Atton drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep. An indeterminate amount of time passed, and then he heard raised voices, and his eyes cracked open to see the shifting patterns of light rippling across the ceiling once more.
“Hidden passages leading to lift tubes locked with access codes that I’m not allowed to know. . . . What am I supposed to think? You have a whole other life that I don’t know a thing about!”
“It’s just a meditation room, Destra. It’s where I go to clear my head and plan my next move. I’m sorry you had to find out about it.”
“I’m not! If it’s just a meditation room, why can’t I know about it?”
“That’s classified. Leave it alone, Des. It has nothing to do with us, and it’s not safe for you to know more.”
“What can’t you tell your wife? I already know your big secret. I’ve kept that for all these years. Why don’t you just admit it—you don’t trust me. That’s why you keep secrets.”
The voices drifted away, leaving Atton’s mind running in confused, fractured circles over the last part of that conversation as the light sculpture and the fragrant pillows lulled him back to sleep—not safe to know . . . don’t trust . . . Hoff. . . . secrets. Not safe. Don’t trust Hoff. Secrets. . . .
Atton’s eyes snapped open. Suddenly he was suspicious of the light sculpture and the scented pillows. Maybe there was a reason they were making him sleepy. He sat up and shook his head vigorously to rid himself of their hypnotic effects. If Hoff was hiding something—even from his wife—Atton had a bad feeling it wasn’t an innocent little secret.
This was something big.
PART TWO
REVELATIONS
Chapter 18
The lift tube opened on deck six of the Tauron to reveal Commander Donali already waiting. Admiral Hoff held the doors open and nodded to his XO. The commander walked in, pushing a hover gurney. Lying on the gurney, stunned and draped with a white sheet, was High Lord Kaon. He looked like an ordinary cadaver going to the morgue, but Kaon’s destination wasn’t the morgue—at least not yet. Deck six was the deck the med center was on, so having Kaon disguised as a cadaver was a good cover. Adding to that cover was the fact that Donali was a part of the senior medical staff aboard the Tauron—although he rarely practiced medicine since being promoted out of the restricted-line officers’ ranks.
“Good evening, Admiral,” Donali said.
“Did you have any trouble with nosy subordinates?” Hoff asked.
“None. The few who asked where I was taking the body, or who it was, were told that it was classified, and they seemed satisfied with that.”
Hoff nodded. “Good.”
Now that they’d jumped to SLS to follow Brondi, there was little left for them to do but wait until they reached Dark Space. Hoff wasn’t very good at waiting, but fortunately he had Kaon and the mystery of the Sythians to keep him busy.
As the lift doors slid shut, Hoff keyed in deck twenty-four. The very existence of the lift tube was a closely-guarded secret, and besides Hoff and Commander Donali, the only one who even knew it existed was Hoff’s wife, Destra. That lift tube was the only way in or out of the facility which lay in the heart of the battleship. The only two access ways to the lift were from the maze in Hoff’s garden and the disused storage room on deck six.
When the lift arrived on deck 24, the doors opened into a dark, airy room. “Lights,” Hoff commanded, and a wan yellow light filled the space. The air was almost zero degrees and drew condensing white clouds of moisture from their lungs. That was a happy coincidence for Kaon, who liked frigid temperatures just as much as the Gors.
Hoff looked around. To their right lay a catwalk, which could just barely be seen crossing into a vast, hollow sphere. Bright blue lights shone out from the walls of that room. The lights blinked, faded, and swirled in wave-like patterns. At the end of the catwalk, lay a mysterious, glossy black sphere. To their left, lay more of the airy room where they currently stood. The walls were lined with dozens of stasis tubes. The blue-tinted transpiranium covers glowed from within to indicate that they were occupied. Only a few stood dark and empty. Beyond that, at the far end of the room, lay a pair of luminous transpiranium tanks filled to the brim with bubbling blue liquid. Hoff headed toward those tanks, hurrying past the stasis tubes. Donali’s footsteps echoed behind him.
