Dark Matters (Class 5 Series Book 4) Read online

  Dark Matters

  Michelle Diener

  Copyright © 2019 by Michelle Diener

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction and all names, people, places and incidents are either used fictitiously or are a product of the author’s imagination.

  Created with Vellum

  To every reader who wrote to ask me if I would please write another book in the Class 5 series, this one is for you.

  Contents

  About Dark Matters

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  The Class 5 Series

  Sky Raiders Series

  About the Author

  Also by Michelle Diener

  Acknowledgments

  About Dark Matters

  DARK MATTERS . . . taking matters into her own hands

  A time bomb, waiting to go off . . .

  Lucy Harris is on the run, not sure where she can turn to for help, or if help is even available. But even as her abductors chase her down, she realizes they don't just want to recapture her, they want to erase her.

  When your very existence puts a planet at the risk of war, there's no choice but to do everything in your power to stay out of your enemies hands.

  A predator . . . waiting for the chance to pounce

  The powerful AI battleship, Bane, is accompanying the United Council envoy to Tecra to mete out the punishment the Tecrans have earned for breaking UC law. He revels in the power he's about to have over his old masters. But his mission isn't only to rain down retribution on the people who kept him chained for years, he's also looking for a human woman his fellow Class 5 mentioned in the final seconds of his life. Paxe admitted to taking Lucy Harris from Earth, and Bane has been looking for her ever since.

  A warrior conflicted . . .

  Commander Dray Helvan thinks the Grih made a mistake in not pushing for war with the Tecran, but he's had to accept the compromise, that he and the other envoys from the United Council will go to Tecra and dismantle its military from the top down. His mission is not one of his choosing, but when he and his team arrive, he's handed a very different job. While he distrusts Bane on principle, when the thinking system tells him there's a woman running for her life on the planet below, he will do whatever he has to to see her safe. And if that means war for Tecra, well, then it means war.

  Chapter 1

  The door swung open, the sound of it jerking Lucy from a light sleep.

  A light bloomed and then was dropped with a soft curse. In the twist and tumble of its fall, she caught a glimpse of Dr. Farnn, pressed against the wall, a strange dark splatter pattern across the pale green of her shirt.

  The dropped light hit the ground and rolled a little, illuminating Dr. Farnn's feet, and then the doctor slid down and sat on the floor.

  Lucy swung her legs over the side of her bed, heart hammering in her chest. “What is it?” Her voice was a whisper.

  Dr. Farnn lifted a hand for quiet, looked toward the door, and Lucy thought she heard someone scream down the passageway.

  The sound galvanized the doctor. She pushed herself back up to standing, her breath coming in pants. “You need to go.”

  Lucy shoved her feet into the thin shoes beside her bed. “Go where?”

  There was nowhere for her to go. That had been made clear to her.

  “Hurry.” Dr. Farnn bent to retrieve the light.

  “Why? What's happened?” She was right next to the doctor now, and she saw what she'd thought was a pattern on Farnn's shirt was blood spatter. Dr. Farnn was covered in blood.

  Lucy stared at her in shock.

  A tiny cry escaped the doctor's throat, her beak-like mouth opening and then snapping shut, and she pointed the light in Lucy's eyes. “Move.”

  Lucy blinked, blinded, the scent of blood, the stink of sweat, enveloping her.

  “No! Wait!”

  She stopped, felt the rough pull as Dr. Farnn grabbed the necklace she'd been given more than six weeks ago, and tried to snap its chain.

  It didn't break easily, but after another yank, Lucy felt it slither across her skin and then the ting of sound as it landed on the floor.

  “Why?” She had always wondered about the gift.

  “Tracker.” Farnn didn't even try to sound apologetic. “It was either that or embed it in you. In fact, they think we did embed it.” She drew in a deep breath. “We have to go. Now.”

  The door swung open.

  “Here's my pass, this will get you out.” Dr. Farnn shoved the slim card at her.

  Lucy looked at it in the dim light of the corridor but didn't take it, even though only yesterday she'd have grabbed it with both hands if it had been offered to her. “First tell me what's going on.”

  “There's no time to explain.” Farnn looked down the passage. “Cantin and Rool are holding them up, they've blocked the door into this section. We have seconds.” Her big eyes gleamed in the reflected light from her tiny flashlight. She was shaking, Lucy realized, and shivered herself. “You need to run and hide. If they find you, they'll kill you.”

