Dark Space: Origin (52 page)

“How’s he doing?” Ethan asked.

“He’ll live,” the admiral replied.

Brondi shook his head and moaned. “I don’t
want
to live!”

“Then that’s exactly why you have to,” Ethan replied. “You’re going to have to live a long, long time,
Big Brainy
. Admiral Heston will make sure of that.”

*  *  *

As they left the probe room, Ethan turned to Hoff and said, “Thank you for helping me.”

“Thank
you
for bringing Brondi to justice.”

“That was Alara’s work, actually, but I guess now you know that I really was forced to help Brondi.”

“Not that it excuses your actions, but I suppose you
were
telling the truth.”

Ethan smiled. “Yes, I was, but you weren’t.”

Hoff suddenly stopped walking, and his eyes narrowed sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Atton told me.”

“And what exactly did he tell you?”

“Everything.”

“Well, well—what do you plan to do about that?”

Ethan shrugged. “It’s none of my business.”

“Smart.”

“But—” Ethan shook his head, and Hoff’s gray eyes hardened. “You need to get on board the
Tauron
and find out what happened.”

“Find out what happened to what?”

“To your clone.”

“I must be missing something,” Hoff said, looking around quickly to make sure no one was around to overhear their conversation.

“I went EVA during the battle, and Atton picked me up in your corvette. You were on board, but it was your clone, not you. He insisted we drop him on board the Sythian command cruiser so he could get answers.” Hoff’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. Ethan went on, “He told us that we should look for him on the
Tauron
, and that Atton would know where to look. That was before Caldin blew the Sythians and Brondi’s men all to the netherworld. If your clone did find something before the ship was destroyed, and if what Atton told me about you is true, then there might still be a record of what happened on board that ship.”

Hoff nodded slowly. “You’d better keep all of this to yourself, Ortane.”

“Or else? What are you going to do? I’m already headed for death row.”

“Actually, you might be surprised what I have in mind for you.” Ethan raised one eyebrow, and Hoff went on, “Thank you for the tip, Ethan. I’ll investigate. As for you, let’s assume for now that your record will be erased. Is that enough to ensure your silence?”

“Good enough for me.”

“Excellent. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get a team together.”

Ethan nodded. “Let me know what you find.”

“I can’t promise that, Ortane, but thank you.”

The admiral started off at a jog, and Ethan watched him go with a frown. Hoff turned a corner and disappeared, and Ethan shook himself. Mysteries of the universe be damned. He had more important things to deal with—it was time to schedule an operation to remove Alara’s implant.

*  *  *

Walking through the mangled remains of the
Tauron
was otherworldly. Twisted girders and beams hung down from the ceiling; severed wires and sparking conduits drifted like tentacles in the zero-G environment. Bodies and pieces of bodies floated past Hoff’s floodlights with looks of horror frozen on their battered and bloodied faces. Hoff pushed on, ignoring the carnage. So far there were no survivors, but that wasn’t surprising. The
Tauron
was a mess, and it would need extensive rebuilding before it could even serve as a garbage hauler, let alone a warship for the fleet, but that was for the spacebees and greasers to deal with. Hoff had his prerogatives for boarding the derelict ship.

As soon as Ethan had revealed the startling news about what had happened to Hoff’s clone, the admiral had put together a small team of engineers and jetted over to the
Tauron.
He’d left Commander Caldin in charge of search and rescue operations and told her to open a dialogue with the Gors. Meanwhile, Hoff had his own search and rescue operation to conduct. With everything going on, he’d completely forgotten to go looking for his clone, and loose ends could be dangerous if left untied. He needed to get access to his data center and his cloning facility. He had to find out if his clone had been revived, and if so, what had happened aboard the Sythian command cruiser.

Perhaps that clone had found answers to some of the myriad questions which had haunted humanity ever since the invasion.
Who are the Sythians and what do they want
for starters.

Hoff pressed on through the twisted corridors of his ship, occasionally using his cutting beam to open up corridors which had completely collapsed or been blocked with rubble. With all the debris it was hard to see where he was going, or even to recognize where he was, but he had a feeling he was getting close.

