“We’ll end up jumping somewhere else if I don’t maintain this heading!”
“Either way we’re jumping blind, Lieutenant. Now go evasive before another missile hits us!”
Their view of space began to spin and whirl, and Caldin watched the stream of warheads heading toward them go streaking by with a narrow margin to spare. Her shoulders sagged with relief and she felt a brief wash of light-headedness as the adrenaline pumping through her veins began to wane.
The Sythian battleship stopped firing.
“Good work everyone,” Caldin said, leaning on the captain’s table for support.
“Captain! The Guardians are asking how they’re supposed to get on board if we’re cloaked. I can’t reply without giving away our location.”
“Use a tight beam comm signal; tell them to match approach vectors to the Emissary.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The Sythians are going to use the same method to find us,” Donali said a moment later.
“I’m sure they will,” Caldin replied, “but without accurate target readings, their missiles won’t lock on to us. They’ll be forced to resort to pulse lasers, and we all know how short-ranged those are. We’ve just bought ourselves another sixty seconds, which is all we needed.”
“Indeed,” Donali replied, nodding slowly.
Caldin watched him curiously out of the corner of her eye while studying the grid rising out of the captain’s table. There was something about Donali’s attitude that she didn’t like, but she didn’t have time to focus on it. She watched the Emissary and the Guardians roaring toward the Intrepid’s port hangar bay. In less than a minute their gravidar icons converged, and she heard the comm officer announce: “The Emissary is on board!”
“Guardians?” Caldin asked.
“All but one.”
“Where is he?”
“Three klicks out, inbound.”
“Without the Emissary to guide him in, he’s going in blind. He’s not going to make it.” Caldin grimaced, feeling a sudden weight settle on her shoulders. “Helm, punch it.”
After a brief hesitation, the stars elongated to bright lines and then whirling streaks of light joined those star lines as they jumped to SLS. Caldin turned to look around the bridge at her crew. The looks on their faces and their solemn silence mirrored what she was feeling. They’d escaped what should have been certain death for all of them, but they’d left a man behind and lost dozens more in the course of their escape. This was not victory, but a near miss with an ignominious end. Death had come capriciously for some, leaving the rest to drown in a sea of guilt.
Caldin’s comm piece buzzed in her ear—incoming call from Commander Ortane. She walked to one side of the gangway to answer it and listened intently to what he had to say. When he finished explaining, she thanked him and turned around.
Commander Donali was standing right behind her.
She nearly jumped with fright.
“Good job, Captain,” Donali said.
“Yes . . .” she replied, frowning. “We did it.”
“A successful retreat.”
Caldin nodded. “It wouldn’t have been if you’d had your way. We would have left the Emissary behind for the Sythians. Would you care to explain that?”
Donali appeared to freeze in place, as if he’d abruptly stopped breathing. “I didn’t think we had enough time to effect a rescue,” he replied, sounding calm but looking otherwise. “I didn’t think we could do it.”
“I don’t think anyone thought we could, but here we are.”
“Indeed we are, ma’am,” Donali replied, the glowing red optics of his artificial eye dimming and then brightening again as he blinked.
“I am curious about one thing, however . . .” Caldin replied, her head canting to one side. “How did they know we were coming?”
“I don’t know that they did.”
“No? Then why were they already surrounding us when we dropped out of SLS? Space is too vast to allow for that type of coincidence.”
Donali smiled thinly at her. “What are you suggesting, Captain? That we have a Sythian agent on board?”
“Yes,” she replied, holding Donali’s gaze. “And I’m suggesting that agent is you.”
Every head on the bridge abruptly turned their way.
“That’s ridiculous!” Donali spat. “I’m the Admiral’s XO, his most trusted advisor!”
“Yes, but even though you are his most trusted advisor, the Admiral chose to send his stepson on a top secret mission instead of you. That wasn’t part of the plan, was it Donali? You were supposed to be the one he sent. So you tried to convince Commander Ortane to let you go instead of him.”
