Dark Space- The Complete Series

by Jasper T. Scott

  “I do not snore.”

  “Don’t make me get the flight recorder to prove it,” Alara replied.

  “Go ahead. You can’t prove what don’t exist. I’m as quiet as a—”

  “All right break it up, girlies!” Commander Donali said, striding over to them and clapping his hands to get their attention. “I’m going to take you lot to the flight deck myself. We’re expecting the admiral to land there in a few minutes, and I need to speak with him.” Donali turned to find Commander Caldin. She was busy talking to a nearby corpsman. “Come with us, Commander,” he said. “I’m sure the admiral is eager to meet the one time captain who discovered the Gors.” Caldin turned to look at him and he went on, “That stunt you pulled, trying a probe on one of them might have landed you in krak with the overlord, but it’s going to put you in the admiral’s good books. We don’t waste time blowin’ kisses to skull faces in this fleet.”

  “That sounds like a welcome change to me, sir,” Caldin replied as she walked up to them. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder at the corpsman she’d been speaking with, and nodded. He smiled back before turning away.

  What passed between them could have been nothing, but Alara had heard the rumors—almost everyone on the Defiant had hooked up during the long wait for a rescue. Something about near-certain death and boredom made people’s passions boil over. The only reason Alara hadn’t fallen prey to that herself was that she’d been the one doing the rescuing and the only man within light years had been Delayn. That was just as well. With her slave chip telling her to think and act like a pleasure palace playgirl named Angel, without even wanting to she would have slept with every man on board the Defiant before a rescue came.

  The one man she could be sure she really wanted was Ethan. There was something about him that she just couldn’t forget. Despite the wife he claimed to still be in love with, and regardless of his alleged crimes, Alara couldn’t forget about him. He haunted her dreams and her every waking thought. She ached for him, and deep down, she knew that he was destined to be hers.

  But he was also destined to be thrown out an airlock.

  She wanted to find the admiral and beg him for Ethan’s release. Whatever he’d been accused of, she loved him, and she knew he was a good man. He wasn’t guilty of anything deserving death. He couldn’t be! She couldn’t explain how she knew, but she did. Alara felt sick.

  “Fall in!” Master Commander Donali said, and with that, he marched them off to the flight deck. Alara bit her lip, wondering where Ethan was now and what he was doing.

  * * *

  Crew rushed back and forth across the flight deck. It was nothing like what Alara remembered from the badly-undermanned Defiant. There the flight deck had been just large enough for the cruiser’s original two squadrons of novas, and they’d barely had a handful of ground crew, but here she could see more than a dozen assault transports, and each of those transports looked large enough to hold half a dozen novas by itself. The hangar was enormous, and the ceiling very high to accommodate the heavy assault mechs which stood in their docking stations along the bulkheads. Those mechs towered between three and five stories high, sticking out high above the tops of the assault transports and milling squads of sentinels. They were monsters—the battleships of ground warfare—bristling with beam cannons, pulse lasers, ripper cannons, and missiles. Due to their size, they would never be useful for ship-to-ship actions, so they weren’t going on this mission. Heavy assault mechs were typically reserved for planetary assaults, and Alara was willing to bet these hadn’t seen any action since the exodus. The human survivors didn’t have the manpower or the resources to think about assaulting planets and taking them back from the Sythians.

  Squads of light assault mechs stomped across the deck in pairs, filing into the transports. The matte black zephyrs were little more than exaggerated suits of combat armor, and just small enough to traipse through most parts of the Valiant without getting stuck.

  The level of noise and activity in the hangar was overwhelming. Alara struggled to hear herself think above the thudding of mechanized footsteps, and the booming of loading ramps opening and closing. Adding to that was a near-constant crackle of announcements, blaring over the intercom to be heard over everything else.

