Ethan’s lips formed a thin, determined line as the answer came to him. It seemed to shine bright and clear in his mind. He’d waited, because she would have done the same for him, and because for all he knew she was out there somewhere, alive and waiting still.
* * *
Deck Commander Loba Caldin sat in her quarters—which until recently had been the overlord’s quarters—aboard the Defiant. Her dark blue eyes stared out the broad viewport and into space. It had been more than a day since they’d salvaged fuel and components from the Defiant to give the Rescue a chance to reach Obsidian Station. The corvette should have arrived by now, but without SLS gates and the associated network of comm relays which had once made up the galaxy-wide commnet, there was no way to communicate across vast, interstellar distances. They would have to wait patiently, for at least another day, before the Rescue might return with help. Caldin forced herself to be positive. They would make it; they would return; and this wasn’t the end.
It was, however, the end of something else. Now that the overlord had been discovered as a holoskinner, the Imperium was finally undone. It had survived the Sythians, but it wouldn’t survive this. This deception brought into question everything that had happened—both before and after the exodus. How long had the imposter been in power? How had he come to be in power? How many decisions had he made which he was both unqualified and unauthorized to make? Had his bad decisions been what had led to the destruction and unraveling of a galaxy-wide Imperium? Had he somehow doomed the Valiant to the virus which had run rampant on the ship, killing countless thousands of fleet officers?
And those weren’t the only mysteries surrounding Supreme Overlord Altarian Dominic’s imposter. Upon reviewing security holos from the brig with her confidant and lover, Corpsman Terl, she’d discovered that Captain Adan Reese was the imposter’s son, and that Dr. Kurlin Vastra, who was the engineer of the virus which had ravaged the Valiant, seemed to know them both personally. Had they all been co-conspirators with the crime lord Alec Brondi?
But that didn’t make sense, since they had both fought Brondi and run from him. There was some kind of plot afoot—more likely several plots—but it was all a tangled web of lies, and the more Caldin tried to unravel it, the less sense it made. She could sit here all day asking questions, each one more disturbing than the last, but there would be no reliable answers until they could get to Obsidian Station and subject the prisoners to a mind probe. Until that time, she would have to be patient. . . .
Caldin gritted her teeth and played connect the dots with the stars, but every time she blinked, the hateful face of the imposter swam before her eyes. She shut her eyes and tried to push him out of her head, but then she saw the pale faces of dead officers go dancing by in a haunting parade, their eyes all dark and accusing. Tens of thousands had died on the Valiant. Hundreds of them had been her friends—some as close as family. She was sure the imposter overlord was at the bottom of it, and that made her see red.
Suddenly Caldin rose to her feet. She’d had enough of being patient. If nothing else, beating some answers out of the erstwhile overlord would give her an outlet for her frustration, and maybe, just maybe—a modicum of justice for the dead.
* * *
Alara Vastra stared unblinkingly at the jagged, misshapen debris of Obsidian Station as they tumbled and turned, slow-dancing through space. Besides the stars, there were no lights shining through that carbon-scored mess of twisted alloy, and apart from the perpetual tumbling of the debris, there was no movement either—nothing that could be considered purposeful or alive.
Beside her, at the Rescue’s other pilot control station, Gina Giord tried the comm again. “This is the ISSF Light Corvette, Rescue, to any survivors aboard Obsidian Station, please acknowledge.”
Gina waited with the comms open, but all they heard was static. Eventually she sighed and shook her head. “There’s not a whisper of life. We should probably try to land on one of the bigger pieces of the station—see if we can get aboard for salvage.”
“It’s going to be hard to get any closer without debris hitting us,” Alara said. Even as she said that, two of the larger pieces of the station collided, generating a brief shower of sparks and pulverized duranium before flying apart.
Petty Officer Cobrale Delayn looked up from the engineering station and shook his head. He reached up to rub tired eyes and run a hand through his stubbly gray hair. “What’s the point? If there were any fuel aboard, it would have blown up with the station.”
