Darius frowned at the sight of the weapon. He must have seen her put it in her sleeping bag before they fell asleep. It was a simpler explanation than that his dream had somehow revealed something he hadn’t already known—or the even less likely possibility that his dream hadn’t been a dream at all.
Occam’s razor, he thought, nodding to himself: the simpler explanation was usually the correct one.
“Are you okay?” Dyara asked. “You look like you’ve seen a Revenant.”
Darius’s heart began pounding at her use of that word, and he remembered what Tanik had said in his dream: The Revenants are coming.
“A what?” he asked.
“A Revenant, you know... like a ghost, but a living one. It’s what we call the kids who never come back from the Crucible.”
“A living... revenant,” Darius said slowly. “Are they real?”
“Well, some people think they are. I guess it makes it easier to think that the kids who don’t come back are still out there somewhere. Some people swear to have seen them, though.”
“Maybe I did see one,” he said. “A Dark Revenant.”
Dyara frowned. “You mean Tanik? That’s just a nickname he got because he’s cheated death one too many times, and because of his... reputation in the USO.”
Darius nodded slowly. His eyes swam out of focus as he replayed the dream in his head, trying to find the seam between real and unreal.
Dyara arched an eyebrow at him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Okay. Let’s go get some breakfast,” Dyara said, and bent down to strap on her mag boots.
“And then you’ll take me back to Hades?”
Dyara nodded. “I promise. As soon as we drop out of FTL.”
“All right.” Darius unzipped his own sleeping bag and floated out. He slipped into his mag boots and strapped them on, and then followed Dyara back to the mess hall.
When they arrived, they found that they were the last ones there. He and Dyara each grabbed a handful of vacuum packs from the buffet counter, along with flasks full of orange juice plus their utensils—a pair of scissors and a spoon. Darius had trouble carrying all of that over to the table where the others were standing without losing his grip on anything, and he had to stop a few times to grab things that floated free.
Dyara and Darius caught looks from several of the others as they approached. Lisa glared at them from where she stood beside Captain Riker. Blake grinned like an idiot and winked at them. “Nice choice,” he said, nodding to Dyara. “She’s a hottie.”
“Shut up,” Darius replied. “It wasn’t like that.”
Dyara popped a dried banana slice into her mouth and casually drew the pistol from her pocket to aim it at Blake’s head. “Mind your own business.”
“Hey!” he held up his hands. “I was just joking!”
“Your jokes are not funny,” Dyara said.
Tanik gave a snarling smile. “Put the gun away, Dyara.”
“Fine,” she said, and slipped it back into her pocket.
“Son of a vix...” Blake muttered, and Veekara made an irritated noise in the back of her throat.
“How did you all sleep?” Tanik asked.
“Not bad, considering that we couldn’t close the doors or turn off the lights in the hall,” Lisa said.
Ectos hissed his agreement and Veekara nodded.
“Today we’ll see about getting the ship’s maintenance bots to repair the damage,” Tanik said.
They all ate in silence for a while, until a few minutes later Tanik spoke once more, “It’s time to formally assign your roles on this ship,” he said. “That means you all need to head down to the data center and take aptitude tests. Based on the results of those tests, Captain Riker and I will make crew assignments. While you’re doing that, I’m going to put together an orientation video we can use when we wake up the others to get them up to speed as quickly as possible. I’ll get Gatticus to narrate, since he apparently speaks English.”
Darius glanced at Dyara and cleared his throat.
She swallowed a mouthful of food and then said, “Tanik—”
“Yes?”
“Darius would like to go back to Hades to look for survivors.”
Tanik’s gaze shifted to her. “You mean to look for his daughter.”
“Among others. I offered to fly him back.”
Tanik’s eyes narrowed and flicked to Darius. “I see.”
Captain Riker looked up. “I want to go too,” he said.
“Do you now?” Tanik asked, and gave a snarling smile.
Darius’s guts clenched. He had a bad feeling that Dyara had been wrong to include Tanik in their plans.