  “Kill me?” Her voice rose and Farnn winced. “Who's they?”

  “Shh.” Farnn tilted her head, listening for a moment. “They sent you here, asked us to work with you, and now they think if they make you disappear, make all of us disappear, that'll clean up the mess they've made.”

  She grabbed Lucy's arm and pulled her down toward the far end of the facility.

  Lucy heard a crash in the opposite direction and Farnn switched off her light. In the brief moment before it winked out, Lucy caught a glimpse of the doctor's face before they were plunged into darkness--she was terrified.

  They ran in silence for less than a minute and then Farnn stopped and touched her shoulder, pointed to a door lit with a thin strip of floor lighting.

  Before she could say anything, there was a thud of boots running toward them. “My hover is the one with the red wing.” Farnn shoved the pass into Lucy's hand, pushed her toward the door and ran on.

  Lucy stumbled forward, shouldered through the door, and found herself in a garage full of small hovers.

  She forced herself to move, even though she wanted to stand and gawk.

  There! Three down from the door. A silver hover with a red wing on the side.

  She ran to it, pulled herself in.

  She was a lit
tle shorter than the Tecran, but not by much. She had never been in a real hover, but she had flown a virtual one almost every day for the last three weeks, racing the doctors and scientists in the game they all seemed to enjoy.

  Had they known this moment was coming? Had they been preparing her for this?

  She shook her head, slid Farnn's pass into a slot that seemed designed for it, and started up the hover.

  As far as she could see, the controls seemed the same as the game. Rool had told her when he'd first introduced her to the game that playing it was just like driving the real thing.

  She maneuvered through the parked hovers in her way, and then drove straight for the closed door that was surely the exit, and when she got close enough it started to open. She eased back on the throttle, trying to make as little noise as possible, drifting forward as the hinged door swung up. Just when there was enough space to fit through, she heard a sound behind her and glanced back.

  Four Tecran--strangers to her--burst through the door from the corridor, weapons in their hands.

  She faced forward again, panic making her heart leap in her chest, and punched the accelerator.

  She shot out into a cold, foggy night, the acceleration forcing her back in her seat.

  The road from the garage was short, ending abruptly in a T junction and stretching left and right. She heard shouting behind her and she was about to choose a direction, her hands uncertain on the controls, when something hot sliced past her cheek on the left, then another close to her hip on the right, forcing her to continue on straight, over the rough ground beyond the road's end.

  She caught the sudden flash of rock and bush below the hover, and then she was suddenly airborne, a bank of fog blocking any view of what lay ahead.

  The hover dropped.

  She screamed, the sound wrenched from her as she went into free fall.

  The wind snatched the scream from her mouth, making her breathless, and then suddenly she was through the fog bank, below it, and the hover's lights, as well as lights that came from somewhere to the right, showed her just what was happening.

  She was falling down the side of a cliff toward the sea below.

  She couldn't scream again, the sound frozen in her throat as she dropped, as she realized the height of the fall. She blinked watery eyes to make out the rough waves surging below her.

  Self-preservation suddenly kicked in.

  She knew what to do!

  Knew from the racing game she'd played at the facility that the hover needed the ground to be at least five meters below it to fly.

  She had to strap in--snap out of her confusion and fear, and strap the fuck in.

  She fumbled for the buttons, and the straps shot out, securing her in the seat, and then, with the foam of the waves close enough to blow up to catch on her slippers, she turned the hover hard right, swinging her body to tip it ninety degrees onto its side.

  Gravity pulled at her, almost wrenching her hands from the controls, and foam flecked her hair and her cheeks. Suddenly she was driving sideways, using the cliff face as the ground to hold up her hover.

  Rool and Ziller had shown her this trick right at the start of her introduction to the game and they'd laughed when she'd used it to win against some of the other scientists.

  She felt the hover stabilize, speed up, and she punched the accelerator as hard as she could.

  Behind her, she heard a massive boom, and red and orange light filtered through the fog above her.

  The facility.

  She almost lost her grip, almost plowed into the cliff face she was skimming, and the jerk of the hover jolted her back.

  She'd wished herself free of that place many times, and she'd had an uncomfortable relationship with the scientists and doctors who had kept her there.

  But tonight it seemed they'd sacrificed themselves to get her free. Although free from what was still something she didn't understand.