  Abruptly, Commander Donali held up a hand for them to stop as a mechanized load lifter stomped across their path carrying a big plastiform crate. Alara watched the mech pass, craning her neck to look up at it. Once it was gone, Commander Donali started forward again, leading them across the deck to one of the smaller ships on the flight deck. Slightly shorter and much sleeker than the assault transports, it was a seraphim-class corvette. That ship sat on a landing pad close to the blue fuzz of the hangar’s shielded opening to space, as if the pilot had been in a hurry to set down or was just about to leave again.

  Standing at the foot of the boarding ramp was a squad of Zephyr light assault mechs with their bulky black helmets off and cradled in their hands. Slung across their backs were oversized plasma rifles and tanks of oxygen. Admiral Heston stood in front of the squad looking small beside their mechs, but somehow still intimidating as he ordered one of them to kneel before him. Alara frowned, wondering what was happening. When they stopped just a few paces away from the admiral, she heard what he was saying, and she recognized the man he was speaking with.

  “Repeat after me, if I step out of line you will kill me with the push of a button, sir.”

  The mech pilot repeated that phrase and Alara shook her head. It can’t be. . . . She listened to him repeat after the admiral, and she realized that his voice was a match, too. Alara studied that soldier’s face and downcast eyes more carefully, and suddenly her heart began thudding in her chest.

  “Good!” the admiral said. Turning to another mech pilot whose breastplate was decorated with more colorful bars than the others, he said, “Sergeant Dorian, if Private Ortane gets out of line, don’t hesitate to shoot him. You don’t need to wait for me to give the order.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, chip him!”

  “Wait!” Alara screamed.

  Commander Donali turned and gave Alara an incredulous look.

  “Who said that?” Admiral Heston boomed.

  “Second Lieutenant Alara Vastra, sir,” Donali answered with his brow furrowed all the way up to his receding hairline. “She’s one of the survivors from the Defiant. A pilot.”

  “I see,” the admiral said as he walked up to her. “Atten-tion!” Alara straightened, but the admiral frowned. “Forgotten how to salute? How in the netherworld did you get to lieutenant?”

  Alara gave a sloppy salute now that she was prompted. “Sorry, sir. I was drafted in a hurry, so I’m not used to fleet protocols.” Her gaze skipped to Ethan just in time to see him look up at her.

  “That’s no excuse. You’ve been aboard the Defiant for at least a week, so you should have learned by now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Care to explain your outburst, Lieutenant?”

  “I overheard you say you were going to chip that man over there.” Alara’s gaze turned to Ethan once more.

  “And what is that to you?”

  “I used to be his copilot, sir.”

  “Indeed? Are you aware that he’s a criminal?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know what he is being charged with?”

  “High treason, I believe, sir.”

  “That’s correct, so we have no choice but to have him chipped if he’s going to join the assault teams boarding the Valiant.”

  “Why would you let a prisoner fight for you?”

  “Because I believe in letting people make amends, and because I’d rather he die than one of my own men. A man with nothing to lose is a powerful adversary, and he tells me he has a score to settle with Alec Brondi, so that makes him even more dangerous. Now, I’m going to ask you again—what is it to you that Ethan Ortane be chipped?”

  “I . . .” Alara’s eye
s found Ethan’s once more. “I have feelings for him, sir.”

  “Romantic feelings?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “And does he return your sentiments?”

  “Leave the girl alone, Hoff,” Ethan said.

  The admiral turned to glare over his shoulder. “Shut up or I’ll put you back in the brig where you belong.” Turning back to Alara, he pressed, “Well?”

  “I don’t know, sir . . .” Alara replied, confused by the inquisition. “He told me he can’t return my feelings because he still loves his wife.”

  Hoff held her gaze for a long, uncomfortable moment until at last he began to nod. Turning back to Ethan and the assembled squad of mechs, he said, “Well, Private Ortane, it seems you weren’t lying about her at least. As for the rest of your story, we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”

  Ethan glared stonily back at the admiral, but said nothing.

  “Good. You’re learning the value of silence. It’s less incriminating. Chip him! I don’t have any more time to waste here.” With that, the squad medic stepped forward and raised an implanter to Ethan’s neck. Alara winced as it went in.

