Ethan nodded and paced over to Kurlin, picking him up by his arms and dragging him toward the stasis tube. “I’m sorry, Doctor. If we make it, I’ll let you out as soon as I find a successor to the throne. If not, at least you’ll die in your sleep. That’s more than I can say for the rest of us.”
* * *
As Atton slept, he dreamed of a beautiful woman with bright violet eyes and flowing dark hair. She had the face of an angel. Angel. That was her name. She was an angel, but she didn’t act like it as she pushed him onto the bed and crawled over him on all fours to pin him down and kiss him roughly on the lips. He felt his pulse quickening as he savored the sweet taste of her lips on his. Atton closed his eyes to enjoy the sensation more fully, and he felt a warm stir of desire as she lowered her body on top of his. She ended the kiss and pulled away from him, leaving a stupid grin on his face. Then he opened his eyes—
And screamed.
He was gazing up at the black, skull-like helmet of a Gor soldier. Staring back at him were a pair of glowing red insect eyes. As he watched, the Gor’s helmet opened impossibly at the jaw, revealing a mouth full of glistening black teeth.
Atton awoke with the dying echoes of his scream still reverberating from the close walls of his quarters. He grimaced and checked the time on the alarm clock beside his bed, and then he groaned. It was just an hour before they were due to revert from SLS. He was never going to get back to sleep, so he may as well get up. He’d lain down on his bed thinking it would just be for a short nap, but he’d promptly succumbed to four straight hours of sleep. He was still wearing his comm piece in case someone needed to contact him, but no one had tried.
With another groan, Atton stretched and stood up from the bed. He’d slept in his flight suit, since there would be no time to pull it on if the squadron had to scramble. Atton’s stomach rumbled loudly and he frowned. At least he had time to get something to eat from the pilots’ mess. It was smaller, with fewer options than the main mess hall, but they were all on a yellow alert, meaning they couldn’t leave the flight deck. They needed to be able to scramble at a moment’s notice. Still, at this point, any food would taste good—possibly even the freeze-dried krak which passed for food aboard the Defiant.
There was one advantage to being the overlord, Atton thought as he headed for the door. I only ever ate fresh. But the Defiant didn’t have fresh, overlord or not, and Atton’s stomach was taking some time to adapt to freeze-dried foodstuffs—hence the intense rumblings he felt now. It had been nearly a day since he’d last braved the mess hall, and if he didn’t eat something soon, he was likely to pass out in his cockpit. You’d like that wouldn’t you, skull faces? Snippets of Atton’s nightmare flashed into his mind’s eye. The Gors weren’t their enemy, but it was hard to remember that when they had been the real face of the war. Apparently having Tova become a more visible presence aboard the Defiant was starting to get to him, too.
* * *
Alara awoke to the sound of an alarm clock buzzing in her ears. She rolled over with a groan and looked up at the low ceiling above her bunk, where the noise was coming from. Lying on the top bunk was Lieutenant Gina Giord. Alara didn’t know much about her, except that she was one of only two other female pilots in the squadron besides herself. Gina was an ill-tempered loner and she didn’t say much, so it was hard to get a conversation going, but maybe that was because she just hadn’t hit upon the right topic yet. Alara watched Gina jump down lithely from the top bunk and then take a moment to straighten the wrinkles in her flight suit. What would be a topic of common interest between the two of them? Alara wondered.
She remembered seeing Gina eyeing Captain Reese the night of the trainees’ celebration. Men, Alara thought with a smile, always a good topic when relating to women. It was a topic she was particularly familiar with.
“You know, Gina, I was talking to Captain Reese about you last night.” That was a lie, but it was a good way to introduce the topic.
Gina turned on her heel to glare at Alara. “About what?”
“Nothing bad, don’t worry.”
“I find it hard to believe he’d have anything good to say.”
“Why’s that? He seems nice.”
“Yeah, seems. He just wants to get into your pants, girlie. Don’t let the charm fool you. He frekked me over, and he’ll frek you over, too, but first he’ll just frek you.”
“You mean you two were . . .”