“How did you know I spoke to Ortane?”
“He just called to let me know.”
Donali held her gaze without blinking. “I’m the better choice for the mission. That doesn’t mean I’m a Sythian agent!”
“No?” Caldin shrugged. “I had my doubts about you when we rescued you, Donali, and now I’ve got enough circumstantial evidence to do something about it. You’re going to ride out the rest of this trip in stasis.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Well, I could always put you through a mind probe to find out for sure whose side you’re on.”
Donali’s real eye widened to a panicky aperture. “That could kill me.”
“Then I suppose you should be grateful for stasis technology which enables us to delay that fate. Guards! Stun him.” Caldin roared.
Donali opened his mouth to object, but two stun bolts hit him before he could get out another word. He collapsed to the deck in a pile of twitching and jittering limbs. Caldin stepped up to him and kicked him hard in the ribs to make sure he really was unconscious. When he didn’t so much as stir, she withdrew and watched as the pair of sentinels she’d summoned bent down to bind Donali’s hands and feet with stun cord.
“Take him to the med bay and put him in stasis. The admiral can decide what to do with him when we get back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the nearest sentinel replied as he levitated Donali off the deck with his grav gun and carried him away.
Caldin heaved a deep sigh and shook her head. How were any of them supposed to sleep at night with the threat of Sythian agents lurking in their midst? For all her crew knew she was a Sythian agent, and for all she knew, all of them were. She turned to pass a critical eye over her crew. They watched her with expressions ranging the gamut from shock to horror.
“Eyes on your stations!” she barked. “We revert to real space in less than half an hour, and we need to be ready for another jump if we’re going to elude pursuit.” Sythian SLS drives were slower than human ones, but they weren’t so slow that Caldin felt they could afford to delay.
Her crew grudgingly went back to their stations. She turned and headed for the bridge doors just as the sentinels carried Donali out. “Delayn! You’re the CO until I get back, and you’re reinstated as my XO.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Caldin toyed with the idea of following those sentinels to the med bay and actually submitting Donali to a mind probe, but on the off chance that she was wrong about him she didn’t want to be responsible for his death. At least this way, no one could blame her for anything.
“Comms, have Commander Ortane meet me in the operations center in five.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Time to find out why Commander Ortane’s mission is so damned interesting to the Sythians.
Chapter 14
Ethan sat opposite his bride at an expensive restaurant in the Vermillion Palace, now into day seven of their honeymoon. It should have been one of the most relaxing, enjoyable times of his life, but rather than staring across the table into his wife’s startling violet eyes, his head was turned at an awkward angle to watch the holoscreen mounted above the restaurant’s bar. Alara’s gaze was similarly fixed upon that screen. Karpathia’s news channel was playing with nonstop updates from the Sythian occupat
ion. There were scenes of troopers marching down city streets in the glossy black armor with glowing red optics which had been the Gors’ hallmark, a symbol of the horrors visited upon humanity during the initial invasion. Those scenes were made more horrifying still by the knowledge that those troopers weren’t Gors at all, but rather human slaves wearing recycled Gor armor. Unlike the original invasion, there were no images of mass destruction and slaughter. A few suicidal citizens ran at the advancing armies only to be shot dead before they could reach them, but apart from those incidents the Sythians didn’t appear intent on killing anyone. Instead, their armies walked the streets in orderly formations, ignoring innocent bystanders and local security forces alike.
It was confusing to watch, but the obvious reason for their ambivalence was that this time the Sythians hadn’t come to kill and destroy; they’d come to occupy. Ethan frowned, wondering what the Sythians could possibly hope to get from Dark Space. Leaning in close to Alara, he whispered, “We should go.”
“Where?” she whispered back. “They have the planet blockaded! No one’s getting on or off unless they say so.”
