Dark Space: The Invisible War (32 page)

Atton sat blinking out at the mesmerizing swirl of SLS. He did a quick check to see how long before the reversion to real space and found that it would be almost four hours. Enough time to get some rest he supposed, but every time he tried to close his eyes, they shot open again as if loaded with springs. He couldn’t sleep. There were too many thoughts bouncing around in his head. They’d crossed just two systems, and already they’d run into enough opposition to take down six novas and nearly obliterate the
Defiant.

Atton pushed those thoughts from his head and focused on what was to come. He and the remainder of Guardian Squadron would have enough fuel to reach the rendezvous, but not by much. Adari and his wingman in the smaller Mark II’s would be even lower on fuel by the time they reverted to real space. They’d be lucky to make it. And as for the
Defiant . . .
he’d seen the bad shape the
cruiser
had been in when it had entered SLS.

Shaking his head, Atton let out a long, calming breath and closed his eyes once more, forcing himself to relax in preparation for sleep. He rolled his ankles and flexed his legs as much as he could in the cramped confines of his cockpit, and he grimaced at the sharp tingle of pins and needles which shot through his limbs. Atton’s eyes popped open again.

He sighed, and asked his AI for a sleeping aid. There was nothing he could do about his squadron or the
Defiant
until they dropped out of SLS, and when they did, he’d need to be well-rested. Atton felt a sharp prick, and then a spreading wave of warmth which seemed to reach every corner of his being. He laid his head back and let that wave carry him into sweet oblivion.

*  *  *

The reactor room was filled with smoke—laser welders flashed brightly in the dim red glow of the emergency lights. Ethan gazed up at the dark transpiranium dome high above the reactor, watching sparks hissing out in high arcs above the catwalk where he stood in a bulky yellow radiation suit.

According to his chief engineer, Petty Officer Delayn, the aft shields had overloaded, sending a power surge back through the reactor which had cracked the dymium core. They were working fast to patch the core before it went critical, or before they’d have to shut the reactor down completely and drop out of SLS. An interruption like that would use up too much of their remaining fuel, and they needed that fuel to send Brondi’s corvette the rest of the way to Obsidian Station.

“May I ask you something, sir?” Caldin said, interrupting his thoughts.

“Of course,” he said, turning to her.

“What was the mission you sent those two corpsmen to complete?”

“My guards?”

Caldin nodded.

Ethan looked back out over the reactor core and shook his head. “You know that’s classified.”

“We’re going to die, sir. It shouldn’t matter anymore.”

“No, I suppose it shouldn’t,” Ethan admitted. “But why does it matter to you?”

“One of them was my . . . lover, sir.”

“Oh.” Ethan was taken aback. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“No one did. I just wanted to know . . . if he’s okay . . . if maybe he left a message for me.”

Ethan hesitated. “I’ll have to check with Captain Reese.”

Caldin looked abashed and she averted her eyes. “Of course.”

“Don’t worry. If anyone is safe right now, it will be him.”

No sooner had Ethan said it than an alarm went off and a sharp hiss rose into the air. A man screamed, and their eyes were drawn to see someone stumbling around on top of the reactor core, clawing at his melted faceplate. “Frek!” Ethan said. “Get a medic over there!”

No one heard him.

“She’s gonna blow!” someone yelled.

“Shut it down!” Delayn yelled back.

“Brace for reversion!”

Ethan held on to the railing; then came a resounding
bang,
as someone shut down the reactor,
followed by the steady hum of the SLS grinding to a halt. The emergency lights flickered inside the reactor room, and then they were all yanked off their feet as the ship was thrown out of SLS.

Ethan picked himself off the catwalk. “Report! What happened, Delayn?” Ethan whirled around to find his chief engineer already hurrying down the catwalk toward them.

“We almost blew the reactor wide open! We’re going to have to stay here and fix it.”

“Frek . . .” Ethan muttered. “Where is here?”

“By my calculations we’re about twenty minutes from the rendezvous. Maybe half a light year off.”

“Well, hurry up and fix the reactor!”

“Yes, sir.”

This just gets better and better.
“Factoring for this little detour, are we going to have enough fuel to send Brondi’s corvette the rest of the way to Obsidian Station?”

