Dark Space: Origin (27 page)

REVELATIONS

Chapter 18

T
he lift tube opened on deck six of the
Tauron
to reveal Commander Donali already waiting
.
Admiral Hoff held the doors open and nodded to his XO. The commander walked in, pushing a hover gurney. Lying on the gurney, stunned and draped with a white sheet, was High Lord Kaon. He looked like an ordinary cadaver going to the morgue, but Kaon’s destination wasn’t the morgue—at least not yet. Deck six was the deck the med center was on, so having Kaon disguised as a cadaver was a good cover. Adding to that cover was the fact that Donali was a part of the senior medical staff aboard the
Tauron
—although he rarely practiced medicine since being promoted out of the restricted-line officers’ ranks.

“Good evening, Admiral,” Donali said.

“Did you have any trouble with nosy subordinates?” Hoff asked.

“None. The few who asked where I was taking the body, or who it was, were told that it was classified, and they seemed satisfied with that.”

Hoff nodded. “Good.”

Now that they’d jumped to SLS to follow Brondi, there was little left for them to do but wait until they reached Dark Space. Hoff wasn’t very good at waiting, but fortunately he had Kaon and the mystery of the Sythians to keep him busy.

As the lift doors slid shut, Hoff keyed in deck twenty-four. The very existence of the lift tube was a closely-guarded secret, and besides Hoff and Commander Donali, the only one who even knew it existed was Hoff’s wife, Destra. That lift tube was the only way in or out of the facility which lay in the heart of the battleship. The only two access ways to the lift were from the maze in Hoff’s garden and the disused storage room on deck six.

When the lift arrived on deck 24, the doors opened into a dark, airy room. “Lights,” Hoff commanded, and a wan yellow light filled the space. The air was almost zero degrees and drew condensing white clouds of moisture from their lungs. That was a happy coincidence for Kaon, who liked frigid temperatures just as much as the Gors.

Hoff looked around. To their right lay a catwalk, which could just barely be seen crossing into a vast, hollow sphere. Bright blue lights shone out from the walls of that room. The lights blinked, faded, and swirled in wave-like patterns. At the end of the catwalk, lay a mysterious, glossy black sphere. To their left, lay more of the airy room where they currently stood. The walls were lined with dozens of stasis tubes. The blue-tinted transpiranium covers glowed from within to indicate that they were occupied. Only a few stood dark and empty. Beyond that, at the far end of the room, lay a pair of luminous transpiranium tanks filled to the brim with bubbling blue liquid. Hoff headed toward those tanks, hurrying past the stasis tubes. Donali’s footsteps echoed behind him.

Suddenly, a warbling noise drew their attention, and Hoff turned to see Kaon rising wraith-like from his gurney, the white sheet falling away as he looked around with wide blue eyes. Donali had already drawn his sidearm and trained it on Kaon to stun him once more, but Hoff held up a hand for him to wait.

Kaon warbled something as he stumbled toward one of the stasis tubes to get a closer look. Hoff’s translator communicated that a moment later as, “Where am I? What is this place?”

“Admiral,” Donali began in a warning tone, but Hoff waved his hand dismissively. It couldn’t hurt for Kaon to know what they were doing here. Who was he going to have a chance to tell?

Kaon turned away from the stasis tube, and his lips parted in a disturbingly human smile. “You are not what you seem to be, Admiral.”

“Neither are you, but we’ll talk more about that in a moment. Can we trust you to go peacefully?” Hoff gestured to the far end of the room, which was furnished with all the same equipment that any other med center would have—except for the pair of bubbling transpiranium tanks.

Kaon followed Hoff’s gesture, and after just a moment, he began stumbling in the indicated direction. Donali kept his sidearm trained on the alien, and Hoff drew his for good measure. When Kaon reached the sole examination table, Hoff gestured to it with his gun.

The alien climbed up wordlessly. “Now what do you wish me to do? Kill myself?”

Hoff smiled. “I haven’t brought you here to kill you, Kaon—not on purpose, anyway.” Hoff dialed his weapon down to a very low stun setting, and then he shot Kaon in the head. The alien jittered uncontrollably before falling back onto the table with arms, legs, and head dangling over the sides. Hoff holstered his weapon and turned to Donali. “Go configure the diagnostic station for a probe while I strap him down.”

Striding over to Kaon, Hoff opened a storage compartment on his belt and pulled out a pair of stun cords. He tied Kaon’s wrists and ankles, and then pulled out a third, longer cord and tied it around both Kaon’s neck and the examination table, just in case. That done, he turned to look around for his XO. Hoff picked out the glowing red orb of the commander’s artificial eye bobbing in the swirling shadows of the attached stasis room. Donali returned with a pair of probe helmets, trailing with long wires. They’d brought those helmets with them from Fortress Station.

A sharp hiss drew their attention as Kaon tried to sit up, only to be stunned by a vicious jolt of electricity. Hoff ignored Kaon and followed his XO to the main control console. Donali connected the helmets to the console, and they sat down on a pair of matching black stools on mag-lock rollers.

