Dark Space- The Complete Series

by Jasper T. Scott

  * * *

  Atton awoke to the sound of raised voices and a little girl crying. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and stared up at the shifting pattern of light on the ceiling. “I don’t want to go!” she cried.

  “You don’t have a choice, Atta. It’s too dangerous for you to stay,” a familiar male voice said.

  “No! I don’t want to go!”

  “Shh, Atta, listen to your father.”

  Atton sat up, wondering what was going on. A moment later his door swished open.

  “Lights!”

  Abruptly the room was brightly lit. Atton winced against the glare.

  “Get dressed,” Hoff ordered as he strode in.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We’re about to jump into battle. Brondi is much better prepared than I had hoped, and it’s too dangerous for any of you to stay. I’m sending you three to the enclave.”

  Atton climbed out of bed and went to pick his clothes off the deck where he’d left them in a messy pile the night before. “If you’re that worried about what we’re up against, then you need my help,” he said as he pulled on his pants.

  “Your help?” Hoff echoed.

  “I’m a good pilot, and a decent commander. Put me in a cockpit. Let me fly a shuttle at the very least.”

  Hoff frowned. “I’m short of ships—not pilots.”

  “You must have an extra ship of some kind that could use a pilot.”

  “It’s too dangerous, Atton,” Destra insisted.

  He looked up from buttoning his shirt to see his mother standing in the open doorway. Atta was hugging her mother’s legs and peeking out warily between them.

  “I’m not going to run and hide when I could make a difference in this fight,” Atton said.

  Destra set her jaw and crossed her arms as she looked to Hoff for support. “I’m not leaving him again. Either he goes with us, or we’re staying, too.”

  Hoff turned back to Atton and shook his head. “Under those conditions I’m afraid you don’t have a choice, and your mother’s right. It is too dangerous.”

  “Chip me then.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Make me like you, and then even death can’t touch me, right?”

  Hoff held his gaze for a quiet moment.

  “You’re going to have to chip all of us, Hoff, and then send the backups to the enclave,” Destra said, “because I’m not leaving without him.”

  Hoff turned back to her. “No one can be sure that we don’t still die when we transfer, so I’m not taking the risk if I don’t have to. You’re all going, and that’s final.”

  Atton took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Fine. Who’s going to pilot the ship that’s taking us to the enclave? Don’t tell me you’re sparing someone you’re about to need against Brondi.”

  Hoff smiled. “Not exactly, no. I’m going to take you.”

  Destra’s brow furrowed. “You’re abandoning your command?”

  Atton gave a slow smile. “Couldn’t resist it, could you? The chance to be in two places at once.”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “What’s he talking about, Hoff?” Destra asked, sounding suddenly frightened.

  Atton turned to his mother just in time to see a familiar man appear beside her in the open doorway. “We need to go, Des,” he said.

  Destra recoiled from the voice, and Atta ran away screaming. “Hoff!” Destra’s gaze skipped between the two identical men, and her face stretched into a rictus of horror. “What is this?”

  Chapter 26

  Both men wore the exact same spotless black uniform with white piping and the three gold stars’ insignia of an admiral. Destra couldn’t believe her eyes. This was beyond anything she had prepared herself to deal with. Just a few hours ago she’d decided to join her husband’s mad existence, but she had never imagined that something like this could happen. There’s two of them! she thought, looking from one to the other and back again. She couldn’t blame Atta for running away screaming. Even though she understood what she was seeing, and her daughter didn’t, Destra was tempted to run away screaming, too.

  “Hoff, you’ve gone completely skriffy.”

  The admiral standing inside Atton’s room turned to give her a grim look. “I’m sorry you feel that way. If it helps, remember that you’ve already been with two of us, so adding a third shouldn’t be that hard. Go with him. He’ll take you to the enclave.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Destra burst out. Her eyes kept flicking between the two clones, unsure of which one she should address. “What are you going to do when you come back for us? Flip a coin to see who gets to be my husband and Atta’s father? Or maybe you’ll take turns?”

