Dark Space: Origin (5 page)

“Am I glad to hear your voice, Delayn!” Caldin said.

“The feeling’s mutual, Commander.”

“What took you so long?”

“Sythian ships aren’t as fast as ours, ma’am, but you’ve got to see this beasty from the inside—creepy as the netherworld and just as dark.”

Caldin nodded. “I suspect we’re all going to be seeing a lot more of her than we’d like.”

“Roger that—here’s the captain again, ma’am.”

“
Defiant,
I hate to interrupt a happy reunion, but we’ve taken a long detour from our original mission to pick you all up. Please proceed to the following coordin—hold on a second,
Defiant
.”

Caldin listened with a frown to the hiss of static which accompanied that pause in the captain’s transmission. He was back a second later and sounding tense. “
Defiant,
we’re detecting multiple Sythian warships de-cloaking in this orbital. They’re surrounding you as we speak.”

Caldin turned from the viewports to see Goldrim look up from the gravidar station with wide eyes and an ashen face. “He’s right, ma’am.”

“We see them,
Interloper,”
Caldin said,
“but
we’re undermanned and damaged. We could use your help!”

In the next instant space shimmered and a lavender-hued ship de-cloaked right in front of them. A wave of alien missiles spun out toward them before Caldin could even react. “Evasive action!” she said.

The comms crackled with the
Interloper’s
reply, “Negative,
Defiant,
our mission cannot be compromised. We’ll send someone back for you in case you survive.”

Caldin shook her head, incredulous. “So you’re just going to leave us here?” She heard the sounds of a struggle in the background. It sounded like Delayn.

“Restrain that man! I’m sorry,
Defiant.
We did what we could.” And with that, the comms went silent, and the
Interloper
disappeared from the star map, cloaking once more.

The first of the enemy warheads hit their bow with a bright flash of light and the deck shook underfoot. The lights dimmed as the shields took most of the available power to absorb that hit, and Caldin traded horrified glances with the nearest crewman—Deck Officer Gorvan, the weapons chief. He seemed frozen with shock, his eyes wide and his eyebrows raised, as if asking her what he should do.

“Return fire!” she shouted.

*  *  *

—THE YEAR 3 AE—

Destra stood on the steaming, glassy black plains of a recently cooled magma field. The residual heat of it was enough to keep the ice back—for now. She stared up at the stars, watching as one which was far larger than the rest, moved quickly across the sky.

It must be a meteor,
she thought.

She saw it begin to glow, lighting up the night as it hit Ritan’s upper atmosphere, and then came the sonic boom of its passage. A frigid wind raised hairs on the back of her neck, and she turned in a quick circle, to make sure nothing was creeping up on her while she stood mesmerized by the rare event.

There were no rictans on the ground that she could see—not that she could see very well—and as for predators hunting her from the sky, she would hear the loud
whoosh
of wings just before one of the giant bats descended on her, and that would give her at least a few seconds’ warning.

Thanks to them, however, the rictans mostly left her alone. Months ago she’d discovered a bat cave at the end of an icy canyon. She’d harvested enough guano there that she could mask her scent whenever she left home—
home
was the Sythian shell fighter she’d landed in. That alien spacecraft was her only sanctuary on the desolate netherworld which was Ritan. She remembered sleeping with Hoff inside that bubble of relative warmth and safety. Every night they’d slept together on the same improvised bed and held each other close for warmth and reassurance. Now she slept alone, shivering and afraid, waking up every hour with her eyes wide and darting, searching the shadows for some unseen predator.

By her count it had been almost a month since Hoff had been killed by rictans, but it was hard to tell without a sun to divide the days from the nights. She hadn’t been the same since he’d died. She’d buried him under a mound of snow and rocks, but rictans had dug him up the next day and finished what they’d started. If only she and Hoff had found the bat cave together. That guano would have saved his life.

Since Hoff had died she’d become even skinnier, if that were possible. Hoff had been the hunter, but now it was up to her, and it wasn’t easy to get the ever-blunting point of her bone spear through the tough, hirsute hide of the ice walkers. It was even harder to drag one of them to a place of safety where she could skin and gut her kill. She’d always been the one keeping watch while Hoff had done that.

With a grimace, Destra turned away from the falling meteor and limped back to her sanctuary. The injuries she’d sustained from the rictans that had killed Hoff still haunted her. The dark silhouette of the
shell
grew on the horizon. Ritan was always dark. Sometimes, she’d wake up on a particularly smoke and ash-clouded day and step outside to find that it was too dark to even find her hand in front of her face. On days like that she’d wonder with a sudden, cold sweat of panic if she were going blind.

The faint light inside the shell belied that, but her tendency toward irrational, paranoid, and even outright crazy thoughts grew with every passing day.

