Dark Space: Origin (36 page)

Hoff turned away from the viewports to look over his crew. There were a dozen crew stations on the bridge of the
Tauron
, thirteen counting the captain’s table where he and Commander Lenon Donali oversaw the running of the old battleship from a bird’s eye perspective.

“Gravidar, is the Dark Space gate active?” Hoff asked as it appeared, glowing like a bright blue eye through the murky gray nebular clouds.

“Yes, sir; it appears to be. Do you think they left the door open on purpose?”

“If they did, then it’s mined. Nav, plot a parallel course. Make sure it’s still a safe distance from the nearest event horizon. We don’t want to get sucked into a black hole.”

“Affirmative.”

“Engineering, raise shields to maximum. If we hit a stray mine or two, we need to be sure we live through the experience.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is it people—the last leg of our journey.” Heads bobbed around the bridge, and Hoff paced up to the captain’s table to find Donali frowning down at the grid, his expression grave, his real eye wide and startled. “What’s wrong?” Then Hoff saw what his XO was looking at and his jaw dropped open.

Hoff spun around, his face livid. Behind him, steadily advancing out from their ship was a glittering yellow wave which indicated another unexplained tachyon burst. “Comms! Put me through to the med bay immediately! And get a squad of sentinels down there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Betrayal is lurking around every corner, it would seem,” Hoff muttered as his comm trilled. A moment later the chief medical officer answered, but Hoff didn’t give him a chance to speak. “Where are the Gors?”

“In stasis, sir . . .”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Lie sir?”

“One moment.” Hoff muted the channel and pointed to his security officer, Sergeant Thriker. “Get me eyes on that deck. I want to
see
the Gors in their stasis tubes.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hoff unmuted the channel. “You were saying, Deck Officer?”

“I was saying they haven’t been taken out of stasis since they were put there, sir.”

A moment later Sergeant Thriker reported he’d isolated the correct holocorder. Hoff gestured for him to display it on the main viewport. A moment later the viewport shimmered and a holo of Tova and Roan appeared. They stood upright in matching stasis tubes, their skull-like faces clearly visible through the blue-tinted transpiranium.

“That’s impossible,” Hoff whispered. The Gors weren’t conscious, so how were they sending telepathic messages?
Do they communicate in their sleep?
What other possible explanation could there be?

“Sorry, sir? What’s impossible?” the medical chief asked.

“I’ll get back to you in a moment,” Hoff replied and ended the comm call.

“Perhaps we have a stowaway?” Donali asked.

“If we do, then why haven’t our displacement sensors alerted us? Moreover, how has no one noticed? If we have a stowaway, he can’t be cloaked. You said we can’t detect tachyon radiation from a cloaked source.”

“There is one other possibility. . . .” Donali whispered. “What about that device we found? The alien implant?”

Hoff’s eyes flew wide. “We may have made a terrible mistake, Commander—it wasn’t the Gors who gave us away.”

“It was Kaon,” Donali finished.

And with that, both men raced down the gangway to the entrance of the bridge.

“Sir?” the comm officer said. “The sentinels have arrived at the med bay. What are your orders?”

“Tell them it was a false alarm! Nav—stay your course, but don’t jump to SLS until you hear me give the word.”

Sergeant Thriker stood up from his security control station near the entrance of the bridge, and he snapped to attention as they raced by, as if expecting new orders, but Hoff and Donali waved the doors open and passed straight through without offering further explanation to anyone.

All Hoff could think about as they ran was that if the Gors really had been telling the truth, then he’d just declared war on the only friends humanity had. By now Ritan must have been evacuated and all the Gors on the surface were dead.

 That wasn’t even the worst of the bad news. They’d already arrived at the entrance of Dark Space, and the implant they’d found in Kaon’s brain was broadcasting their location at near-instantaneous speeds to any Sythian fleet which might be close enough to receive them. Dark Space was about to be cracked wide open, and it was all Hoff’s fault. His suspicion of the Gors had blinded him to the real threat, and now, a new exodus was about to begin.

*  *  *

The silverleaf hedges shone bright in the midday sun, their leaves gleaming like the alloy for which they were named. Atton followed his mother through the maze, racing through an endless series of left and right turns. He carried a heavy rifle in his arms. It was a cutting beam, designed to cut through duranium rather than flesh and bone—although it could do either one just as easily.

Finally, they reached the end of the maze. Spots danced before Atton’s eyes and his lungs heaved, burning for lack of air. He followed his mother through the holofield which concealed Hoff’s secret lift tube. Once they’d walked through, into the dim gray corridor beyond, Atton stopped and leaned heavily on the wall to catch his breath.

