Dark Space: Origin (8 page)

Activating his comms, Brondi put a call through to the bridge.

A young woman answered, “Brondi!”

Brondi could barely hear her over the whirring of the dymium core and the droning of his zephyr’s radiation alarm. “I need you to shut down the main reactor!” he said.

“We don’t have any control from up here! Have you tried the manual overrides?”

One of the Lokis began pounding on the doors, demanding to be let out.

Of course! The manual overrides!
Without bothering to reply, Brondi ran around the dymium core, searching for the manual controls. He found the control box on the opposite side of the core, and quickly fumbled with the latch to open it. The panel swung open, and Brondi couldn’t believe his eyes. The lever was sheared off at the base. A moment later he noticed the broken lever lying at his feet. “No!” he screamed, and kicked the handle across the deck. He began struggling with what was left of the lever, but it was twisted and the mechanism was jammed. Brondi strained with all of his zephyr’s augmented strength to force the damaged lever. A metallic groan came from the control box, and then the entire assembly tore free of its mounting and hit the deck with a
thunk.
Brondi stared at it incredulously.

We’re frekked,
he thought.

*  *  *

Commander Loba Caldin leaned over the captain’s table coughing on the thick clouds of acrid smoke wafting through the bridge. IMS was out, main power was out, shields were down and offline, guns likewise. They were dead in space. Only the grav gun on Caldin’s equipment belt kept her feet rooted to the deck. “How long until we have the main reactor back on line?” she asked through another cough.

“Five minutes, maybe ten . . .” the engineering officer reported, shaking his head. Caldin eyed him through the shifting veils of smoke for a moment, watching his hands fly over the controls. He looked frazzled. She turned to the gravidar officer. “Any sign of another volley from our Sythian friends?”

“No, ma’am.”

“What are they playing at?” she wondered aloud, her eyes scanning the grid.

“Maybe they want to take us alive?” Deck Officer Gorvan suggested from the gunnery station.

“Perhaps. . . .” Caldin waited to see alien transports come flying out at them, but for long minutes nothing happened. “What are they waiting for?” Then another Sythian cruiser appeared on the grid.

“Contact!” gravidar said. “It’s the
Interloper.
”

“They’re hailing us,” comms reported next.

“Didn’t they leave already?” Caldin asked.

“Apparently not,” gravidar replied. “Hoi! The Gors are bailing out of their ships!”

“You mean they’re coming to board us?” Caldin asked, trying to see what the gravidar officer was talking about. She had to set the zoom on the grid to maximum in order to see it, and then she gasped. The Gors were literally bailing out of their ships.

“They’re going EVA, ma’am,” gravidar replied.

Caldin shook her head. “What in the nethers is going on? Put the
Interloper
on screen.”

A moment later the dark, glossy deck of the
Interloper
appeared, overlaid on the main viewport. Captain Adram’s vulturine face dominated their view with his long, hooked nose and arching brows. His wispy white hair and wrinkled skin put his age around seventy, but his dark eyes were still as lively and keen as a teenager’s. He must have received longevity treatments to keep him so full of energy at that age. “Commander,” Adram said in a strong voice. “It would appear that the skull faces have agreed to surrender.”

Caldin shook her head. “How did you get them to do that?”

“Not I—your Gor did it. Tova, I believe her name is.”

Caldin smiled grimly and sighed. “Just in time. We wouldn’t have survived another volley.”

“Indeed. Fortune smiles on you, Commander. I don’t know what Tova said to her crèche mates, but they agreed to bail out if we would rescue them. You’d better get on that now. We’ll rescue your crew as soon as you’ve picked up all the Gors. I’m told there are nearly 1,000 of them.”

 Caldin’s smile faded. “Say again, Captain? How are we supposed to rescue them? We don’t even have power back yet.”

“The admiral would never allow so many Gors to board one of his ships, and even if he would, we don’t have room for them. Make your repairs and then pick up the Gors and stow them aboard the
Defiant.
When you’re done, we’ll rescue your people.”

