04 Dark Space

by Jasper T. Scott

  “To live forever.”

  “I could make ten of me, Commander; we’d all look and sound the same, but only one of them would actually be me, and that’s the original.”

  Atton shrugged. “That is one theory.”

  “It’s backed up by the facts.”

  “I’m not arguing the existential philosophy with you, Captain. I agree, it does seem like a naive way to achieve immortality, but I saw it with my own eyes. Admiral Heston cloned himself in the last battle with the Sythians. There were two of him alive at the same time. One of those clones died on the Sythian command ship. The other is now ruling Dark Space.”

  “Suppose I were to believe all of this—why would we want to go to Avilon and join the Avilonians in their mad existence? It sounds to me like they have a lot in common with the Sythians.”

  “Some things, yes, but the admiral told me the Avilonians are nothing if not civilized. They won’t greet us with violence, and I suspect that means they won’t turn us away when we have nowhere else to go.”

  “You suspect. Did the admiral say why he was exiled?”

  “No, he just said not to tell the Avilonians he sent me. Commander Donali was the one who told me that the admiral was exiled because he believed that people should be allowed to choose a mortal life if they wished.”

  The captain let out a long breath. “Said the suspected traitor. Donali might have told you that just to gain your confidence. It could be pure krak, meaning we don’t know why the admiral was exiled.”

  “Avilon is not far from our present location, ma’am. When we do get out of here, before we go running to the farthest corner of the galaxy to find a world where we can rebuild, we should at least send an envoy to Avilon and see if it’s worth going there instead.”

  “Agreed.”

  Atton was taken aback. “So you believe me?”

  “I’m not sure why you would lie, but no I don’t. I’ll believe all of this when I have some proof. For now, I’m willing to keep it in mind and give you the benefit of the doubt, at least enough to further investigate.”

  “I understand. You won’t regret that decision.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Caldin replied. “Meanwhile, there is one other thing we should do.”

  Atton cocked his head. “What’s that?”

  “Call for help.”

  “Call who?”

  Caldin smiled. “The Avilonians of course.”

  “Without a jump gate and an open wormhole our comms will be limited to the speed of light. They’ll arrive in—”

  “Two and a half years,” she said, pointing to the glowing green diamond on the star map once more.

  “And then what? I’m not sure the Avilonians will care enough to send a rescue, but even if they did, it wouldn’t get us out of here any faster.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. If they are as technologically advanced as you say, they might have a way to travel through a gravity field at superluminal speed.”

  “That’s a big if, ma’am.”

  “At this point everything is a big if, Commander.”

  “What if Sythians intercept our comm signal? We have reason to believe they are looking for Avilon in order to wipe out humanity there, too.”

  “Really? Well, that does sound like them. Either way, our message won’t contain any coordinates except for our own, and I’ll be sure to keep it generic enough that it doesn’t give the skull faces anything to go on. The worst that can happen is some Sythians come jumping into this gravity well and they end up stuck right along with us. If that happens, good riddance, but chances are their fail-safes will work and they won’t even be able to get close to us.”

  “Well, then I guess it can’t hurt.”

  “No,” Caldin said with a tight smile. “Now, you had better get to the stasis rooms with everyone else. I’ll handle this. If we get lucky and if everything you said is true, then we’ll be waking you up a year or two earlier than expected. Dismissed, Commander.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, rising to his feet. He left the operations center and made his way back to the med bay where he’d woken up all of an hour ago. On his way there, Atton considered the implications of what he and the captain had just discussed. It was quite possible that the Avilonians would welcome them as refugees, but what that would mean for them and their futures was anybody’s guess. Even the admiral couldn’t say how Avilon had changed since he’d been there. He hadn’t been back in tens of thousands of years. When Atton thought about how much the Imperium had changed in that time, he realized that anything was possible. The future was uncertain, but one thing was certain—once they arrived in Avilon they wouldn’t be allowed to leave. If the Avilonians were in the habit of letting people come and go as they pleased, then someone somewhere would have found their sector a long time ago.

