Hoff caught Adram smirking at Caldin. “What are you smiling about, Adram?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Good, because you’re too busy to gloat. Make the supply transfer and then send for Captain Caldin and her crew. I also need you to oversee construction of a temporary docking station for the Interloper. The Tauron will have to carry her through SLS. We can’t afford to travel separately. Sythian SLS drives are too slow, and I don’t want any Gors or Sythians to follow us to Dark Space.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Of course, all of that trouble will be pointless if Dark Space has already been compromised. . . .” Hoff added, turning to glance up at Tova.
“At least you won’t be responsible for it, sir,” Caldin said.
“A small comfort,” Hoff replied, frowning deeply. “I suppose we’ll have to blame Overlord Dominic or his imposter for that.”
“I’m going to enjoy watching that man die in a probe chair,” Caldin said.
“One thing at a time,” Hoff replied.
“Humansss,” Tova hissed. “It is no wonder you were defeated so easily. You never stop fighting each other. Children of the Gettiz know better—we do not fight our crèche mates.”
Hoff shot Tova a glance as they turned to leave her cell block. “Who are the children of the Getties, Tova?”
She cocked her head. “We are.”
“And the Sythians?”
“Yesss . . . they are also children of the Gettiz.”
“Yet you are fighting them. Doesn’t that make what you said incorrect?” Hoff wondered if Tova had accidentally spoken the truth. If the Sythians didn’t exist, then her claim that children of the Getties know better than to fight each other would be correct.
Tova gave no reply, and Admiral Hoff allowed himself to count to ten before he ran out of patience and repeated his question. This time Tova did speak.
“Not all children remember where they came from.”
“Wise words.”
They came to Roan’s side of the brig. Hoff turned to Caldin and said. “Captain, go back up to the Tauron and get your crew together. Take Tova with you and wait until Adram sends for you.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned with a frown to the naked alien. “Come on, Tova.”
Hoff watched them leave, and he nodded in appreciation of the woman’s bravery. She hadn’t asked for an escort, which meant she either trusted the Gor not to rip her throat out, which he doubted, or else she was just itching for an excuse to shoot the alien in the head.
Once both of them were gone, Hoff turned to the pair of sentinels he’d brought with him. “Go get Roan. We’ll wait here.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hoff waited until both sentinels were out of earshot before turning to Captain Adram. “I need you to keep an eye on Caldin for me.”
“Sir?” he asked, his brows beetling. “Why would you want me to keep an eye on a superior officer?”
“Your demotion is just for show—although I am concerned by your recent desire to second guess all of my decisions. Ever since you came back from the Getties you’ve been unusually recalcitrant and pro-Gor. Did you make friends with them while you were there, Captain?”
“No, sir! I’m sorry that I’ve been questioning you a lot lately, sir. I’ll work on it.”
“You had better, lest your demotion become real.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want you to keep an eye on Caldin, because until we start probing suspects, we have no idea how far or deep this conspiracy with Alec Brondi’s virus and the holoskinning overlord goes. I don’t really think Caldin and her crew are involved, but I’m giving them—and the Gors for that matter—just enough slack on the proverbial leash to hang themselves.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hoff sighed. “Tova is right about one thing.”
“What’s that, sir?”
Hoff smiled sadly. “We never stop fighting each other.”
Adram smiled back. “Humans are a self-destructive species, aren’t they?”
The admiral sighed and shook his head. “One day we’re all going to realize that we’re the same, and then we’re going stop this pointless in-fighting.”
Adram hesitated and his brows beetled as if that particular bit of wisdom had struck a chord with him.
“You’re dismissed, Captain.”
Adram snapped out of it and gave a quick salute. “I’ll let you know when we’re ready.” With that, he turned to head in the direction that Captain Caldin had gone.
Hoff watched him go, wondering if Captain Adram was hiding any resentment over having his ship and his command temporarily taken from him. This mission would be a test for him as much as it would be for Caldin. They can keep an eye on each other, he thought.
