He lay on his bunk, fingers tightly laced behind his head so he wouldn’t feel the tremors in his arms. Although his eyes had grown accustomed to the pitch black, he could see little more than the vague outline of the room on the fringes of his vision. His single wool blanket had been rolled carefully to one side; down here, so close to engineering and the ion drives, it was too warm for a blanket. His mouth was dry and his heart pulsed in his throat. He took in a deep breath, trying to calm his nerves, but his muscles continued to shudder. It never changes, does it? he thought bitterly. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. But I’m still freaking out in the dark. Trusting to luck. Waiting for them to call.

  As though summoned by that thought, a shallow howl echoed in the empty dark, somewhere beyond the blast door to his cell. The noise picked at the frayed edges of his nerves and pressed on his chest. Behind it came a hollow thump as the cell door unlocked. This was his call, and he dared not ignore it.

  He took in another breath, stronger this time, and reached down for his boots. He sat up and straightened, then slipped his feet into them, lacing them by the familiarity of touch. He wiped the sweat from his face and stood.

  He walked first towards the bulkhead to his right, still half-blind in the dark. When he reached it, he laid his hands gently against it, drawing some small comfort from the soft vibrations beneath his touch. Sweat gathered in his palms as they pressed against the warm metal. He leaned his face towards the bulkhead and kissed it once. He turned away and did the same to the opposite bulkhead, then to the wall beside his bunk. On this last, he rested his forehead against the steel and allowed it to linger, letting the vibrations tumble down his neck and back. For a moment, he pretended the tremor in his chest was the hum in the walls rather than the fear in his heart. But he knew that was a lie.

  Time to go. They would be waiting. He pushed himself away from the wall and made his way over to the blast door.

  This was Gant’s ritual. His foolish superstition.

  Because every time he expected it to be his last.

  The brightness shining in from caged lamps in the corridor dazzled the shrunken pupils in his eyes, but he knew the way well enough. And by the time he reached the first blast door, his eyes had grown accustomed to the harshness of the ambient orange light and the pounding in his chest had slowed. He pressed a hand against the pad beside the door, then pulled back his shoulders to relieve the tension as the door shifte
d aside and settled into its recess in the bulkhead. He turned and looked back at his cell, staring at the shadows within. The open door would remain that way until he returned—if he returned—only to be closed again as soon as he was inside. There had been a time when he would have fought, and probably died, to be away from that tiny box. Now it was his home. A place to come back to, where he could let the relief of safety wash over him. Does it bore me, knowing I am at least safe, locked away in there? he wondered. Do I still crave the challenge of the unknown? The thrill of dancing with risk? Is it better to die doing what you love? Or better to live a long, yet boring, life in captivity?

  He stepped through.

  A single ladder, leading upwards, lay beyond the blast door. He took hold of the handrails and placed a foot onto the first rung. The steel treads had been worn away by thousands of footfalls, and now all that was left was a polished sheen. Again he felt the familiar calming vibrations of the ship through the metal. He began to slowly climb.

  Papin was already in her seat by the time he arrived at the bridge. He nodded as he settled in beside her. She didn’t look at him, just continued to stare at the huge, three-panelled screen that took up almost the whole of the front of the bridge. The reflected blues and greens of the tunnel danced across her rough face and glimmered in her eyes. Her fleet tattoos, a storm of black flames, curled up from beneath the collar of her suit and crept onto her cheeks. Yet these were not the open signs of Kolyma affiliations and allegiances. They evinced none of the protections negotiated with the powerful sects and gangs who ran the general population of each Kolyma prison ship—markers to be observed and obeyed. Papin’s tattoos demonstrated none of these things, because she had been a parāyā—an outsider. It must have been a dangerous game for her to play, Gant had often thought, but Papin was a loner and a survivor. She didn’t need, or want, anyone.