Dark Space: Origin

by Jasper T. Scott

  “I was discovered aboard the Interloper and shot in the head for my trouble. I revived here, in a copy of my human body, so that I could speak to you without the need for translators.”

  “Then the Sythians have been doing the same thing as us—cloning themselves to become immortal.”

  Adram smiled. “You recognized our world when you saw it in my mind. Origin you call it, but that’s not its real name. Its real name is Sythia, and it lies in the heart of the Getties Cluster—not the Adventa Galaxy.”

  Hoff blinked. “That’s not possible.”

  “No? Why do you think the planet was lost to your kind?” Adram stopped just a few paces away, and his vulturine features came into the dim light cast by Hoff’s headlamps. The man’s hooked nose, white, wispy hair and high, arching brow seemed even more sinister than Hoff remembered. “I assume you’re here to strike some sort of deal,” Adram said.

  “I want answers, Adram—Kaon—whatever your name really is. If we come from the same planet, how did we get to be whole galaxies apart?”

  “Crossing from one galaxy to another takes a lot of time, even now, but back then it took centuries. In your version of history, a third of humanity rose up and attacked your way of life, destroying all the cloning facilities they could find. A third of you were killed in the fighting, while a third of you ran far away—isn’t that right? No, don’t look so surprised. You’re not the first Immortal human that we’ve come across.

  “The third of you who ran came to this galaxy. Far more than a third were killed in the fighting, and far fewer than a third escaped. Humans are the Immortals who left. Sythians are the mortals who stayed. Your evolution slowed dramatically, because you cloned yourselves over and over again for millions of years, but ours progressed and we took steps to accelerate that even further, making us what we are now.” Adram sneered and pinched his human skin. “I do not know how you live in such frail bodies.”

  Hoff’s mind raced to catch up, but a numb sense of unreality set in, and he wondered if he were awake or dreaming. His racing thoughts seized on one small part of what Adram had said. “Millions of years?” he echoed. “The War of Origin was less than thirty thousand years ago.”

  “The war you remember was not the first Immortal War, and it was not the war for Origin. The fact that humans were no longer cloning themselves when we finally followed you here is proof that history repeats itself, and the fact that Sythians are now cloning themselves and have been for millions of years is even further proof. For lack of proper records, your legends are but vague recollections of where you came from, and your history has all blurred together without a proper sequence. When and how you left became subsumed by more recent events. How far back does recorded memory and equivalent history go, Hoff? How far back does your memory go? It would take data centers the size of whole cities just to store all of one person’s memories across millions of years, let alone everyone’s.”

  Hoff shook his head. “If all of that is true, and if your people are the mortals who won the first war, then why would you go back to doing the very thing which you fought to stop?”

  “The desire to live is very strong, Hoff. No one wants to die, and when faced with death, everyone wants a way out, even if there’s only a small chance that it will work. You know this firsthand. For a long time my people cloned themselves in secret, illegally, until once again there were more clones than not, and we were all forced to admit to our weakness—but that’s ancient history now. Since then, we’ve come to terms with it and perfected the system. Now, we can transfer exactly at or before the time of death at near-instantaneous speeds. Our bodies are engineered to be much stronger than yours, so we can live for four or five of your lifetimes before we ever need to grow a clone.”

  Hoff tried desperately to work some moisture into his mouth. “What about the Gors?”

  “What about them?” Adram challenged. “What about me? I’m using a human’s body. You make slaves out of people by implanting them with memories of lives that they’ve never lived. We make trained soldiers out of savage beasts so that we don’t have to fight you ourselves.”

  Hoff smiled. “But you’re Immortal, so what’s the worst that could happen? Unless you’re afraid that you actually do still die.”

  “Don’t condescend to me, Admiral. We were the ones who came up with those theories, remember? A lot of pseudo science and spiritual nonsense.”

  Hoff smiled thinly. “You’ve come a long way from that, haven’t you?”

