by Jay Allan
“Hoi! Are you okay . . . ?” A man’s voice. “Frek! She’s out of it! You know how to pilot a hover?”
“No,” came a woman’s reply. “Do I look like I have the sols for a hover?”
“Hoi!” the man shaking her said again. Destra’s eyes rolled in her head. “That’s it! Wakey wake! She’s coming around!”
Destra’s eyes fixed on the man who—for frek’s sake!—was still shaking her. “Stop it!” she groaned.
“Sorry, girlie. Think you can drive us all outta here?”
Destra sat up and shook her head. “Give me a second. Let me out. I need some fresh air.” Destra felt stifled. She couldn’t breathe. She stumbled out of the driver’s seat, and fell to the snow-covered road on her hands and knees. She focused on her breathing, trying to calm herself. Atton was gone. He was gone, and she would never see him again!
“I think she’s having some kinda panic attack . . .” said the man who’d been shaking her. Now he was standing to one side of her.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” said the woman.
A child whimpered.
Destra looked up at the man beside her and studied his shadowy features.
“Help me up,” she said.
“Yea, sure.”
Halfway to her feet, the dark, snowy world flashed brightly, revealing the man’s face. He had short, curly black hair, wet with melted snow, a ragged cut on his left cheek, which had smeared that side of his face with blood before freezing into a thick red scab, and he had a shifty look in his small, dark eyes.
The man’s gaze snapped up to study the source of the sudden brightness. “Holy krak!” he yelled. “There she goes!”
Destra spun to see what had suddenly peeled away all the shadows, and her eyes were immediately drawn to the expanding fireball in the sky. Just then the sound of the explosion reached their ears with a thunderous boom.
“Six thousand motherfrekkers! That’s what ya get! Leavin’ us all to die! Frek you!” The man pumped his fist as he railed at the sky.
Destra turned to stare at him. He was actually happy. “We’d better go,” she said, swallowing her disgust with a frown.
“Yea, don’t want the same to happen to us,” he said, nodding. “Second that!”
Destra retook the driver’s seat, and turned to see a woman and her young child approaching. She felt a stab of recognition to see them. This was the little blond boy who’d been clinging to the fence as she’d waited for Captain Reichland to arrive—and his mother, the one who’d yelled at her.
“You!” the woman said as she drew near.
Apparently Destra wasn’t the only one with a good memory. She nodded. “Hop in.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Where’s your son?”
“He’s . . .” Destra hesitated. “He’s gone.” Tears sprang to her eyes, and the woman’s expression softened immediately.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought—” The woman assumed gone meant dead along with the rest of the evacuees aboard the transport, but Destra didn’t correct her. It would be easier travelling together without the burden of that woman’s jealousy.
“Well, there’s no accounting for justice, now is there?” the man with the gash in his cheek said, still talking about the evacuees’ transport. Either he hadn’t heard their conversation as he’d walked around the back of the hover to the passenger’s side, or else he was being deliberately insensitive. Destra decided to ignore him. He climbed in beside her, and in the rear viewscreen Destra noticed the woman and her son climb in the back. As soon as the doors had shut, she gunned the throttles. Justice? she wondered, thinking about that man’s remark. There’s no justice in any of this. Just death.
The road wound around the mountains, and Destra followed it as best she could despite the depthless blue of the infrared overlay. The trees alongside the road appeared as a scraggly black and blue wall.
“Where are we going?” the woman in the back asked.
“May as well head to the mines with the rest,” Destra replied.
“That’s a great idea,” the man said. “Gather everyone together in one place so it’ll be easier for the Sythians to kill us.”
“You have a better idea?” Destra asked, turning to him with a scowl.
“Yea, we go south until we reach Covena.”
Destra frowned. She vaguely recognized the name of the town. “How far is that?”
“It’s about three hundred klicks from here. We’ve already burrowed underground up there, so we’ll be safe—for a while.”
“Underground?”
“A bunker of sorts. We built it to keep our operations out of pryin’ eyes, if ya know what I mean.”