The door behind the admiral swished open and he turned to see Roan being escorted out. Roan dwarfed the pair of sentinels, even in their bulky armor, making them look like toy soldiers.
“Hello, Roan,” Hoff said. “Are you ready to go home?”
“My home isss Noctune,” Roan hissed.
Hoff smiled thinly at the alien. “Not anymore.”
* * *
Ethan climbed awkwardly out of his docking station by suspending himself from the sides and swinging his legs down to the floor—which was actually the ceiling of the transport, since they’d crashed upside down.
“Report!” Sergeant Dorian ordered. “Anyone injured?”
“Negative, sir,” the man who’d been docked beside Ethan said for all of them. Dorian stopped in front of Ethan while the remainder of Aleph Squad swung down out of their docking stations. “Good—go see what’s out there, Laser Bait!”
Ethan didn’t bother to argue. He didn’t have any friends to stick up for him here. He poked his head out the hatch directly above their heads, in the floor of the transport, and looked around. Seeing nothing immediately dangerous, he climbed out and stood on the bottom of the shuttle. The hangar bay where they’d crash-landed was entirely empty except for them and a few damaged nova fighters. It was enormous, and Ethan felt like he was standing on the field of a massive grav ball stadium. It was designed to comfortably fit a 280-meter-long venture-class cruiser, meaning it had to be at least 300 meters deep.
Ethan heard the comm system inside his helmet crackle with, “Laser Bait, report!” He ignored Dorian as he looked around. The hangar was cloaked in deep shadows with only a handful of working glow panels flickering intermittently overhead. A blue wash of light spilled from the shields at the entrance and cast everything in cold, monochromatic tones. Ethan turned in a slow circle, noting the ruined concourse wall they’d crashed into. That was familiar. Brondi still hadn’t repaired the damage his troops had made when they’d fought their way past the half a dozen sentinels Atton had left guarding the Valiant. Thick carbon-scoring was in evidence on the bulkheads, and in places they were dented and carved with deep furrows. It looked as though a bomb had gone off inside the hangar.
Not a bomb—torpedoes. Ethan remembered now. When he and Gina had fought their way off the Valiant in Brondi’s corvette, they’d blown a hole in the side of the hangar rather than ask nicely for Brondi to lower the shields. Since then, the hole had obviously been repaired, but very little else had been fixed.
“Will someone go shoot Laser Bait for me? He’s not responding to comms. I think he’s gone AWOL already.”
Ethan smirked at the sergeant’s sarcasm. If the order had been serious, he wouldn’t have broadcast it so Ethan could hear. “All clear,” Ethan replied.
“About time!” A moment later the sergeant jumped straight up through the open hatch and landed on the shuttle with a boom. “We’ve got to get out of here before they see us on the holocorders.” Another boom sounded as a third Aleph jumped up onto the shuttle.
“I don’t think we need to worry about holocorders,” Ethan said.
“Why not?” Dorian demanded as a fourth zephyr jumped up. He turned to them and gestured to the two main entrances of the hangar. “Tra
cker, Rull’s-eye, set up a perimeter.” They nodded and jumped down to the deck.
Ethan watched them go stomping away. Another pair of zephyrs jumped up and Dorian told them to set up a command center. “That abandoned control tower looks like a good bet,” he said, pointing up to the roof of the hangar where a bank of broken viewports gazed down on them.
The next thing anyone heard was the sound of another hatch hissing open. Ethan and the sergeant turned to see someone in a black flight suit climbing out the side of the cockpit. At that, a new voice joined them on the comms. It was Gina.
“Hoi!” she said, waving an arm out the side of the transport. “I’ve got an injured pilot here!”
Ethan felt cold dread slide into his gut like a wedge of ice. Alara.
“Mender!” Sergeant Dorian called over the comms. “Get up to the cockpit.”
“Yes, sir.”
A moment later, the last two zephyrs landed on top of the transport. One of them was apparently Mender because he jogged over to the opposite side of the cockpit and climbed down the ladder to the hatch opposite the one which Gina was blocking.
Ethan stomped up to her. “Is Alara okay?” he asked.