“Can’t we all cram in together? How far is it to Ritan?”

“Eight hours. It’s not an option, Commander. The admiral is very strict about such things. Even having your one Gor aboard is pushing the limit with him. I wish I could bend the rules—really, I do. Pick them up or leave them—your choice—and then fly over here, but make it quick. We don’t know if there are more Sythian ships out there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“
Interloper
out.”

Caldin frowned and turned in a slow circle to see her bridge crew staring uncertainly at her. They were probably thinking the same thing as her. It would take them hours to recover that many Gors gone EVA, and in that time more Sythian ships could easily arrive and make the whole exercise pointless. Adram had already demonstrated his willingness to leave them to that fate, but Caldin couldn’t leave the Gors to die in space after they had surrendered. News would travel fast and the alliance would be over.

Time was of the essence.

Caldin clapped her hands. “What are you all staring at? Anyone with pilot’s training is with me. We’ve got rescue shuttles to fly. The rest of you stay where you are and coordinate our repairs! Comms—get me as many pilots as you can. I don’t care what their ratings are.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Come on, people! You know the drill, it’s just like any other emancipation mission, but this time we don’t have anyone shooting at us, so it should be a real moonwalk. Let’s get it done!”

Chapter 5

R
itan was an eternally dark and forbidding place, an exoplanet with no sun. The only light it received was the bloody red glow which came from its thousands of active volcanoes. Overhead, the distant stars were rarely even glimpsed through the thick clouds. The air was choked with ash from decimated fields of the world’s only flora—the fast-growing lumimoss, which grew up around volcanic vents and near geothermal pools. The world’s only fauna consisted of ice walkers which fed off the moss, rictans which fed off them, and giant bats which fed off both. The entire ecosystem had been created by scientists for some long-forgotten purpose, although Ritan had never been a world with very much purpose. Now, however, it was a strategic jewel. It was the closest thing to Noctune which the Gors had found outside of Sythian-occupied space, and as such, it was now the location of Overlord Dominic’s Gor Academy.

There were over 40,000 Gors already roaming the surface of the world, hunting rictans and ice walkers alike. Hoff didn’t think the fragile ecosystem could support that for very long, but the Gors were a temporary presence. Ritan was just a good place to put them where they wouldn’t be a drain on human resources while they were pushed a few thousand at a time through the academy. After that, they would go to fight alongside humans as starship crew and soldiers. The first few thousand graduates were already serving in the overlord’s fleet.

Hoff shuddered at the thought of it. In his estimation, the entire operation was a waste of time and resources. The Gors couldn’t be trusted, and even if they could, there were far more Gors on Ritan than all of humanity had ships to crew. They didn’t have the resources to field that many hungry aliens in any capacity. Hoff’s own fleet, which was certainly larger than Dominic’s, was crewed with just 75,000 men and women, and he needed at most another twenty thousand to crew his ships properly. At the moment, he had fully ten thousand stationed at Ritan to keep an eye on the Gors.

Hoff sat in the copilot’s chair of his personal corvette, the
Last Chance
, watching as it skimmed low over the icy surface of the world. The pilot flew them over dozens of fresh, steaming magma flows which glowed brightly from the bottoms of deep canyons in the ice. This was the Diaphinous River Valley, so named for the curtains of steam which rose up from the canyons whenever fresh magma flowed into them and melted the surrounding ice and snow. As Hoff watched, his pilot guided them toward a particular curtain of steam. The corvette sliced through that rising wall of vapor and came out over a wide river of glowing red magma. This was the Isharian Flow, fresh from Mt. Isharan, the nearest and crankiest of the volcanoes in the Diaphanous River Valley.