Destra turned to him with narrowed eyes. “You mean smuggling?”
“Sharp, girlie. Yea, smuggling. I managed supply-side operations—brewin’ the stims, that is.”
So he was taking them to a stim lab. “I see,” Destra said, wondering if he just brewed the batches of stim or tested them, too. There was something off about him. Destra was surprised she hadn’t heard of a stim lab in Covena before. Ethan must have known of it. He’d been a smuggler—before he’d been caught and exiled to Dark Space. “So why aren’t you hiding there now?” Destra asked.
“It’s got supplies to keep us goin’ for a few months, you know—not forever. My associates found their own way off Roka, leavin’ me to fend for myself, so I thought I’d try my luck smuggling myself onto the next ship outta here, but no go. Well, guess it was my lucky day, since that bird got shot to frek anyway. Serves the frekkers right.”
“Okay, okay—you’re giving me a headache. Punch the destination into the nav. I can’t spare a hand from the controls right now.”
“Whatever you say, girlie,” the man said, smirking as he leaned forward to fiddle with the nav. “Name’s Digger, by the way.”
“Digger, huh? I’m Destra. What about you two?” she asked, looking up into the rearview screen. The woman and her son were very quiet. Both of them looked very pale—shell-shocked. At first they didn’t reply, so Destra yelled, “Hoi! Wake up back there!”
The woman started and said, “I’m Lessie. My son’s Dean.”
“Okay. You two fine with hiding out in Digger’s stim lab for a while?”
Lessie’s already wide and staring eyes grew wider still. “A stim lab? What about the mines?”
Destra shook her head. “Digger’s right. We stand a better chance hiding out on our own. The fewer people to give us away, the better.”
“Smart girlie.”
“Anyone else hiding up there?” Destra thought to ask Digger, suddenly uncomfortable with the thought of being surrounded by outlaws like him. Ethan had been a smuggler, too, but he was different. He was an outlaw because of what he did for a living, not because of who he was as a person. As for the man sitting beside her, Destra was pretty sure smuggling wasn’t the only criminal thing he’d ever done.
“Just Doc and Petra.”
“And they won’t mind us staying with them?”
“Well . . . supplies are short, like I said, but don’t worry.” He shot her a small smile and his eyes twinkled with amusement. “I’ll convince them.”
Destra frowned. She wasn’t convinced that this was a good idea at all, but it wasn’t as though they had a lot of options. At least she had some idea of how to handle outlaws, thanks to her early days with Ethan when they’d been making runs together. “All right,” she said. “But if we’re not welcome there, I’m taking Lessie and Dean and we’ll leave you lab rats to bake your brains with stims.”
Digger snorted. “Sure thing, girlie.”
Destra drove on for hours, listening with still-ringing ears as Digger railed against the world and how unfair it had been to him, until eventually the trees began to lighten with the first strokes of dawn. Destra wondered how much time had passed, and the answer flashed up before her eyes, fed to her brain directly from the small implant behind her right ear: 0750. Little more than an hour had passed since she�
�d seen her son off at the landing platform, but it felt like it had been much longer. By now the planet would be crawling with Sythians. They needed to get into hiding—soon.
Destra snapped off the light amplification HUD overlay and found that now she could just barely see in the growing light. The cliffs running beside them had disappeared, and now trees rose to both sides, forming a leafy green corridor. Destra cut a quick glance to the nav and saw that it wasn’t more than another fifteen klicks to the point Digger had specified on the map. She looked up to see in her rearview screen that Lessie and Dean had fallen asleep in the back of the hover. Seeing the boy’s face finally relaxed in sleep, she was reminded of her own son, by now light years away from her. She looked away quickly.
“We’re gettin’ close,” Digger said, leaning forward to study the nav.
Destra glanced his way, watching him pan and zoom the map with shaking hands. “You okay there, Digger?”
“Yea, why?”
“Your hands are shaking.”
He sent her a quick smile. “Must be the adrenaline.”
