Crystalline Space Read online

  CRYSTALLINE SPACE

  DARK STARS TRILOGY: BOOK 1

  A.K. DuBoff

  CRYSTALLINE SPACE

  Copyright © 2018 by A.K. DuBoff

  All rights reserved. This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this eBook may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews or promotions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Special thanks to Beta/JIT readers:

  Kurt Schulenburg

  Eric Haneberg

  Pam Haneberg

  Liz Singleton

  Randy Barber

  Nick Rayl

  Charlie Obert

  John Ashmore

  Diane L. Smith

  Leo Roars

  Jim Dean

  Publisher: BDL Press

  Cover Copyright © 2017 A.K. DuBoff

  Copyright Registration Number: TXu002101391

  First eBook Edition: 19 September 2018

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  About the Dark Stars Trilogy

  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

  Also by A.K. DuBoff

  Author’s Notes

  About the Author

  About the Dark Stars Trilogy

  "Do-overs" are possible.

  The crystalline network spanning Elle’s civilization allows reality to be reset to past moments in time…

  After a routine reset on her homeworld, Elle instead awakens on a spaceship. Her body is different, she has new magical abilities, and she’s told that the fate of known civilization is in her hands.

  An alien Darkness is corrupting the crystalline network across the settled worlds. Elle and a team of talented companions—strangers imbued with special abilities like her own—must embark on an interstellar journey to seal the Master Archive, their only hope of restoring the infected planets.

  With only vague clues to guide them, Elle and her new friends must gather legendary artifacts to protect the Archive. But if they can’t unravel the ancient secrets in time, their worlds and loved ones will be lost in shadow forever.

  Crystalline Space offers a fun blend of sci-fi and fantasy adventure with a sleek high-tech skin on traditional magic, perfect for fans of Final Fantasy, Star Ocean, and Xenosaga. The Dark Stars trilogy will transport you to a universe where second chances are real. Start?

  1

  Flirting with death was the perfect way to spend an afternoon.

  My slim shadow stretched behind me as I paced along the brink of the cliff, squinting into the setting sun.

  Next to me, Adrianne prepared to leap. She grinned from her perch at the edge.

  “Just jump already,” I urged while securing my pink hair into a braid past my shoulders.

  “Relax, Elle. I’m getting in the zone.” She stretched her arms wide and leaned forward, surrendering to the wind.

  I peeked over the lip as she plummeted toward the depths of the sandstone canyon.

  Adrianne’s gleeful cheer echoed through the chasm as she fell. She kicked off an outcropping, launching herself into a cartwheel through the air, which she transitioned into a somersault. Every movement was fluid, reaching and twisting in ways I’d never be able to achieve myself.

  While I watched her aerial acrobatics, I gripped my left shoulder in my right hand with subconscious envy—my reminder that showing off sometimes came with a price.

  “Reset!” I called out to our friend Jiro when Adrianne was almost to the canyon floor.

  “Loading,” he confirmed behind me.

  The air electrified, tingling my skin and pulsing in my ears. White light crept into the corners of my vision, accompanied by an intensifying hum. With a flash, my vision went black.

  For a moment, I floated in nothingness. Then, the physical world resolved around me once more. The blackness receded into sunlight and my feet were again solidly on the rocky ground.

  I was now standing in the same position I’d been minutes before when I made the reset point at the access terminal. Suspended inside the monument was a two-meter-tall crystal that glowed with a swirling blue inner light.

  It was one of four monuments in the vicinity of our community, each connected to a larger crystalline network woven throughout the planet and surrounding worlds. The remarkable properties of the crystals made our play possible.

  Every time someone touched one of the crystals, it would record the precise physical state within its zone at that moment—including the kinesthetic abilities, clothing, and hair style of each person, along with the general environmental configuration. The access panel on the monument could then be used to reset the surrounding landscape and our physical forms into one of the previously recorded states with our cognition intact. Out in the remote canyon where it was just us, we could reset as many times as we wanted since the action was restricted to each crystal monument’s specific zone.

  Adrianne beamed, exhilarated by her recent fall that now only existed in memory. “I needed that.”

  I let my good arm drop to my side and stepped back from the terminal. “Showoff.”

  “Let’s see your moves.” She smirked.

  Despite being an unfair competition, I took the bait. “Watch and learn.”

  “Be quick,” Jiro instructed, sweeping aside a lock of dark hair that had fallen in front of his almond eyes. “We need to get back.”

  He was right; it was almost dinnertime. As much as I dreamed about ways to prolong our last summer of freedom, even resetting the physical world didn’t alter the underlying flow of time, only the physical state within the crystal’s zone.

