Dark Space: The Invisible War (9 page)

“One of them just brought us breakfast.”

Ethan frowned. “Well, that’s going to help me sleep at night. Couldn’t we have them reassigned somewhere else? Maybe we could leave them on the transfer station.”

Atton nodded. “I would recommend that, yes, but that won’t shut them up forever, it’ll just isolate them for a while. Eventually the news will get out.”

“Well, let’s hope they keep their mouths shut.”

“A more permanent solution would be to assign them to the boarding party for the
Valiant
. . . .”

Ethan’s eyes grew wide as he understood what Atton was implying. He felt a sharp pang of disappointment to think that his son would even consider such a thing. “Atton . . .”

The boy shook his head. “I can see you don’t approve, but think about the greater good here. Part of your responsibility as overlord is going to be making the hard decisions—doing the things that on the surface seem wrong, but for the greater evil they will prevent.”

“Wrong is wrong, Atton.”

Atton smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You can’t afford to see the world in black and white, Ethan. Right and wrong are often just shades of gray. I’m surprised I have to tell a
smuggler
that.”

Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “Ex-smuggler. I lost everything because of my own moral compromises. If it weren’t for that, you and your mother and I would never have been separated, but instead you grew up without me there, and your mother is . . .” Ethan trailed off, shaking his head. “Missing.” That was as honest as he could afford to be with himself right now.

“Look, all I’m saying is that we need Kurlin. I don’t care how you keep him alive, but you’d better, or many more people will die.”

Ethan nodded. “Fine. Speaking of Kurlin, I should check on Alara,” he said, smoothly changing the topic. He felt privately sick that his son had such a convenient concept of right and wrong. Ethan touched his ear to activate his comm piece and then he said, “Call Kurlin Vastra.” The comm began to trill faintly in his ear, and a moment later the doctor picked up.

“Doctor Kurlin!” Ethan said. “This is Overlord Dominic speaking. How is Alara doing?”

Kurlin hesitated before replying. “Oh . . . hello, sir . . .” He sounded confused. “Alara’s not well, I’m afraid. She’s just suffered a relapse.”

Ethan frowned. “Where is she now?”

“Med bay. We’re looking after her. Why do you ask?”

Ethan had momentarily forgotten that Alara was nobody to the overlord; they didn’t even know each other. But while Ethan had been Adan Reese, he had professed to have some sort of connection to her—a connection which Alara wouldn’t even recognize if she were in her right mind.

All this identity switching was getting complicated.

Ethan’s gaze flicked to Atton. “My new XO, Adan Reese, was asking about her. I’ll put him through to you now.”

Ethan spoke aloud the command to transfer the comm call to Adan Reese, and then Ethan went back to his breakfast with a frown. He didn’t close the call on his end, so he was able to listen in as Atton did a good job of pretending to be concerned for a woman he’d never known. Ethan heard Kurlin relay the details of Alara’s regression—the incident in the mess hall with the lieutenant and then the subsequent reset which had knocked Alara unconscious.

Apparently the only thing the
Defiant’s
barely-qualified medic had been able to do for Alara without knowing how to safely deactivate her slave chip, was to implant another chip which would fight against the first. The code word “reset” would temporarily interrupt the slave chip, but it seemed doing that had been so traumatic for her brain that she’d been knocked unconscious. She was awake now and still claiming to be Angel, but with less conviction than before. The medic had said she would be okay, but he’d strongly cautioned against using another reset. Alara would have to fight her programming on her own.

Ethan gritted his teeth. Brondi was going to pay. His mind flashed back to what Atton had said about Tova’s mate aboard the
Valiant
and that brought a dark smile to his face.
I hope he eats you,
Ethan thought, but his next thought was that if Brondi died they would never get the deactivation codes they needed to safely remove Alara’s slave chip.

It was hard to want someone both dead and alive at the same time.

