04 Dark Space (2 page)

“Answer my questions, human,” Kaon demanded.

“You’re on board my corvette, and I put your implant in a human body to see how it would react. . . .” Donali shook his head. “But I never imagined this.”

The clone hissed again. “So I am your experiment? You pay for this, human.”

Donali raised one eyebrow. “I don’t see how.”

Kaon closed his eyes and Donali watched his lips move. He heard whispers coming out, but they were alien warbles, not human speech. “What are you doing?” he asked, frowning.

Kaon turned to him with an ugly smile. “You will sssee.”

Donali cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. A moment later, the ship shuddered, and Kaon’s smile broadened.

“No,” Donali said.

“Yess,” Kaon whispered.

Donali ran back to the bridge. He arrived, out of breath and panting all of a minute later, but he was too late.

The entire forward viewport was filled with the shining hull of a Sythian warship. It was bigger than any ship he’d ever seen, and it wasn’t firing on him—it was drawing him toward it with some kind of grav gun.

“How?!” Donali demanded as he sat down at the controls and powered up the drives. He’d made ten jumps! They couldn’t have followed him through all of that.

Then he noticed that the grid was painted with the yellow vector of a tachyon trace. That radiation was just over an hour old, meaning Kaon’s implant must have called for help almost the instant it had been inserted in the clone’s brain. For the Sythians to be here now, they had to have been very close when they’d received the transmission. They
had
been following him, then.

Donali pushed the throttle up past the stops into overdrive, trying to escape the grav gun which had seized his ship . . . but nothing happened. The ship wouldn’t turn, and the drives just pushed him faster toward the alien cruiser. He shut down the drives with a scowl and sat back to consider his options.

There weren’t any. He could armor up and go down fighting, or he could let the Sythians capture him. What kind of choices were those? Donali settled for the dubious third option of holding Kaon ransom in the med bay.

*   *   *

Less than half an hour later, a pair of hulking Gors burst into the med bay in their glossy black armor. These were the Sythians’ slave soldiers—carnivorous monsters with gaunt, skull-like faces; slitted yellow reptilian eyes; thick, rippling muscles; and ashen gray skin. Armored as they were, Donali was spared the horror of seeing them in the flesh, but that was a small comfort. He knew that these two would happily eat him alive if they had the chance.

Holding Kaon at gunpoint, he told the Gors not to take another step—not that he thought they could understand him. Kaon smiled up at him and warbled something. At that, the Gors shot them both.

In the dark, Donali had no concept of time. His artificial eye helped him to see and pick out details of his surroundings which a regular human wouldn’t be able to observe, but all he saw were the usual glossy black walls and floor of a Sythian ship. He also noticed strange, hulking shadows moving around him. He felt like he was trapped in a bad dream. All he knew was that he wasn’t dead. The Sythians had kept him alive. But why?

Why . . .

At last, he was awake and conscious enough to think clearly, but his thoughts were different now. He knew where he was and why. He wasn’t frightened. And the cold, unfeeling darkness was a comfort to him—a touch of home.

A moment later, a dim light snapped on, and now Donali could see better. He tried to sit up and found that he could. There was no longer any need to restrain him. He looked around and saw more beds like the one where he lay, each of them occupied by another man or woman of his species. There were thousands of them, and the room where they lay was so large that Donali couldn’t even see the walls or ceiling, just endless rows of humans, disappearing to all sides of him.

A voice spoke into the darkness, warbling at him in a language which he now knew and understood. “Arise,” it said. Donali did as he was told and stood up. “Walk toward the light.”

A pale yellow light appeared in the distance, shining through the darkness, and Donali strode toward it, his footsteps eager, driven, and purposeful. When he reached that light, he found someone waiting for him. It was High Lord Kaon. Donali recognized him by the subtle pattern of lavender freckles on his translucent skin, as well as by the gills in the sides of his neck.

“My lord,” Donali warbled.

“We have a special purpose for you, Lenon Donali.”

“I await the honor of hearing it.”

“You are to meet the admiral at the entrance of Dark Space as planned.”

“As you wish, My Lord.”

“You must get close to him.”

“Yess—” Donali hissed, anticipating the rest of his mission. “—and kill him!”

