04 Dark Space (29 page)

“We’re lucky that we’re still alive and free,” Covani whispered. “Revenge will have to wait.”

Destra shook her head and made her way wordlessly from the bridge. On her way, she shot an acid look at the lieutenant manning the comms station. “Make sure my daughter doesn’t get a chance to see that. No news feeds in the mess or any of the common areas.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The bridge doors swished open and then shut behind her. Her body was physically trembling with rage. She would have her revenge. Sooner or later she would find a way to make the Sythians pay.
Just a few more weeks,
she tried to tell herself.
A few more weeks and reinforcements will be here.
Then she would hunt Kaon down and throw
him
out an airlock.

Chapter 19

Two weeks later . . .

T
wo more days,
Ethan thought, admiring the view from one of the Vermillion Palace’s balconies. Far below, the bright turquoise of the Argyle Sea sparkled in the sun. Semi-tropical islands dotted that expanse, overgrown with vegetation that was all the colors of the rainbow. Fluffy white clouds sailed by close below their cliffside vantage point. Two more days and they’d be back to reality. Thanks to the Sythian occupation, it was an even harsher reality than they’d had to endure in the past.

Hoff had been executed for all the sector to see. Citizens were being taken by the thousands every day. They were taken from their beds at night, or taken off the streets in broad daylight. People were being enslaved left and right to serve in the Sythian fleet, without warning or explanation. Initially those reports had been seen on the news nets, warning people not to trust the Sythians. The invaders had promised to leave Dark Space in peace, but they were leaving it in
pieces
. No one was safe. After the first such report had aired, no further outcries had been heard from the press. They were feeling the weight of the Sythians’ rule, just the same as everyone else. The only truly free press humanity had left was the one which could be heard whispered from one ear to another.

Ethan tightened his grip on his wife’s shoulders and shot her a wan smile. “Did you enjoy your honeymoon?” he asked, trying to lighten the mood.

It was the wrong question to ask.

Alara raised her eyebrows and shot him a bland look. That was her
don’t be stupid
look. The Vermillion palace had its own water, power, and food supply—enough to last for months without replenishment, so they hadn’t suffered any of the worst effects of the Sythian occupation, but being stranded for a month in a luxurious hotel whilst they knew the rest of humanity was suffering one of the worst times in human history had been more than enough to ruin their honeymoon.

The blockade had been lifted, for what that was worth, but where could they possibly hope to go? Ethan wasn’t sure. Without a cloaking device and a hold full of red dymium fuel, they wouldn’t get far. As far as he knew cloaking devices had never been adapted to ships as small as his
Trinity
, and red dymium fuel was still restricted to the fleet, which was now controlled by Sythians, so they were just as stuck as anyone else in Dark Space.

“What if they take
us
next, Ethan? What’s going to happen to our baby?”

“Let’s hope the drafting stops soon. They only have so many ships, and if they expect us to be a renewable source of crew for the future then they’ll have to leave the majority of our population alone.”

“The majority. How many do you think they’ll take before they have enough?”

Ethan thought back to the initial invasion and how many Gors had been in the Sythians’ fleet. “Assuming they haven’t brought any new fleets to our galaxy . . . they’ll need to take at least a few million of us to replace the Gors.”

“A few
million?
Our entire population
is
a few million!”

“Just over ten,” Ethan corrected.

Alara shook her head. “This is a nightmare. Maybe we
should
leave.”

“No, you were right,” Ethan said. “There’s no way out and nowhere for us to go. We have to lie low. We can find a safe place to hide somewhere out in deep space until they’re done abducting people.”

“I’m tired,” Alara said suddenly. “I want to go back to our room now.”

“Okay,” Ethan replied, turning away from the view and walking back inside the palace.

When they got back to their room, Ethan waved his wrist over the identichip scanner and held the door open for Alara. He walked in behind her and turned to shut the door behind them, but as he moved to do so, there came a
thunk
and it bounced back into him, as if something had been wedged between the hinges. “What the frek . . .” Ethan muttered, trying to push the door closed once more. This time it bounced more violently back into him, and he heard a familiar hiss. Ethan’s hand automatically dropped to his gun belt, but he wasn’t wearing one.