Delayn nodded. “We should, yes, but we’ll have none left for ourselves.”

Ethan grimaced. “Not like we could have made it in the Defiant anyway.”

“It will be risky, sir. As I mentioned before there’s a chance the corvette’s reactor will overheat and blow the ship apart. Corvettes weren’t designed to make long-range jumps. Max SLS time from one system to another is around 12 hours. This trip will take about a day.”

“So they might not make it, and we’ll have drained all our fuel just to give them the chance,” Caldin said, shaking her head. “We’ll be stranded.”

“Yes, ma’am, that is the risk we’ll take.”

Ethan clenched his jaw. “It doesn’t sound as though we have much choice.”

“No, sir.”

“We’ll head to the rendezvous to pick up novas first, and then you’re free to take whatever parts you need from the
Defiant
to make this crazy scheme of yours work, Delayn. How long do you think before we’re patched up and ready to enter SLS again?”

Delayn hesitated, turning to watch the teams of engineers and other crew swarming over the reactor with arc welders, and heavy ingots of duranium filler. The man who’d been burned by the reactor leak had subsided to one side of the room, with the ship’s only medic attempting to administer first aid for what were almost certainly lethal burns. Delayn grimaced. “It could be a while.”

Ethan frowned. Without being near a working gate relay, they couldn’t send a message to the Guardians to let them know what had happened.

Suddenly there came a
bang
and the emergency lights went out, plunging the ship into utter darkness. Ethan felt his stomach lurch, and the weight on his legs and spine was abruptly lifted. His feet lost traction on the deck and he began to float free of the catwalk.

“Hoi!”

“We’ve lost IMS!”

Ethan flailed in the dark for anything solid to grab on to, but there was nothing within reach. He listened to the rising tumult as his crewmen shouted out confusing and contradictory orders as they bumped into walls and each other.

We’re derelict,
Ethan thought with rising horror. Of all the ways he’d imagined them dying—drifting quietly and alone in the cold dark void of deep space had not been one of them.
This is the real Dark Space—
he thought as he listened absently to Delayn snapping orders for the crew to use the grav guns on their belts to pin their feet to the deck. —
being stranded without power in the vast emptiness between the stars. . . .

Derelict

Chapter 22

K
urlin awoke in darkness. The air was still and terribly cold. He tried to sit up, but his head slammed into something hard and unyielding. He winced and tried to quell the rising panic in his chest before it swept away his ability to reason. Trying to push against the cool glass-smooth surface above his head, he found that it would yield. The obstacle swung away and a welcome rush of warm air brushed his face and body. He shivered with the sudden change in temperature, only now realizing that he was naked. His mind pieced the clues together and he realized that he’d been put in stasis. A second after that, he realized why. The overlord had done it to shut him up.

Kurlin scowled, and stepped out into the darkness, but he found as he pushed out of the stasis tube that there was no gravity on the ship. He floated freely across the room until his shins slammed into something hard, and he tipped face first onto a soft mattress. He bounced off and began floating above the bed, his hands flailing and grabbing handfuls of the sheets for purchase.

And then, suddenly, the darkness was replaced with a blinding red light. The emergency lights. Kurlin blinked and squinted against the sudden brightness, and he now noticed that he was floating three feet above a bed, white sheets billowing and trailing from his hands like a giant jelly fish as he drifted through the air.

Then the IMS came back online and Kurlin fell to the bed with a
whump.

Shaken, he stood up and looked around. What had happened? Why had the lights and IMS been offline? How long had he been asleep?

Unsure about the answers to any of those questions, Kurlin quickly hunted through the unfamiliar surroundings for his clothes. He found them strewn all over the floor, no doubt having floated there from somewhere else during the power failure. It didn’t take Kurlin long to recognize where he was.
The overlord’s quarters,
he thought grimly.
But where’s the overlord?
Kurlin looked around warily, but there was no one else in the room with him. Having confirmed that, he hurried to get dressed. Not bothering to pull on his socks, Kurlin strode over to the overlord’s desk and keyed the holoscreen to life. Using it to log into his netmail account, he quickly found the message which he’d left pending. The time was 0920 hours—which he estimated meant that he’d been in stasis for almost fifteen hours. It was now late morning. Kurlin was grateful that he hadn’t awoken to find the overlord enjoying a late breakfast in his room. It was just as well that he wasn’t.

