Ethan let out a long sigh and his shoulders slumped. He watched the crew celebrate, a small smile tugging at his lips. One system down, one more to go. An SLS timer appeared on the captain’s table. Ethan touched his ear and whispered a command to set his comm piece to intercom mode and amplify his voice across the deck speakers.
“Congratulations! We’ve crossed the first system. Good job, people! The time till we reach Forlax is eleven hours and ten minutes. You can leave your stations to rest, but please wait for the relief crew to arrive, and don’t go too far. If something knocks us out of SLS, I need my best men to be sitting back at their stations before I can even give the order. Dismissed!”
More cheering.
Ethan smiled. Turning to Commander Caldin, he nodded and said, “Care to join me for a drink at Aurora’s?”
Caldin frowned and shook her head. “Don’t you think a celebration would be premature at this point, sir?”
“We both need some down time, Commander. I’m not suggesting we drink anything with alcohol, but we could use a break. The chances that Sythians have laid a trap between Taylon and Forlax are very low, so we should be safe, and I need you to be at your best when we reach Forlax.”
“I think I’d rather stay here, sir. Someone needs to keep an eye on Tova for us,” Caldin said, glancing at the alien.
“Yes . . . she is oddly quiet, isn’t she?”
Caldin acknowledged that with a shrug.
“You’re going to be okay here?” Ethan asked.
She nodded. “Go get some rest, sir.”
Ethan turned to leave. “I’ll be on the comm if you need me.”
Just before Ethan reached the entrance to the bridge, he saw the doors swish open to reveal a familiar tall, cadaverous man. Ethan called out to him as he approached. “Dr. Kurlin!” But as Kurlin drew near, it became apparent that whatever news he had to deliver was not good.
“Hello, overlord,” Kurlin returned, stopping in front of Ethan with a smirk. He crossed his arms and stared meaningfully at Ethan.
Ethan’s eyes narrowed at the old man’s sarcastic tone and the insubordinate look on his face. “If this is about your daughter, I’ve already told you that—”
Kurlin held up a hand to stop him and Ethan’s eyes flashed. As the overlord he couldn’t allow himself to be interrupted like that. “Before you continue,” Kurlin said. “I think we’d better find someplace private to discuss what I’ve just discovered.” The doctor lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and he leaned closer to say, “I know your secret.”
Ethan’s eyes went wide.
Kurlin began nodding, and a smile sprang to his face. “Yes, I can see by your reaction that you know what I mean.”
“Let’s go discuss this in my quarters.”
“Of course,” Kurlin said. “Lead the way.”
* * *
—THE YEAR 0 AE—
Destra tried to put thoughts of leaving Lessie’s son, Dean, to a horrible fate out of her mind as she ran up to the strange, rounded silver ship with no visible viewports or engines. She’d never seen a vessel like this before. Rounding it quickly, she saw that the engines were in the side of the ship, but that changed her perspective and she realized from the shape of the vessel that it was lying on its side, and the engines were really in the back, making the rounded silver part the top. Destra walked around the rounded bottom of the fighter, and then passed a quartet of cylindrical cannons, capped with strange, glowing red barrels. She began to get an overall picture of the vessel, and now she recognized it as a Sythian Shell Fighter. It was the size of a human shuttle, which meant there could be any number of Sythians waiting on board, but the fact that there’d been no reaction as she’d run across the grassy clearing to reach the ship gave her hope.
Destra saw a ramp leading down to the grass just below the shell-shaped top of the fighter. With a flutter of trepidation, she ran up the ramp, grunting with the effort of pushing the hover gurney up the incline. How would she even be able to fly the ship? The controls would be alien, the language would be alien, even the numbers and symbols would be unfamiliar to her.
It will be a miracle if I can fly it to the next system, she thought. It would be an even bigger miracle if the vessel could take her all the way to Dark Space. No human vessel that size would have enough fuel to make it—even travelling on the space lanes—but maybe, just maybe, the Sythians used a more efficient type of fuel.
She had a feeling she was asking for one too many miracles.