Gina turned around again as she waved her wrist over the scanner on her locker. “We were together, yes.”
“And? What’s he like?” Alara asked, leaning forward with a grin. “Does he look as good with his shirt off as I’m betting?”
Gina eyed her with obvious disgust. “You know, I wouldn’t be so eager to get frekked if I were you. A girl who looks like you might get passed halfway around the fleet if she doesn’t develop some self-respect.”
Alara’s grin faded and she sat back, her brow furrowing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that I’ve heard things. You shouldn’t make yourself so available. No matter what’s been done to you.”
From the way Gina held her gaze, it was obvious she was talking about the slave chip. Alara rubbed the side of her head self-consciously, and her eyes dropped to the deck.
Gina’s tone softened and she offered a slight smile. “Come on, let’s go get some breakfast, Alara.”
“It’s Kiddie,” she said, standing up.
Gina acknowledged that with a nod as she withdrew her sidearm from her locker.
“You’re taking a gun?” Alara asked, her eyes wide.
“You should take yours, too,” Gina replied while strapping it around her waist.
Alara looked hesitant. “What for?”
Gina looked up, her expression grim. “In case we get boarded.”
“I—I didn’t think of that . . .”
“No one does until it happens. Not that I suppose you’d see the frekkers even if they did board us. For all we know, there could be dozens of them on the Defiant right now.”
“Sythians? Or Gors?”
Gina closed the locker and turned to leave. “That’s the million sol question, isn’t it?”
“Wait, can’t we take a vaccucleanse first?”
Gina snorted. “I wish. We’re on yellow alert, greeny. That means we need to be able to scramble to our cockpits in five minutes or less. You think you can cut short a vaccucleanse, pull on your flight suit, run to the hangar, and be sitting sealed inside your cockpit in just five minutes?”
Alara hesitated.
“I didn’t think so. Let’s go.”
Alara caught up to her just as she opened the door to their room. “How long until the yellow alert is over?”
“Probably until we reach Obsidian Station.”
“What? We’re going to go days without a vaccucleanse?”
Gina chuckled. “Well, someone’s a princess, isn’t she? Yes, girlie, we’re all gonna stink together. Once you’ve been out here on enough wolf hunts, you get used to it, but I’ll tell you one thing—” Gina turned to her with a wry grin. “—you get to know who the sweaters are, and you learn to steer clear.”
Alara’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “How attractive. I might just develop some self-respect after all.”
Gina laughed and clapped her on the back. “That’s the spirit, greeny!”
They reached the pilot’s mess hall and strode in to see Guardian Twelve racing around the room with a pile of pancakes almost as tall as she was, giggling and screaming as she went, hounded by the entire squadron.
“Get her!”
“She took the whole frekkin’ lot of ‘em!”
“I’m gonna get you Stix!”
Stix. That was her call sign, so named because she was so skinny and petite that her arms and legs resembled sticks.
Captain Reese and Lieutenant Adari were sitting and eating to one side of the commotion, neither one of them doing anything to stop the pilots from roari
ng around the mess hall, knocking over tables and chairs in their hurry to get the stolen pancakes.
Alara smiled, but Gina scowled. “So much for unit discipline,” she said as they passed Captain Reese’s table.
He looked up with a frown. “Let them have their fun. There’s precious little of it to be had around here.”
“Yeah, you’re all about fun,” Gina said, shaking her head as she crossed over to the serving counter.
Alara followed her there, still smiling as she watched the racing pilots catch up with Stix. One of the larger men swooped her up under his arm like a grav ball and pancakes flew everywhere.
“Guess I’m going to have to eat dust and wash it down with spit!” Gina called out in a loud voice, but no one paid any attention to her. “Stupid frekkin’ greenies. . . .” she said as she stalked after them. “Gotta break ‘em in every time!”
When Gina caught up to the group of pilots she swore viciously at them, but they were having a hard time suppressing their laughter in the face of her vitriolic, so she gave up and went to pick up the lone pancake which had fallen on a table rather than the floor.