“Hmmm, right,” Destra replied. “Must be.” That or you’re getting a little edgy between doses of stim.
Destra wasn’t sure why she was so mistrustful of this man. Perhaps it was the idea of an outlaw allowing them to hide with him and share limited supplies. In her experience, her husband notwithstanding, outlaws had a highly evolved me-first attitude. The less selfish ones were usually dead, or toiling away on a prison world in Dark Space, because they’d falsely expected their self-sacrificing attitude to be reciprocated by their associates.
As the distance to Digger’s stim lab narrowed, Destra began to chew her lower lip. She wasn’t worried about being able to take care of herself—Ethan had taught her well—she was worried about the woman and her son sitting in the back of the hover, and whether or not she could protect them, too. Outlaws could be the exception to all the rules—like Ethan—or they could be the stereotypes which defined those rules, and it was a coin’s toss to know which. Based on her first impression of Digger, Destra’s bet was on the stereotypes, but she decided to reserve judgment.
They came to a point on the road which lay parallel to the one which Digger had marked on the map, and Destra brought the transport to a slow stop. “What now?” she asked, scanning the immediate area.
Digger nodded out his window to the trees. “In there.”
Destra peered into the forest, noting that the trees were too close together for the hover to make it through.
“We’ll have to go on foot,” Digger said.
“Right,” Destra frowned. “Of course.” This felt like a trap, but it was too late to turn back. Sythians would be all over by now, flying grid patterns and raining death on human settlements. They’d never escape notice in broad daylight, so for now hiding in a forest was a pretty good idea. Destra drove the transport down to the tree line, as close as she could get it, and then she extended the landing struts and dialed down the grav lifts until the transport settled lightly on a bed of leaves.
“Wakey wake!” Digger said, turning to Lessie and Dean with a broad grin. “Time to go for a walk.”
Chapter 3
—THE YEAR 10 AE—
“So?” Ethan asked, now that they were seated once more in Atton’s office aboard the Defiant. “How is that monster below decks our only hope?”
Atton smiled. “The Gors are great warriors, as you can imagine. They crew and pilot the Sythian ships and serve as foot soldiers on the ground. They fight all of the Sythians’ battles for them. Having them on our side completely reverses the balance of power in this war.”
“If the Gors fight all the Sythians’ battles, why have we never seen them before?”
“Have you ever seen a Sythian without its armor, Ethan?”
Ethan shook his head. “I thought the armor was a part of them, some sort of exoskeleton.”
Atton smiled. “I suppose you wouldn’t have had a chance to see them without armor. Those images only surfaced late in the war, and even then they were classified.” Atton directed his gaze to the desk and said, “Holofield on. Show armored Sythian trooper.”
The air above the desk shimmered, and the lights inside Atton’s office dimmed. A moment later, a tall bipedal creature in shiny black armor appeared rotating above the desk. Ethan studied the image. It looked just as he remembered a Sythian should—tall, broad-shouldered, glowing red compound eyes, chitinous black exoskeleton.
“Enlarge head,” Atton said, and the image zoomed in on the Sythian’s skull-like head. “Freeze image,” he added, so they could study the face.
Atton pointed to the image and traced the gleaming, angular black lines of the creature’s head. “When we dissected the first Sythian, we found exactly what you’d expect from a giant bug—beneath the exoskeleton is a spongy yellow layer, but then beneath that is an epidermis, and below that we found another skeleton.”
Ethan blinked.
“When you strip away the outer shell and the spongy insulating layer, you have a real Sythian, with eyes, ears, nose, skin, muscle, and bone. Below their exoskeleton armor, the Sythians appear more reptilian than insectile.”
“Okay . . .” Ethan said, his brow furrowing as he wondered where Atton was going with his biology lesson.
“Overlay unarmored Sythian trooper,” Atton said, speaking to the holo projector once more.
Suddenly the gleaming skull-shaped helmet faded to a skull-shaped face with bald blue-gray skin, flat nose, and slitted yellow eyes.
Ethan almost fell out of his chair. “That’s Tova!”
