Dark Space: Origin (49 page)

But what about the world Hoff had seen and recognized from Kaon’s memories—how and when had the Sythians found the lost world of Origin? And finally, perhaps the most disturbing question of all—why was Kaon a
clone
? When Hoff thought about all of that, he felt increasingly uneasy. The answers seemed to drift around his head in lazy circles, always just out of reach.

Kaon hadn’t been captured. He’d been
sent
by the Sythians, so that he could eventually lead them here, to Dark Space—or perhaps to some other human settlement—but they hadn’t counted on Kaon revealing anything truly useful. Or maybe they didn’t care what humanity found out about them. Whatever the case, Kaon had given Hoff a glimpse into something vast and terrifying—

The past. No one knew much about what had happened before the great war, the War of Origin.
No
humans,
that is,
Hoff corrected himself.

At last, Hoff saw what looked to be a sealed set of doors up ahead. They lay at the end of a short corridor which had been sheared off when the cruiser had cracked in half. Hoff aimed for the mangled opening of that corridor and fired the braking thrusters on his booster rocket to slow down. A few seconds later he collided with the doors and bounced off. Hoff let go of the booster and activated the grav field on his belt to anchor himself to the deck. A moment later he stood up, now weighing roughly half of what he should. Hoff panned his floodlights over the doors and then the ceiling, walls, and floor. There appeared to be enough of the surrounding corridor left that he could use the portable shield he’d brought to create a secondary seal for when he sliced the doors open with his cutting beam.

Hoff reached around to unhook the shield generator from his belt, and then he affixed it to the deck as close to the doors as he could while still giving himself a few feet of space to work. He configured the generator to project a weak shield which would be good enough to hold in the ship’s atmosphere, and then he activated the generator. A fuzzy blue wall of energy materialized in front of his face.

Turning back to the sealed doors, he drew his cutting beam and aimed it at the doors. Taking a deep breath, he fired, and a brilliant red beam shot out in the darkness, dazzling his eyes before his faceplate could polarize. As he traced a molten line around the inside of the doors, he remembered that he was standing in a vacuum, and the doors would blow out on a violent gust of escaping air as soon as he separated them from their frame. Hoff turned off the beam and stepped to one side before he finished the cut. He eyed the glowing, horseshoe-shaped furrow he’d carved in the doors, but nothing happened. He wondered if he had managed to cut all the way through. Then he noticed that the doors were bulging outward with some unseen pressure. He took a long step sideways, and a moment later the doors burst open. Two jagged pieces of metal went flying past his head, and then the gust of air hit him like a tidal wave. It lifted him off his feet and sent him tumbling out through the shield along with the door fragments. The grav field emitted from his belt was enough to slow him to a rolling stop a few dozen paces from the fuzzy blue glow of the portable shield generator. With a grunt, he pushed himself to his feet and jogged up to the shields. Forcing his way through the barrier, he stood on the other side and eyed the HUD displays inside his helmet. According to his vac suit’s sensors, the area where he stood was pressurized.

Perfect.

Hoff didn’t take off his helmet, just in case, but he hurried through the hole he’d cut in the doors and rushed through the alien ship. Dazzling, lavender-colored reflections shimmered off the shiny black walls and floor wherever Hoff turned his headlamps. He turned them down low, and allowed a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. Like that, he found that he could see, but only barely. Now he walked onward, his head turning every which way, expecting to see Sythians or Gors melting out of the shadows, but so far the ship was deserted.

Hoff walked on like that for long minutes, traversing corridor after corridor before he encountered anything different. Doors lined the corridors, much as he would have expected to see on any human ship, but Hoff wasn’t interested in looking behind them. He already had a good idea about the layout of Sythian ships from the handful of captured Gor vessels he’d managed to add to his fleet. He was looking for something in particular.