The pilot, Hoff’s chief security officer, Sergeant Thriker, dove down into the canyon and flew out low over the glowing river of magma. The bridge of the corvette was immediately bathed in a bloody red glow, and Hoff leaned forward in his chair, straining against the seat restraints to peer up at the high walls of ice rising to either side. The walls leaned ponderously out over the river. Glittering rows of icicles hung from the walls, formed by the rising steam. Unlike a real river canyon which was narrower at the base and wider at the top, magma canyons were wider at the base, and formed partially-covered tunnels in the ice.

Before they’d flown even a dozen kilometers, Hoff saw the end of the canyon appear through the swirling curtains of steam. The end was a field of black glass—obsidian which had piled up from thousands of separate magma flows. Eventually the entire canyon would be filled with obsidian and the magma would carve a new canyon somewhere else.

For now, however, that mostly-flat field of glassy black rock was the landing field for Dominic’s Gor Academy. All of five minutes later they’d set down on the unmarked landing field and Hoff was standing inside the corvette’s airlock, dressed in a suit of light combat armor and waiting for the boarding ramp to extend. He hadn’t brought any guards along, because even a whole platoon of sentinels wouldn’t be enough to protect him from the Gors if they decided to turn on him, and right now secrecy took precedence over safety. After all, he didn’t want just anyone to know what he was doing at Dominic’s academy.

There were two reasons Hoff had made Ritan his headquarters and the intra-fleet rendezvous between his Fifth Fleet Remnant and the ISSF forces in Dark Space. The first reason was because he could drop a few shatter bombs from orbit if the Gors so much as sneezed in the wrong direction, but the second reason was because Hoff wanted to study the Gors, and the academy gave him the perfect excuse.

The airlock opened with a hiss, and steam swirled in. Hoff descended the boarding ramp quickly, walking easily in Ritan’s slightly below standard gravity. He left his pilot aboard the corvette to keep the engines warm, just in case, and headed for a crevice in the ice at the end of the landing field. When he reached it, Hoff walked into the crevice, and a faint blue light led the way. The icy walls picked up and magnified the light, sparkling like crystal. The light grew brighter and brighter until Hoff came to another dead end. There he stopped and waited, gazing up at a sheer, luminous wall of ice. A moment later, that wall shimmered and Hoff heard a groan and cracking of ice around frozen mechanisms as a hidden door opened. The shimmering continued until the wall of ice faded, replaced with an open corridor. The entrance was disguised with a holofield. Hoff walked inside, and almost immediately a young petty officer in a white thermal suit stepped out of an alcove to greet him.

“Admiral!” the petty officer saluted. Based on the naked bronze chevrons of his insignia, he was ISSF. Hoff had changed all the insignias in his fleet, surrounding them with glowing white borders to make the rift between their forces more visible. Overlord Dominic and the ISSF were working with the enemy, so all of them fell under suspicion right along with the Gors.

Hoff returned the petty officer’s salute. “Take me to the sim hall.”

“Yes, sir.”

They spent the next ten minutes winding through broad, icy corridors that were only dimly lit by a string of glowing blue lamps hanging down from duranium bulkheads and reinforcing beams. Along the way they passed dozens of naked Gors, and only a handful of fleet officers. There were even fewer armed and armored sentinels walking around—Hoff spotted just two—making him feel more and more trapped the deeper he went into the facility.

Trying not to dwell on it, Hoff thought about the message he’d received from his research team. They had made a breakthrough. Rather than explain, his XO, Master Commander Lenon Donali, had said he should come down from Fortress Station and see it for himself—just in case someone was eavesdropping on their comms. Hoff was still wondering what that cryptic message had been about when he reached the broad double doors of the academy’s simulator hall. The petty officer stepped up to the doors and typed in a security code. The doors swished open and Hoff stepped out into a wide, open concourse with high ceilings and multiple doors leading off in all directions. All of the doors were labeled in glowing blue letters and numbers. The doors along the sides of the lobby were labeled “O” followed by a dash and a number, indicating the observation rooms where the instructors watched and evaluated their classes. At the back of the lobby were a series of much larger doors labeled “S” followed by a dash and a number, and those doors led to the various sim rooms. Some of those simulator rooms focused on ground combat, while others focused on starship operation. This sim hall was the primary training arena for the Gors. After studying their theory with instructors in classrooms, they came here where they could practice with the interactive holofields.