Then the air before him shimmered and a hulking shadow appeared. Fear struck Ethan like a hot knife. He backpedaled into the room, and the shadow advanced. Then Ethan realized the shadow was too big to be human. The glowing red eyes and glossy black armor were Sythian construction, but the dimensions were all Gor, and the Gors were allies now.

“Who are you?” Ethan asked, stopping to stand his ground before the alien.

It warbled something at him which he didn’t understand. He wasn’t wearing a translator.

“Ethan, what’s going on?” Alara called. Then Ethan heard her scream right beside his ear as she came to see for herself. He turned to see her stumbling away from the Gor who had barged into their room.

“Stay back, Kiddie—what do you want?” Ethan demanded of the alien.

“It’s not what he wants,” a familiar voice answered. Ethan noticed the door swing shut behind the Gor, but not what had shut the door. “It’s what I want,” the voice went on. Then the owner of that voice stepped out from behind the hulking alien and Ethan found himself staring into a familiar pair of blue eyes. His ex-wife’s eyes.

Ethan’s eyebrows shot up. “Destra? What are you doing here?”

“Hello, Ethan—Alara,” she said, nodding to each of them in turn. “We need to talk.”

*   *   *

High Lord Shondar watched the timer hovering in front of his command chair. Soon his ship, the
Gasha
would arrive at the coordinates for Avilon. The real coordinates. As of two weeks ago when Shondar had left Lord Kaon and Dark Space behind, Lord Quaris and the 2nd Fleet had
still
been missing. Perhaps they would never be heard from again. That was unfortunate for Quaris, but it gave Shondar a chance to steal the glory. Now
he
would be the one to discover the lost human sector of Avilon. He would be the one everyone praised when he returned to the Getties, and he would be the one they
rewarded
. Never more would he be forced to live on harsh, inhospitable worlds like Etica, Caas, or Ramad.

Before the invasion the Sythians had been left with but one option—expand or die from sheer scarcity. Like Lord Kaon, Shondar came from a harsh world. Kaon’s world was dark, watery, and cold, while Shondar’s was dark,
rocky,
and cold. Both were equally bleak and pitiless in Shondar’s opinion. The ultimate honor was to live on Sythia in Shangrila. There the word scarcity didn’t even exist. There was no pain or suffering. Not even death could touch the chosen, because they had ways to extend their lives even beyond the average thousand years of life which most Sythians would see. No more cloning. No more mind transfers. No more niggling doubts as to whether or not they really died when they were reborn. He hadn’t been engineered to live on Sythia. None of them had. They had been born to live on cold, inhospitable worlds where none of the chosen would dare to go, but in Shangrila, even that could be changed. There were ways of altering the body without touching the mind—expensive ways.

Those nettlesome details would all be taken care of when Shondar returned from war. All of that and more had been promised to him—to all of them—as payment for risking their lives in service to the Coalition. Few who were immortal would risk an untimely death—or for that matter the chance to be killed permanently if one died too far from the nearest command ship. The behemoth-class cruisers were the only places in the Adventa Galaxy which could receive their brain scan data and use it to resurrect them in a new body. Transmission time for such data was near-instantaneous, but limited in range to just over a thousand light years, depending on interstellar interference. Shondar knew he was pushing those limits by flying so far from Dark Space and the other fleets, but the prestige he stood to earn by being the first to engage the Avilonians was too tempting to pass up.

Ultimately, Shondar had decided to take almost half of his fleet—105 warships and a skeleton crew of slaves. His mission wasn’t to take planets or to somehow conquer the Avilonians. They had been forewarned—the Avilonians were too strong for that. Thus, he would gather intelligence data that would later be used by the other lords to conquer Avilon. Shondar would come back with them when the time for that honor came.