  Hoff smiled sadly, and his gray eyes filled with a subtle sheen of moisture. “You’re assuming that I am coming back.” He turned to address his clone standing in the doorway. “Even if we win this fight, I won’t get in your way, and you won’t see me again. They’re as much your family as they are mine.”

  “I appreciate your sacrifice,” the clone said. He took Destra’s hand, and she tried to jerk it away, but he held her fast. “Don’t make me stun you, Des,” he warned.

  At that, she gave in. “I’m never going to join you now, Hoff,” she said, blinking tears. “And I’m never going to forgive you!”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” the one holding her replied.

  “You’d better go with them while you still have the chance, Atton,” the one standing closest to Atton added.

  “What about Atta?” Destra demanded. “Are you going to threaten to stun her, too?”

  “If I have to.”

  “Why would you let her see this, Hoff? She’s just a child.”

  “She’s the child of a clone, and sooner or later she had to find out.”

  Atton snorted. “Good luck explaining that to her.”

  “You’re a heartless kakard, Hoff,” Destra added.

  “I’m sorry it had to be this way,” he replied.

  “So am I,” Destra said, nodding slowly. She wiped away her tears with the back of the hand which Hoff’s newest clone wasn’t squeezing with bone-grinding force. So am I.

  * * *

  Atton was forced to walk in front of Hoff's clone the whole way. The moon in the artificial sky overhead did nothing to lighten the black walls of the silverleaf maze. Little Atta was surprisingly quiet. Whatever her father had said to her before he’d said goodbye had dried her stream of tears and replaced her frightened, darting eyes with a wide and vacant gaze. By contrast, his mother’s expression was grim and determined.

  “Where are you taking us?” Destra asked.

  “To your transport.” They reached another fork in the path, and Hoff barked out to Atton, “Left!” At the next turn—“Right!” And then—“Another left!”

  A few more minutes of that, and they reached the end of the maze. Atton stopped at the concealing holofield and waited there. All of a second later Hoff poked him in the back with his sidearm. “Keep moving.”

  Atton smirked as he walked through the seeming wall of silverleafs to the hidden passage on the other side. “You know, you don’t have to march me along at gunpoint.”

  Hoff gave no reply, but when they reached the end of the corridor, he holstered his gun and stepped up to the control panel to reactivate the lift tube. Atton considered attacking the admiral while he was distracted, but then he remembered how easily Hoff had deflected his last attack and he thought better of it. Once the lift was reactivated, Hoff gestured for Atton to enter first.

  “Still don’t trust me, hoi?” Atton said.

  “No more than I have to,” Hoff replied, stepping in after him.

  Then something completely unexpected happened.

  The admiral must have seen the look of shock cross Atton’s face, because he abruptly spun around to look, but it was too late. Destra had picked up one of the discarded pieces of the lift tube doors which Atton had cut away the prev
ious day, and now she swung that heavy sheet of duranium with all her might.

  It hit Hoff in the side of the head with a hollow-sounding smack! He staggered, and Atta began to scream again. Destra didn’t give him a chance to recover. She hit him again and he went spinning into the side of the lift tube and bounced off. Hoff turned in a dizzy circle, blood streaming from a gash above one eye. “I was right not to trust,” was all he managed to say before he collapsed to the floor.

  Destra dropped the piece of metal with a noisy bang, and took a quick step back, her eyes wide and locked on her husband’s unconscious form, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d just done. Atta’s cries snapped her out of it. “Daddy?” she said in a small voice, trying to squeeze past her mother to get to him.

  Destra grabbed her and turned her away from the scene, shushing her frantic questions. “Why did you hit him? Is he dead?”

  “No darling, he’s not dead. He’s just sleeping. Remember he wanted to take us away, but we don’t want to go away, do we? We’re going to stay and help your father, but he wouldn’t let us, so that’s why we had to put him to sleep.”

  “But he’s not really Daddy, is he? He told me he is, but . . .”

  “Shhh,” Destra cooed.

  Atton looked on with a growing sense of unreality setting in. The irony wasn’t lost on him. Hoff hadn’t trusted his wife to know his secret because he was afraid of how she’d react. Now, having seen his mother’s reaction, Atton couldn’t say he blamed the man. He’d known his wife very well.

