Dark Space: Origin (28 page)

Donali shrugged as he turned and headed back to the examination table. He resumed slicing with his scalpel, and a few moments later he’d separated Kaon’s brain from the skull. He held it up, dripping, and Hoff suppressed an urge to run away.

“Find me another surface area to work on!” Donali said.

Hoff looked around quickly. There was nothing in the immediate area, but then he remembered the hover gurney they’d left in the stasis room. When he returned with it, Donali all but dropped the brain on the surface. It landed with a splat, and Hoff had to force himself not to jump back. Donali sectioned the brain and found the elements he was looking for, setting each one aside carefully, one at a time. “I’m probably not the most qualified person to be doing this,” he said. “We could use an expert—a neurosurgeon, for example.”

“No one has ever dissected a Sythian brain before, Commander. There
are
no experts. Keep cutting.”

“Yes, sir. What am I looking for?”

Admiral Hoff frowned, suddenly doubting the purpose of this exercise. Donali was right—they needed someone with more experience. He was just about to tell the commander to stop when Donali abruptly jumped back from the brain.

“What is it?” Hoff asked.

Donali pointed to the organ with his scalpel. “I don’t know . . .” he said. “I found something . . . it shocked me.”

“That much is obvious.”

“No, I mean it gave me an electrical shock.”

Hoff smiled. “What do you suppose might do that, Donali?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t see anything in there . . .” He poked the brain with his scalpel once more. This time he yelped and dropped the instrument.

“You’re wearing surgical gloves, Donali. Whatever you’re experiencing, it’s not electricity. Your hands are perfectly insulated.”

Donali stared at his hands with wide eyes, turning them first one way and then the other. “Then I don’t understand.”

“Show me where you’re cutting when it happens.”

Donali pointed to a cleft in the brain tissue.

“Hand me a fresh scalpel,” Hoff said. He accepted the tool from Donali and poked it into the same place his XO had. Something pushed
back
, and despite his best efforts, Hoff recoiled, too.

“Interesting . . .” he handed the scalpel to his XO. “Cut around the area. We need to see what’s in there.”

Donali set to work once more, occasionally reacting with another yelp and recoiling from his work only to try again from a different angle. When he was done, he had carved a small, roughly square section out of the Sythian’s brain. Donali picked it up gently, trying not to provoke another shove. He held it up to the light, his real eye wide as he marveled at the specimen in his hand. “What should we do with it?”

“I have a theory, if you’ll permit me the sample, Commander.”

Donali blinked stupidly at him.

“Set it down.”

Once the commander had done so, Hoff drew his sidearm, set it to lethal, and dialed it down to the lowest power setting. At that setting it wouldn’t even leave a mark on the deck, but organic matter would not fare as well.

“What are you going to do?” Donali asked, already backing away.

Hoff took aim and fired. A bright red flash shot out from the barrel and hit the sample. Tissue blackened and caught fire, burning up in a greasy yellow flame that smelled like burning rubber. When the fire died down and ashes crumbled away, they were left staring at nothing but empty space. Hoff bent to eye level with the ashes and his eyes widened appreciably. There was one small bit of charred flesh hovering just a few centimeters above the gurney.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing, Donali?”

The commander’s red eye appeared on the other side of the floating specimen.

“That’s impossible. Organic matter cannot oppose gravity by itself.”

“I don’t believe that’s what we’re seeing. . . .” Hoff reached out with one finger extended toward the empty space beneath the specimen . . . and just before his finger would have passed through the spot, his hand bounced away with another kinetic jolt. He smiled and nodded. “It’s cloaked. That’s why it’s repelling us.” It was common knowledge that cloaking shields repelled matter with a weak, but discernible force, and they bent electromagnetic radiation
around
them to make things invisible to the naked eye and scanners.

Abruptly, Hoff reached out and grabbed the invisible thing, knocking the last bit of organic matter aside.

“Admiral!”

Hoff couldn’t feel any texture, but there was a palpable force pushing him away, as if his hand and the object were two magnets trying to push each other apart. Unlike the violent reaction he’d felt while probing with the scalpel, or the powerful one he’d felt when touching the object with his fingertip, now he felt only a mild repulsive force. Hoff tried squeezing harder, and he managed to touch the sides of the thing. It felt cold and smooth—glassy—and was spherically-shaped. Hoff held it in a closed fist above the table, and then slowly opened his hand.

“Look,” Hoff said. Now they could see a faint, shimmering outline of the thing. It appeared a moment later, a shiny silver ball no larger than the tip of his thumb. “The shield must be exhausted. . . . but why now?”