“No. Capture him and bring him to us. We use him to find the lost sector of humans, and then we kill him.”

“It will be done, My Lord.”

Chapter 2

A
dmiral Hoff Heston stood on the bridge of the
Valiant
, watching from the captain’s table as the
Intrepid
coasted toward them from the Dark Space gate. Even as he watched, the gate shut down and the glowing blue wormhole it maintained disappeared, sealing the entrance of the sector. It wouldn’t be enough to keep out another Sythian invasion, but at least it would slow them down.

“Gravidar, magnify the
Intrepid
400%. Comms, put me through to the captain.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Hanz said from the comm station.

The gravidar officer said nothing, but Hoff saw the
Intrepid
suddenly swell to four times its size, filling a much larger section of the forward viewports. A moment later, it shimmered, replaced by a head-and-shoulders view of Captain Loba Caldin. She had striking indigo eyes and short blonde hair which framed a deceptively delicate-looking set of features—button nose, small jaw, smooth alabaster skin, and a narrow, unlined forehead.

“Admiral Heston,” Caldin said.

“I trust your mission was successful,” Hoff replied.

“It was. Commander Donali was already waiting at the rendezvous when we arrived.”

“Any sign of Sythian pursuit?”

“None sir. We stayed cloaked for a full ten minutes, checking the area before we revealed ourselves.”

There had been a time when cloaking technology had been an enigma to humanity, but now, thanks to their Gor allies, it was no longer exclusive to the Sythian invaders.

“You were wise to be cautious, Captain,” Hoff replied. Not that it would matter if Donali had been followed. The Sythians knew where Dark Space was now. “You may proceed to dock, Captain. Tell Commander Donali to meet me in the Operations Center as soon as you set down. I’ll debrief you right after him at 1600 hours.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

The captain’s face disappeared, replaced by a now-much-closer view of the
Intrepid.
It
was one of two 280-meter-long venture-class cruisers which berthed inside the
Valiant
. To the
Valiant,
a five-kilometer-long gladiator-class carrier,
those cruisers were gnats, but at over 20 stories high, with 18 decks, the venture-class was hardly small—just not a mobile fortress like the
Valiant
.
Thanks to heavy automation those cruisers had a crew of only 128 men and women. That included gunners, engineers, pilots, sentinels, medical staff, and bridge crew. Most of the deck space was devoted to weaponry, power, fuel, storage, and an ample living space. The venture-class had been designed to go for a decade or more before needing to resupply.

Hoff admired the rugged lines of the
Intrepid
, the broad bow and bristling beam cannons. It wasn’t an elegant warship, but what it lacked in elegance it made up for in brawn. For its class and size, the venture-class was unparalleled in a fight. Sure the
Valiant
could squash dozens of them by herself, but she was also a thousand times the size. Big, impressive warships like the
Valiant
were intimidating, but not efficient. They were safe for important political figures and high-ranking fleet officers to sit behind the lines, but they were not the real engines of war, and they were not nearly as emblematic of the Imperium. Just six gladiator-class carriers had been requisitioned for the Imperial Star Systems Fleet (ISSF), while over a thousand venture-class cruisers had been in service at the height of the Imperium.

That was before the invasion. Now there was just one gladiator-class carrier and six venture-class cruisers. Hoff worried his lower lip, the skin around his gray eyes tensing. Shadowy, half-remembered memories of death and unspeakable destruction across countless worlds drifted through his mind’s eye on a sea of blood. The mind was a capricious warden, at times holding captive all of the worst memories, while at others, letting them all out in a dire free-for-all. Hoff remembered. . . .

Ten years ago, the Sythians had come boiling into the Adventa Galaxy from the neighboring Getties Cluster and stormed across the galaxy, wiping out everything in just nine months. Trillions of people had died in that war. Humanity had been woefully unprepared.

The Sythians had come with almost two thousand cloaked warships filled with millions of slave soldiers—vicious, two-meter high monsters called Gors. Even the foot soldiers were cloaked, and they’d always had the element of surprise—
always ripped our throats out before we could scream
, Hoff thought with a grimace.

