Empire Reborn (Taran Empire Saga Book 1): A Cadicle Space Opera by A.K. DuBoff (jenna bush book club TXT) 📕

the young man, feeling his hurt from the loss through the telepathic link. I don’t know that I’d handle it any better if I lost my family.

When Darin didn’t say anything else, Jason continued, “All I want to know is why you decided to venture from the usual salvage grounds.”

“Quotas to meet. Lots of good stuff gets swooped up in the Kryon Nebula. We had a lead on valuable scrap from the war that would keep us in business.”

The TSS had suspected as much, but it was still odd a singular ship would venture so far beyond the normal transit routes. “Who gave you that lead?” Jason asked.

“We always worked through Renfield, a salvage op headquarters on Duronis.”

“How long did you have that business relationship?”

“I think my mom had worked with them for… I dunno, a decade.” This time, at the mention of his mother, he winced.

“Do you know if Renfield is part of some larger organization?”

“How should I know? I just flew the bomaxed ship! I never should have gone along with the plan to go after scrap in the nebula.”

“When did things start getting strange?” Jason questioned.

“I went to investigate a shipwreck, and I was knocked out while on board.”

“And you have no memory of the events that took place on the ship?”

“I was unconscious. So no.”

Jason studied him. He couldn’t blame the guy for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Darin was definitely holding something back. Only minutes before, he was going on about how the entity was ‘everything’. The mood swings and shifts in lucidity were proving to be a challenge, after all. However, the interview was never intended to be only question and answer, so Jason prepared to delve into the man’s inner mind.

“Tell me everything about what led up to when you were rendered unconscious.” As Jason asked the question, he also slipped past the outer layers of Darin’s mind.

The young man’s surface thoughts shifted to the moment. In Jason’s mind’s eye, he experienced the events from Darin’s vantage, feeling the pressure of his EVA suit and the anxiety of exploring the unknown.

This man Jason saw on the inside reminded him much of himself—confident, capable, playful. None of that was evident in Darin now. The light was gone from his eyes and Jason could feel his emotions were on a short fuse, coiled so tight he could go from apathetic to intense, bitter anger in a flash. Though Jason hadn’t yet witnessed that swing, he was aware of the potential and knew he needed to tread carefully.

“We were scoping out a salvage target,” Darin explained. “I went in to investigate with Jameel. I’ve done tons of EVAs, but I felt a little off from the beginning with this one. Headache, dizzy. But that could be from anything, you know? I didn’t want to miss out on the action, so I stuck with it and started scoping out the ship. After a while, I started feeling worse. I was trying to head back to the Andvari when my memory goes blank. Next thing I remember, I’m waking up in the escape pod.”

Jason continued to explore the sensory memory, playing it slowly in his mind moment-by-moment as Darin explored the ship wreckage. Aside from Darin’s physical discomfort, there was nothing remarkable about the event at first. Then, without warning, there was a bright flash followed by unconsciousness.

There has to be more to it. Jason dove deeper, isolating the moments leading up to the flash.

Except, when he tried to delve into the memory, he hit a wall. It was likely the same block the other interrogating Agents had come up against and been unable to bypass. Strange, considering that Darin didn’t have abilities of his own. Usually, those without Gifts could only manage rudimentary mental guards. But this… The barrier shielding the memory had no discernable weakness. To anyone less skilled, it would be as if the sectioned off area didn’t even exist.

“Let me see,” Jason coaxed in Darin’s mind. When there was no telepathic response, Jason said aloud, “Keep thinking about that moment. Share it with me.”

The mental wall remained, but its edges became more defined. Jason picked a spot and began chipping away at it, using more force than he had expected to need when he’d walked into the interview. Darin gave no indication of being in discomfort, so Jason forged ahead until there was enough of a crack in the wall to look inside.

Unlike Darin’s spoken testimony that he didn’t remember anything, there was a vivid memory of the encounter locked inside the vault. Now, when Jason played through the event again, there was definitely something there right before the light. A glimmer—almost like a tendril reaching out toward him. He couldn’t see it, exactly, but the intensity of it seemed to make the air vibrate. The tendril extended to his forehead, and at the moment it touched him, he was frozen. It scoured his mind in one rapid wave, offering none of the deference and respect those with Gifts tried to show those they read. It was looking to gather information, and it didn’t care what it did to Darin in the process.

The Everything. Jason felt the immensity of it through Darin. Awe, fear, wonder, terror. The entity had known him in his entirety in the span of an instant. While it had been too much for Darin to consciously register, it was seared into his sensory memory.

What was immediately evident to Jason’s trained senses was that the being didn’t exist in any recognizable corporeal form. Its presence extended from somewhere unseen, in the way he sensed the immense energy of the Rift, even from afar. It made sense, given the reports from the Andvari and the transdimensional image of the form he’d flippantly called a ‘space kraken’ during the briefing. Now, he got