The Defiant was derelict.
Chapter 4
Tova sat aboard the Rescue, with her eyes closed and her hands clasped in her lap. The humans were adamant that she not be allowed aboard their captured cruiser, so she waited patiently. For her, patience came easily when she needed it. Every good hunter knew the value of patience. She didn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed aboard, since the ship was originally Gor-crewed, anyway, but Tova had agreed to respect their wishes—for now. It was common knowledge among the Gors that the one called Admiral Heston had not joined the alliance, and she had recently learned that he would soon be in charge of all humans everywhere. If that meant the end of the alliance, the Gors would be ready.
Tova heard the doors to the bridge swish open behind her and she turned to see the one called Gina come running in. Sensing that something was wrong, Tova rose to her feet.
“They’re going to be here any second, Tova!” Gina said. She sounded like she couldn’t breathe.
Tova watched the human woman lean heavily on the back of the pilot’s chair. “Who?” she asked.
“The crew of the Interloper! They’ve turned on us. They’re not going to rescue the Defiant. I need . . .” Gina gasped for air. “There are Sythians here, Tova! I need you to contact them. Tell them to stop firing on the Defiant!”
“I cannot give orders to Sythians,” Tova said, warbling in her language.
Gina’s translator communicated the gist of that a moment later, and she shook her head. “No, I mean Gors—there are Gors here. I don’t know if there are Sythians, too . . . just try it, Tova!”
Tova hissed quietly, but she did as the human woman asked and closed her eyes to communicate with any others who might be out there. She found them almost immediately—thousands were in range, some closer than others. She saw the network clearly in her mind’s eye as three clusters of red dots, each cluster connected with intermittently streaming lines of communication that flashed brightly as the Gors talked among themselves. Tova moved toward the nearest cluster and sent out a query with her thoughts, searching for the one in charge. That query brought her to the top of the cluster, and she had to wait there a moment while one of the subordinate Gors answered her. Tova asked them to stand down, but the subordinate Gor responded by demanding to know who she was and what authority she had to make such a request. Tova allowed him to know her name and status as a praetor of her people, and she was immediately sent to the top of the cluster. Now she spoke with the one in charge of the ship. Again, the same question—why should they stand down? Tova explained that the alliance was in danger. Something had happened to destabilize the human government, and now it was more important than ever that they gain the admiral’s trust, because he stood poised to take command of the entire human remnant. Without his consent, the alliance could be dissolved all together and the Gors might be massacred.
The one in charge hesitated, but at last he agreed. They would cripple their ships’ engines and bail out. That would mean yielding more of their vessels to the humans, and Hoff would have even more tools with which to reverse engineer Sythian technology. If they succeeded in doing that, they would have much less need for the Gors. They had made themselves useful by helping humans to develop their own cloaking devices, and by using their telepathy to sense their fellow Gors, even aboard cloaked enemy ships, enabling them to serve as living cloak detectors. That deal had worked well to keep humans dependent on them, but Admiral Heston had still refused to join the alliance, and given enough time, he would find his own solutions to those problems.
Tova hissed with displeasure, thinking that this latest gesture of goodwill had better be enough for the stubborn admiral. She broke her telepathic connection and opened her eyes. That was when she noticed the blinding crackle of sparks coming from the bridge doors. Gina stood covering the doors with her sidearm drawn.
Someone was trying to break through.
“They agree to stand down,” Tova said. “They disable their ships and bail out. You need rescue them.
Gina turned to her with wide eyes. “They’re surrendering? I could kiss you, Tova!”
“Do not.”
“Wait—you said they’re bailing out. How many are there?”
“More than a thousand.”
“Tova, we don’t have room for that many Gors! The Interloper isn’t even half the size of the Defiant!”
Tova hissed again. “Then you need make room for them.”
