“They surrendered without a fight, sir.”
“Kind of them to do so. Did they realize they were surrendering to us rather than their ISSF allies?”
“As far as I can tell from talking to Tova, the Gor liason from the Defiant, the Gors are aware of the political upheaval. They’re concerned that the Imperium is now leaderless and their alliance is in jeopardy. The unconditional surrender seems to be some kind of peace offering. She’s hoping we’ll consider joining the alliance.”
“I see, and what did you tell this Tova?”
“I told her we can’t promise anything, but it will be taken into consideration.”
“How very vague of you.” Heston smiled. “Good. What have you done with the ships and their Gor crews?”
“We left the ships and their crews with the Defiant. The Gors bailed out as usual, but we didn’t have room for them and I didn’t think you’d want me to bring them aboard, so we stowed them aboard the Defiant before we rescued her crew.”
“I assume you checked your ship for stowaways.”
“Yes, we’re clear. I’ve also isolated the human survivors in our hangar bay.”
“Excellent. You were wise to be cautious. We don’t need to accidentally bring a band of outlaws aboard. I’ll tell Dominic’s forces here to go back for their ship and their allies. Rescuing Gors is an ISSF prerogative. Finish what you have to, Captain, and then come meet me in my office. Meanwhile, have our subject escorted to the probe rooms, and make sure no one sees him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll see you soon. Don’t keep me waiting. Heston out.”
The admiral stared out the viewports of the lounge a while longer, his gray eyes flicking over the smooth, mirror-clear hull of the Interloper.
The overlord a holoskinner . . . he thought wonderingly. And what about the other overlord aboard the Valiant? Is he the real Altarian Dominic? If not, then had the overlord always been a holoskinner? Was he one of them? In some ways it would make sense if he were. Heston had always suspected something about the old man. The curious part, however, was the holoskin. With some prior planning, there were more permanent ways of hiding.
He must have come to the position recently, Hoff decided.
Heston was going to have to be very careful about probing the imposter, just in case. It would make no sense for him to accidentally reveal the truth in a public trial. People can only handle the truth in small doses—give them too much and they’ll kill you.
Chapter 7
Ithicus awoke with a gasp, and his back arched involuntarily against the hard surface where he lay. Everything was dark. His arms and legs were secured. Ice began crawling through his veins, and he collapsed, shivering in the dark. Through the fog in his brain he could hear the steady whoosh of air cyclers, and the droning hum of superluminal space. The ice crawling through his veins reached his heart and he groaned as his chest began to ache and burn. Then the pain subsided, and his eyes drifted shut.
He saw a flash of light and heard a fast-dying roar as explosive bolts blasted his canopy away and his flight chair ejected into space. Then came a painful silence as he sailed through the vacuum. Ithicus gazed down on the flowering explosion that had been his wingmate, Guardian Four, and then he saw his own nova fighter go rocketing toward the odd dozen Sythian missiles which were still tracking it. Those spinning purple stars quickly reached his needle-nosed Mark II and provoked another brilliant flash of light and accompanying cloud of fire. The flames quickly faded from an angry red to a pale, translucent gold, and then they died all together as their fuel abruptly dissipated and ran out.
Ithicus had his flight helmet on, and his suit was pressurized, so exposure to the vacuum wouldn’t kill him, but the air tanks strapped to the back of his ejection seat would only last for a few hours—that wasn’t even half the time it would take for the Defiant to send someone back for him, so he didn’t bother to activate his distress beacon and let the other Guardians know he was still alive. Why make them feel guilty? He and Guardian Four had given their lives to let the others escape. There was no sense making that sacrifice haunt them more than it already would.
“You shouldn’t have ejected, Ithy,” he whispered to himself. “Now you’re really frekked.” “Bought yourself a couple of hours for stargazing before the end.”
But that end had never come. He’d eventually fallen asleep as his air had trickled out, and then . . . then he’d woken up here. If this is the netherworld, he thought, it should at least be a little warmer.