Hoff dismissed the petty officer, and then headed for room O-6, where his research team had been given exclusive access. Hoff’s program was designed to train mixed teams of human and Gor commandos for insertion into enemy-occupied worlds, but that was just the official line, and what he told to Overlord Dominic’s men. The truth was that he was studying the Gors’ telepathy and cloaking abilities. Like that, he hoped to eventually find a way to detect cloaked Gors and their ships.

As the door to O-6 swished open before him, Hoff stepped into what looked like the bridge of a generic, medium-sized starship. A gangway led from the entrance of the room to a captain’s table, while a dozen different bridge control stations lay below and to either side of that. Those control stations had been configured to monitor sensor nodes in skintight skullcaps which certain Gors wore beneath their glossy black helmets. Mixed Gor and human commando teams were the perfect excuse for Hoff to modify the Gors’ equipment, adding those caps as so-called comm suites to help them communicate with their human cohorts. The sensors in those caps took readings from the Gors’ brains and their surroundings in order to detect anomalies and brain wave patterns which could be associated with the Gors’ telepathic and cloaking abilities.

Hoff strode up to the captain’s table and gazed down on it with a pair of men in insulated white lab coats. One of them looked up and nodded to him. Hoff recognized the man in his peripheral vision. The man’s glowing red artificial eye gave him away. It was Hoff’s XO, Master Commander Lenon Donali.

As Hoff watched, the commander touched the comm piece in his ear and said, “Good work, Corporal Vossa, now pass that message on to Gor Squad Two.”

Hoff saw that the training environment was a rocky, sand-swept red landscape. There were groups of green and yellow friendly contacts on the grid, each separated by their color. The green was for human commandos and the yellow for Gors. They advanced slowly on a seething mass of red enemy contacts which were clustered at the base of a rugged red mountain. Abruptly, Hoff’s gaze was drawn away from the bird’s eye view by a holo display which flashed up in the air above the table. It showed more than a dozen colored bars, each of them labeled with letters. Some of the bars were grayed out, minimizing their importance, while others remained bright. All of their levels were constantly fluctuating. As Hoff watched, one of the bars spiked up out of nowhere and then began to diminish. It was a yellow bar, labeled with the letter “T.”

Donali caught Hoff’s eye and nodded to the display. “You see that?” he whispered.

Hoff nodded. “What does it mean?”

The commander held up a hand as if to say,
wait and see
. “Same message, Vossa, but this time to Gor Squad Three.” A moment later the yellow bar spiked again, and this time a shaded red circle appeared on the map, overlaying one of the clumps of yellow icons.

“That bar you see labeled with a T represents the level of tachyon radiation around Corporal Vossa,” Donali explained, pointing to the slowly dropping levels. “Every time he communicates with his crèche mates, we detect a micro burst of tachyons. It’s the same thing we see after a ship has jumped to superluminal space, but the radiation is obviously much weaker.” Donali smiled, and he leaned close over the holographic glow of the captain’s table, bringing his features into sharp relief. “We can
detect
when they are communicating with each other, Admiral. We can pinpoint the origin of the radiation to within a five klick radius, and we can even calculate a vector from the fan-like spread of the radiation.”

Hoff’s eyebrows elevated only slightly, but his heart raced and his brain buzzed with the possibilities for such a technology. “What about when they’re cloaked? Or . . . are they already cloaked?”

“Unfortunately not. Somehow their cloaking shields hide even T radiation from our scanners.”

“Are we sure that the Gors actually
can
communicate with each other while they’re cloaked?”

Donali nodded. “Carefully timed and coordinated missions have confirmed that, but we remain unable to detect communications between cloaked Gors.”