Destra reached the top of the ramp and stepped across the threshold of an open door into terrifying blackness. She heard the telltale sizzle of static shields, or their Sythian equivalent, and turned to see the air in the open doorway rippling strangely. Suddenly aware of where she was, Destra ducked down behind the gurney and drew her pistol. She left the man on the gurney at the entrance and began stalking through the alien ship. The corridors were very dark, the air was frigid, and the walls of the ship were cold and very smooth. She detected a faint purple light coming from the walls, but it was almost nothing to see by.
Destra’s heart pounded, and she began to sweat beneath her clothes despite the cold. What if there were Sythians cloaked inside the ship and she ran right into them? But they won’t be cloaked while they’re aboard their own ship, she thought. Who would they be hiding from? Not that it mattered in the low light. Cloaked or not, she wouldn’t see them.
Destra had to use one hand to feel her way along the smooth walls of the corridor to keep from stumbling, while her other held her pistol in a shaky grip. She felt the walls curving strangely, and that was when she realized that the floor was curving, too, driving her against the wall, and making her feel like she was about to fall over. After walking like that for a few moments, the light in the corridor began to increase, and she rounded a bend to see a curving stairway leading up into the light. She climbed it cautiously, until her head popped out into a broad, transparent dome.
Suddenly, the world tipped on its side and she felt sick. To one side she saw the ground, to the other the sky, while above her head and in front of her she saw trees. The ship was turned on its side, and so was she. Somehow the direction of gravity had shifted inside the fighter, and the strangely-curving corridor had actually twisted around a full 90 degrees so that one wall had become the floor, while the other had become the ceiling. As for the dome itself, she hadn’t seen any transparent canopy from the outside, so she assumed it was simulated rather than real.
Climbing the rest of the stairs, Destra emerged inside a broad cockpit with two seats in the middle. She crept up behind the flight chairs, keeping her steps quiet just in case. . . .
But the seats were both empty. Destra’s heart soared. She had a chance. Digger and Lessie had no doubt bought that chance for her with their lives. She holstered her pistol and hurried to sit down in the left flight chair, where there appeared to be a flight yoke of some kind. The chairs were over-large, and the cockpit was strangely dark despite the unbroken, dome-shaped canopy. The light coming in from outside was dim enough to suggest that it was dusk, even though she knew it was still early afternoon.
Destra’s eyes jumped around the control consoles and displays before her. As she’d expected, everything was alien, but she tried not to let it daunt her. She scanned the controls, finding not a solitary button, gauge, or slider. Besides the flight yoke, which was designed for two hands much larger than hers, there were no visible controls whatsoever. Destra felt a crushing weight of despair bow her neck and shoulders. The ship must have been voice activated, and there was no way it would respond to her language.
A quick look at the copilot’s station revealed the same lack of visible flight controls. Desperate, she tested her hands on the flight yoke. It could move directly up or down, push forward or back, slide left or right, and even twist or tilt, giving her a total of five axes of movement. Destra shook her head, thinking, I just want to take off!
Suddenly the deck rumbled underfo
ot and the ship began to hum and vibrate. Destra jumped up from the flight chair and drew her pistol to cover the entrance of the cockpit—
But the stairway leading up into the cockpit was dark, and there was nothing there. Her brow furrowed and she sat back down. No Sythians had entered the cockpit without her realizing, so how had the ship started up? She must have done it by accident somehow. Even as Destra watched, the ship began to rise slowly off the ground. Now if only I could go a bit faster, she thought.
The ship’s rate of ascent rapidly increased, and that was when she figured it out.
It’s responding to my thoughts! Destra shook her head in awe. Somehow it didn’t matter that her language and physiology weren’t the same as a Sythian’s. The technology was sophisticated enough to translate her thoughts to action anyway.
Hope soared anew and Destra’s lips parted in a broad grin. She shivered, and her teeth threatened to chatter, reminding her how cold it was inside the ship. Then she thought, I want to raise the temperature and increase the available light. The dusky light coming in through the canopy abruptly brightened to full daylight, and then the ship shuddered and she heard a new sound—this one like the heavy whump of an impact.
