“Report!” she called out. “What are we looking at?”
“Sythians, Ma’am . . . an entire fleet of them!” gravidar reported.
“Aren’t we cloaked? How are they shooting us?”
“I don’t know . . . we’re not radiating anything our sensors can detect, Ma’am.”
“Well they have to be able to see us to shoot at us, so we must be radiating something!” As if to emphasize her point, the deck shuddered once more. “Raise our shields and take evasive action!” Destra said.
“Yes, Ma’am!”
Destra studied the grid rising from the captain’s table, trying to make sense of the mess of red and green contact icons there. She had zero experience with command. Suddenly she understood Covani’s point about him being better equipped to lead them to safety. Despite her lack of experience, she did notice one thing that seemed odd. As she watched, a green friendly contact appeared out of nowhere, right beside the Baroness.
“Contact!” gravidar reported. “She’s friendly, venture-class! Looks like she’s shielding us from the bulk of the enemy fire!”
“They’re trying to hail us,” Comms reported.
“Well hail them back!” Destra shook her head, feeling overwhelmed and bewildered. She leaned heavily on the captain’s table, studying the friendly warship. It lay in the enemy’s line of fire, sacrificing itself to shield them from harm. Destra wondered about that. The ship’s designation flagged it as the Tempest.
She didn’t recognize the name.
Suddenly one of the crew began yelling and shouting. Those exclamations were soon echoed by others on deck, and Destra spun around, trying to find the source of the fuss. Everyone was staring at the entrance of the bridge, where the air was shimmering as though something were de-cloaking there. A sound like rushing water roared through the air, and then came a strong gust of wind. Destra was staggered by it, but even more staggered by what she saw next.
A group of four officers appeared out of nowhere—three men and one woman, all of them wearing ISSF uniforms, and their eyes were glowing.
Destra blinked a few times quickly. Recovering from her shock, she started toward them with a scowl. “Who are you and what are you doing on my ship?” As she drew near, she noticed that one of the men was wearing two gold stars on his uniform, marking him as an admiral.
Suddenly all four of them raised their weapons and took up a defensive stance, their backs to each other’s, their eyes and gun barrels warily tracking through the room.
The admiral spoke, “Tell those skull faces we can see them skulking around, and we will open fire if they don’t stand down and reveal themselves immediately!”
Destra called out. “Torv! They’re friends!”
The air began shimmering again, but there was no accompanying noise or blast of wind. Gors appeared all around the bridge. Torv was standing right beside her, thick arms crossed over his chest and slitted yellow eyes scanning the quartet of newcomers.
“Who are you and how did you get on board my ship?” Destra demanded as the newcomers relaxed their defensive stance.
The admiral breezed by her without a word of explanation, hurrying toward the captain’s table.
Destra caught up to him. “Hoi, I asked you a question!” she said.
“I’m taking command of this ship,” he said.
“Not without the Matriarch’s permission,” Torv hissed.
The admiral turned to regard him. “What did he say?”
“He said you’d better ask nicely first,” Destra explained.
The deck shuddered again, and engineering reported, “Hull breach on deck twelve! We’re not going to take much more of this!”
“Seal it up!” the admiral ordered. Turning to her, he pointed out the forward viewport and said, “We don’t have time for pleasantries or explanations. I know what I’m doing. Let me save you first, and then I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
She hesitated just a split second longer before she nodded and gestured to the captain’s table. “Be my guest.”
The admiral turned and walked up to the captain’s table, frowning as he stepped over the bloody smears Covani had left to mark his passing. “What happened here?”
“We don’t have time for explanations, remember?”
“Very well. Helm, plot a blind jump out of here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We have a fleet of Gors with us. They can’t follow a blind jump,” Destra objected.
The deck shuddered once more.
“Shields at 74%!” engineering reported.
“And you can’t survive much more of this. Comms—contact the Tempest, inform them of our plans and tell them to make their own jump out.”
“You intend to leave my people behind,” Torv said, stepping up on the other side of the table.
Destra translated.
“Multiple contacts inbound!” the gravidar operator interrupted. “It’s the Gors!”
Destra watched the unidentified admiral and Torv glaring at one another across the captain’s table.
“Your people communicate telepathically—directly from one mind to another—don’t they?” the admiral asked.
Hiss.
“Yes,” Destra translated.
“Then you can tell them where we end up. If we don’t leave now, they’ll be on their own anyway, because we’ll be dead.”
“Very well. Do not jump further than the distance that light travels in ten orbits or I cannot contact them.”
The admiral looked to her once more, and Destra translated for him.
At that, the Admiral called out, “You heard the skull face! Make that blind jump a short one.”
Destra winced. “Don’t call them that,” she whispered.
The admiral shot her a bewildered look, but said nothing. She could read his expression easily enough. His eyes said it all. The Gors would always be skull faces to him.
“The Tempest just jumped away, sir! We’re exposed again!”
The deck began shuddering in earnest. Destra’s gaze fell upon the grid once more and she saw flashing streaks of purple light streaming out from the enemy fighters and slamming into their aft section.