Gina sighed. “We’ll have to talk to the Captain about it.” Tova watched as the human woman touched her ear and said, “Interloper, this is Second Lieutenant Gina Giord from the Defiant—you can cancel your jump. We’ve just secured three more Sythian cruisers for your fleet, but there’s a catch . . . we’ve got over a thousand Gors gone EVA, and they need a pick up before their air runs out.”
* * *
The corridors were dark, barely lit by the dim, red emergency lights. Brondi and the other zephyrs illuminated that darkness in bright swaths with their floodlights. The atmosphere was tense, no one speaking. Brondi listened in silence to his breath reverberating inside his helmet, to the thudding of his squad’s footsteps, and to the whirring of servos and motors in the zephyrs’ legs. Each squad was made up of eight assault mechs, and dozens of squads were now striding through the ship on the way to Valiant’s reactor core. Brondi hoped that when they reached the core they wouldn’t find it ruined beyond repair. He gritted his teeth, furious that the alien saboteurs had made such a nuisance of themselves.
This wasn’t how things were meant to go.
Up ahead, the squad leader, Sergeant Grovin Gibbs, held up a hand for them to stop as he reached a junction where the corridor split into three divergent branches. Brondi heard his comms crackle as he checked in with the others to see which way they’d gone.
“Hunter One here,” one of the other squad leaders replied. “We went left. The Lokis went right. The middle’s for you and the rest of the Alphas, sir.”
“Roger that,” Gibbs replied. “Have you found any more mines?”
“Not since the rail tunnels.”
“Hmmm, keep an eye on your scopes.”
They started down the middle corridor. All of the available access ways to the reactor were being swept, and teams had been posted at bulkheads along the way to create a multi-layer cordon which would hopefully be enough to catch their saboteur if he or she were still around, but there were no guarantees it would work—not when their enemy was cloaked.
After travelling through the ship for another ten minutes, leaving three teams of two in their wake, their squad of eight was down to just two—Brondi and Sergeant Gorvin Gibbs. Now the reactor room lay dead ahead, and reports were filtering in from the other two point squads that they were almost there, too.
“So far so good,” Gibbs said.
“Don’t jinx us,” Brondi replied.
They reached the doors of the reactor room and waited there for the point teams from Hunter and Loki squads to arrive. Now they were six. Gibbs motioned to the doors, and one of the Lokis stepped forward to open them. The heavy doors opened with an ominous boom as they retracted into the bulkheads. A large, shadowy chamber lay beyond, and here not even the emergency lights were working. They crept inside the reactor room in single file and hurried around the perimeter of the circular chamber. Brondi swept his floodlights up to the distant transpiranium dome above the dymium reactor core. Ordinarily both the core and the dome would be shielded, and the dome could be seen faintly glowing with the energy of those shields, but right now all Brondi could see was a maze of catwalks crisscrossing above the reactor core from the over fifty decks above theirs.
Brondi turned from gazing at the ceiling just as the sergeant’s voice crackled over his comms. “The core seems intact, but the main power conduits have been ripped wide open. Area seems clear. Should we call in the greasers to fix the damage?”
“Go ahead,” Brondi replied.
An abrupt noise shattered the s
ilence inside the reactor room. Brondi whirled toward the sound, and one of the other soldiers called out, “Hoi!”
It had come from the core. “What was that?” Brondi demanded, already stomping toward the dormant reactor. Next came a soft whirring noise which rapidly grew in pitch and volume.
Brondi recognized that as the reactor coming to life and he frowned. “Did someone turn it back on?”
Before anyone could answer, the reactor room doors shut with a resounding boom. Everyone turned to look at them.
“Hoi, what the frek?! Someone shut us in here!” Hunter One said.
Radiation leaking from the core set off an alarm in Brondi’s zephyr almost immediately, and it rang out even above the rising whir of the reactor. Brondi gritted his teeth and ran for the doors. He tried to open them, only to hear a warning bleep, followed by a computerized voice which said, “Access Denied. Radiation leak detected.”
Sergeant Gibbs appeared beside him. “What’s going on?” he asked, sounding out of breath.