Frowning, Destra looked out the left side of the dome-shaped canopy and saw a dwindling black speck on the ground. That speck was firing tiny purple stars up at her from both palms. It was a Sythian. They’d found her. She was running out of time.
Not knowing how much the alien fighter’s shields would take, and remembering that they were supposed to be far weaker than human equivalents, Destra thought, I need to get to orbit—fast!
Suddenly, her view of the planet’s surface blurred as the ship righted, rolling 90 degrees, and turning to point up at a clear blue slice of sky. Destra braced herself as the ship accelerated toward the fluffy white clouds overhead. She felt the g-force piling against her chest with ever-mounting pressure, and began searching for seat buckles. When she didn’t find any, she looked up and thought, How do I strap in? No sooner had she thought it, than seat restraints shot out from the sides of the chair to crisscross her chest. Destra kept her arms and hands clear while the belts tightened, and she tried to ignore the frightening feeling of acceleration while focusing on the problem at hand.
The Sythians knew she’d stolen one of their ships, so they’d be flying after her soon. Destra gritted her teeth against the acceleration and tested the flight controls. The ship moved subtly in whatever direction she pulled the yoke. Unlike human fighters which flew in atmosphere using a combination of grav lifts and control surfaces, the nonexistent aerodynamics of the Sythian fighter suggested that it stayed aloft with grav lifts and thrusters alone.
The ship roared into the clouds, turning Destra’s view a misty white for several seconds before screaming out into the vast, empty blue. She watched the sky growing ever darker and then the faint light of stars began pricking through the fading veil of Roka IV’s atmosphere. It was beautiful and terrifying at the same time—transitioning from the comfortable safety of a planet to the vast emptiness of space. It was even more terrifying with the thought of enemy ships racing after her.
How do I detect other vessels? she wondered.
A hovering holo flashed up in her peripheral vision. She turned to it and studied a map of sorts, clustered with unfamiliar symbols and letters, but the 3D grid plot of space and the red icon in the center, which she supposed to be her ship, were familiar. She could see nothing on the grid to suggest an enemy or friendly vessel, but then as she watched, a wave of light spread across the map, like ripples spreading across the surface of a pond, and she saw a cluster of red icons appear both below and above her vessel.
Destra’s heart sank. She’d be shot down in no time! As far as she could tell, she was flying straight toward a cluster of enemy ships—although she couldn’t see any sign of them with her naked eyes. The faint haze of atmosphere fell away and the vast, starry darkness of space snapped into clearer focus.
As Destra watched, the red icons on the map began to fade, and then the next wave of light reached them, and they reappeared, their positions slightly altered. Destra frowned. This was a much less useful form of gravidar.
How am I supposed to evade anything like that? It only took a matter of seconds to die in a dogfight, so real-time data was important. She wondered how the Sythians had been able to fight them so efficiently if their gravidar was so inadequate.
Then, suddenly, she realized what she was missing. The Sythians had cloaking devices. It was almost certain that they were using them, and that was why they were hard to pin down on the gravidar. Destra shook her head ruefully. That meant Sythian gravidar was better, not worse, than the human version. Not even the best gravidar systems humans had been able to devise could see Sythian ships coming. None of their early warning systems had worked. It was a pity they hadn’t found a way to reverse engineer a Sythian gravidar, but she supposed it was far too late for wishful thinking.
Frowning out at space, Destra wondered if the ship she’d stolen had a cloak. The ship interpreted that thought as intent to cloak, and suddenly she heard a sound like rushing air. She saw her own icon on the grid slowly fading and reappearing. Destra smiled. How do you like having the tables turned, you bug-eyed kakards? Her ship reached the nearest group of enemy contacts, while she searched the gravidar for one contact in particular—a gate. It wouldn’t be fading in and out like the rest, because it wasn’t cloaked. It would be a human contact, and probably the only one remaining in the system.