At last, he found it. The corridor he presently walked down widened out into a large, circular chamber, and Hoff felt himself growing impossibly heavy as he approached. His knees shook and threatened to buckle. Gravity was working here. Hoff fumbled with the grav field generator on his belt, turning it off, and the sensation of heaviness eased somewhat. Up ahead, the circular chamber glowed with a dim light. Hoff walked inside to see exactly what he’d been expecting. Running around the edges of both the ceiling and the floor were a dozen glowing circles, yellow ones in the floor, and purple ones in the ceiling—each one marked the open end of a tube which ran to or from some part of the alien ship. Instead of lift tubes and rail cars, Sythians used a network of accelerator tubes, which functioned much like nova fighter launch tubes. Hoff was surprised to see that they were still active after the ship had been carved in two, but in a ship the size of a behemoth cruiser there had to be backup generators running from stem to stern.

Hoff started toward the nearest hole in the floor to see where it would lead. Strange, glowing hieroglyphics marked each opening, but Hoff couldn’t read them. He would have to choose a destination at random. All he had to do was step inside and he’d be whisked away to a matching hub in some other part of the ship.

Hoff sighed and gazed down on the glowing yellow rim of the tube in front of him, trying to summon his resolve. He’d used the tubes only a handful of times before, and it was always the same thing—darkness all around, racing past muted yellow rings of light, a terrifying whooshing noise, and a stomach clenching sensation of free-fall. While Sythian ships had their own artificial gravity and inertial management systems for the usual rigors of battle and space travel, they hadn’t seen fit to completely negate the g-forces inside their accelerator tubes.
Maybe the skull faces like the thrill,
Hoff thought.

Taking a deep breath, he took another step toward the tube he’d chosen. But just before he could step inside, the glowing yellow rim and hieroglyphic turned purple, just like the openings in the ceiling. Hoff frowned and tried lowering his foot below the rim, expecting to feel the tug of the accelerator tube trying to pull him in, but instead his foot bounced away, repelled by some unseen force, and a two-tone warning issued from somewhere inside the room, as if the ship were scolding him.

Strange.
Hoff moved to the next portal in line, but the same thing happened, and this time, all of them turned purple. The next thing he noticed was a loud, grinding noise
coming from the hallway behind him. Hoff turned to see bulkhead doors slowly sliding shut, dragging
sparks across the deck as they sealed him inside the hub. The doors only partially closed, grinding to a stop with a gap of a few feet left between them. They were obviously damaged, and Hoff could still get out easily if he wanted to, but he hadn’t come all this way just to run. He turned back to the accelerator tubes and waited. He had a feeling someone knew where he was and they were watching him.

Seconds later, he heard a loud
whoosh
of approaching air, and one of the glowing tubes in the ceiling began to flash. Someone was coming.

Hoff smiled grimly, waiting with a mounting feeling of mingled horror and excitement. It was surely death which came for him, but he didn’t care. It didn’t even scare him. Perhaps because he didn’t believe it was really possible for him to die anymore. He’d been to the brink so many times . . . but still he had somehow lived on, his memories chaining together in one long, uninterrupted stream. That was the illusion of immortality, he supposed. If immortals still felt the sting of death in the moment that their brains died, then the clones which lived on to take their place had no memory of it and no idea what that was like. There was no record in existence of what happened after death—if anything.

Suddenly a dark shape floated down from the flashing transporter tube in the ceiling. The shadowy figure was too small to be a Gor. Hoff felt a spark of adrenaline course through his fingertips. He activated his helmet speakers and said, “Hello, Sythian. I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

Hoff saw a flash of white teeth.

“So have I, Admiral,” a familiar voice said.

The admiral shook his head, unable to believe his ears. It couldn’t be.

Chapter 34

T
he
Interloper
skated through the blue wall of the hangar’s static shields, passing so close to the ceiling that Caldin felt like she could reach out and touch it. They were now inside the middle of three hangar bays in the port side of the mighty gladiator-class carrier. Silent and unseen, the
Interloper
hovered above the deck as hordes of Brondi’s men filed into waiting assault transports below, lifting off and jetting out into space. Caldin waited until the troops were all gone and the transports stopped launching, until the deck was all but empty and just a few ground crew were left walking around.