“We’re locked in!” Brondi roared. He whirled around to see the other four men who’d entered the reactor room with him standing behind him, all of them staring at him expectantly. “What are you all standing around for? Shut it down!”
Gibbs turned and ran for the control console near the base of the reactor core. Brondi hurried after him. Once there, Gibbs tried to power up the console, but nothing happened.
“What’s wrong?” Brondi asked.
Gibbs shook his head. “It doesn’t have power.”
“You’re telling me that the reactor is on, and we’re about to be baked alive by the energy pouring out of it, but there’s no power to the control console?”
Gibbs shrugged and shook his head.
“Get out of my way!” Brondi roared, giving Gibbs a shove and sending him sprawling to the deck with a noisy clatter of armor. Brondi ignored him as he tried to power up the console, but the result was the same. He glanced up at the dark transpiranium dome over their heads. Still absent was the faint blue glow of the reactor’s outer shields, which meant his entire crew was going to be baked alive if they didn’t either shut the reactor down or get the shields up soon.
Activating his comms, Brondi put a call through to the bridge.
A young woman answered, “Brondi!”
Brondi could barely hear her over the whirring of the dymium core and the droning of his zephyr’s radiation alarm. “I need you to shut down the main reactor!” he said.
“We don’t have any control from up here! Have you tried the manual overrides?”
One of the Lokis began pounding on the doors, demanding to be let out.
Of course! The manual overrides! Without bothering to reply, Brondi ran around the dymium core, searching for the manual controls. He found the control box on the opposite side of the core, and quickly fumbled with the latch to open it. The panel swung open, and Brondi couldn’t believe his eyes. The lever was sheared off at the base. A moment later he noticed the broken lever lying at his feet. “No!” he screamed, and kicked the handle across the deck. He began struggling with what was left of the lever, but it was twisted and the mechanism was jammed. Brondi strained with all of his zephyr’s augmented strength to force the damaged lever. A metallic groan came from the control box, and then the entire assembly tore free of its mounting and hit the deck with a thunk. Brondi stared at it incredulously.
We’re frekked, he thought.
* * *
Commander Loba Caldin leaned over the captain’s table coughing on the thick clouds of acrid smoke wafting through the bridge. IMS was out, main power was out, shields were down and offline, guns likewise. They were dead in space. Only the grav gun on Caldin’s equipment belt kept her feet rooted to the deck. “How long until we have the main reactor back on line?” she asked through another cough.
“Five minutes, maybe ten . . .” the engineering officer reported, shaking his head. Caldin eyed him through the shifting veils of smoke for a moment, watching his hands fly over the controls. He looked frazzled. She turned to the gravidar officer. “Any sign of another volley from our Sythian friends?”
“No, ma’am.”
“What are they playing at?” she wondered aloud, her eyes scanning the grid.
“Maybe they want to take us alive?” Deck Officer Gorvan suggested from the gunnery station.
“Perhaps. . . .” Caldin waited to see alien transports come flying out at them, but for long minutes nothing happened. “What are they waiting for?” Then another Sythian cruiser appeared on the grid.
“Contact!” gravidar said. “It’s the Interloper.”
“They’re hailing us,” comms reported next.
“Didn’t they leave already?” Caldin asked.
“Apparently not,” gravidar replied. “Hoi! The Gors are bailing out of their ships!”
“You mean they’re coming to board us?” Caldin asked, trying to see what the gravidar officer was talking about. She had to set the zoom on the grid to maximum in order to see it, and then she gasped. The Gors were literally bailing out of their ships.
“They’re going EVA, ma’am,” gravidar replied.
Caldin shook her head. “What in the nethers is going on? Put the Interloper on screen.”
A moment later the dark, glossy deck of the Interloper appeared, overlaid on the main viewport. Captain Adram’s vulturine face dominated their view with his long, hooked nose and arching brows. His wispy white hair and wrinkled skin put his age around seventy, but his dark eyes were still as lively and keen as a teenager’s. He must have received longevity treatments to keep him so full of energy at that age. “Commander,” Adram said in a strong voice. “It would appear that the skull faces have agreed to surrender.”
