Dark Space- The Complete Series

by Jasper T. Scott

  “They’re not going to like her either.”

  “Well, we’re all just going to have to get along.”

  They entered the lift tube at the end of the long, dark corridor which they’d taken to reach Tova’s crèche. The guards entered behind them, and Ethan watched as they turned to cover the entrance of the lift, presenting their backs to him. They were the same guards that knew Dr. Kurlin had created the virus which had killed almost everyone aboard the Valiant. Ethan spent a moment eyeing them before turning to Atton. “We have some reassignments to make, don’t we?” he said, nodding sideways to the guards in the lift.

  Atton caught his meaning and nodded. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry.”

  Ethan smiled. “Good. We need everything to go smoothly over the next week.”

  The lift arrived with an almost imperceptible jolt that spoke of a better-functioning inertial management system, and then the doors swished open, and a welcome blast of warm air entered the lift. Ethan realized from the way his face started tingling that his exposed skin had begun to go numb in Tova’s crèche.

  They exited the lift behind the guards. One fell in behind Ethan and one in front. As they walked, Ethan wondered about the time, and the hour flashed up as fading green digits before his eyes—18:33—fed to him by the holo card reader implanted behind his ear. It was getting late. “Why don’t you go speak to the doctor about testing the crew,” Ethan said, speaking to his son. “You can make crew reassignments just before we leave. I’d like things to remain the way they are when Tova officially comes aboard the bridge,” Ethan explained, thinking that it would be nice to have a few bodyguards around, even if only for another day.

  “All right,” Atton replied.

  “I’ll meet you at the operations center at twenty hundred hours. We’re going to draw up a plan of action and introduce Tova to the rest of our bridge crew. Maybe you can help me come up with a way to break the news that we have a Gor aboard?”

  Atton shook his head. “Doesn’t matter how you decorate krak, no one is going to be happy you’re bringing it aboard.”

  Ethan snorted. Now that Atton had given up his role as the supreme overlord, much of his genteel bearing and manners had fallen away, and Ethan realized what a good actor his son had to be to have kept up such an elaborate façade for so long. He shot Atton a speculative look as they walked, and for just the briefest moment he wondered what other façades his son might be keeping up.

  * * *

  Ethan watched Deck Commander Loba Caldin pull up a chair to the captain’s table inside the Defiant’s operations center and sit down. Already sitting at the table were Atton, in the guise of nova pilot Adan Reese; First Lieutenant Ithicus Adari, the ranking nova pilot among the survivors who’d escaped Dark Space; Petty Officer Delayn, chief engineer aboard the Defiant; Corpsman Goldrim, the gravidar officer; Petty Sergeant Damen Corr from the helm; Deck Officer Gorvan, the weapons chief; and finally . . . Ethan struggled to remember the comm officer’s rank and name. It flashed up before his eyes a second later. Deck Officer Grimsby. Atton had given him a list of names and their associated holos so he could get to know his crew. Ethan had promptly loaded it into the holo card reader behind his ear to help him transition into his role as overlord. The implant had a significant degree of artificial intelligence, so it was able to read his thoughts and even see what he was seeing in order to provide a two-way interface between his brain and whatever information he had loaded into it. If he’d had the necessary dictionaries and heuristics on a holo card, he could have even used his implant to provide a simultaneous translation of Tova’s language.

  Ethan noticed the assembled officers hugging themselves or rubbing their hands together to keep warm. A few were even starting to shiver. It was freezing inside the operations center.

  “Why’s it so cold in here?” Commander Caldin asked.

  Ethan turned to her with a smile. “I’ll explain that in a moment.” Turning to address the entire room, Ethan folded his hands on the gleaming transpiranium-topped holo table and nodded to the assembled officers. “I’ve called you all here to help formulate a plan of action going forward and to brief you on what’s to come. First off, I’d like to establish our command structure. I’ve decided to promote Lieutenant Ithicus Adari to Lieutenant Commander and permanently assign him as Guardian One.”

