04 Dark Space (34 page)

He nodded and returned that grin. If nothing else, at least they could distract themselves from the fact that their future, which had looked so bright a month ago, now teetered on a knife’s edge above an uncertain abyss.

Chapter 22

112 standard galactic hours since last contact with unknown vessel . . .

C
aptain Caldin stared at the grid, her eyes fixed on the enemy warship. They were still trailing behind the
Intrepid
by more than a hundred klicks, safely out of range. Now that they’d slowed down, torpedoes were no longer out of the question, but Caldin didn’t think a volley of torpedoes would get past whatever passed for the Avilonians’ AMS (anti-missile system). No, they were defenseless and at the Avilonians’ mercy. The
Intrepid
had spent the last four and a half days decelerating from over one tenth the speed of light to their present velocity of just over one kilometer per second.

“Stand by to lower our shields,” Caldin said.

“Standing by . . .” Delayn replied from the engineering station.

“Lower them.”

“Shields disabled.”

Caldin waited, chewing her lower lip and tapping her foot. A full minute passed like that. She looked up from the star map to find her comms officer. Now that the crew was awake, Corpsman Terl was back in med bay with the other medical staff, and her regular comms officer was sitting in his place.

“What are they waiting for?” Caldin asked.

“Maybe they haven’t noticed yet?” Delayn suggested.

“I’d hail them to let them know, but they’re either unwilling or unable to receive comms from us. Are the Gors standing by at the hangar?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the comms officer replied.

“Good, and our Novas?”

“Ready and waiting to launch.”

“Then I suppose all we can do is wait for the krak to hit the turbines.”

“Or us,” Delayn added.

“Mind your station, Commander.”

Another minute later the bridge speakers squealed in protest and the gravelly voice from four days ago returned. “We are coming aboard now . . .” it said.

“This is it, people!” Caldin called out, starting from the captain’s table at a run. “I’m going to the hangar bay to greet them. Let me know the instant anything changes.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the comm officer replied.

But Caldin never made it off the bridge. The air in front of the doors began to shimmer, and she skidded to a stop a dozen meters from them. A sound like rushing water filled the air, and then she was slapped in the face by a strong gust of wind. That gust almost knocked her off her feet, and the shock of what she saw next left her gaping in silence.

Three men in dazzling suits of armor had just appeared out of nowhere.

Caldin’s brain hurried to fill in the blanks. They must have sent a cloaked ship to board the
Intrepid
and then somehow snuck aboard and made their way to the bridge using cloaking armor.

Their armor was highly reflective and it glowed a brilliant blue-white, dazzling her eyes. They wore matching helmets with even more brilliantly glowing visors. The taller man, who stood in the middle of the three, wore a shimmering blue cape that cascaded down from his shoulders, and a strange emblem was etched into his breastplate. The emblem glowed a deep blue, the same color as his cape, and was comprised of the letter
A
—
A
for Avilon?
Caldin wondered. In the center was a spiral suggestive of a spiral galaxy with brilliant white points of light that resembled stars, and in the center of that was a pattern which looked disturbingly like an eye.

The man whose armor bore that emblem stepped forward, and the same deep gravelly voice which they had heard only a few minutes ago now echoed out across the bridge. “In the name of the Ascendancy and the almighty Omnius, I accept your surrender. You stand in breach of ancient covenants. Not only have you trespassed, but you have told others to do the same. Have you anything to say in your defense?”

Caldin shut her gaping mouth and shook her head. “Who are you?” she asked.

“That is irrelevant to these proceedings.”

“No, it’s not. You are accusing us of crimes we know nothing about. We have a right to know who our judge is.”

“I am not your judge. Your judge is the same as ours—he is Omnius.”

“And who is this Omnius?”

Suddenly the room flashed with a blinding light, Caldin winced and looked away. When she looked back again, she saw that the center of the symbol on the taller Avilonian’s breast plate was now glowing as bright as a sun, and the entire bridge was awash with the light.