Turning his gaze away from the timer counting down to the
Gasha’s
reversion to real space, Shondar studied each of his crew in turn. Here were the twelve Sythian
operators
who tirelessly kept watch over the
Gasha’s
automated systems and helped give orders to the
drivers,
each of whom
was the commander of one slave ship. They kept in constant contact with the slave captain and his crew, but from a distance, safely ensconced aboard the command ship, which would stay cloaked behind enemy lines. Still, if something horrible befell the command ship—as had happened recently with Kaon’s
Sharal
—then immortal or not, all 270 Sythians on board would go down with their ship, either to be reborn aboard the nearest command ship, or to be lost forever. In this case most of the drivers had stayed behind in Dark Space with their ships, so the
Gasha
only stood to lose the 105 drivers who were needed, plus its 12 operators—
and one high lord,
Shondar thought.

He felt a horrible heat creeping down his spine. He couldn’t recall clearly what it was like to die, but he knew what it was like to be reborn. Even after more than five hundred orbits had passed, he could still remember the awful rush of heat coursing through his brain, the violent spasm as all of his muscles twitched in the same moment, and the identity-stealing reminder that his previous body had just died. That triggered the suspicion that perhaps he wasn’t really alive anymore, but merely a clever copy of his old self which had in turn merely been a copy of the iteration that had preceded him. That chain of doubt went so far back it boggled the mind. Shondar remembered being overwhelmed with a strong urge to kill himself just to stop the madness.

But of course, that wouldn’t end it. It would just start a new iteration of life.

Thankfully those first few moments of self-doubt and existential questioning never lasted long. The initial confusion and horror passed. Shondar had been told that everyone dealt with resurrection in their own way, and that not everyone suffered the same ill effects from the birthing process. Sadly, Shondar was not one of those lucky individuals.

A raucous noise erupted, tearing into Shondar’s thoughts and drawing his attention back to the fore. It was the ship’s reversion alarm. But it was too soon for them to have arrived. Then the deck shuddered and lurched underfoot. The swirling streaks of light which accompanied superluminal travel abruptly vanished from the simulated star dome that covered the
Gasha’s
bridge. Yet instead of seeing stars and space as Shondar had expected, now all he could see was a pure, unadulterated black.

“What happens?” Shondar demanded. “Where does the display go?”

“The star dome is functioning perfectly, My Lord,” the
operator
in charge of engineering reported.

“Sensors show we are pulled out of the light stream inside of a dark nebula,” the sensor operator added. “We cannot see any suns because their light is blocked by the particles of the nebula.”

“Where are we?” Shondar was already pulling up a star map at his command control station so he could see for himself. A glowing hologram of the
Gasha’s
surroundings appeared floating in the air before him. He saw their destination marked on the map, still over three light years distant, and he hissed angrily. “What causes this delay on the path to glory? Chart a course around the obstacle!”

“I . . . cannot, My Lord,” the operator at the helm replied. “We are in the middle of the gravity field which does pluck us from the light stream. We cannot re-enter it until we move beyond the field.”

Shondar couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had to take a moment to calm himself. “Why do our sensors not detect this field and drop us out of the light stream before we land in the
middle
of it?”

The operator at the engineering station gave a strangled whimper which Shondar recognized as shame. He had no excuse.

“Are the sensors operating effectively?”

“I go to find out, My Lord,” engineering replied.

“Do so. Navigation, make us to leave this field as quickly as possible that we may continue on our way. When your path is ready, tell me how long this . . .
unfortunate incident
will take to correct.”

“I already calculate this, My Lord,” navigation replied.

“Then? How long? I must report our progress to Lord Kaon.”

The navigation operator took a suspiciously long time to reply, and Shondar was about to yell at him again. Just as he was taking a breath to do so, the operator replied, “The shortest path out of the field is to take us . . . five to six orbits, My Lord,” the operator said in a quiet voice.

Shondar thought perhaps he was asleep and dreaming. Something this terrible could only happen in a nightmare. If it would take that long to leave the gravity field, then Shondar and his crew would not only
not
be the ones to have the honor of discovering Avilon, but they would not have the honor of conquering it either.