  Ithicus smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

  Turning to him, Ethan went on, “Your first task will be to put together as many working novas as you can for your squadron and then find pilots for them. You will be able to draw on the entire 72 surviving crew members of this ship as candidates for nova training. We’re going to take any spare novas as well as any supplies we find aboard the Stormcloud Transfer Station before we leave.”

  Ithicus blinked. “Nova training takes three years, sir. You’re not seriously suggesting we spend that kind of time out here before we move on, are you?”

  Ethan shook his head. “No, you’ll have until tomorrow night.”

  “That’s less than two days!”

  “Do you have a problem with that, Commander? If so, I may need to reconsider your promotion.”

  “No, sir, but with respect, sending unqualified pilots up in our birds will just give the enemy more targets to shoot at.” Ithicus shook his head. “They’ll die and take our fighters with them.”

  “I’m not asking for unqualified pilots. I’ve already been skimming the databanks and it appears that many of the officers we have aboard started their careers as pilots and when they got older or wiser they moved on to crew and command positions. There are also a fair number of officers, including myself, who have become good pilots as sim-flyers and hobbyists. Among those, find the best candidates you can, train them as well as you can in the time that you have, and use your own discretion as to whom should fly which missions, but in an emergency I don’t want to have any empty cockpits, understood?”

  “Understood.”

  Ethan turned to look across the table at his son, Atton, though he was actually staring into the face of Atton’s holoskin, Adan Reese. “Lieutenant Adan Reese has recently demonstrated a keen instinct for command, and so I’ve decided to promote him to Captain and assign him as the new XO of the Defiant.”

  Ethan didn’t miss the way Loba Caldin’s blond eyebrows quickly shot up and then fell, dropping a curtain of shadows across her narrowing indigo eyes. From the way her jaw had clenched she looked like she wanted to say something.

  “Caldin,” Ethan said, addressing her. “You will be my tactical adviser and the acting XO when Adan is not on deck.”

  “Yes, sir,” she nodded, but she did not look happy. Neither did Ithicus, and both were sending Atton icy stares, angry that he had been promoted straight from lieutenant all the way to captain, effectively out-ranking both of them.

  “Good. Now that we all understand our roles, we can discuss a plan of action. Petty Officer Delayn—” Ethan turned to the man and gazed into the watery blue eyes of the Defiant’s chief engineer. Cobrale Delayn was at the tail end of what could be considered middle-aged, with gray hair cropped military short, and plenty of wrinkles and lines to mark the years. He had a very pale skin, making him look sick, but that was just because he was a Worani, and Woran never saw any real sunlight peeking through its perpetually dark and rainy skies. “—assures me that repairs will be completed, as best they can be, within the next two days. By then our systems should be mostly in the green and we can move out.”

  Everyone nodded their heads and Ethan went on, “My plan is to proceed from here directly to Obsidian Station in the Advistine System, which is our nearest staging point out here in Sythian Space. There we will gather our forces for a counter-attack on Dark Space and the Valiant. Unfortunately, we can’t simply comm them from out here, since there aren’t enough working gate relays in Sythian Space for us to send comm messages, and without the commnet, the only way we can communicate over interstellar distances is by direct messenger—or by an alter
nate form of comms . . . which brings me to introduce the final member of our bridge crew.”

  Everyone looked at Ethan expectantly, and he went on, “You’re all aware that we have an alliance with the Gors.”

  Delayn hesitated. “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you ever seen one?” Ethan asked of the entire group. He noticed his son was frowning, but the others looked confused. “Yes,” Caldin said. “We’ve all seen the Gors. You know that, sir.”

  Ethan nodded. “Then this won’t come as such a shock.” He turned to look over his shoulder at the door of the operations center. He called out a command for the door to open, and then said, “Tova, you can come in now.”

  Suddenly, out of thin air, Tova appeared in the doorway, her broad shoulders completely blocking the width of the door. She was slouching so that her head wasn’t cut off by the entrance.

