Go to Ground (Broken Dark Season One, Episode Two)

By Taylor P. Davidson

Hunted. Afraid. Alone. The crew of the Elias are running, chased from their operations on Calgany Space Station by the Alcohol Enforcement Agency. The AEA’s raid on Lisa Tant’s warehouse scattered the nefarious bootleggers and one of the bloodiest pursuits in Prohibition history ensued as they made their escape. Cars were wrecked, vans were destroyed and lives were lost, but the smugglers evaded capture.

The bootleggers managed to flee Calgany, but their capture is far from avoided. They are cut off from each other and the help they sorely need. The Elias is damaged and adrift in space, Trace Dempsey is being chased through the subterranean bowels of Dunmere and Lisa Tant is trapped in an engineering shuttle with no faster than light capabilities. The AEA is relentless and unyielding. Prohibition Agent Laura Reid means to have her prized arrests.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Taylor P. Davidson
• Release date: Nov 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311499912

Taylor P. Davidson

Taylor P. Davidson was born in Manchester, England, and moved to Norfolk when he was very young. Living in Norfolk’s wide, open fields and sweeping forests, Taylor grew up on steady diet of fantasy and science fiction, with authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, H. G. Wells and J. K. Rowling being among his favourites. They have become prominent figures as inspiration for his work and heavily influence everything he writes.Taylor studied biology at the University of Manchester and he is now training to be a radiographer at the University of Leeds. He plans to balance his writing with his career and is currently juggling his projects around his studies, work placements with the NHS and a busy social life.

Book preview

Go to Ground

Broken Dark

Season One, Episode Two

Taylor P. Davidson

Go to Ground

By Taylor P. Davidson

Copyright © 2015 David Taylor

Smashwords Edition

Taylor P. Davidson is the pseudonym of David Taylor

Cover designed by Najla Qamber Designs

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievable system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means other than that in which it is published.

All characters and situations in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons or events are entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Previously on Broken Dark

Broken Dark: Episode Two

Also by the Author

About the Author

For Heidi

My love and guiding star.

Previously on Broken Dark

Since the ban of alcohol in the Donaghue Act (2624 MES), the Stellar Dalcross Systems have become a violent cesspool for organised crime. Bootleggers smuggle liquors from neighbouring solar systems and countless rackets operate in mockery of the law, growing rich on a liquid that is worth more than gold. Calgany quickly became infamous for its role in bootlegging and Iain Clay owns it all, using the three million people that live there as a market for his insatiable greed.

The Alcohol Enforcement Agency is eager to break Clay’s hold over the Tartan System and tasked Prohibition Agent Aiden Wallace with bringing him to heel. Operation Hammer Stroke was ambitious and meticulously planned, but it saw the escape of Captain Lisa Tant and her crew—some of the most notorious bootleggers in the Clay Syndicate. Tant’s escape was spectacular and her crew’s flight down one of Calgany’s busy causeways left over a dozen police offers dead, caused tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of damage and an exploding van left Agent Wallace fighting for his life in a hospital’s resuscitation ward. Public outrage over the heavy-handedness of the operation is high and Wallace’s partner, Prohibition Agent Laura Reid, is poised as the hapless scapegoat of its failure. For all of the bloodshed and public killings throughout the event, Tant and much of her crew managed to slip away.

Tant herself managed to lose the police by hijacking a car. Along with Nathan, a gunhand in her employment, and a knuckle-dragging gangster called Byron, she found her way to an isolated part of the station that had been closed and evacuated for repairs. The three bootleggers managed to steal a short range engineering shuttle, which they used to leave Calgany. Yet their escape was short lived since the flight authorities detected the shuttle’s departure and hailed the boat. Lacking the ability to enter slipstream and travel faster than light, Tant knows that she must board and steal a vessel with such capabilities before the police move to intercept her.

While Tant was implementing her escape, Trace Dempsey, Richard Burke and James ‘Jimmy’ Reynolds were improvising their own. The two parties of bootleggers separated on the causeway and Dempsey’s van was eventually brought to a halt in a spectacularly violent crash after sustaining heavy damage from police fire. The three of them rigged the van to explode and slipped into one of the station’s maintenance tunnels in the brief respite the trick brought them. Knowing that Tant’s ship—the Elias—had already left Calgany, they made their way to the station’s Plasma Terminal. Once there, they hoped use the lift to reach the city of Dunmere on Tartan’s surface undetected, but they were recognised once aboard. Dempsey had no choice but to take the civilians in the lift hostage and used them to incite chaos when they reached the planet’s surface; chaos the bootleggers used to evade the police. The chase that ensued was as violent as the one across the causeway and resulted in Burke sustaining a gunshot wound to his abdomen, yet they managed to trick the police into thinking they had boarded a train and slipped unseen into the darkness of a subterranean railroad’s tracks.