  That meant he would never find out what had happened to his family.

  Atton felt a rising ache in his chest, which became a painful lump in his throat. It was hard to accept that he would never see his mother, father, half-sister, or stepfather again. By the time he woke from stasis they would all be dead.

  It was that depressing thought which Atton took with him to the stasis rooms, and when the transpiranium cover of stasis tube number 97 sealed him in with a hiss of pressurizing air, it was that thought which he carried with him into the cold, dream-filled world of near-perfect metabolic suspension. In there, time lost all meaning, and a dream could last for days or years. Atton’s dreams were nightmares filled with haunting images of all the people he loved most—people he would never see again.

  * * *

  High Lord Kaon stood on the auxiliary bridge of the Valiant, the lights and heat turned down low to his liking. He turned in a slow circle to watch his crew of human slaves work. They already knew how to operate the warship. They were, after all, the very same humans who had been controlling the ship before, except now the Mind Web had turned them into obedient slaves.

  The Mind Web could implant any knowledge, skill, or memory; it could sculpt the mind until the person became whatever the sculptor wished them to be. Humans turned out to be much more susceptible to the Mind Web than Gors, and the structure of their brains was better understood, so rather than wipe out the rest of humanity as they had originally intended, the Sythians had come to occupy Dark Space and conscript its people to serve in their fleet. That way they could replace the rebellious Gors.

  Kaon’s gaze wandered out the forward viewport to the stars. Silhouetted against a nearby ice planet were the ruins of his command ship, the Sharal. That was what he had to show for the Gors’ treachery. As if it weren’t bad enough that they’d subsequently stolen his entire fleet, now they were interfering with the occupation in Dark Space.

  Initially, everything had gone smoothly, but now there were hidden cells of Gors cropping up here there and everywhere to disturb the peace. In the last twenty four hours alone Gors had killed over a thousand human slaves, and almost all of those were on Karpathia. The Sythians were being forced to conscript greater and greater numbers of humans in order to make up for losses.

  Kaon hissed with displeasure. Something would have to be done about it, but for now he had other concerns. Kaon stalked up to the Valiant’s command control station. Humans called it the captain’s table. He stared at it for a long moment, his big blue eyes watering and itching with frustration. He’d forgotten how to turn the thing on. He understood Imperial Versal well enough, so the language barrier wasn’t the problem, but human control systems were less intuitive than Sythian ones. In a Sythian ship one merely had to think a command and the ship would answer. Anything the ship knew, it would display, and anything the ship could do, it would perform. Human ships on the other hand required hands-on manipulation of control systems. Endless gestures and linguistic queries were required just to get at a specific bit of information.

  Kaon refused to submit to the Mind Web in order to learn how to operate human control systems. He’d done it once befor
e to learn their language, but it was not an experience he wished to repeat. No, for now, he had The Pet to help him. Kaon turned from the captain’s table to see The Pet standing behind him, his wrists bound with a few lengths of human stun cord. The Pet’s shoulders were rounded, his eyes and expression haunted. Flanking him were a pair of fully-armored human slave soldiers, standing ready to kill him if he did anything wrong. Not that he could do anything wrong.

  “Come here Pet,” Kaon warbled. The Pet took a few steps toward him as soon as those words were translated by the device it wore in its ear. Ten years had passed since the original invasion of the Adventa Galaxy, and in all that time humans hadn’t bothered to learn Sythian. No wonder they had lost the war. Their ignorance was astounding. “Show me what is around our ship. I want to see the fleet,” he instructed.