  Almost as an afterthought, the admiral turned to her. “Don’t worry, I’m only implanting him with a tracker. It’s not dangerous so long as he doesn’t do anything stupid that might endanger this mission or his squad.”

  Alara nodded mutely, and the admiral smiled thinly back before he turned and stalked away. She heard him and the XO begin speaking in hushed tones, but she wasn’t paying attention. Her focus was on Ethan as he rose from the deck and rolled his shoulders. Alara crossed the space between them as his squad began filing into an adjacent transport. She stopped in front of Ethan, looking tiny beside his zephyr. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at him.

  “For what?”

  “That they’re treating you this way. I know you’re not guilty.”

  Ethan smiled. “Alara, I was an ex-con when you met me, and I’m not innocent now, either.”

  Alara’s eyes flashed. “Shhh!”

  “It’s all right; it’s no secret.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to shout it from the rooftops!”

  “I’m not. I just want you to know that—”

  “Hoi!” someone called out. Alara turned to see Ethan’s sergeant standing and waving from the boarding ramp of a nearby transport. “Private, you need to get aboard now, or you’re going to be left behind! Double time!”

  “I’ll be right there, Sergeant,” Ethan called back. “Alara, I have to go.”

  “Don’t! They want you to die out there, Ethan. The admiral said so! No one is going to have your back.”

  “Maybe not, but someone’s got to have yours.”

  Alara frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Brondi’s on that ship, Alara. He’s the only one who can give us the code to deactivate your slave chip. Without that, you’ll be Angel the playgirl forever.”

  “I don’t care!” she said. “I’m not even sure I want my memory back.”

  Ethan shook his head. “There’s no use trying to talk me out of it.”

  “Damn you, you hard-headed . . . skriff! I love you! That’s one thing I can still remember. You can’t get yourself killed.”

  “If it brings you back, it’ll be worth it.”

  “Why? So I can remember you better, and mourn you more?”

  “Alara . . .”

  “Ethan!”

  “I love you, too, Kiddie. I know it’s not fair to say this to you now, but I think I’ve always loved you. . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I found her, Alara.”

  “Found who?” Alara’s thoughts ran in confusing circles—He loves me! He’s leaving! He’s going to die! He loves me! He’s leaving me?

  “My wife. She’s on the Tauron right now.”

  “What?” Alara blinked. She felt suddenly light-headed and she stumbled back a step. “How . . . when?”

  “It’s a long story. She’s been missing ever since the exodus, but I just found out that she’s been with Hoff all this time. She’s his wife now, Alara, and she’s probably the only reason I haven’t already been jettisoned out the nearest airlock with the rest of the garbage.”

  Alara shook her head. “I don’t understand; I thought—”

  “Private! I’m raising this ramp! Don’t make me go into combat without my laser bait.”

  “On my way, sir!” Ethan called back. Speaking to Alara, he said, “You don’t have to understand, just remember this: I’m sorry, and if I ever had the chance to make a life with you again, I wouldn’t waste it. Take care of yourself, Kiddie.” With that, he turned and sprinted up to the transport where his sergeant stood waiting.

  Alara stood numb and speechless, watching as Ethan jumped up to the top of the boarding ramp and turned to wave goodbye. She couldn’t even bring herself to wave back. The last thing she saw before the ramp closed was him turning and putting his helmet on.

  “Frek you, Ethan!” she finally managed, but he couldn’t hear. He wasn’t going to leave her like that. She would make him eat that heart-wrenching goodbye! She’d make sure he had that chance to make a life with her if it was the last thing she did, and then they’d see if he was telling the truth or not. Alara turned to look around the milling flight deck. “Gina! Where the frek are you?”

  “He doesn’t deserve you,” she said.

  Alara whirled around to see Gina standing behind her. “You were listening the whole time?”