Suddenly, a warbling noise drew their attention, and Hoff turned to see Kaon rising wraith-like from his gurney, the white sheet falling away as he looked around with wide blue eyes. Donali had already drawn his sidearm and trained it on Kaon to stun him once more, but Hoff held up a hand for him to wait.
Kaon warbled something as he stumbled toward one of the stasis tubes to get a closer look. Hoff’s translator communicated that a moment later as, “Where am I? What is this place?”
“Admiral,” Donali began in a warning tone, but Hoff waved his hand dismissively. It couldn’t hurt for Kaon to know what they were doing here. Who was he going to have a chance to tell?
Kaon turned away from the stasis tube, and his lips parted in a disturbingly human smile. “You are not what you seem to be, Admiral.”
“Neither are you, but we’ll talk more about that in a moment. Can we trust you to go peacefully?” Hoff gestured to the far end of the room, which was furnished with all the same equipment that any other med center would have—except for the pair of bubbling transpiranium tanks.
Kaon followed Hoff’s gesture, and after just a moment, he began stumbling in the indicated direction. Donali kept his sidearm trained on the alien, and Hoff drew his for good measure. When Kaon reached the sole examination table, Hoff gestured to it with his gun.
The alien climbed up wordlessly. “Now what do you wish me to do? Kill myself?”
Hoff smiled. “I haven’t brought you here to kill you, Kaon—not on purpose, anyway.” Hoff dialed his weapon down to a very low stun setting, and then he shot Kaon in the head. The alien jittered uncontrollably before falling back onto the table with arms, legs, and head dangling over the sides. Hoff holstered his weapon and turned to Donali. “Go configure the diagnostic station for a probe while I strap him down.”
Striding over to Kaon, Hoff opened a storage compartment on his belt and pulled out a pair of stun cords. He tied Kaon’s wrists and ankles, and then pulled out a third, longer cord and tied it around both Kaon’s neck and the examination table, just in case. That done, he turned to look around for his XO. Hoff picked out the glowing red orb of the commander’s artificial eye bobbing in the swirling shadows of the attached stasis room. Donali returned with a pair of probe helmets, trailing with long wires. They’d brought those helmets with them from Fortress Station.
A sharp hiss drew their attention as Kaon tried to sit up, only to be stunned by a vicious jolt of electricity. Hoff ignored Kaon and followed his XO to the main control console. Donali connected the helmets to the console, and they sat down on a pair of matching black stools on mag-lock rollers.
“Let’s get started, shall we?” Hoff said, slipping the helmet over his head. As before, he found himself staring at a blank holoscreen with a timer in the top right-hand corner. “I’m counting on you to guide the process, this time, Commander. We need to find out if Kaon has been programmed, or if these really are his memories we’re seeing.”
“I’m not sure if we have enough time,” Donali replied. “Following all the neural pathways which provoke anxiety in our host is like looking for ship’s logbox in space, but we’ve got just five minutes to do it.”
“Do your best, Commander.”
“Yes, sir. . . . Probe commencing in five, four, three . . .”
Hoff watched the countdown reach zero, and suddenly the blank holoscreen became a vibrant scene of light and color. Long green grass rippled in the wind, birds flew overhead chirping as they soared across a bright blue sky. Towering mountains rose up against the horizon, cloaked with evergreen skirts and capped with gleaming white glaciers. To one side, a lavender-hued lake sprawled, and on the
other side of it, was a towering, dome-topped fortress, gleaming white in the sun. Four artfully-crafted towers rose from high, crenelated walls surrounding the main building. Transpiranium walkways crossed from near the top of the main building to the tops of the towers. Hoff couldn’t see it from here, but he knew the central structure was capped with a transparent sky dome and accompanying garden—that fortress was the supreme overlord’s summer palace.
