04 Dark Space (25 page)

“All but six.”

Atton shook his head. “That seems . . .”

“Extreme? It’s not. I don’t think we want to find out what happens when 116 officers are forced to compete for food, space, and other supplies over the course of the next four years.”

“Standard stasis rotation for long journeys leaves a skeleton crew, ma’am. In this case we should have at least 25 officers awake at all times.

“We should, but these aren’t standard circumstances. We have no hope for rescue and nowhere to go even after we get free of this gravity trap. Whatever happens in the next four to five years, whether the citizens in Dark Space evacuate or get slaughtered by Sythians, there’s no point in us going back there. Our homes are gone forever, Commander. That puts added mental and emotional stress on our crew which makes them a threat to themselves and the well-being of my ship. Besides, if we are ever going to find a planet far enough from the Sythians and habitable enough for humanity to start over, we’re going to need all the supplies we can possibly save.”

“And what about you? How are you going to deal with the stress?”

“The six I’ve picked to stay awake are those who have the best psych evaluations and a proven track record for dealing with this type of situation—all survivors of the original invasion.”

“Even the most stable person in the world will go skriffy after spending a few years in isolation, Captain.”

“We won’t be isolated. We’ll each have our partners for support. Three couples. And we have another three to relieve us when we need a break.”

“Sounds like you have everything figured out,” Atton said. In a way he was relieved not to have to spend any part of the journey awake and slowly succumbing to madness, but there was something he had to tell the captain before she put him to sleep with the rest of the crew. “There is one thing you haven’t factored in, however, ma’am.”

“What’s that?”

“We do have somewhere to go.”

“Oh? And where is that?”

“It would be easier to discuss this in person.”

“Very well. Meet me in the Operations Center as soon as you can get there. Don’t keep me waiting.”

Atton heard a
click
which was the captain ending the call from her end. He waved the holo projector on his desk off and then headed for the door to his quarters.

Five minutes later he was sitting in the operations center for a private audience with the captain. She regarded him quietly, her indigo eyes boring into his green. “Well?” she demanded. “If this is some trick to avoid stasis, it’s not going to buy you much time.”

“It’s no trick. Let me explain.” And so he did. He explained all about his mission, about Avilon, and about the immortal humans who had been hiding out there for eons.

“That’s quite a story,” Caldin said.

“It is. I’m afraid I don’t have much proof except for the fact that the admiral sent us out here for a reason. He thought we might be able to save Dark Space if we could get reinforcements from the Avilonians. With their superior technology, we might be able to wipe out the Sythians for good.”

“If that’s the case, why didn’t they help us sooner?”

Atton shook his head. “Most likely because they didn’t know what was going on, or they didn’t think it was their fight.”

“You’re assuming that’s the case. They might also be on the run from the Sythians, staying hidden because they know they would lose if it came to a straight fight.”

“Maybe,” Atton conceded.

“And there’s something else about all of this that doesn’t make sense.” Caldin turned to gaze into the star map which Atton had pulled up from the holo table where they sat. He’d highlighted the coordinates the admiral had given him. Now the captain jabbed a finger at the green diamond which represented those coordinates. “These Avilonians, as you call them, are not far from what used to be civilized space. At least, their forward base isn’t. You don’t have the coordinates for their actual location?”

Atton shook his head. “The admiral felt it best to reveal as few of the Avilonians’ secrets as he could. He thought my knowing their actual location could anger them and make them unwilling to cooperate with us.”

“All right. Let’s assume their actual location is close to their forward base. But even if it isn’t, their forward base is in the middle of known and charted space . . . why, in all the millennia that the Imperium flourished in this quadrant of the galaxy, did no one ever find these Avilonians and document their civilization? Why has no one ever heard of them?”

“But we have. The Immortals are—”

“Stories we tell to children, Commander. I’m talking about a real documented case of an encounter with Avilonians, not myths and legends about the lost world where humanity evolved.”