  “And yet you are a clone in a long line of clones that cannot remember his own death.”

  Hoff ignored that. “So the Gors were never on our side.”

  Adram smiled slowly. “Actually they were and apparently they are still. Somehow, even after you killed all of them at Ritan, they’d still rather side with you than fight for us.”

  Admiral Heston’s eyes narrowed. “You’re lying. If you’ve been working for the Sythians since you came back from the Getties, then why were you always on the Gors’ side? You argued for us to join the alliance. You wouldn’t do that if it would ultimately help humanity and hurt your people.”

  “After all these years, do you really think that I don’t know how to manipulate you, Hoff? I was never on the Gors’ side, but if a man trusts no one, then telling him the truth is the easiest way to make him doubt it. My position and that of the other humans around you only blinded you further to the fact that the Gors really were your allies.”

  Horror rose on a tide of acid from Hoff’s stomach as he realized how badly he’d been played. He felt sick. “If the Gors are programmed to fight for you, why not simply reprogram them? Why let them rebel?”

  “We don’t know what happened to interfere with their original programming, and we have tried to reprogram them, but it doesn’t work. Perhaps the savagery of war reminds them of their savage past and triggers memories of who and what they really are. And every time they come into contact with emancipated Gors, even the most loyal slave becomes a rebel. It’s like a disease the way it spreads. We can override their ships so they’re stuck with us unless they bail out and you rescue them. We’ve begun locking their airlocks to keep them inside, but that is our problem to deal with, and slaves are easy enough to find. Humans are proving to be much more reliable slaves.”

  Suddenly Hoff realized the significance of what he was looking at. He should have realized it by now, after seeing Adram—a once loyal human officer, now a converted Sythian agent.

  “I’ve answered your questions, and we’re running out of time. Brondi’s men are boarding this ship as we speak, and there are not enough of us to repel them.”

  “Not enough of you? On this enormous ship?”

  “I told you during my interrogation, Admiral, this is a carrier. It carries Gors into battle, not Sythians. We supervise them and remotely control their ships from here, but there are fewer than three hundred of us to do all that. Now, as I said, we are running out of time, and we have a deal to make.”

  “A deal?”

  “Yes.”

  Hoff shook his head, putting off that question for now. “One more thing, Kaon.”

  “Yess?”

  Hoff shivered to hear a human hissing like a Sythian. “Why did you attack us? What is the point if we’re all really the same?”

  “You fight your own people all the time, and you’re not separated by millions of years of evolution and genetic engineering.”

  “That’s not an answer. I want to know why you had to commit xenocide—why come to our galaxy at all? Was it because you thought we invaded you first?”

  “That was just a happy coincidence. We were already planning to come to your galaxy. You opened a jump lane for us when we were almost ready to leave.”

  “But why?” Hoff insisted, sounding shrill with exasperation.

  “What did you think would happen to a society whose population never dies?”

  Hoff’s eyes widened. Suddenly he understood what was wrong with being i
mmortal. We were never meant to live forever.

  Adram nodded slowly. “Even the strictest population controls cannot stop that kind of growth. We don’t all live on cold, dark worlds in the Getties. The rich live in luxurious towers on worlds filled with light and warmth, but there aren’t enough worlds like that for all of us. We’re the unlucky ones, engineered and born to live below the surface. Others were born and bred to live underwater. Why do you think my Sythian body has gills? We had to splice our DNA with that of the Gors and a dozen other species in order to adapt to even the harshest environments. There are quintillions of us, Hoff, and our galaxy is far smaller than yours. We came here to expand, to find a home for our children.”

  “Then you’re not even a unified species.”

  “We are unified by our philosophy of life, not by DNA.”

  “If there are so many of you, and you came here to find new worlds to colonize, then where is everyone?” Hoff demanded. “Why aren’t you busy colonizing our worlds?”