  The Pet stepped up to the captain’s table and began waving his hands, bound as they were, through the air. A holographic map flickered to life, rising out of the table with a blue glow. Kaon gave an eager hiss and peered into the open cube of space which had appeared. He realized that he still had much to learn about human systems of measurement and annotation. He could see miniature representations of each major ship on the display. Whole squadrons and wings of fighters were shown with small Shell Fighter icons. They were the only fighters on the map, since the humans’ Novas were all grounded until loyal slaves could be trained to pilot them. A few of The Pet’s best pilots were already hooked up to a Mind Web so that their skills and knowledge of piloting could be isolated, downloaded, and then transferred to obedient slaves.

  As for The Pet himself, he was also a slave, but a different kind of slave. He had been implanted with a device which forced him to obey, but rather than alter his brain to make him a willing slave, instead it made him a prisoner in his own mind and body, a victim of suggestion and authority. He couldn’t resist any orders, even though his mind was surely screaming for him to do so. It gave Kaon no small amount of satisfaction to see the former admiral who had destroyed his mighty Sharal now a desiccated husk of his former self, locked in an endless struggle against himself.

  “Are you watching, Pet?” Kaon pointed to the map, his armored finger tracing a line around a group of Sythian ships which was now splitting off from the rest. “Those ships go to Avilon. They go as the first wave of the next invasion.”

  “The Avilonians are very strong. Those ships won’t be enough to defeat them,” The Pet said in a toneless voice. The implant in his brain forced him to speak his mind even if he didn’t want to. That added layer of transparency helped Kaon gain insight into his enemies.

  “Do not worry. We have many more ships to fight this new enemy,” Kaon replied. “We are already culling your population of its troublemakers to fill these fleets with fresh slaves. Any and all who resist are forced to join the forces they fight against. The irony is delicious,” Kaon said, licking his rubbery lips.

  “I think it’s despicable,” The Pet replied.

  “I know you think this, but even you must admit that it is an efficient way to subdue your people.”

  “Yes, it is,” The Pet replied, his face scrunching up in dismay.

  Kaon’s eyes greedily tracked the ships leaving Dark Space. High Lord Quaris had elected to go, since the Second Fleet, which he commanded, was the smallest of the Sythians’ remaining fleets. Thanks to the Gors and their terrorism, the Sythians couldn’t afford to leave Dark Space undefended, so Kaon and Shondar would stay behind and wait to hear back from Quaris. He had orders to run with his command ship before losing the entire fleet, but even if he did, the data collected from that battle would be worth it. Armed with advance knowledge of their enemy’s weaknesses and strengths, they would defeat Avilon just as easily as they had defeated the rest of humanity. None could stand against the might of the Sythian Coalition, and soon their mission in the Adventa Galaxy would be complete.

  Kaon felt a pleasant warmth rise in his chest as his twin hearts began beating faster at the thought. He basked in that warmth for a moment before turning his thoughts back to the matter at hand.

  He and High Lord Shondar were going to stay behind to continue the work of re-crewing their ships with human slaves. They needed to hurry, especially now that they were sending a fleet to poke their sleeping enemy in the belly. Within a week, High Lords Worval, Rossk, Thorian, and Lady Kala would all arrive with their behemoth command cruisers. Docked inside those massive ships would be over a thousand starships—empty and waiting for their new slave crews. Even at the rate they were going, conscripting over a hundred thousand slaves per week, it would take several months to completely crew those ships.

  Kaon considered that a few million slaves was probably more than they could justify by claiming those citizens were resisting the occupation, but Sythians didn’t have to explain themselves to their slaves. Any justifications they gave were just a courtesy to make their slaves feel like their lives actually mattered. A happy slave is a productive slave.

  The Pet interrupted Kaon’s thoughts by asking, “How will you fill all of your ships with humans if you only take the ones who offer resistance?”

  Kaon turned to The Pet, the gills in the sides of his neck flaring with surprise. Had The Pet read his mind?

  “Our population is small,” The Pet went on. “You will destroy our economy if you take too many of us.”

  “Your people have their orders to breed. They are to replenish what we take.”

