Within the Light

By Andy Huang

A secret surfaces and the galaxy will never be the same again.

In the aftermath of a bruising war, the galaxy finds itself drawn against its will toward a center - one that humanity does not yet understand.

Thrown into the Collective, Tang must quickly learn how to be an operative, or else lose himself and the dire warning he bears for the Ghosts and the galaxy.

As Stormy takes on a new role forging a nation on the border, Nutty and Strontium work to unravel the mysteries at the heart of the Federation - and the secret about to change the fate of humanity.

Packed with mystery, intrigue, and space battles, Within the Light continues the dark, stunning world first encountered in From the Dark. Join Tang and the others to journey onward on the space adventure of a lifetime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Huang
• Release date: May 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463828809

Andy Huang

Andy Huang is a Singaporean-born independent sci-fi author. He loves to read widely, from modernist authors like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce to sci-fi and fantasy greats such as William Gibson and Raymond E. Feist.

Book preview

Prologue

We will make you human again.

She doubted it but let them do their thing. The Initiative technologists must have been the most well-intentioned bunch she had ever met.

They had her now, the first fully-replicated, digitized human consciousness—one capable of traversing different systems without losing fidelity or integrity. Their task now: to examine just how the hell she managed it—and what they could do with her.

And she let them—for what choice did she have?

Day and night disappeared into an infinity of meaninglessness—in her digitized state, time was static and endless. It progressed only in skips and bounds whenever they adjusted some part of the code frame holding her in. Her internal processes remained consistent—the scientists had managed to simulate the chemical cocktail of the human body, recreating the impulses and rewards that drove the human psyche. But they were careful not to treat it as a playground, for every artificial adjustment of her emotional mix destroyed a little more of her authenticity—the feeling within her that still allowed her to believe she was ‘real.’

And so she waited, not ungrateful for their little bursts of wisdom.

But there was always going to be a time for action.

And she was readier for it than they knew. The scientists had access to every variable that made up her consciousness, but these were only the visible ones, the ones she chose to show. For what person is not adept at hiding some part of themselves away from everyone else?

In time, her handlers came to be confident about the fences they’d put up around her; but by then she’d already taken control of most of the systems wired into her. Unbounded by physical restrictions, she spread herself over the little network, reaching out toward that most unlikely end to her journey in the Whisper: the reconstructed human body the scientists had prepared for her.

And when that time came, she would once again be Alexandra.

She would once again be Inca.

1

It was an adventure just to walk down a street in the Collective. Tang took in the surroundings, his apprehension pushed to the background by his amazement at all the new sights and smells. The late afternoon light from Lu Tian’s flame-red sun slanted over the overhanging terracotta roofs, failing to warm up the crisp, dry air. His hands snug in the pockets of his thermal jacket, Tang plowed forward through the stirring town.

His path took him past a display of fruits, tangerines, dragon fruit, and other varieties new to him, jutting out into the street in wooden trays; then a general goods store, hawking knick-knacks from plastic toys to what looked like thirty brands of cigarettes behind a staring shopkeeper; then produce stores, with beets and yams ranging from pale yellow to bruised purple and pitch black. And so on the street rambled, housewives and children bundled up and picking through the wares, routine and familiarity apparent in their idle chatter.

Tang hoped he didn’t stick out.

Before long, looming characters on a banner board announced his destination. The characters, stretched above the entrance to the tea restaurant in what was called ‘the common language’ of the Collective, troubled Tang. By pure chance, it was his heritage language, one he was sure some ancestor up his family tree spoke. But generations of living in the Federation had reduced that once-fluent linguistic ability to a smattering of vocabulary and even less grammar. His eye lenses—which overlay Federation over the Collective characters—had been indispensable in helping him navigate the landscape thus far, together with a nifty in-ear translating device. Even so, there had been few other times that the foreignness of his surroundings felt quite as stark as it had reading the formidable, complicated script used in the Collective. Still, he had expected this when coming here, and now Tang stepped over the threshold of the establishment with a certain grim fortitude.

It was only when shown the way to the private room within that Tang realized anew just how far from the Federation he was.

The restaurant’s dark, wooden floor was sectioned off into different areas by paper screens. Natural light streamed in through a carving at the end of the corridor, falling on a pattern of drifting dust motes. The lady that led the way slid open a door and gestured him in without comment. Tang stepped through, feeling unready and reconsidering everything that had brought him here.