  “When was the last time you went close enough to look? Perhaps you’re just looking in the wrong places. The worlds your people considered inhospitable are the ones that most of us were bred to call home—ice worlds and desert planets, planets covered with endless, raging seas. It takes a whole generation—almost a thousand years—for us to adapt to something new, to planets which you might consider more hospitable. But by then, perhaps the fires will have stopped burning and we can clear away the rubble of your civilization.

  “Those who already live on lush worlds like Sythia are in no hurry to leave. For them, the Getties is not an inhospitable place of torment and scarcity—it is home. But the more the rich breed, the more the poor, downtrodden masses are pushed off those worlds and forced to find new homes. It is a cruel system. We are thrown out into the dark by our people to make room for their children, and we throw your people out into the dark to make room for ours.”

  “Well, congratulations,” Hoff said. “You have plenty of room. Now leave us alone.”

  Adram gave a patient smile. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Eventually your population will grow too large and you’ll be forced to expand like us. Then you will try to push us out of your galaxy. We know how humans think. They think like us, and we will do anything to survive—isn’t that why we’re all Immortals in the first place?”

  Hoff gritted his teeth. “So what now? You’ll send another fleet to Dark Space and finish us off? What kind of deal is that?”

  “No, Dark Space is unique. It is impossible to leave, except by one narrow entrance. It is a small sector, and it has limited resources, so if we can be sure that it’s the only place where humans still reside, then it wouldn’t be hard to keep you bottled up in here, and we’d be willing to allow that in exchange for some information.”

  Hoff’s eyes narrowed. “What information?”

  “Tell us where the other humans are hiding, and we’ll leave Dark Space alone.”

  Hoff flinched. “You’re asking me to kill trillions.”

  “Don’t think of it like that. Think about all the lives you’ll save here in Dark Space. And humanity will live on, guaranteed. Otherwise, we won’t rest until we’ve found and killed every last one of you. You can’t hide forever.

  “If you need any proof of that, you should know that Captain Cathrall didn’t just carry the survivors from Obsidian Station to the enclave. He also carried a Sythian tracking device. I gave him both when I transferred those so-called supplies from the Interloper.”

  “You kakard,” Hoff said, his gray eyes flashing as he reached for the cutting beam he’d brought with him. He drew it and aimed it at Adram’s head.

  “They’re already dead, Hoff. It’s too late for you to save them—or your fleet—so before you kill me, think about the people you can save. Dark Space is the only refuge of humanity which we will tolerate.”

  Hoff hesitated with his finger on the trigger. His whole body trembled with the urge to shoot, but he stopped and forced himself to think about the trade the Sythians were offering. He thought about the trillions of Immortals in the lost sector of Avilon. The Immortals had all already lived impossibly long lives, while the people here in Dark Space numbered in just the millions, but they had barely begun to live by comparison. The Immortals were civilized, while Dark Space was overrun with criminals. Perhaps the most convincing argument was the true nature of immortality. Now that Hoff had seen its end result, he wasn’t sure he could support it anymore. They’d fought not one but at least two wars with themselves over it, and a lost part of humanity had become so twisted by their desire to live forever that they had eventually turned into the xenocidal Sythians. Adram—Kaon, Hoff corrected himself—had already spelled it out clearly: “We will do anything to survive.”

  “What do you say, Admiral? Do we have a deal?” Adram asked, his eyes glittering in the dim light of the alien cruiser.

  Chapter 35

  “I think you can all go to the netherworld,” Hoff said. “They’ve been waiting a long time for you there.”

  “Then you’ve chosen death,” Adram said slowly.

  “Maybe, maybe not. If we could disable an entire fleet of yours by finding and killing just one ship, what makes you think we won’t do the same thing when you come back?”

  Adram’s eyes narrowed.

  “Humanity is quite safe,” Hoff went on, “but as for the Sythians, you’re the ones facing an entire army of savage slaves that have suddenly decided they don’t want to serve you anymore—that’s the same army that wiped us out. Something tells me your people are next.”