“Atton!” Destra hissed. “Hurry up!”

He nodded and forced himself to carry on to the end of the corridor. Once there he cycled through the settings on the side of the cutting beam. “We’re lucky that the lift is already waiting here,” he said. “That’s going to make things a lot easier.” Atton picked a spot on the doors and pulled the trigger. A bright red beam shot out from the barrel and heated the burnished duranium face of the lift tube doors to a glowing orange. He waited a second for the point of impact to become molten, and then he began tracing a slow line around the inside of the doors. Molten duranium ran in rivulets, and acrid tendrils of smoke began to waft to their noses. Barely ten seconds later he’d finished tracing a glowing line all the way around the door frame. Atton stepped up to the doors and kicked them in the middle of the outline he’d drawn. Two separate pieces bent inward at the seam. He kicked the doors once more and those pieces fell into the lift tube with a hollow-sounding bang. He turned to his mother with a grin. “Ready?”

“Let’s go before I change my mind,” she replied.

Atton ducked through the hole he’d cut, taking the cutting beam with him, just in case. As Destra climbed in after him, he turned to study the control panel. “Here’s hoping there’s no security on the inside,” he said, as he stabbed one of the only two available decks—deck 24. Suddenly the lift dropped away and they saw plain gray duranium go racing past the still-glowing hole in the inner doors.

When the lift arrived, what was left of the doors slid open with a soft metallic screech. A blast of frigid air swirled into the lift and Atton shivered. He stepped out into the vast, airy darkness, his eyes wide and staring as they tried to pierce the gloom. His heart pounded, machinery hummed and hissed, and Atton’s imagination filled the shadows with terrors. His finger lay ready on the trigger of the cutting beam.

“Lights?” he tried, and the room was suddenly lit. It was lined on both sides with dozens of stasis tubes, while a catwalk arced out to their right, crossing into a vast hollow sphere of blinking blue lights. To the far left lay what looked like a small med center.

“What is this place?” he wondered aloud.

Behind him, Destra was oddly quiet.

“Mom?” he turned to look for her and found her standing just behind him, her lips slightly parted, her eyes wide and distant, as if her thoughts were suddenly someplace else, or as if she had been here before.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded slowly.

“Come on,” he said. “Those stasis tubes are lit up. I want to see who’s in them.”

Destra turned to him with a vacant expression and shook her head. “You go,” she said. “I can’t look.”

Atton crept toward the nearest stasis tube and peered inside. The face staring back at him looked familiar, but he couldn’t tell from where. He shook his head. “Who is this . . . ?”

Destra appeared beside him a moment later, looking pale and hugging herself against the cold. “That’s Master Commander Lenon Donali.”

Atton’s eyes lit with recognition. He’d met the admiral’s XO on various occasions while acting as the supreme overlord. “Hoff put his executive officer in stasis?”

“No,” Destra said.

“Then I don’t understand.” Atton shook his head.

“Keep looking.”

Atton moved on down the line of stasis tubes and stopped suddenly at the next one. “It’s Hoff!” He shot Destra a horrified look. “What is this? The admiral and the XO are hiding in stasis?”

“Look in the other ones, Atton.”

Wordlessly, Atton continued down the line of stasis tubes. As soon as he looked into the next one, he understood, but he had to see the rest to be sure. He walked past all twelve stasis tubes on that side, with ever-mounting confusion.

“They’re all the same,” he said, stopping at the last stasis tube in line, this one dark and empty. “They’re clones of the admiral and his XO, but they’re more than that. They’re exact replicas, aged to the day, with all their distinguishing marks and features intact,” he said. “Why?”

“To cheat death,” a deep, male voice answered, and then Hoff stepped out of the lift tube, and right behind him was Master Commander Donali. The XO’s red artificial eye glowed ominously in the dark, making him look like a Gor.

“What is this?” Atton demanded. “This is what you’ve been hiding? A cloning lab? This is a joke, Hoff.”

“If it is, I’m afraid I don’t share your sense of humor.” Turning to Destra he said, “What are you doing here, Des? I told you it wasn’t safe for you to know more. Why did you have to disobey me?”

“You told me the man I met on Ritan was a clone,” she said, her voice trembling.

Hoff inclined his head. “That was true, but you never asked if I were also a clone.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Longer than anyone can remember.”

Atton’s jaw dropped, and Hoff gave a slow, unsettling smile.

Chapter 23

“Y
ou’ve been cloning yourself
as long as anyone can remember?
What
are
you?” Destra asked, backing away.

Hoff gave a small, sad smile and shook his head. “Now you understand why I didn’t want to tell you.”

