“We want but one thing. Release the Gorz to us so that we may punish them for their rebellion, and then join the Sythian Coalition. Then we agree to leave your people in peace, and you have our permission to exist in Dark Space as long as you please.”
“Join you? Why would we do that, Shondar?”
“Because that way you do not die.”
“I see.”
“The decision is yours.”
“You are asking us to surrender,” Hoff clarified.
“Yesss, we are giving you that opportunity. It is generous of us.”
“Very generous,” Hoff replied. He shot Tova a sidelong glance, but she hadn’t reacted to Shondar’s demands; she was still slumped on the deck, apparently in shock. Her people had been summarily wiped out. It was ironic that after the Sythians had used them to exterminate humanity, they had then turned around and done the same thing to the Gors.
Captain Ocheron chose that moment to add his two cents. “My fleet would happily agree to your terms, Shondar.”
Hoff sent him a scathing look. “You do not have a fleet, Captain! I control the fleet, and you are subordinate to me. You would do well to remember that before I have you court-martialed for insubordination.”
Ocheron glared back at Hoff, his thick black mustache twitching as his pale head began to turn an angry shade of red. “We did not join your fleet willingly, Admiral. We joined it because we had no other choice, and you need us just as much as we need you.”
Hoff turned back to the main holoscreen with a dark look. “Your proposal will need to be discussed, Shondar. I will meet with my commanders and inform you of our decision as soon as possible.”
“Of course,” Shondar hissed. “Do not make us to wait too long. Your time is running out.”
With that, the transmission was cut on the Sythians’ side; back were stars, space, and the overwhelming display of force which the Sythians had mustered to back up their threats. Hoff shook his head and turned to Tova. “Get up. We have a lot to discuss.”
“What’s to discuss?” Ocheron demanded. “Return to frekking sender! The Gors are their slaves, so why should they be our problem? They’re eating all our damn food anyway.”
“Ocheron—” Hoff didn’t have a chance to finish his intended rebuke. Tova flew off the deck and reached out to seize Captain Ocheron by the throat. She lifted him high off the deck with one arm, and Ocheron’s face turned an ugly purple. Veins stood out on his forehead, and his cheeks bulged. He beat his fists against Tova’s armored forearm, but to no avail. Hoff stood frozen, watching everything happen as if in slow motion.
“You worry how to feed us? I have an answer! We eat humanz. Starting with you.”
A part of Hoff was tempted to let Tova do exactly that, but instead he stepped up beside her and laid a hand on her arm. “Tova. This is not the way. He does not speak for all of us. Put him down.”
Tova’s head turned and her glowing red eyes drilled into his once more. “Do you take his side, then?”
“I do not agree with him, no.”
“He must die for his treachery.”
“He will be punished.”
“Is not good enough!” Tova roared, her warbling speech almost loud enough to drown out the simultaneous translation which came across the bridge speakers.
“Tova. You will not win this fight by killing him. You will lose, and your people will lose, and I will not be able to stop it. Humanity must never again see you as the monsters who slaughtered us. Do you understand? Put him down.”
Tova’s broad chest heaved with fury, air hissing in and out of her helmet, but at last she responded. “I do what you ask . . . for now.” With that, Tova flicked her wrist and Captain Ocheron, a man of some two hundred and fifty pounds, went flying. He landed several feet away with a thud and a grunt of pain.
“Good. Now, as I said, Tova. We have much to discuss . . .” Hoff’s gaze found Ocheron as he rose from the deck. The outlaw captain stood rubbing his throat and his lower back. “And we will discuss it without him. Follow me, Tova. Guards! Kindly show the captain to the brig.”
“What?” Ocheron rasped. “You can’t lock me up! Heston!”
“No?” Hoff turned away with a smirk. “I believe you’re about to be mistaken.”
A soft click sounded somewhere behind him, and he felt the hair rising on the back of his neck.
“Stop right there, Admiral.”