  “Atton,” Destra said, snapping him out of it. “Come on.”

  He shook his head. “Hoff said there was a ship waiting below. It must have weapons and shields.”

  “Atton . . .”

  “I can’t just do nothing! If Brondi wins . . .”

  Destra sighed. “You’re as stubborn as your father. Go. I’m not going to stop you.”

  “You might want to come with me rather than be around when Hoff wakes up. He’ll never trust you again.”

  “He never trusted me to begin with, and I could have killed him. The fact that I didn’t should tell him something. You leave Hoff to me.”

  “Which one?”

  Destra hesitated, her eyes back on the unconscious clone. “You’d better take that one with you. You’ll need his credentials to get aboard the transport.”

  “Then what do you want me to do with him?”

  “Tie him up for now. We can figure out that part if you . . .” Destra swallowed hard and shook her head. “When you return.”

  “Right. Take care of yourself, Mom,” Atton said as he selected deck 24 from the lift control panel.

  “You too, son. I love you!”

  He looked up and smiled, opening his mouth to reply, but whatever he said was stolen by the wind as the lift dropped away.

  * * *

  Hoff returned to the bridge scant minutes before the Tauron dropped out of SLS. Relief radiated from his crew like a palpable force. They’d been trying to reach him on the comms for the past half an hour while he’d been busy dealing with his family emergency.

  Things hadn’t gone the way he had hoped, but he wasn’t surprised by Destra’s reaction. She would come around, although unfortunately, he wouldn’t get to see that. Even if he survived, he couldn’t complicate matters and return to vie against himself for his family. It made no sense. Instead, he would stay in Dark Space and lead humanity there. Eventually he’d find a new persona for himself—a new body, and a new life.

  It was almost enough to make him want to give up and die, but he’d been down this road many times before, and as ever, he had a job to do. As long as there were still criminals like Brondi or Sythians and Gors to fight, he would have a reason to carry on.

  Hoff forced himself to focus on something other than that brooding train of thought. The Tauron was now just five minutes from her reversion to real space, and he needed to be ready for it. Their battle plan was simple, but there were a million things which could go wrong.

  Upon analyzing Intel from the Interloper, they’d found just four safe paths through the minefield which surrounded the Valiant—three leading in, and one leading out. Of those three approach vectors, only two would be possible to line up with the exit vector on the other side, and one was a better approach angle than the other.

  Preliminary calculations predicted that their window of opportunity would be tight. Hoff planned to drop out of SLS just a few kilometers from the edge of the interrupter buoys and then roar through the minefield at their top acceleration of 70 KAPS. At that speed it would take just a minute and a half for them to close to within 25 kilometers of the carrier, which was their maximum effective beam and torpedo range. By that point they’d be moving at over six kilometers a second, and the helmsman better have already adjusted their course to avoid a collision. They would have between three and four seconds to overwhelm the hangar shields. Then the Interloper would have approximately fifteen seconds to get inside before the carrier’s port shields equalized and they would have to make another pass. But there could be no second pass. The Tauron wouldn’t survive it. Everything came down to timing.

  The narrow entrance and exit of the minefield was another problem they’d have to address. Brondi hadn’t even left enough room to escape the minefield himself. The gaps he’d left were only large enough for fighter wings and small capital ships. Nothing the size of the Tauron was going to make it through unscathed, so they would have to be sure they shot all of the mines along their entry and exit vectors before they got too close, and depending how powerful the mines were, they could still suffer damage—not to mention how much damage they’d take from the hundreds of fighters and the odd dozen capital ships which Brondi had scraped together in the last day and a half to defend himself.

  If they got past all of that, they would still have to deal with the carrier’s own defenses. For the most part the Valiant was designed to defend itself from fighter attacks, but there were a handful of capital-ship cracking beam cannons to worry about—not the least of which was her main cannon, a massive corona XL which could punch a 60 meter-wide hole in an unshielded hull at 50 klicks.