Caldin gave the word, and the
Interloper
settled to the deck. If they crushed someone or something under the cloaked Sythian cruiser, they didn’t notice, and Caldin didn’t care. The time for hiding was over.

“Drop our loading ramps! This is going to be easier than we thought,” Caldin said. “Brondi’s just launched all his men on those transports. Only the Immortals know what he’s up to, but it’s good news for us. Ruh-kah! Let’s go!”

An echo of that battle cry rose up from her surviving bridge crew. Delayn and Terl caught up to her as she hurried off the bridge and down a dim, glossy black corridor. Walking through the alien ship made her think of what it must be like to be a bug trapped inside a Gor’s armor.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay here, ma’am?” Delayn asked.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Well . . . you’ll be safe.”

“Being safe is highly overrated, Deck Commander.”

“Deck Commander?”

“You’re my new XO, since Captain Adram seems to have come down with an acute case of brain failure.”

“Thank you, ma’am!”

Caldin nodded. “Don’t thank me yet. We still need a ship to command before that promotion will mean anything.”

“We’ll have the
Valiant
back again soon,” Delayn said.

“I’m counting on it.”

They turned a corner in the glossy black corridor and ran straight into a waiting throng of sentinels. The cruiser had not been designed to hold over two thousand men. It had held barely two hundred Gors when it had been in Sythian hands. The sentinels had been forced to sit and stand shoulder-to-shoulder and back-to-back in the corridors while they waited to be sent into battle. Now, finally, after hours of waiting, they could do their part.

Caldin smiled as she shuffled down the winding corridors of the
Interloper.
She listened to the steady thunder of boots, the clatter of armor, the rattle of guns—it was music to her ears.

You’d better run, Brondi,
she thought.

*  *  *

“Captain Adram?” Hoff asked. “What are you doing here?”

Still smiling, the former captain shook his head. “You haven’t figured it out yet, Admiral? You’re not the only one who can cheat death.” Hoff frowned. “Wondering how
I
know about that?” Adram went on. “You might know me better by a different name—High Lord Kaon, perhaps.”

“
What?
” Hoff blinked. “How?”

“I never returned from the Getties Expedition, Admiral. I was chipped and set free.”

“Chipped . . . to think that you are Lord Kaon?”

“I
am
Lord Kaon. It’s much easier to trust oneself to carry out a mission, wouldn’t you say?”

Hoff shook his head. “How did you get here?”

“I was discovered aboard the
Interloper
and shot in the head for my trouble. I revived here, in a copy of my human body, so that I could speak to you without the need for translators.”

“Then the Sythians have been doing the same thing as us—cloning themselves to become immortal.”

Adram smiled. “You recognized our world when you saw it in my mind.
Origin
you call it, but that’s not its real name. Its real name is Sythia, and it lies in the heart of the Getties Cluster—
not
the Adventa Galaxy.”

Hoff blinked. “That’s not possible.”

“No? Why do you think the planet was lost to your kind?” Adram stopped just a few paces away, and his vulturine features came into the dim light cast by Hoff’s headlamps. The man’s hooked nose, white, wispy hair and high, arching brow seemed even more sinister than Hoff remembered. “I assume you’re here to strike some sort of deal,” Adram said.

“I want answers, Adram—Kaon—whatever your name really is. If we come from the same planet, how did we get to be whole galaxies apart?”

“Crossing from one galaxy to another takes a lot of time, even now, but back then it took centuries. In your version of history, a third of humanity rose up and attacked your way of life, destroying all the cloning facilities they could find. A third of you were killed in the fighting, while a third of you ran far away—isn’t that right? No, don’t look so surprised. You’re not the first Immortal human that we’ve come across.

“The third of you who ran came to this galaxy. Far more than a third were killed in the fighting, and far fewer than a third escaped. Humans are the Immortals who left. Sythians are the mortals who stayed. Your evolution slowed dramatically, because you cloned yourselves over and over again for millions of years, but ours progressed and we took steps to accelerate that even further, making us what we are now.” Adram sneered and pinched his human skin. “I do not know how you live in such frail bodies.”