That imposter had demonstrated his unwillingness to cooperate by stuffing Kurlin into the stasis tube, and if he found Kurlin awake and running around freely on his ship, he might have found a more permanent way to shut him up. Kurlin had only one recourse now.

He stabbed the key to send his message over the ship’s commnet and then hurried out of the overlord’s quarters. He was still barefoot, and the floor was cold, but there was no time to waste. Until the message was discovered by enough people that they could take action to overthrow the imposter, he was going to have to find his wife and daughter and get them to hide with him somewhere aboard the
Defiant
.

But where?
he wondered.
Where wouldn’t the overlord think to look?
Remembering the stasis tube where he had just spent the better part of the last day, Kurlin thought he had an idea. He would hide in the place the overlord would least expect to find him—

The stasis room.

After all, who would go straight from one stasis tube to another?

*
 
*
 
*

Atton awoke from a pleasant dream to an alarm that was more suited to an air raid siren than a wake up reminder before a reversion to real space.

His heart pounded with adrenaline, his eyes were wide and staring out at stars. Atton blinked.
Stars.
The alarm should have woken him a few minutes before reversion. Why had he dropped out of SLS early? This wasn’t right. He noticed the SLS countdown on the HUD was frozen at 15 minutes, and then he sat up suddenly and scanned the gravidar—but there were no contacts on the grid.

“What happened?” Gina asked, voicing the question which was on all of their minds.

“We got yanked out of SLS early,” Ithicus replied.

Atton shook his head. “The Sythians don’t have SLS disruptor tech, so unless they have . . .”

“A wormhole ship cloaked somewhere between Forlax and Odaran?” Ithicus finished for him.

“Has anyone else noticed the
Defiant
is missing?” Guardian Nine, Tenrik Fanton, added.

Atton felt a stab of dread and re-checked the gravidar. The
Defiant
had been the first one to jump to SLS, but they hadn’t entered SLS on the same trajectory as the Guardians had, so the wormhole ship wouldn’t have yanked them out.

“We have to get to the rendezvous!” Gina said.

“With what fuel!” Ithicus Adari shot back. “I’m down to 5%. That’s barely enough to fire up the SLS for an emergency speed correction. We’re stuck.”

“Ours isn’t much better,” Atton replied, “but it’s enough to get us to the rendezvous. We can send someone back for you. Think you can wait?”

Three snorted. “Not like I have a choice.”

Gina came back on the comm, saying, “Hoi, in case you skriffs haven’t noticed, we were yanked out of SLS by
something
. We might have enemies tracking us as we speak. We need to hurry.”

An enemy contact siren blared, making Gina’s warning prophetic, and space was suddenly crowded with dozens of red bracket pairs as Sythian fighters began swarming out of nowhere. “Evasive action!” Atton cried.

Even as he stomped on the rudder to line up the nearest enemy fighter, a flurry of missile lock alarms sounded through his cockpit. The numbers of enemy fighters immediately ahead of him were increasing by the second, until one pair of brackets seemed to blur into the next. Atton fired off a quick laser blast, slicing off the bottom half of the nearest shell, but it was just one out of more than a hundred.

“There’s too many of them!” Tenrik Fanton screamed.