  Ethan heard a collective gasp from the assembled officers, and he nodded to them. “I’m sorry, she startled me this morning, too.”

  Caldin frowned. “I didn’t know we have a Gor aboard.”

  Ethan turned to the alien. “Tova come inside.”

  She turned to him with her yellow eyes narrowed to thin slits. “Make room dark first.”

  Ethan called out a command for the lights to dim. The room plunged into near darkness, and then Tova stepped inside, and she stopped squinting. As the doors swished shut behind her, she walked to one side of the room where she stopped and stood with her eyes flicking suspiciously from one officer to the next, as if she were equally mistrustful of the humans as they were of her.

  Ethan reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of aural translators. He passed them to Ithicus Adari, who was sitting to his left, and asked the pilot to put one in his ear and pass the rest around the table. Looking up, Ethan said, “These translators will help you understand Tova as she will understand us.”

  The assembled officers each took one of the translators as they were passed around the table, fitting them into their ears which were not already wearing a comm piece.

  As soon as they were done, Ethan went on, “Tova is going to help us detect cloaked Sythian ships along our journey.”

  “But, sir, we have a cloak detector for that,” Corpsman Goldrim, the gravidar operator, said.

  Ethan turned to Goldrim with a smile. The boy was young, too young to be a part of a bridge crew under any normal circumstances. “I apologize for the lie, but there is no such thing as a cloak detector. Tova has been our cloak detector all this time, hiding in her crèche aboard our ship.”

  The assembled officers grew very quiet, and the air seemed to grow thick with accusation. “She’s not been a visible presence on this ship until now, but Tova is as much an officer of the fleet as any of us.” Ethan’s eyes swept around the room. “The Gors are able to detect cloaked ships because they are telepaths, and in the same way that they communicate they can also find and locate one another.”

  The comm officer turned to look at Tova. “So why doesn’t she just contact the Gors aboard Obsidian Station and have them pass on our message to the fleet?”

  “That was my question when I brought her here,” Ethan said. “Tova tells me that she needs to be within roughly 10 light years of another Gor to be able to contact them. She also warns that if she does so, whoever she contacts will be able to locate her, too.”

  “Then she can’t help us detect cloaked Sythians without revealing us to them,” Goldrim said.

  “Without a cloak, we’re already visible, but even if that weren’t the case, the Gors are on our side. If we’re not planning to rescue them, they can’t afford to disobey their Sythian masters overtly, but they can help us in covert ways—by revealing the location of cloaked Sythian ships and by not revealing ours.

  “Now, here is the problem. We need to get to within at least 10 light years of Obsidian Station so that Tova can contact them for us. We’re low on fuel, and we don’t have any long range scout ships aboard. That leaves us with exactly two options that I can think of—one, we send the Defiant on the most direct route possible to Obsidian Station. Or two—we modify Brondi’s corvette for extended range and send it instead.” With that, Ethan turned to Petty Officer Cobrale Delayn. “Can we do that?”

  Delayn hesitated. “I’m not sure . . . how far are we talking?”

  Ethan turned to Damen Corr, the helmsman. He was another middle-aged man, but his hair was still a vibrant red, and his face relatively wrinkle-free. He appeared to be making calculations in his head. Ethan saw the man squinting and scratching his head too much, so he triggered the star map on the captain’s table and set the zoom so that they could see both their current location and Obsidian Station. Ethan nodded to the helmsman. “Use the controls on your side to set the most direct course from here.”

  “On the lanes or off?”

  “Off the lanes for now. If we have the fuel for it, that’s the course we’ll take.”

  Damen Corr nodded and turned to his controls. A moment later, a jointed green line appeared on the map, joined with three points where they’d need to revert to real space to navigate around obstacles between them and Obsidian Station. “All right, according to the map, the shortest route is 41 light years. . . .”

  The engineer was already shaking his head. “To travel that far off the lanes with the Defiant will take us almost twice as much fuel as we have left aboard, and to refit a smaller ship for such a trip would take one much larger than a corvette. The drive system and fuel supply alone would take up more cubic space than we’d have if we stripped the corvette to its beams.”

