Wronged: A Story of the Dark (Alexis Carew Book 301) Read online

  Wronged

  A Story of the Dark

  J A Sutherland

  Contents

  Copyright

  Description

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  A Note from the Author

  Also by J.A. Sutherland

  About the Author

  WRONGED

  A Story of the Dark

  by J.A. Sutherland

  © Copyright 2015 Sutherland. All rights reserved.

  Created with Vellum

  Jon Bartlett’s path is clear before him. Finish his last year of schooling, then off on the family’s ships to learn the intricacies of interstellar trade. Then a message of tragedy at home comes for him and his expected life is flung far out of reach.

  Created with Vellum

  Introduction

  Wronged is a short story set in the Alexis Carew universe. It takes place some thirty years before the start of Into the Dark (Alexis Carew #1). It is best read after The Little Ships (Alexis Carew #3).

  Wronged is also offered free of charge when you join the author’s mailing list at www.alexiscarew.com, so there’s that.

  Chapter 1

  “Are you sure it’ll work?”

  “It’ll work.”

  “He’s late. He’s not coming.”

  “He’s not late.”

  Jon Bartlett would have rounded on his mates with exasperation … if he’d had the room to do so.

  Being crammed into a maintenance compartment with the two other teens, though, made any movement difficult and awkward. There were already places touching where teenage boys generally didn’t care to have contact with their mates, no matter they’d spent some years at school together.

  Well, he wouldn’t truly mind a bit of awkward touching with Kaycie Overfield, but it would be a bit icky at the moment, what with Wynne in the compartment with them. Not to mention that she’d made it clear over the last two years that she didn’t share the same desires.

  It was hot and stuffy, as well as crowded, and none of that was helped by the fact that they were all wearing balaclavas over their heads in case they were seen.

  Instead he watched his tablet intently, double-checking the connections to the maintenance panel and waiting for a figure to appear on the camera feed he’d hacked into.

  “Are you certain it’ll work?”

  “Look, Wynne, I’ve tested it, haven’t I?” He heard Kaycie start to speak. “Kaycie, I bloody swear, if you say he’s not coming, I’ll yank your bloody tongue right out of your mouth.”

  Jon counted off nearly thirty seconds of silence.

  “He’s late,” Wynne whispered.

  Jon closed his eyes and counted to ten. Kaycie and Wynne were decent mates, the most decent he could hope to find at The Lesser Sibward Merchant Spacer Preparatory School, but there was no doubt they were a pair of whingers when it came to any sort of waiting.

  No patience, either of them.

  He opened his eyes to study his tablet again.

  “Hst! There he comes.”

  A figure had appeared in the camera image. Jon checked the time on his tablet. It was two minutes of one in the afternoon, just when he’d predicted their target would be heading for the bog. “Just on time, too. Regular as a clock, that one.”

  “Regular as prunes,” Wynne added, and Kaycie laughed out loud.

  “Ssh!”

  Jon silently noted the time, to the second, when their target went through the loo’s hatchway.

  “Do it!” Wynne whispered, voice harsh and tense.

  “He’s not there yet,” Jon said, exercising as much patience as he could with his friends.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve timed it, right?” Jon said. “‘Know your enemy. Learn everything you can about him. His habits, his loves, his hatreds, and his desires — then use all that to crush him.’”

  “You reading that Hso-Hsi bloke again?” Kaycie asked.

  “Chinese — precolonization,” Jon said absently, watching the clock. “But, no, that’s my father, said that.”

  “Holds a grudge, does he?”

  “Nurses it like a baby at its mother’s teat, he does.”

  Jon poised his finger over his tablet where he’d set the controls he’d hacked into. Most people didn’t realize the degree of fine-grained control modern grav-plates allowed — over individual plates, even. It wasn’t an all-or-nothing bargain. In fact, it wasn’t only gravity, as most thought of it, that the plates could simulate.

  “Do it!”

  “Just a few seconds more …”

  Jon nodded as the clock passed his target time. No, not just gravity that pulled someone down — they could also go negative. More than zero-g, they could actually repulse things and send the whole lot up. He touched the tablet’s surface and slid his finger upward — not too quickly, he didn’t want to injure their target, just …

  The three could hear the shrieks of outrage even from where they were in the maintenance compartment.

  Jon slid the control all the way to the top, then eased it back down again. He stopped not quite at the control’s bottom.

  “Go!” he yelled, pulling the cables from his tablet and spinning to push the others to hurry them along.

  Wynne slid the hatch open and the three of them spilled out into the corridor, stumbling and tripping over one another in their haste.

  The shrieks were louder now, without the maintenance closet’s closed hatch to muffle them.

  They’d barely gained their footing when the hatch to the professors’ loo slid open and the sounds of outrage filled the corridor.

  Jon stared for a moment in slack-jawed awe as Professor Smallidge, bane of many a first-year’s comparative economics grade, came into view.

  His hair and clothing were wet, soaked with water and … well, Professor Smallidge was well known for his digestive issues. Regular in timing, he might be, but that did nothing for the material in question.