His comm piece crackled. “Admiral? Are you all right? You’re getting a bit far from the expedition.”

“I’m fine,” Hoff replied. “Give me another hour, and I’ll find my way back to the hangar.”

“All right, but don’t forget to check in.”

Hoff frowned and clicked his comm to acknowledge that before ending the transmission. He felt like a child out past his curfew, but he
had
refused an escort. It would have made sense to have a team of engineers with him in such a potentially unstable environment, but he couldn’t afford to have them find out about his secret. It was bad enough that Destra and Atton knew—and now Ethan, too.

After another twenty minutes of struggling through the dark, broken corridors of his ship, Hoff found what he was looking for—his lift tube. It was still mostly intact. The lift itself was missing, but since gravity was out, all he had to do was dial down the field strength on the grav gun hooked to his belt, and then jump.

Hoff floated down past deck after ruined deck, using his grav gun to direct his fall between jutting beams and the jagged edges of crumpled bulkheads. Hoff saw the lift tube coming up fast below his feet, and he dialed down the grav field strength some more. His feet touched the roof of the lift, and he bent his legs to absorb his remaining momentum. Using his cutting beam, he sliced a hole in the roof and dropped down.

The cloning lab was a mess, but at least it was a recognizable mess. Glow panels still flickered down here, and the artificial gravity gave a weak, but perceptible tug. That meant that Hoff’s backup generators were still running—a good sign.

The clone tanks in his med center had broken open, spewing blue nutrient fluid everywhere. Stasis tubes had broken away from the walls and fallen over, others were cracked and dark, the clones inside them now dead. None of the tubes were open, however, which was a bad sign. His helmet sensors told him that there was no breathable atmosphere, so if his clone had been revived down here, he would have woken up to find himself trapped inside a stasis tube that refused to open due to the vacuum on the other side. That clone would have suffocated to death.

Hoff grimaced and shook his head. Looking to his right, he found his data center still flickering with rolling waves of blue light. The glossy black meditation sphere at the end of the catwalk which led out into that data center was apparently also intact. Hoff felt a spark of hope, and eagerness drove him on. He passed through the entrance of the data center and walked down the narrow catwalk, his eyes scanning the far walls of the hollow sphere. Those walls only shone with half of the lights that they should have, indicating that many, if not most, of his memories would be inaccessible now.

When Hoff reached the mediation sphere, he placed a palm against the glossy black side of it and waited, hoping it still had enough power to respond. For a moment, nothing happened, but then the sphere spun, revealing an opening which had been hidden underneath. Hoff walked inside and strapped himself into the high-backed black chair inside the sphere. The walls of the sphere were transparent from the inside, giving Hoff a magnificent view of his data center. He watched the lights undulate around the room for a moment before he swiveled his chair to face the control station behind it and booted up the meditation sphere. He began searching for the most recent data set in the database.

To his surprise, that data set was just a few hours old. One of his clones
had
in fact tried to revive in here, but the operation had failed, and he was listed as deceased. Hoff spent a moment parsing through the data set to find the clone’s last half hour of life; then he configured his data center for a memory walk and routed the sounds to his helmet so he could hear despite the vacuum inside the data center. With everything now ready, he stabbed the button to start his journey into the not-so-distant past.

The transparent walls of the mediation sphere shimmered and then suddenly Hoff was standing inside a Sythian ship, in a room filled with glowing purple portals in the floor and ceiling. Just a few minutes later, a dark shape floated down from the ceiling, and Hoff heard himself say,
“Hello, Sythian. I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

Then he saw a flash of white teeth, and heard a familiar voice say, “So have I, Admiral.”

If Hoff hadn’t been strapped into his chair, he would have fallen out of it. He shook his head. It couldn’t be.

And yet it was. It was Captain Adram. Hoff sat and listened with horror and fascination to the explanations which followed.
So this is what immortality leads to
, he thought, a
vile, twisted perversion of life.

He shook his head. It had to end. He’d had his doubts about immortality before, but now he was sure—man wasn’t meant to live forever.

*  *  *