Dark Space: The Invisible War (38 page)
They held their breath, and then Tova’s gleaming black helmet turned to them. “I cannot. They are silent.”
“What do you mean they are silent?”
“Their voices too far for me to hear.”
“So we’re not close enough yet.”
“Perhaps.”
Gina nodded and she and Alara got up to stretch their legs while they waited for the reactor to cool. They spent the time pacing around the small bridge, periodically checking on the core temperature while Tova sat still and silent at the gravidar station. Half an hour later the temperature had fallen enough for them to risk another jump. Alara sat down with a sigh, and when the stars dissolved into star lines and streaks of light once more, she had to swallow a scream. This had gone on too long. “How far away are we?”
“Three hours,” Delayn answered.
“Let’s just finish the trip. Tova can try to contact her people again when we arrive—or not—I don’t care. I need to get aboard Obsidian Station and out of this ship soon or I’m going to go skriffy.”
“Sure,” Gina said.
Alara tried to calm her racing heart enough to get back to sleep. Eventually, with the timer running down from two hours, she managed to do just that. She dreamed of a faceless army of black-armored soldiers marching across a dark field of equally black glass. Their glowing red eyes turned to her as one, and then they began shooting deadly purple stars at her. As the missiles swarmed toward her, the aliens began to chant in a deep, computerized voice, “Ten, nine, eight, seven—”
Alara woke up suddenly, realizing that what she was hearing was the countdown to real space. “We made it?”
The timer reached one, and they watched the star lines return to pinpoints of light. Alara’s gaze dipped to the star map, searching for the station, but all she could see was a clump of asteroids marked in gray icons on the grid.
Gina punched her star map. “Frek you!” she screamed.
“Where is it?” Alara asked, tears springing to her eyes. She shook her head, unable, or unwilling, to understand what she was looking at. “What is this?” She pointed to the gray icons on the star map.
Gina turned to her, a solemn look on her face. Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Neither of them could. After coming all this way, exhausting all their fuel and taking all of the hopes of the
Defiant’s
crew with them, they’d finally made it to Obsidian Station.
What was left of it.
The gray contacts on the grid weren’t asteroids, they were drifting chunks of debris. Gina dialed up the throttle to get a closer look, and as they drew near, they saw the gray bracket pairs resolve into dark, jagged pieces of the station. The larger pieces were riddled with holes.
“They’re all dead,” Alara whispered.
“Yeah, and so are we. We have 6% of our fuel left,” Delayn said.
Alara shook her head and wiped her tears with the backs of her hands. “We came all this way for nothing!”
“Well, we’re here now, and there’s no going back, so we’d better see if there’s anything we can salvage from the wreckage,” Gina said.
“Like what?”
Gina met Alara’s gaze as Tova turned—the red eyes of her helmet glowing ominously as she gazed up at them from the gravidar station. “Like a chance of survival,” Gina replied.
— THE YEAR 0 AE—
T
he shell fighter set down on the surface of the exoplanet not far from an active volcano with a river of glowing magma running down the side. Destra let out a long breath and scowled at the inhospitable landscape. She’d set down on a dark field of ice, which glittered like black glass. Between the fiery magma flows and the ice fields, the world was bound to be either too hot or too cold, but never anywhere in between.
Destra shook her head and abandoned the cockpit to go check on her patient. By now he should have been waking up, and if not, she’d have to wake him. They both needed to eat something. Destra felt her stomach growl painfully at just the thought of food, and she stumbled along the darkened corridors of the fighter to find the officer she’d rescued.
She ended up bumping straight into him in the dark and both of them fell over. Destra winced at the pain which shot up through her spine, while the man cried out and began panting heavily from the much greater pain of his injuries.
Destra sighed and searched for him in the dark. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“I . . . I don’t know,” he wheezed. “Where am I?”
She found his hand in the dark and she squeezed it in an attempt to reassure him. “You should have stayed on the gurney,” she said.
“Who are you?”
“I saved your life. Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
“I’m Destra,” she said. “Destra Ortane.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m . . .” he panted once more, obviously struggling to catch his breath. “Hoff,” he said. “Admiral Hoff Heston.”