“Very well,” Tanik said.
“We can go?” Darius asked, blinking in shock.
“Of course. You are not prisoners here, but do take care that no Cygnian ships follow you back to the Deliverance.”
“This is pointless, and it will accomplish nothing,” Ra growled. “There are no survivors.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” Tanik said. “But even closure is not pointless.”
Dyara nodded, but Darius shook his head. “Cassandra is alive,” he insisted. “I know she is.”
Tanik looked to him. “Then I believe you. Go, and hurry back. We cannot afford to wait long. In the meantime we will begin waking the rest of the crew.”
Darius nodded. “Thank you.”
“If we’re not prisoners, then Gatticus and I can leave, right?” Blake asked.
“Of course—but not until Darius returns.”
“What? Why?”
“Because we cannot move the Deliverance if Dyara is to find us when she returns, and yet we will have to do so if we send a ship to the USO, because it could be traced back to us through the nav logs.”
“How long will it take for them to leave and come back?” Blake asked and jerked his chin to indicate Darius.
“A little more than a standard day,” Tanik replied.
“Well, that’s just great,” Blake muttered.
“Dyara, you’d better go get ready for your trip,” Tanik said as he emptied the vacuum pack he was eating from and left it drifting beside him. “I’m going to find Gatticus so he can help me with the orientation video. Ike—” He nodded to the white-furred, blue-eyed Korothian. “Take the others to the data center and help them with their aptitude tests.”
“My pleasure to do this.”
Tanik nodded and then turned and strode for the exit. They all watched him go. As soon as he disappeared, Blake snorted and shook his head. “Is it just me, or is there something off about that guy?”
Darius glanced at each of Tanik’s comrades to check their reactions, but none of them seemed offended by the remark.
“It isn’t just you,” Dyara said quietly.
Blake turned to her with eyebrows raised. “Really? Is there something you’d like to share with the group, Hottie?”
Dyara frowned, but Darius couldn’t decide if that was a reaction to the way he’d addressed her or to his question. Tik, the Murciago, and Ikatosh gave her sharp looks, and Dyara shook her head. “No.”
Blake pointed accusingly at the Korothian. “What was that?”
“It is nothing,” Ikatosh said, and heaved his furry white shoulders in a shrug. He wasn’t wearing a jumpsuit, or any clothes at all besides his mag boots and an equipment belt.
“No, that was something.” Blake traced an imaginary line between Ike, Tik, and Dyara, making it clear that he’d seen the looks they’d given her. “Whatever she was about to say, you didn’t want her to say it.”
Ike said nothing to that, and Tik chittered softly.
“Well, Hottie?” Blake pressed. “Are you going to let Batman and the Abominable Snowman intimidate you?”
Darius watched Dyara carefully, waiting for her to explain.
“It’s nothing,” Dyara insisted, shaking her head. “Excuse me. I have to go find a ship to take us back to Ha
des.”
Darius watched her go, and Blake caught his eye across the table. “Well that was interesting,” he said.
“Yeah,” Darius agreed. He stared pointedly at Ike as he said that, but the Korothian appeared not to notice.
Blake’s gaze remained fixed on Ike and Tik. “Whatever she was about to say, it sure as hell wasn’t nothing.”
Chapter 35
EIGHT HOURS EARLIER...
At first Gatticus couldn’t believe his luck: he’d found a room aboard the Deliverance that looked like it had belonged to an android! There was a safety harness with a charging port beside it where he could recharge. There was also a high-speed data connection, and instead of sleeping bags in the closet, he found transparent cubes with a signature lattice structure inside.
Data cubes.
He went snooping through the data. It was encrypted, but something about this felt familiar. On a whim he tried his own encryption code. It worked.
Gatticus stared in shock at the data cubes as one of them glowed to life. This was his data, and these were his quarters. It made a certain amount of sense. If there’d been more than one android on board, he would have encountered the other one by now.
