To those who dare,
And to those who dream.
To everyone who’s stronger than they seem.
“Believe in me /
I know you’ve waited for so long /
Believe in me /
Sometimes the weak become the strong”
—STAIND, Believe
THE ENEMY IN OUR MIDST
Chapter 1
Master Commander Lenon Donali dropped out of superluminal space (SLS) for the tenth time. The bright streaks and starlines of faster-than-light travel disappeared with a flash, persisting only as an afterimage burned onto his retinas from staring too long into that mesmerizing swirl of light. Ghostly patterns floated across the diamond-bright sparkle of the void. Fuel was running low from so many stops. He hadn’t travelled more than twelve light years away from Dark Space, but entering and leaving SLS were the most fuel-expensive parts of space flight.
Donali checked the grid for enemy contacts, just as he had done at each reversion point since leaving Dark Space. He wasn’t expecting to see anything, and he wasn’t surprised. Apart from the spreading wake of radiation from his corvette, there was no detectable trace of tachyon radiation. Donali waited a minute longer, watching the grid without blinking, but his scopes were clear; he hadn’t been followed.
He sighed with relief, and his thoughts went to the alien implant which he’d left in the corvette’s med bay to be analyzed by the ship’s computers. Whatever it was, it had finished calling home long ago, and now it couldn’t be bothered to tell the Sythians where it was. The last time that mysterious alien device had transmitted anything at all had been at the entrance of Dark Space. Donali hoped it hadn’t given away the location of the sector. Dark Space was humanity’s only refuge from the Sythians, and it was only safe because it had been kept hidden for the last ten years after the invasion.
But now that refuge was in jeopardy. If the alien implant they had discovered while dissecting High Lord Kaon’s brain had managed to call home, then for all Donali knew Dark Space was already overrun with Sythians.
Donali unbuckled his seat restraints and pushed out of the pilot’s chair. It was time to finish studying the alien device and then jettison it out the nearest airlock. He had a rendezvous with Admiral Hoff Heston coming up in just five days, and that was precious little time to study the Sythian device.
When he arrived in the med bay, he was gratified to find the implant still sitting inside the holoimager where he’d left it. He’d been half expecting it to have walked off by itself. Donali keyed the machine for the results of its analysis and a hologram flickered to life above the imager.
The inside of the implant was organized into a crystal lattice structure, and the outside hadn’t responded to any probe of any kind . . . except for . . . the electrical conduction test. When the device had been exposed to low level electrical signals, it had begun to respond with the same. That made sense, since it would have to interact with the Sythians’ brains somehow. Donali stared at the screen, wondering what purpose the implant served.
If the Sythians had known Kaon was going to be captured, or if they had allowed him to be captured, then the device could be a tracker of some kind, but if that were so, then why wasn’t it transmitting now? The fact that it responded to electrical stimulation seemed to indicate that it still had power.
It’s a pity I don’t have someone to implant this in . . . he thought. It was much larger than the average human implant, and would require surgery to insert—not that he had a test subject for that, anyway.
Unless. . . .
Donali’s eyes turned to the stasis room adjoining the med bay. Abruptly he turned and walked toward it. He waved his hand over the door controls, and the door slid away with a swish. The lights came on automatically for him. This was Donali’s own personal transport, and it knew him well.
He walked to the back of the room to the pair of empty stasis tubes there. The room held twelve stasis tubes in all, one for each of the corvette’s standard crew. When Donali reached the pair of empty stasis tubes, he stepped up to the control panel of the leftmost one and keyed in a code which only he knew. He heard a clu-clunk of duranium bolts sliding away and reached out with both hands to grasp the sides of the heavy stasis tube. It pulled away from the wall easily enough, rolling on wheels that it shouldn’t have had. Behind that, lay another stasis tube, the transpiranium cover glowing blue and active. Donali saw a stranger staring back at him from the other side of the transpiranium. That stranger was his escape plan—a clone of a long dead fleet officer.
Serving under someone like Admiral Heston, Donali had to be careful. The admiral had been betrayed so many times that he would betray his friends and family preemptively just to keep it from happening again, and that meant Donali needed to keep a few secrets of his own—just in case the admiral should ever decide to preemptively betray his own XO.
Already fitted in the clone’s wrist were all the credentials Donali would need to get away and make a new life for himself without the admiral ever being the wiser. Being a senior member of the Tauron’s medical staff had its advantages. Any bodies which passed through the morgue were his to examine if he so chose. He’d stolen the identichips from more than a few of them and subsequently erased the record of their deaths. Then he’d cloned them and left their cloned bodies in stasis until they were needed. Using the Lifelink implant in his brain, Donali could transfer his conscious self from his current body to any one of the clones. Like that, he could effectively disappear. So far Donali hadn’t needed that backup plan, but it gave him a unique opportunity now.
He walked into the dark crawl space and keyed the control panel to release the clone. The cover of the stasis tube opened with a hiss and the clone opened its eyes for the first time. It saw him and began to cry pitifully. It fell into Donali’s arms, unable to even stand up on its own. Donali backed out of the crawl space, half dragging and half carrying his clone. He tried to ignore its wailing cries while it clung to him like a baby to its mother.
