Dark Space: The Invisible War (31 page)

“Negative, lead.”

And then Atton saw hailfire missiles streaking out from the interceptors one after another in a continuous stream. Suddenly he understood, and he felt ashamed of his suspicions. Adari wasn’t leaving the rest of the Guardians to fend for themselves, he and his wingmate were providing the necessary distraction for them to escape.
 
Even as he watched, the first hailfires began breaking into smaller warheads and tracking the onrushing shells. Multiple explosions flashed in the distance, and Atton nodded grimly.
You’re a better man than I thought, Adari.
Atton and the rest of the Guardians reached the leading edge of the gate and pulled a tight turn to head toward it. The Sythian battleship, now sitting off to one side, erupted with missiles and lasers, and so did the pursuing shell fighters. Atton’s cockpit speakers screamed with missile lock alarms, and lasers flashed all around him, intermittently lighting his cockpit in a pale purple light. He began a spiraling arc toward the gate and pushed his thrusters to the max. Sythian missiles streaked past him to all sides, and another nova winked off the grid. Atton checked the designation of that fighter before its contact icon fully faded. It was Guardian Six, Gina’s wingmate—another trainee. He couldn’t even remember the pilot’s name.

“Frek it!” Atton said. The gate loomed large over his fighter, the swirling blue pool of the wormhole now tantalizingly close.

Enemy lasers began to find him despite his evasive maneuvering, and Ethan heard his AI call out, “Aft shields critical!”

A quick look at the gravidar showed Ithicus and his wingman now running for the gate, too. The
beep-beep-beeping
of incoming enemy missiles sped up to a nearly solid tone, and then Atton’s nova hit the gate and the wormhole enveloped him with a flash of light. Space dissolved into star lines and Atton sat back with wide eyes and shaking hands. He had to pry his hand off the flight stick; his knuckles cracked painfully as he did so. Then he just sat there, blinking out at the swirling brightness of SLS, flexing his hand to bring feeling back into it, and thinking to himself,
that was close.

He shook himself out of his daze and used his right holo display to check the battle logs and see who they’d lost. The dead nova pilots flashed up on his screen one after the other—Guardian Twelve, Guardian Eight, Guardian Seven, Guardian Ten, Guardian Eleven, and Guardian Six. They were down by six pilots out of the original fourteen—after crossing just two systems! Atton stared at those pilots’ numbers and realized that some of them were just that—numbers. He could barely remember their names, let alone what they looked like, but one face came to him clearly—
Stix
. Atton could still recall the young woman’s sweet nature and her almost girlish features. He remembered her stealing the pancakes at breakfast and running off with them with all the other pilots racing after her. . . .

She was gone now. He felt like he’d failed her, and that thought brought with it a flash of rage against himself and the Sythians.
If the Gors are on our side, why are they still fighting us?
he wondered. But he knew the answer. Unless the Imperium came in force to rescue the Gors, they would do as their Sythian masters commanded, or else
they
would be the ones slaughtered. Tova couldn’t tell her crèche mates to stand down without condemning them to die, and even if she tried, they likely wouldn’t have listened to her.

Atton shook his head. He thought back to the
Defiant’s
darkened thrusters and the flames shooting from them.

They were never going to make it the rest of the way.

*  *  *

 
“Damage report!” Ethan called out as he picked himself off the deck amidst the swirling clouds of acrid gray smoke pouring onto the bridge.

“Engines are down! Reactor is at 52% integrity and power levels are dropping,” Delayn replied. “We bled some fuel from a gash in the starboard engine, but I shut it down before we lost much.”

The bridge grew deadly quiet. That revelation hit hard. They were short on fuel as it was.

“How much fuel did we lose?” Ethan demanded.

“Enough to miss, but not enough to stop us from getting where we’re going.”

“What about SLS?” Ethan asked.

“Holding steady for now, but with power levels dropping the way they are . . . we might get yanked back to real space at any minute. We need to patch that reactor and fast.”

“All right!” Ethan clapped his hands for attention. “You heard the man! Let’s go! Don’t forget your radiation suits.” Ethan was already running down the gangway with Commander Caldin close on his heels.

“If we don’t fix that reactor leak, we’re frekked,” Caldin said.

“If we don’t fix a lot of things, we’re frekked,” Ethan shot back.

Chapter 21

A
lec Brondi ran down the corridor at top speed, the servos and motors in his zephyr assault mech
whirring
as he ran. Flanking him to the fore and rear were two more pairs of zephyrs—his bodyguards.