Suddenly, the world flashed with blinding light and deafening sound, and she had another irrational thought—Ritan was exploding around her. Destra blinked spots out of her eyes and forced herself to focus on the bright and shining hull of the
shell
which had been her home for the past three years. It shouldn’t have been bright or shining in the perpetual darkness of Ritan, but now the mirror-clear hull of the fighter’s “shell” was glowing as bright as a sun—not that she could remember what suns looked like. Besides that hallucination, there was also the loud roaring in her ears which grew louder and nearer by the second.

Suddenly her mind seemed to grasp what was happening and she realized that both the light and sound were coming from behind her. She spun around to look and saw a bright point of light drawing steadily closer and larger on the horizon. It was the meteor she’d been watching earlier, except that it was no meteor.
It’s impossible,
she thought.
I’m dreaming. Wake up, Destra! Damn you, wake up!
The worst dreams were the ones where a rescue came, because when she finally woke up, she was still alone in the dark on Ritan. Those dreams haunted her more than any nightmare of Sythians, rictans, or bats—they were just another reminder of a rescue that would never come.

The light became so bright and all-consuming that Destra couldn’t watch it anymore. The sound was horrendous, but now growing softer. She heard a
th-thunk
as the ship settled to the ground in front of her, and she just stood there, shaking her head. It wasn’t real.
Don’t believe it, Destra! Don’t!
It’s not real. It’s never real. Don’t fall for this again. . . .

Then she felt someone shaking her by her shoulders, and she opened her eyes to see a man—a very familiar man—gazing at her with fire burning in his gray eyes. “Where is Hoff?” he asked.

Destra shook her head. She tried to work enough moisture into her mouth so that she could speak, but no words came out when her lips moved. She hadn’t had to use her voice in over a month.

“Where is the admiral?” the man demanded, shaking her again.

It was impossible.
I must be dreaming,
she thought as she stared into the lovely gray eyes of a ghost. Her gaze flicked over his decorated black ISSF uniform with white piping and gold stars’ insignia, and then back up to his rugged face. She wasn’t sure why he was looking for the admiral. He
was
the admiral.

“Oh, Hoff, you died,” she said. She reached out to cup his cheek with a dirty hand, and tears welled in her eyes.

Hoff’s gaze softened. “Who are you?”

It couldn’t be him. He didn’t even remember her. “I’m Destra . . . Destra Ortane,” she said, wiping her cheeks as her tears fell. “Don’t you remember me, Hoff?”

“Are there any others here with you?”

Destra shook her head.

“Well, let’s go. At least I didn’t come all this way for nothing,” Hoff said as he wrapped an arm around her shoulders to guide her toward the light.

Destra went willingly, still wondering when she was going to wake up, but so far this was unlike any dream she’d ever had. When she stepped aboard the waiting corvette and followed Hoff’s ghost to the ship’s med bay, she began to wonder. She reached the med bay in a daze and was forced to sit while the doctor checked her over. When he stepped in front of her to examine her more closely, she saw that one of his eyes was red and glowing, and she jumped up from the table. “Stay away from me, Sythian!”

The doctor frowned and Hoff turned to watch her backing away with his eyebrows raised. “It’s an artificial eye. Sit down.”

Destra stared at the doctor for a long while, her chest rising and falling quickly, fists clenched and shaking. The man smiled reassuringly at her. “Come on,” he said, and patted the examination table beside him. “Let’s finish checking you over.”

After another moment, she walked hesitantly back to the examination table, but her eyes never left his face. When he didn’t suddenly turn into a hissing Sythian, she relaxed somewhat and sat down on the table.

“She’s delirious with hunger,” Hoff said.

“Yes,” the doctor replied. “From the look of her, it’s a miracle she’s lived this long.” He forced Destra to lie down while he inserted a catheter in her wrist. The sharp prick made her wince, and a moment later she felt a cold trickle of fluids entering her body. She gasped, her head spinning where it lay on an impossibly soft pillow. She’d forgotten what a pillow felt like.

“She’s badly malnourished,” the doctor said.

“Finding food with the proper nutrients can’t have been easy.”

“Indeed . . . what about the transmission we heard?” the doctor asked. “She claimed
you
were with her.”

“As I said, Lieutenant, she’s delirious. Maybe I met her briefly before or during the war, but as for why she felt the need to invent a fictional story that fixated on
me
in particular . . . that’s your department.”

“It probably made her feel better to think she was marooned with an admiral rather than all alone. Well, I’m sure she’ll be more lucid when we get her back to health.”

“I’m sure she will. Meanwhile, if you’ll excuse me, we need to get back to the
Tauron
—goodbye, Destra.”

She saw the admiral’s smiling face appear above her.
That smile is wrong,
she thought. It didn’t have the sardonic twist that she was used to, and his cheek didn’t bear the old rictan scar which should have caused it. “I’ll see you soon,” the admiral said, and his face disappeared. “Take good care of her, Donali.”

“I will. I’ve administered a sedative, so she should fall asleep soon.”