Alara watched all of that with a dreamy smile. For the first time in what seemed like forever, she felt like she was home. Something about the camaraderie and the childish antics struck a chord in her memories. Alara wasn’t sure whose memories, but it struck a chord all the same.
* * *
—THE YEAR 0 AE—
Destra pulled the flight yoke hard left and pushed it down. She watched the alien missiles arc slowly after her, but the reaction was delayed by several seconds. She realized that they were only tracking when she became visible on the Sythians’ scanners. That gave her hope. Destra began evasive maneuvering in earnest, pulling all the maneuvers she could think of with the strange flight controls. Whatever direction she pushed the flight yoke was the direction her ship would fly, but some directions were slower than others—such as moving vertically.
Destra pushed the yoke all the way forward for maximum thrust, tilted up, then slid and twisted it left, making a spiraling upward turn.
She heard the tick-tick-ticking of several overlapping missile lock warnings speed up suddenly and then slow down again as a stream of enemy missiles sailed straight by underneath her fighter. No sooner had those warnings faded than they started up again, and she heard alarms screeching out in warning as more spinning purple stars swarmed to take their place. Waves of missiles were pouring out from the approaching swarms of enemy fighters. Destra grimaced, wishing not for the first time that her husband were with her. He was a far better pilot. Destra forced her eyes to focus on the blinding barrage, trying to find a clear space between the missiles, but there were no such spaces. The enemy firing pattern was evenly spread and so thick that eventually it would have to snare her. They just had to get lucky once, and although their missiles weren’t tracking her perfectly, they were still tracking.
A few purple stars swelled in her forward view and she jerked the yoke to the opposite side, tilted it down, and began rolling her ship by twisting the flight controls in the same direction as her turn. The result was a downward spiral. Destra was rewarded for the sudden maneuver by seeing the purple stars go sailing by her with a narrow margin.
I need to target the gate! She thought desperately, but nothing happened. Clearly the ship didn’t always understand her thoughts. She tried again, this time focusing on the nearest of the two distant red specks which she’d identified as SLS gates on the coordinate grid.
Suddenly the contact she focused on grew brighter, and a red HUD indicator flashed in the air above her head. It wasn’t an arrow like she would have expected to see in a human ship, but rather a solid red circle. She followed that circle, moving in the direction it indicated, and mere seconds later she saw the gate appear in her view. The Sythian HUD bracketed it in red and displayed information about her target with a stream of unfamiliar symbols.
Good enough, she thought. It might have been useful to know where that gate went, but at the moment anywhere else but here would be an improvement. She roared toward the gate at full throttle, keeping half an eye on the grid to make sure the enemy wasn’t too close behind her. The enemy fighters belatedly reacted to her new heading and turned to follow her to the gate. Destra frowned. They’d just follow her through and she’d still have to face them on the other side. At least they won’t be accompanied by any larger ships.
That was something.
Destra watched the gate growing rapidly larger in her forward screens, and then she remembered that she needed to slow down to enter it. She didn’t have to stop maneuvering or warm up her own SLS drive the way she would if she were travelling off the space lanes, but she still couldn’t exceed the relatively slow SLS-safe entry velocity. Destra thought about how she could relay that concern to the ship so it could slow down to an appropriate speed, and suddenly she felt the g-force of acceleration shift from pressing her against the back of her flight chair, to yanking her against her flight restraints and trying to pluck her eyeballs out of her skull.
Destra immediately heard the tick-tick-ticking of more missile locks, and then multiple alarms sounded inside the airy cockpit, and she went evasive while trying desperately to keep heading toward the gate. The tick-tick-ticking sped up, slowed down, sped up, and slowed down as her ship faded in and out of scanners. She turned to look behind her and saw four purple stars racing toward her, picking up speed.
“Frek!” She turned back to the fore and redoubled her evasive maneuvering. Destra listened intently to the tempo of the missile lock warnings to know when the missiles were getting close, and at the last minute she jinked hard to starboard.
Destra was gratified to see three purple stars go spinning by to her port side. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, but then it seized in her chest.
Three missiles . . .
