Abbott in Darkness Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  SAROVARI PIDGIN WORD LIST

  ABBOTT

  IN

  DARKNESS

  D.J. BUTLER

  Abbott in Darkness

  D. J. Butler

  John Abbott is all in.

  He’s up to his eyeballs in debt to pay for school, and he’s just moved his small family forty light-years from Earth for a plum job with the wealthy interstellar corporation, The Sarovar Company. John’s first assignment is to discreetly investigate possible corruption at the remote Arrowhawk Station, where Company traders buy the famous Sarovari Weave from the three-sided, crablike Weavers.

  John finds evidence of theft and worse, but when the guilty parties realize he’s getting close, they come after him and his family. Can John catch the thieves and end their corrupt trade? Can he head off a war between the Company and the Weavers? Can he make a life for his family in this remote wilderness without corrupting himself?

  With no way back to Earth, the only direction for John Abbott and his family to go is forward—into danger.

  BAEN BOOKS by D.J. BUTLER

  Abbott in Darkness

  The Cunning Man with Aaron Michael Ritchey

  The Jupiter Knife with Aaron Michael Ritchey

  The Witchy War Series

  Witchy Eye

  Witchy Winter

  Witchy Kingdom

  Serpent Daughter

  In the Palace of Shadow and Joy

  Abbott in Darkness

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by D.J. Butler

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-9821-2609-4

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-863-3

  Cover art by Dom Harman

  First printing, May 2022

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Butler, D. J. (David John), 1973- author.

  Title: Abbott in darkness / D.J. Butler.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Books, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022001551 (print) | LCCN 2022001552 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982126094 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781625798633 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.U8667 A63 2022 (print) | LCC PS3602.U8667 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23/eng/20220114

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001551

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001552

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  For Abid

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  “This is just as nice as the margrave train in New York.” Ellie smushed her face against the window, made a kissing shape with her lips, and blew an enormous raspberry. When she pulled her face away again, a sheet of condensation on the glass surrounded an archipelago of negative space remembering the presence of her nose, cheekbones, and chin.

  John stopped his pacing to admire his daughter.

  Beyond the glass, deep blue sky and bright green foliage stretched in all directions. The train was fast; only three hours earlier, the family had come down the ramp from the shuttle bay onto the concourse at Central Transit Station.

  Ruth handed each girl an animal cracker. She offered John one, and he waved it away. She did all this without releasing her grip on one of her bags—it was the bag into which she’d packed her mother’s jewelry, once the steward of the starship Oberon had retrieved it from the ship’s safe.

  “Maglev,” Sunitha said, correcting her sister. “It means magnetic levitation.”

  “Fine,” Ellie shot back, “but margrave means you float.”

  Animoosh barked. Her ears were rotated into their forward position, which meant that she was alert, curious, and a little on edge. She pressed against John’s knee.

  Ellie was five years old and Sunitha eight. They shared a cinnamon complexion midway between the peaches and cream colors of their mother’s face and the dark walnut of their father’s. Ellie also had her mother’s features, with a long nose, narrow, full-lipped mouth, and strong jaw, framed by a shock of unruly dark red hair. Sunitha’s face looked like her father’s, angular, with fine features and high-arching eyebrows. Except, of course, that she didn’t have his protruding eyes or the ears that poked out perpendicular to the sides of his skull. Her hair was a deep golden color, and tightly curled.

  “We call this kind of train a maglev train,” John said to Ellie. “You’re right, it does float. It levitates on giant magnets, which keeps the drag down and lets the train go really, really fast. This train is much newer than the ones in New York, so it’s cleaner and shinier.” Also, the Sarovar Company employees seemed less prone to writing vulgarities on the train walls than New Yorkers were, but he wasn’t going to point that out to his young daughters. “It doesn’t go to as many places, though.”

  “Because Sarovar Alpha is unexplored!” Sunitha said.

  Ruth smiled. She still had that part-fretful, part-hectoring expression on her face that she had put on when John had told her they’d be traveling to Henry Hudson Post by train. She fretted and hectored from a good place, from the best of all possible places: she didn’t want John to die of heart failure, if the train accelerated too fast.

  He knew why she worried, but it was still too much. He wasn’t that fragile.

  “Sit down, John,” she said. “Stop bending your wrists and fingers back.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Ellie said. “You’re going to break off your hands!”

  John clasped his hands together to stop himself from bending his wrists and fingers backward. It was a lifelong habit, like cracking one’s knuckles.

  Ruth fretted in part because they had sold everything and borrowed all the money they could to get here. They had a suitcase each full of clothing and small domestic items plus John’s computer, but no other possessions.