Then she found it. There were two gates, both marked in red and lying at the far edges of the grid cube. Just as Destra wondered how to head for the nearest gate, the seemingly empty space ahead of her became suddenly crowded, and enemy ships were racing toward her from all sides.
“Oh frek . . .”
There were hundreds of fighters just like the one she was flying, and behind those, in a more distant orbit of Roka IV, lay a dozen or more large capital ships, their blue and lavender hulls shining mirror-clear in the sun.
They’d all uncloaked—but why? Then the contacts on the map turned from red to blue, and a chime sounded somewhere inside her cockpit. In the next instant a deadly wave of spinning purple stars began pouring toward her, and she had her answer.
Chapter 18
—THE YEAR 10 AE—
“What do you want?” Ethan asked as soon as they sat down together inside his quarters.
Dr. Kurlin smiled with all the smugness of one who knew he had a winning hand. “Very little. I want you to send me and my family back to the transfer station with enough food and supplies to last until help can come. And if you make it to Obsidian Station, I want you to send help back for us.”
Ethan blinked. “That’s it?”
“Well, I’d also like to know why and how you’re impersonating the supreme overlord, but I won’t get greedy just to satisfy my curiosity. Those questions seem to matter infinitely less when I know that you won’t make it alive to Obsidian Station.” Kurlin spread his hands. “At which point my moral obligation to reveal you as an imposter is clearly removed.”
“Your moral obligation,” Ethan snorted. “That’s a joke coming from you, Kurlin.”
The old man’s eyes hardened and he scowled. “I had no choice, and who are you to judge me? For all anyone knows you’re a serial killer whose next target was the overlord.”
Ethan shook his head. “There’s always a choice, and you made the wrong one, just as you’re making the wrong choice now by trying to blackmail me. What if I decide to kill you, just to shut you up?”
Kurlin sat back, smiling once more. “I’ve written a netmail which will be sent out as soon as my heart stops, informing the entire crew of your secret. Attached to that is the proof that you are not who you appear to be. You’ll be jettisoned out the nearest airlock by a mob of angry officers.”
“Well, you’ve thought of everything, haven’t you,” Ethan replied. “What proof do you have? How shoul
d I believe that you know anything at all?”
“I know because I had to test your blood sample, along with everyone else’s on this ship, for markers which would indicate an active infection of T4-76. Unfortunately for you, this involved checking the age of each person from their blood. I found access to this test mysteriously restricted for your sample and conducted the test by hand only to find that your genetic age did not match your apparent age. Not even close.”
“Interesting,” Ethan said. “But then you still don’t know who I am?”
Kurlin hesitated. “I don’t need to know. You’re an imposter. It’s good enough.”
“You’re right, it is good enough, but there’s something you haven’t thought of, Kurlin. The Defiant has just jumped to SLS and I have no ships or fuel to spare for you to make the SLS jump back to Stormcloud Transfer.”
Kurlin’s eyes flashed, and his lips pressed into a thin line. “Very well, then you leave me no choice.”
Ethan held up a hand. “Wait. While that is true, I believe I could be persuaded to do something about this situation.”
Kurlin cocked his head, his brow furrowed curiously as he waited for Ethan’s reply.
Ethan drew his sidearm in a blur, faster than Kurlin could have imagined possible. Ethan’s reflexes were honed from long practice as an outlaw and a freelancer. He could draw faster than most, and far faster than Kurlin could react.
Ethan pulled the trigger just as Kurlin’s eyes were beginning to widen. Kurlin’s body convulsed, causing him to slump to the floor, and Ethan stood up, eying the man’s motionless form.
Re-holstering his sidearm, Ethan grimaced. Now what was he going to do with the body? It would be a while before Kurlin woke up, so he had time on his side. The old man had said that his message would be sent out as soon as his heart stopped. He’d said nothing about it being sent out if he were stunned. A big oversight, my friend. Casting his eyes around his quarters, Ethan spied a cylinder with a blue transpiranium cover stacked against the wall inside his bedroom. It was his private stasis tube, reserved for medical emergencies and long trips through SLS.
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