Gina threw up her hands. “All right, let’s just sit here and wait for a rescue, then! Oh right—that’s our job. We picked a great name for this bucket.” She shook her head. “We came all this way to get help, but there’s no one here and we’re out of fuel, so we may as well go frek ours—”
Gina cut herself off as space began to ripple strangely above them.
“What the . . .”Alara began, looking up.
And then the rippling stopped and a Sythian cruiser appeared in its place.
“Evasive action!” Alara yelled.
Gina’s hands were already on the controls, diving and rolling out from under the enemy ship to put the debris field between them and it.
“As if we weren’t already frekked!” Gina said. “Tova, tell them to stand down! We’re friends!”
“That cruiser must have been waiting to trap any ships still en route to the station . . .” Delayn put in.
Alara gazed at the alien cruiser on the gravidar display. It wasn’t opening fire.
An alien warbling interrupted them, and then the translator in Alara’s ear said, “I cannot tell them anything. I sense no one aboard.”
Everyone turned to the giant alien sitting at the oversized gravidar station. Tova’s black armor gleamed in the low light of the bridge, and the red eyes of her helmet glowed as she stared back at them.
“Wait, what did you say?” Gina asked.
“I sense no one aboard.”
Alara shook her head. “You mean that ship is empty?”
“If it’s empty, how did it de-cloak?” Gina said.
Alara traded glances with Gina, and Delayn finished their unspoken thoughts. “Sythians.” They didn’t have the telepathic abilities of the Gors, so Tova wouldn’t be able to sense them.
“Sounds like it,” Gina replied.
“So why aren’t they firing on us?” Alara asked.
Before any of them could hazard a guess, the comms crackled with an answer. “Rescue, this is the FFR vessel, Interloper, please state your business here.”
Alara gaped at Gina. “That was a human voice.”
Gina blinked and slowly shook her head. “What are our guys doing aboard a Sythian Cruiser?”
* * *
Thwack!
Caldin’s fist hit Ethan’s already battered face. She wore padded black combat gloves, but the padding was for her, not for him. One of Ethan’s eyes had swollen shut, and his lips were split and bleeding in several places.
“Who are you!” the commander demanded. Her chest heaved from the exertion and her eyes flashed with rage.
Ethan’s head lolled, and his neck cracked painfully. Two burly men held him up by his arms with bruising force, but he barely noticed the pain of their dirty fingernails digging into his skin. The more immediate throbbing from Caldin’s blows took his full attention.
“Still not talking?” she demanded.
Whuff—the air left his lungs in a rush as Caldin knocked the wind out of him with another blow. Ethan groaned and spat blood on her shiny black boots.
“He already told you, Caldin!” Atton said. He was in the cell just across the aisle, but Ethan heard him as though from a great distance. “He’s just an ex-con from Dark Space! Leave him alone.”
“So how did a lowly ex-con become Supreme Overlord of the Imperium?”
Atton sighed. “It’s a long story.”
“Really? Start talking!”
“You going to beat me senseless, too? I’m not
sure a mind probe will be much use to you if we’re both already brain dead.”
Ethan wanted to tell Atton to shut up and stop goading her, but he couldn’t open his mouth. He wondered if that meant his jaw was broken, or if his tongue had simply swollen too much to move—he’d bitten it several times as Caldin had pummeled his face. He tried to lift his head to see where Caldin had gone, but then the guards holding him let him go, and he fell to the deck with a bone-jarring thud.
Ethan just lay there, sprawled out on his back, waiting to hear the meaty smack of Caldin’s fist against Atton’s face.
“You’re very lucky, Mr. Reese, that I’m a patient woman.”
Ethan heard his cell door slide shut with a squeal, and the next thing he heard was booted feet receding down the hall. A door swished open and shut, and then came a ringing silence. Ethan could barely hear in one ear. He wondered if that was because blood had run into it and blocked it, or because Caldin had beat him so badly that she’d burst his eardrum.
“Are you all right?”
