04 Dark Space

by Jasper T. Scott

  A crackle of static caught Atton’s attention, followed by: “ . . . new orders. We are to . . .” He turned up the volume and heard, “. . . the Emissary at all costs. Repeat, protect the Emissary at all costs.”

  Atton frowned and shook his head. That was him. And that was why the Intrepid was sticking around to fight. The captain was risking everything to give him a chance to get to Avilon. He was about to key his comms to tell mission control that he didn’t need an escort, when another series of sharp tones sounded from the cockpit speakers, drawing his attention back to the glowing blue grid on the main holo display. A few dozen blips had appeared between him and his SLS entry point. Shell Fighter analogs.

  “Frek me,” Atton whispered. “I guess I do need an escort.” He targeted the nearest enemy fighter and checked his time to target. The nav calculated eight minutes until he reached that fighter, ten until he should reach his SLS entry waypoint. Atton adjusted his trajectory by a few degrees to keep the Sythians guessing, and then he set his throttle to full reverse. He had to start slowing down now if he were going to reach the SLS-safe entry speed limit in time for his jump. If he wasn’t flying at 999 m/s or less when he entered SLS, his ship would be torn apart by the gravitational forces.

  In the next instant his comm buzzed with a direct message from Guardian One.

  “Iceman, what the frek? My sensors show you slowing down.”

  “I have a jump plotted at ten klicks out, Tuner,” Atton said, using Gina’s call sign.

  “That’s lovely. I don’t suppose you noticed the red cloud of krak headed your way?”

  “I see it.”

  “So you thought you’d slow to a crawl and make it easier for them to tag you?”

  “The jump is our priority. Once I’m away, you can bug out, too. Until then, we’re all stuck. Follow your orders and I’ll follow mine.”

  Gina clicked her comm to acknowledge that, and Atton went back to focusing on the task at hand. She was right. It made no sense for him to slow down, but keeping his speed up would only delay his jump, and time was critical. If he delayed the Intrepid unnecessarily, the cruiser would be obliterated by those enemy battleships. She couldn’t jump away until he did. So somehow he had to stick it out, dodging Sythian missiles and lasers until he could jump to SLS. No problem, Atton thought, eyeing the approaching wall of enemy fighters, now only six klicks away.

  He thumbed over to Hailfire missiles and began lining up the nearest Shell in his targeting reticle. Suddenly a loud roar thundered through his SISS (sound in space simulator). He turned to look out the side of his canopy just in time to see a pair of Nova Fighters go rocketing past him to greet the enemy fighter wave. That pair was followed by another, and then another, and then nine more wing pairs, until both squadrons of Novas were flying out ahead of him, their triple thruster banks lighting up the space ahead of him like a string of blue festive lights.

  As Atton watched, missiles began streaking out from those Novas, followed by stuttering red lines of lasers. Explosions flashed in the distance as Shell Fighters flew apart, and then Sythian Pirakla missiles streaked out from the enemy fighters—dozens of spinning purple stars tracking toward the approaching line of Novas. The Novas held their course for just a second before they broke formation, jinking and juking in a dozen different directions to get away from the enemy missiles.

  A pair of purple stars collided with Nova Fighters, and space lit up with blinding starbursts of light as their dymium reactors went critical.

  Now Atton was alone, flying at the enemy fighter wave. Streams of bright purple pulse lasers flickered out toward him, scoring a few hits on his shields and provoking sharp hissing noises from the SISS.

  Atton passed his targeting reticle over the nearest enemy fighter, waiting until the beeping tones of an acquiring target lock became a solid tone and the reticle flickered red. He pulled the trigger twice in quick succession and two Hailfire missiles roared out on hot orange contrails. Then the Sythians replied with six warheads of their own. Missile lock alarms screamed in Atton’s ears. He used his command control implant to turn down the volume with a thought. As he watched the approaching missiles, he noted that these missiles didn’t look like spinning purple stars, they looked like glowing blue orbs. Some new weapons tech? He wondered. He hoped the strategy for dealing with them was still the same. Holding the flight yoke steady, he hovered his feet over the rudder pedals, waiting until the last minute to juke away. The missiles reached 500 meters, and Atton depressed the right rudder pedal fully and rolled to the left. Three of the six missiles sailed by overhead, only narrowly missing him.

