In a couple of weeks (September 24th), Harper Voyager is due to publish the fourth action-packed installment in the Planetside by Michael Mammay: in Darkside, retired Colonel Carl Butler gears up for another investigation, full of danger, corporate intrigue, and technology that people would kill for. To mark the imminent release, we have an excerpt to share! Here’s the synopsis:
Colonel Butler has paid his dues and just wants to enjoy his retirement on a remote planet. But the galaxy has had other plans. He has been roped into searching for a politician’s missing son and an industry magnate’s missing daughter. He has been kidnapped, violated numerous laws, and caused the destruction of colonial facilities. He’s famous — or infamous, depending on who you ask — praised and reviled in equal measure across the galaxy for his exploits.
And he is determined to never let the government drag him into another investigation.
But when a runaway twelve-year-old girl whose father has gone missing asks him for help, well… it’s a lot harder to say no.
The girl’s father, Jorge Ramiro, was supposed to have been on Taug, a moon orbiting the gas giant Ridia 5, working on a dig with a famous archaeologist. But now there’s no sign of him and no record of him being there. Mining operations on the moon are run by two different consortiums, Caliber and Omicron — both of which have tried to kill Butler in the past. Butler doesn’t believe in coincidence.
Landing on Taug with his right-hand man Mac, computer genius Ganos, and an elite security squad, Butler soon finds that they’ve charged back into the crosshairs — because Ramiro is not the only who has disappeared, and the perpetual darkside of this moon is hiding more than the truth about a missing archeologist…
*
I got home fairly late, but I had questions that I needed a computer genius to look into, and Ganos would be awake. She’s a ridiculous night owl, plus it’s an hour earlier where she is. She and her partner, Parker, had moved to Ridia about eighteen months prior, finally caving in to my insistent requests. She didn’t have as many enemies as I did, and if you asked her, she’d have told you that she could take care of herself. I made it about me so that she could keep that illusion. With a computer, she was the baddest of the bad, but that wouldn’t do much if someone with a gun physically showed up at her door. I sold it to her that I needed her nearby, just in case. I had exaggerated a bit, but at the same time, it did make me more secure, and it gave me an excuse to pay for their move without it seeming untoward.
I texted first, so when I called, she answered after one buzz.
“What’s up, sir?”
“Something weird came up today.”
“Weird as in we need to pack and get out of town as quietly as possible, or…”
“Nothing like that,” I assured her.
“You’ve said that before.”
“Fair point. But no, this is about a little girl.”
“Whoa, whoa, sir. I don’t want to hear about—”
“Grow the fuck up, Ganos,” I said, but I was laughing as I said it. “She apparently got crowdfunding to hire me to find her missing dad.”
“Give me a second,” she said. “Yep. Here it is. Nice. She raised forty thousand. You don’t come cheap.”
“I don’t find missing persons for any price.”
“Yet here you are on the comm with me, about to ask me to find one…”
“The girl ran away from home. I made a deal with her that I’d take a preliminary look in return for her going home to her aunt.”
“No mom?”
“She didn’t mention one. It didn’t seem cool to ask.”
I waited through a moment of dead air on the other end of the line. “Mom died two years ago. Ouch. Okay. So what’s the plan?” asked Ganos.
“Dig around a bit and see what you can find. Odds are good that her dad disappeared the way that most dads do and there’s nothing special about this situation.”
“Wow, someone was hurt as a child.”
“This isn’t about me.”
“Right. He could have met someone, and suddenly, it became convenient not to have a kid.”
“I hope not, but yeah. Something like that. See if you can find him. Send me a bill for your time.”
“This one’s on me.”
“Yeah?” Something in her voice tipped me to the fact that there was more to that than she was saying, but I didn’t want to press.
“Let’s just say that I knew a dad like that once.”
Someone had hurt her, too. It made me angry, but I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t exactly been father of the year to my own kids when they were younger. I’d never be able to make it up to my daughter, who had died in military service on Cappa. I was still trying to make it up to my son and his kids. But I didn’t want to compare that with whatever lay in Ganos’s past. There were all kinds of ways to screw up as a parent, each unique in its own horrible way. All I said was “Thanks.”
“Sure thing. You want me to call you with what I find?”
“Can you send me a file? I’m going to bed, and I’ll look at it in the morning.”
She snickered. “You’re old.”
“I really am.”
—
I was lost in a building. I didn’t know what building, only that it had that vague quality to it that screamed, I am a military building! I was behind or late for something, and I didn’t know how to fix it. I was supposed to be processing out of the military today, but I didn’t have any of the prerequisites completed. I hadn’t turned in my gear or even had it cleaned. But I was a colonel, and I’d been called back in after retiring, so maybe they’d cut me a break. Because bureaucracies are always great at making exceptions for things.
I passed multiple offices with soldiers lined up down the wall outside each door, and finally one of them pointed me to the right place. The door was closed, so I knocked before opening it and peeked inside.
“Sorry I can’t stand to greet you,” said a woman with a thin, pale face and dark hair seated behind a government-issued desk. I didn’t know if she meant she physically couldn’t stand at all, or if something was preventing her at the moment, and it seemed like the most absurd thought to have right then. Something was off, and I didn’t know what. I’m not good in these kinds of situations…
I forced myself awake.
My clock said 0445.
I hadn’t dreamt like that in a while, and while I found it interesting that my stress dreams had gone from combat things to administrative, I still wasn’t happy about it. I’d learned how to push myself out of them a lot of the time now—to force myself to wake—but they still left me disconcerted. I needed more rest, but I didn’t want to go back to sleep because I’d dream again, so I swung my feet to the floor, hesitating at a slight twinge from my robot foot that thankfully passed, and sat on the edge of my bed for a bit, somewhere in that state that might be sleeping, might not, but you can never really tell on your own.
After a time, I got up and made coffee before checking my security system to see if anything happened in the night. Assured by the AI that ran it—I called him Todd now for some reason that I’ve forgotten—that all was well, I fired up my terminal to see what Ganos had sent me. Sure enough, I had a message from her. Not that I ever suspected I wouldn’t, but her efficiency always impressed me.
Sir,
So… this guy is gone. Like gone gone. No trace. This is no deadbeat dad situation. I checked bank transactions, credit records, travel out of any space port remotely near Ridia 5. Nothing. And before you ask if this is legal or not, let me tell you what I always tell you:
Stop asking questions you don’t want the answer to.
Bottom line, there are only three possibilities with this guy. Either he’s dead, he’s incapacitated, or he got a pro-level change of identity. Which got me thinking, so I checked. He didn’t get a pro-level change of identity. I *really* can’t tell you about that one. Just trust me. I know some stuff.
I did trust her. If Ganos said the man was dead or incapacitated, there was a really good chance he was dead or incapacitated. She had contacts in her world well beyond anything I had, and I had a standing policy: When you bring in an expert who knows more than you, believe them when they tell you something. Even if he somehow wasn’t dead, the fact that he looked dead meant something.
*
Michael Mammay’s Darkside is due to be published by Harper Voyager in North America and in the UK, on September 24th.
Civilian Reader 