Hoff gasped and shook his head. He recognized this place. It could have been any of a dozen different worlds in the Adventa Galaxy, but Hoff knew it wasn’t. The palace gave it away. Besides that, the vegetation was the same, the sky the same—the mountains and lake the same. Hoff couldn’t even remember the world’s name—not it’s real name, anyway—but the mythical name was simply Origin. It was the long-lost world where humanity had begun.
“Where are you, Kaon?”
“Where am I? Where . . . . where . . .”
Hoff’s mind reeled. “What is this world to you?”
“It is . . .”
“Where is it?” Hoff demanded.
“Is . . . is . . . it? Is it?”
“We’re losing him, sir,” Donali interrupted.
“Already? That’s not possible.”
“He needs more time to rest. I don’t think we’re going to make even a minute like this.”
“Give me a second!” Hoff snapped. “Tell me where you are, Kaon.”
“Sssss . . .” Kaon hissed nonsensically.
“His vitals are all over the place! I have to shut it down.”
“One more second!”
“That’s all you’ll have!”
“Kaon! Answer me!”
“Ssssssss . . . !” Kaon’s hissing faded to silence. Next came the warning screech of a siren, followed by a flatline. Hoff tore off his helmet and dropped it on the deck with a thunk. “Damn it! Revive him!”
Donali shook his head as he slowly removed his own helmet. “I cannot revive him.”
“Why not?” Hoff demanded, turning to glare at his XO.
The commander pointed at one of the holoscreens rising from the control station in front of him. “He’s brain dead.”
Hoff blinked but said nothing.
“Did you get the information you were looking for?” Donali asked quietly.
“Cut him open,” Hoff growled.
“Sir?”
“You heard me—dissect him! I want to know everything there is to know about this creature.”
An hour later they had Kaon flayed open on the examination table. Donali had taken various tissue and blood samples, which the lab computers were busy analyzing. Hoff watched as Donali retrieved a small cutting beam from his tray of surgical tools and walked around to the head of the examination table. This was the part Hoff most wanted to see—the part where they cut open Kaon’s skull. He stood to one side of the operation, watching with a wrinkled nose as Donali worked. Most of Kaon’s body was analogous to a human’s or a Gor’s, but he had twin hearts; he was cold-blooded, and he had gills which would enable him to breathe under water.
Donali removed the top of Kaon’s skull and set it aside before setting to work with his scalpel. Hoff tried to ignore the wet cutting sounds which followed.
“Well?” Hoff demanded. “Have you found anything?”
“I’m taking a sample of the brain tissue for analysis,” Donali replied, “but so far it’s all more or less the same as the Gors we’ve examined.”
Hoff walked around the examination table to get a better look, and he was immediately sorry he had. A pale purple fluid was dripping down from the table, pooling on the deck at Donali’s feet. His surgical gloves were glistening with it, and so was Kaon’s blanched white brain. The alien’s blood was relatively colorless, just like a Gor’s, but it smelled like sulphur. Hoff’s nose wrinkled. “Are we sure we’re not breathing anything toxic?”
Donali dropped a small tissue sample in a jar and headed over to the lab computer with it. “The compounds we’re breathing are harmless,” he said as he went, “which is more than I can say for the venom sacs in Kaon’s jaw.”
“Venom sacks? You mean he had envenomed fangs and he never tried to use them?”
“It would appear so.”
“What—was he trying to be nice to us all this time?”
“Maybe he really was cooperating,” Donali said as he slotted the tissue sample into the computer’s queue and selected a battery of tests to run.
“To what end?” Hoff asked.
Donali shrugged as he turned and headed back to the examination table. He resumed slicing with his scalpel, and a few moments later he’d separated Kaon’s brain from the skull. He held it up, dripping, and Hoff suppressed an urge to run away.
“Find me another surface area to work on!” Donali said.
Hoff looked around quickly. There was nothing in the immediate area, but then he remembered the hover gurney they’d left in the stasis room. When he returned with it, Donali all but dropped the brain on the surface. It landed with a splat, and Hoff had to force himself not to jump back. Donali sectioned the brain and found the elements he was looking for, setting each one aside carefully, one at a time. “I’m probably not the most qualified person to be doing this,” he said. “We could use an expert—a neurosurgeon, for example.”