  The next three slammed into the topside of his ship. The Emissary shuddered with the impacts. Deafening booms sounded across the SISS, followed by a warning from his ship’s computer: “Shields depleted.”

  Frek! Atton thought.

  Then the threat detection system screamed a warning and out of nowhere a pair of glowing blue orbs appeared on his six. Atton tried to evade but the controls felt sluggish, as if the maneuvering jets and thrust control nozzles had jammed. This time all of the missiles stayed on target. They arced straight in toward him. . . .

  Atton winced and then came a deafening roar from the SISS. Abruptly that sound ceased as all the lights and displays in the cockpit flickered out, leaving him in utter darkness. He tried moving the stick, but nothing happened. He tried flicking the ignition switch to re-initiate the transport’s reactor, but still nothing.

  The Emissary was derelict. He should have been dead. His shields had been depleted and then they’d hit him with yet another wave of missiles, but instead of his ship being atomized, it had simply lost power. Atton frowned and shook his head. It must have something to do with the new weapons they’d fired at him. Somehow those missiles had disabled his ship without causing severe damage. But why? And why had no one ever seen that technology before?

  Then, suddenly, he had the answer. The Sythians were trying to capture him, not kill him. No one had ever seen such technology from the Sythians before because they’d never been interested in capturing humans—until now. Until they began making slaves of us for their fleets. Atton shuddered at the thought. They’d come all this way just to suffer the same fate as the refugees in the Enclave.

  No one was going to get to Avilon now.

  * * *

  Why isn’t he moving? Caldin wondered, her heart beating frenetically in her chest. The Emissary had stopped cold, which of course was relative, because the ship’s momentum remained the same. The difference was, the ship wasn’t maneuvering, nor was it accelerating or decelerating, and its icon had gone dark on the grid.

  “Gravidar! Get me a pulse scan on the Emissary. I want to know what’s wrong with it.”

  “Already ahead of you, ma’am. She’s drifting without power.”

  “Not even emergency backups?”

  “Not even that.”

  “The frek . . . ?” Caldin wondered aloud.

  “We registered a strange spike from her reactor just before she shut down, ma’am. If I had to guess it must have had something to do with those new weapons we saw.”

  New tech was the last thing anyone wanted to see from the Sythians. “Okay, so they disabled it. Why?”

  Master Commander Donali shrugged and offered a suggestion. “Perhaps because the Sythians are now using human slaves to crew their ships?”

  A few gasps rose from the crew, and Caldin turned to her XO with a frown. “That’s not common knowledge, Donali, and I’d appreciate if you kept it to yourself.”

  “Yes, ma’am. What I meant to say is that they must be trying to capture more of us to turn into crew for their fleets.”

  “Again, classified information, but . . .” Caldin considered that for a moment; then her eyes narrowed and she shook her head. “No, that’s not it. They’ve killed three Nova pilots so far,” she said, pointing to the grid where the Intrepid’s Nova squadrons were embroiled in a dogfight with at least twice as many Shell Fighters.<
br />
  “Then I don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” Caldin said. “They want the Emissary alive and to the netherworld with the rest of us. Whatever the reason for that, we can’t let them have what they want. Helm, set course for that transport; bring us alongside. Comms—tell the hangar bay operators to stand by for a grav lock on her.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they chorused.

  “What’s our ETA to the Emissary?”

  “Two minutes, ma’am.”

  “Good. Start spooling for a jump.”

  “Coordinates?”

  “Dead ahead, two light years. That should give us a good lead on any pursuit.”

  “Dead ahead, ma’am? We don’t know what’s out there . . .”