  Ethan frowned. “And if we travelled on the lanes?”

  “On the lanes . . .” Damen Corr bent to his controls once more, and another jointed line appeared, this one less direct and joined with many more points where they’d need to revert to real space. “It’s 57 light years, but because the gates will open the wormholes for us, we’ll have more than enough fuel to make the trip with the Defiant.”

  Ethan looked from the helmsman to the engineer and back again. “Would a modified corvette make it that far on the lanes?”

  “Maybe . . .” Delayn said, rubbing his chin. “But she won’t have shields or weapons.”

  Caldin shook her head. “Then the fuel is not the problem. A naked corvette would never get that far. Even one Sythian fighter would be enough to take it out.”

  Ethan pursed his lips and nodded. “We’ll take a hybrid approach. The Defiant will make half the trip using the lanes, and then we’ll send out Brondi’s corvette to skirt the most dangerous systems. Delayn, Mr. Corr, would you please run a calculation of how much fuel we’ll expend and where would be the optimal point to stop and send out the corvette? We can afford to fall short by a few light years if need be, and then have Tova contact the station for help.”

  Both men nodded and began conferring between them. Damen worked the star map while Delayn brought out his holo pad and started making calculations.

  The rest of them waited while Damen and Delayn came up with the optimal flight plan. A few minutes later both men looked up from their work, and Damen nodded to the glowing blue grid which rose out of the captain’s table between them.

  “Our best option would be to send the Defiant along the space lanes until the Odaran System. From there we could conceivably stop to send out the corvette and have it travel off the lanes the rest of the way to Obsidian Station. There’ll be just enough fuel for the corvette to make it the whole way, assuming nothing goes wrong.”

  Ethan frowned. “What might go wrong?”

  “Well,” Delayn began, setting his holo pad down on the table. “A modified corvette with maximum space devoted to the drive system and fuel supply might make it as far as 21 light years, travelling off the lanes, but we run the risk of seriously overheating the reactor. If that happens, it could suffer a meltdown and destroy the ship. If the crew sees that happening, they’ll have to drop out of SLS early to let the reactor cool. That will mean opening an ext
ra wormhole and using even more fuel to make the trip. The route we’ve plotted allows for one such emergency stop. If the reactor is spent by then, hopefully Tova is close enough to make contact with her people.”

  Ethan sighed and nodded. “Okay.”

  Caldin frowned at the route outlined on the star map. “Even two systems is a lot to cross without a cloak.”

  Ethan turned to study the map with her. “Taylon, where we are now, is remote, so it should be relatively empty. If there were Sythians here, they should have found us by now.”

  Ithicus Adari chose that moment to speak up. “We could send out the nova trainees on a recon flight to check that.”

  Ethan turned to him. “A live training mission? What if they find something? We could lose all our novas right out the launch tubes.”

  “As you said, they’d have found us by now if they were here—” Ithicus turned to look at Tova. She stood leaning against the wall with her brawny arms crossed over her thick, masculine chest. “And wouldn’t she have detected them if they were here?”

  Ethan nodded. “Okay, send the novas out to make sure we’re clear to the gate, but pick the best candidates for that mission. We don’t want any accidents.” Ithicus nodded, and Ethan turned back to the group to say, “The next system in line is Forlax.” He tapped the associated point on the map so they could view more detailed information about the system. The most recent recon report was just a month old. A cloaked guardian-class destroyer had been sent out to investigate. They’d found a small fleet of Sythians at Forlax, but nothing significant.

  “It would appear that Forlax is also fairly empty,” Ethan said, reading the report. “After that comes Odaran. We’ll drop out of SLS a few million klicks short of the gate and send out Brondi’s corvette. That’s just two systems to cross, and one of them is most likely empty. We can definitely make it that far.”

  “Agreed,” Ithicus Adari said. “Assuming the recon data is still accurate. What if we send a scout ship ahead of us to Forlax?”