He cracked his eyes open to see two glowing red orbs set in a shiny black helmet. There came a familiar hiss, followed by an alien warbling, and that was when Ithicus Adari understood that he wasn’t dead and this really was the netherworld.
He began to scream. “I’m not going to let you eat me, you motherfrekkers!”
Death would have been preferable. He’d been captured by Gors. Ithicus spat at the one he could see, aiming for the glowing red eyes of the alien’s helmet. He hit his mark, provoking another hiss, and then an armored elbow slammed into his forehead and he surrendered to the darkness.
* * *
“Tell me the truth, Kaon, and I’ll let you go. Who are the Gors?”
Kaon warbled, and Heston’s translator communicated the gist of what was said. “I tell you the truth already. The Gorz are our slaves.”
“Where did they come from?”
“The Gettizz,” Kaon hissed, revealing a double row of serrated white teeth.
“Really,” Heston quirked an eyebrow at that. “So both the Gors and the Sythians evolved in the same galaxy?”
Kaon hissed again. “Yess.”
“Who are the Sythians?”
“We are Zithianz.”
“I know that. Who are you?”
“We are masters of the Gorz.”
“How very circular.” Heston gave the alien an open-handed slap, which echoed loudly in the small room and sent Kaon’s head slamming back into his headrest. The alien hissed again. “Once more with feeling,” Heston said. “Who are the Sythians?”
“Who are the humanz?” Kaon countered.
Heston smiled thinly at the alien and stared intently at his translucent face. “Why did you attack us?”
“We attack you to kill you.”
“That’s self evident. Why did you want to kill us?”
“So that you would be gone.”
Heston’s eyes flashed. “Why did you leave the Getties?”
“We left the Gettiz to get here.”
“What are you doing here? What do you want?”
Kaon didn’t reply, so Hoff raised his hand again as if to slap the alien. Kaon hissed at him, but remained silent. “Are you at war with the Gors?”
“Some fight us now, yes.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Then you do not ask well.”
Heston growled and slapped Kaon again, sending his head reeling once more. “You’re wasting my time! You know I’m going to have you probed, right?” Heston loomed closer. “You know what that is? A small army of nanites will be injected into your bloodstream near your brain stem. From there they’ll go straight up and imbed themselves in your brain. Like that I’ll be able to see everything you’ve ever seen, and ask any questions with the assurance that you can’t lie. You won’t be able to hide anything from me.”
Kaon warbled a response. “You ask me questions, but do not believe the answers, so answer your own questions and see that I tell the truth.”
“I will, but the probe might kill you to get the information I’m looking for. . . .” Heston shrugged. “I’d rather you didn’t have to die.”
Kaon hissed. “You should kill me long ago.”
“Why? What do you think you are doing that’s hurting us? Giving us misinformation, perhaps?”
Again Kaon gave no response.
“Hoi!” Heston reached out and took the alien’s face in his hand, squeezing its rubbery cheeks together with br
uising force and puckering his scarred lips. “I’m talking to you, little fish!”
Kaon just stared at him with big, lidless blue eyes. After a moment, a membrane nictated over his eyes and Heston let him go with a disgusted shove.
“Fine.” Heston nodded and turned to his XO sitting at a control station along one side of the room. “Are we ready to begin, Commander Donali?”
Donali turned from the control station, his red artificial eye glowing in the dim light of the probe room. “Yes, sir,” he said, rising from his chair. Hoff eyed the commander as he walked over to them with an implanter. In his role as the executive officer aboard Hoff’s aging flagship, the Tauron, Master Commander Donali was privy to things most people would never get to see—such as the fact that High Lord Kaon was now in Hoff’s possession.