  “No, we don’t, but we can’t stay here, and we don’t have time to turn around and head for known space, so we stay the course and hope we don’t run into anything.”

  “Yes, ma’am . . .”

  “Gravidar! How close are those battleships?”

  “We’ve got three angling for a flank attack, port and starboard. The nearest will be in firing range in three and a half minutes.”

  “And the other two?”

  “Approximately five and six minutes, ma’am.”

  Caldin grimaced. By her estimation they would have to survive a barrage from at least one Sythian battleship for two full minutes—and that was just the time it would take for their SLS drives to spool. “Comms, have our Novas get back on board, ASAP. Renegades first, then Guardians. They have until the Emissary is on board. If they don’t make it in that time, we can’t wait.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Her XO sent her a worried glance from the captain’s table. “Those battleships are much stronger than us. We should leave the Emissary and get out now while we still can.”

  Caldin’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “And let the Sythians have what they want?”

  He shrugged. “It seems the better option.”

  “How much did the admiral tell you about Commander Ortane’s mission?”

  “Enough to know it is important.”

  “Critical to our survival as a species, is what he told me,” Caldin replied. “Knowing that, how can we forfeit that which is critical to our survival in order to survive? The logic runs back on itself.”

  “Ma’am . . .”

  “I’ve made my decision, Commander. Let’s hope that if they’re so desperate to have the Emissary intact, then they won’t risk firing on us with live weapons when we’re right alongside her.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Chapter 13

  Cold and still—trapped in the dark—Atton’s transport drifted on without power, direction or purpose. The infinite sprawl of stars shone like a million tiny flecks of quartz glinting in the sun against a blacktop as dark as death. Atton tried to make sense of the patterns woven by those pinpricks of light, just as a more distant part of his brain tried to make sense of what was happening.

  Sythians had been waiting for them at the reversion point, meaning that either they were extraordinarily lucky, or they’d known the Intrepid was coming. The latter possibility made the most sense given the vastness of space, but even if there was some type of Sythian agent in their midst, when would he or she have had the chance to send a message to the Sythians? And how?

  Human comms were limited to the speed of light unless there was a jump gate with an open wormhole nearby. The Gors they had on board couldn’t have sent the message telepathically, since even they couldn’t send a message when a ship was travelling through SLS, and the Intrepid had been travelling through SLS for the past week.

  Except . . .

  About three hours ago the Intrepid had stopped to navigate around a pulsar. At the time, however, they had still been more than 10 light years away from their reversion point, and it was widely known that the Gors’ telepathy had a limited range of just under 10 light years. That meant their spy wasn’t a Gor.

  Just then a pair of Novas raced by Atton’s cockpit, their triple thrusters burning up the void with bright blue tongues of fire as they chased a quartet of Shell Fighters. The Novas spat blinding streams of red dymium lasers at one of the Shells, scoring a few dozen hits in quick succession. Then a sudden flash of light ripped the enemy fighter apart.

  Atton’s hands flexed into fists on the transport’s lifeless flight yoke. He was itching to join his squadron in the battle, but powerless to do so. The stars winked at him, dragging slowly by his cockpit with maddening serenity. Frustrated, he flicked the transport’s ignition switch back and forth a few times, just in case the Emissary still had a spark of life in her.

  Nothing.

  “Frek it!” Atton released the flight yoke and pounded it with a fist.

  Unable to do anything useful, he returned to wondering who was responsible for this mess. If they had a traitor on board, and that traitor wasn’t a Gor, then who was it?

  Sythians also possessed faster than light, near-instantaneous telepathy, and for whatever reason, theirs was not limited to the 10-light-year radius of the Gors’. That meant their traitor could be a Sythian, but the Intrepid was fitted with displacement sensors that would have detected a cloaked Sythian onboard by now, so he would have to be hiding in plain sight.

  A human agent . . . Atton realized, his green eyes widening to twice their normal aperture.