Hoff froze and slowly turned back to the captain, his smile still in place. “This is treason, Captain. Are you ready to die for your pride?” Hoff nodded to Ocheron’s sidearm, which was drawn and pointed at his chest. All of the crew on the bridge had abruptly frozen at their stations and turned to watch the confrontation. Hoff heard the clanking of armored sentinels approaching from the entrance of the bridge.
“Are you?” Ocheron countered, clucking his tongue. “You’re real skriff-krakking special, Admiral. You think you can take us all down to the netherworld with you? You’re wrong. By a show of hands . . .” Ocheron said, waving his own free hand in the air. “How many of you think the Gors should go and we should accept the Sythians’ offer?” No one moved a muscle. “Come on, don’t be shy,” Ocheron said.
Hoff heard the sentinels’ clanking footsteps draw near, followed by, “Drop your weapon!” The voice was distorted by the sentinel’s combat helmet. “You are under arrest.”
“Am I?” Ocheron looked surprised. “All right,” he said, raising his sidearm along with his other hand. Just don’t shoot me, okay? I have a sensitive stomach. He used his empty hand to pat his protruding belly, and Hoff’s eyes abruptly narrowed on the outlaw captain’s uniform jacket. The captain was a heavy man, but not because he was overweight.
Hoff held up a hand to stop the sentinels from advancing any further. “Halt!” he said, just as they took up flanking positions on either side of him.
Ocheron smiled slowly. “You’re not as dumb as you look, Admiral.”
“That man’s wired with explosives,” Hoff said.
Officers began rising from their control stations in a hurry, but Ocheron called out, “Stay where you are!” And with that, he used the hand which wasn’t holding his sidearm to rip open his vest, revealing three belts of WDX4 explosives. “The detonator is tied to my pulse. If I die, so do all of you—and don’t think you can stun me either. I’ve wired in an electrostatic sensor which will detect a stun blast and detonate the explosives either way.”
“What do you want, Captain?” Hoff asked.
“What do I want?” Ocheron turned in a slow circle to address everyone on the bridge. “I want you all to think about this very carefully. Are the Gors worth it? They nearly wiped out the human race! I say we cut the dumb freks loose and join the Sythians. What do we have to lose?”
“Besides liberty?” Hoff asked.
Ocheron turned slowly back to face him, and in that moment Hoff became aware of something important—
Tova was missing.
The admiral looked around suddenly, his eyes wide. “Tova?” Then he noticed Ocheron’s expression become abruptly confused. The outlaw’s head jerked backward, and blood spurted from his nose. Screaming, he whirled around with blood pitter-pattering to the deck in fat droplets as he searched for whatever had hit him. “Frekking skull face! Show yourself!”
Then Ocheron’s face contorted once more as his knees buckled the wrong way with a sickening pop. He toppled to the deck, his screams going on and on. “I’m going to kill you!” he roared, fiddling with something on his belt.
“Everybody down!” Hoff yelled, flattening himself to the deck and crossing his arms over his head. He heard a loud whump, followed by something heavy landing on top of him. A superheated rush of air roared past his ears like a hurricane, followed by muffled screaming, and then . . . ringing silence.
When Hoff’s ears recovered enough for him to hear through the ringing he heard a violent crackle of flames eating away at whatever they could find. Acrid smoke reached his nost
rils, and his head spun with the fumes. The weight on his back felt heavier than ever, and he wondered if some fragment of the captain’s table had landed on top of him. He risked lifting his head off the deck to check . . .
And saw the gunmetal gray armor of a sentinel’s arm, lying in a puddle of blood beside his head. He reached out to prod the sentinel, but the arm moved independently of its host. Hoff twisted around in horror to find that the sentinel lying on top of him was maimed beyond recognition. With a monumental effort he managed to roll the body off of him. Then he himself off the deck to stand swaying on his feet in the middle of a scene straight out of the netherworld.