Kaon remained calm as the commander stepped up behind him and pushed his head forward to look for a vein in his translucent skin. The alien’s arms and legs were already bolted into the chair manacles, so he didn’t bother to resist. Hoff studied Kaon as the needle went in, and Kaon studied him back, not reacting at all to the needle. Heston glanced at the alien’s mangled hands and feet and the ridge of scar tissue running along his bald head where his cranial fins had been cut off. By now Kaon had to be so used to pain that the prick of a needle was nothing to him.
“You’re very calm for someone who’s about to die.”
“I do not fear death.”
“That’s odd, considering you tell me that the Sythians are hiding on their cloaked ships, directing their slave soldiers into battle. If you were so fearless, wouldn’t you fight your own battles?”
Kaon warbled, “I said I do not fear death. That does not mean that Zithianz are stupid. Bravery and recklessness are not the same. Are you a coward?”
Heston’s eyes flashed. “Be careful not to insult me. I’m already short of patience.”
“Then why do you not fly a fighter into battle? You do not fear death, either, but you do not risk it more than necessary.”
Heston smiled. “I don’t fly fighters because I can kill you more efficiently from the bridge of a battleship than I can from the cockpit of a nova. You think you’re a clever little fish, don’t you? Let’s go meet your Sythian friends, shall we? Assuming they exist, of course. . . .” Kaon gave no reply. His big blue eyes just stared into Heston’s gray ones, and eventually the admiral grew tired of the game. “Start up the probe!” he said. Heston knew the alien was lying. Trusting Kaon to tell them the truth was like Overlord Dominic trusting the Gors to let him know when cloaked Sythian ships invaded Dark Space.
If the Sythians really existed, why after more than a decade of war, had they only ever met one Sythian and never even seen their elusive command ships? The Gors’ entire story was full of holes. Time to fill them in, Heston thought as he walked over to the probe control station. “Let’s see what our little fish is hiding,” he said as he reached for one of the helmets which hung on a rack above the control console. The gray helmets were covered with knobby nodes, and the glossy black visors were opaque. Heston sat down in the interrogator’s chair beside the probe console and slipped the helmet over his head. On the inside of the visor was a holoscreen. At the moment the screen was blank, but in the top-right hand corner was a timer. It read: 00:00. Without that, it would be easy to become so immersed in a subject’s memories that one lost all sense of time, and time was of the essence if they were going to get anything out of Kaon before the probe turned his brain to jelly.
“Are you ready, Admiral?”
“I am.”
“Probe commencing in five, four, three . . .”
Heston watched the countdown appear as a green number flashing up in the center of the display. When the countdown reached zero, suddenly the blank screen vanished and he was standing on a glossy black deck under a vast, transparent dome of stars. It looked like the bridge of a Gor ship. Alien control stations were scattered around the deck in concentric circles, just as he would have expected to see on any Gor vessel, but when Heston looked closer at those control stations, he gasped. They were too small for Gors, and sitting at each one of those stations was a—
It can’t be, Heston thought. “Where are you, Kaon?” he asked aloud.
“I am . . . on the bridge of my ship.”
“And what ship is that?”
“The Sharal.”
“A Sythian command ship?”
“Yes.”
“And these beings on the deck are . . .”
“My crew.”
“They don’t look like Gors, Kaon.”
“They are not Gorz. They are Zithianz.”
“Where are all the Gors?”
“On their ships.”
“There are no Gors aboard this vessel?”
“We do not risk having them aboard.”
“What is the purpose of this vessel, Kaon?”
“It is a carrier.”
Hoff’s mind boggled at that. A thirty-kilometer-long carrier would hold thousands of fighters. “How many fighters does this ship hold?”
“None.”
“What? What does it carry?”
“It carries Gors.”
Hoff’s eyes narrowed and suddenly his suspicions were raised again. “You just told me you don’t risk having Gors aboard your ship.”
“We do not. The Sharal carries Gor vessels for long journeys. The Gors are not allowed to leave their ships.”
“Show me.”
