Dark Space: The Invisible War (27 page)

How do I detect other vessels?
she wondered.

A hovering holo flashed up in her peripheral vision. She turned to it and studied a map of sorts, clustered with unfamiliar symbols and letters, but the 3D grid plot of space and the red icon in the center, which she supposed to be her ship, were familiar. She could see nothing on the grid to suggest an enemy or friendly vessel, but then as she watched, a wave of light spread across the map, like ripples spreading across the surface of a pond, and she saw a cluster of red icons appear both below and above her vessel.

Destra’s heart sank. She’d be shot down in no time! As far as she could tell, she was flying straight toward a cluster of enemy ships—although she couldn’t see any sign of them with her naked eyes as the faint haze of atmosphere fell away and the vast, starry darkness of space snapped into clearer focus.

As Destra watched, the red icons on the map began to fade, and then the next wave of light reached them, and they reappeared, their positions slightly altered. Destra frowned. This was a much less useful form of gravidar.

How am I supposed to evade anything like that?
It only took a matter of seconds to die in a dogfight, so real-time data was important. She wondered how the Sythians had been able to fight them so efficiently if their gravidar was so inadequate.

Then, suddenly, she realized what she was missing. The Sythians had cloaking devices. It was almost certain that they were using them, and that was why they were hard to pin down on the gravidar. Destra shook her head ruefully. That meant Sythian gravidar was better, not worse, than the human version. Not even the best gravidar systems humans had been able to devise could see Sythian ships coming. None of their early warning systems had worked. It was a pity they hadn’t found a way to reverse engineer a Sythian gravidar, but she supposed it was far too late for wishful thinking.

Frowning out at space, Destra wondered if the ship she’d stolen had a cloak. The ship interpreted that thought as intent to cloak, and suddenly she heard a sound like rushing air, and she saw her own icon on the grid slowly fading and reappearing. Destra smiled.
How do you like having the tables turned, you bug-eyed kakards?
Her ship reached the nearest group of enemy contacts, while she searched the gravidar for one contact in particular—a gate. It wouldn’t be fading in and out like the rest, because it wasn’t cloaked. It would be a human contact, and probably the only one remaining in the system.

Then she found it. There were two gates, both marked in red and lying at the far edges of the grid cube. Just as Destra wondered how to head for the nearest gate, the seemingly empty space ahead of her became suddenly crowded, and enemy ships were racing toward her from all sides.

“Oh frek . . .”

There were hundreds of fighters just like the one she was flying, and behind those, in a more distant orbit of Roka IV, lay a dozen or more large capital ships, their blue and lavender hulls shining mirror-clear in the sun.

They’d all uncloaked, but why?

Then a deadly wave of spinning purple stars began pouring toward her, and she had her answer.

Chapter 18

—
THE YEAR 10 AE—

“W
hat do you want?” Ethan asked as soon as they sat down together inside his quarters.

Dr. Kurlin smiled with all the smugness of one who knew he had a winning hand. “Very little. I want you to send me and my family back to the transfer station with enough food and supplies to last until help can come. And if you make it to Obsidian Station, I want you to send help back for us.”

Ethan blinked. “That’s it?”

“Well, I’d also like to know why and how you’re impersonating the supreme overlord, but I won’t get greedy just to satisfy my curiosity. Those questions seem to matter infinitely less when I know that you won’t make it alive to Obsidian Station.” Kurlin spread his hands. “At which point my moral obligation to reveal you as an imposter is clearly removed.”

“Your
moral
obligation,” Ethan snorted. “That’s a joke coming from you, Kurlin.”

The old man’s eyes hardened and he scowled. “I had no choice, and who are you to judge me? For all anyone knows you’re a serial killer whose next target was the overlord.”

Ethan shook his head. “There’s always a choice, and you made the wrong one, just as you’re making the wrong choice now by trying to blackmail me. What if I decide to kill you, just to shut you up?”

Kurlin sat back, smiling once more. “I’ve written a netmail which will be sent out as soon as my heart stops, informing the entire crew of your secret. Attached to that is the proof that you are not who you appear to be. You’ll be jettisoned out the nearest airlock by a mob of angry officers.”