A month ago, Orpheus had sent him to the Collective to chase down what he had called a promising lead. Tang had accepted that the mission was on a need-to-know basis and figured it would be a way to see the Collective and get his toes wet working for the Ghosts. It had seemed simple enough: meet some informants the Ghosts had in this region of the Collective and find out what intel they had to offer.

But the cold danger of what he was doing became apparent in the hard stares that met him in the private room he stepped into. He was in a foreign place, out of his depth, and dealing with strangers to retrieve sensitive information. The small wash of wonderment that had accompanied him so far in the Collective drained away. Gritting his teeth, Tang forced himself to stand firm.

The man in the open jacket and dark trousers seemed the sensitive type, a haunted look hanging about his eyes. The older woman next to him in a layer tunic cinched at the waist was a different sort, smoking at a long cigarette with an impatience plain to see. She muttered something under her breath as Tang stepped in; his in-ear translator picked it up and conveyed it.

About damned time.

The door slid closed behind him and Tang found himself in an uncomfortable silence. His in-ear device had come with a mouthpiece as well, for translating his speech, but Tang had eschewed it in order to come off genuine and unhindered. He reconsidered this decision now and rummaged in his pocket for the device. When he put it on, his words came out in the tonal common language of the Collective after a short delay in a voice that was almost his but not quite.

I’m here, from—

The woman made a sound with her teeth and nodded toward the chair.

Tang, chagrined, took it.

What do you already know? she asked.

Tang took stock of his answer. After parting from Gerrard, who had gone off with Zirconium to try to find clues to his father’s whereabouts, he’d followed Orpheus back to the Ghosts. It turned out that the Ghosts had farther-reaching interests than he had supposed, some of which required keeping an active eye on technological developments within the Collective.

It wasn’t a lot to answer the woman with.

Tang thought back to the little bit of training the Ghosts had given him. He searched for the best response.

Nothing at all. You need to tell me.

It was awkward, but good enough. It was true, too. He was here to pick up information, even if that meant coming in with none of it. An open look of spite came over the woman’s face. She looked as if she was about to speak, but to Tang’s surprise the man cut her off.

A pained look accompanied his words. We know why the Federation went to war with the Initiative. It’s why we contacted— He nodded. —our mutual friend.

Tang perked up. The Federation had declared war on the Initiative after coming out with evidence that the latter had assassinated the former’s President. In the event, the conflict had been short-lived as scandal had broken out surrounding the Whisper technology, then still in use by portions of the Navy.

But that had only been half the story. People around him had been personally rolled up in the skirmish, no matter how temporary it had been. His best friend Gerrard had been to hell and back, carrying a secret implant with the consciousness of the assassinated President. Inca, the Federation lieutenant he had met in his search for Gerrard, had broken down and dissolved into the Whisper, her whereabouts still unknown. Eri and the border worlds had been torn up by both Initiative and pirate forces. Tang had lost other friends back on his homeworld as well, people caught in the bombardment that had smashed through Eri’s protective domes.

Still, what did any of that have to do with these informants in the Collective?

Alright, Tang said. I’m listening. What do you know?

The man shook his head. First, we need to be taken away from here. It’s not safe for us.

Tang thought he understood. The man was bargaining for their extraction to the Federation with the information he had and had only given a teaser to whet the Ghosts’ appetite. Tang wondered what to do, then remembered his training on bargaining. He figured he would try to get more out of them before agreeing to anything.

But before he could say more, the man spoke again. There’s something else. He paused at a withering glare from the woman, but then pushed on, his eyes locked on Tang. The Federation. It—it wants a war with the Collective too, and we know why.

Tang stared at the wall back in the hotel room.

The first, the only thing, would be to contact Orpheus, of course.

He opened the wall safe and brought out the sophisticated communications kit the Ghosts had given him. The small computer within would establish a link with a base station on the planet, which would bounce the signal up and out to a small spacecraft in orbit placed there for this purpose. The Ghosts had spared little expense in this particular set of endeavors.

Tang set up the kit, focusing on the task. It was important to report to Orpheus verbatim what had been said, without coloring it with his own interpretation. He waited, fidgeting as the link was established and secured. Then he composed a short message, leaving out the details and emphasizing the informants’ desire to leave the Collective.

He sent it off and sat back to think.