The final failure of Operation Hammer Stroke came in the escape of the Elias itself. Despite the numbers of heavily armed police officers that were sent to seize and ground the ship, her crew were unperturbed and resisted all attempts to board her cargo bay with violence. They repelled the first wave of officers in a firefight that saw Harry Dawson take a bullet to the chest, after which Eddy Millward sacrificed his freedom to open the outer doors of the hangar bay. Freed, the Elias left the station and her pilot, Danielle ‘Danny’ Shaw, evaded the police’s intercept fighters until they were able to escape into slipstream. But the Elias took heavy damage during its flight and was unable to maintain slipstream for long. Its FTL drive failed and the ship was left powerless, drifting alone through the empty cold of deep space . . .

Episode Two

[Location]: Calgany Space Station

[Mother Earth Standard Time]: 16th June 2627

[Local Time]: 3rd March 0243 Since Settlement

The planet Tartan drifted through an ocean of eternal blackness, watched by the ancient eyes of glittering stars. The deep ochre of its soils, visible even from space, spread vast continents and broke pristine oceans. Colossal roll clouds banded its atmosphere, splitting the planet’s surface red and white like the patterned fabric it was named after. Tartan had been aptly called and was a familiar sight to the inhabitants of Calgany whenever they gazed down through its pyroplex windows. Like a great, glittering spider’s web of steel walkways and angular living compartments, the space station orbited the planet as a testament to the ingenuity of mankind.

Tartan served as a backdrop to the countless spacefaring vessels that orbited Calgany also; tens of thousands of ships of all sizes, shapes and colours. Small private vessels queued endlessly as they waited for spaces in hangar bays. Serpentine freight carriers drifted through precisely controlled formations, too large to ever hope of docking with the station and relying instead on fleets of cargo ships to unload their wares. The light of Calgany washed over them all, glittering across burnished metal and identification markers that flashed red, blue, orange and green.

It was through these swirling eddies of ships that a small engineering shuttle sped. Its journey required discretion so its navigation computer had been deactivated and its pilot had to meander between vessels as openings presented themselves, weaving and banking here and there. A single slip of Lisa Tant’s concentration and the lives of her companions and herself would end in a plume of fire and twisted metal in the black.

Easy, Captain, Nathan said, sitting beside Lisa in the shuttle’s cockpit. He glanced at the sensors before him and ran a hand through his ruffled hair. Calgany Control will have too many ships on their scopes to track us accurately through this mess. There’s no need to rush, just come in nice and slow. The last thing we want to do is spook them.

Lisa nodded in response, but she was not really listening. She was a poor pilot at best and only dire need had pushed her into the wingman’s seat. She had been an infantry soldier once, an officer serving in the British Space Corp, and had seen little need to hone her flight skills. But the shuttle they had found proved to be their only way off Calgany and with the Alcohol Enforcement Agency and the station’s police force devoted to finding her, she dared not pass the opportunity by. Along with her companions, Nathan and Byron, she had stolen the shuttle and had every intention of using it to steal another vessel; one that had slipstream capabilities so they could leave this forsaken system behind them forever.

Tight lipped, Lisa focused on the prize she had selected from the drifting thousands: a small triangular vessel with just two decks. It had the look of a private spacefaring craft, which should make boarding it easy and help her avoid bloodshed. More importantly, its sleek hull bore the slightly blunted edges that afflicted ships which had spent enough time in slipstream. A small vessel with a Faster than Light Drive. She was perfect.

Easy now, Nathan said as they neared their quarry.

Lisa gestured for quiet and tried to ignore her pounding heart, the pulse she could hear in her ears. Her palms were sweaty as she clutched the shuttle’s dual steering joysticks, and shook slightly as she eased the throttle back. Here we go.

Squeezed into the small space behind them, Byron grimaced and glanced at the Heads-Up Display that was being projected onto the windscreen. You sure you can do this, Blondie? How do you know we can even dock with them?

That’s a private vessel, meaning it’ll have standard hatches on its hull, Lisa replied absentmindedly. "Our docking clamps should