V
erlin stalked through the bowels of the
Valiant
with his team of scouts. Everywhere he went, the bounty hunter saw Brondi’s men walking beside big, hovering black garbage bins, using portable grav guns to pick up the bodies of the previous crew and drop them inside.

Even Verlin’s stomach turned at the sheer numbers of the dead. Walking through the
Valiant
was like walking through a mausoleum. He turned his eyes to the fore and forced himself to focus. He and his team reached a rail car tunnel and waited for the car to arrive. Once it did, they piled in, ignoring the bodies inside the car. Verlin turned to the directory beside the doors. He searched the ship for probable locations to hide something—what was he looking for anyway? What could old Dominic have been hiding?

This is a wild rictan hunt,
Verlin thought as he punched in a random destination—the med lab.
Good as any.
He went to find a seat as far as possible from the nearest body.

Brondi was wasting his time, but with the amount of Sols he was being paid, Verlin supposed that he couldn’t complain. He settled his head back against the side of the car just as it began
whooshing
through the ship.

*  *  *

Roan glared at the door of his prison, willing it to open. His slitted yellow eyes had been fixed on that spot for the past four hours straight, and the door still hadn’t been opened. No one had come to bring him food. Roan finally tore his gaze away from the door and looked around his half-finished crèche. It was much larger than the previous one he’d shared with Tova. She was probably still there waiting for him. The human workers in their thick coats and gloves had disappeared more than a day ago, and they had locked the door behind them. This had never happened before, and it called into question the level of trust between them. Roan wondered if something had happened to break the alliance.

The humans had been gone too long. They were supposed to be finishing his crèche and bringing him food. They were not keeping their end of the deal, so it was time for Roan to break his. He refused to stay hidden any longer. He would find a way out. Roan stalked over to his armor and put it on piece by piece until he was cloaked in the comforting coolness of his second skin. This one would protect him from the elements unlike the weaker one he’d been born with. He flexed his forearm gauntlets and then turned to the door with his palms outstretched. Two lances of purple light shot out and slammed into the door with a resounding
thud.
Nothing happened. The door was pristine; its armor too strong for his weapons to pierce. Roan cursed under his breath and turned to search the vast chamber for another way out. His eyes jumped from pillars of ice to the still blue waters of his pool. The floor was covered in ice and snow. There were no other exits that he could see.

Then his eyes seized upon something. It was long and black and roughly rectangular. He’d seen the humans using it to carve and shape the ice pillars. Roan stalked over to it. He remembered that the device produced an intense beam of light and heat. He wondered if it would also cut a hole through the door. Picking it up, Roan carried the device over to the door and fiddled with the controls until he found a small lever which fired a bright red beam and melted a furrow in the icy floor behind him. Turning to look at the damage, Roan let out a hiss, and then he turned the device around. Now he triggered the lever again and began tracing a line across the door. He saw the duranium begin to glow, and watched as small rivulets of metal began oozing down the door in fast-drying streaks.

This would do, Roan decided.

*  *  *

The med lab was also filled with bodies. These ones wore white hazmat suits, but they were just as dead. Verlin kicked the nearest one in the ribs to see if it would stir, but it didn’t even twitch, and rigor mortis made the body react to his kick like a rock. Verlin looked away. The hazmats hadn’t saved them.

Looking around the darkened room, Verlin saw vials of serum and lab equipment scattered everywhere. The sheer, frantic disarray seemed to suggest that these med workers had been trying to formulate a vaccine to the virus right up until the moment it had killed them.

“This is interesting. . . .” one of Verlin’s men said. Verlin turned to see the man querying a nearby lab computer.

“What?” Verlin asked, walking up behind him.

“There’s a large area greyed out on the ship schematic.” The man turned to him and then back to the screen to point. “Look—here’s the med lab. On the other side of it is the med center, but in between . . . there’s this big empty space with no apparent access. The schematic labels the area as hazardous, but doesn’t say what’s in there. All other information is classified.”

“Well, well,” Verlin said. “That is interesting. No doors? Which wall separates that area from us?”