Besides the fact that they’d recently run into serious opposition from Sythians on their way through the Kedaris System, losing nearly half their compliment of novas and taking heavy damage to their port side, he still had to deal with a mysterious enemy attacking them from within. Verlin and his men had just been the first in a very long series of casualties. Now they were up to 73 dead and counting. Men reported seeing their fellows snatched out of thin air, gutted by an invisible foe. Brondi refused to walk down the corridors of his own ship anymore without the protective armor of a zephyr. He couldn’t get everywhere like that, but most corridors and rail cars had been designed with high enough ceilings and broad enough doors to accommodate the two-meter-high light assault mechs.

Yet even like that Brondi felt hunted. His eyes darted every which way inside his helmet; his breath came reverberating raggedly to his ears; his heart pounded; and his back prickled with sweat that itched maddeningly beneath the armor.

They say
it
can kill a man just by breathing on him.
Brondi wasn’t sure about that, but whatever it was, it had killed nearly a hundred of his men in less than two days. That made it enemy number one.

Brondi had discovered the hard way in the Kedaris System that the ISSF hadn’t been lying about the Sythian threat, and he’d decided to forget about the extra fuel cost and fly straight to the rendezvous with Admiral Hoff Heston’s forces at Ritan. His engineer had told him that left a small risk of being obliterated by undetected interstellar obstacles, but Brondi figured those odds had to be lower than the odds that they’d be killed by Sythians if they tried to cross through all seven systems between them and Ritan.

Travelling off the lanes, ETA was another day and a half, and at the current rate of death among his crew, Brondi guessed he would lose another hundred men by then.
If I’m not careful,
he thought,
one of them could be me.

It seemed fairly obvious what they were up against. Invisible, deadly, murderous—it fit the description of a Sythian perfectly. Somehow they had been infiltrated by one or more of the enemy, and now, rooting them out would be nearly impossible. Brondi had already ordered traps to be laid, but the kakards always saw them coming.

They’re always one step ahead,
Brondi thought, panting inside his helmet. He shouldn’t have had to cross his own ship in a suit of armor, running in abject fear from one side to the other, but lately, he’d even begun sleeping in the zephyr. Who knew if a Sythian had crept into his quarters with him and would kill him in his sleep?

Stop it,
he chided himself.
Don’t be paranoid.

But he was. Brondi grimaced. Somehow he had to keep this mysterious intruder from interfering with his plans. There was a reason he was crossing Sythian Space to find and meet with Admiral Hoff and the remnants of the 5
^th
Fleet. It wasn’t so they could sit down and have tea together.

Brondi and his men reached their destination and Brondi waved to the point team. “Open the doors.”

One man stepped forward and keyed in a security code in lieu of waving his wrist over the scanner. Their identichips would be unreadable through their armor, and Brondi’s slicers were still figuring out how to add their identities to the security permissions list.

The doors swished open and they stomped into the med center aboard the
Valiant
. Their eyes were drawn to the shifting light sculpture in the center of the room, but after only a moment of succumbing to the sculpture’s mesmerizing effects, Brondi looked away and continued through the waiting area to a long, white hallway which was barely wide enough to fit their mechs.

Brondi led the way to the stasis room and keyed open the door. Once inside, he scanned stasis tubes lining the walls until he found the nearest one whose control panel was lit up to indicate a live occupant. There were plenty to choose from. Brondi stalked up to the stasis tube and his men followed, their footsteps thudding after him.

“All right, Doctor, collect your blood sample,” he said, turning to one of the other zephyrs.

The people in the stasis tubes were the sole remaining survivors from the
Valiant’s
original crew. No doubt they’d entered stasis in a last ditch attempt to escape the virus which had spread throughout the ship, but that wouldn’t fix them no matter what treatment they’d selected from the stasis controls. The virus was too virulent to be stopped by conventional means, and going into stasis would merely delay the inevitable.

Brondi turned to watch the entrance of the room. He half expected to see the doors open mysteriously, and then to hear his men screaming as they were overcome by an invisible foe.

But no,
he chided himself. That only happened in his nightmares. Not even a Sythian could take down a man in a zephyr—not bare-handed anyway; their armor was too strong.