The war had come to be known as
The Invisible War,
and the Gors—with their glossy black armor and skull-like helmets—had been the ugly face of that war. They crewed the Sythians’ warships, piloted their fighters, drove their spider tanks, and did all the Sythians’ dirty work. They’d done such a fantastic job of keeping their Sythian masters out of harm’s way that for almost a decade, no one even knew the Sythians existed. Even after meeting one of them, Hoff had continued to believe that the Gors were the real enemy.

That suspicion had almost cost humanity everything they had left.

Near the end of the war, a few million wealthy and important people, including Supreme Overlord Altarian Dominic, had managed to flee to Dark Space. Once a place of exile for the Imperium’s worst criminals, it was now the last refuge of humanity. The sector was surrounded by black holes and had just one safe way in or out, which was hidden by a sensor-disrupting nebula. No one except for a few high-ranking officers had even known where it was. Officially, Dark Space didn’t exist, and for ten long years, that had been enough to keep it safe.

During that time, Hoff had been almost 1,000 light years away, having been cut off from the retreat. He’d used the remnants of his Fifth Fleet to rescue survivors from the war and bring them to his Enclave. Much later, he’d found out about the survivors hiding in Dark Space, and he’d learned that the sector had suffered a criminal revolt. The criminals had come to him with a stolen warship—none other than the overlord’s flagship, the
Valiant
herself—and Hoff had chased them back to Dark Space, thinking he would defeat the rebellion with just one captured Sythian cruiser and his own flagship, the
Tauron.
That plan would have worked flawlessly, too, were it not for the fact that he’d unwittingly brought a Sythian tracking device with him.

“Hangar bay controllers have a grav lock on the Intrepid,” Lieutenant Hanz said from the comm station, interrupting Hoff’s reverie.

Hoff acknowledged that with a nod. “Bring them in.”

“Yes, sir.”

Waiting on board that cruiser was Hoff’s XO, Master Commander Lenon Donali. He’d missed a lot in the week that he’d been away. When they’d parted ways, Donali had been leaving to take the alien tracking device they’d found with him, hoping to lead the Sythians away from Dark Space. Before that tracking device had been found, Hoff had suspected that the Gors had betrayed them. In retaliation for that, he’d broken the alliance and had thousands of them slaughtered at a human-run Gor training facility on Ritan. Not long after that they’d found the alien tracking device and realized that the Gors had been innocent all along, but by then it had been too late. Thanks to the tracking device, the Sythians knew where Dark Space was, and they had ignored Commander Donali’s diversion to rather follow Hoff into Dark Space with an entire fleet.

Suddenly it had no longer mattered whether the legitimate government or a gang of criminals would be in control of the sector. There was no way that a dozen human starships were going to fight off several hundred Sythian ones. There wasn’t going to
be
a Dark Space.

Yet when all had seemed lost, Hoff had found a way to detect the Sythians’ cloaked command ship. . . .

And destroy it.

His eyes turned from the approaching
Intrepid
to the drifting ruins of the Sythians’ thirty-kilometer-long behemoth-class cruiser. The red eye of the Firean System’s sun glinted brightly off the distant halves of the giant alien warship. The dark speck beside it was what was left of Hoff’s flagship, the
Tauron
. He’d crashed his kilometer-long battleship into the Sythians’ command cruiser, slicing it in half before they could raise their shields. With that killing blow, the Gors had shown their true colors—

And stopped fighting.

With the command ship disabled, the Gors were no longer afraid of what their Sythian masters would do to them if they disobeyed, and like that, the battle was over.

Hiding behind the cloaking shields of a captured Sythian warship, Hoff’s men snuck aboard the
Valiant
and took it back from the criminal insurrectionists. The remainder of the outlaw fleet surrendered, and the Gors agreed to maintain the alliance in exchange for mutual asylum in Dark Space.

The legitimate government was still shattered, however. As the last surviving admiral from the ISSF, Hoff was the closest thing they had to a legitimate leader, and as such, he had assumed the title of supreme overlord. His first act as overlord had been to offer a onetime, unconditional pardon for all of the criminals in Dark Space if they would agree to work with the fleet defending the sector. Most of them had welcomed that opportunity, though whether they would actually mend their ways remained to be seen.