Dark Space: Avilon (26 page)
Read Dark Space: Avilon Online
Authors: Jasper T. Scott
Tags: #Children's Books, #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Alien Invasion, #Cyberpunk, #First Contact, #Galactic Empire, #Military, #Space Fleet, #Space Opera, #Children's eBooks, #Metaphysical & Visionary, #Science Fiction
The last thing she saw as the transpiranium began to frost up was a faint flicker of movement along the far wall of the stasis room. A familiar gray, skull-like face appeared, and two slitted yellow eyes peered at her from the gloom.
Torv?
she wondered, surprised to see him there. She blinked and he was gone, as if he’d suddenly cloaked himself to avoid being seen.
She realized she was hallucinating. By now the Gors would all be on board a transport waiting to transfer to one of their own ships.
Her eyes drifted shut and she dreamed of the Gors taking over the ship and using the crew in stasis to augment their dwindling rations. She woke up in her dream, faced with the cadaverous face of a hungry, hissing Gor.
What she’d told Atta was a lie. There
were
nightmares in stasis; they were just limited to the first few minutes and the last few minutes.
The Gor went on hissing at her, and now he bared sharp teeth and prominent canines. She wondered if that meant he was planning to eat her, and if so, why he didn’t just get on with it. . . . She braced herself for the sudden stabbing pain of teeth sinking into her flesh.
The Gor reached out for her with giant hands. She squeezed her eyes shut. Something groaned and snapped, and then a weight she hadn’t realized was resting on her chest lifted.
Her eyes popped open and she saw the restraining belt that had been strapped across her chest dangling from the Gor’s hands. Destra used her freshly-freed hands to fend off the monster.
Rather than tear off one of her arms, the Gor ignored her feeble efforts and bent down to rip out the belt that was pinning her feet in place.
That done, he stepped back and waited, hissing at her once more.
Destra blinked and shivered, her senses coming alive. Pins and needles prickled through her hands and feet. Suddenly she realized that this
wasn’t
a dream, and the Gor standing before her was none other than Torv—the same one she’d thought she’d seen before succumbing to stasis. There were no medics or corpsmen anywhere to be seen.
Then she remembered her daughter and panic gripped her. She stumbled out of her stasis tube to the one beside it. Atta was still asleep behind the frosted glass, her cherubic face relaxed in sleep. Destra glanced at the timer. It was counting up, not down, since they’d been placed in an
indefinite
hibernation. The glowing red digits marked just
four hours, fifteen minutes, and twelve seconds.
Destra turned to Torv and shook her head, for the first time noticing the bloody red emergency lighting in the stasis room. “What’s going on?” Her gaze traveled to the exit and she found a trail of bodies leading there—medics and corpsmen as well as a few sentinels. None of them were moving. Destra turned back to Torv, wide-eyed. “What have you done?”
* * *
30 Minutes Earlier . . .
Sergeant Cavanaugh kept his ripper rifle trained on the Gors’ backs as they crossed the hangar deck to their waiting transports. There were a few dozen
skull faces
in all. Captain Covani was adamant that they be confined to their transports while the
Baroness’s
crew went into stasis, just in case.
They reached the nearest of three Gor transports, and stopped there, waiting as one of the Gors went to trigger the loading ramp.
“Get me a head count,” Cavanaugh said.
Rictan Five replied a moment later. “Twenty-six skullies, sir.”
“Twenty-six?” Cavanaugh asked. “There were meant to be twenty-seven.”
Five nodded. “The Gor’s liason, Torv, is still coming, sir.”
“Without an escort?”
“Another squad is bringing him.”
“Why am I only hearing about this now?”
“I thought you knew.”
Cavanaugh grunted and put a call through to the bridge. “The Gors have reached their transports, sir.”
The captain’s reply crackled close beside Cavanaugh’s ears. “Are all of them accounted for?”
“All except for
Torv
.”
“What? I just received confirmation that he’s with you.”
Alarm bells rang in Cavanaugh’s head. “From who?”
“His escort!”
“His escort never arrived,” Cavanaugh replied, looking around quickly. His skin prickled, and hairs rose on the back of his neck. “That confirmation must have come under duress. There’s no one else here.”
“Stun them, Sergeant!”
Suddenly the air shimmered and the Gors were gone.
“Frek!” Cavanaugh said.
Ripper fired roared out from Cavanaugh’s squad, tearing through the empty air where the Gors had been and plinking harmlessly off their transport.
Cavanaugh’s pulse pounded in his ears. “Fall back!” He turned and ran for the hangar bay doors. They had to get there before the Gors did. Their only chance was to trap the skull faces inside the hangar.
