“You think they hid?”
Hoff shook his head. “Unless the IMS was the very last system to fail, it doesn’t matter whether they hid or not. No one is still going to be alive on that ship. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we are dead. I make extensive backups of anything and everything that’s important. If you find me, I’ll help you bring your mother and your sister back.”
Atton’s jaw slowly dropped open as he understood what that meant. “You didn’t . . . that’s not the same, and you know it!”
“It could be the same, if you let it.”
Tears sprang to Atton’s eyes. “Whatever.” He gestured out the forward viewports. “It’s a one way trip, admiral. We’re just going to leave you inside and go.”
“That’s fine. I don’t expect you to wait.”
Atton snorted. “I guess we’ll catch up with you later.”
“What are you two talking about?” Ethan finally demanded, his gaze turning from Hoff to Atton. “How are we going to find him, or your mother and Atta if no one survived the collision?”
“It’s a long story,” Atton said.
“Well, start explaining!”
“All right, fine. You know Hoff cloned himself, and you might have guessed that he and his clone share both his personality and his memories.”
Ethan shook his head. “Actually I just thought being a skriff must run in the DNA, but go on. What else am I missing?”
“What do you know about the Immortals, Dad?”
“Not much . . . why?”
The explanation which followed went past the point of credulity and challenged everything Ethan thought he knew about human history. All the while, Hoff decelerated in preparation for boarding the alien command ship. Atton finished explaining just as Hoff reached the debris field. They maneuvered around chunks of the alien cruiser which were the size of small cruisers themselves before diving down into the exposed mess of broken decks and beams which blocked their entry into the front half of the behemoth. Ethan couldn’t see any opening large enough for their corvette to enter, but Hoff cruised slowly onward.
“Atton—would you take the controls? I need to go suit up.”
“What do you need me to do?” Atton asked as he rose to take Hoff’s place.
“Get close to one of those decks. Line up the rear hatch and wait until I tell you that I’m clear.”
“Those decks are exposed to space, Hoff.” Atton shook his head. “They’ll be sealed off from the rest of the ship. You’re not going to find a way in.”
“Leave that to me,” Hoff said. “Just get me close.”
Ethan turned to watch the admiral leave. “So Destra is . . . going to be a clone now, too?”
“He must have found some way to chip her and Atta without them realizing.”
“Do you think it works?”
“No.”
Ethan’s gaze flicked out the port side of the bridge to find the dark, drifting ruin which had once been the Tauron. Neither he nor Atton said anything for the next five minutes while Atton got the corvette into position and held it there. They waited fully another minute until they heard Hoff’s voice crackle through the comm speakers—“I’m clear,” he said.
“Good luck, Admiral,” Atton replied in a sarcastic tone. With that, they roared away from the drifting ruins of the two ships.
“Now I need your help, Atton,” Ethan said slowly, watching as his son wove a path back through the debris.
“With what?”
“I need you to get me on board the Valiant.”
“What are you going to do—capture the whole ship by yourself?”
“Not the whole ship, no. Just one person.”
* * *
“Get alongside them!” Caldin ordered.
“Yes ma’am.”
What are you after, Brondi? she wondered as the Interloper came alongside the carrier and cruised past thousands of shining viewports. They were right under the crime lord’s nose, but still perfectly cloaked.
The Valiant slowed as it approached the broken halves of the Sythian command ship. It turned and presented its flank to the ruins of the Sythian ship, and the Interloper matched that maneuver. Then, all of a sudden, Caldin understood what Brondi was doing. He was going to finish off the alien command ship, but the Interloper lay in the path of at least a few dozen laser turrets, and with the cloak up and their shields disengaged, they’d be cracked open in seconds.
“Evasive action!” Caldin roared.
But what shot out from the side of the carrier wasn’t a volley of lasers and warheads. Instead, it launched wave after wave of troop transports and shuttles. Caldin’s eyes widened, and she shook her head. “Scratch that last order, Mr. Corr. “Aim for the nearest hangar bay! Full throttle. If ships are coming out, then we can fly in.”