The man turned and looked around the lab. A moment later he pointed to the wall furthest from them. There were a few mag-clamped trolleys of medical equipment stacked there. “I think it’s that one.”

Verlin walked up to it and moved one of the trolleys aside to run his hands along the wall, looking for seams. “It appears solid,” he said. “We’ll have to blast it open if we want a look on the other side.” Verlin snapped his fingers and said, “Someone get over here and make a hole.”

Another of his men came up behind him and shook his head. “We’ll need a welding laser.”

“And?”

“We didn’t bring one.”

Verlin just stared at the man.

“Right, I’ll go get
one.”

“Good,” Verlin replied. “I’ll wait.”

While they were still waiting there, a recessed section of that wall slid soundlessly aside. One man noticed the movement and turned to look. “Hoi! What the frek!” he said and whipped up his ripper rifle to cover the dark hallway which had appeared out of nowhere. “Halt! Anyone there?”

Now everyone had their rifles covering the opening while slowly backpedaling away from it. Verlin covered the entrance with his modified ripper pistol, but he didn’t back away. He’d already checked the corridor with his visual scanning implant, but there was nothing there—nothing on either the infrared or visible light spectrums. That dark corridor was very cold and very empty. There was, however, a very soft sound emanating from the open space, which his aural scanning implant detected as a movement of air. It could have simply been the warmer air of the lab meeting the colder air of the corridor and starting up a convection current.

“We need to get out of here!” one man said.

“Relax!” Verlin replied. “There’s nothing there—you!” He snapped his fingers at the man who was most visibly frightened. “Go investigate.”

“Me?” the man’s voice cracked. “Why me?”

“Because I frekkin’ said so. Now go!”

The man took a hesitant step toward the darkness. When nothing happened to him, he seemed to gather a bit more courage and he took a few more steps. The man reached the threshold and stopped. “Frek, it’s cold in there,” he said. “Do you think this was storage for some type of bioweapons?”

Verlin frowned. “I don’t know. If you get in there, maybe you can tell us.”

The man hesitated once more, and then he walked in. Verlin could see his thermal signature receding into the colder blue of the corridor. When he was just a distant red and yellow speck in Verlin’s augmented sight, the man’s voice came echoing back to them, “You have to see this!”

Verlin nodded to the rest of his team, gesturing for them to follow, and they began walking single-file down the corridor, their rifles at the ready. Verlin was the last one to enter; he heard the men ahead of him exclaiming one by one as they reached the end of the corridor. When Verlin himself reached that point, he stopped in the open doorway and gaped at what he saw. This was not some secret bioweapons storage locker. It was a carefully constructed habitat, designed to fit some creature’s native environment. The dim light, the snow and ice, and the deep blue pool of water gave clues to what kind of creature it might be, but there were too many possibilities for Verlin to hazard a guess. He watched his men fanning out through the vast chamber. One of them stubbed his toes on a block of ice and exclaimed, “Frek! It’s dark! Hasn’t anyone found the lights? Lights on!” the man tried.

“That’s not going to work, Baller,” another man said. “You think whatever animal lived in here used voice-activated systems?”

So, the overlord was keeping pets aboard his ship.
Verlin nodded slowly to himself. On the surface it seemed a curious idiosyncrasy, nothing more, but then why would Dominic feel the need to hide his pets away in an unlabeled part of the ship?

As he was considering the question, Verlin’s brain registered something strange in the corner of his eye. He turned to look and saw a welding laser lying in a puddle of water just inside the chamber. Verlin frowned down at the device and took a step forward to pick it up. It was still hot. He turned in a quick circle to determine what it might have been used for, and then he saw a molten chunk of duranium lying in the snow, cast off to the other side of the chamber. Verlin looked down the corridor to the med lab, and that was when he noticed that where the chamber used to be sealed with a door, now there was just a melted hole. Whatever had been locked up in here had escaped.

Verlin turned back to his men and called out, “Fall back!”

And that was when he heard the first gurgling scream.