“Well, you’ve thought of everything, haven’t you,” Ethan replied. “What proof do you have? How should I believe that you know anything at all?”

“I know because I had to test your blood sample, along with everyone else’s on this ship, for markers which would indicate an active infection of T4-76. Unfortunately for you, this involved checking the age of each person from their blood. I found access to this test mysteriously restricted for your sample and conducted the test by hand only to find that your genetic age did not match your apparent age. Not even close.”

“Interesting,” Ethan said. “But then you still don’t know who I am?”

Kurlin hesitated. “I don’t need to know. You’re an imposter. It’s good enough.”

“You’re right, it is good enough, but there’s something you haven’t thought of, Kurlin. The
Defiant
has just jumped to SLS and I have no ships or fuel to spare for you to make the SLS jump back to Stormcloud Transfer.”

Kurlin’s eyes flashed, and his lips pressed into a thin line. “Very well, then you leave me no choice.”

Ethan held up a hand. “Wait. While that is true, I believe I could be persuaded to do something about this situation.”

Kurlin cocked his head, his brow furrowed curiously as he waited for Ethan’s reply.

Ethan drew his sidearm in a blur, faster than Kurlin could have imagined possible. Ethan’s reflexes were honed from long practice as an outlaw and a freelancer. He could draw faster than most, and far faster than Kurlin could react.

Ethan pulled the trigger just as Kurlin’s eyes were beginning to widen. Kurlin’s body convulsed, causing him to slump to the floor, and Ethan stood up, eying the man’s motionless form.

Re-holstering his sidearm, Ethan grimaced. Now what was he going to do with the body? It would be a while before Kurlin woke up, so he had time on his side. The old man had said that his message would be sent out as soon as his heart stopped. He’d said nothing about it being sent out if he were stunned.
A big oversight, my friend.
Casting his eyes around his quarters, Ethan spied a cylinder with a blue transpiranium cover stacked against the wall inside his bedroom. It was his private stasis tube, reserved for medical emergencies and long trips through SLS.

Ethan nodded and paced over to Kurlin, picking him up by his arms and dragging him toward the stasis tube. “I’m sorry, Doctor. If we make it, I’ll let you out as soon as I find a successor to the throne. If not, at least you’ll die in your sleep. That’s more than I can say for the rest of us.”

*  *  *

As Atton slept, he dreamed of a beautiful woman with bright violet eyes and flowing dark hair. She had the face of an angel.
Angel
. That was her name. She
was
an angel, but she didn’t act like it as she pushed him onto the bed and crawled over him on all fours to pin him down and kiss him roughly on the lips. He felt his pulse quickening as he savored the sweet taste of her lips on his. Atton closed his eyes to enjoy the sensation more fully, and he felt a warm stir of desire as she lowered her body on top of his. She ended the kiss and pulled away from him, leaving a stupid grin on his face. Then he opened his eyes—

And screamed.

He was gazing up at the black, skull-like helmet of a Gor soldier. Staring back at him were a pair of glowing red insect eyes. As he watched, the Gor’s helmet opened impossibly at the jaw, revealing a mouth full of glistening black teeth.

Atton awoke with the dying echoes of his scream still reverbrating from the close walls of his quarters. He grimaced and checked the time on the alarm clock beside his bed, and then he groaned. It was just an hour before they were due to revert from SLS. He was never going to get back to sleep, so he may as well get up. He’d lain down on his bed thinking it would just be for a short nap, but he’d promptly succumbed to four straight hours of sleep. He was still wearing his comm piece in case someone needed to contact him, but no one had tried.

With another groan, Atton stretched and stood up from the bed. He’d slept in his flight suit, since there would be no time to pull it on if the squadron had to scramble. Atton’s stomach rumbled loudly and he frowned. At least he had time to get something to eat from the pilots’ mess. It was smaller, with fewer options than the main mess hall, but they were all on an orange alert, meaning they couldn’t leave the flight deck. They needed to be able to scramble at a moment’s notice. Still, at this point, any food would taste good—possibly even the freeze-dried krak which passed for food aboard the
Defiant
.