I’ve got you now, Caldin thought.
* * *
Admiral Hoff held on to the handheld booster rocket with both hands, using it to guide himself through the dark, twisted ruins of the alien cruiser. A pair of floodlights on either side of his helmet lit the way, casting bright lavender and violet reflections off the insides of the ship. He wore an armored vac suit, and he’d strapped a cutting beam to his back along with a portable shield generator. In addition to that, he wore a belt of plasma grenades around his waist, and a stun pistol hung low on one hip. He was heavily laden, but in the zero-G environment he didn’t notice the weight.
Despite being so heavily armed and armored, he hadn’t come all this way to fight; he’d come for answers, and with any luck, the Sythians would give them to him before he died. Nearly everything about the Sythians was still a mystery. Apparently the Gors had been telling the truth from day one, but that didn’t really answer anything. He still didn’t know who the Sythians were or what they were after. Why had they never been seen? Why did they hide aboard massive command ships like this one? He remembered Kaon had explained during one of his two probe sessions that these command ships carried Gor ships into battle and gave them overall guidance and direction during battle. That made some sense, Hoff supposed. Rather than have each ship individually jump to SLS, they could all jump together, opening just one wormhole and using much less fuel.
But what about the world Hoff had seen and recognized from Kaon’s memories—how and when had the Sythians found the lost world of Origin? And finally, perhaps the most disturbing question of all—why was Kaon a clone? When Hoff thought about all of that, he felt increasingly uneasy. The answers seemed to drift around his head in lazy circles, always just out of reach.
Kaon hadn’t been captured. He’d been sent by the Sythians, so that he could eventually lead them here, to Dark Space—or perhaps to some other human settlement—but they hadn’t counted on Kaon revealing anything truly useful. Or maybe they didn’t care what humanity found out about them. Whatever the case, Kaon had given Hoff a glimpse into something vast and terrifying—
The past. No one knew much about what had happened before the great war, the War of Origin. No humans, that is, Hoff corrected himself.
At last, Hoff saw what looked to be a sealed set of doors up ahead. They lay at the end of a short corridor which had been sheared off when the cruiser had cracked in half. Hoff aimed for the mangled opening of that corridor and fired the braking thrusters on his booster rocket to slow down. A few seconds later he collided with the doors and bounced off. Hoff let go of the booster and activated the grav field on his belt to anchor himself to the deck. A moment later he stood up, now weighing roughly half of what he should. Hoff panned his floodlights over the doors and then the ceiling, walls, and floor. There appeared to be enough of the surrounding corridor left that he could use the portable shield he’d brought to create a secondary seal for when he sliced the doors open with his cutting beam.
Hoff reached around to unhook the shield generator from his belt, and then he affixed it to the deck as close to the doors as he could while still giving himself a few feet of space to work. He configured the gen
erator to project a weak shield which would be good enough to hold in the ship’s atmosphere, and then he activated the generator. A fuzzy blue wall of energy materialized in front of his face.
Turning back to the sealed doors, he drew his cutting beam and aimed it at the doors. Taking a deep breath, he fired, and a brilliant red beam shot out in the darkness, dazzling his eyes before his faceplate could polarize. As he traced a molten line around the inside of the doors, he remembered that he was standing in a vacuum, and the doors would blow out on a violent gust of escaping air as soon as he separated them from their frame. Hoff turned off the beam and stepped to one side before he finished the cut. He eyed the glowing, horseshoe-shaped furrow he’d carved in the doors, but nothing happened. He wondered if he had managed to cut all the way through. Then he noticed that the doors were bulging outward with some unseen pressure. He took a long step sideways, and a moment later the doors burst open. Two jagged pieces of metal went flying past his head, and then the gust of air hit him like a tidal wave. It lifted him off his feet and sent him tumbling out through the shield along with the door fragments. The grav field emitted from his belt was enough to slow him to a rolling stop a few dozen paces from the fuzzy blue glow of the portable shield generator. With a grunt, he pushed himself to his feet and jogged up to the shields. Forcing his way through the barrier, he stood on the other side and eyed the HUD displays inside his helmet. According to his vac suit’s sensors, the area where he stood was pressurized.