Donali shook his head. “Most of our implants draw power from their host. Sythians must utilize similar technology.”

“Yes . . .”

“What do you think it is?”

Hoff looked up at his XO with a slow smile. “Isn’t it obvious? This, my dear Lenon Donali, is a cloaked implant.”

Suddenly they were interrupted by a soft bleep from the lab computer. It had finished analyzing Kaon’s tissue and blood samples. Both turned and started toward the computer. Hoff brought the implant with him.

Donali sat down at the control station to study the results which had flashed up above the controls. A moment later, he inhaled sharply.

“What is it?” Hoff asked.

“Kaon . . .”

“What about him?”

Donali slowly turned away from the console and looked up at the admiral. “He’s a clone, sir.”

“A
what?
Why haven’t we discovered this sooner?”

Donali shook his head. “We never performed a brain biopsy before. The brain tissue contains markers which are not present in the other tissue samples. He’s a clone with an implant. . . . What do you think that means, sir?”

Hoff took a moment to process that. Then he began nodding slowly and said, “Did you recognize the world we saw, Donali?”

“No.”

“It was Origin. Kaon is a clone with an implant who has been to
Origin
. I’ll tell you what
that
means, Commander—it means that this is not the first time our two species have met.”

*  *  *

Twenty minutes earlier . . .

Atton waited with his ear pressed to the door, listening to the sounds of receding footsteps and of doors swishing open then closed. He waited at least five minutes after he stopped hearing noise on the other side of his door—until he could be sure that Hoff had gone wherever he was going, and that his mother had gone back to bed. Then Atton turned to the control panel beside the door and waved his wrist over it.

Nothing happened.

Atton blinked, but then he remembered he didn’t have an identichip anymore. Hoping that didn’t mean he was locked in his room, he tried using the keypad to open the door.

It
swished
open and Atton let out a sigh of relief. He crept out into the darkened hallway, glancing to the left, back the way he’d come earlier, and then to the right, down to the end of the hallway. Here the walls were painted dark gray and the gold wainscoting and crown moldings from the living room continued. The transpiranium wall sconces were dark, but more light paintings glowed dimly between doors, casting enough light into the hall that Atton could see. At the far end of the hall was a transpiranium door which looked out on the garden he’d seen earlier from the main living area. Through the top of the door Atton could see a crescent moon shining down on an immaculate green lawn. The moon was obviously fake along with the rest of the sky, but the vegetation might have been real. In the middle distance a big tree rose into the night with dark, scraggly braches. A child’s swing hung down from one of the lower branches, and beyond that lay a thick black hedge.

Atton crept down the hall toward that door, curious about the garden. He passed light paintings of landscapes from worlds he’d never been to—soaring black mountains reaching for angry red skies; pristine white sand beaches and serene turquoise oceans; endless snowy deserts and towering jungles. Amidst those unfamiliar scenes, one painting in particular sparked his interest. It showed a mirror-clear lake reflecting a backdrop of soaring, snow-capped mountains washed gold by a setting sun. As Atton stopped to look at the painting, it came alive. The lake sparkled, the sunset faded, and a red moon rose. Atton sighed with nostalgia.

“You never forget it, do you?”

Atton started and turned to see his mother standing at the other end of the hallway, beside the door to his room. “Oh, hi Mom. You scared me . . .”

Destra padded across the soft white carpet to reach him. He noticed that she was holding a steaming cup of some beverage. She stopped beside him and lifted the cup to her lips for a sip. She nodded to the painting. “You recognize it?” she asked, taking another sip of her tea.

Atton turned back to look at the painting just in time to see the sun rise over the lake, bathing the scene in fiery reds and yellows, and he sighed again. “Yes, it’s home.”

Destra nodded and a faraway look crept into her eyes. “And it always will be.”

Atton covered a yawn with one hand. His mother noticed and turned to him with a smile. “You should be in bed. What are you doing up?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Neither could I,” she said, tapping the tea cup with one long fingernail. “That’s what this is for. Want some?”

Atton shook his head, and his thoughts turned back to what had brought him out of his room. The reason he couldn’t sleep. “Mom . . .” he began.

“Yes?”

“What is Hoff hiding from you?”

Destra’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I overheard you and him talking. You said he was keeping secrets, and he said it was dangerous for you to know.”

“You heard that?”

“Just before I drifted off to sleep. Mom . . .” Atton shook his head. “If he’s hiding things from
you,
his
wife
, don’t you think that’s a bad sign?”