As he parsed through the data cubes, Gatticus found that they contained backups of his internal data, his memories. The latest one was only a few weeks old, which meant that it had been made just before he’d been shot in the head.
An emergency memory dump? he wondered. If so, it would contain all of his missing memories, including the memory of who had shot him, and why.
Gatticus felt a chill creeping down his spine, a simulated reminder of his long-lost humanity.
Gatticus shook his head and forced himself to focus on the matter at hand. The fact that he’d had his own quarters aboard the Deliverance had staggering implications. It meant that he might actually be a member of the Coalition!
But then who had shot him in the head?
Gatticus frowned. Maybe he’d been an undercover agent for the USO. That might explain why the ship’s fuel had been dumped. Maybe he had been the one to dump the fuel.
But there was still something that didn’t make sense. How had just two Banshees managed to slaughter thousands of armed crewmen?
There was only one way to find out. Gatticus found the data cube with the most recent date stamp and prepped it for transfer to his data core.
But he hesitated before executing the transfer. As soon as he integrated these memories, he would know who he was, and whose allegiance he shared. If he turned out to be a loyal member of the Union, then he would promptly betray everyone on board. After this, he’d be back to his old self—whoever that was.
Perhaps the transfer could wait, at least until he left the Deliverance with Blake. That seemed to be the fairest solution.
Except for one nagging concern: whatever had happened on board, it could be somehow important to his own survival, or the survival of the ship’s new crew.
Gatticus settled for the dubious third option of going through a virtual reality replay of the memories in the data cube without actually integrating them. That way, the current version of himself with his unknown allegiance would remain in control, but he would at least learn what his old self was like and what had happened on board the Deliverance.
Gatticus nodded to himself and queued the memories for playback. Let there be light, he thought, just as a flood of memories went flashing before his eyes....
Gatticus was sitting on the bridge of the Deliverance, right beside Captain Deena Okara. The bright circle of light dead ahead and the pure darkness all around on the holo panels in the walls, floor, and ceiling of the bridge indicated that they were in FTL. Looking through a warp bubble was just like staring down the proverbial dark tunnel with a light at the end. He hoped that wasn’t a portent of things to come for his negotiations with the Kassaraks.
Captain Okara glanced at him. “Time to make our delivery, Ambassador.”
He nodded back. “Warp bubble dispersing in three... two... one.”
A bright flash of light consumed the warp tunnel, and then quickly faded to black. As Gatticus’s eyes adjusted, he saw stars prick through the darkness, and dead ahead, he saw a glassy-smooth, spherically-distorted region of space-time with a colorful blue nebula trapped inside. It looked like a giant marble floating in space.
“The Eye of Thanatos,” Captain Okara said, nodding to it.
Gatticus stared into it, and he couldn’t help feeling like it was staring back. He wondered what was on the other side, and how far away the other side was. The Eye led to some uncharted corner of the universe. By rights it should have been a charted corner by now, but no one who’d gone through it ever remembered the time they spent on the other side, and the Cygnians guarded the wormhole jealously, making sure that no automated probes could slip through.
Gatticus’s gaze shifted to the scattering of tiny gray specks floating in front of the Eye: the 22nd Cygnian Fleet. Those ships looked tiny from this distance, but Gatticus knew better than to believe it. Ring Ships and Behemoth-class Battleships were fantastically large vessels, the former having a radius of more than five kilometers—large enough to generate their own gravity through rotation—and the latter measuring about the same from bow to stern. Both ship types were much larger than their own Colossus-class carrier, and the Colossus was the largest USO vessel ever built, at three point nine kilometers long.
“Comms, contact the Cygnians. Tell them we have their delivery of unmarked refugees, and ask where we should transfer the cryo pods.”
“Aye, Captain,” the comms officer replied. “They are already hailing us. Would you like to tell them yourself?”
“Very well. Put them on screen, Lieutenant.”
After about a two-minute delay, the brown pug-like face of a Ghoul appeared on the main forward holo panel. His four black eyes gleamed in the low light of the Cygnian bridge, jagged rows of interlocking nine-inch teeth gleamed, and hunched shadows lurked in the background behind him.