Perfect.
Hoff didn’t take off his helmet, just in case, but he hurried through the hole he’d cut in the doors and rushed through the alien ship. Dazzling, lavender-colored reflections shimmered off the shiny black walls and floor wherever Hoff turned his headlamps. He turned them down low, and allowed a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. Like that, he found that he could see, but only barely. Now he walked onward, his head turning every which way, expecting to see Sythians or Gors melting out of the shadows, but so far the ship was deserted.
Hoff walked on like that for long minutes, traversing corridor after corridor before he encountered anything different. Doors lined the corridors, much as he would have expected to see on any human ship, but Hoff wasn’t interested in looking behind them. He already had a good idea about the layout of Sythian ships from the handful of captured Gor vessels he’d managed to add to his fleet. He was looking for something in particular.
At last, he found it. The corridor he presently walked down widened out into a large, circular chamber, and Hoff felt himself growing impossibly heavy as he approached. His knees shook and threatened to buckle. Gravity was working here. Hoff fumbled with the grav field generator on his belt, turning it off, and the sensation of heaviness eased somewhat. Up ahead, the circular chamber glowed with a dim light. Hoff walked inside to see exactly what he’d been expecting. Running around the edges of both the ceiling and the floor were a dozen glowing circles, yellow ones in the floor, and purple ones in the ceiling—each one marked the open end of a tube which ran to or from some part of the alien ship. Instead of lift tubes and rail cars, Sythians used a network of accelerator tubes, which functioned much like nova fighter launch tubes. Hoff was surprised to see that they were still active after the ship had been carved in two, but in a ship the size of a behemoth cruiser there had to be backup generators running from stem to stern.
Hoff started toward the nearest hole in the floor to see where it would lead. Strange, glowing hieroglyphics marked each opening, but Hoff couldn’t read them. He would have to choose a destination at random. All he had to do was step inside and he’d be whisked away to a matching hub in some other part of the ship.
Hoff sighed and gazed down on the glowing yellow rim of the tube in front of him, trying to summon his resolve. He’d used the tubes only a handful of times before, and it was always the same thing—darkness all around, racing past muted yellow rings of light, a terrifying whooshing noise, and a stomach clenching sensation of free-fall. While Sythian ships had their own artificial gravity and inertial management systems for the usual rigors of battle and space travel, they hadn’t seen fit to completely negate the g-forces inside their accelerator tubes. Maybe the skull faces like the thrill, Hoff thought.
Taking a deep breath, he took another step toward the tube he’d chosen. But just before he could step inside, the glowing yellow rim and hieroglyphic turned purple, just like the openings in the ceiling. Hoff frowned and tried lowering his foot below the rim, expecting to feel the tug of the accelerator tube trying to pull him in, but instead his foot bounced away, repelled by some unseen force, and a two-tone warning issued from somewhere inside the room, as if the ship were scolding him.
Strange. Hoff moved to the next portal in line, but the same thing happened, and this time, all of them turned purple. The next thing he noticed was a loud, grinding noise coming from the hallway behind him. Hoff turned to see bulkhead doors slowly sliding shut, dragging sparks across the deck as they sealed him inside the hub. The doors only partially closed, grinding to a stop with a gap of a few feet left between them. They were obviously damaged, and Hoff could still get out easily if he wanted to, but he hadn’t come all this way just to run. He turned back to the accelerator tubes and waited. He had a feeling someone knew where he was and they were watching him.
Seconds later, he heard a loud whoosh of approaching air, and one of the glowing tubes in the ceiling began to flash. Someone was coming.
