Dark Space: Origin

by Jasper T. Scott

  Alara caught him staring at her and she turned to him with her big violet eyes. She smiled demurely at him. “What?”

  Ethan shook his head. “I just can’t believe that you chose me. I can’t believe that you’re mine.”

  She held his gaze with a small smile until he looked away, and then she shook her head. “I’m not yours yet . . .”

  Ethan turned back to her with a sly look. He’d been waiting for the right moment. Now, he judged that this was it. “Close your eyes,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  “Okay . . .”

  Ethan’s smile grew. A few days ago, Destra had taken him aside and given him something—a pair of rings.

  “These belong to you,” she’d said, placing them in his hand. “I’m sorry it couldn’t be forever.”

  He’d stared at the pair of rings in his hand, scuffed and beaten silver, dark with age. The artificial diamond was missing from the engagement ring, and the prongs of the mounting were bent.

  “I’m sorry they aren’t in better condition,” she’d said. “I wore them on Ritan, so . . .”

  “It’s okay. I’m surprised you kept them this long.”

  “I haven’t worn them since I married Hoff, but it seemed wrong, somehow, to throw them away.”

  Ethan had thanked her and slipped the rings into the breast pocket of his flight jacket. Now he unbuttoned that pocket and withdrew the smaller and thinner of the two rings. He took Alara’s hand in his and slipped the ring on her finger. Her eyes flew open, and she gaped at the diamond staring back at her. The new diamond, a real diamond this time, was Hoff’s contribution—as was the shiny platinum finish.

  “Sorry it took me so long,” Ethan said.

  Alara unbuckled her seat restraints and flew across the short aisle between them. She landed in his lap and showered him with kisses. Eventually Ethan managed to calm her enough to give her a real kiss, and they lost themselves in the moment as time seemed to slow and stretch out toward infinity. Ethan inhaled deeply, allowing the fragrance of her breath, skin, and hair to intoxicate him fully.

  “Thank you, Ethan!” she said, finally coming up for air.

  Ethan smiled as he wiped the tears from her cheeks. “For what?”

  “For making me the happiest woman in the galaxy.”

  “I could say the same, but I’d have to add an extra thank you for waiting so long for me,” he said.

  She grinned happily. “You were worth the wait.”

  Later, as they travelled through the streaking brightness of superluminal space, Alara and Ethan lay side by side in their quarters, naked, their arms and legs wrapped tightly around each other as they gazed into one another’s eyes. They spoke excitedly about their future, about where they would go and what they would do.

  Barely half an hour later, they’d consummated that future for the second time, and the long hours of the night floated by in a dreamy haze with more of the same. As Ethan finally drifted off to sleep, Alara told him in a hushed voice about a dream she’d had, about two little children and a cabin by a lake. He smiled, imagining everything clearly in his mind’s eye. With that, Ethan decided that maybe Dark Space wasn’t so dark, after all—at least not for him, and not anymore. You can’t see darkness because it isn’t really there—

  It’s just an absence, waiting for the light.

  DARK SPACE CONTINUES IN SPRING 2014 WITH

  DARK SPACE IV: Revenge

  TO GET DARK SPACE IV FREE WHEN IT COMES OUT

  Post an Honest Review of Dark Space III: Origin on Amazon, and then Send me the Contents of Your Review by

  Signing up Here.

  http://files.JasperTscott.com/ds4.htm

  (Remember, your feedback is important to me and to helping other readers find the books they like!)

  READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEAK OF

  DARK SPACE IV: Revenge

  Chapter 1

  Master Commander Lenon Donali dropped out of SLS for the tenth time. Fuel was running low from so many stops. He hadn’t travelled more than twelve light years away from Dark Space, but entering and leaving SLS were the most fuel-expensive parts of space flight, and he’d already done that twenty times over the past two days.

  Donali checked the grid, just as he had each of the other nine times he’d dropped out of SLS. This time he wasn’t expecting to see anything on the grid, and he wasn’t surprised. Apart from the spreading wake of radiation from his corvette, there was no detectable trace of tachyon radiation. Donali waited a minute longer, watching the grid unblinkingly, but sensors were clear; there was nothing.

  His mind turned to the alien implant which he’d left in the corvette’s med bay to be analyzed by the ship’s computers. Whatever it was, it had finished transmitting long ago, and now it couldn’t be bothered to tell the Sythians where it was. The last time that mysterious alien device had transmitted anything at all had been at the entrance of Dark Space. Donali decided that it must have run out of power. It was either that, or the implant they’d found in Kaon’s brain hadn’t actually been the source of the radiation they’d seen.

  Except that didn’t make sense either. The admiral was right. If there were a stowaway aboard any of their ships, then they would know about it. Displacement sensors had been installed at every door and airlock of every ship in the admiral’s fleet. Those sensors would detect and highlight disruptions in the air flow which were consistent with a humanoid-sized object moving through the ship. They would cross-correlate that data with holocorders and see whether or not the source of the disruption was a human, or a cloaked alien. If there were a stowaway, he would have had to be hiding in plain sight.