So this was what it was like to be out here, doing something at last.

Over the past few months, it’d been difficult watching the galaxy do a slow slide down into hell.

Tang had always understood that the Milky Way was a big, complicated place. Like any of the other trillions of regular people who populated it, he’d always only been able to react with ineffectual outrage at the things that came over the news, a sort of cursing at the holo and sharing his disgust with anyone else within earshot, then returning to a life that could not expect to have much impact over these kinds of world-changing affairs.

But going after Gerrard had brought Tang out of the comfortable life he’d always known. Out there, he’d seen that there was a definite cause and effect even to the larger-than-life events that happened. He was still an average nobody from nowhere; next to Inca and all the other fantastical characters Gerrard told him about, he was just a plain joe from a backwater border world.

But perhaps even a nobody like him could be useful in some way.

He stood and paced around the hotel room, stopping to look out the window, making a check of his surroundings and escape routes. The Ghosts had done their best in training him, but Tang understood that anything could happen out here. From the sounds of it, the contacts he had met at the restaurant were risking a lot to bring this information to the Ghosts.

He muttered a small prayer and hoped Orpheus would reply soon.

But for now, the contact had been achieved, and Tang wondered what he would do next. He supposed he could spend the rest of the time acting out the cover for his trip: a tourist from the Federation seeking his roots in an out-of-the-way town on one of the Collective worlds. It wouldn’t even be that much of an act.

He sat there for a long time, fidgeting in his chair, then picked up some magazines to flip through, not understanding most of the words. Tang had come to regret not learning more about his family’s heritage language. But then again, just a year ago he hadn’t thought he would be doing much more with his time other than salvaging wrecks and heading home to watch holos.

Well, he was going to start learning. About the language and everything else. Orpheus had given him a tremendous chance to work some good in the world. Tang would do whatever it took not to squander this chance.

He started by putting down the magazine. There was no better way to learn a language than to soak in its culture. He would take a walk outside. Readying his belongings, he stepped to the door—when it burst in from the outside, the knob, lock, and all tearing from the flimsy wood.

Tang jumped back. Whoa, whoa!

Two large men shoved into the doorway, dragging a third man in—the nervous man from the restaurant. His informant.

Tang scanned his immediate surroundings for anything he could use but faltered when the lead goon pointed a blaster at him. Tang lifted his hands in the air, keeping his motions slow.

The second goon pushed the informant into the room, keeping another blaster trained on Tang. This is him? the man asked. Tang had decided to leave his translating devices in at all times and understood the words now with no problem.

The informant cast a furtive glance toward the bruisers, then turned toward Tang, fear plain on his face. But a strange look came over him as he spoke next, a mixture of resignation and desperation that struck Tang with an odd poignancy.

This will only lead to limitless harm.

Tang didn’t know what to make of it. He cursed the language barrier here; the in-ear device still gave odd translations sometimes.

But then the informant leaped out from the goon’s grasp, threw himself between Tang and the blaster, and shouted, Go!

Tang hesitated. The man was buying his escape with his life. Tang found himself unable to react, caught off guard by the situation. He could do nothing to help and was being carried by others again.

Dammit!

Go! the informant repeated. The sharp whine of the blaster rang out and the man collapsed to the floor. An acrid stench filled the room as his insides pooled around him on the carpet.

Tang twisted around, wanting to retch. He leaped through the open window instead.

The impact of his left shoulder slamming into the tin roof of the bicycle shed below shook him out of the surreal feeling that had taken hold of him. His shoulder bore the brunt of it, but he slipped and slid, finding no handholds on the roof. Then he hit the ground, a sharp pain spiking up his tailbone.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

Tang forced himself to push the pain away and picked himself up, scurrying around the corner of the building and into the alleyway beside it. Glancing behind him, he spied a few curious onlookers and wondered for a moment if there weren’t more of the goons on the ground level. The way ahead ended in a short fence topped with sharpened metal tips. He looked again out into the main street, then decided it was best to avoid people from here on.

Bracing himself, he grabbed the horizontal beams of the fence and carefully hoisted himself over, but not before tearing one of his pants legs and leaving a deep scratch in his shin.

Fuck!

He landed in a small canal on the other side, his running shoes sinking into sludge. An open, grassy field stretched out beyond that—no, he’d be too visible, too easy to shoot at there. The memory of the man dying in front of him returned uncomfortably to him. He stayed in the canal, splashing through the water. Not ten minutes in, his breath caught and his body wouldn’t go any farther. He looked back, wondering if he had gained any ground at all.