Atton shrugged. “According to the Sythians, that world isn’t in our galaxy at all. They call it Sythia, and it’s located in the Getties Cluster. Sythians were humans once. They were the mortals who won the war for Origin that ultimately drove us to the Adventa Galaxy long before the Imperium was even founded.”

The captain regarded him for a long moment with her eyebrows skeptically raised. “Really? Explain to me why they’re aliens, then.”

“Apparently, many years after the war, they began manipulating their genes, selecting them for longevity. Eventually they became something that wasn’t even human anymore. When that wasn’t good enough, they went back to cloning themselves and transferring their consciousness to those clones before they died, making their system for immortality an improvement on the old human method.”

“And how exactly do you know about all of this?”

“The admiral told me. He was once an Avilonian—before he was exiled here.”

“So he knew about our mutual history with the Sythians, about our past, and he didn’t think to warn anyone that there was a serious threat lurking beyond our galaxy? He was an admiral of the fleet.”

“Apparently he didn’t know. That knowledge was lost over the eons. The admiral rediscovered the truth about our past when he went aboard the Sythians’ command ship.”

“And I suppose he heard that convoluted story from the Sythians themselves.”

“Yes.”

“What if they lied?”

“What would they have to gain by lying to us?”

The captain spread her hands. “That story of theirs
literally
humanizes them. From there they can build a foundation of trust which might earn them some level of cooperation from us.”

“But to what end? Why would they need us to cooperate?”

Captain Caldin shook her head. “I don’t know, and I’m not sure that they were lying, but we shouldn’t just take their word for it. Until we find Origin or Sythia, as you call it, we shouldn’t believe a word they’ve said. As for the rest of what you’ve told me . . . it’s a very unlikely story, Commander—you
do
know that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“The only reason I haven’t thrown you out of here for lying to my face is that we have the technology to do what these Avilonians are supposedly doing. We
could
clone ourselves and transfer the contents of our minds to those clones, but to what end? Why bother?”

“To live forever.”

“I could make ten of me, Commander; we’d all look and sound the same, but only one of them would actually
be
me, and that’s the original.”

Atton shrugged. “That is one theory.”

“It’s backed up by the facts.”

“I’m not arguing the existential philosophy with you, Captain. I agree, it does seem like a naive way to achieve immortality, but I saw it with my own eyes. Admiral Heston cloned himself in the last battle with the Sythians. There were two of him alive at the same time. One of those clones died on the Sythian command ship. The other is now ruling Dark Space.”

“Suppose I were to believe all of this—why would we want to go to Avilon and join the Avilonians in their mad existence? It sounds to me like they have a lot in common with the Sythians.”

“Some things, yes, but the admiral told me the Avilonians are nothing if not civilized. They won’t greet us with violence, and I suspect that means they won’t turn us away when we have nowhere else to go.”

“You
suspect.
Did the admiral say why he was exiled?”

“No, he just said not to tell the Avilonians
he
sent me. Commander Donali was the one who told me that the admiral was exiled because he believed that people should be allowed to choose a mortal life if they wished.”

The captain let out a long breath. “Said the suspected traitor. Donali might have told you that just to gain your confidence. It could be pure krak, meaning we don’t know why the admiral was exiled.”

“Avilon is not far from our present location, ma’am. When we do get out of here, before we go running to the farthest corner of the galaxy to find a world where we can rebuild, we should at least send an envoy to Avilon and see if it’s worth going there instead.”

“Agreed.”

Atton was taken aback. “So you believe me?”

“I’m not sure why you would lie, but no I don’t. I’ll believe all of this when I have some proof. For now, I’m willing to keep it in mind and give you the benefit of the doubt, at least enough to further investigate.”

“I understand. You won’t regret that decision.”

“We’ll see about that,” Caldin replied. “Meanwhile, there is one other thing we should do.”

Atton cocked his head. “What’s that?”

“Call for help.”

“Call who?”

Caldin smiled. “The Avilonians of course.”