  “You boys! You there!” Smallidge started toward them, face red where it wasn’t brown. “You did this, you little bastards! I’ll —”

  Smallidge’s feet went out from under him, leaving disgusting brown streaks on the deck, and he landed flat on his back.

  Chapter 2

  “‘You did this! You little bast — urk’” Wynne mimed his feet flying out from under him and flung himself onto his bunk.

  Kaycie collapsed on the other lower bunk, holding her stomach as she laughed.

  Jon watched her roll on the bunk, entirely taken by the sight. He frequently had to force down the thoughts her trim figure brought to mind, and remember that she wanted to be nothing more than mates with him. It was a bit of torture he often thought must be punishment for some vile sin he’d committed in a past life.

  Despite the frustration it would bring, though, he often wished she berthed with him and Wynne, instead of their having to put up with Peavey and Scoggins. Scoggins was all right, he supposed, but Peavey was a right prat. Of course, Kaycie was only second year, while they were third, so that wasn’t even an option.

  Jon tossed his tablet onto his bunk, the one atop Wynne’s, and smiled, but he didn’t laugh out loud. He was busy replaying things in his mind, seeing where they’d gone wrong at the end.

  “Should’ve left him at a tenth negative-G,” he muttered. “Stuck up at the ce
iling unless he pulled himself down and over to another gravplate.”

  “Oh, give over, Jon!” Wynne sat up and wiped his eyes. “Then we’d never’ve seen him. No, with graduation two months away, that was the perfect end to our time at good old Lesser Sewer. Oh, lord, the sight!”

  “Oh, lord, the smell!” Kaycie cried out. “Got a whiff right down the corridor!”

  “Still,” Jon said, “he saw us.”

  “In balaclavas?” Wynne asked. “And those down a trash chute already?”

  Jon frowned. He’d turned off the corridor cameras along their route back to the rooms, all except the one just outside the loo so he could see Smallidge arrive, so there was no record of them fleeing, disposing of the balaclavas, or even leaving and returning to their room. So far as the cameras were concerned, the three of them had been in this room since just after breakfast. The other residents of the room, Thornton Peavey and York Scroggins, had morning classes, so wouldn’t be able to say differently. He thought they were safe, despite being seen by Smallidge, but it still nagged at him.

  His tablet pinged for his attention and he retrieved it from the bunk.

  “Damn,” he muttered at the sight of the message.

  “What?” Wynne asked.

  Jon frowned. “Summoned to headmaster.”

  Both Kaycie and Wynne grabbed for their own tablets.

  “Nothing for me.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I suppose he just assumes I was involved,” Jon mused. If all three of them weren’t summoned, then the headmaster was probably just fishing.

  “There was poo involved,” Kaycie said. “Small wonder you’re the first one they think of.”

  “I don’t —” Jon broke off. He supposed there was a bit of a scatological theme running through many of his pranks. He’d have to look into that and see about changing things up a bit.

  Not good to be predictable.

  He took a deep breath and slid his tablet into a pocket.

  “Well, nothing for it but to face the Inquisition.”

  “We were all three right here studying,” Wynne said.

  “Surely,” Kaycie agreed.

  Chapter 3

  “Mister Bartlett. How good of you to come.”

  “Headmaster Fitt,” Jon said, nodding.

  He stood in front of the headmaster’s desk, not taking one of the visitors’ chairs — Fitt very rarely invited a student to sit.

  Fitt was silent for a time, reading some document displayed on his desktop, then finally sat back in his chair and looked at Jon.

  “Mister Bartlett,” Fitt repeated.

  Jon started to become worried. Fitt’s face was as impassive as always, but there was a gleam in the man’s eyes. Almost as though he were … happy? No, that couldn’t possibly be it. The headmaster was as dour an old stick as there ever was. Jon didn’t think anyone had ever seen him smile. Still … those eyes.

  “You’ve heard about Professor Smallidge’s mishap, I assume?” Fitt asked.

  “Mishap?” Jon tried to keep his own face impassive, or at least displaying only the sort of mild curiosity one might expect at such a question when one was entirely innocent of the events.

  “A gravitational fluctuation in the heads.” Fitt leaned farther back in his chair, looking positively casual. “Just the sort of thing that’s up your alley, I believe.”

  Jon forced a puzzled look to his face, then added a bit of concern.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I haven’t heard … I do hope he’s all right?”

  The corners of Fitt’s mouth turned up. Not quite a smile, but enough to send a chill through Jon.

  Good lord, where’d I bollox it up? What didn’t we think of?

  “You have been a thorn in my side these many years, Mister Bartlett,” Fitt said. “A pebble in my shoe. A pea under my mattress.”

  Pea under the mattress? An image of Fitt in princess-garb sprang to mind and Jon had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. Have to share that with Wynne and Kaycie.

  “Yes, you and your constant shadows, Mister Proffit and Miss Overfield. I’d thought Mister Peavey might provide an acceptable influence on you three, but he seems to have failed in that.”