Suddenly the scene on the bridge vanished, and Hoff stood looking out a broad viewport at a vast hangar bay, ten times the size of anything Hoff had ever seen aboard a human warship—the Valiant included. Inside were dozens of Gor cruisers hanging from the ceiling and locked into docking stations on the floor. Hoff wondered if Overlord Dominic’s allies had told him about this, or if this was the first anyone had ever discovered about the nature of Sythian command ships. Given the size of the average Sythian fleet, even at 30 kilometers long, a behemoth cruiser wouldn’t have much room for anything besides docking stations for the Gors’ ships. Hoff thought about how easy it would be for the Gors to obliterate the behemoth cruiser from the inside, and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Yet again, the Gors’ story didn’t make sense. If they were trying to break free, they should have done so long ago.
“How many Sythians are on board this ship, Kaon?”
“Two hundred and seventy.”
“That’s it? What do they do?”
“There is one to control every Gor ship, and twelve more for the Sharal.”
“Just twelve? What are the Sythians doing in our galaxy, Kaon?”
“What are we doing . . .”
“Yes, you heard me.”
“W-what . . .” What followed was not translated by Hoff’s translator.
Suddenly the scene vanished and back was the blank black screen. “What happened?”
“We’re losing him, sir.”
“Stop the probe.”
Heston pulled off the helmet and shook his head. He turned to look at Kaon. The alien’s eyes were rolling, and his expression was a rictus of pain. “So you weren’t lying to me?” Hoff found it difficult to believe.
“I told . . . you the truth. . . .” he said distantly. “You do not believe it.”
“Did you see that?” Hoff asked, turning to Commander Donali.
“I did.”
“There were Sythians on that ship.” Hoff shook his head. “It can’t be. He’s not telling the truth!”
“Sir—” Donali turned to him. “—if I may ask, what makes you so sure?”
“I . . .” Heston trailed off and turned to stare at the Sythian. Kaon stared back. “Is his brain showing any signs of damage from the probe?”
“No, but I doubt he’ll live through another session like that. Not yet anyway. He’ll need some time to recover.”
Heston stood up from the interrogator’s chair. “Well then, it seems we’re forced to take a break.”
“Yes, s
ir.”
“In your experience, Commander, is there any way to fool a probe?”
“Only if the subject himself is fooled.”
“And how might that occur?”
Donali blinked; his glowing artificial eye dimmed and then brightened to mimic the effect. “If he were chipped, sir, and his memories were planted rather than real.”
“Exactly.”
Donali shook his head. “If Kaon had an implant, I’d have found that right away with the probe.”
“Sythians don’t have the same technology as us. They might not need to implant anything.”
“Then how are we supposed to find out about it?”
“If you knew he was chipped, but you couldn’t see the implant, what would you look for?”
“Scar tissue, or maybe some type of trace—memories, feelings, or thoughts which are out of place, things which cause anxiety in the host because they don’t fit with the rest of his or her identity.”
“Good. Look for that, and let me know what you find.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hoff stormed out of the probe room, shaking his head. The Gors were not going to get away with this. Maybe Overlord Dominic had made allowances for them, but Hoff Heston had run out of patience. Kaon was a planted Gor agent; he was sure of it. He was going to have to try a different tack to prove it. Maybe he’d interrogate a Gor or two. The aliens’ telepathy posed a problem, but he could always drum up some excuse to take a few Gors out for a joy ride so they could get far enough away from their crèche mates that they wouldn’t be able to tell the others what he was doing to them.
Hoff smiled, and his mood lifted as he strode through the detention level. He was eager to get started interrogating the Gors, but unfortunately there were still some political ends to tie. While debriefing Captain Adram of the Interloper, he’d found out that the imposter overlord was an ex-con named Ethan. As for the other two prisoners, one was Ethan’s alleged son, a nova pilot named Adan Reese, and the other a doctor named Kurlin Vastra. Apparently that doctor was the man responsible for creating the virus which had ravaged the Valiant. All three were awaiting his judgment.
Dark Space: Origin Page 8