Ethan turned to her. “We have to try. You think we can afford to stay here with that?” he gestured to the holoscreen and the marching armies depicted there. He gave her a grim look. “We’re witnessing another invasion, Kiddie. Just because they haven’t started slaughtering us yet, doesn’t mean they won’t.”
Alara stared back at him, her lips trembling, her eyes wide and terrified. Abruptly he saw her gaze brighten with a sheen of moisture. Reflected there he saw visions of a cottage by a lake and two little children racing around it with their father chasing them; then she blinked and fresh tears welled up to wash away those dreams.
“It’s the only way,” he said.
“What do they want from us?”
Ethan shook his head, not knowing what to say, but the holoscreen answered what he couldn’t, and suddenly a loud, alien warbling filled the restaurant. Ethan’s head snapped back to the screen and he watched with slack-jawed astonishment as the face of a real Sythian appeared. That alien—with his translucent skin, lavender-colored freckles, and the gills slashing the sides of his neck—looked disturbingly like the one Ethan had seen before, the one and only Sythian humanity had ever captured and interrogated—High Lord Kaon. Except Kaon had died with his ship, meaning that this could only be his clone.
Kaon’s warbling was muted, and a translation began to stream out in the neutral tones of a universal translator. “Humans, I am High Lord Kaon,” the alien said, confirming Ethan’s suspicions. He went on, “Your rulers surrender to us, and you are now subjects of the Sythian Coalition. You surely require proof to convince you, and so . . .” The alien turned and gestured to one side of the podium where he stood. The camera panned away from Kaon’s face to show none other than Admiral Hoff Heston—at least, Ethan thought it was him. It was hard tell from his outward appearance—greasy, matted gray hair; days’ old stubble on his face; dirty, tear-stained cheeks; haunted gray eyes, and rounded shoulders. His usually pristine white Supreme Overlord’s uniform looked like it had been soaked in blood, sweat, and tears. If defeat had a face, it was his.
Had his eyes been any other color, Ethan would have said it was an imposter. He had known the admiral as a daunting personality, a man who tolerated little and asked much, a man with supreme confidence in his abilities. Now that man with his impeccably high standards and arrogant strength was broken. He looked like a homeless grub.
Ethan gave an involuntary shiver, and the camera panned back to High Lord Kaon’s face. His rubbery lips stretched into an unconvincing smile. “Welcome to the Coalition,” Kaon said. “Your people make a wise decision by joining us. Our rules for humanity are simple and easy to follow. Rule number one—your people are to provide us with food and whatever other supplies we should require for our fleets. Two—you must cease your pointless infighting. Those found disrupting the peace or resisting the new order are to be enslaved. Three—every mated pair must produce a minimum of four offspring. Life mates with extra offspring are to be rewarded. If you have no mate, you must find one. If you and your mate cannot provide for your offspring, those you cannot feed are to be taken as slaves until death finds them. And finally, at the age of 16, which I am told is the age humans become adults, all must serve in the Coalition Fleet for a minimum of five standard Sythian years—that is six years to your kind.
“If you obey these rules, your race is to be left in peace. Any humans found attempting to flee are to be killed. There is no dissonance, we are one. We are Sythiansss.”
Abruptly, the alien’s face faded, replaced by a local news reporter’s frightened visage. “That . . . we . . .” the reporter stumbled over his tongue and then turned to look down at his notes. For a long moment he didn’t look up, and then the screen faded to show footage of more Sythian cruisers setting down on the plains outside Karpathia City. Those alien warships caught the fading light of the setting sun on their highly reflective hulls and began shining like suns in their own right—dozens of them.
Ethan turned back to Alara. “We have to go, Kiddie,” he repeated. To his astonishment, she shook her head. “Kiddie . . .”
“Ethan, you heard what that skull face said. If we try to run, they’ll shoot us down.”
“What’s the alternative? Stay?”
Alara’s eyes drifted out of focus and she began nodding slowly. “It might not be so bad. They’re actually encouraging us to have children. We already have one on the way.”