“I am,” a new voice boomed. The voice was so loud and resonant that it sounded like rolling thunder.

“You are what?” Caldin asked in a small voice.

One of the other Avilonians took a sudden step forward and raised glowing palms toward her. Before Caldin could wonder what he was doing, she heard a
whoosh
of air; her stomach lurched, and she saw the ceiling rushing up to greet her. She hit with a
crunch,
and
a sharp spike of pain erupted in her shoulder. Caldin began falling back to the deck, but an invisible hand seized her just before she could land on her knees and shatter them, too. The hand released her and she was left kneeling on all fours. Afraid to move and aggravate her throbbing shoulder, Caldin stayed down, panting heavily and working hard to suppress the pain. Her shoulder was almost certainly broken.
What the frek was that?
she wondered.
Some type of grav gun?

“That is better,” the deep, gravelly voice said. “Now you are showing the proper respect. Do not speak again unless Omnius asks you a direct question.”

Caldin shook her head and gritted her teeth. She heard murmurs of discontent rumbling across the bridge as crew members took umbrage at the way their captain was being treated. It was tough to see through the blinding light, but Caldin thought she saw a few officers getting up from their control stations to kneel on the deck along with her. Seeing that only infuriated her more. Under the guise of checking her injured shoulder, she raised a hand to her ear to activate her comm piece. They needed the Gors up here ASAP. Things were already going to the netherworld.

“You do not know me,” the voice like thunder began as Caldin whispered orders into her comm piece, “but I know all of you. I know all of you as if you were my own children. Yet you are not my children, because my children know me.”

Caldin was tempted to say she was happy not to be one of those
children.
Of all the things she had expected from the Avilonians when they came aboard, this was the last thing she had imagined. Clearly the glowing
eye
in the center of the Avilonian leader’s chest was a symbol of this Omnius they spoke of. Now he, or
it
. . . whatever it was, was somehow communicating with them remotely.

Caldin finished whispering orders into her comm piece. While she waited for the Gors to arrive, her mind turned to wondering about the eye, but she was at a loss to understand who or what was speaking to them. Whatever it was, the Avilonians were treating it like a deity.

“You have come to my kingdom uninvited,” the thunderous voice said. “And your Sythians came with you.”

“Sythians are here?” Caldin couldn’t help from blurting out.

“Do not speak!” the gravelly voice of the taller Avilonian warned once more.

Thunder rolled again, “No, let her defend herself. She does not yet understand our customs, so she cannot be held accountable for her disrespect.”

Caldin took that as her excuse to say everything else that was on her mind. “I don’t know who or what you are, and I don’t know what you want with us, but I do know that you are mistaken,” she said. At that, Caldin heard the Avilonians gasp.

The thunder was quiet for a long moment. When it returned, it was much softer than before, “Go on.”

Caldin tried to look up into the blinding light, but her eyes began tearing almost immediately, and she was forced to look away. “We have not brought any Sythians with us. None that we are aware of, at least. We
were
sent to find Avilon, but until recently only one of us knew that. Allegedly, we were sent out here to look for survivors, but our mission was cut short when we ran into Sythians. We made a blind jump and accidentally ran into this gravity field. We’ve been stranded here for the past three weeks.”

“You are telling the truth, but one of your people
is
responsible for the Sythians’ presence here.”

Caldin shook her head. “Who?”

“He is not aboard this ship.”

“If you knew that, then why did you accuse us?”

“I didn’t. I told you the Sythians came with you. You assumed I was accusing you of bringing them here. As for why you are stranded, it is because I determined that you should be. No one shall enter the light without being first invited, and I would know had I invited you.”

Caldin shook her head. “
You
trapped us here?”

“There are twelve overlapping gravity fields surrounding my kingdom. When an intruder is detected, the nearest field turns on and they are forced to turn around. I then decide whether or not to meet with them. In the past I would do so to make them forget what they had discovered here. Now with so few of your people left, it is rare that anyone happens upon us by accident, so I meet with everyone. So far, the only trespassers have been refugees. In my mercy I allow them a chance to prove that they are worthy to become children of the light.”