  Chapter 2

  Bane eavesdropped in on the first full meeting of the heads of the United Council team headed for Tecra. They were sitting around a large table in a conference room on the sleek spaceship Urna, and they were not a cohesive group.

  They had spent the first few days of the journey talking to their own people, organizing their staff and getting to know one another.

  This meeting was the first time the leaders were gathered together and he found the interplay of diplomacy and strategy fascinating.

  Some were pleased by Bane's presence, as he paced beside the Urna in convoy with them, while others feared or despised him. The conversation, instead of being about the trouble ahead of them all in Tecra, circled back around to the need for him to accompany the Urna, and the resentment from some of the group that the Grih had gotten their way, that their request for Bane to participate in this mission had been granted.

  He could tell some of the team guessed he might be spying on them from the way they responded to criticisms about him. The Grih, in particular, refused to comment. A few Bukari, as well.

  There were leadership teams consisting of three representatives each from four of the five member groups of the United Council.

  The Tecran had only been allowed one person, more in the capacity of liaison than decision-maker.

  They'd lost the right to be a full stakeholder when they'd threatened to destabilize everything the United Council had worked for since the Thinking System Wars.

  A war, Bane knew, fought against those just like himself.

  That he occupied the moral high ground, and the Tecran were the villains, in this diplomatic nightmare that teetered on the brink of a new war, was thanks to Rose McKenzie and her advice when she'd set him free.

  He had followed it against his instincts, and she hadn't steered him wrong.

  He was theoretically the biggest threat, and yet, here he was, a legitimate party to the mission.

  He was the trusted one, or mostly trusted. The Tecran were the ones to be punished.

  After everything the Tecran had done to him, it satisfied something deep inside him.

  His original plan of killing every Tecran in his reach would have been but a moment's worth of pleasure. Seeing them punished, and their power stripped from them, was much, much more satisfying.

  And because he'd declared himself a neutral party when he'd been freed, because he hadn't aligned himself with the Grih as his brothers Sazo, Eazi and Oris had done, he was the one chosen to oversee this UC mandated power-stripping.

  A neutral party.

  If he'd had a mouth, it would be curved in a smile.

  Everything about this was sweet.

  So, so sweet.

  The only thing sweeter would be if he could take at least one thing of significance from them, destroy it in front of their eyes so they understood the depths of his hatred.

  He thought of Fa'allen, their capital city and a place he'd hovered over many times in his long servitude to the Tecran military, and wondered what they would do if he destroyed their most revered monument, the statue of Karn.

  The tone of the conversation at the meeting had changed, he noticed, and at last the UC team stopped squabbling about him, and moved on to the human women the Tecran had abducted.

  That led his thoughts down darker, more sinister paths.

  Did he tell the UC team that there might be another woman from Earth still unaccounted for? A woman called Lucy Harris.

  She'd definitely been taken.

  Whether she was alive or not, he didn't know.

  She might be on Tecra right now, hidden somewhere in the sprawling capital of Fa'allen.

  If he told the UC leadership team about her, they would raise it with the Tecran. Then the secret would be out, and if she was still alive, the Tecran would have every incentive to kill her.

  So he would have to bide his time.

  Earth women had his respect.

  Between Rose, and the other two women who'd been taken from their home, Fiona and Imogen, they had done nothing but help h
im and his brothers.

  If he could find this last one and save her, he would, although logically Bane couldn't see why the Tecran would have kept her alive. Certainly not since three weeks ago when the UC had demanded full oversight of the Tecran military for the next five years.

  As soon as the Urna's team and their hundreds of observers landed on Tecra and took over the controls of the Tecran military, it would be that much harder for the Tecran to hide anything.

  Not impossible, but harder.

  The woman had been taken, though. Whether she was alive or not, she had been taken. And the Tecran hadn't said a thing about it. Hadn't come clean and admitted it during the hearings that had recently concluded at UC headquarters.

  Before Paxe, the fifth Class 5, had been destroyed, he'd sent Oris a confession. That he'd been responsible for taking a woman from Earth, only days before Oris himself had done the same thing.

  And when she was onboard, he'd tried to kill her.

  Which had been the start of Paxe's troubles. He'd shown his hand too early to his Tecran masters. Alerted them to his growing rebellion.

  They'd worked out he was trying to harm her and transferred the woman to another ship to get her away from him.

  Bane suspected she'd been light-jumped across the galaxy to Tecra.

  Paxe had tried to keep track of her--with an eye to killing her if he got the chance.