Hoff smiled grimly, waiting with a mounting feeling of mingled horror and excitement. It was surely death which came for him, but he didn’t care. It didn’t even scare him. Perhaps because he didn’t believe it was really possible for him to die anymore. He’d been to the brink so many times . . . but still he had somehow lived on, his memories chaining together in one long, uninterrupted stream. That was the illusion of immortality, he supposed. If immortals still felt the sting of death in the moment that their brains died, then the clones which lived on to take their place had no memory of it and no idea what that was like. There was no record in existence of what happened after death—if anything.
Suddenly a dark shape floated down from the flashing transporter tube in the ceiling. The shadowy figure was too small to be a Gor. Hoff felt a spark of adrenaline course through his fingertips. He activated his helmet speakers and said, “Hello, Sythian. I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
Hoff saw a flash of white teeth.
“So have I, Admiral,” a familiar voice said.
The admiral shook his head, unable to believe his ears. It couldn’t be.
Chapter 34
The Interloper skated through the blue wall of the hangar’s static shields, passing so close to the ceiling that Caldin felt like she could reach out and touch it. They were now inside the middle of three hangar bays in the port side of the mighty gladiator-class carrier. Silent and unseen, the Interloper hovered above the deck as hordes of Brondi’s men filed into waiting assault transports below, lifting off and jetting out into space. Caldin waited until the troops were all gone and the transports stopped launching, until the deck was all but empty and just a few ground crew were left walking around.
Caldin gave the word, and the Interloper settled to the deck. If they crushed someone or something under the cloaked Sythian cruiser, they didn’t notice, and Caldin didn’t care. The time for hiding was over.
“Drop our loading ramps! This is going to be easier than we thought,” Caldin said. “Brondi’s just launched all his men on those transports. Only the Immortals know what he’s up to, but it’s good news for us. Ruh-kah! Let’s go!”
An echo of that battle cry rose up from her surviving bridge crew. Delayn and Terl caught up to her as she hurried off the bridge and down a dim, glossy black corridor. Walking through the alien ship made her think of what it must be like to be a bug trapped inside a Gor’s armor.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay here, ma’am?” Delayn asked.
“Why would I want to do t
hat?”
“Well . . . you’ll be safe.”
“Being safe is highly overrated, Deck Commander.”
“Deck Commander?”
“You’re my new XO, since Captain Adram seems to have come down with an acute case of brain failure.”
“Thank you, ma’am!”
Caldin nodded. “Don’t thank me yet. We still need a ship to command before that promotion will mean anything.”
“We’ll have the Valiant back again soon,” Delayn said.
“I’m counting on it.”
They turned a corner in the glossy black corridor and ran straight into a waiting throng of sentinels. The cruiser had not been designed to hold over two thousand men. It had held barely two hundred Gors when it had been in Sythian hands. The sentinels had been forced to sit and stand shoulder-to-shoulder and back-to-back in the corridors while they waited to be sent into battle. Now, finally, after hours of waiting, they could do their part.
Caldin smiled as she shuffled down the winding corridors of the Interloper. She listened to the steady thunder of boots, the clatter of armor, the rattle of guns—it was music to her ears.
You’d better run, Brondi, she thought.
* * *
“Captain Adram?” Hoff asked. “What are you doing here?”
Still smiling, the former captain shook his head. “You haven’t figured it out yet, Admiral? You’re not the only one who can cheat death.” Hoff frowned. “Wondering how I know about that?” Adram went on. “You might know me better by a different name—High Lord Kaon, perhaps.”
“What?” Hoff blinked. “How?”
“I never returned from the Getties Expedition, Admiral. I was chipped and set free.”
“Chipped . . . to think that you are Lord Kaon?”
“I am Lord Kaon. It’s much easier to trust oneself to carry out a mission, wouldn’t you say?”
Hoff shook his head. “How did you get here?”
Dark Space: Origin Page 36