“No one has ever dissected a Sythian brain before, Commander. There are no experts. Keep cutting.”
“Yes, sir. What am I looking for?”
Admiral Hoff frowned, suddenly doubting the purpose of this exercise. Donali was right—they needed someone with more experience. He was just about to tell the commander to stop when Donali abruptly jumped back from the brain.
“What is it?” Hoff asked.
Donali pointed to the organ with his scalpel. “I don’t know . . .” he said. “I found something . . . it shocked me.”
“That much is obvious.”
“No, I mean it gave me an electrical shock.”
Hoff smiled. “What do you suppose might do that, Donali?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t see anything in there . . .” He poked the brain with his scalpel once more. This time he yelped and dropped the instrument.
“You’re wearing surgical gloves, Donali. Whatever you’re experiencing, it’s not electricity. Your hands are perfectly insulated.”
Donali stared at his hands with wide eyes, turning them first one way and then the other. “Then I don’t understand.”
“Show me where you’re cutting when it happens.”
Donali pointed to a cleft in the brain tissue.
“Hand me a fresh scalpel,” Hoff said. He accepted the tool from Donali and poked it into the same place his XO had. Something pushed back, and despite his best efforts, Hoff recoiled, too.
“Interesting . . .” he handed the scalpel to his XO. “Cut around the area. We need to see what’s in there.”
Donali set to work once more, occasionally reacting with another yelp and recoiling from his work only to try again from a different angle. When he was done, he had carved a small, roughly square section out of the Sythian’s brain. Donali picked it up gently, trying not to provoke another shove. He held it up to the light, his real eye wide as he marveled at the specimen in his hand. “What should we do with it?”
“I have a theory, if you’ll permit me the sample, Commander.”
Donali blinked stupidly at him.
“Set it down.”
Once the commander had done so, Hoff drew his sidearm, set it to lethal, and dialed it down to the lowest power setting. At that setting it wouldn’t even leave a mark on the deck, but organic matter would not fare as well.
“What are you going to do?” Donali asked, already backing away.
Hoff took aim and fired. A bright red flash shot out from the barrel and hit the sample. Tissue blackened and caught fire, burning up in a greasy yellow flame that smelled like burning rubber. When the fire died down and ashes crumbled away, they were left staring at noth
ing but empty space. Hoff bent to eye level with the ashes and his eyes widened appreciably. There was one small bit of charred flesh hovering just a few centimeters above the gurney.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing, Donali?”
The commander’s red eye appeared on the other side of the floating specimen.
“That’s impossible. Organic matter cannot oppose gravity by itself.”
“I don’t believe that’s what we’re seeing. . . .” Hoff reached out with one finger extended toward the empty space beneath the specimen . . . and just before his finger would have passed through the spot, his hand bounced away with another kinetic jolt. He smiled and nodded. “It’s cloaked. That’s why it’s repelling us.” It was common knowledge that cloaking shields repelled matter with a weak, but discernible force, and they bent electromagnetic radiation around them to make things invisible to the naked eye and scanners.
Abruptly, Hoff reached out and grabbed the invisible thing, knocking the last bit of organic matter aside.
“Admiral!”
Hoff couldn’t feel any texture, but there was a palpable force pushing him away, as if his hand and the object were two magnets trying to push each other apart. Unlike the violent reaction he’d felt while probing with the scalpel, or the powerful one he’d felt when touching the object with his fingertip, now he felt only a mild repulsive force. Hoff tried squeezing harder, and he managed to touch the sides of the thing. It felt cold and smooth—glassy—and was spherically-shaped. Hoff held it in a closed fist above the table, and then slowly opened his hand.
“Look,” Hoff said. Now they could see a faint, shimmering outline of the thing. It appeared a moment later, a shiny silver ball no larger than the tip of his thumb. “The shield must be exhausted. . . . but why now?”
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