Moments later, Cavanaugh heard a human scream. He turned to see Rictan Five dangling by one foot, help up by an invisible force. Cavanaugh aimed just above Five’s foot and fired. Something
screeched
and
hissed
. Five fell on his head, but he was wearing a helmet, so he still got up and ran.
Cavanaugh laid down covering fire. “Come on!”
Another
hiss
sounded right beside his ear. He whirled toward it, spraying bullets in a wide arc. Something knocked the rifle out of his hands. He reacted instantly, drawing his sidearm and firing off four shots into thin air. Sparks flew as those rounds hit an invisible plate of armor. Then something grabbed his sidearm and wrenched it out of his hand. Cavanaugh saw the weapon floating in the air, the barrel turning to face him, and he knew he was in trouble.
He lashed out with his prosthetic arm, hammering his invisible opponent. His arm hit something solid and unyielding. Then he was lifted bodily and
thrown
across the deck. Cavanaugh skidded to a stop and scrambled to his feet. He saw the rest of his squad spread out and locked in their own struggles with invisible opponents. A steady stream of blue stun bolts came racing in from one side, hitting Rictan Seven, then Five, then Two. They crumpled to the deck, armor and weapons clattering as they fell. One of the Gors had stolen a sidearm and he knew how to shoot.
But why stun bolts?
Cavanaugh wondered.
He didn’t have time to come up with an answer.
The gunman fired on him next. Cavanaugh ducked and rolled. He came out of that roll sprinting for the nearest again for the hangar bay doors. One of his squad mates caught up beside him. Rictan Four.
They reached the doors. Cavanaugh passed his wrist over the control panel, and the doors
swished
open. “Go, go, go!”
They raced through and Cavanaugh sealed the doors from the other side. The doors slid shut, but didn’t close. Something invisible was wedged in between, forcing them open again.
Rictan Four raised his ripper rifle and fired a burst into the gap. Sparks flew from invisible armor, provoking a
hiss
from the Gor who was forcing the doors apart. That alien retreated, nursing whatever injuries they’d inflicted, and the doors shut the rest of the way.
Cavanaugh’s comms crackled. It was Captain Covani. “What’s going on, Sergeant?”
“The Gors attacked! Four men down. We’re on our way to the bridge!” Cavanaugh spun away from the doors. Rictan Four tossed him a sidearm, and Cavanaugh caught it in the air.
Then came another
hiss.
Cavanaugh jumped with fright and spun toward the sound. He went flying into the doors, hit by an invisible enemy. Rictan Four fired blindly back. Then he got hit by the same thing and slammed into the ceiling. His ripper rifle clattered to the ground a split second before he fell on top of it. Cavanaugh recovered just in time to be slammed into the doors for a second time.
His ears rang with the impact. The sidearm was pried from his fingers and turned on him. Then came a stun bolt, fired straight into his chest. Cavanaugh collapsed, his muscles turning to jelly as he fell. Before his eyelids fluttered shut, and his eyes rolled up in his head, he saw the air shimmer, and a face appear—
A
skull
face.
It was Torv.
Chapter 21
“W
e’ve got a lock on the
Baroness.
She’s just dropped out of SLS!” the
Tempest’s
sensor operator called out.
Bretton turned and nodded down to the crew deck. “Helm, sequence our jump.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And get me an ETA as soon as you can.”
“Approximately . . . ten minutes, sir.”
Bretton grimaced.
Ten minutes!
By then the Baroness could jump somewhere else.
Bretton drummed his fingers on the captain’s table while he waited. He was peripherally aware of Captain Picara and his niece, Farah, crowding him to either side.
A countdown hovered up before Bretton’s eyes, projected mere millimeters from his retinas by his newly-acquired ARCs. At first he’d balked at the reminder of being a Peacekeeper, but these contacts were only networked to the ship, and he’d already been de-linked from Omnius, so the AI-god couldn’t use the ARCs to read his mind.
After what felt like an eternity, the timer reached zero, and then—
The world exploded with a blinding radiance. An instant later the light was gone, and everything was back exactly as it had been before, but now the star map on the captain’s table was showing a different star system, and the pattern of stars beyond the forward viewport had been replaced with a dark, intermittently flashing gray nebula—the Stormcloud Nebula.
“Report!” Bretton called out.
“Jump successful, all systems green . . .” the ship’s engineer replied.
“The
Baroness
is dead ahead, sir! Twenty klicks,” sensors announced.
“Good let’s—”
“Sir! I’m detecting multiple contacts! Sythian hull types. They’re moving to surround the
Baroness
.”
Bretton scowled. “That was fast. Aren’t they supposed to have slower jump drives than the ISSF? How did they get here at the same time as the
Baroness?
”
“Maybe they’ve been improving their jump tech,” Farah suggested.