Atton felt a crushing weight of despair at the futility of it all, and then the onrushing wave of enemy fighters erupted with a blinding volley of missiles. Atton heard his comm crackling with more exclamations, but he could barely hear them over the screaming of the missile lock alarms as more than a dozen spinning purple stars vectored in on him. The missiles were still too far away for him to go evasive, so Atton targeted the next nearest shell and fired two more blasts from his lasers. He felt his nova shudder with each fire-linked burst, and then watched the enemy fighter fly apart in a bright flash of light. Applying slight pressure to the port rudder pedal, Atton lined up the next target and did the same. Another explosion flared in the enemy formation, followed by three more as other Guardians hit home with their lasers. Atton watched Ithicus Adari and his wingmate go speeding toward the enemy formation, taking advantage of their greater speed to fly into the thick of it. They fired their dual pulse lasers with perfect accuracy, strafing from one enemy to the next and slicing off pieces of them left and right. Bright lavender-hued lasers flashed out in reply from the enemy fighters, tracking the two mark II’s, but Adari and his wingmate began executing oscillating barrel rolls which were unpredictable enough to keep them safe. Like that they sailed straight through the wave of Sythian missiles without a scratch. Atton followed their lead, boosting and barrel rolling to evade the missiles vectoring in on him. The g-force alternated between pinning him to his seat and pulling him against his restraints, and Atton quickly dialed up the IMS to keep from getting disoriented.

Two explosions blossomed on the star map where green icons had been, and someone yelled over the comm, “Fourteen! Frek! Thirteen, too! Why didn’t they eject?” Atton’s wingmate, Alara, asked.

Atton shook his head.
Down to six pilots.
If the Defiant doesn’t get here soon . . .
but soon couldn’t be soon enough. With the overwhelming odds they were facing, they wouldn’t last long.

Even as Atton thought that, he saw the massive bulk of a Sythian carrier de-cloaking in front of them. The scale of it was immense and it was pouring hundreds more shells after them as they watched.

*  *  *

The stasis room was freezing cold. Doctor Kurlin held his wife’s hand as they crossed the room in the dim emergency light to reach the nearest pair of empty stasis tubes. They’d tried to find Alara, but it had quickly become apparent that she was out on a mission with the other nova pilots.

“W-what if the ship is destroyed while we’re asleep?” Darla asked.

Kurlin turned to her from the control panel of the nearest stasis tube. “Wouldn’t you
rather
die in your sleep, darling?”

“I don’t want to die at all.”

Kurlin shook his head. “We won’t. Not yet. And we’ll find some way to escape this dead man’s quest as soon as we get Alara back.”

“Do think she’s all right? I heard the fighting on the comms. They were dying out there, Kurlin!”

Kurlin turned to her with a frown. “She scored well in the training. If anyone survived, then she did.”

“What if we’ve lost her and we don’t even know it?”

Kurlin just shook his head as he turned back to the control panel.
We’ve already lost her, Darla,
he thought but didn’t say.
The slave chip made sure of that.

“There, the first one’s ready. Would you like to go first, my darling?” he asked, gesturing to the open stasis tube. He was putting them in stasis for a day, long enough for the imposter overlord to be arrested.

Darla hugged herself and shivered, her gaze locked on the coffin-sized chamber. She shook her head vigorously. “You go first.”

“No one’s going anywhere!”

Kurlin whirled around to see who’d said that. He came face to ripper rifle with a brawny corpsman. “Who are you?” Kurlin demanded.

The man snorted. “Funny, I was about to ask you the same. Aren’t you that doctor we rescued from the corvette?”

Kurlin’s eyes widened and suddenly he recognized the man in front of him. Another burly corpsman stepped out of the shadows, his ripper rifle also leveled at them.

“Yes,” Kurlin replied, trying to sound nonchalant.

The man who’d spoken gestured with his rifle to the doors of the stasis room. “What’s going on out there?”

Kurlin shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

“Why would you want to put yourself in stasis?” the other corpsman asked, nodding to the open tubes.

Kurlin frowned, wondering how much he could trust these two men—the very same two who had interrogated him and knew that he had created the virus which had decimated the
Valiant
. He had to tread carefully with them. “It seemed the safest place to hide.”

The first corpsman snorted. “Hide, huh? The rest of the crew figured out what you did, then?”

Kurlin felt a cold lump of ice settle in his gut. “No . . .” he shook his head. “Worse than that.”

“Oh yea? Spill it, brua.”

“The overlord is an imposter.”

“He’s a what?” both men were taken aback.

“A holoskinner.”

“What makes you say that? You see him take off his skin?”

“No, I tested his blood. He has the blood of a 46-year-old, and there’s only one way that’s possible.”

Both corpsmen just stared at him for a long moment, looking uncertain. Finally one of them said, “Is that true or are you just blowin’ smoke?”