Caldin shook her head. “How did you get them to do that?”
“Not I—your Gor did it. Tova, I believe her name is.”
Caldin smiled grimly and sighed. “Just in time. We wouldn’t have survived another volley.”
“Indeed. Fortune smiles on you, Commander. I don’t know what Tova said to her crèche mates, but they agreed to bail out if we would rescue them. You’d better get on that now. We’ll rescue your crew as soon as you’ve picked up all the Gors. I’m told there are nearly 1,000 of them.”
Caldin’s smile faded. “Say again, Captain? How are we supposed to rescue them? We don’t even have power back yet.”
“The admiral would never allow so many Gors to board one of his ships, and even if he would, we don’t have room for them. Make your repairs and then pick up the Gors and stow them aboard the Defiant. When you’re done, we’ll rescue your people.”
“Can’t we all cram in together? How far is it to Ritan?”
“Eight hours. It’s not an option, Commander. The admiral is very strict about such things. Even having your one Gor aboard is pushing the limit with him. I wish I could bend the rules—really, I do. Pick them up or leave them—your choice—and then fly over here, but make it quick. We don’t know if there are more Sythian ships out there.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Interloper out.”
Caldin frowned and turned in a slow circle to see her bridge crew staring uncertainly at her. They were probably thinking the same thing as her. It would take them hours to recover that many Gors gone EVA, and in that time more Sythian ships could easily arrive and make the whole exercise pointless. Adram had already demonstrated his willingness to leave them to that fate, but Caldin couldn’t leave the Gors to die in space after they had surrendered. News would travel fast and the alliance would be over.
Time was of the essence.
Caldin clapped her hands. “What are you all staring at? Anyone with pilot’s training is with me. We’ve got rescue shuttles to fly. The rest of you stay where you are and coordinate our repairs! Comms—get me as many pilots as you can. I don’t care what their ratings are.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come on, people! You know the drill, it’s just like any
other emancipation mission, but this time we don’t have anyone shooting at us, so it should be a real moonwalk. Let’s get it done!”
Chapter 5
Ritan was an eternally dark and forbidding place, an exoplanet with no sun. The only light it received was the bloody red glow which came from its thousands of active volcanoes. Overhead, the distant stars were rarely even glimpsed through the thick clouds. The air was choked with ash from decimated fields of the world’s only flora—the fast-growing lumimoss, which grew up around volcanic vents and near geothermal pools. The world’s only fauna consisted of ice walkers which fed off the moss, rictans which fed off them, and giant bats which fed off both. The entire ecosystem had been created by scientists for some long-forgotten purpose, although Ritan had never been a world with very much purpose. Now, however, it was a strategic jewel. It was the closest thing to Noctune which the Gors had found outside of Sythian-occupied space, and as such, it was now the location of Overlord Dominic’s Gor Academy.
There were over 40,000 Gors already roaming the surface of the world, hunting rictans and ice walkers alike. Hoff didn’t think the fragile ecosystem could support that for very long, but the Gors were a temporary presence. Ritan was just a good place to put them where they wouldn’t be a drain on human resources while they were pushed a few thousand at a time through the academy. After that, they would go to fight alongside humans as starship crew and soldiers. The first few thousand graduates were already serving in the overlord’s fleet.
Hoff shuddered at the thought of it. In his estimation, the entire operation was a waste of time and resources. The Gors couldn’t be trusted, and even if they could, there were far more Gors on Ritan than all of humanity had ships to crew. They didn’t have the resources to field that many hungry aliens in any capacity. Hoff’s own fleet, which was certainly larger than Dominic’s, was crewed with just 75,000 men and women, and he needed at most another twenty thousand to crew his ships properly. At the moment, he had fully ten thousand stationed at Ritan to keep an eye on the Gors.
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