Armageddon (2 page)

Her eyes popped open.

She blinked away a sudden rain of tears. The comforting weight in her lap where Atta had fallen asleep became suddenly horrifying. Destra couldn’t bear to look, afraid that she might find a skeleton lying in her lap instead.

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

Destra screamed at the top of her lungs. Atta leapt up and fell over. Then she turned to her mother with a puzzled look.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?”

Destra curled into a fetal position and shrank against the wall. Atta approached slowly. Destra hugged her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth, slowly shaking her head.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

“It won’t stop!” she said.

Atta touched her gently on one arm. “What won’t stop?”

Destra rounded on her daughter, her eyes wild. “The sound! Don’t you hear it?” Her voice cracked with the strain of shouting after untold months of aching silences when all that had been needed was a whisper. “You have to hear it! It isn’t in my head. I’m
not
losing my mind. I’m not…”

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

Destra squeezed her eyes shut and pressed herself more firmly to the wall, but the noise only grew louder.

Scrape! Scrape! Scraaape!

Destra’s eyes shot open, and she stood up. Her mind felt brittle, like an old rusty piece of metal bent back and forth too many times.

“I heard it…” Atta murmured.

Suddenly she noticed that Atta had gone completely still, her ear cocked toward the wall that Destra had been pressing herself against a moment ago. Then the noise came again, another long
scraaape!

Suddenly a block of castcrete slid out of the wall and landed on their cot with a muffled
thud
. Then came a pitter patter of debris and a cloud of dust.

Destra stared into the hole, scarcely believing what she saw. Something within the hole coughed, and then a pair of slitted yellow eyes appeared, glinting in the gloom. As the dust cleared, a giant head appeared—a familiar skull-shaped head with corpse gray skin.

The being hissed at her and bared its dagger-like teeth.

“Torv?” Destra said, wondering if this was another dream.

More hissing.

She didn’t have her translator anymore, so she had no idea what the Gor had said.

“How did you get here? Never mind. I can’t understand you.”

“He said he wanted to find a way out, not another box to live in,” Atta said.

Destra turned to her daughter, blinking slowly, not understanding until she remembered that Atta, being a child, was more sensitive to the Gors’ telepathy than human adults.

Torv hissed some more, and Atta translated. “He says that now the Sythians will find his tunnel and kill him.”

Destra shook her head. “No, we’ll hide it on our end, but you have to promise to take us with you when you find a real way out of here.”

Hiss-sssss.

Atta flashed her mother a pretty smile. “He says he is happy to help, but first he must find Shara.”

Destra nodded. “The matriarch…” Shara was the last female Gor, and the only hope for their species. “Tell him we’ll do whatever we can to help.”

“He says you can start by helping him fix the wall.”

Destra hurried back to the cot and tried lifting the castcrete block from her cot. Her arms strained until it felt like they would snap, but the block was far too heavy for her. In the end it took all three of them to lift it. Torv helped with one muscular arm reaching out of his tunnel. He barely managed to pull his fingers out from under the block before it slid back into place.

Destra and Atta chewed soap and mixed it with dust to fill in the gaps in the wall. It was dirty work, and the taste of the soap nauseated her, but Destra couldn’t help feeling elated. It felt good to finally be
doing
something. It felt even better to have hope. They weren’t going to die in captivity after all.

They were going to escape.

Chapter 2

—One Month Later—

F
arah Hale stood alone on the deck of the
Baroness
, an old venture-class cruiser. It came equipped with a cloaking shield, but that was the extent of its modernizations. It was a far cry from the warships that Farah had served on as a Peacekeeper in Omnius’s fleet.

She sighed and splayed a hand against the cold transpiranium of the
Baroness’s
main forward viewport, as if to narrow the intervening space between her and Bretton, wherever he was.

She’d done her best to keep sentiment out of it, to make a logical decision, but she knew that was impossible. Bretton was her uncle, yes, but he was also the man she had secretly loved since even before the Sythian invasion. There was so much to admire about him, so much to care for; it had been inevitable that she fall for her superior officer. The
uncle
part was the only reason she’d never done anything about it.

It had taken some convincing to get her bridge crew to agree with the rescue mission, but Bretton’s ship, the
Tempest,
was quantum-refitted. That meant it could jump across thousands of light years in the blink of an eye, and it could communicate with equal ease. Finding that ship had been their incentive. The
Tempest
was too valuable to simply give up as lost. In spite of that, her XO, Deck Commander Tython, had shown early signs of resistance to the rescue mission, and the rest of the bridge crew hadn’t been far behind.

Unlike the
Tempest,
Farah’s ship did not have a quantum jump drive, and it would take six months just to reach Noctune. Making matters worse, they only had enough fuel for a one-way trip, which meant they’d be stranded in the Getties Cluster once they arrived.

There’s a rule about rescues,
Farah mused.
You don’t dive in to save someone from drowning if you aren’t strong enough to swim with them to shore.

If they found the
Tempest
intact and used its quantum jump drives to get back to the Adventa Galaxy safely, then all would be well, but even Farah was realistic about the chances of that. If the
Tempest
could bring them home, wouldn’t Bretton have used it to come back by now?

Adding to the multitude of reasons against a rescue mission was the fact that it wasn’t just the skeleton crew of five bridge officers whose lives she risked. There were also the rest of the original crew of the
Baroness,
all of them survivors from Dark Space, all locked away in the ship’s stasis rooms, and all ignorant of the fact that their vessel had been commandeered by a resistance movement from a planet called Avilon.