“Maybe,” Bretton conceded. “Comms—please tell me you still have the old systems working.”
“Old systems, sir?”
Bretton turned to regard the comms officer. “You expect to contact an Imperial vessel with quantum tech? There’s a reason we never heard from the Sythians during the war. Quantum signals won’t even register on their comms.”
“I believe they are working, sir, but I’ll check. Give me a minute.”
“You’ve got thirty seconds. Gunnery—I assume we have some kind of ordinance on board . . . ?”
“We have a few thousand dymium grenades, sir.”
“
Grenades?
What are you going to do, throw them out the nearest airlock? What about torpedoes, missiles . . . ? You must have ripper cannon rounds at the very least.”
“The
Tempest
wasn’t in good condition when we found her, sir, the original armaments were all non-operational.”
“Okay, back to my original question—what are we going to do against the enemy with
grenades?
”
“We’ll launch them with the quantum junction,” Captain Picara put in.
Bretton gaped at her. “Assuming that works, we’ll have just one launcher.”
“Yes, but one that’s capable of teleporting a lethal payload instantly to the target,” Picara replied. “Sythians don’t have quantum disruptors. They barely have quantum comms. They’ll be defenseless.”
“So what do we do about enemy fighters?”
“Keep our distance and stay cloaked.”
Bretton was incredulous. “This is the resistance’s secret weapon? A warship without guns? I feel like I’m the captain of a garbage hauler!”
“We can’t hope to defeat either Omnius or the Sythians in a straight fight,” Picara replied.
“No, I can see that.”
“I meant that it won’t make a difference how many guns we have, Captain. It’ll never be enough.”
Bretton shook his head.
“Sir! Conventional comms are working, but I can’t hail the
Baroness
without revealing us to the enemy,” the comms operator interrupted.
“Are we out of range of the enemy?”
“A few ships have been drifting closer to us since we arrived. They’re not far out of range,” sensors replied.
Bretton’s eyes fell on the glowing blue star map projected above the captain’s table. “Drifting closer?” He eyed the disposition of enemy forces on the grid. Suddenly he noticed what the sensor operator was talking about. A small group of Sythian warships had broken off from the main formation and was taking a very circuitous route to get to the
Baroness.
If Bretton didn’t know better, he’d say they were maneuvering to get closer to
his
ship.
“Sensors, get me vectors on those ships.”
A moment later vector lines appeared on the grid. Current and projected headings appeared as green and red arrows respectively. Those arrows turned slowly around the red icons of enemy contacts like the hands of old-fashioned clocks. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for Bretton to see that the vectors were all subtly shifting in their direction.
“That’s impossible,” Captain Picara whispered. “There’s no way they can see us.”
“They can’t detect their own ships when cloaked, let alone ours,” Farah added.
“So how are we detecting them?” Bretton replied. “Obviously the tech is out there to be discovered. Omnius has it. Maybe now the Sythians do, too. It would explain how they followed the
Baroness
from Dark Space. We
assumed
they have a traitor on board. I wonder if there isn’t a simpler explanation.”
Picara shook her head. “We’ve been hiding under their noses for months. We
still
have a ship hiding in Dark Space. The
Emancipator
should have come under fire by now if the Sythians could see her.”
“Maybe, or maybe they’ve just been watching us to see what we’re up to. It’s not like
two
ships are much of a threat to them. In either case, we need to know if the enemy can see us. Engineering—please confirm the status of our cloaking shield.”
“Engaged at 100%, all sub-systems green.”
“Are we releasing any radiation? Comms? Engines?”
“Nothing that’s getting by the shield, sir.”
“The enemy is launching fighters!”
Bretton saw a large swarm begin pouring out from the main formation, zeroing in on the
Baroness.
A smaller swarm poured from the ships vectoring in on them.
“Why haven’t they jumped to SLS?” Farah whispered, her eyes on the
Baroness.
“They’ve had more than enough time.”
“There’s a lot of obstacles in this nebula,” Captain Picara said. “It’s playing havoc with sensors. Maybe they don’t want to risk running into something.”
Bretton began nodding. “That, and they don’t know they’ve been followed. The Sythians are still cloaked. Sensors—how long before the enemy reaches firing range?”
“ETA five minutes for the first squadron,” the sensor operator replied. “The others aren’t far behind. . . .”
“If we power energy shields now, they’ll see us for sure,” Captain Picara said. “We might be jumping at shadows.”
“Any chance the traitor that
we
brought on board is communicating with the enemy to give our position away?”
“We would have detected that. Besides, he’s sitting in the middle of a quantum disruption field. Nothing’s getting in or out of that. It’s your call, Admiral,” Picara said, “but we may not survive a volley from them even with our shields raised.”