Ethan had to fight the dreamy haze swirling inside of his head to focus on that voice. It was his son. He tried again to speak, but this time a sharp pain lanced through his jaw, stopping him. Definitely broken, he thought.
“Frek . . .” Atton muttered. “She almost killed you!”
“You think she’ll send a medic?” Another voice. Ethan thought it might be Doctor Kurlin. He was encouraged that he could still make some sense of the world around him, even with just one blurry eye and one ringing ear. Maybe that meant he didn’t have a concussion.
“She’d better do something if she wants him to live long enough to stand trial. Hoi! Can we get a medic down here? Caldin! If you want to get any answers out of us, you’d better keep us alive!”
Ethan wanted to tell them that he was okay, but his one good eye drifted shut and his battered body relaxed in sleep.
* * *
Gina Giord finished explaining who they were and why they’d come to Obsidian Station to Captain Adram of the Interloper. They waited through a tense silence for the captain to respond. When that silence dragged on too long, Gina keyed the comm again.
“Interloper, do you copy?”
“We copy, Rescue. Please stand by.”
“Acknowledged . . . standing by . . .” Gina replied with a furrowed brow.
Alara frowned at the comm display, reading the transcript of their conversation for a recap. A minute later she shook her head and looked up at Gina. “Do you think they believe us?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“The overlord was a holoskinner. A notorious crime lord set a devastating virus loose on the ISSF’s flagship and he’s now controlling both that ship and likely all of Dark Space, while we’re out here looking for help so we can rescue the handful of survivors from that attack.”
“Hmmm.”
“And after all that, no response—just, we copy. Stand by—like they’re still deciding what to think of us.”
“Maybe they’re trying to figure out how to bring us aboard?” Delayn suggested. “It can’t be easy to operate a Sythian cruiser. They use mental control systems for everything, and half the time we don’t know what thought patterns will activate a given system.”
“Well, there’s another mystery for you—” Gina said. “—and I still haven’t heard an answer. What are our boys doing joyriding in a Sythian Cruiser?”
“Maybe it isss more comfortable,” Tova hissed.
Gina turned to glare at her. They couldn’t see the alien’s expression behind her helmet, so it was hard to decide if her comment was an attempt at humor—assuming Gors had a sense of humor.
The comm crackled once more. “Rescue, we’ve detected a Gor aboard your ship.”
Gina leaned forward to speak into the comms once more. “That’s correct, Interloper, but she’s friendly.”
Another long pause.
“The admiral doesn’t allow skull faces aboard his ships.”
All eyes turned to Tova, but thankfully she didn’t react to the racial slur.
Gina sighed loudly. “We’ve come a long way, Interloper, and we have people counting on us, so time is short. Don’t you think you could bend the rules, just this once?”
“She’ll have to stay on the corvette. If you agree, we’ll bring you aboard.”
Gina scowled. “Agreed, Interloper.”
“Stand by for grav lock.”
The ship shuddered almost imperceptibly and Alara noticed their icon on the star map begin moving toward the larger icon of the Sythian cruiser. “I thought they were going to fire on us,” she said, looking up from the display.
Gina shrugged. “Not everyone’s as forgiving as Overlord Dom—” She cut herself off with a frown and left it at that.
It was common knowledge that the overlord had been uncovered as a holoskinner and an imposter. Knowing that, it was hard not to question his judgment in forming an alliance with the Gors.
“What do you think will happen now that the overlord’s not in power anymore?” Delayn asked.
Gina shrugged. “I guess the fleet will take over with Admiral Heston in command.”
“A military dictatorship,” Alara said.
“Better than an illegitimate civilian one.”
Alara noticed Tova watching them as they discussed the situation, and she wondered how much the alien understood about human politics. Was Tova authorized to know about the current instability in the human government? Technically, Admiral Heston wasn’t a part of the alliance between humans and Gors, so if he took over both human factions, that alliance would be in jeopardy. If the Gors realized that, then they might take preemptive measures.