Atton smiled. “The few Sythians we did manage to kill and examine looked just like the Gors, but that’s because they were Gors. Besides protecting them in battle, their armor functions as a space suit in the event of decompression, and an environment suit to deal with inhospitable climates. They breathe roughly the same mixture of air that we do, but they use their armor to protect their eyes and skin from solar radiation as well as their bodies from the heat. Being a nocturnal species that evolved to live in caves and underground lairs, the Gors are used to cold, dark, and wet environments.”
“Wait,” Ethan held up a hand and shook his head. “If the Sythians are actually Gors, then where are the real Sythians?”
“They are only found aboard their largest warships, sitting safely cloaked behind the lines while they command their armies of slaves.”
“What do these command ships look like?”
“Display Sythian Behemoth Cruiser.”
The cadaverous Gor disappeared and a long, organically-shaped cruiser began rotating above the desk. It had a dark blue and lavender hull with glimmering patterns that shifted subtly as the ship turned. It looked just like a bulkier version of the Sythian ships he’d seen in the Rokan Defense simulation.
“Hmmm . . . so that’s it?” Ethan asked. “That’s our real enemy?” The ship didn’t look so menacing. “How many of them are there?”
“According to the data the Gors gave us, there are seven command ships in the Sythian armada. One for each cluster—or fleet.”
“Only seven?”
Atton nodded to the holo. “Check the scale.”
Ethan leaned forward to peer more closely at the glowing white numbers hovering at the bottom of the projection. His eyes widened as he read them. “That can’t be right,” Ethan said. “The scale says this ship is over thirty kilometers long.”
“The scale is correct.”
“No ship is that big! How do they fit through our gates?”
“Only just.”
Ethan sat back in his chair, looking startled. “We were even more outmatched than we thought. Just one of those ships would rival a whole fleet of ours. Why didn’t they ever join the fighting?”
Atton shrugged. “The Sythians aren’t willing to risk their own lives in battle, so they send in the Gors. Apparently the Sythians’ courage is quite legendary.” Atton added that last part with laughing eyes.
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“So all those fleets and millions of armored soldiers which overran us were . . .”
“Gors. Slave armies.”
Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “And the Sythians? Do we even know what they look like?”
“I wouldn’t have trusted the Gors if they hadn’t come to us the way they did. They brought us High Lord Kaon of the Sythian First Fleet and military intelligence on the numbers and positions of all the ships in the Sythians’ seven fleets.”
“Lord Kaon, huh?” Ethan rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
Atton nodded. “We keep him prisoner on Obsidian Station—our supply point for the prime worlds’ strike force.”
“You have a picture of this . . . Kaon?”
Atton smiled. “I have better.” He glanced at the holo projector once more and said, “Play back recording: Obsidian Interrogation.”
Ethan watched the holo of the cruiser disappear, replaced by a view into a dark room. The camera was bobbing, heading toward a large, brightly-illuminated transpiranium cube in the center of the room. As the camera closed in on the cube, they were given a closer look at what was inside—nothing. Just an empty steel cot and a trough which looked suspiciously like it served as a latrine. There was also a tray piled high with green mush, and a cup of water lying untouched in front of a slot-sized opening in the base of the cube.
The camera moved up to a section of the cube wall which contained a control panel and a metal grill that might be a speaker. Now the cameraman began to talk. “Hello, Kaon.”
There was no reply, but someone off camera said, “He doesn’t want us to see him.”
“We’ll have to smoke him out.” A hand reached into the camera’s field of view and touched a button on the wall-mounted control panel. Suddenly, jets opened up in the ceiling and walls of the cube, and pressurized white streams shot out. The streams reached a certain point inside the cube and then came to a sudden stop in midair, spraying out in all directions around an invisible obstacle, quickly coating it. The jets turned off a few seconds later, but the thick, gummy ‘smoke’ had adhered to the creature’s body and defined a rough shape. He was bipedal with two arms and two legs, but Ethan couldn’t discern much else about him. Based on his size, he could have even been human.