04 Dark Space (20 page)

Sythians also possessed faster than light, near-instantaneous telepathy, and for whatever reason, theirs was not limited to the 10-light-year radius of the Gors’. That meant their traitor could be a Sythian, but the
Intrepid
was fitted with displacement sensors that would have detected a cloaked Sythian onboard by now, so he would have to be hiding in plain sight.

A
human agent
. . . Atton realized, his green eyes widening to twice their normal aperture.

Suddenly, something jerked the
Emissary
violently to starboard. The seat restraints dug into his shoulders and chest, making it hard for him to breathe. Atton gritted his teeth, waiting for the sensation to pass, but if anything the inertial pressure increased. With all the
Emissary’s
systems offline, even the inertial management system and artificial gravity wasn’t functioning.

What the frek is going on . . . ?
Atton wondered. Had he been hit by something?
No,
he decided. If he’d been hit by something, the inertial tug would have eased after the initial impact. The fact that it hadn’t meant something was accelerating the
Emissary
with a constant force. His mind supplied a likely reason for that: a grav gun must have seized his ship. The Sythians had come to claim their prize and turn him into another mindless soldier for their fleet.

But there was something in that explanation which didn’t make sense. Why disable him and not the squadrons of Novas that had rallied out? Atton had watched two Novas blown to pieces with live warheads before the enemy had fired so much as a shot against him. Why pick on his transport?

The obvious answer was that they knew something about his mission, but that was impossible. No one knew about his mission besides the admiral.

And Donali.

Atton’s eyes narrowed to slits. He remembered the commander’s insistence that he take Atton’s place and his eyes flew wide. “You motherfrekker . . .” He gritted out against the g-force. No wonder Donali had wanted to take over his mission.
Well, you got what you wanted,
he thought. Soon the Sythians would be able to interrogate him for the location of Avilon.

With a monumental effort, Atton managed to turn his head against the naked g-force of the grav beam that had seized his ship. He stared out the starboard side of the cockpit . . .

And hope surged in his chest. Rather than see a Sythian warship or fighter pulling him along behind it, he saw the rugged lines of the
Intrepid
and the welcoming blue glow of her hangar bay growing steadily closer as she guided him in.

Atton would have grinned in triumph were it not for the
Intrepid’s
troubled state. Shell Fighters swarmed her from all sides, firing Pirakla missiles. Those bright purple warheads were slamming into the top and port sides of the ship in a continuous stream, peppering her hull with explosions. The
Intrepid
fired back with red dymium pulse lasers, ripper cannons, and Hailfire missiles, nailing Shells by the dozen and lighting space on fire with their explosions, but it wasn’t good enough. Dozens more were streaming in to take their place, and the few Novas he could pick out of the chaos were stretched mighty thin.

At this rate, the
Intrepid
would be torn apart before they could even get the
Emissary
on board, and the Sythians would simply pluck him out of the wreckage.

Atton gritted his teeth and silently cursed Donali for his treachery. If only his comms were working, he could at least warn the
Intrepid
about the traitor in their midst, but with all his systems mysteriously disabled he couldn’t even initiate a self-destruct sequence to keep the Sythians from getting to him.

Atton decided that if it came to it, he’d shoot himself before they captured him. Better that than to doom the last safe refuge humanity had to yet another Sythian invasion.

*   *   *

“Augment our port shield arrays!” Caldin screamed over the hiss and roar of Sythian missiles exploding against their hull. “And turn down the volume on the SISS!”

Immediately the roar of explosions faded into the background.

“Ma’am, we’re venting atmosphere on decks fourteen, six, and eight!” engineering reported.

“Seal them off!”

“We still have crew in those areas.”

“They know the drill. We’ll get them out later, but if they’re not already suited up, there’s nothing we can do for them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Helm, how long until our drives are spooled?”

“Three more minutes, ma’am.”

Caldin shook her head. “Another one and a half minutes until those battleships are in range.” She turned to watch on the captain’s table as the
Emissary
sped toward them. The pair of numbers beside the
Emissary’s
gravidar icon put her range at just over three klicks and her time to reach the
Intrepid
at 20 seconds, but that time was wrong. The hangar bay controllers would have to start slowing the
Emissary’s
approach if they expected to get Commander Ortane back alive.

“Comms, please remind our grav gun operators that the
Emissary
has no power, which means her IMS is not functioning. They’ll have to keep acceleration and deceleration vectors below 10 g’s if we want to get our pilot back in one piece.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll warn them.”

The deck shuddered underfoot and damage alarms sounded. “Engineering! What was that?”

“I don’t know . . . give me a second to calibrate damage sensors . . .”

“It’s one of the battleships,” Donali replied, pointing to the grid. “They’re in range already.”

“Frek,” Caldin hissed, watching as warheads ten and twenty times the size and explosive power of those which Shell Fighters carried spiraled toward the
Intrepid
from the nearest Sythian battleship.

“One minute till we’re spooled for SLS,” the helm reported.

Another explosion rumbled underfoot.

“Are all of our Novas on board?” Caldin yelled.

“No, ma’am! The Renegades are, but the Guardians are just coming about now.”

“Tell them to hurry! Comms—can I get an estimate of how much longer before the
Emissary
is on board?”

“Checking . . . our grav gun operators estimate another three minutes, ma’am.”

“So we’re stuck until then.”

“We could punch out now,” Donali suggested, pointing to the missiles vectoring in on them. “At least we’ll live to fight another day.”

Another missile reached them, and the lights on the bridge dimmed as their shield arrays drew extra energy to buffer the impact.

“Hull breaches on decks five and six!”

“Seal ‘em off!” Caldin roared. She whirled on Donali, her dark blue eyes wild, her short blonde hair sticking up at odd angles. “What’s the point in living, Commander, if you can’t live well? And if you can’t live well, then by the Immortals you should at least die well!” Caldin rounded on her crew, her gaze finding the weapons officer. “Return fire on that battleship! All batteries! Ruh-kah!”

“Ruh-kah!” the crew roared back, and now the deck was shuddering with their own weapons’ fire.

“You can’t hope to destroy them. They’re five times our size,” Donali whispered close beside her ear, like the pessimistic devlin who sometimes sat there.

She ignored him.

Another two missiles from the battleship hit them, and Caldin watched through the viewports as a brief gush of flames blew out a chunk from the top side of the
Intrepid.

“Shields equalizing at 25%,” Delayn reported from engineering.

“Ten seconds until we can jump,” the helm said.

“Engage our cloaking shield!” Caldin replied, eyeing the stream of missiles still streaking toward them.

“We have to disengage our energy shields first,” Delayn warned. “We won’t last long like that.”

“We won’t last long like this, either! At least if they can’t see us, they can’t target us!”

“I thought you wanted to die well?” Donali asked.

“I do, which is exactly why we’ve got to live a little longer.”

“Cloaking shield engaged.”

“Helm, go evasive! Shake those warheads off our tail.”

“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.