  John had a life insurance policy, but it wasn’t very big, because they couldn’t afford much in the way of
monthly premiums right now. The Company salary had started getting deposited in their Sarovar Depository account when they boarded the Oberon in orbit above New York and had therefore become visible immediately upon their emergence from the Saravor end of the wormhole, but life insurance premiums were high for John. If he died, Ruth would be economically stranded, with two children.

  “Is that what Doctor Doctor tells you?” John asked. Doctor Doctor was the AI tutor he had installed on both girls’ multitools in New York. “Sarovar Alpha is unexplored?”

  “The planet has been surgeried!” Ellie cried, before pressing her face against the window again.

  “Surveyed. Yes, but not explored,” Sunitha said, slipping into her faux aristocratic-English accent. “Surveyed just means that they flew around it a few times and took measurements from space. All of the planets of Sarovar System have been surveyed but not fully explored. There are satellites orbiting Sarovar Alpha right now, but they’re mostly for communication. That’s how our multis work here. There are just a few large posts on the planet, and although there are many minor posts, they are really small. The train lines mostly connect the major posts with Central Transit Station—that’s the spaceport we just left. Cataloguing of indigenous species is only at an estimated forty percent completion. Of course, any planet has an awful lot of species, given all the bugs and microbes and stuff.”

  Ellie detached from the window. “Some planets are just rocks.”

  “Yes, but I mean habitable planets,” Sunitha said.

  “There are still many unknown species,” Ruth said. “What are the most famous ones we do know about?”

  “Weavers!” Ellie shouted.

  “Shhh,” Ruth urged her.

  John bent his left hand back until his knuckles nearly touched his forearm and shrugged. “We’re the only ones in the car.”

  It was true. The car in front of them was empty and the car behind them held several men who had embarked with them at Central Transit Station. They wore heavy boots and jumpsuits, and accompanied several large crates marked TOOLS and PROPERTY OF THE SAROVAR COMPANY on a long, narrow sledge.

  “Good,” Ruth said. “They can practice acceptable manners while there’s no one around to hear them fail.”

  John laughed.

  “Weavers,” Ellie whispered. “But what about the other ones? Zoofoos and ills?”

  “You mean Zaphons,” John said, “and Illig. There’s only one known wormhole connecting to Sarovar System, and its other end is near Jupiter. That means that to get here, you have to go through Earth. It’s like we’re on a dead-end street, in terms of space travel. You might see nonhuman sentients here, but I think they would have to come as Company employees, so there can’t be very many of them.”

  He’d had a Zaphon lecturer at NYU, Professor Tzaark. Not for an accounting class; the sedate extraterrestrial, who looked half wolf and half lizard, had lectured on the experience of encountering alien life-forms—while at the same time providing in his own person an object lesson. Zaphons were nocturnal, so the class had been held in the evening, and Tzaark had always arrived yawning and blinking, newly roused from sleep.

  “But Sarovar Alpha has lots of its own species,” Ruth said. “Doesn’t it, girls?”

  “The Sarovari Weavers,” Sunitha explained, “have a three-sided geometry rather than being bilaterally symmetric, as so many of Earth’s life-forms are. They produce the Sarovari Weave, which is one of the exports of the Sarovar Company from the Sarovar System.”

  “Those are some awfully big words to come from such a delightfully small girl,” John said.

  Sunitha smiled.

  “Did you just memorize the words, or do you know what they mean?” John asked. Sunitha was capable of parroting back enormous amounts of data, but he worried she didn’t always process what she learned by rote. “What is ‘bilaterally symmetric’?”

  “Bilateral symmetry means that a creature’s left and right sides mirror each other,” Sunitha said. “Like you, mostly, when you don’t slouch or bend your hands back.”

  “Thanks.” John grinned. “I didn’t really have a good posture coach until I got married.”

  “Daddy slouches.” Ellie laughed.

  “The Weavers are radially symmetric, and three-sided. On Earth, bilateral symmetry is associated with cephalization, which means having a head.” Sunitha frowned. “Doctor Doctor doesn’t know whether the Weavers have heads or not.”

  “They’re sentient,” Ruth said.

  Sunitha grimaced. “That doesn’t mean they have heads. Maybe they have brains, and whatever else they need to be sentient, in some part of their body other than a head.”

  “Souls,” Ruth suggested. “They need souls.”

  “Doctor Doctor doesn’t mention whether the Weavers have souls.”

  “I’m glad to hear that Doctor Doctor doesn’t know everything,” John said. “That means there are a few things left for us to explore.”

  “Like sixty percent of the species,” Sunitha said. “Estimated. Maybe we’ll see the Weavers close up ourselves.”