Caldin felt shock coursing through her. She opened her mouth to say something, but the words got stuck in her throat, leaving her mouth agape. The Avilonians’ technology was astounding—artificial gravity fields several light years across, sensors that could passively detect a ship moving through SLS . . . Caldin shut her gaping mouth in an effort to contain her awe. She didn’t want to give this
Omnius
any more justification for arrogance than it already had.

“What makes a person
worthy?
” she asked, trying but failing to suppress her scorn. It bled clearly into her tone of voice.

“I can see that you do not like me,” the thunder said. “I also know that you have called for help and that the ones you called are standing outside right now, about to burst in and kill my three servants here.”

Caldin’s heart seemed to freeze in her chest. How could Omnius possibly know that? Had he overheard her speaking into her comm piece?

“Tell your . . .
Gors
to surrender before they get hurt.”

Caldin forced herself to look up at the blinding light just as the doors behind the three Avilonians swished open. She smiled. “Too late, Omni-frek. Tell your men to stand down before
they
get hurt. They’re trespassing on my
ship.”

Suddenly the blinding light diminished as the three Avilonians turned away from her. Nothing appeared to have come in, and the bridge doors swished shut almost as soon as they had opened, but Caldin knew better than to let that fool her. The Gors were all cloaked.

The caped Avilonian crossed his forearms in front of him and a shimmering bubble of light expanded out from where he stood to surround all three of them. The air seemed to buzz and crackle with energy. Then the two flanking Avilonians raised their arms with palms outward, just as Caldin had seen one of them do before she’d been thrown against the ceiling.

Suddenly the mysterious bubble of light flashed and Caldin saw something glossy and black hit the floor with a
thud
. She gaped at it in horror. It was a Gor’s arm, sliced off cleanly at the elbow. A loud hissing noise filled the air—the Gor who’d lost his arm screaming in pain, or more likely, outrage.

The Avilonians began gesturing wildly in the air. Then came a raucous series of booming
thuds
as if someone were beating the bulkheads with sledgehammers. Caldin’s eyes were drawn toward each
thud
as it sounded—to the bulkheads, the deck, the ceiling, and finally to the bridge doors. A deep dent appeared in the doors, revealing a slice of the corridor beyond. It looked as if they’d been hit with a battering ram. The battering ram in question appeared a moment later, a glossy black shadow lying on the deck, hissing and writhing in pain.

Back was the thunderous voice of Omnius. “Do not let them suffer,” it said. The glowing bubble of energy vanished, and then the Avilonians unleashed screeching beams of blinding white light from their palms. One Gor at a time, the hissing stopped, and fallen Gors appeared all around them, their armor smoking and glowing with a faint orange light. Caldin was left staring in horror at the scene.

“How did you see them?” Caldin asked, unable to believe what she’d just witnessed. The Gors had been cloaked!

The taller Avilonian turned back to her and the glowing
eye
in the center of his chest swelled to a blinding brightness once more. “I see everything!” Omnius replied. “Did you really think you could hide them from me?”

“You didn’t have to kill them! They were already incapacitated.”

“Not all are worthy of redemption,” the thunder said. “Now, explain to me why you came.”

“We came to get help! The last of us are holed up and hiding in an isolated corner of the galaxy called Dark Space. A few weeks ago the Sythians arrived there with a fleet. We need your help to fight them off before they can finish what they started when they came to this galaxy. If you won’t help us for our sake, consider this—they’re coming for you next. We know they’ve been looking for Avilon for some time now. It won’t be long before they discover you.”

“They have already discovered us,” Omnius replied. “And it is too late for us to help you. Your people have lost the fight. Your leaders surrendered, and the Sythians now have complete control of Dark Space. They are busy enslaving your people to replace the Gors as crew for their fleets.”

“What?”
Caldin couldn’t believe it. “How can you possibly know that?”