Hellfire - Tyranny: Hellfire, #2

By Simon Goodson

Hunted for information he doesn't have, Drake's only option is to run.

 

Drake is used to being the hunter, not the hunted.  He spends his time destroying hellships, not fleeing from humans.  But everything has changed now.

 

The Phoenix Conglomerate and the most feared pirate across a thousand systems are both convinced Drake has learnt the secret of how hellships are created… and both want that prize.

 

So, Drake and the Dagger's crew must run, and Drake is wrestling with a different secret.  One which endangers his entire crew.  One he knows he must never share… and which is likely to lead to the deaths of everyone under his command.

 

Will he escape?  Grab Hellfire – Tyranny and find out for yourself!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dark Soul Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781910586266

Book preview

Part I

1

Drake winced as the dressings over the wound in his chest were removed. He glanced down and scowled as he saw they were well on their way to healing. They had no right to be. He’d taken three bullets to his chest only two days before, yet the wounds looked as if they’d been healing for closer to two weeks.

The reason they were so far along in the healing process was the ship he was on. His ship. The Dagger. It was far more than it seemed to be and had greatly accelerated his healing when he’d been shot. Without its help he might even have died.

It wasn’t the fact the ship had healed him that he had an issue with, it was where the energy to provide that healing had come from. The ship had taken it from members of Drake’s crew, without their knowledge or consent, and pushed it into him. He’d been in no state to prevent it from happening, or even have been aware of it, but he still hated knowing his health came at the expense of his crew.

One of the crew whose energy had been leached was Jacobs who was now helping to change the dressings on Drake’s wounds. Not that Jacobs was a medic. In fact he was the ship’s cook, but he was the only person on the ship other than Drake who knew its secret. The only member of the crew who knew the Dagger was in reality a hellship.

Jacobs was also the longest serving member of the crew by years. He’d been part of the first group Drake had recruited just after he’d been forcibly joined to the hellship Azimuth, back when Drake had just renamed the ship the Dagger.

It was through Jacobs’ rapid falling under the influence of the hellship that Drake had learnt the dangers of keeping any crew member aboard for too long. Unfortunately it had been too late for Jacobs who now could never leave the ship for long, and wouldn’t ever want to. Drake carried a lot of guilt over that.

Ow! hissed Drake as Jacobs probed at one of the bullet holes.

Sorry, Captain, but I’m a cook not a medic! I’m not used to the meat I handle answering back!

If I could show this to any of the medics without having to explain how wounds I got two days ago are so well healed I would. As I can’t I’ll have to make do, but could you at least stop treating me like meat that needs to be tenderised?

Jacobs chuckled. Well, maybe you should have one of the medics hang around. Keep them aboard the ship long enough they’re stuck here like me. Then you’d get proper medical attention!

Drake sighed. That wasn’t even slightly funny but he certainly wasn’t going to censor Jacobs. With a word or even just a thought he could ensure Jacobs never made such a joke again, but that was something Drake had vowed never to do. It was bad enough Jacobs was stuck joined to the hellship. Drake owed him every bit of dignity and freedom he could get.

Sorry, Captain. You know I’m just teasing. If I couldn’t make my jokes I wouldn’t really be me anymore. I do appreciate the reason I still can is because of you. I know you blame yourself but like I keep saying you really shouldn’t. You had no idea what would happen to me. I know you’d never have allowed it to happen if you did. The way you’ve treated all your crew since then shows that.

Thanks, Jacobs, I guess I’m just touchy. You know how much I hate the idea of the energy for this healing coming from the crew. Coming from you!

Now Captain, what’s a little bit of life between friends?

If I could return any of it you know I would.

I know, Captain. The ship doesn’t work that way. Anyway, I’m more than glad to have given you some life as it’s kept you alive, and it’s not just my bond to the ship which makes me say that.

Really?

"Of course! I don’t think you’ve thought it through, Captain. I have. What if the ship hadn’t saved you? What if you’d died? The only reason the ship we’re on acts like the Dagger and not the hellship Azimuth is you!"

"The Dagger is the hellship Azimuth!"

"No. It really isn’t, Captain. It’s nothing like a hellship, despite the quirks which leak through occasionally. You know that. You know what an uncontrolled hellship is like. You learnt that the hard way when you encountered the Azimuth the first time, before it found you again and was stupid enough to force you to be its captain.

"With you as its captain this ship is the Dagger, a mostly normal ship where people can live normal lives. If you’d been killed you know the hellship would have been unleashed again. It would be like every other hellship out there, causing misery and death wherever it went."

I hadn’t thought that far ahead. You’re right. That’s exactly what it would do.

And what do you think would have happened to me? Jacobs tilted his head to the side. "Some of the rest of the crew might manage to get clear, somehow get off the ship as it started to change and they realised what it was. If it took time to get back up to its full strength, at least.

But me? I wouldn’t be going anywhere. I’d be stuck here aboard a fully malignant hellship. One with a grudge to bear against you which I’m sure it would take out on me. We both know that’s not something we’d wish on our worst enemies.

Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry, I hadn’t thought of it that way.

"Well now you have, so stop moping around about the fact you’ve stolen a little bit of energy from us. Focus on all the misery the Azimuth can’t cause while it’s slaved to your will. Focus on what you saved me from. And not just me…"

Jacobs trailed off and Drake grimaced again.

"I’ve been trying not to think about the others. Damn the Commander. Why didn’t he let me leave them behind when I asked? It wouldn’t have been many of the crew and it would have saved them from being sucked into the Azimuth’s influence, from being stuck like you."

"From what I heard the Commander didn’t seem to be particularly rational. The only way you might have succeeded would have been telling him what type of ship he was really on sooner, but we saw how that ended when you did."

Jacobs gestured towards the wounds in Drake’s chest. The wounds inflicted by the Commander when he’d learnt he was aboard a hellship. After shooting Drake with a weapon concealed in his arm the Commander had turned the gun on himself, taking his own life. Sometimes Drake was pleased about that, other times he wished he could take out some of his irritation on the man who’d caused so many of their problems.

I still feel bad, though, said Drake. And at some point I’m going to have to explain what’s happening to them. It’s not fair to leave them confused when I can help.

Maybe, but not yet, Captain. They’ve passed the point of no return but they’re a long way from being fully under the ship’s control. They won’t be ready to hear what you have to say yet. It’s not a good time.

"Will there ever be a good time?

Eventually. Jacobs shrugged. "Ultimately they won’t care about it. More importantly they won’t be able to tell anyone else about it. You still have the rest of the crew to look out for."

"At least with the Commander gone I can let anyone else go that needs to. I’m not going to risk leaving it so late next time either, though I have plenty of time.

I think I have, at least. There should still be plenty of time to get Jensen and the others off the ship now but they fell much more quickly than I’d expected. I still don’t know why for sure, but I think it was those areas of space we were travelling through. Every time we entered them I felt a pressure, a pain, that no one else seemed to be aware of.

You felt that too, Captain?

"What? You felt it?"

I did, I thought it was just… well, I thought it was just something strange to do with me being linked to the ship.

"I think it probably was, but not in the way you thought. I’m pretty certain the time spent in those regions is what led to the others falling under the Azimuth’s influence so quickly."

They fell silent for a couple of minutes as Jacobs put new dressings in place, though truth to tell Drake was reaching a stage where he probably didn’t need them. He was wearing them more as camouflage now than anything else. If anyone else in the crew noticed the dressings he could say the Commander had struck him and bruised him. If anyone saw the healing bullet holes that would be much harder to explain away.

There you go, Captain. Not bad for a cook, even if I do say so myself.

Thank you, Jacobs.

Will you be needing anything else, Captain? I’ve got some food roasting in the oven and I don’t want it to burn.

No, that’s all. Thank you!

Any time, Captain. Though, thinking about it, I’d kind of prefer it if you didn’t go getting yourself shot up again any time soon!

You and me both!

Once Jacobs had left Drake poured himself a glass of too rough whiskey and sat down at the desk in his cabin. He wasn’t sure if gunshot victims were supposed to drink alcohol, nor did he particularly care. He needed a drink so he was damn well going to have one.

The problem Drake faced now was what to do next. The Commander was gone and so was the bomb he’d smuggled aboard and used to blackmail Drake into following his insane mission. A mission Drake had only learnt the full details of towards the end of their relationship.

During his time aboard the Commander had been chasing after a very specific hellship. Ironically he’d thought he was chasing the Azimuth when the whole time he had been aboard that hellship. Drake would have laughed at that if the situation hadn’t ended so badly.

Finding the hellship the Commander was hunting proved to be tricky. In the end they’d captured some Dark Acolytes, the strange fanatics that chose to worship hellships, and from the information aboard the Acolyte ship they’d identified possible locations for the hellship.

As the pressure of the mission built the Commander finally let slip to Drake what the mission was really about – he and the Phoenix Conglomerate he was part of believed the hellship they chased was creating new hellships!

More than that, the Commander wasn’t hunting down the hellship to destroy it, to prevent it creating more of its kind. Drake would have been fully behind the Commander if that was the case. He’d sworn his life to hunting down other hellships, to ending the misery they caused, both to fulfil a promise to his dead sister and to satisfy his own thirst for revenge.

But that wasn’t why the Phoenix Conglomerate sought that hellship. They didn’t want it to be destroyed. The Commander even vetoed destroying the mind of the hellship but leaving its structure intact. His goal was to capture the hellship, to somehow subdue it, and then to learn the secret of how it created new hellships.

The Commander hadn’t explained why the Phoenix Conglomerate wanted that information. In fact he panicked when he realised he’d revealed as much as he had, but to Drake the answer was obvious. The only possible reason they could have for wanting to learn how hellships were created was so they could create their own, ones crewed and controlled by their own people.