Control stations had been shredded, and some of them were on fire; the captain’s table was reduced to a charred stump. Crew members lay here and there at their stations below the gangway where the bomb had detonated. Some were unmoving, while others were only now climbing to their feet to survey the carnage. Captain Ocheron was a bloody smear on the deck, and Tova . . . Tova lay to one side of the ruined captain’s table, her glossy black armor shredded to a poor reflection of its former glory. Her helmet had been carved open on one side, but the skull-like face beneath it seemed relatively intact. She was, however, lying in a puddle of pale blood. It caught and reflected flickering orange light from flaming debris that had landed around her.
The bridge was decimated, the thick transpiranium viewports striated with fractures, but thankfully still intact. The deck was scuffed and charred and a few of the bulkheads had been gouged with shrapnel. Hoff gazed down upon his savior, the sentinel who had given his life to shield him from the blast. Sergeant Arconin, Hoff thought, remembering the man’s name. His armor was shredded even worse than Tova’s; there could be no doubt that he was dead. “Frek,” Hoff growled. Looking up he turned to the nearest officer he could find standing on the deck with him. It was his comm officer, Lt. Hanz. “Comm the medbay!” Hoff barked at him, but that command came out more like a wheeze for air than an urgent order.
“Yes, sir!” Hanz nodded and touched the comm piece in his ear to make the call. His comm control station was far too damaged to send the message.
Hoff hurried to Tova’s side and dropped to his knees in a sulfur-smelling pool of the alien’s blood. His nose wrinkled, but he forced himself to focus. “Tova.”
She hissed softly, but said nothing.
Hoff grimaced. “Help is on the way, Tova.”
“Do not . . . waste time, Woss.”
He shook his head and grabbed her upper arm. “You’re stronger than this, Tova! Fight!”
“I fight . . . long enough. Now I leave my mate to do what I cannot.”
“Frek it, Tova . . . we need you! Your créche mates need you!”
“No, Woss . . . my créche mates already have what they need. They have freedom.” Tova’s real eye, a yellow reptilian slit now exposed by the missing half of her helmet, turned from the ceiling to stare at Hoff. She seemed to be looking past him, but then her eye narrowed still further to focus squarely on his face, and she hissed once more. “Do not let them . . . take that from us.”
Hoff shook his head. “I won’t.”
“Give me your word, human. Swear it before your gods. . . .”
Hoff shook his head. “I have no gods, but I swear it, Tova. I will not let the Sythians enslave your people again.”
“Good.” Tova’s chest heaved, and she released her breath in a sigh. With that, the light went out of her eye and she went back to staring past him. A moment later, the red glow of optics in the other side of her helmet also faded, and just like that . . .
She was gone.
Hoff stood up, but some type of a disruption in his inner ear almost caused him to fall over.
Strong hands took hold of him, and Hoff turned to see the surviving sentinel of the two who had been standing beside him when Ocheron had detonated his bomb. “Are you okay, sir?” the sentinel asked.
Hoff gave the man a weary frown. “Yes, thank you.” He turned to look around the bridge, and now he saw officers moving all over the deck, tending to one another’s injuries. One of them had pulled out a fire suppression hose and was spraying it over the flaming sections of the bridge.
“Listen up!” Hoff yelled. “Those of you who are injured too badly to move, stay where you are; med teams will be here to tend to you soon. As for the rest of you, follow me; we’re heading to the auxiliary bridge.” Hoff clapped his hands together for emphasis just before doubling over with a hacking cough. “Move out!” he croaked. With that, he jogged toward the double doors of the bridge. The surviving sentinel kept pace beside him, limping from a shrapnel wound in his leg. Along the way Hoff considered what he was going to say to Tova’s mate, Roan, and how he would convince the alien that he’d had nothing to do with Tova’s death.
Hoff grimaced. The Sythians’ deal had unraveled the tentative alliance in Dark Space in a matter of minutes. Something told him that was exactly what they had hoped to achieve.
Divide and conquer. Hoff hoped the Sythians didn’t find out how fast their plan had worked until he had regained control of the situation. He needed to call an emergency meeting between Ocheron’s second-in-command and Roan in order to apprise them of recent developments and devise a strategy to deal with the Sythians’ demands.