“Tell me what? That you’re some kind of biological bot? What are these clones for, Hoff?”

“Spares, in case I should die. What do you think happened when I got stranded on Roka IV during the Exodus? My lifelink implant detected I was mortally wounded and unlikely to live, so it downloaded my consciousness to the next clone in line, waiting aboard my flagship in orbit. The fact that you later found and rescued me as you say you did is something I’ll never be able to remember, just like I can’t remember our time together on Ritan.”

Atton turned to his mother. “You
knew
about this?”

She shook her head. “He died on Ritan, Atton, and later came back to rescue me himself. I knew from that he had cloned himself, but I didn’t know that he was still doing it, or that he’s been doing it
forever
. How old
are
you, Hoff?”

Hoff shrugged. “The human brain is self-limiting in what it can remember and store. Eventually even important things are forgotten. That’s why I have my data center here—” Hoff gestured to the catwalk leading out into the vast chamber of blinking blue lights which Atton had seen upon leaving the lift tube. “In there I have stored every memory, thought, and experience from more than ten thousand iterations, and now Commander Donali’s own memories are in there as well.

Atton blinked rapidly as he did a quick mental calculation. “Ten thousand iterations . . . That would make your earliest memories more than a million years old, Hoff.”

“More or less.”

“The Imperium is—
was
—only twenty-seven thousand years old. A million years of life and knowledge! You’re practically immortal! Omniscient.”

“I’m not a god. Not the way people think.” Hoff started through the stasis room, closing the gap between them. “And I’m not just practically immortal, Atton—I
am
an Immortal, and traces of cloning in my DNA go back more than
ten
million years.”

Atton shook his head and traded a quick glance with his mother as both of them backed up against the row of stasis tubes to get away from Hoff. “Stay back,” Atton said, hefting the cutting beam.

The admiral laughed. “Relax. What do you think I’m going to do to you—kill you? Why, because you discovered my secret? Destra, at least you should know better than that. Commander Donali was the one who discovered you were pregnant with my daughter after we rescued you from Ritan. If I didn’t kill him then, why would I kill either of you now? I’m not a monster.”

Destra’s lips trembled and her blue eyes glistened brightly in the dim light. “You could trust
him
with the truth, but you couldn’t trust me.”

Hoff frowned. “Back then I didn’t even know who you were, Destra, but I knew Donali. I knew him well enough to know that if I told him the truth he would embrace it, just as I know you well enough to know that you will fight it. But I’m going to give you and Atton both the same choice I gave Donali back then: join us, or forget what you’ve seen here.”

Atton shook his head. “How are we supposed to forget?”

“This is not the first time we’ve been discovered, Atton. Why did you think holoskins and slave chips were invented? To hide from nosy mortals like you. We invented those, just as we invented almost everything else you take for granted today.”

“
We?
There are more like you?”

“Trillions more, an entire civilization hidden beyond the known galaxy, untouched and undiscovered by the Sythians.”

“The lost worlds . . .” Destra whispered.

Atton began to laugh. “You don’t seriously expect me to believe that trillions of humans have deceived themselves into thinking that they can live forever by transferring their memories to clones. That doesn’t make you live forever, Hoff. You said it yourself—two different versions of you were alive at the same time—one on Roka and one on this ship. Either one of them could have been you, but more likely, neither of them was, and the real Hoff was lost millions of years ago when your mind was downloaded to the very first clone.”

“You’re assuming that what we are is more than mere matter, bits and bytes stored in a biological computer.”

“How else can you explain the dual existence?”

“It’s a paradox, to be sure, but who’s to say that a parallel version of you isn’t already living in another dimension higher or lower than ours? There are plenty of theories which suggest parallel realities. Creating a clone of yourself with a copy of the same conscious experience is just an extension of that principle. But regardless of whether you believe it works, and regardless of whether or not you choose to believe in some immaterial soul which we can neither see, measure, nor transfer from one body to another, the fact remains that there is a lot for humanity to gain from such technology. It’s what got us this far. Imagine a galaxy where every time you die, you continue on living right where you left off, but you get to go back to living as a younger, stronger version of yourself. You accumulate more and more knowledge, becoming better and better at what you do, generation after generation. That is infinite progress, Atton. The greatest minds ever born never need to die.”

“But no one is actually born anymore in a system like that, are they? If you all live forever, then you can’t afford to keep having children. You would eventually run out of room, no matter how many habitable worlds there are in the galaxy.”

“There are population controls for that. Breeding is strictly regulated, and we’re cloned to be sterile at birth.”

“If you’re sterile from birth, then explain Atta,” Destra said. Her eyes were wide and terrified, darting around the room, looking for an escape.