  Knew the prat was reporting to you. Bloody wanker.

  Fitt took a deep breath and now he did smile. Jon stared at him with a growing foreboding.

  “And now I’m shut of you.” Fitt leaned forward and slid his fingers over his desk. He turned the document he’d been reading to face Jon and slid it across the desk. “You won’t have heard yet, of course. My condolences.”

  Puzzled, Jon bent to read.

  It was a news report out of Greater Sibward and the headline made his knees buckle.

  Bartlett Shipping Stock Plummets!

  Notes called! Bonds questioned!

  Jon vaguely felt himself come to rest in the headmaster’s visitors’ chair. He couldn’t even bring himself to read the article; just the headline was enough. How could their notes have been called? The company was solid financially--his father wouldn’t have it any other way--and the banks knew that. Their bonds were all held by the appropriate third parties; their validity was unquestionable. What could have …

  “There’s more, I’m afraid,” Fitt said. “Been nearly six weeks since the last ship from Greater Sibward arrived in-system, you know. Plenty can happen in such a time.” He reached across his desk and swiped the article away to be replaced by the next, then again and again, so rapidly that Jon could only take in the headlines, though that was more than enough.

  Bartlett Shipping Scandal Worsens!

  Were Bartlett ships used for smuggling?

  Marchant Company to Guarantee Bartlett Bonds!

  Frederick Marchant says: “The integrity of the transport system must not be in question!”

  Bartlett Allegations Worsen!

  Stolen cargoes! “Piracy claims an inside job” says major insurer!

  Criminal Charges Imminent in Bartlett Scandal!

  Insurers to sue over false piracy claims!

  Fitt jabbed his finger down on the latest article.

  “Again, my condolences, Mister Bartlett.”

  He flicked his finger to the side.

  Edward Bartlett Dead!

  Apparent Suicide! Where will the blame fall now?

  Jon felt his eyes burn and his throat tighten. His father was dead? Killed himself? Could he really have been involved in all that?

  He didn’t see how it could be true. His father was an honest man — hard, yes, and a ruthless businessman, but he was scrupulously honest.

  Was.

  My father is dead.

  Fitt’s finger jabbed the headline and flicked again.

  Elizabeth Bartlett Pleads Guilty!

  No further charges sought! “We are satisfied” says Crown Prosecution Service!

  Jon felt his vision blur. Mother, too? And pled guilty so quickly?

  Fitt was speaking, but Jon couldn’t make out the words. There was a rushing noise in his head and the sides of his vision contracted until all he could see was the headline, then that blurred too and he knew nothing at all.

  Chapter 4

  Jon felt his eyelids flutter. He could hear voices, but not understand the words. He knew he was waking up, but didn’t want to. He wanted to dive back down into the darkness. There was something in waking life he needed to avoid, but he couldn’t recall what it was. The voices became clearer and he fought against hearing them — that way lay pain, something he wanted to avoid.

  “Mister Bartlett! Wake up!”

  Fitt.

  The headmaster.

  It all came back to him — the lark of pranking Professor Smallidge, followed by the call to Fitt’s office and the revelation that …

  My father’s dead. And …

  “Mother.”

  The word came unbidden from him.

  “Transported,” Fitt said, as though it had been a question, “for fraud and indentured for de
bt. Though I doubt she or any of your family could hope to repay those you’ve cheated.”

  Jon opened his eyes. He was in the school’s clinic. Fitt stood by the bed and Mistress Virden, the nurse, hovered behind him.

  “The boy needs rest, headmaster,” Virden said. She was frowning, brow furrowed.

  “He can do that once I’ve finished with him,” Fitt said.

  “We cheated no one,” Jon said. His voice sounded weak to his own ears.

  “Your father killed himself for shame and your mother’s admitted it!” Fitt was practically yelling now. “Up with you!”

  He grasped Jon’s shoulder and pulled him upright in the bed. Jon’s head swam and his vision blurred again.

  “You must leave him be, sir!” Virden stepped forward and reached out a hand to push Jon back down.

  “You must mind your place, Mistress Virden,” Fitt said. “This is none of your affair. I shouldn’t have called for you when the boy fainted to begin with.”

  Virden stepped back and Fitt dragged Jon upright, twisting him so that he sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I had Peavey pack your things for you,” Fitt said, pointing to a spacer’s travel bag next to the bed. “It’s time for you to be on your way.”

  “On my way?” Jon asked, confused. What did Fitt mean? Was he to go home? Was there even a home to go to with his father dead and mother transported?

  “Away,” Fitt said. “You’ve no place here any longer. This school is for proper merchant shippers, not …” He scowled. “Not the spawn of criminals and cheats.”

  Jon stared at him. There was other family, but he wasn’t sure he could rely on them or what their status was. Most worked the family’s ships, with only a few, like his parents, resident on Greater Sibward.

  Fitt was using this as an excuse to get rid of him, but the school might well be the only place Jon had right now. He narrowed his eyes, thinking.