  Suddenly, something jerked the Emissary violently to starboard. The seat restraints dug into his shoulders and chest, making it hard for him to breathe. Atton gritted his teeth, waiting for the sensation to pass, but if anything the inertial pressure increased. With all the Emissary’s systems offline, even the inertial management system and artificial gravity wasn’t functioning.

  What the frek is going on . . . ? Atton wondered. Had he been hit by something? No, he decided. If he’d been hit by something, the inertial tug would have eased after the initial impact. The fact that it hadn’t meant something was accelerating the Emissary with a constant force. His mind supplied a likely reason for that: a grav gun must have seized his ship. The Sythians had come to claim their prize and turn him into another mindless soldier for their fleet.

  But there was something in that explanation which didn’t make sense. Why disable him and not the squadrons of Novas that had rallied out? Atton had watched two Novas blown to pieces with live warheads before the enemy had fired so much as a shot against him. Why pick on his transport?

  The obvious answer was that they knew something about his mission, but that was impossible. No one knew about his mission besides the admiral.

  And Donali.

  Atton’s eyes narrowed to slits. He remembered the commander’s insistence that he take Atton’s place and his eyes flew wide. “You motherfrekker . . .” He gritted out against the g-force. No wonder Donali had wanted to take over his mission. Well, you got what you wanted, he thought. Soon the Sythians would be able to interrogate him for the location of Avilon.

  With a monumental effort, Atton managed to turn his head against the naked g-force of the grav beam that had seized his ship. He stared out the starboard side of the cockpit . . .

  And hope surged in his chest. Rather than see a Sythian warship or fighter pulling him along behind it, he saw the rugged lines of the Intrepid and the welcoming blue glow of her hangar bay growing steadily closer as she guided him in.

  Atton would have grinned in triumph were it not for the Intrepid’s troubled state. Shell Fighters swarmed her from all sides, firing Pirakla missiles. Those bright purple warheads were slamming into the top and port sides of the ship in a continuous stream, peppering her hull with explosions. The Intrepid fired back with red dymium pulse lasers, ripper cannons, and Hailfire missiles, nailing Shells by the dozen and lighting space on fire with their explosions, but it wasn’t good enough. Dozens more were streaming in to take their place, and the few Novas he could pick out of the chaos were stretched mighty thin.

  At this rate, the Intrepid would be torn apart be
fore they could even get the Emissary on board, and the Sythians would simply pluck him out of the wreckage.

  Atton gritted his teeth and silently cursed Donali for his treachery. If only his comms were working, he could at least warn the Intrepid about the traitor in their midst, but with all his systems mysteriously disabled he couldn’t even initiate a self-destruct sequence to keep the Sythians from getting to him.

  Atton decided that if it came to it, he’d shoot himself before they captured him. Better that than to doom the last safe refuge humanity had to yet another Sythian invasion.

  * * *

  “Augment our port shield arrays!” Caldin screamed over the hiss and roar of Sythian missiles exploding against their hull. “And turn down the volume on the SISS!”

  Immediately the roar of explosions faded into the background.

  “Ma’am, we’re venting atmosphere on decks fourteen, six, and eight!” engineering reported.

  “Seal them off!”

  “We still have crew in those areas.”

  “They know the drill. We’ll get them out later, but if they’re not already suited up, there’s nothing we can do for them.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Helm, how long until our drives are spooled?”

  “Three more minutes, ma’am.”

  Caldin shook her head. “Another one and a half minutes until those battleships are in range.” She turned to watch on the captain’s table as the Emissary sped toward them. The pair of numbers beside the Emissary’s gravidar icon put her range at just over three klicks and her time to reach the Intrepid at 20 seconds, but that time was wrong. The hangar bay controllers would have to start slowing the Emissary’s approach if they expected to get Commander Ortane back alive.

  “Comms, please remind our grav gun operators that the Emissary has no power, which means her IMS is not functioning. They’ll have to keep acceleration and deceleration vectors below 10 g’s if we want to get our pilot back in one piece.”