“You’re glossing over the reason they want us to have kids. They need more soldiers and crew for their ships.”
“The war is over, Ethan! And we lost. Their terms are not ideal, but they’re the only ones we’ve got. We’re lucky we’re still useful enough that they want to keep us alive.”
“Alara, snap out of it! Our children will have to serve in the Sythian fleet! They might not even live through that. And we’re being forced to have four. Everyone is. The ones we can’t support will become Sythian slaves! To top it all off, our overburdened economy will have to supply their war machine!”
Finally Alara’s eyes focused on his face, and Ethan felt a spark of hope that perhaps she hadn’t completely lost it. That spark died with what she said next.
“If the Sythians are no longer at war with us, who are they going to fight? There will be no war machine to support. Our children will serve for six years without ever having to fire a shot at anyone, and then they’ll come home to live a normal life.”
“And supposing we don’t have the resources to provide for all four of our mandatory offspring?”
“That’s what we should be concerned about, and it just proves my father’s point. We need to sell our ship, Ethan. After that we’ll have more than enough to support a family of any size.”
Ethan gaped at his wife, unable to continue the argument any further. He shut his gaping mouth and began nodding slowly, as if he’d conceded to her wisdom. He would have to plan their escape without her. “All right, fine. You want to stay, we’ll stay, but we’re not selling the ship yet. I’m still going to try to make it as a freelancer first.”
Alara’s eyes narrowed, and an unhappy frown graced her lips. “Ethan . . .”
He held up a hand to forestall her. “We had a deal, remember? Six months.” We’ll be out of here long before then, he thought.
“Fine,” Alara agreed. “Six months, but you’re not getting any extensions on that.”
Ethan smiled grimly. “Don’t worry, I won’t need them.” He turned to find their waiter, but of course the man was standing frozen in the middle of the restaurant, staring up at the holoscreen as footage of the Sythian occupation played in a loop. “When do you think our food is going to arrive?” Ethan asked absently, as if he hadn’t just permanently lost his appetite.
His return to the mundane seemed to fool Alara, and she replied. “I’m not sure. I think we’ll be waiting a while with all of these developmen
ts. Maybe we should go back to our room for a while until things settle down?”
“Yes,” Ethan said, rising from the table and holding out his hand to help Alara up. “Let’s do that.”
* * *
“I want to know what’s so damned important about your mission, Commander.”
“It’s classified,” Atton replied with a frown.
Captain Caldin shook her head. “Not good enough. I just risked my ship and all of our lives to make sure you don’t fall into Sythian hands. Commander Donali is in the med bay in stasis right now because you suspect him of being a traitor. I need some explanations.”
“He wouldn’t be in stasis if you didn’t suspect him as well,” Atton pointed out.
“I can’t take the risk you’re right.”
“Look, Captain . . .”
“Can I be frank with you, Ortane?”
Atton hesitated. “I suppose.”
“I’m not here to expose your mission, or to put it in any danger. I need to know what you’re trying to accomplish out here so that I can help you. Your transport is damaged beyond immediate repair. Whatever the Sythians did to it, the reactor is completely slagged.”
“What? When did you find that out?”
“While I was waiting for you to get here, I checked in with the chief greaser on deck. He ran a diagnostic and passed the good news on to me. Now I’m sharing it with you. What do you think that means for your mission, Commander?”
Atton grimaced. “How long will it take to fix?”
“A few days at least—assuming we can rebuild it with parts we have on hand. If not, that bird will be grounded until we get back. Now, I’m going to take a guess here, but since your transport is a long-range assault recon-class, that means whatever you need to do, it’s quite a bit farther out than we are right now. With that assumption in place, you should know that we don’t have another ship like yours on board. So, either you keep your mission details to yourself and hope your ship gets repaired before long, or you tell me now, and we use the Intrepid to get you to wherever you’re going on schedule. Bearing in mind of course that the admiral told me your mission is unspeakably urgent.”
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