“Without a jump gate and an open wormhole our comms will be limited to the speed of light. They’ll arrive in—”

“Two and a half years,” she said, pointing to the glowing green diamond on the star map once more.

“And then what? I’m not sure the Avilonians will care enough to send a rescue, but even if they did, it wouldn’t get us out of here any faster.”

“Maybe, maybe not. If they are as technologically advanced as you say, they might have a way to travel through a gravity field at superluminal speed.”

“That’s a big if, ma’am.”

“At this point everything is a big if, Commander.”

“What if Sythians intercept our comm signal? We have reason to believe they are looking for Avilon in order to wipe out humanity there, too.”

“Really? Well, that does sound like them. Either way, our message won’t contain any coordinates except for our own, and I’ll be sure to keep it generic enough that it doesn’t give the skull faces anything to go on. The worst that can happen is some Sythians come jumping into this gravity well and they end up stuck right along with us. If that happens, good riddance, but chances are
their
fail-safes will work and they won’t even be able to get close to us.”

“Well, then I guess it can’t hurt.”

“No,” Caldin said with a tight smile. “Now, you had better get to the stasis rooms with everyone else. I’ll handle this. If we get lucky and if everything you said is true, then we’ll be waking you up a year or two earlier than expected. Dismissed, Commander.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, rising to his feet. He left the operations center and made his way back to the med bay where he’d woken up all of an hour ago. On his way there, Atton considered the implications of what he and the captain had just discussed. It was quite possible that the Avilonians would welcome them as refugees, but what that would mean for them and their futures was anybody’s guess. Even the admiral couldn’t say how Avilon had changed since he’d been there. He hadn’t been back in tens of thousands of years. When Atton thought about how much the Imperium had changed in that time, he realized that anything was possible. The future was uncertain, but one thing was certain—once they arrived in Avilon they wouldn’t be allowed to leave. If the Avilonians were in the habit of letting people come and go as they pleased, then someone somewhere would have found their sector a long time ago.

That meant he would never find out what had happened to his family.

Atton felt a rising ache in his chest, which became a painful lump in his throat. It was hard to accept that he would never see his mother, father, half-sister, or stepfather again. By the time he woke from stasis they would all be dead.

It was that depressing thought which Atton took with him to the stasis rooms, and when the transpiranium cover of stasis tube number 97 sealed him in with a hiss of pressurizing air, it was that thought which he carried with him into the cold, dream-filled world of near-perfect metabolic suspension. In there, time lost all meaning, and a dream could last for days or years. Atton’s dreams were nightmares filled with haunting images of all the people he loved most—people he would never see again.

*   *   *

High Lord Kaon stood on the auxiliary bridge of the
Valiant,
the lights and heat turned down low to his liking. He turned in a slow circle to watch his crew of human slaves work. They already knew how to operate the warship. They were, after all, the very same humans who had been controlling the ship before, except now the Mind Web had turned them into obedient slaves.

The Mind Web could implant any knowledge, skill, or memory; it could sculpt the mind until the person became whatever the sculptor wished them to be. Humans turned out to be much more susceptible to the Mind Web than Gors, and the structure of their brains was better understood, so rather than wipe out the rest of humanity as they had originally intended, the Sythians had come to occupy Dark Space and conscript its people to serve in their fleet. That way they could replace the rebellious Gors.

Kaon’s gaze wandered out the forward viewport to the stars. Silhouetted against a nearby ice planet were the ruins of his command ship, the
Sharal
. That was what he had to show for the Gors’ treachery. As if it weren’t bad enough that they’d subsequently stolen his entire fleet, now they were interfering with the occupation in Dark Space.

Initially, everything had gone smoothly, but now there were hidden cells of Gors cropping up here there and everywhere to disturb the peace. In the last twenty four hours alone Gors had killed over a thousand human slaves, and almost all of those were on Karpathia. The Sythians were being forced to conscript greater and greater numbers of humans in order to make up for losses.