In a strange way the attraction was obvious. Hellships were tough and difficult to defeat just taken as starships, but there was another element to them. How that element expressed itself varied greatly from hellship to hellship, but it involved abilities and attacks science could not explain and in many cases couldn’t defend against.

Drake disliked the term magic, he felt it didn’t convey the danger and horror of those attacks sufficiently, but the abilities were often described as magical. Any ship with those powers would be valuable indeed, though Drake knew only an idiot would believe they could control a hellship and bend it to their will.

He had to laugh at himself at that thought. After all, he was in control of a hellship, but that was a very different situation. It hadn’t been by design. In fact the hellship had hunted him down and had been trying to subject him to the same harm and control as the rest of its crew when it miscalculated badly.

While he hadn’t known it, Drake was one of those rare individuals known as an immune. Immunes couldn’t be controlled by hellships, couldn’t be overwhelmed by their influence. They could still suffer physically at the hands of a hellship, but the hellship would never gain control of their mind or their soul.

Drake also hadn’t known when a hellship took a captain it poured far more into the link than for any other poor unfortunate member of the crew. A captain suffered far more deeply even than normal crew on a hellship and their soul was bound even more tightly to the hellship.

There was a lot Drake hadn’t known, including what would happen when a hellship tried to make an immune its captain. The Azimuth certainly hadn’t known that either or it would have made damn sure Drake wasn’t an immune before starting the process.

Drake suspected no one had known what would happen. Maybe the situation had never arisen before. Once the procedure was started the hellship had managed to forge a connection to Drake despite him being an immune, but the connection did not bring Drake under the Azimuth’s control. Being an immune seemed to make that impossible.

Instead the hellship had tightly bound its soul to someone it could not control, and in doing so had ended up being controlled itself.

That was information Drake didn’t intend to share with anyone else. He wanted to see hellships wiped from the universe, not brought under the power of humans and their governments. He was as careful as possible to avoid any of his crew falling to the hellship’s influence but he had no doubt others would be much less scrupulous.

Slavery wouldn’t begin to cover it. Entire crew’s souls and minds would be stolen from them. They’d be tied to the hellship and its human controller until they died and would quickly be replaced with new victims when they did. The thought of anyone else learning Drake’s secret was horrendous.

As for the Commander… he had been proved wrong on many counts in the end. For a start the hellship he’d tracked down was not the Azimuth. Of course Drake had known that from the beginning, seeing as they were on the Azimuth already.

Putting that aside, the hellship they’d tracked down hadn’t been an ancient and canny ship creating more of its kind as the Commander had believed. Far from it. The hellship they encountered was newly born itself.

It had been tentative and uncertain to begin with, so much so Drake and the Dagger had been able to neutralise it despite it being a much larger ship. With the hellship stunned Drake had led his troopers aboard to try and reach its mind.

They’d failed. The hellship had recovered while they were aboard and started to learn its true power. Drake had managed to flee with most of his troopers, though several didn’t make it off the hellship. Drake at least had the comfort of knowing each had been put beyond the hellship’s ability to revive, bullets to the brain ensuring that. The crew he’d left behind were much better off dead than living under the control of a hellship.

The Commander had violently disagreed with Drake’s decision to leave and had attempted to destroy the Dagger. But by that point Drake was able to disable the bomb, making the Dagger safe. Shortly after that the Commander, knowing his mission was a failure, had agreed to go to Drake’s cabin. When Drake revealed they were actually on board the Azimuth it had been too much for the Commander who shot Drake and then himself.

Now Drake wondered whether the Commander had been wrong about something else as well. The Commander and apparently those he worked for were convinced the new hellships were being created by another hellship. Yet Drake hadn’t seen any other hellship nearby when they’d attacked the Dark Destiny. What he had seen were Dark Acolyte ships.

That might not have set him wondering but he’d realised the new hellship was a vessel he had encountered very recently, and at that point it had only been a Dark Acolyte ship.

That encounter had taken place far from normal routes and the ship which would become the Dark Destiny had been surrounded by other Dark Acolyte ships arranged in a very precise pattern.

Throw in the fact the area had been one of those where space felt strange to Drake and an idea began to form. Was it possible no hellship was involved in creating a new hellship? Was it possible that the hellships came purely from the Dark Acolytes’ efforts?

It was a huge leap to make, one he’d never even heard hinted at. The Dark Acolytes were a major nuisance and fanatical in their worship of hellships, but the hellships never seemed to return their attentions. Could it be possible the Dark Acolytes were responsible for new hellships? Drake didn’t know and he couldn’t think of any way to find out more.

‘I could tell you.’

The message insinuated itself into Drake’s mind, bringing with it an oily texture which made Drake shudder. He pushed the voice away, not wanting to even begin to engage with the Azimuth anymore than he could avoid.

The fact it had spoken to him, found a way to slip the message past his barriers, worried him. Normally he managed to keep himself completely separated from the mind of the hellship, a trick he had learnt soon after becoming captain.

The message getting through was an indication recent events had loosened the barriers.