There was one advantage to being the overlord,
Atton thought as he headed for the door.
I only ever ate fresh.
But the
Defiant
didn’t have fresh, overlord or not, and Atton’s stomach was taking some time to adapt to freeze-dried foodstuffs—hence the intense rumblings he felt now. It had been nearly a day since he’d last braved the mess hall, and if he didn’t eat something soon, he was likely to pass out in his cockpit.
You’d like that wouldn’t you, skull faces?
Atton frowned, snippets of his nightmare flashing into his mind’s eye. The Gors weren’t their enemy, but it was hard to remember that when they had been the real face of the war. Apparently having Tova become a more visible presence aboard the
Defiant
was starting to get to him, too.

*  *  *

Alara awoke to the sound of an alarm clock buzzing in her ears. She rolled over with a groan and looked up at the low ceiling above her bunk, where the noise was coming from. Lying on the top bunk was Lieutenant Gina Giord. Alara didn’t know much about her, except that she was one of only two other female pilots in the squadron besides herself. Gina was an ill-termpered loner and she didn’t say much, so it was hard to get a conversation going, but maybe that was because she just hadn’t hit upon the right topic yet. Alara watched Gina jump down lithely from the top bunk and then take a moment to straighten the wrinkles in her flight suit. What would be a topic of common interest between the two of them? Alara wondered.

She remembered seeing Gina eyeing Captain Reese the night of the trainees’ celebration.
Men,
Alara thought with a smile,
always a good topic when relating to women.
It was a topic she was particularly familiar with.

“You know, Gina, I was talking to Captain Reese about you last night.” That was a lie, but it was a good way to introduce the topic.

Gina turned on her heel to glare at Alara. “About what?”

“Nothing bad, don’t worry.”

“I find it hard to believe he’d have anything good to say.”

“Why’s that? He seems nice.”

“Yeah,
seems
. He just wants to get into your pants, girlie. Don’t let the charm fool you. He frekked me over, and he’ll frek you over, too, but first he’ll just frek you.”

“You mean you two were . . .”

Gina turned around again as she waved her wrist over the scanner on her locker. “We were together, yes.”

“And? What’s he like?” Alara asked, leaning forward with a grin. “Does he look as good with his shirt off as I’m betting?”

Gina eyed her with obvious disgust. “You know, I wouldn’t be so eager to get frekked if I were you. A girl who looks like you might get passed halfway around the fleet if she doesn’t develop some self-respect.”

Alara’s grin faded and she sat back, her brow furrowing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that I’ve heard things. You shouldn’t make yourself so available. No matter what’s been done to you.”

From the way Gina held her gaze, it was obvious she was talking about the slave chip. Alara rubbed the side of her head self-consciously, and her eyes dropped to the deck.

Gina’s tone softened and she offered a slight smile. “Come on, let’s go get some breakfast, Alara.”

“It’s Kiddie,” she said, standing up.

Gina acknowledged that with a nod as she withdrew her sidearm from her locker.

“You’re taking a gun?” Alara asked, her eyes wide.

“You should take yours, too,” Gina replied while strapping it around her waist.

Alara looked hesitant. “What for?”

Gina looked up, her expression grim. “In case we get boarded.”

“I—I didn’t think of that . . .”

“No one does until it happens. Not that I suppose you’d see the frekkers even if they did board us. For all we know, there could be dozens of them on the
Defiant
right now.”

“Sythians? Or Gors?”

Gina closed the locker and turned to leave. “That’s the million sol question, isn’t it?”

“Wait, can’t we take a vaccucleanse first?”

Gina snorted. “I wish. We’re on orange alert, greeny. That means we need to be able to scramble to our cockpits in five minutes or less. You think you can cut short a vaccucleanse, pull on your flight suit, run to the hangar, and be sitting sealed inside your cockpit in just five minutes?”

Alara hesitated.