Hoff’s mind raced to catch up, but a numb sense of unreality set in, and he wondered if he were awake or dreaming. His racing thoughts seized on one small part of what Adram had said. “
Millions
of years?” he echoed. “The War of Origin was less than thirty thousand years ago.”

“The war you remember was not the first Immortal War, and it was not the war for
Origin
. The fact that humans were no longer cloning themselves when we finally followed you here is proof that history repeats itself, and the fact that Sythians are now cloning themselves and have been for millions of years is even further proof. For lack of proper records, your legends are but vague recollections of where you came from, and your history has all blurred together without a proper sequence. When and how you left became subsumed by more recent events. How far back does recorded memory and equivalent history go, Hoff? How far back does
your
memory go? It would take data centers the size of whole cities just to store all of one person’s memories across millions of years, let alone everyone’s.”

Hoff shook his head. “If all of that is true, and if your people are the mortals who won the first war, then why would you go back to doing the very thing which you fought to stop?”

“The desire to live is very strong, Hoff. No one wants to die, and when faced with death, everyone wants a way out, even if there’s only a small chance that it will work. You know this firsthand. For a long time my people cloned themselves in secret, illegally, until once again there were more clones than not, and we were all forced to admit to our weakness—but that’s ancient history now. Since then, we’ve come to terms with it and perfected the system. Now, we can transfer exactly at or before the time of death at near-instantaneous speeds. Our bodies are engineered to be much stronger than yours, so we can live for four or five of your lifetimes before we ever need to grow a clone.”

Hoff tried desperately to work some moisture into his mouth. “What about the Gors?”

“What about them?” Adram challenged. “What about me? I’m using a human’s body. You make slaves out of people by implanting them with memories of lives that they’ve never lived. We make trained soldiers out of savage beasts so that we don’t have to fight you ourselves.”

Hoff smiled. “But you’re
Immortal
, so what’s the worst that could happen? Unless you’re afraid that you actually
do
still die.”

“Don’t condescend to me, Admiral. We were the ones who came up with those theories, remember? A lot of pseudo science and spiritual nonsense.”

Hoff smiled thinly. “You’ve come a long way from that, haven’t you?”

“And yet you are a clone in a long line of clones that cannot remember his own death.”

Hoff ignored that. “So the Gors were never on our side.”

Adram smiled slowly. “Actually they were and apparently they are still. Somehow, even after you killed all of them at Ritan, they’d
still
rather side with you than fight for us.”

Admiral Heston’s eyes narrowed. “You’re lying. If you’ve been working for the Sythians since you came back from the Getties, then why were you always on the Gors’ side? You argued for us to join the alliance. You wouldn’t do that if it would ultimately help humanity and hurt your people.”

“After all these years, do you really think that I don’t know how to manipulate you, Hoff? I was never on the Gors’ side, but if a man trusts no one, then telling him the truth is the easiest way to make him doubt it. My position and that of the other humans around you only blinded you further to the fact that the Gors really were your allies.”

Horror rose on a tide of acid from Hoff’s stomach as he realized how badly he’d been played. He felt sick. “If the Gors are programmed to fight for you, why not simply reprogram them? Why
let
them rebel?”

“We don’t know what happened to interfere with their original programming, and we have tried to reprogram them, but it doesn’t work. Perhaps the savagery of war reminds them of their savage past and triggers memories of who and what they really are. And every time they come into contact with emancipated Gors, even the most loyal slave becomes a rebel. It’s like a disease the way it spreads. We can override their ships so they’re stuck with us unless they bail out and you rescue them. We’ve begun locking their airlocks to keep them inside, but that is our problem to deal with, and slaves are easy enough to find. Humans are proving to be much more reliable slaves.”

Suddenly Hoff realized the significance of what he was looking at. He should have realized it by now, after seeing Adram—a once loyal human officer, now a converted Sythian agent.

“I’ve answered your questions, and we’re running out of time. Brondi’s men are boarding this ship as we speak, and there are not enough of us to repel them.”