Dark Space: Origin (55 page)

 
DARK SPACE CONTINUES IN
SPRING 2014
WITH

TO GET
DARK SPACE IV
FREE WHEN IT COMES OUT

Post an Honest Review of
Dark Space III: Origin
on Amazon
, and then Send me the Contents of Your Review by
Signing up Here.

http://files.JasperTscott.com/ds4.htm

 (Remember, your feedback is important to me and to helping other readers find the books they like!)

READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEAK OF

Chapter 1

M
aster Commander Lenon Donali dropped out of SLS for the tenth time. Fuel was running low from so many stops. He hadn’t travelled more than twelve light years away from Dark Space, but entering and leaving SLS were the most fuel-expensive parts of space flight, and he’d already done that twenty times over the past two days.

Donali checked the grid, just as he had each of the other nine times he’d dropped out of SLS. This time he wasn’t expecting to see anything on the grid, and he wasn’t surprised. Apart from the spreading wake of radiation from his corvette, there was no detectable trace of tachyon radiation. Donali waited a minute longer, watching the grid unblinkingly, but sensors were clear; there was nothing.

His mind turned to the alien implant which he’d left in the corvette’s med bay to be analyzed by the ship’s computers. Whatever it was, it had finished transmitting long ago, and now it couldn’t be bothered to tell the Sythians where it was. The last time that mysterious alien device had transmitted anything at all had been at the entrance of Dark Space. Donali decided that it must have run out of power. It was either that, or the implant they’d found in Kaon’s brain hadn’t actually been the source of the radiation they’d seen.

Except that didn’t make sense either. The admiral was right. If there were a stowaway aboard any of their ships, then they would know about it. Displacement sensors had been installed at every door and airlock of every ship in the admiral’s fleet. Those sensors would detect and highlight disruptions in the air flow which were consistent with a humanoid-sized object moving through the ship. They would cross-correlate that data with holocorders and see whether or not the source of the disruption was a human, or a cloaked alien. If there were a stowaway, he would have had to be hiding in plain sight.

Donali shook his head. It was time to finish studying the implant and then jettison it out the nearest airlock. He had a rendezvous with the admiral coming up in just six days, and that was precious little time to study the alien device. He unbuckled his seat restraints and pushed out of the pilot’s chair.

When he arrived in the med bay, he was gratified to find the alien implant still sitting right where he’d left it, inside the holoimager. He’d been half expecting it to have walked off by itself. Donali keyed the machine for the results of its analysis, and a moment later, a holo flickered up above the imager. Donali studied it.

The inside of the implant was organized into a crystal lattice structure, and the outside hadn’t responded to any probe of any kind . . . except for . . . the electrical conduction test. When the device had been exposed to low level electrical signals, it had begun to respond with the same. That made sense, since it would have to interact with the Sythians’ brains somehow. Donali stared at the screen, wondering what purpose the implant had served.

If the Sythians had known Kaon was going to be captured, or if they had
allowed
him to be captured, then the device could be a tracker of some kind, but if that were so, then why wasn’t it transmitting now? The fact that it responded to electrical stimulation seemed to indicate that it still had power.

It’s a pity I don’t have someone to implant this in . . .
he thought. It was much larger than the average human implant, and would require surgery to insert—not that he had a test subject for that, anyway.

Unless. . . .

Donali’s eyes turned to the stasis room adjoining the med bay. Abruptly he turned and walked toward it. He waved his hand over the door controls, and the door slid away with a
swish
. The lights came on automatically for him. This was Donali’s personal transport, and it knew him well.

He walked to the back of the room to the pair of empty stasis tubes there. The room held twelve stasis tubes in all, one for each of the corvette’s standard crew. When Donali reached the pair of stasis tubes, he stepped up to the control panel of the leftmost one and keyed in a code which only he knew. He heard a
clu-clunk
of duranium bolts sliding away and reached out with both hands to grasp the sides of the heavy stasis tube. It pulled away from the wall easily enough, rolling on wheels that it shouldn’t have had. Behind that, lay another stasis tube, the transpiranium cover glowing blue and active. Donali saw a stranger staring back at him from the other side of the transpiranium. That stranger was his escape plan. With someone like Admiral Heston, one could never be too careful. Hoff had been betrayed so many times that he would betray his friends and family preemptively just to keep it from happening again, and that meant Donali needed to keep a few secrets of his own—just in case Hoff should ever decide to preemptively betray his own XO.

Already fitted in the clone’s wrist were all the credentials Donali would need to get away and make a new life for himself without the admiral ever being the wiser. Being a senior member of the
Tauron’s
medical staff had its advantages. Any bodies which passed through its morgue were his to examine if he chose. He’d stolen the identichips from more than a few of them and subsequently erased the record of their deaths. Like that, he could pretend to be the dead officer and mysteriously appear in Hoff’s enclave or even Dark Space to make a new life for himself. So far Donali hadn’t needed that backup plan, but it gave him a unique opportunity now.

