Dark Space: The Invisible War (4 page)

“If I were you, I wouldn’t come back without him. She looked like she wanted to eat us when it seemed like we didn’t know where he was.”

“Yes, well, let’s hope that Alec Brondi has a similar experience.”

That brought a nasty smile to Ethan’s face. “I didn’t think of that.”

—THE YEAR 0 AE—

D
estra winced away from the light and sound of the explosion, and then another enemy warhead hit the converted ore freighter. She stumbled through the resultant shockwaves and the blasting wave of snow and ice that stung her exposed skin. Destra reached the abandoned hover transport which had brought her uncle to the platform, and she ran up to the driver’s side, not even bothering to close the passengers’ side doors before climbing in and gunning the throttles. She flew toward the fence at an unsafe speed, feeling the acceleration pin her against the driver’s seat. Destra pulled back on the yoke just before she slammed into the fence, and the transport jetted up and over. As she descended on the other side, her headlights illuminated a swath of fleeing civilians and backpedaling assault mechs, their guns tracking warily across the sky. The crowd was finally dispersing, but they were far too late. Destra grimaced, wondering if she had time to pick a few of them up. She was already slowing down to do so when she saw the first purple star touch ground in front of her, hitting one of the larger assault mechs and exploding with a
boom
and a blinding flash of flight. Debris, bodies, and clods of earth went flying as the burning ruins of the mech tottered to the ground.

“Frek!” Destra said as she swerved to avoid the fiery rain of debris. Something heavy
thunked
off the roof of the transport, and she tried not to imagine what it could be. Destra snapped off her headlights and switched the transport over to infrared and light amplification mode. The nav computer overlaid a colorful version of the world in which the terrain was dark blue and the people were moving points of orange, yellow, and red. It was harder to avoid obstacles like this, but using the headlights was not an option with the Sythians on her tail. That would light her up like a beacon.

Destra angled for the line of cliffs and trees coming up on her left. She would follow the road between the forest and the base of the mountains, and hopefully like that she would escape the Sythians’ notice. Just then, the transport hit a boulder she hadn’t seen, and Destra felt her stomach lurch as it jumped into the air like a grasshopper.

It settled down once more, and soon she joined the cliffside road and began winding around the base of the mountains. Destra let out a shaky breath. So far so good. No more enemy fire rained down around her. Destra turned a sharp corner in the road at high speed—

Only to see three bright orange shapes walking out of the trees, straight into her path. One of them was small—just a child. Destra felt her heart seize in her chest. Without her headlights on, they couldn’t see her, and hover vehicles were very quiet.

Destra stomped on the air brakes and yanked up on the flight yoke, hoping to clear their heads with enough of a margin that the grav lifts wouldn’t break their necks. She heard their muted screams and exclamations as she passed over their heads, and then the transport touched down ten meters distant. Despite the inertial management system, Destra’s head flew forward and hit the dash. She saw stars, and heard more screaming, but as from a great distance. Minutes or hours later—she couldn’t tell which—the world began to shake violently, and she thought the Sythians must have found her and shot the hover to pieces.

A second later the screams resolved into something intelligible and Destra realized the world was shaking because someone was shaking her by her shoulders.

“Hoi! Are you okay . . . ?” A man’s voice. “Frek! She’s out of it! You know how to pilot a hover?”

“No,” came a woman’s reply. “Do I look like I have the sols for a hover?”

“Hoi!” the man shaking her said again. Destra’s eyes rolled in her head. “That’s it! Wakey wake! She’s coming around!”

Destra’s eyes fixed on the man who—for frek’s sake!—was
still
shaking her. “Stop it!” she groaned.

“Sorry, girlie. Think you can drive us all outta here?”

Destra sat up and shook her head. “Give me a second. Let me out. I need some fresh air.” Destra felt stifled. She couldn’t breathe. She stumbled out of the driver’s seat, and fell to the snow-covered road on her hands and knees. She focused on her breathing, trying to calm herself. Atton was gone. He was
gone
, and she would never see him again!

“I think she’s having some kinda panic attack . . .” said the man who’d been shaking her, now standing to her right.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” said the woman.

A child whimpered.

Destra looked up at the man beside her and studied his shadowy features.

“Help me up,” she said.

“Yea, sure.”

Halfway to her feet, the dark, snowy world flashed brightly, revealing the man’s face. He had short, curly black hair, wet with melted snow, a ragged cut on his left cheek, which had smeared that side of his face with blood before freezing into a thick red scab, and he had a shifty look in his small, dark eyes.

The man’s gaze snapped up to study the source of the sudden brightness. “Holy krak!” he yelled. “There she goes!”

Destra spun to see what had suddenly peeled away all the shadows, and her eyes were immediately drawn to the expanding fireball in the sky. Just then the sound of the explosion reached their ears with a thunderous
boom.

“Six thousand motherfrekkers! That’s what ya get! Leavin’ us all to die! Frek you!” The man pumped his fist as he railed at the sky.

Destra turned to stare at him.
He was actually happy.
“We’d better go,” she said, swallowing her disgust with a frown.

“Yea, don’t want the same to happen to us,” he said, nodding. “Second that!”

Destra retook the driver’s seat, and turned to see a woman and her young child approaching. She felt a stab of recognition to see them. This was the little blond boy who’d been clinging to the fence as she’d waited for Captain Reichland to arrive—and his mother, the one who’d yelled at her.