  Their only advantage and their only hope in the coming fight lay with the Interloper. Hoff hoped to death that the cloaked Sythian cutter-class cruiser was already in position at the Valiant’s port ventral hangar bay. They’d loaded that small, hundred-meter-long cruiser until sentinels were standing literally shoulder to shoulder on her decks, and now there were more than two thousand soldiers in full battle armor and over 100 zephyrs crammed aboard the alien cruiser. All they needed was a chance to get aboard, and Brondi wouldn’t stand a chance.

  After that, however, they would still have to deal with the five hundred angry fighters buzzing around the Valiant. In a straight fight that many fighters could easily take down both the Valiant and the Tauron without an ample fighter screen of their own, but Hoff trusted in the outlaw pilots’ instincts of self-preservation to keep them from doing anything stupid. Most of Brondi’s fighters were short-ranged, and by the time the Valiant was back under Imperial control, they’d be low on both fuel and air. If they decided to destroy the Valiant rather than see her fall back into Imperial hands, they’d be sentencing themselves to death, too. Brondi’s cruisers and destroyers were not equipped to take on that many fighters.

  All things considered, their plan had a fifty-fifty chance of success, and it relied on everything working perfectly. Hoff feared he might be relying too much on common sense and reason with a band of uneducated, impetuous criminals who might just as easily decide to shoot first and regret it later. But, as they say— Hoff thought, watching the reversion timer tick down to five seconds. —only time will tell.

  The countdown became audible. When it reached zero, superluminal space disappeared with a flash, and back was the comparative dimness of stars and space.

  “Engineering, report!”

  “All systems green, Admiral!”

  “Comms!
Sound the alert! Launch Inferno Squadron and have them screen us on our approach. Their priority is AMS. Do not let them break off and engage. Anyone who peels off our flight path gets left behind. Weapons, your priority is AMS, too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nav—come about! Maximum acceleration.”

  “Coming about.”

  “Gravidar, what do you see out there?” Hoff asked, already scanning the grid to see for himself.

  “Minor variations in the enemy formation. Everything looks predictable so far . . . wait, no, this is new. I have a pair of old baron-class cruisers coming up on our starboard side at K-44-54-16 and K-48-54-16. They’ll reach us before we’re through the minefield.”

  Hoff noted the cruisers on the captain’s table and called out, “Gunnery! Flag those cruisers as secondary targets. Primaries are still the mines along our flight path and any missiles that we pick up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hoff looked up to see the Valiant pan into view. It glittered distantly against Firea’s day/night terminator. The half of the giant carrier which faced them was dark, shaded by its own bulk from the pale red light of the system’s sun, and Hoff could see the light of a million viewports glowing like broken flecks of fireglass in the dark. His gray eyes dipped back to the grid in time to see the enemy fighters responding to their approach vector. Almost a hundred of them would be in missile range before the Tauron was even through the minefield. You’d better be in position, Caldin, he thought.

  “Admiral, a small transport just launched out the back of the Tauron!” gravidar reported.

  Hoff nodded; he’d been expecting that. His clone would take Destra and Atta deeper into Dark Space, and from there they’d find a way to either commandeer a larger ship, or refit theirs so that it could take them all the way to the enclave. “Did they have clearance?”

  “They were auto-cleared by the system.”

  “Then ignore them. They’re authorized.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hoff followed the gravidar icon of that transport out the back of the Tauron until he was satisfied that they were out of danger, and then he turned his attention to the seething mass of red enemy contacts converging on his battleship. A short stream of friendly nova fighters shot out the front of the battleship, launching with the Tauron’s forward momentum to give them an extra boost. That was Inferno Squadron—down to just nine out of the original dozen after their first run-in with the Valiant. Now it was time for revenge. Once all nine of them were clear, transports began to appear, flooding out on both sides of the Tauron. Assault transports weren’t either fast or maneuverable, but they were heavily armed and armored, and better than nothing as an escort, so Hoff had ordered them to flank the Tauron in two groups of twenty three. Along with Inferno Squadron, they would provide AMS support for the battleship.