  “Last one for the night.” I jogged to the edge of the cliff and peered into the familiar canyon. It was at least one hundred meters to the bottom, but the shadows made the depth difficult to gauge. I beckoned Adrianne over. “Spot me.”

  We had learned the hard way to reset before hitting the bottom. Since we retained all of our memories after each physical reset, the splat at the end kind of put a damper on the thrill of freefall.

  “I’m watching,” she assured me.

  I took a deep breath and raised my arms—my left only making it forty-five degrees from my side due to the permanent effects of a childhood injury. Even though I couldn’t put on an aerial show as well as Adrianne, I could still fly.

  A gust of wind crested the canyon and I leaned forward.

  “Wait!” Jiro shouted.

  Adrianne yanked me back by my braid.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, regaining my balance. No sooner had I spoken than I saw the reason fo
r his concern.

  The crystal that normally exuded pleasant blue light now contained a dark cloud.

  Jiro took a step away from the monument. “What’s wrong with it?”

  Adrianne and I cautiously approached. As I neared, the cloud took on more definition, as though individual black particulates were floating inside the prism.

  “I have no idea,” I murmured.

  Nothing had ever disrupted the crystal before. Its existence was a given—as much as the sun rising and having chores.

  “We should go,” Adrianne stated as she backed toward the path leading to our town.

  “Maybe it needs to recharge or something,” Jiro suggested, following her.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, though I didn’t believe it, and followed my longtime friends away from the canyon.

  “Should we tell someone?” Adrianne asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that in one of the crystals.”

  “That would require explaining why we were out here,” Jiro pointed out.

  “That’s definitely not going to happen.” There was no way my mother would approve of me repeatedly jumping off a cliff in the adjacent zone while she prepared dinner back home. Especially after what had happened six years ago, this was the last place I wanted her to know I hung out. What she didn’t know wouldn’t worry her.

  “If we’re going to keep this to ourselves, then we should monitor it,” Adrianne said.

  “We could come back to check on the crystal tonight,” I proposed. “If it looks good, maybe we could get in a night jump.”

  Adrianne beamed. “I do enjoy falling under the stars.”

  “Well, it’s not like I have anywhere to be first thing in the morning,” Jiro said with a devious sparkle in his eyes.

  “Sneaking out for a night jump… it’s like we’re fourteen again.” I chuckled.

  “Only now we’re better at not getting caught.” Adrianne winked at me.

  I smiled back. “22:00?”

  “Works for me,” Jiro agreed.

  Adrianne nodded. “You know I’m in.”

  We picked our way through a field of boulders along our standard path. The rough terrain would be difficult for the uninitiated to navigate, but vaulting over rocks and sidestepping sticker bushes was second-nature to me.

  I kept my gaze straight ahead as we crossed the border from the canyon crystal’s zone to the domain of the town’s crystal, trying to ignore the rock formation that had changed my life when I was twelve. My fall from the four-meter-tall boulder in the town’s zone had dislocated my shoulder and broken my arm—a seemingly minor injury at first—but deeper tissue damage that knitted into scar tissue forever impaired my arm’s mobility. By the time the doctors realized what had happened, it was too late to repair and the window for a town reset had long since passed.

  As I’d come to grips with the injury and what it might mean for my future, I’d often fantasized about a universal-scale reset that wasn’t limited by the rules governing our town. If everything everywhere could be reset, I could go back to how I was before the accident, just like everyone else would get a second chance. We could make things how they should be. Of course, that was impossible; one girl’s minor injury wasn’t worth disrupting our community, let alone the dozens of planets in the Hegemony’s purview.

  My mom always told me what was in the past was done; the only way was forward. I’d heard it so many times that part of me believed it, but deep down there was still lingering bitterness. Thanks to that one stupid mistake as a kid, I feared I’d never be able to have the kind of future I’d dreamed about in the space force.

  I suppressed the resentment welling in my chest. There was nothing I could do about it now.

  Eventually, the trail became more defined, and we broke into a light jog. The sun was low in the sky by the time we reached pavement. I might be late for dinner, but not terribly.

  The final path segment traced the upper ridge of the hills surrounding our town, Ochre. Stucco homes topped with solar panels were situated along meandering streets in the southern portion of the valley, and the administrative, commercial, and educational buildings occupied the north. A social square at the center of town was landscaped with mature trees, their sturdy branches distinct even from my distant vantage. The main crystal for our town at the center of the square cast a faint blue glow through the trees’ shadows.