He walked into the dark crawlspace and keyed the control panel to release the clone. The cover of the stasis tube opened with a hiss and the clone opened its eyes for the first time. It saw him and began to cry pitifully. It fell into Donali’s arms, unable to even stand up on its own. Donali backed out of the crawlspace, half dragging and half carrying his clone. He tried to ignore the clone’s wailing cries. It clung to him like a baby to its mother.

Clones spent their entire lives in an induced sleep, growing to maturity at an accelerated rate until they reached the right age, and then they were frozen like that until they were needed. All a clone ever had a chance to experience was a cloning tank and the endless dreaming of accelerated aging or the near perfect metabolic suspension of stasis. They could last in stasis for a thousand years and only age ten. What they dreamt about while they were in there was a mystery, but the most likely answer was—nothing at all. They had never experienced anything, so how could their brains imagine something? They never learned to walk, talk, eat, or do anything else that a regular adult took for granted. They were fully-grow newborns until the implants in their brains received the flood of information which they would use, along with a billion little nanites, to sculpt their brains into the mirror image of their creators’.

Clones were never woken like this. Donali tried to ignore the pinprick of guilt which he felt over that and over what he was about to do. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It’s okay. Daddy needs your help.” Donali set the clone down on the cold deck and its cries intensified. The man curled into a fetal ball, while Donali fumbled with his grav gun. He gravved the clone off the deck and carried him back into the med bay.

An hour later, Donali had his subject strapped down on the examination table, still crying, but more softly now. The clone’s eyes flicked from side to side, darting and wide. Donali put him out of his misery a moment later with a sleep-inducing anesthetic.

Now the operation could begin. It took just over an hour to open the clone’s skull and delicately tuck the implant inside his brain. Donali hoped he’d remembered the right location for it, although a Sythian’s brain was only roughly analogous to a human’s. He also hoped that it wouldn’t cause his patient any seizures when he woke up. Another hour passed while he cleaned up his surgical instruments and waited for the clone to wake up.

Suddenly, Donali heard an alien warbling and he spun around to look. His patient was awake. He hurried back to the clone’s side, his heart pounding, his eyes wide and filled with wonder. The clone had been a blank slate, dumb and mute, and now he was speaking in some facsimile of Sythian.

“Hello, Kaon,” Donali tried, unable to contain his growing excitement.

Kaon turned to look at him, and his eyes narrowed. He warbled something else, but Donali wasn’t wearing a translator. Then the alien noticed that he was strapped down, and he raised his chin to his chest and saw that he was
human
. Kaon hissed, and turned back to Donali with a hateful glare. “Where am I? What have you done to me?” he demanded, now speaking in Imperial Versal.

Donali blinked and his red artificial eye winked in tandem. “You can speak our language?” He shook his head incredulously, still trying to catch up with everything. This confirmed Hoff’s suspicions. Humans and Sythians had met before, and they were both doing the
same
thing—cloning themselves to live forever.

“Answer my questions, human,” Kaon demanded.

“You’re on board my corvette, and I put your implant in a human body to see how it would react. . . .” Donali shook his head. “I never imagined
this
.”

Kaon hissed again. “So I am your experiment? You will pay for this, human.”

Donali raised one eyebrow. “I don’t see how.”

Kaon closed his eyes and Donali watched his lips move. He heard whispers coming out, but they were alien warbles, not human speech. “What are you doing?” he asked, frowning.

Kaon turned to him with a smile. “You will sssee.”

Donali cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. A moment later, the ship shuddered, and Kaon’s smile broadened.

“No,” Donali said.

“Yess,” Kaon whispered.

Donali ran back to the bridge. He arrived, out of breath and panting, just a few seconds later, but he was too late. The entire forward viewport was filled with the shining hull of a Sythian warship. It was bigger than any ship he’d ever seen, and it wasn’t firing on him—it was drawing him toward it with some kind of grav gun.

“
How?!
” Donali demanded as he sat down at the controls and powered up the drives. He’d made
ten
jumps! They couldn’t have followed him through all of that.

Then he noticed that the grid was painted with the yellow vector of a tachyon trace. That radiation trace was just over an hour old, meaning Kaon’s implant must have called for help almost the instant it had been inserted in the clone’s brain. For the Sythians to be here now, they had to have been very close when they’d received Kaon’s transmission.

Donali pushed the throttle up past the stops into overdrive, trying to escape the grav gun which had seized his ship . . . but nothing happened. The ship wouldn’t turn, and his drives just pushed him faster toward the alien cruiser. He shut down the drives with a scowl and considered his options.

There weren’t any. He could armor up and go down fighting, or he could let the Sythians capture him. What kind of choices were those? Donali settled for the dubious third option of holding Kaon ransom in the med bay.

*  *  *