She glared up at him. “What’s it to you?”
Before Ethan could answer, the sergeant came up behind him and said, “Private Ortane, leave the injured to Mender. Focus on the mission. Why don’t we have to worry about holocorders in here?”
Ethan turned to Dorian with a frustrated hiss. “We don’t have to worry because when Gina and I shot out of here like a rictan on fire, we didn’t leave enough working pieces of a holocorder to spot a supernova, let alone a few insignificant zephyrs. This is probably the only part of the ship where they won’t be able to see us.”
“Wait a second—” Gina said. “When we shot out of here? I was with Captain Reese. I don’t even know you—except that apparently you were caught impersonating the overlord.”
“It’s a long story. What’s wrong with Alara?”
“She’s got a headache—answer the damn question!”
“Look, this is going to be hard for you to understand, but I was Adan Reese, and I was also the overlord.”
Gina shook her head. “You can’t be in two places at once, krakhead. Try again.”
“First I was a holoskinner impersonating Adan Reese for Brondi. Then I found out my son was a holoskinner impersonating the overlord, and he and I switched places while we were aboard the Defiant.”
Gina shook her head. “You were working for Brondi?”
Ethan felt a cold sweat break out under his armor, and he hurried to add, “Hoi, I’m not on his side. He forced me to do it.”
There came a soft click of a weapon’s safety sliding off. “Yea? Forced you to do what exactly, Laser Bait?” Ethan turned to see Sergeant Dorian aiming a plasma rifle at him.
“He’s telling the truth,” a weak female voice said over the comm.
Ethan recognized that voice immediately. “Alara!” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m . . . alive.”
“You don’t sound too good. I’m coming to get you—get out of the way Gina.”
“Hoi!” Sergeant Dorian bellowed as Ethan started down the ladder to the cockpit. “I didn’t say you could move!”
“Let him go,” Gina said as she withdrew from the hatch. “He should say goodbye. Alara deserves that much.”
Goodbye? Ethan’s feeling of dread intensified. He hurried the rest of the way down to the hatch and swung into the cockpit. He found Alara inside, splayed out on the roof of the shuttle. One of her eyes had swollen shut and she held a bloody wad of gauze to her forehead. The squad medic crouched beside her, tending to her injuries with a medkit. His zephyr stood open like a butterfly in the far corner of the cockpit.
“Kiddie . . .” Ethan whispered.
Alara lifted her head and smiled. Her open eye sparkled a warm shade of lavender. “Hoi, Ethan,” she said.
He walked up to her and knelt awkwardly beside her in his bulky armor. “What happened?” he reached out as if to caress her face, but stopped himself, afraid to hurt her more.
“Don’t worry. It’s just a bump on the head,” Alara said.
“How?” he spotted her helmet lying beside the copilot’s station. There was a big dent in the side of the helmet, and the faceplate was smashed. “Frek . . . we didn’t crash that hard, did we?”
Gina appeared crouching beside them. “A spare tank of oxygen exploded,” she explained. “It must have been damaged in the crash. It blew the cover plate into her head.”
The medic looked up and asked Gina. “Has she been conscious since the crash?”
Gina shook her head. “She lost consciousness for a few minutes. I found her that way, but she came to before I could administer first aid, and threw up all over the copilot’s station,” Gina pointed to the mess.
The medic grimaced and turned to Alara. “Are you experiencing any confusion or dizziness?” She shook her head. “Weakness in one side of your body? Raise your arms, please.” Alara lifted both arms from her sides, but one arm rose slower than the other, and the medic frowned. “You can lay your arms back down.” He turned to his medkit to withdraw a syringe and an ampoule of medication.
Alara lowered her arms. She placed one small hand over Ethan’s armored gauntlet, and his zephyr’s tactile sensors relayed that touch as a light vibration through his armor. Tears trickled from her good eye.
“Hoi, don’t cry, Kiddie,” he said. “What’s wrong? Are you in pain?”
“I remember everything, Ethan. I know who I am! Is it true you found your wife?”