  My family’s house was toward the southeastern edge of town, so I’d made a shortcut trail down one of the slopes to facilitate easier access to the surrounding hills. “I’ll see you tonight!” I called to Adrianne and Jiro as I dashed down my personal corridor toward home.

  When I reached the bottom of the hill, I took a moment to dust myself off and smooth my hair. No need to call attention to the fact that I’d been running through bushes rather than focusing on preparations for my future.

  I walked the rest of the way to the back entrance of my house. Light shone through the rear kitchen window, illuminating my path along the pavers bisecting my father’s vegetable garden in the backyard.

  The welcoming sight erased my apprehension about the strange cloud in the canyon crystal, but I tensed with the knowledge that these homeward treks were now numbered. Without the adrenaline rush of a good cliff jump to clear my mind, my impending departure for the vocational academy crept into my thoughts. In a few weeks, playing in the canyon with my friends would be a distant memory. No more resets for fun—only the pressure of trying to get it right the first time.

  Heart heavy, I opened the back door and braced for a berating about my tardy arrival.

  “There you are!” my mother exclaimed from the kitchen when the screen door to the mud room clicked shut.

  Scents of apple pie and steamed potatoes wafted toward me as I slipped off my shoes. “Sorry I’m late!”

  I padded into the kitchen, my stomach letting out a low growl. Seated at the wooden table in the center of the room, my younger brother, Ben, was absorbed in a puzzle game on his tablet. At the counter along the back wall overlooking the garden, my mother was in the process of spooning freshly whipped potatoes into a blue serving bowl.

  With the hope of stealing a taste, I headed for the counter, ruffling Ben’s blond mop of hair as I passed by.

  He batted away my hand with more force than normal; I guess at fourteen he was getting a little old for me to mess with him. “Mom said it’s your turn to take out the trash,” he mumbled without shifting his gaze from his tablet.

  “The fish from last night is… lingering,” my mother said, wrinkling her petite nose beneath evergreen eyes like my own.

  “I’m on it.” I pivoted on my heel and went back to the receptacle in the mud room.

  As soon as the lid was cracked open, I understood the urgency of the request. Holding my breath, I slipped out the bag while jamming my feet back into my shoes, then sprinted around the side of the house to deposit the garbage into the central collector. When the bin was safely re-sealed, I took a deep breath. “I won’t miss this—”

  The chime in the town square pierced the quiet evening.

  My pulse spiked as I ran back inside. “There isn’t a town meeting tonight, is there?” I asked the moment I was through the kitchen door, shoes still on.

  Ben had set down his tablet, and my father now stood in the archway between the kitchen and living room with his own tablet in hand. The worried glances passing between my parents confirmed my suspicion that the alarm wasn’t for a scheduled event.

  “Dinner can wait,” my mother stated, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Let’s go.”

  “Any changes to log?” my father asked as the four of us headed through the living room toward the front door.

  I shook my head since I hadn’t made any purchases in the last three days that had yet to be recorded in the Hegemony’s central database.

  Ben groaned. “My game is new. Lemme back it up real quick.” He darted back into the kitchen to his tablet.


  The lines of worry on my father’s forehead deepened as we waited. Unscheduled meetings were a rarity, and they almost never brought good news.

  However, I tried to remain positive. After all, if something terrible had happened, we could fall back on the town’s archive in the event of an accident more serious than a broken arm. Any inanimate objects would reset, too, so long as the raw materials were still within the crystal’s zone and the object had been inside the zone during the previous check-in. Occasionally, handmade trinkets may be lost in our local resets, but it was worth the wellbeing of our town’s inhabitants—especially since digital content was always secure on the Hegemony’s offworld servers.

  When Ben was finished backing up his game, we stepped out into the street along with the dozen other families on our block. The group of us hurried past the row of stucco houses as we headed toward the central square.

  “Have you heard anything about the meeting?” my father asked one of our neighbors.

  “No,” he replied. “Interrupting dinner like this—must be important.”

  As we merged onto the main street into the heart of town, I kept an eye out for Adrianne and Jiro. In the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder if the unscheduled meeting had anything to do with the dark cloud we’d witnessed up in the canyon crystal.

  My mother’s hand brushed my back. “There’s no need to be nervous.”

  “I’m not.” But part of me was concerned. I could only remember three unscheduled meetings in my eighteen years of life; something must be seriously wrong.

  “Not just about tonight,” my mother continued in the tone she slipped into when she was channeling her day job as a therapist. “I’ve seen you reading over the course offerings at the Academy. You’ll find something that’s a good fit.”

  I stared down at my feet as I walked. “It all seems so…”

  “Boring?” she completed for me.