Clones grown for immortals spent their entire lives in an induced sleep, growing to maturity at an accelerated rate until they reached the right age, and then they were frozen like that until they were needed. All a clone ever had a chance to experience was a cloning tank and the endless dreaming of accelerated aging, and after that—another tank and the near perfect metabolic suspension of stasis. They could last in stasis for a thousand years and only age ten. What they dreamt about while they were in there was a mystery, but the most likely answer was nothing. They had never experienced anything, so how could their brains imagine something? They never learned to walk, talk, eat, or do anything else that a regular adult took for granted. They were full-grown newborns until the Lifelink implants in their brains received the flood of information which they would use, along with a billion little nanites, to sculpt their brains into the mirror image of their creators’.
Clones were never woken like this, without their Lifelink implant being activated first. Donali tried to ignore the pinprick of guilt which he felt over that and over what he was about to do. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It’s okay. Daddy needs your help.” Donali set the clone down on the cold deck and its cries intensified. The man curled into a fetal ball, while Donali fumbled with his grav gun. He aimed the gun at the clone and gravved him off the deck to carry him into the med bay.
An hour later, Donali had his subject strapped down on the examination table, still crying, but more softly now. The clone’s eyes flicked from side to side, darting and wide. Donali put him out of his misery a moment later with a sleep-inducing anesthetic.
Now the operation could begin. It took just over an hour to open the clone’s skull and delicately tuck the alien implant inside his brain. Then Donali sealed the clone's skull once more. Another hour passed while he cleaned up his surgical instruments and waited for the clone to wake.
Suddenly, there came an alien warbling and Donali spun around to look. His patient was awake.
He hurried back to the clone’s side, his heart pounding, his eyes wide and filled with wonder. The clone had been a blank slate, dumb and mute, and now he was speaking in some facsimile of Sythian. There was only one explanation for that. The alien implant was more than just a tracker. It contained information from the Sythian they'd taken it from. Perhaps it was the Sythian equivalent of an immortal human's Lifelink implant.
“Hello, Kaon,” Donali tried, testing his theory. He was almost unable to contain his excitement.
The clone turned to look at him, and warbled something else. Donali wasn’t wearing a translator, so he didn’t understand. Then the clone appeared to notice that he was strapped down to the table. He raised his chin to his chest and saw that he was a human. Seeing that, he turned back to Donali with a hateful glare. “Where am I? What you do to me?” he demanded, now speaking in Imperial Versal.
Donali blinked and his red artificial eye winked in tandem with his real one. “You can speak our language?” He shook his head incredulously, still trying to catch up with everything. This confirmed Admiral Hoff’s suspicions. Humans and Sythians had met before, and they were both doing the same thing—using implants and clones to live forever.
“Answer my questions, human,” Kaon demanded.
“You’re on board my corvette, and I put your implant in a human body to see how it would react. . . .” Donali shook his head. “But I never imagined this.”
The clone hissed again. “So I am your experiment? You pay for this, human.”
Donali raised one eyebrow. “I don’t see how.”
Kaon closed his eyes and Donali watched his lips move. He heard whispers coming out, but they were alien warbles, not human speech. “What are you doing?” he asked, frowning.
Kaon turned to him with an ugly smile. “You will sssee.”
Donali cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. A moment later, the ship shuddered, and Kaon’s smile broadened.
“No,” Donali said.
“Yess,” Kaon whispered.
Donali ran back to the bridge. He arrived, out of breath and panting all of a minute later, but he was too late.
The entire forward viewport was filled with the shining hull of a Sythian warship. It was bigger than any ship he’d ever seen, and it wasn’t firing on him—it was drawing him toward it with some kind of grav gun.
“How?!” Donali demanded as he sat down at the controls and powered up the drives. He’d made ten jumps! They couldn’t have followed him through all of that.
Then he noticed that the grid was painted with the yellow vector of a tachyon trace. That radiation was just over an hour old, meaning Kaon’s implant must have called for help almost the instant it had been inserted in the clone’s brain. For the Sythians to be here now, they had to have been very close when they’d received the transmission. They had been following him, then.
Donali pushed the throttle up past the stops into overdrive, trying to escape the grav gun which had seized his ship . . . but nothing happened. The ship wouldn’t turn, and the drives just pushed him faster toward the alien cruiser. He shut down the drives with a scowl and sat back to consider his options.
There weren’t any. He could armor up and go down fighting, or he could let the Sythians capture him. What kind of choices were those? Donali settled for the dubious third option of holding Kaon ransom in the med bay.
* * *
Less than half an hour later, a pair of hulking Gors burst into the med bay in their glossy black armor. These were the Sythians’ slave soldiers—carnivorous monsters with gaunt, skull-like faces; slitted yellow reptilian eyes; thick, rippling muscles; and ashen gray skin. Armored as they were, Donali was spared the horror of seeing them in the flesh, but that was a small comfort. He knew that these two would happily eat him alive if they had the chance.