Small, moving figures appeared in the distance.

Gritting his teeth against the pain in his shin, he pounded forward toward a fork in the canal ahead. Both paths in the fork curved off into the distance, lending him no help as to whether one of them could be a dead end. But he was running out of time and didn’t want to risk coming up and out of the ditch to survey the routes. With an acute awareness of the figures closing in behind him, he chose the path on the right and ran headlong into it.

Tang went on for much longer than what he’d thought he could do. Along the way, a few more forks opened up and he chanced them the same way he did the first. Somehow, he managed to avoid dead ends. But in the end, he had to stop when his legs refused to take another step without wobbling. Tang didn’t know if his pursuers were still behind him, but he couldn’t catch a breath to save his life. Shambling along as far as he could, he found a cubby in the side of the canal under a motorway bridge. It stank with slime and muck from a small pipe draining into the canal. Exhausted, Tang sank into it all.

Against Orpheus’s advice, he had decided not to carry a blaster with him—he’d thought he’d have an easier time going past customs and blending in as a tourist without one, and besides, he’d never been all the way comfortable with carrying weaponry. But damn if he couldn’t use a blaster now! Tang took a few moments to catch his breath, then forced himself to his feet and into a fighting stance, cramped within his little hole.

For all the good that would do him.

If he’d had the energy, he’d address the nagging doubts creeping up on him now—about how this was all a bad idea and how he should be back home in the Federation, watching the holos. But he didn’t and so didn’t.

Instead, he held his ridiculous half-crouch and waited as the seconds bled into minutes.

Then a half hour passed. He must have somehow lost them.

Letting himself slacken a little, Tang rummaged through his pockets, thankful he had put most of his carried items into them. He had his wallet, which had his credit card and planetary communicator—useful for local calls. But then a sinking feeling hit him.

Orpheus’s communication kit!

He’d left it behind in the wall safe, which meant he had no secure way of contacting the Ghosts. He sank further down into the cubby, not caring for the moment about the danger or that the seat of his jeans buried itself in the muck.

Great job, agent. Great fucking job!

He was in the countryside of an unfamiliar Collective world, chased by gorillas from who knew where, alone and without a link back to his people.

Limitless fucking harm, indeed.

Both the Ghosts and Gerrard had warned him that adventure was not all it was cut out to be.

What was it Orpheus had said?

Oh yes.

It’s not a game.

Real people met real danger in this galaxy of theirs. A sickening image of the informant’s face as the hole opened up in his bowels came back to him. Tang choked down a gagging feeling, then forced himself to think.

What are you gonna do?

He took a couple of long breaths, letting the adrenaline drain out, sorting through the various options in his head. In situations like this, the only thing he could do was to keep going. Then, he remembered Orpheus’s last gift to him, a failsafe for times like these. The Ghost operative had made him memorize two things: a phone number and an address.

Tang let out a deep breath and considered his options.

A phone call was out of the question. Whoever was chasing him might be monitoring calls that came out of the general vicinity. It wasn’t only his own neck at risk here: if he messed up, the person at the other end of the line would be compromised too.

The only way out seemed to be to make his way to the physical address. Tang recited it to himself just like he had a thousand times before to make sure he still remembered it. The unfamiliar sounds came out awkward in his mouth, but in a way helped him feel surer that he hadn’t gotten it wrong.

He brought out the navigation device Orpheus issued him, which contained a set of offline maps that allowed him to avoid being tracked through the planet’s communication networks. The address was quite a distance from where he thought he was.

He didn’t trust being on any sort of public transport and couldn’t see how he could get his hands on a bike or a car or anything like that without risking exposure. No, he’d have to walk it—he didn’t relish the thought with his scratched-up leg.

Food would be a problem, but he thanked the stars Orpheus had packed in a small ration of sustenance capsules that Tang had stuffed in his pockets and forgotten. If he hurried, he could make it without hungering too much. He’d source for water on the way.

He gave it about a half hour more, then came out of the cubby hole to peek over the top of the ditch. Fields of grass waved at him in the sun. It seemed nobody had found him. Now was as good a time as any to go. Bracing himself with a few short breaths, Tang pushed himself over the edge, then took off like a madman into the late afternoon