The doctor stepped up to the stasis tube and prepared a syringe to take a blood sample. This was Brondi’s master plan. With that man’s blood sample, he would add the remnants of the 5
^th
fleet to the
Valiant
, and he would become the most powerful force in the galaxy—
well, besides the Sythians,
Brondi thought. But if they stuck to themselves and he stayed in Dark Space then everyone would be happy. At least until he could find a way to kill the skull faces once and for all.

When the doctor was done taking his sample, he tucked it into a storage compartment in his suit and turned to Brondi. “Let’s get out of here.”

Brondi nodded, and then they were off again, racing back down the corridors they’d taken to get to the med center. They were all nervous to be exploring the “unsafe” areas of the ship. They’d managed to at least cordon off certain places where they knew their killer—or
killers—
wouldn’t be hiding. They’d used a combination of round-the-clock guards stationed at every bulkhead and lift tube along the perimeter of the safe zones, as well as anti-personnel proximity mines seeding the corridors leading to those areas. The mines had to be disabled from a distance with the right codes. As a final layer of security they had installed stealth detectors above every door—laser beams which if broken unexpectedly would set off an alarm. Like that they’d managed to reduce their casualties, but out here, there were none of those security measures.

The corridor seemed to stretch out endlessly ahead of them. Now that they’d gathered the sample, Brondi was in an even greater hurry to get back. He had a bad feeling crawling in the pit of his stomach, like they were being watched.

They reached the first rail tunnel on the way back, and one of Brondi’s men stepped forward to punch the
summon car
button. They waited a moment for the rail car to arrive, all of them looking around nervously.

“I’m surprised it hasn’t tried anything. We’re on his turf,” one man said.

“We’re wearing armor, stupid. You think it wants to get riddled with 20 mm ripper rounds while it tries to crack us open?”

“Shhh . . .” the doctor said, looking around suddenly. “Did you hear that?”

They stopped to listen, but all they heard was the quiet
whoosh
of air cyclers and the subtle hum of the SLS drives rumbling through the deck. “What did you hear?” Brondi asked.

“Footsteps . . .” he said, moving away from the rail tunnel to investigate.

Brondi humored him for a few seconds, and then said, “Hoi, get back here. You’re hearing things, Doc.”

“I don’t know . . . I feel like we’re forgetting something important.”

“Like what?”

They heard the distant rumble of an approaching rail car, and suddenly the doctor turned to them with his hands outstretched as if to stop them. “Wait! Get away from the tunnel!”

“What?” Brondi asked. “Why?”

“We’re outside the safe zone! There’s no one else out here! The car should have been waiting for us!” The doctor turned and ran away at top speed, his footsteps booming down the corridor.

Brondi’s eyes flew wide, and then the car arrived with a screech of brakes, and the doors swished open. They all turned as one toward the open doors, their forearm-mounted ripper cannons raised to track whatever might be lurking within, but the car was empty.

Empty, except for a large plastiform crate sitting on the floor.

“Frek!” one man said, backing away. “He’s hiding in the crate!” Brondi recognized the warning labels a second too late to stop that man from firing off a burst of ripper fire. The plastiform crate turned to swissel cheese. Brondi held his breath for a heart-stopping second, but nothing happened; then he raced up behind the man who’d fired that volley and knocked him over with a vicious swipe of his zephyr’s arm. “You dumb frek! That’s a crate full of proximity mines! Fall back!” Brondi was already backing away.

Just then the damaged wall of the crate collapsed, sending dozens of mines rolling out toward them. Brondi turned and ran.

The first mine reached the man he’d knocked over, and went off with a deafening boom. The subsequent chain reaction set off all the mines, and they were picked up and thrown down the corridor by a superheated rush of air. The doctor was the only one far enough from the shockwave to remain standing. When Brondi’s mech finally stopped rolling, he groaned and tested his power-assisted limbs. They still moved, but now with labored grinding sounds. He pushed himself to his feet and turned to study the damage.

The rail car was obliterated, the corridor a molten ruin of blackened duranium and scattered rubble—and as for the man who’d set off the explosion, all Brondi could identify amidst the rubble was a boot and a gauntlet. The other two were lying face down on the deck and not moving. They’d been closer to the blast.

 
Brondi gritted his teeth and roared in frustration. Now
he
fired off a random burst of ripper fire, pelting the debris-strewn corridor. “Frek you! Show yourself!” He fired another burst and then stood there panting with fury while he waited for a reply, but none came. He turned to the doctor and shook his head. “What now?”

The doctor gazed solemnly back at him. “We find another way back.”

*  *  *