Bretton eyed the approaching contacts on the grid. “Gunnery! Can we remote detonate those dymium grenades of yours?”
“No, sir, but they have proximity sensors.”
“Good enough. Find a squadron of Shells that isn’t moving around too much, behind the leading edge of the fighter wave, and then launch a handful of grenades as close as you can get them to the target.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Two minutes to firing range!” the sensor operator declared.
Bretton watched the grid without blinking, his eyes intent upon the enemy as he waited.
“You’re going to fire the first shot,” Farah said, slowly nodding.
“I don’t see how that helps us assess their threat level,” Captain Picara put in.
“It might get them to open fire prematurely,” Farah explained. “Right now, they’re trickling out towards us. The fighters will reach firing range before their capital ships. If they think the jig is up, those Shells might start firing right away rather than wait for the big guns to get into position first. We’ll survive some small arms fire from the Shells with our shields down, but the big guns could take us out in one volley.
Bretton turned to regard Farah with a smile. “Exactly. When did you get so good at reading my mind?”
“About the same time I became a wise ass, sir.”
Bretton gave a snort of laughter.
“Grenades away!” gunnery reported.
Bretton watched the grid intently. A small burst of light flared in the middle of the enemy fighter formation, taking almost a dozen Shell Fighters off the grid as it faded.
“Nine down!” sensors reported.
Bretton held his breath, waiting.
“The first squadrons have reached firing range with us,” sensors reported.
Long seconds passed and nothing happened.
“Guess they can’t see us after all . . .” Farah said.
Then, suddenly, the onrushing waves of enemy fighters de-cloaked and the grid came alive with sparkling purple waves of Sythian Pirakla missiles.
“Frek me!” Farah exclaimed.
“Shields!” Bretton bellowed. “Helm—take evasive action! Comms—see if you can hail the
Baroness
. By now they should have detected those enemy fighters, but at least let them know who we are and ask them if they need any help. Maybe this time we can agree on jump coordinates and set up a rendezvous.”
A chorus of
Yes, Sirs,
reached his ears. Bretton watched with a grimace as red enemy contacts began brightening all over the grid. The Sythians were all de-cloaking and powering their shields. The cloak and dagger phase of this engagement was over, but Bretton couldn’t take any satisfaction in that. The
Baroness
and the
Tempest
were horribly outnumbered.
Bretton’s eyes skipped to the
Baroness,
watching a much larger wave of fighters rushing toward them. The enemy wasn’t in range of them yet, but they would be soon.
Suddenly he noticed something. The Baroness’s icon on the grid was still dark.
Farah was the first to voice that concern. “They haven’t raised their shields yet. What are they waiting for?”
Bretton made an irritated noise in the back of his throat. “Comms—are they responding to our hails?”
“Negative, sir. Nothing yet.”
“They’re not maneuvering or accelerating, sir,” sensors added.
“What, you mean they’re derelict? What do they think they’re doing?”
“As far as we can tell, they are still under power, sir,” sensors replied.
Bretton waited a few more seconds. Veins pulsed in his temples. He felt an impatient heat rise around his collar. “Come on . . . raise your shields, damn you!”
“The first fighters are in range of the
Baroness.
Opening fire!
”
Bretton watched, breathless, as waves of sparkling purple missiles raced toward the unshielded hull of the
Baroness.
And still they didn’t raise their shields.
“They’re going to be obliterated if we don’t do something.”
“Frek it . . . Helm! Plot a micro jump into the path of those missiles.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can’t be serious,” Captain Picara said. “They’re not responding or maneuvering. For all we know they’re dead. You plan to sacrifice us for a ghost ship?”
“No, I’m going to buy some time while I teleport over there and take command of the
Baroness
myself.”
“What if the ship has suffered a catastrophic failure? There’s no quantum junction on the other end. You’ll be trapped on board as she goes down.”
“The resistance needs a real ship, Captain. One with real weapons. We can’t afford to lose the
Baroness
without a fight.”
“Even if you get her working, with just two ships against an entire Sythian fleet, we don’t stand a chance.”
Bretton was already turning to hurry down the gangway and off the bridge. Farah hurried to keep up beside him. “Helm, how are those jump calculations coming along?”
“Almost ready, sir. . .”
“I need an ETA!”
“Thirty seconds!”
The timer appeared before Bretton’s eyes and he nodded in approval. “Good.” He reached the doors leading off the bridge and stopped there to turn to Captain Picara. She was just half a step behind him. “You’re in command while I’m gone, Picara. With any luck I’ll be back soon.”
“Don’t do this, sir. Even if you can save her, we can’t beat an entire fleet of Sythians with just two ships. We have to go now. The
Baroness
is forfeit.”