Holding Kaon at gunpoint, he told the Gors not to take another step—not that he thought they could understand him. Kaon smiled up at him and warbled something. At that, the Gors shot them both.
In the dark, Donali had no concept of time. His artificial eye helped him to see and pick out details of his surroundings which a regular human wouldn’t be able to observe, but all he saw were the usual glossy black walls and floor of a Sythian ship. He also noticed strange, hulking shadows moving around him. He felt like he was trapped in a bad dream. All he knew was that he wasn’t dead. The Sythians had kept him alive. But why?
Why . . .
At last, he was awake and conscious enough to think clearly, but his thoughts were different now. He knew where he was and why. He wasn’t frightened. And the cold, unfeeling darkness was a comfort to him—a touch of home.
A moment later, a dim light snapped on, and now Donali could see better. He tried to sit up and found that he could. There was no longer any need to restrain him. He looked around and saw more beds like the one where he lay, each of them occupied by another man or woman of his species. There were thousands of them, and the room where they lay was so large that Donali couldn’t even see the walls or ceiling, just endless rows of humans, disappearing to all sides of him.
A voice spoke into the darkness, warbling at him in a language which he now knew and understood. “Arise,” it said. Donali did as he was told and stood up. “Walk toward the light.”
A pale yellow light appeared in the distance, shining through the darkness, and Donali strode toward it, his footsteps eager, driven, and purposeful. When he reached that light, he found someone waiting for him. It was High Lord Kaon. Donali recognized him by the subtle pattern of lavender freckles on his translucent skin, as well as by the gills in the sides of his neck.
“My lord,” Donali warbled.
“We have a special purpose for you, Lenon Donali.”
“I await the honor of hearing it.”
“You are to meet the admiral at the entrance of Dark Space as planned.”
“As you wish, My Lord.”
“You must get close to him.”
“Yess—” Donali hissed, anticipating the rest of his mission. “—and kill him!”
“No. Capture him and bring him to us. We use him to find the lost sector of humans, and then we kill him.”
“It will be done, My Lord.”
Chapter 2
Admiral Hoff Heston stood on the bridge of the Valiant, watching from the captain’s table as the Intrepid coasted toward them from the Dark Space gate. Even as he watched, the gate shut down and the glowing blue wormhole it maintained disappeared, sealing the entrance of the sector. It wouldn’t be enough to keep out another Sythian invasion, but at least it would slow them down.
“Gravidar, magnify the Intrepid 400%. Comms, put me through to the captain.”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Hanz said from the comm station.
The gravidar officer said nothing, but Hoff saw the Intrepid suddenly swell to four times its size, filling a much larger section of the forward viewports. A moment later, it shimmered, replaced by a head-and-shoulders view of Captain Loba Caldin. She had striking indigo eyes and short blonde hair which framed a deceptively delicate-looking set of features—button nose, small jaw, smooth alabaster skin, and a narrow, unlined forehead.
“Admiral Heston,” Caldin said.
“I trust your mission was successful,” Hoff replied.
“It was. Commander Donali was already waiting at the rendezvous when we arrived.”
“Any sign of Sythian pursuit?”
“None sir. We stayed cloaked for a full ten minutes, checking the area before we revealed ourselves.”
There had been a time when cloaking technology had been an enigma to humanity, but now, thanks to their Gor allies, it was no longer exclusive to the Sythian invaders.
“You were wise to be cautious, Captain,” Hoff replied. Not that it would matter if Donali had been followed. The Sythians knew where Dark Space was now. “You may proceed to dock, Captain. Tell Commander Donali to meet me in the Operations Center as soon as you set down. I’ll debrief you right afte
r him at 1600 hours.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dismissed.”
The captain’s face disappeared, replaced by a now-much-closer view of the Intrepid. It was one of two 280-meter-long venture-class cruisers which berthed inside the Valiant. To the Valiant, a five-kilometer-long gladiator-class carrier, those cruisers were gnats, but at over 20 stories high, with 18 decks, the venture-class was hardly small—just not a mobile fortress like the Valiant. Thanks to heavy automation those cruisers had a crew of only 128 men and women. That included gunners, engineers, pilots, sentinels, medical staff, and bridge crew. Most of the deck space was devoted to weaponry, power, fuel, storage, and an ample living space. The venture-class had been designed to go for a decade or more before needing to resupply.
Hoff admired the rugged lines of the Intrepid, the broad bow and bristling beam cannons. It wasn’t an elegant warship, but what it lacked in elegance it made up for in brawn. For its class and size, the venture-class was unparalleled in a fight. Sure the Valiant could squash dozens of them by herself, but she was also a thousand times the size. Big, impressive warships like the Valiant were intimidating, but not efficient. They were safe for important political figures and high-ranking fleet officers to sit behind the lines, but they were not the real engines of war, and they were not nearly as emblematic of the Imperium. Just six gladiator-class carriers had been requisitioned for the Imperial Star Systems Fleet (ISSF), while over a thousand venture-class cruisers had been in service at the height of the Imperium.
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