  “Waiting for you,” she clarified. “We’ve got a bird to fly, remember?” Gina pointed to the side of another transport. “The XO doesn’t like the idea of a brevet flying solo, so he’s got you assigned as my copilot—always the copilot, never the pilot, hoi?” Gina winked.

  Alara shook her head. “I need your help.”

  “We don’t have time for any favors, Kiddie.”

  “I want us to fly that transport.” Alara turned and pointed to the one Ethan had disappeared into.

  Gina frowned. “That’s Assault Trans One. See the emblem on the side?”

  Alara noted the badge-shaped emblem, black with a jagged gold lightning bolt cutting through a glittering field of stars. She shook her head, not comprehending. “So? What’s that mean?”

  “They’re vanguards—the sentinels’ elite. They’re the first ones in and the last ones out.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Gina shrugged. “Just thought you’d like to know what you’re getting us into.”

  “Come on,” Alara set off at a jog.

  “Hoi—hold up! What’s your plan to replace the pilots already in there?” Gina asked, jogging up beside her. “They’re probably A class vets. We’re both class B. There’s no way they’ll let us switch with them just like that. Mission control won’t allow it either.”

  “I’ll think of something,” Alara said.

  When they got up to the blocky front of the shuttle, Alara ran around the nose until she could clearly see the pilot and copilot through the forward viewport. She began waving her arms in the air frantically. The pilot noticed her first and turned to his copilot to say something. Then the copilot looked up, saw her, and shook his head. Alara didn’t stop waving her arms until the pilot cracked the side hatch open and poked his head out to speak with her.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Thank the Immortals you saw me in time! You have a crack in your engine block, and I think I saw coolant leaking!”

  “Frek . . .” the pilot muttered. “Thanks, I’ll get it checked.”

  “You don’t have time for that! You’re with the vanguards, right?” Alara turned and pointed to the transport Gina had indicated was theirs. “Take ours. She hasn’t been loaded yet. I’ll make sure this one’s repaired and we’ll fly it in the last wave.”

  “All right. I suppose that’ll do. Let me just notify command about the switch.” A minute later he and his copilot started down the ladder from the open hatc
h. They reached the deck just as Alara heard the loading ramp at the back of the shuttle opening to let the vanguards out. The pilot sent her a thumbs-up before he and his copilot ran off. Alara smiled and bounded up the ladder to the cockpit. Panting heavily, she found the button marked raise/lower ramp and stabbed it just before it finished lowering. In the next instant, she heard the ship’s intercom crackle. “Hoi, what’s going on up there?” It was Ethan’s sergeant. “I thought we were switching shuttles, Dreggs?”

  “Ah, one moment please, we appear to be having some technical difficulties with the ramp controls.”

  Alara heard a hiss of static as the sergeant let out a frustrated sigh. “Don’t bother. We’ll climb out the airlocks.”

  “Negative, negative . . .” she said, thinking fast. “It looks like we’ve got an oxygen leak. Wouldn’t want a spark to flash cook you.”

  Gina quirked an eyebrow at her as she reached the top of the ladder. Oxygen leak? she mouthed.

  “The frek? Who is this?” the sergeant demanded.

  “Command says there’s no time to switch shuttles, Sergeant. You’re going to have to stay there. All systems are green now, so don’t worry. Must have been a faulty sensor.” Alara locked the ramp as soon as it closed, and then she locked all of the airlocks for good measure.

  “Hoi!” the sergeant said. She could hear someone banging in the background of the transmission. “Let us out!”

  Gina took a seat beside Alara and leaned forward to speak into the comm. “It’s all right, Sergeant—had some confusion on this end with my greeny copilot, but we’re good to go now.”

  “Where’s Lieutenant Dreggs? He said—”

  “Forget what he said. There’s no time to switch shuttles. We’re your new pilots for this mission. Please strap in and stand by for launch.” With that, Gina muted the intercom and shook her head. “You’re in my chair.”

  “Oh, right—sorry,” Alara said, standing up quickly.