Put it all together, and going to Noctune seemed like a skriff’s errand. Farah had heard the crew whispering behind her back, and she’d seen the tight-lipped smiles they gave her whenever she walked by. She’d known what they were thinking.

So one night, about a week after setting course for Noctune, Farah had found herself alone on deck with Commander Tython, and she’d decided to do something about the looming threat of mutiny. She’d waited for just the right moment, and then she’d walked up behind Tython, drawn her sidearm, and pulled the trigger.

The rest of the crew had been fast asleep in their beds at the time, so she repeated the process, sneaking into one crewman’s room after another until all five of them were incapacitated.

The weapon had been set to stun, of course. She wasn’t a murderer. Once they were all unconscious, Farah had used a grav sled to carry them to a row of empty stasis tubes. Then, one by one, she’d wrestled them into position and activated the tubes with the auto-wake timer disabled. That done, she’d checked the rest of the crew’s stasis tubes, just in case any of them accidentally woke up. She’d been surprised to find them all with the same settings. Clearly the former captain of the ship had been just as paranoid as her—and with good reason: from what she’d heard, he’d been killed during a mutiny.

But there was a price to pay for being so wise; Farah had spent the last six months in complete isolation. With no one to talk to, she’d begun talking to herself. She told herself it was to keep her vocal chords working, but the road to madness was littered with better rationalizations than that.

Skriffy as a space rat or not, her lonely mission was finally at an end. The
Baroness
was about to arrive at its destination.

Farah traced the bright, kaleidoscopic patterns of light that raged just beyond the bridge viewports. Legend had it that one could go skriffy just from staring out into those spinning strands of light for too long.

“I’m not that superstitious. Then again… I am talking to myself, aren’t I?”

Farah wondered what she would find at Noctune after all this time. Perhaps the
Tempest
had suffered some catastrophic failure of its jump drives and none of the crew were sufficiently knowledgeable to fix them. Or maybe Bretton had landed on Noctune with the Gors, and the Sythians had found and destroyed his ship in orbit, leaving him stranded on the Gors’ icy home world.

A small voice in the back of her mind whispered to her about other, darker possibilities, but she refused to listen. She couldn’t turn back now, so she had to leave room for hope to live and breathe inside her weary soul.

Not that she had a soul. Omnius had resurrected her and Bretton along with everyone else who had died during the Sythian invasion. They were immortals now; they didn’t even age. Perhaps that was why she found it so hard to believe that Bretton was really dead. Death had long-since ceased to have any meaning for them.

An automated countdown began, and Farah shook herself out of her thoughts. She took the gangway back from the viewports and hurried down the stairs to the crew deck. Finding the nav station, she sat down and began configuring the displays in preparation for the reversion to real space.

The countdown reached zero, and a bright flash washed away the rainbow-colored swirls of SLS. As the brightness faded, it was reduced to a myriad of twinkling pinpricks—the flickering candles of the universe.

Farah held her breath and pulled up a star map. She’d set most of the ship’s systems to auto, so by now the gravidar station must have finished a preliminary scan of the area.

The star map showed Noctune dead ahead, a few moons in orbit around it, and a small field of…

Farah shook her head and squinted at the map. Her heart was beating so hard she felt like it was about to explode. There was a small field of
debris
orbiting the planet.

Farah jumped up out of the nav station and ran over to gravidar to get a closer look at the debris. Optical scans revealed familiar components. In-depth scanning showed that the debris was mostly duranium. The clincher was what she saw when she switched back to an optical display and zoomed in on the largest piece of debris. Light amplification overlays revealed details that never should have been visible in the weak light of Noctune’s sun. She saw a sheet of metal, curled and blackened at the edges. A trio of Imperial-white letters were emblazoned on one side—
EST
. If the other half of that hull fragment was spinning around out there somewhere, Farah was sure it would have read
TEMP.

Farah sat back with an incredulous snort, her eyes busy filling with a suspicious warmth. “You selfish
kakard,
Bret. Six months and
this
is what I’ve got to show for it?” She shook her head. “No.”

Bretton wasn’t dead. She refused to believe it. She tried to calm herself, to remember that she’d already allowed for this possibility. Debris didn’t mean that Bretton was dead. He might be frozen and half-starved to death somewhere on the surface of Noctune, but he was
not
dead.

Farah toggled the ship’s scanners for an in-depth scan of the planet. It was only 60% complete by the time she thought to wonder about what had destroyed the
Tempest
.

Her thoughts went to the
Baroness’s
cloaking shield, and she turned to look at the engineering station where she could activate that shield.

She may as well be cautious and keep a low profile. Rising from the gravidar station, she hurried over to engineering.

Just as she was about to sit down, a thunderous
boom
roared through the ship’s sound in space simulator (SISS). Damage alarms screeched and alerts popped up all over the engineering station. Aft shields had dropped from blue to green.

Boom!

Another hit. This time the dorsal shields flickered into the green.

“Frek!” Farah queried the ship’s computer to locate her attackers. She found them moments later—two Sythian cruisers racing up behind, and a massive battleship pacing her from below.

Farah’s mind raced. She couldn’t fight back without a bridge crew to man the control stations, and even then, she’d still be short the gunners and pilots she needed to put up a proper fight. Running was the only viable option, but fuel was far too low for that.