  Donali shook his head. It was time to finish studying the implant and then jettison it out the nearest airlock. He had a rendezvous with the admiral coming up in just six days, and that was precious little time to study the alien device. He unbuckled his seat restraints and pushed out of the pilot’s chair.

  When he arrived in the med bay, he was gratified to find the alien implant still sitting right where he’d left it, inside the holoimager. He’d been half expecting it to have walked off by itself. Donali keyed the machine for the results of its analysis, and a moment later, a holo flickered up above the imager. Donali studied it.

  The inside of the implant was organized into a crystal lattice structure, and the outside hadn’t responded to any probe of any kind . . . except for . . . the electrical conduction test. When the device had been exposed to low level electrical signals, it had begun to respond with the same. That made sense, since it would have to interact with the Sythians’ brains somehow. Donali stared at the screen, wondering what purpose the implant had served.

  If the Sythians had known Kaon was going to be captured, or if they had allowed him to be captured, then the device could be a tracker of some kind, but if that were so, then why wasn’t it transmitting now? The fact that it responded to electrical stimulation seemed to indicate that it still had power.

  It’s a pity I don’t have someone to implant this in . . . he thought. It was much larger than the average human implant, and would require surgery to insert—not that he had a test subject for that, anyway.

  Unless. . . .

  Donali’s eyes turned to the stasis room adjoining the med bay. Abruptly he turned and walked toward it. He waved his hand over the door controls, and the door slid away with a swish. The lights came on automatically for him. This was Donali’s personal transport, and it knew him well.

  He walked to the back of the room to the pair of empty stasis tubes there. The room held twelve stasis tubes in all, one for each of the corvette’s standard crew. When Donali reached the pair of stasis tubes, he stepped up to the control panel of the leftmost one and keyed in a code which only he knew. He heard a clu-clunk of duranium bolts sliding away and reached out with both hands to grasp the sides of the heavy stasis tube. It pulled away from the wall easily enough, rolling on wheels that it shouldn’t have had. Behind that,
lay another stasis tube, the transpiranium cover glowing blue and active. Donali saw a stranger staring back at him from the other side of the transpiranium. That stranger was his escape plan. With someone like Admiral Heston, one could never be too careful. Hoff had been betrayed so many times that he would betray his friends and family preemptively just to keep it from happening again, and that meant Donali needed to keep a few secrets of his own—just in case Hoff should ever decide to preemptively betray his own XO.

  Already fitted in the clone’s wrist were all the credentials Donali would need to get away and make a new life for himself without the admiral ever being the wiser. Being a senior member of the Tauron’s medical staff had its advantages. Any bodies which passed through its morgue were his to examine if he chose. He’d stolen the identichips from more than a few of them and subsequently erased the record of their deaths. Like that, he could pretend to be the dead officer and mysteriously appear in Hoff’s enclave or even Dark Space to make a new life for himself. So far Donali hadn’t needed that backup plan, but it gave him a unique opportunity now.

  He walked into the dark crawlspace and keyed the control panel to release the clone. The cover of the stasis tube opened with a hiss and the clone opened its eyes for the first time. It saw him and began to cry pitifully. It fell into Donali’s arms, unable to even stand up on its own. Donali backed out of the crawlspace, half dragging and half carrying his clone. He tried to ignore the clone’s wailing cries. It clung to him like a baby to its mother.

  Clones spent their entire lives in an induced sleep, growing to maturity at an accelerated rate until they reached the right age, and then they were frozen like that until they were needed. All a clone ever had a chance to experience was a cloning tank and the endless dreaming of accelerated aging or the near perfect metabolic suspension of stasis. They could last in stasis for a thousand years and only age ten. What they dreamt about while they were in there was a mystery, but the most likely answer was—nothing at all. They had never experienced anything, so how could their brains imagine something? They never learned to walk, talk, eat, or do anything else that a regular adult took for granted. They were fully-grow newborns until the implants in their brains received the flood of information which they would use, along with a billion little nanites, to sculpt their brains into the mirror image of their creators’.

  Clones were never woken like this. Donali tried to ignore the pinprick of guilt which he felt over that and over what he was about to do. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It’s okay. Daddy needs your help.” Donali set the clone down on the cold deck and its cries intensified. The man curled into a fetal ball, while Donali fumbled with his grav gun. He gravved the clone off the deck and carried him back into the med bay.

  An hour later, Donali had his subject strapped down on the examination table, still crying, but more softly now. The clone’s eyes flicked from side to side, darting and wide. Donali put him out of his misery a moment later with a sleep-inducing anesthetic.

  Now the operation could begin. It took just over an hour to open the clone’s skull and delicately tuck the implant inside his brain. Donali hoped he’d remembered the right location for it, although a Sythian’s brain was only roughly analogous to a human’s. He also hoped that it wouldn’t cause his patient any seizures when he woke up. Another hour passed while he cleaned up his surgical instruments and waited for the clone to wake up.

  Suddenly, Donali heard an alien warbling and he spun around to look. His patient was awake. He hurried back to the clone’s side, his heart pounding, his eyes wide and filled with wonder. The clone had been a blank slate, dumb and mute, and now he was speaking in some facsimile of Sythian.