“Aft shields at 67%!”
“Helm! Where’s that jump I ordered?”
“Our SLS drives are still spooling, sir!”
“What? What have you all been doing out here? You should have had your drives spooled long ago!”
“We were otherwise occupied,” Destra put in.
The admiral shot her a glance.
“Incoming missiles!”
“Take evasive action!” the admiral ordered. “Why aren’t our gunners firing back?”
“They’re in stasis,” Destra explained.
“Stasis? What are they doing in stasis?”
“Brace for impact!” gravidar called out.
They all grabbed the captain’s table, and Destra fiddled with the emergency grav field generator on her belt, just in case artificial gravity failed. The lights dimmed and a loud roar of simulated explosions filled the air.
“Damage report!”
“Aft shields holding at 43%! Minor hull breach on four! Coolant leak in the reactor room. We’re down to 75% power.”
“Helm! We need to jump!”
“One more second!”
“Here comes the next wave!”
Destra scanned the grid and she saw a sparkling wall of Sythian missiles rushing toward them from one of the larger Sythian warships. The first missile reached them with a titanic boom! Ten more followed, one after another.
Boom!
Boom!
BOOM . . . !
“Helm!” the admiral bellowed to be heard over the roaring of the explosions. “Where’s that jump?”
“Aft shields at two percent!”
“Jumping!”
Destra looked up and saw the flashing gray clouds of the nebula turn to a blurry gray streak as they jumped to SLS.
“Stay
in SLS for half an hour. Project our exit coordinates and start plotting a second jump from there. We don’t want the Sythians tracking us from our jump trajectory. We’ll have to confuse them with multiple jumps.” Destra saw the Admiral’s brow grow lined as he turned to look at Torv. “The Sythians could follow your people to us. Their jump drives are the same speed as yours. Ours are twice as fast, so we can lose them. You can’t. We can’t afford to rendezvous with your people.”
Torv hissed loudly and looked away from the admiral. His slitted yellow eyes bored into Destra’s instead. “You lie to me! You say we follow, but you leave us to die!”
Destra translated that, and the admiral shook his head. “I didn’t lie. I simply didn’t have enough time to think about it in the heat of battle.”
Torv’s expression flickered and his eyes seemed to darken. Destra had a premonition of violence, and she took the admiral aside.
“Sir, we can’t abandon the Gors. They’re our only allies, and their fleet is too valuable to sacrifice.”
“What would you have me do? Better that we lose them than all of us die together.”
A loud hiss drew their attention back to Torv. He bared razor sharp teeth in a terrifying grin. “You repay our sacrifice by taking us to Noctune.”
“What did he say?”
Destra translated.
“What?” The admiral shook his head. “That’s in the Getties! Why the frek would we go there?”
For the first time Destra heard one of the other men who’d come with the admiral say something. She was shocked when she realized that he wasn’t speaking Imperial Versal.
Suddenly the questions she’d been holding back since they’d mysteriously appeared out of thin air all came flooding back. The admiral replied to his subordinate in kind, using the same language.
“Who are you?” Destra whispered, momentarily ignoring Torv’s hissing.
The admiral turned to her. “We’re in the middle of a diplomatic negotiation. Try to keep up.” He turned back to Torv. “We will take you and the other Gors on board this ship to Noctune, if that’s what you want.”
Torv went on hissing at them. As soon as he was done speaking, he looked away—from both of them this time. Now even she was unworthy of his sight. Turning to the admiral, Destra translated, “Torv says that will be good enough, but that humans have no honor and cannot be trusted. The alliance is at an end.” There’d also been a more personal note about her not being worthy of the title of Matriarch, but she chose not to translate that part.
“Fine with me,” the admiral grunted, turning away. “Engineering, how are repairs coming along?”
“They’re not. Our crew is in stasis, sir.”
“All of them? Someone had better start explaining something soon.”
“We’re critically low on supplies,” Destra said. “Stasis was a way to make them go further.”
“I see . . . and the blood stains?” he stamped the floor under his feet.
“The Gors didn’t see eye to eye with our captain. They wanted him to take them to Noctune.”
The admiral’s head came up suddenly and he fixed Torv with a deadly look. For his part, the Gor still wasn’t looking at them.
“The captain refused, and they killed him.”
Destra nodded. “I was in stasis at the time, but they tell me he killed a few of them first.”
“So where are the bodies?”
Destra shrugged. “The captain’s was here when I arrived. I asked the Gors to take him off the bridge.”
The Admiral’s gaze turned to her and she felt suspicion pouring off of him. “So you were the one calling the shots after this little mutiny of theirs?”
“They . . . wanted to put me in command, since I was willing to take them to Noctune. They called me their Matriarch. Until now.”
“I see, and who are you?”
“Councilor Heston.”
The admiral blinked at her. “Heston?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not by any chance related to Admiral Hoff Heston, are you?”
“I’m his wife.”
“His wife?” the admiral asked, surprise evident on his face.
“You knew him?” she asked, wondering at the man’s sudden interest in her.