“Admiral?” Destra blinked and she recoiled from his hand as though it were a snake.
Hoff chuckled, but it came out as a wheeze. “Yes, not that it matters. An admiral needs a fleet to be an admiral, does he not?”
Destra frowned. “I . . . I suppose so.”
“Where are we?” Hoff asked with his next available breath.
“I don’t know. Some barren rock in the middle of nowhere. We’re out of fuel. I stole a Sythian fighter and escaped Roka to come here, but we didn’t get far.” Now it was Destra’s turn to laugh. “It looks like we’d have been better off on Roka with the Sythians.”
“Hmmm,” Hoff grunted. “Well, let’s see, shall we? Does this fighter have a cockpit?”
“Yes, but it’s almost as dark outside as it is in here.”
“Lovely. Help me up, would you?”
Destra found the man’s hand once more and hauled him to his feet. She helped him along the corridor, letting him lean heavily on her as they walked to the cockpit. As they emerged in the transparent dome, the admiral let out an appreciative whistle, his head turning every which way to study their surroundings. “Well, you’re right about one thing,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“We’d have been better off on Roka. I believe you’ve landed us on Ritan. I can’t think of a less hospitable place to crash land.”
“You know where we are?”
“Yes, but don’t get too excited. It’s habitable, but only just, and only if you have a nice bio dome to live in. The temperatures are consistently twenty below, which is balmy considering the planet’s distance from the nearest sun. The ice fields are riddled with rictan burrows, and the skies are filled with giant, carnivorous bats which feed on the rictans and the ice walkers which roam the surface looking for edible moss growing up near the geothermal vents.”
“So the air is breathable, then?”
“You might choke on sulphurous fumes, but more or less it is breathable, yes.”
Destra sighed. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
Hoff shot her a skeptical look. “You might not still be saying that after you’ve been outside.” He nodded to the viewports as another spurt of magma shot high into the sky from the volcano they’d landed beside. “If there’s an uninhabitable class of habitable planets, then Ritan’s it, and lucky you, you’ve found it! The only thing which would make Ritan worse would be if the Sythians have already discovered it. They’d love this place. Cold, dark, filled with deadly creatures to make good sport for their hunts. . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. “Perfect for the bug-eyed kakards.”
Destra turned to look out at the dark, malevolent vista of Ritan. “How would we know if they were here?”
Hoff turned to her with a smile. “Well, that’s just it—you wouldn’t. We never did see them coming. It was The Invisible War.”
“And we lost,” Destra said, shaking her head.
“No,” Hoff wheezed. He turned to her with a mad sparkle in his eyes, just barely visible in the dim light. “The war is only over when we’re all dead. That’s what they were after,” he said, nodding as his gaze slowly drifted away from hers. They won’t have won, and we won’t have lost until they’ve killed every last one of us, and I have every intention of out-living them. I’ll do it,” he said, nodding once, defiantly. “Even if I have to put myself in stasis for a thousand years.”
“Strong words for an injured man stranded on Ritan.”
“Injuries heal. And we can make Ritan work for us until a rescue comes.”
“A rescue?”
“My fleet will be looking for me. I got cut off from them during the evacuation and had to eject from my corvette, but when I don’t arrive, they’ll come looking.”
Destra snorted. She didn’t voice her opinion on the likelihood of a rescue out here, on a barren rock off the space lanes. Lightning flashed on the horizon, briefly illuminating the icy surface of the world, and Destra thought she saw a dark silhouette fly by overhead. Her thoughts turned to the predators Hoff had spoken of—the rictans and the bats, and she grimaced, thankful at least that they had the Sythian fighter for shelter. But sooner or later they’d probably have to venture out. Even if only to find food. Her mind cast back to Digger’s pet rictans and she wondered absently what they’d taste like, and if it would come to that.
It probably will,
she thought.
It was going to be a long wait for a rescue.
As if voicing her thoughts, Hoff turned to her and said, “We should take stock of our supplies. We’re going to need weapons, armor, and masks to filter out the soot and ash. I hope this fighter of yours came well-equipped.”
Destra frowned, her eyes still on the distant horizon as it flashed with lightning once more. “So do I, Hoff.”
III
: Origin
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