  Adram sneered. “What makes you think that they’ll serve you after you killed all of them at Ritan?”

  Hoff shrugged. “We don’t need them to serve us; we just need them to help us fight you, and the fact that they’re not firing on us right now is a good sign that that’s what they want, too.”

  “If you won’t tell us where the Immortals are, then we’ll tear it from your lips. You’re badly mistaken if you think that humans are the only ones who can dig around inside a being’s brain. I’m going to enjoy interrogating and torturing you the way you and your people did with me.”

  “Good luck with that.” Hoff said as he turned his cutting beam on himself.

  “No!” Adram roared.

  Hoff pulled the trigger and everything that he was vanished with a searing light and a puff of greasy smoke.

  A split second later, Hoff opened his eyes from the inside of a stasis tube and looked out at his cloning chamber. It looked like a warzone in there, but he was alive, so that was a good sign.

  When the stasis tube didn’t automatically swing open, Hoff frowned and pounded on it with his hands, but the cover wouldn’t budge. Panic seized his chest and his eyes bulged. He was trapped. Peering through the transpiranium at his feet, he noted that there were no debris obstructing the cover of the stasis tube, but he had a feeling he knew exactly what had gone wrong.

  In the event of depressurization, a stasis tube wouldn’t open. Tubes like this one could be recovered from cold, hard vacuum and their occupants still be found alive and well—and asleep. But Hoff’s revival system had woken him up before atmosphere had been restored to the ship. Hoff had never planned for the possibility that his cloning chamber might survive but be so badly damaged that all the atmosphere got sucked out into space.

  And now . . . now he was going to suffocate to death in a space which was just the right size and shape to be a coffin.

  * * *

  The Last Chance slipped inside the Valiant’s aft hangar bay, unnoticed amidst the frenzied rush of other transports slipping out. Moments later, as they settled down on the deck, they came under small arms fire as a pair of guards noticed that they didn’t belong.

  Atton vaporized them with the transport’s turrets.

  Ethan stood ready and waiting inside the rear airlock, armed and armored like a sentinel. He’d blend right in with Brondi’s men, who’d all stolen matching gunmetal
gray armor from the Valiant’s supply rooms. Looking like them would give him the element of surprise, but Ethan didn’t expect to encounter much resistance after seeing how many loaded assault transports had launched from the carrier.

  “You’re sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Atton asked over the intercom.

  “Someone needs to stay here and keep the engines warm—all clear out there?” Ethan asked, his hand hovering over the outer door controls.

  “For now,” Atton replied.

  Ethan activated the airlock and it cycled open with a hiss. He didn’t bother to lower the boarding ramp, and rather jumped the five feet to the deck. He landed with a boom. The hydraulic supports in the knee joints of his armor cushioned his fall.

  “Be careful,” Atton said, his voice now coming through Ethan’s helmet. “And make it quick.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ethan said as he started across the hangar deck at a jog. He winced as his injuries made themselves known once more. Hefting his plasma rifle, he set the fire mode to AP-RF—anti-personnel, rapid-fire—and flicked off the safety. “I’ll be in and out before you even notice I’m gone.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  Ethan reached the hangar bay exit and stepped up to the control panel to open the oversized doors. They parted with a noisy bang. Ethan ran to the end of that broad corridor and then opened another wide set of doors to reveal yet more of the same corridor. It stretched endlessly into the distance until it reached a short set of stairs.

  So far so good—the ship was deserted. Looking around, Ethan found that this particular corridor housed a rail car station. Broad transpiranium viewports lined the walls, revealing a set of gravlev tracks on either side and two waiting rail cars. Ethan headed for the nearest one and opened the doors to step inside. The rail car was as empty as the station. He turned to the control panel inside the rail car and scrolled through the ship’s directory until he found the section closest to the crew quarters where Alara was staying. He remembered that her room was on deck 144, just a few decks below the bridge.