“You!” the woman said as she drew near.

Apparently Destra wasn’t the only one with a good memory. She nodded. “Hop in.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Where’s your son?”

“He’s . . .” Destra hesitated. “He’s gone.” Tears sprang to her eyes, and the woman’s expression softened immediately.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought—” The woman assumed
gone
meant
dead
along with the rest of the evacuees aboard the transport, but Destra didn’t correct her. It would be easier travelling together without the burden of that woman’s jealousy.

“Well, there’s no accounting for justice, now is there?” the man with the gash in his cheek said, still talking about the evacuees’ transport. Either he hadn’t heard their conversation as he’d walked around the back of the hover to the passenger’s side, or else he was being deliberately insensitive. Destra decided to ignore him. He climbed in beside her, and in the rear viewscreen Destra noticed the woman and her son climb in the back. As soon as the doors had shut, she gunned the throttles.
Justice,
she thought, thinking about that man’s remark.
There’s no justice in any of this. Just death.

The road wound around the mountains, and Destra followed it as best she could despite the depthless blue of the infrared overlay. The trees alongside the road appeared as a scraggly black and blue wall.

“Where are we going?” the woman in the back asked.

“May as well head to the mines with the rest,” Destra replied.

“That’s a great idea,” the man said. “Gather everyone together in one place so it’ll be easier for the Sythians to kills us.”

“You have a better idea?” Destra asked, turning to him with a scowl.

“Yea, we go south until we reach Covena.”

Destra frowned. She vaguely recognized the name of the town. “How far is that?”

“It’s about three hundred klicks from here. We’ve already burrowed underground up there, so we’ll be safe—for a while.”

“Underground?”

“A bunker of sorts. We built it to keep our operations out of pryin’ eyes, if ya know what I mean.”

Destra turned to him with narrowed eyes. “You mean smuggling?”

“Sharp, girlie. Yea, smuggling. I managed supply-side operations—brewin’ the stims, that is.”

So he was taking them to a stim lab. “I see,” Destra said, wondering if he just brewed the batches of stim or tested them, too. There was something off about him. Destra was surprised she hadn’t heard of a stim lab in Covena before. Ethan must have known of it. He’d been a smuggler—before he’d been caught and exiled to Dark Space. “So why aren’t you hiding there now?” Destra asked.

“It’s got supplies to keep us goin’ for a few months, you know—not forever. My associates found their own way off Roka, leavin’ me to fend for myself, so I thought I’d try my luck smuggling myself onto the next ship outta here, but no go. Well, guess it was my lucky day, since that bird got shot to frek anyway. Serves the frekkers right.”

“Okay, okay—you’re giving me a headache. Punch the destination into the nav. I can’t spare a hand from the controls right now.”

“Whatever you say, girlie,” the man said, smirking as he leaned forward to fiddle with the nav. “Name’s Digger, by the way.”

“Digger, huh? I’m Destra. What about you two?” she asked, looking up into the rearview screen. The woman and her son were very quiet. Both of them looked very pale—shell-shocked. At first they didn’t reply, so Destra yelled, “Hoi! Wake up back there!”

The woman started and said, “I’m Lessie. My son’s Dean.”

“Okay. You two fine with hiding out in Digger’s stim lab for a while?”

Lessie’s already wide and staring eyes grew wider still. “A stim lab? What about the mines?”

Destra shook her head. “Digger’s right. We stand a better chance hiding out on our own. The fewer people to give us away, the better.”

“Smart girlie.”

“Anyone else hiding up there?” Destra thought to ask of Digger, suddenly uncomfortable with the thought of being surrounded by outlaws like him. Ethan had been a smuggler, too, but he was different. He was an outlaw because of what he did for a living, not because of who he was as a person. As for the man sitting beside her, Destra was pretty sure smuggling wasn’t the only criminal thing he’d ever done.

“Just Doc and Petra.”

“And they won’t mind us staying with them?”

“Well . . . supplies are short, like I said, but don’t worry.” He shot her a small smile and his eyes twinkled with amusement. “I’ll convince them.”

Destra frowned. She wasn’t convinced that this was a good idea at all, but it wasn’t as though they had a lot of options. At least she had some idea of how to handle outlaws, thanks to her early days with Ethan when they’d been making runs together. “All right,” she said. “But if we’re not welcome there, I’m taking Lessie and Dean and we’ll leave you lab rats to bake your brains with stims.”

Digger snorted. “Sure thing, girlie.”

Destra drove on for hours, listening with still-ringing ears as Digger railed against the world and how unfair it had been to him, until eventually the trees began to lighten with the first strokes of dawn. Destra wondered how much time had passed, and the answer flashed up before her eyes, fed to her brain directly from the small implant behind her right ear: 0750. Little more than an hour had passed since she’d seen her son off at the landing platform, but it felt like it had been much longer. By now the planet would be crawling with Sythians. They needed to get into hiding—
soon
.

Destra snapped off the light amplification HUD overlay and found that now her eyes were just keen enough to see in the growing light. The cliffs running beside them had disappeared, and now trees rose to both sides, forming a leafy green corridor. Destra cut a quick glance to the nav and saw that it wasn’t more than another fifteen klicks to the point Digger had specified on the map. She looked up to see in her rearview screen that Lessie and Dean had fallen asleep in the back of the hover. Seeing the boy’s face finally relaxed in sleep, she was reminded of her own son, by now light years away from her, and she looked away quickly.