She was about to turn her head to see where the other one had gone when her ship rocked violently with an explosion. A warning siren sounded inside the cockpit and she heard an ominous hissing sound. Destra’s eyes flicked nervously around the airy cockpit. She hoped that noise wasn’t the sound of her atmosphere escaping. She wasn’t even wearing a flight suit.
But there wasn’t any time to worry about it. The gate was swelling before her, and in less than a minute she’d be through. Turning to cast a quick look over her shoulder to see how many enemy ships were following her, Destra counted five silvery specks against the blackness of space. Then she saw the nearest one begin stuttering bright purple streaks of light toward her. The first few hit with sizzling sounds, and Destra went into another barrel roll, leaving the enemy pulse lasers to flash out all around her cockpit in a steady stream of light. Every tenth blast hit, eliciting an angry sizzle from her shields. After ten such hits, she began to smell an acrid smoke drifting up into the cockpit, and she grimaced, wishing she could drop a few mines behind her.
A moment later there came a bright flash of light and then the lasers stopped racing past her cockpit. Destra turned to look behind her and saw the fading light of an explosion. She blinked. Apparently her fighter did have mines. Destra broke into a grin and spared a hand from the flight yoke to pat the dash. “Nice one, baby. Keep that up and we might just make it out of this.”
A few seconds later, the gate was the only thing she could see. Destra aimed for the center of it, and then let go of the flight controls, allowing her fighter to cruise through on a straight trajectory.
Space turned to star lines and then to the bright streaks of SLS, and Destra sat back with a shaky sigh. She stared out at the swirling brightness, trying to calm her racing heart. She’d made it. She’d actually made it! She’d still have to shake off whatever fighters pursued her and evade any enemy forces on the other side, but whatever lay ahead, at least she’d bought herself some time.
Now what? she wondered. She had no way of knowing how long she’d be in SLS, and she had a feeling that her fighter coul
dn’t tell her in a way that she’d understand, but it had to be at least an hour. No two systems were closer together than that. So she had some time to rest and recover.
Recover . . .
Suddenly Destra’s eyes flew wide as she remembered the man she’d left on the hover gurney just inside the entrance of the fighter. He hadn’t even been strapped down when she’d taken off, which meant he’d likely been bounced all over by now.
Destra bolted out of the flight chair and hurried down the stairs from the cockpit, bracing herself for what she might find.
Chapter 19
—THE YEAR 10 AE—
Ethan watched the SLS timer on the captain’s table begin counting down from 60 seconds. Tova assured them that she would be able to detect any cloaked Sythians between them and the gate to the Odaran System, but Ethan was still nervous. If there were a fleet of Sythians blocking that gate, it didn’t matter if they detected them or not, they wouldn’t be able to squeeze through the enemy blockade. The one advantage they had was that the Sythians didn’t know they were coming.
The timer reached 10 seconds and it became an audible countdown in a computerized voice. When it reached one, Ethan looked up to see the streaks and star lines of SLS fade to the bright points of stars.
“Tova! Tell me what you see out there!” he called out.
“Wait . . .” she hissed. The bridge crew seemed to collectively hold their breath as they waited to hear what she had to say.
Ethan turned to admire the view while he waited. The second moon of Forlax lay close below them, stretching out to the horizon with high wisps of white cirrus clouds, sparkling orange oceans, and rocky, red terrain. The color of the world gave the impression that it was hot, but it was in fact very cold, and the atmospheric pressure was so high that the methane in the air rained out as a liquid, forming the sparkling orange oceans. The gravity was also high and the atmosphere toxic, making the moon even more uninhabitable, but despite all that, there was a mother lode of dymium trapped beneath the surface. When Ethan had been exiled to Dark Space, the Imperium had been discussing ways to get at the dymium for the war effort, but they’d never had the time to act on that. Just visible over the horizon of the world was Forlax, the rocky, ringed giant for which the system was named. Peeking feebly between the rings and the planet was the distant red eye of the system’s primary, now giving a brief light to the surface of Forlax II before its larger cousin eclipsed the sun. Forlax was even more uninhabitable than its moons, but it was also fuel-rich.
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