Based on what he’d seen of the Sythian fleet, outright refusal was not an option. Dark Space couldn’t win a straight fight, so they needed to at least appear to acquiesce, and that meant trouble for more than just Dark Space. Even if the Sythians honored their deal, there was something much more important at stake. Hoff had an invaluable piece of information which the Sythians were after—he knew the location of Avilon. A month ago when he’d gone aboard the Sythian command ship and spoken with High Lord Kaon, the Sythians had offered him a similar deal—they would agree to leave Dark Space alone in exchange for the location of Avilon. Something told him that they hadn’t simply forgotten what they were after.
The Admiral felt a pang of dread, but not for his life. His thoughts went straight to his wife Destra and his seven-year-old daughter, Atta. If he refused to tell the Sythians where Avilon was, they would torture his family until he cracked, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to resist that.
No. He had no choice; he had to tell the Sythians where Avilon was. But they can hardly blame me if my memory is off by a few thousand light years, Hoff realized with a burgeoning smile. After all, it has been a long time since I was there.
It wouldn’t be enough to lie. The Sythians surely had mind probe technology the equal or better of what humanity had. They would dig around inside his brain until they either found exactly what they were looking for or killed him in the process. The only way to fool them was to make the lie true, and for that he would have to physically alter his memories.
Hoff touched his comm piece to make a call just as he reached the rail car tunnel which would take them down to the auxiliary bridge.
“Call med bay,” he said while waiting for the ambulatory members of his bridge crew to catch up. A few saluted as they walked past and into the waiting rail car. Hoff nodded back, but made no move to follow them.
“Admiral!” someone answered. “This is Doctor Elder, I’ve just sent three teams to the bridge.”
“Good, but I need something else from you. I need you to prep a mind probe and have it waiting for me.”
“Of course, sir . . . does that mean the saboteur survived?”
“No, I’ll explain when I get there, Doctor.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Hoff said, ending the call.
He caught his nav officer’s eye as she approached the rail car tunnel. She was limping and clutching her side, but otherwise fine. He was relieved to see that she had survived the explosion more or less in one piece. Deck Commander Teseray Akra was the highest ranking officer on the bridge besides Hoff himself. He stepped in front of her before she could enter the rail car, and she stopped to offer a quick salute.
>
“Commander,” Hoff said.
“Sir!”
“You have the bridge until I get there. I have to attend to some urgent business. Have Lieutenant Hanz contact Commander Leskin of the outlaw fleet and Praetor Roan of the Gors. Tell them to come aboard ASAP and to wait for me in the operations center.”
Commander Akra nodded. “It will be done. Immortals be with you, sir.”
Hoff smiled wanly at the irony of her words. “Let us hope they are with us all soon.”
“Yes, sir . . .” the commander said with an accompanying frown. Like almost everyone in Dark Space, she didn’t understand that immortals existed in more than just the stories that parents told their children about their ancestors—powerful beings who never die and keep watch over humanity from Etheria.
Hoff stepped aside for Commander Akra to enter the rail car. As soon as she was through the door, he turned and hurried down the corridor to a nearby bank of lift tubes.
It’s time to give the Sythians what they want.
Chapter 9
Hoff entered the operations center for the third time in as many days. This time he sat down behind the glossy black holo table with a sense of impending doom rather than the feeble hope that everything was going to be okay. Humanity’s chances had gone from slim to none. He had thought they’d have more time before the Sythians arrived with a fleet strong enough to overwhelm their defenses, but he’d been wrong. The only reason the Sythians hadn’t already attacked was because humanity had something they were looking for—according to them that something was revenge on the Gors, but Hoff suspected they were really after the location of Avilon.
He just hoped his gambit would work. He was about to take a big risk with his allies, but ultimately that risk was in the spirit of protecting the alliance. He couldn’t accede to the Sythians demands without alienating the Gors forever, and he couldn’t let the outlaws know his real intentions without knowing that he could fully trust them.
The doors to the operations center swished open and in stepped Master Commander Leskin. His glowing blue eyes found Hoff and there they lingered for a long, silent moment.
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