At that, he stuck out his hand. “Admiral Bretton Hale. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ma’am.”
Destra eyed his hand a moment before taking it; they shook briefly. “A pleasure to meet you, too . . . whoever you are,” she said, releasing his hand to cross her arms over her chest and regard him with a skeptical frown. “I was under the impression that my husband was the last surviving admiral from the Imperium.”
“I fought beside him in the fifth fleet, during the exodus. Back then I was a Captain. My ship became . . . separated from the rest of the fleet during our evacuation from Roka Four.”
Destra’s eyes lit with sudden understanding. Then she recalled something she’d witnessed a moment ago, and her frown was back. “Your accent is Imperial, but you speak another language. I’ve never heard it before.”
Admiral Hale nodded. “We’re from a place called Avilon. Perhaps your husband told you about it?”
That news went through Destra like a lightning bolt. Her pulse raced; her palms began to sweat; she broke out in goosebumps all over. “Avilon? It’s real? Has anyone arrived there recently? Imperials?” The admiral began shaking his head, but Destra barreled on, “A young man, by the name of Atton Ortane. He’s a fighter pilot, a—”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know, Ma’am.”
The woman standing behind the admiral shot him an impatient look. “Sir, we don’t have time for this.”
Destra sent her a scowl. “You have children?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Then you wouldn’t understand.”
The woman’s cheeks bulged for a hasty retort, but she let that breath out with a sigh, obviously thinking better of it. The admiral turned to her, “You have command for now. Leave the crew in stasis. With all of the recent changes in command we could have another mutiny on our hands if we’re not careful.”
The woman eyed him for a moment longer before nodding reluctantly. “Yes, sir.”
Destra saw the Admiral’s eyes flick to Torv and from him to the other Gors standing around the bridge, leaning against the walls and watching them all from the shadows. He said something else to his executive officer then, but it was whispered and spoken in that foreign language of his. To that, she nodded, and she began eyeing the Gors, too.
Admiral Hale turned back to her and said, “We have a lot to talk about, Mrs Heston. Is there somewhere more private we can speak?”
Destra nodded. “Follow me.”
She led him off the bridge, down the hall to the Captain’s quarters. Once there, they locked the door behind them, and both sat down—her behind the desk in the captain’s chair, him in front of it. Destra listened for what felt like an eternity as the Admiral told her the most impossible story she’d ever heard.
He told her all about an AI god called Omnius and his resurrected empire of humanity. They were interrupted a few times as the woman the admiral had left in charge of the bridge called them on the intercom to ask for further orders.
By the time the admiral finally finished explaining everything to her, they’d dropped out of SLS not once but twice, and were now waiting for the Tempest to arrive at their rendezvous.
Admiral Hale went on to explain the difference between Nulls and resurrected Etherians, saying that Nulls were not networked to Avilon’s AI god, so he couldn’t keep an eye on them or tell them what they should and shouldn’t do. When he explained that he and the others with him were part of a Null resistance movement, something occurred to her, and she interrupted him.
“If I have a Lifelink implant like everyone else, then is Omnius watching me, too?” Destra asked.
That question seemed to take the admiral by surprise. “I suppose he can, yes . . . You make a good poi
nt. We’ll have to get you and the rest of your crew de-linked before I end up in front of a firing squad. Excuse me . . .”
Destra waited while he contacted his XO again. The two of them had a heated discussion in their language. Unable to understand what they were saying, Destra took the time to process everything that she’d learned. It seemed too good to be true. Everyone who died in the war had been resurrected on Avilon? Did that mean Hoff was still alive?
As soon as the admiral finished speaking to his XO, he rose from the desk. “We need to go.”
Destra rose with him. “Your first officer didn’t sound happy. What’s wrong?”
“Besides the fact that Omnius could be tracking us right now because we’re in the company of a bunch of martales?” He shook his head. “The Tempest is here, and we need to take your Gor allies to Noctune before they do to me what they did to your previous captain. How many do you have on board this ship?”
“A few dozen, I believe.”
“There were only seven on the bridge. Where are the others?”
“I’ve been in stasis, Admiral.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. We can’t afford to fight that many of them in close quarters. We’ll take too many casualties. The easiest will be to give them what they want.”
“I’m not sure I would call that easy. The Getties is a very long way from here.”
The Admiral regarded her with a small smile. “It’ll take about a day to make the calculations, but otherwise we’ll be able to travel there instantly.”
Destra blinked, shock running through her. “Instantly?”
“Instantly,” the admiral confirmed. “Having a super intellect guide human progress hasn’t been all bad.” The admiral’s glowing blue eyes seemed to flare suddenly brighter, and Destra shivered.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“No, it’s just a lot to get used to all at once . . . I’m having trouble believing it.”
He nodded. “I know just how you feel.”
But it wasn’t just that. Destra was busy thinking about Omnius, and the resistance movement that Admiral Hale belonged to. She wondered whether she should be on their side, or Omnius’s. From there her thoughts turned to Atton, and a stab of worry lanced through her heart.
Dark Space: Avilon Page 28