For just a second Ethan wanted to whoop for joy, but then he realized that it was a bad sign if her slave chip had somehow been interrupted. He nodded. “Yes, I found her, but that just made me realize what a fool I’ve been.”
“Shhh . . .” Alara shook her head slowly. “It’s okay.”
Ethan watched the medic take hold of the gauze she was holding to her head. “I need to see the injury now, ma’am.”
When the medic lifted away the gauze, Ethan went cold. There was an angry purple bruise with a deep gash running through it. The whole area was badly swollen, and as soon as the gauze came away, the gash began bubbling with blood once more. The sentinel pressed the gauze back to her head and told her to hold it firmly.
“How do I look?” Alara asked the medic, sounding like a little girl asking for her father’s opinion on a dress.
The sentinel hesitated, and Ethan felt another spark of dread. A vanguard medic had to be inured to seeing all kinds of battle wounds, and he’d have the experience to know a mortal wound when he saw one, so when he looked up at Ethan and slowly shook his head, Ethan didn’t have to ask—he knew . . .
Alara wasn’t going to make it.
Chapter 16
Captain Loba Caldin strode onto the bridge of the Interloper with her bridge crew and Tova close on her heels. Her gaze skipped from the glossy black deck to the transparent dome which ran from floor to ceiling. She hadn’t seen anything on the outside of the ship to correspond to that dome, so she assumed it was simulated. Human control stations looked out of place on the deck, sprouting naked wires and cables which ran in colorful lines across the obsidian floor.
Captain Adram stood by the foremost edge of the dome, looking out at space, with his own bridge crew flanking him. An expression of solidarity? Caldin wondered as she approached. Just before she reached Adram, he turned around and smiled. Belatedly the rest of his crew did the same. “Welcome to the Interloper, Captain Caldin.” He inclined his head to her and then gestured to the control stations. “My men will assist you with anything which might be unfamiliar, but we’ve already adapted the Sythian controls with our own technology, so for the most part everything should be intuitive.”
Caldin stopped in front of Adram and nodded. He hadn’t bothered to salute, but she wasn’t going to press the point with him. She’d been given his ship and his rank; there
was no point rubbing his nose in it. Adram looked to be seventy-something, with thin, wispy white hair that looked almost neon in the dim light of the alien ship. His angular face and hooked nose made his features vulturine, while his eyes seemed to glitter and glow in the dark.
“Why don’t you dial up the illumination?” she asked.
Adram shook his head. “Sythian ships weren’t built for bright lights; the décor starts to throw off distracting reflections.”
Caldin frowned. “What about the heat? It’s freezing in here.”
“Isss nice,” Tova hissed.
“For you,” Caldin replied.
Adram turned to look up at the alien, and he smiled. She was still naked, but she looked comfortable, much more so than she had been aboard the admiral’s ship. “Welcome aboard, Tova,” Adram said. “Do you like what we’ve done to the place?”
Tova looked around. “Is different?”
Adram laughed. “Come.” He started toward the nearest bridge control station. “We’ll show you all what’s changed.”
Caldin and her crew followed a few paces behind him, and she wondered if he had been talking to them or to Tova. So far Captain Adram and his crew were taking it very well that they’d been summarily supplanted on their own ship. If it had been her command, she would have been furious.
Not everyone is as ambitious as I am, she decided.
* * *
Junior Captain Crossid Adram stood leaning over Captain Caldin’s shoulder, pointing to the glowing blue holographic displays one at a time as Caldin scrolled through them from the captain’s table.
“All of the systems have been laboriously translated and replaced with our own. The original Sythian control systems were thought-controlled, while ours are touch and voice activated.”
Caldin nodded; Adram caught her eye and smiled. “You shouldn’t have any trouble figuring things out, but we’re here just in case.”
“Thank you, Adram.”
“Please, call me Crossid,” he said. “We’re not so formal on my ship—well, your ship now.”
“I see. All the same, I prefer to stick with convention.”
“Suit yourself, Captain. Once you’re all familiarized with the controls, my crew will go to their new assignments, and only I’ll stay here.”
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