  “I don’t want to explore bugs,” Ellie said.

  “The Weavers have diseases,” Ruth said. “Diseases that can be especially lethal for human beings, even though they don’t seem to bother the Weavers themselves.”

  “That’s what we’ve heard, anyway,” John murmured. “So we’ll be careful.”

  “I know.” Sunitha stamped a foot. “I mean, maybe the post we end up at will have a zoo. Or a stuffed specimen, or something.”

  “I just want it to have a decent church,” Ruth said. “I don’t even care much what kind, at this point. I grew so tired of hearing the triple-chewed mush of the Oberon’s chaplain.”

  “Ew, he was boring,” Sunitha agreed.

  “I’m not sure you can really put sentients in a zoo,” John murmured. “Maybe a museum. For artifacts.”

  “Do we know yet what post we’ll end up at?” Ruth asked. They had had this conversation many times before. She was really asking whether he had received any messages on landing.

  “I have to imagine Henry Hudson,” John said. “Surely, the bookkeeping data is all transmitted there from the smaller posts for the financial planning and analysis work. And my boss works there. Stands to reason we’d be there, too, doesn’t it? Of course, they could send us anywhere. Maybe we’ll be sent to the southern continent and we won’t be dealing with Weavers at all. We’ll be mining and watching out for Riders.”

  “Henry Hudson is as big as a city.” Ruth’s eyes were hopeful. Her family tree was heavy with pioneers, missionaries, and explorers, but she was herself a city girl. She liked plays and art galleries, and had thrived in New York City, even having to drag two little girls along with her everywhere she went. “A small city, anyway.”

  “I bet Henry Hudson Post will have a zoo. And a museum.” John nodded. “And there’ll be school, so you can ask your teachers about how to get a good look at a Weaver. And maybe a Rider. Does Doctor Doctor say whether there are Riders on the northern continent at all? At least, there must be better pictures of Weavers here than are available on Earth.”

  “How do we trade with the Weavers?” Sunitha asked. “Doctor Doctor says they don’t speak any human languages.”

  “I have no idea,” John admitted. “Maybe we learned their language. Maybe we have some way of trading without language.” Professor Tzaark had told stories of the first encounter between Zaphons and humans, out beyond the orbital ring of Pluto, at which he had been a young participant. They had initially communicated by laborious pantomime and pictures sketched in a smear of strawberry jam, which had more than once nearly caused the parties to attack each other.

  “Do we give them money?” Ellie asked. “What do they spend money on?” She took another animal cracker from her mother. “Do they like cookies?”

  “I have no idea.” John shrugged. “I’ve read . . . well, in the orientation materials the Company sent me, that there are some f
unny new words we’re going to have to learn while we’re here. Like setty.”

  “Isn’t that a sofa?” Ruth laughed out loud.

  “You’re thinking of set-TEE,” John said. “SET-ty is a Sarovari word, and it means something like ‘guy’ or ‘person.’ The example sentence that the orientation material gives is, ‘My toilet is backed up. Do you know the number for the water-setty?’”

  Ellie laughed. “I’m going to call you my Dad-setty and my Mom-setty.”

  “Just Mom will do fine,” Ruth said. “What does the word ‘setty’ have to do with how we trade with the Weavers?”

  “It suggests there’s a pidgin,” John said. “Probably the traders here didn’t make the word ‘setty’ up, so maybe they borrowed it . . . for instance, from the Weaver language. But that’s just a guess, because how exactly we trade with the Weavers isn’t something I’ve been able to figure out yet. It’s a . . . trade secret, you could say.” He grinned.

  “Is that a dad-setty joke?” Ellie smiled.

  John chuckled. “Guilty. You can ask your teachers all about the Weavers.”

  “I have a teacher now.” Sunitha sounded cross. Had he talked too much about what he knew, and let her talk too little? “Doctor Doctor.”

  “Father meant a flesh-and-blood teacher,” Ruth explained.

  John frowned. Father made him feel old. He preferred Dad-setty, given a choice.

  “I want a real live teacher,” Ellie said. “What’s a margrave, then?”

  Ani pressed against John’s leg, so John sat and stroked the dog behind her ears. Her color-changing coat had become somewhat confused during the five months aboard ship, shifting from chocolate brown to autumn red, and then stopping. Ani was an abstemious dog, if there was such a thing—some dogs would gorge themselves whenever there was food available, but Ani only ate when she was hungry. As a result, she still had her boxy, muscular frame, whereas John and his family had all gotten a little soft on the voyage. As he stroked his dog, he could feel her relax. Her ears slid back to their rear position, and she yawned.