Hoff smiled at his wife. “I haven’t lived among my people for a long time, Destra. Why do you think no one has seen the lost worlds or knows where they are? I haven’t seen them either, Des. I’m an outcast. They’ve been sending aid to us, and helping us to establish the enclave, but that’s as close as they’ll ever come to working with mortals. The betrayal runs too deep.”

Atton’s brow furrowed. “Betrayal?”

“Not everyone wanted to live forever. Some grew bored of it, while others simply rejected the system on moral and spiritual grounds, using arguments such as you’ve already mentioned. Still more of our ancestors rejected immortality because they couldn’t stand the tyranny of the breeding licenses which were handed out once every other century and came at an extremely high price. In a society where only the rich can fulfill their desire to procreate, you can begin to see how the war began—and war for an immortal is the most terrifying thing imaginable, because it is the only thing which can kill us. Kill an immortal’s body and he’ll rise again. Kill his body
and
destroy his data center and you’ve killed him forever. It was all too easy for terrorists to sabotage those data centers, which is why so much of our history has been lost—including Origin.”

“Origin is a myth,” Atton said.

“It’s real, and so was the great war which, as legend has it, drove us from the smoldering ruins of our world. For most of us,
that
war, and
that
exodus are the earliest things we can remember.

“Faced with an enemy which was almost too happy to lay down their lives to destroy us, we ran. Fully a third of us decided to remain immortal, and we ran as far as we could from those who sought to bring an end to our way of life. The third of humanity which stayed behind had their coveted children and died natural deaths.”

“And what about the other third?” Atton asked.

Hoff shrugged. “Casualties of the War of Origin.”

“Admiral . . .” A new voice joined the discussion, and Atton saw Commander Donali walk up beside Hoff. “We must hurry.”

“Yes,” Hoff agreed. “We can discuss this more later. Destra, I’m sorry for the deception, but hopefully now you understand why I felt the need to keep this a secret. I was telling the truth when I said that I’ve been betrayed by women in the past. You’re not the first to discover my secret, and not everyone took it as well as you. I have more than a few deaths to show for being overly trusting in the past.” Hoff eyed Atton’s cutting beam pointedly. “Speaking of which, I’d rather not add another death to the list. You can stop pointing that at me now, son. If you fire it in here, my security system will flood this chamber with toxic gas. A few hours later, after you’re both dead and the gas has been pumped out, I’ll walk out of one of these stasis tubes, alive and well, as if nothing happened.”

Atton grimaced, but he allowed the barrel of his cutting beam to drift away from Hoff’s chest.

The admiral continued on to the med center adjoining the stasis room. He crossed the threshold between the stasis room and med center, passing into the brighter light of the med center. Atton hurried to catch up, and he heard Destra’s soft footsteps echoing almost reluctantly after his.

The admiral stopped at a hover gurney and picked up a specimen jar with something small and shiny inside. Turning to Donali he handed over the jar. “Take it and go. Use a long-range scout ship. Lead them away. Stop a few times so they can pick up the trail. Learn what you can about the device along the way, and then jettison it into space. If all goes well, I’ll meet you back here at the entrance of Dark Space in a week’s time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hopefully the interference in this nebula is enough to prevent the signal from reaching them right now.”

“I doubt the nebula will inhibit superluminal comms if it doesn’t stop us from jumping to SLS,” Donali replied.

“Time will tell.”

Atton stopped beside them, his eyes flicking from Hoff to Donali and back again. “You hope the nebula prevents what signal from reaching who?” he asked.

Hoff clapped his XO on the back and squeezed his shoulder. “You’d better go. Good luck.”

“Yes, sir. . . .” Donali’s real eye found Atton and stayed there for an uncomfortably long moment. “You’re sure you don’t want me to stay here with you a while longer, sir?”

“No, don’t worry. They’re not a danger to me.”

“If you say so, sir.” Donali said. “All the same, however—” The commander reached out with lightning quick hands and snatched the heavy cutting beam from Atton’s arms. “—I’m keeping this.”

Hoff chuckled. “Well, there’s no point leaving anything to chance, is there?”

Commander Donali grunted as he hefted the beam weapon and strode off.

Atton shook his head and looked around the med center. He found his mother standing to one side of the room, staring at another table, this one a medical examiner’s table. It was covered with a white sheet that glowed a faint blue to indicate it was also covered by a containment field. A suspiciously human outline could be seen beneath the sheet. Atton walked over to her. “Who’s under here?” Atton asked. “Don’t tell me you slipped in the vaccucleanser and had to use one of your clones already.”