“Let’s get started, shall we?” Hoff said, slipping the helmet over his head. As before, he found himself staring at a blank holoscreen with a timer in the top right-hand corner. “I’m counting on you to guide the process, this time, Commander. We need to find out if Kaon has been programmed, or if these really are his memories we’re seeing.”

“I’m not sure if we have enough time,” Donali replied. “Following all the neural pathways which provoke anxiety in our host is like looking for ship’s logbox in space, but we’ve got just five minutes to do it.”

“Do your best, Commander.”

“Yes, sir. . . . Probe commencing in five, four, three . . .”

Hoff watched the countdown reach zero, and suddenly the blank holoscreen became a vibrant scene of light and color. Long green grass rippled in the wind, birds flew overhead chirping as they soared across a bright blue sky. Towering mountains rose up against the horizon, cloaked with evergreen skirts and capped with gleaming white glaciers. To one side, a lavender-hued lake sprawled, and on the other side of it, was a towering, dome-topped fortress, gleaming white in the sun. Four artfully-crafted towers rose from high, crenelated walls surrounding the main building. Transpiranium walkways crossed from near the top of the main building to the tops of the towers. Hoff couldn’t see it from here, but he knew the central structure was capped with a transparent sky dome and accompanying garden—that fortress was the supreme overlord’s summer palace.

Hoff gasped and shook his head. He recognized this place. It could have been any of a dozen different worlds in the Adventa Galaxy, but Hoff knew it wasn’t. The palace gave it away. Besides that, the vegetation was the same, the sky the same—the mountains and lake the
same
. Hoff couldn’t even remember the world’s name—not it’s real name, anyway—but the mythical name was simply Origin. It was the long-lost world where humanity had begun.

“Where are you, Kaon?”

“Where am I? Where . . . . where . . .”

Hoff’s mind reeled. “What is this world to you?”

“It is . . .”

“Where is it?” Hoff demanded.

“Is . . . is . . . it? Is it?”

“We’re losing him, sir,” Donali interrupted.

“Already? That’s not possible.”

“He needs more time to rest. I don’t think we’re going to make even a minute like this.”

“Give me a second!” Hoff snapped. “Tell me where you are, Kaon.”

“Sssss . . .” Kaon hissed nonsensically.

“His vitals are all over the place! I have to shut it down.”

“One more second!”

“That’s all you’ll have!”

“Kaon! Answer me!”

“Ssssssss . . . !” Kaon’s hissing faded to silence. Next came the warning screech of a siren, followed by a flatline. Hoff tore off his helmet and dropped it on the deck with a
thunk
. “Damn it! Revive him!”

Donali shook his head as he slowly removed his own helmet. “I cannot revive him.”

“Why not?” Hoff demanded, turning to glare at his XO.

The commander pointed at one of the holoscreens rising from the control station in front of him. “He’s brain dead.”

Hoff blinked but said nothing.

“Did you get the information you were looking for?” Donali asked quietly.

“Cut him open,” Hoff growled.

“Sir?”

“You heard me—dissect him! I want to know everything there is to know about this
creature.
”

An hour later they had Kaon flayed open on the examination table. Donali had taken various tissue and blood samples, which the lab computers were busy analyzing. Hoff watched as Donali retrieved a small cutting beam from his tray of surgical tools and walked around to the head of the examination table. This was the part Hoff most wanted to see—the part where they cut open Kaon’s skull. He stood to one side of the operation, watching with a wrinkled nose as Donali worked. Most of Kaon’s body was analogous to a human’s or a Gor’s, but he had twin hearts; he was cold-blooded, and he had gills which would enable him to breathe under water.

Donali removed the top of Kaon’s skull and set it aside before setting to work with his scalpel. Hoff tried to ignore the wet cutting sounds which followed.

“Well?” Hoff demanded. “Have you found anything?”

“I’m taking a sample of the brain tissue for analysis,” Donali replied, “but so far it’s all more or less the same as the Gors we’ve examined.”

Hoff walked around the examination table to get a better look, and he was immediately sorry he had. A pale purple fluid was dripping down from the table, pooling on the deck at Donali’s feet. His surgical gloves were glistening with it, and so was Kaon’s blanched white brain. The alien’s blood was relatively colorless, just like a Gor’s, but it smelled like sulphur. Hoff’s nose wrinkled. “Are we sure we’re not breathing anything toxic?”

Donali dropped a small tissue sample in a jar and headed over to the lab computer with it. “The compounds we’re breathing are harmless,” he said as he went, “which is more than I can say for the venom sacs in Kaon’s jaw.”

“Venom sacks? You mean he had envenomed fangs and he never tried to use them?”

“It would appear so.”

“What—was he trying to be nice to us all this time?”

“Maybe he really was cooperating,” Donali said as he slotted the tissue sample into the computer’s queue and selected a battery of tests to run.

“To what end?” Hoff asked.