  “They will not obey.”

  “Then those who do not are to become slavesss,” Kaon hissed. “Either way, you give us what we desire.”

  “Why don’t you just clone us?”

  “Cloning takes time and resources. Taking from an existing population is much faster. It puts the burden on your people and keeps your population under control. Humans are never to become strong enough to challenge us again.”

  “I hate you,” The Pet said, his private thoughts making themselves known once more.

  Kaon turned to offer him a rubbery smile. “I know.”

  Chapter 17

  Beep beep, beep beep, beep beep . . .

  Doctor Stevon Elder reached into his outer lab coat pocket and fumbled with his holo pad to turn off his alarm. As soon as the incessant beeping stopped, he subsided with a sigh and began shivering violently where he lay. He realized he couldn’t feel his toes, and he could barely see his hands in front of his face. The cold and darkness were a reminder that he was no longer living among his own kind. The Sythians had come, and even though they now used human slaves—as opposed to Gors whose native environment was dark and frigid—somehow these humans weren’t bothered by either the darkness or the cold the way they should have been. Perhaps it was a question of mind over matter. Thank the Immortals they haven’t messed with my mind yet.

  Stevon turned his head and felt a sharp stab of pain in his neck. He reached around to find a molten chunk of transpiranium poking him there. He threw it to one side, and it landed a few feet away with a thunk. All around him were debris, shattered equipment and twisted girders. It was hard to believe he was still aboard the Valiant. He’d found this abandoned alcove by accident a few weeks ago. An old med lab, hiding almost at the bottom of an abandoned lift tube. Based on the amount of destruction it had seen, there had been some kind of explosive accident.

  Whatever had befallen the lab, Stevon was grateful for it. He had known the Sythians would do one of two things when they came aboard—execute the fleet’s officers en masse, or turn them into slaves the way they had with the refugees they’d found in the Enclave. The skull faces had opted for the latter option, which was far worse than the former in Stevon’s opinion. Better to die and go to Etheria than to live and be forced against one’s will to serve a heartless, soulless enemy.

  Then again, the Sythians likely wouldn’t let him live once they found out what he knew. If they had the chance to turn him into a slave, his newfound loyalty to them would make him tell all, and one of the first things he wou
ld tell them was what he had done to hide the location of Avilon. After that, his life and Admiral Heston’s would be forfeit, but not before both of them were thoroughly tortured to find out what they knew. Stevon would use the suicide tooth the admiral had given him long before it came to that, but it occurred to him that there was a better option than sitting around in the ruined med lab, waiting to be discovered. The admiral had given him the coordinates to get to Avilon, recorded on a micro dot inside his suicide tooth.

  Perhaps the Avilonians wouldn’t welcome him—an Etherian—or perhaps the sector had become more open-minded since Hoff had been there all those millennia ago. Either way, Stevon knew the Avilonians were the key to humanity’s survival. Even if they killed him upon arrival, at least he might have a chance to warn them about the Sythians and what they were doing in Dark Space. When Atton had left to get help, the invaders had been at a standoff with humanity. Now, things were much more serious.

  Stevon stood up and brushed a fine layer of white dust from his clothes which had accumulated while he slept. Clearly the air filters weren’t working in the ruined med lab. Taking a deep breath to steel himself, Stevon turned toward the far wall and the out-of-service lift shaft which he’d climbed down to get here. It was now or never. He’d set his alarm for the middle of the night cycle in the hope that he’d run into fewer of the Sythians’ slave soldiers. He had to try to get to the hangar and steal a ship. If he failed and had to use his suicide pill, or got shot to pieces while trying to escape, then he would suffer the same fate as if he stayed here, only swifter.

  Even rationing himself and sleeping as much as possible, it had taken him less than a week to exhaust the 100 pound grav bag of supplies he’d brought with him. Now he had just two options—stay and die a slow, painful death from dehydration, or make a run for it and go down fighting.