Alara’s mind turned back to the fate of the Imperium and her thoughts began boiling with questions as she tried to reconcile her private knowledge that the man she remembered as her friend and business partner, a man named Ethan Ortane, was the imposter overlord. How could he have been flying with her and somehow also ruling the Imperium at the same time? She decided that didn’t make any sense, so he must have come into the position recently. But how and why had he come to impersonate Overlord Dominic? Had Ethan been working with Brondi to take over the Valiant and destabilize the Imperium, and if so, did that make Ethan her enemy or her friend? She still remembered growing up in Brondi’s care with all of the other orphans he’d rescued. The crime lord was the only one who’d ever really cared about her—the only one who’d ever shown an interest in her life. . . .
Alara had to remind herself that those feelings of gratitude came from memories of a life that didn’t exist. Everyone said that Brondi was their enemy and he had implanted her with a slave chip to turn her into a playgirl for one of his pleasure palaces, but if Ethan was on his side . . .
Alara shook her head. She couldn’t remember! She didn’t know what was real anymore. The only memory she could easily recall that apparently was real was of a man with green eyes and a rugged, sorrow-lined face. Ethan. She often dreamed about him and woke up with his face still trapped in her mind’s eye.
Alara had wondered if her dreams of him were real, or just another phantom from a life that had never existed, but then, the night before their rescue mission, Commander Caldin had suggested she go say goodbye to her father, Dr. Kurlin Vastra—a man who she couldn’t remember at all—and that was when she’d seen him, Ethan Ortane, the man from her dreams brought to life. The same man who said he loved her in those dreams was now sitting in prison, scheduled for a mind probe. Even if the probe didn’t kill him, his crimes would be more than enough to sentence him to death. The only man she could remember having loved was about to be put to death. As if all of that weren’t already enough, the last thing Ethan had said to her before she’d left the Defiant had been: My heart still belongs to my wife.
He was married. Somehow she’d remembered him and how she felt about him, but she hadn’t remembered that he was in love with and married to someone else. How could she have been so stupid in
her previous life? A painful lump rose in her throat, and she shook her head.
“Hoi,” Delayn said, interrupting the silence on the bridge. “We have something to celebrate.” The old engineer waited for everyone’s attention, and then he went on, “The Rescue has been rescued!”
“Ha ha,” Gina laughed drily. “You’ve spent too much time with bots, Delayn. You’re starting to sound like one.”
“At least I have friends,” Delayn replied.
Gina just snorted and shook her head.
The Rescue has been rescued. . . . Alara thought, and she wondered if that really mattered to her anymore.
What did she have to go back to?
* * *
Commander Caldin returned to her quarters even more furious than when she had left. Ethan had given her precious few answers, despite the beating he’d taken. If he really was an ex-con, exiled to Dark Space before the war, then he was probably used to taking that kind of punishment.
She would have tried her luck with his son or even the old doctor, but as much as she hated to admit it, the boy was right—it would be better to wait for the mind probe before she beat them all senseless.
Caldin walked up to her bed and gazed down on it longingly. She was tired, but too agitated and restless to sleep. She needed to unwind, to defuse her stress. Her thoughts turned to Corpsman Terl. She’d left him on the brig to keep an eye on the prisoners for a while. Now she regretted that decision, wishing she’d instead asked him to come spend the night with her.
As she gazed down on the bed, the comm piece in her ear began trilling and a computerized voice said, “Incoming call from the brig.”
Caldin touched her ear to receive the call. “Hello?”
“Commander, the prisoners are askin’ for a medic.” It was Terl. Caldin smiled, grateful to hear his voice. He went on, “The imposter looks to be unconscious. What do you want to do, ma’am?”
“Go ahead, call the med bay, meanwhile you can perform first aid if necessary.”
“If it were up to me, ma’am, I’d just space him out the airlock. No one would blame you.”
“Perhaps they wouldn’t, but we need him—if not exactly intact, then at least lucid enough to endure the probe. Keep an eye on him, though—just in case he’s faking.”
Dark Space- The Complete Series Page 48