“This is King Assuraga,” the Ghoul said.
Captain Okara nodded and sat up straighter in her chair. “It is a pleasure to meet you, King Assuraga, we—”
“Silence.” The Ghoul’s lips curled in annoyance, and he went on in the Cygnians’ growling, hissing language: “A beacon drone arrived here from Hades less than one period ago and relayed a distress signal to us. They are under attack by a Coalition Fleet.”
“A Coalition Fleet?” Captain Okara echoed. “Are you sure? We haven’t seen or heard from the Coalition in more than a year.”
“No, we are not sure, but we cannot ignore the beacon, nor can we leave the Eye unguarded to answer it. You will investigate for us.”
“Of course. We’ll get underway as soon as we’ve finished offloading the cryo pods.”
“No. Now. Offload the lost ones when you return.”
Captain Okara appeared to hesitate. Gatticus didn’t have to wonder why. The medical refugees they’d retrieved from Earth were all unscheduled arrivals. If they weren’t woken up and sent through the Eye before the next shipment of tributes arrived, then they might have to wait their turn aboard the Cygnian fleet for a week or more. It was going to be enough of a shock for them to wake up surrounded by hostile aliens without making the time they had to spend in the Cygnians’ company even longer.
“Very well,” Captain Okara said. She was smart enough not to argue with orders from a Cygnian royal. “We’ll leave at once.”
“Good. I expect a full report when you return.”
The Ghoul’s face faded from the holo panel and Captain Okara turned to Gatticus. “It looks like your negotiations with the Kassaraks will have to wait a little longer.”
Gatticus nodded. “The cease fire should hold. Regardless, there’s nothing we can do about it. We have our orders.”
Captain Okara sighed. “That we do. Helm—”
“Captain?”
“Set course for Hades and spin up the Alcka
m drive.”
“Aye, ma’am, setting course.”
Gatticus stopped the playback there to process everything he’d seen so far. The facts were plain: the Deliverance was a USO vessel, not Coalition, and Gatticus himself had been a USO Ambassador.
But that didn’t make any sense. If the Deliverance was a USO ship, then what had killed the crew? The two Banshees they’d found on board wouldn’t have attacked USO officers. Not to mention that just two of them wouldn’t have been enough to kill that many people.
That meant the crew had to have been killed by something else. Something even more deadly than Cygnians.
Chapter 36
Gatticus glanced over his shoulder at the mangled doors of the room—his old quarters. Whatever had killed the crew, it might still be on board. He remembered the claw marks in the doors. In places there’d been eight parallel furrows—one for each finger on a Banshee’s hand. Maybe something had driven the Banshees mad. But that still didn’t explain how they’d killed so many armed crewmen without being killed themselves. Gatticus turned back to the data cubes and fast-forwarded through the trip to Hades.
The trip through FTL space was uneventful. Captain Okara brought them out of FTL at a safe range from Hades to avoid being surprised by whatever Coalition fleet was attacking Hades.
Except that there was no fleet.
There wasn’t a single ship on sensors, enemy or otherwise. Captain Okara made contact with the Cygnians on the surface to ask about the beacon drone, and Gatticus slowed the playback down.
Queen Cithasi of Hades glowered at them from the operations center of the fuel depot on the surface. Her lower pair of eyes blinked, followed by the upper pair. “We did not send a beacon drone.”
“Someone must have,” Captain Okara said. “One of your beacons arrived at the Eye and relayed a distress signal to the 22nd Cygnian Fleet.”
It took about a minute for Queen Cithasi to receive that message due to their distance from Hades. When she did receive it, she gave a low growl, followed by a stream of more articulate ones: “One moment. I must verify this.”
Her visage faded from the holo panel, only to return a few minutes later. “The beacon was stolen. It must have been a ploy designed to lure our fleet away from the Eye. It is good that King Assuraga had the sense to send you instead.”
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