  “Hello, Kaon,” Donali tried, unable to contain his growing excitement.

  Kaon turned to look at him, and his eyes narrowed. He warbled something else, but Donali wasn’t wearing a translator. Then the alien noticed that he was strapped down, and he raised his chin to his chest and saw that he was human. Kaon hissed, and turned back to Donali with a hateful glare. “Where am I? What have you done to me?” he demanded, now speaking in Imperial Versal.

  Donali blinked and his red artificial eye winked in tandem. “You can speak our language?” He shook his head incredulously, still trying to catch up with everything. This confirmed Hoff’s suspicions. Humans and Sythians had met before, and they were both doing the same thing—cloning themselves to live forever.

  “Answer my questions, human,” Kaon demanded.

  “You’re on board my corvette, and I put your implant in a human body to see how it would react. . . .” Donali shook his head. “I never imagined this.”

  Kaon hissed again. “So I am your experiment? You will pay for this, human.”

  Donali raised one eyebrow. “I don’t see how.”

  Kaon closed his eyes and Donali watched his lips move. He heard whispers coming out, but they were alien warbles, not human speech. “What are you doing?” he asked, frowning.

  Kaon turned to him with a smile. “You will sssee.”

  Donali cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. A moment later, the ship shuddered, and Kaon’s smile broadened.

  “No,” Donali said.

  “Yess,” Kaon whispered.

  Donali ran back to the bridge. He arrived, out of breath and panting, just a few seconds later, but he was too late. The entire forward viewport was filled with the shining hull of a Sythian warship. It was bigger than any ship he’d ever seen, and it wasn’t firing on him—it was drawing him toward it with some kind of grav gun.

  “How?!” Donali demanded as he sat down at the controls and powered up the drives. He’d made ten jumps! They couldn’t have followed him through all of that.

  Then he noticed that the grid was painted with the yellow vector of a tachyon trace. That radiation trace was just over an hour old, meaning Kaon’s implant must have called for help almost the instant it had been inserted in the clone’s brain. For the Sythians to be here now, they had to have been very close when they’d received Kaon’s transmission.

  Donali pushed the throttle up past the stops into overdrive, trying to escape the grav gun which had seized his ship . . . but nothing happened. The ship wouldn’t turn, and his drives just pushed him faster toward the alien cruiser. He shut down the drives with a scowl and considered his options.

  There weren’t any. He could armor up and go down fighting, or he could let the Sythians capture him. What kind of choices were those? Donali settled for the dubious third option of holding Kaon ransom in the med bay.

  * * *

  Less than half an hour later, when Gors burst into the med bay in their glossy black armor, Donali held Kaon at gunpoint and told them not to take another step. Kaon smiled and warbled something. At that the Gors shot them both.

  In the dark, Donali had no concept of time. His artificial eye helped him to see and pick out details of his surroundings which a regular human wouldn’t be able to observe, but all he saw were the usual glossy black walls and floor of a Sythian ship. He also noticed strange, hulking shadows moving around him. His brain made no sense of it, however, and it all felt like a strange and terrifying dream. All he knew was that he wasn’t dead. The Sythians had kept him alive. But why?

  At last, he was awake and conscious enough to think clearly, but his thoughts were different now. He knew where he was and why. He wasn’t frightened. And the cold, unfeeling darkness was a comfort to him—a touch of home.

  A moment later a dim light snapped on, and now Donali could see better. He tried to sit up and found that he could. There was no need to restrain him. He looked around and saw more beds like the one where he lay, each of them occupied by another man or woman of his species. There were thousands of them, and the room where they lay was so large that Donali couldn’t even see the walls or ceiling, just endless rows of humans, disappearing to all sides of him.

  A voice spoke into the darkness, warbling at him in a language which he now knew. “Arise,” it said. Donali d
id as he was told and stood up. “Walk toward the light.”

  A yellow light appeared in the distance, shining through the darkness, and Donali strode toward it, his footsteps eager, driven and purposeful.

  When he reached that light, he found someone waiting for him. It was High Lord Kaon. Donali recognized him by the subtle pattern of lavender freckles on his translucent skin, as well as by the gills in the sides of his neck.

  “My lord,” Donali warbled.

  “We have a special purpose for you, Lenon Donali.”

  “I await the honor of hearing it.”

  “You will meet the admiral as planned in your ship, at the entrance of Dark Space.”

  “As you wish, my lord.”

  “You will get close to him.”

  “Yess—” Donali hissed, anticipating the rest of his mission. “—and kill him!”

  “No. You will capture him and bring him to us. We will use him to find the lost sector of humans, and then we will kill him.”

  Donali tried to hide his disappointment, but he would do as he was told. “It will be done, my lord.”

  “Come with me.”

  KEEP IN TOUCH

  SUBSCRIBE to the Dark Space Mailing List and Stay Informed about the Series!

  http://files.JasperTscott.com/darkspace.htm

  Follow me on Twitter:

  @JasperTscott

  Look me up on Facebook:

  Jasper T. Scott

  Check out my website:

  www.JasperTscott.com

  Or send me an e-mail:

  JasperTscott@gmail.com

  OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES