Dark Space: Origin Read online

“Two of them were, but one of those was training—a blind combat simulation.”

  “What’s your pilot’s rating?”

  “I’m not sure anyone’s been keeping track, sir, but in the training mission I scored 4B.”

  “Training is a lot different from real, blind combat or not. Has anyone here flown with her?” Donali asked, looking up and down the line of assembled officers and NCOs.

  Gina stepped forward and gave a brisk salute. “I have, sir.”

  “And who are you?

  “First Lieutenant Gina Giord, sir. Nova pilot.”

  “How good a pilot is the Brevet Lieutenant?”

  “One of the best I’ve seen—possibly even better than me.”

  “Step back in line.” Turning to Alara, the XO said, “We don’t have any empty nova cockpits right now, but we’ll have you fly one of the assault transports. Go stand over there by the engineers and technicians. I’ll get back to you in a minute.”

  Alara nodded and gave a brisk salute before leaving the lineup. She waited with the greasers and technicians while the XO addressed Commander Caldin.

  “I already know what role you filled, Commander, but on this ship XO is my job, and the Admiral is the Captain. Your record shows an impressive tactical score, so I’d like you to join the Admiral’s advisory staff. You’ll be with us on the bridge, just one step down from myself. Come stand over here,” he said, pointing to the deck beside him.

  “Yes, sir,” Caldin said, leaving the lineup.

  “Next!” Donali pointed to Gina, and she stepped forward. “You said you were a nova pilot.”

  “Ever since I joined the fleet, sir.”

  The XO looked her up and down, noting the white stripes running down the sides of her trousers. “You’ve already got your stripes. You a real veteran or you just like how slimming those stripes are?”

  “No, sir, I earned them. The war’s making veterans of us all.”

  “Hmmm. How long ago did you join the fleet?”

  “Six years.”

  “What—did you join when you were twelve?”

  “No, sir, sixteen.”

  “So you’re fresh out of flight training—or were you also drafted under unusual circumstances? What’s your flight experience?”

  “I had to earn my wings, sir. I spent the full three years training aboard the Baroness, and graduated three years ago with distinction. After that I joined Sunstroke Squadron aboard the Defiant. A year later, we were sent to the Getties Cluster, and in the last year since returning I’ve been serving aboard the Valiant with Guardian Squadron.”

  The XO whistled and ran a hand along his grizzled jaw. “Well, it would be a real shame not to give you a nova, then. What’s your pilot’s rating?”

  “2B over 22, sir.”

  “Twenty-two missions flown? All combat?”

  “About half.”

  “I’m impressed that you managed to keep a 2B rating after flying that many sorties. I’m betting that means you can fly a transport with your eyes closed. You can go join Lieutenant Vastra.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Next!”

  Alara watched Gina walk over to her. When she got there, Alara shook her head and whispered, “I just can’t get away from you, can I?”

  Gina grinned. “You’re stuck with me, Kiddie.”

  “Are you going to steal all my kills again?”

  “Only if you let me.”

  “Hoi, would you two cut the chatter? I had enough of that on the Rescue. Didn’t let me sleep worth a damn!”

  Alara turned to see Petty Officer Cobrale Delayn standing behind them. He was of average height, but with his pale, Worani skin, gray hair, and light blue eyes, the old engineer still stood out in any crowd. Alara smiled at him. “We didn’t let you sleep because you snore, and we didn’t want Tova to get annoyed and eat us.”

  “I do not snore.”

  “Don’t make me get the flight recorder to prove it,” Alara replied.

  “Go ahead. You can’t prove what don’t exist. I’m as quiet as a—”

  “All right break it up, girlies!” Commander Donali said, striding over to them and clapping his hands to get their attention. “I’m going to take you lot to the flight deck myself. We’re expecting the admiral to land there in a few minutes, and I need to speak with him.” Donali turned to find Commander Caldin. She was busy talking to a nearby corpsman. “Come with us, Commander,” he said. “I’m sure the admiral is eager to meet the one time captain who discovered the Gors.” Caldin turned to look at him and he went on, “That stunt you pulled, trying a probe on one of them might have landed you in krak with the overlord, but it’s going to put you in the admiral’s good books. We don’t waste time blowin’ kisses to skull faces in this fleet.”

  “That sounds like a welcome change to me, sir,” Caldin replied as she walked up to them. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder at the corpsman she’d been speaking with, and nodded. He smiled back before turning away.

  What passed between them could have been nothing, but Alara had heard the rumors—almost everyone on the Defiant had hooked up during the long wait for a rescue. Something about near-certain death and boredom made people’s passions boil over. The only reason Alara hadn’t fallen prey to that herself was that she’d been the one doing the rescuing and the only man within light years had been Delayn. That was just as well. With her slave chip telling her to think and act like a pleasure palace playgirl named Angel, without even wanting to she would have slept with every man on board the Defiant before a rescue came.

  The one man she could be sure she really wanted was Ethan. There was something about him that she just couldn’t forget. Despite the wife he claimed to still be in love with, and regardless of his alleged crimes, Alara couldn’t forget about him. He haunted her dreams and her every waking thought. She ached for him, and deep down, she knew that he was destined to be hers.

  But he was also destined to be thrown out an airlock.

  She wanted to find the admiral and beg him for Ethan’s release. Whatever he’d been accused of, she loved him, and she knew he was a good man. He wasn’t guilty of anything deserving death. He couldn’t be! She couldn’t explain how she knew, but she did. Alara felt sick.

  “Fall in!” Master Commander Donali said, and with that, he marched them off to the flight deck. Alara bit her lip, wondering where Ethan was now and what he was doing.

  * * *

  Crew rushed back and forth across the flight deck. It was nothing like what Alara remembered from the badly-undermanned Defiant. There the flight deck had been just large enough for the cruiser’s original two squadrons of novas, and they’d barely had a handful of ground crew, but here she could see more than a dozen assault transports, and each of those transports looked large enough to hold half a dozen novas by itself. The hangar was enormous, and the ceiling very high to accommodate the heavy assault mechs which stood in their docking stations along the bulkheads. Those mechs towered between three and five stories high, sticking out high above the tops of the assault transports and milling squads of sentinels. They were monsters—the battleships of ground warfare—bristling with beam cannons, pulse lasers, ripper cannons, and missiles. Due to their size, they would never be useful for ship-to-ship actions, so they weren’t going on this mission. Heavy assault mechs were typically reserved for planetary assaults, and Alara was willing to bet these hadn’t seen any action since the exodus. The human survivors didn’t have the manpower or the resources to think about assaulting planets and taking them back from the Sythians.

  Squads of light assault mechs stomped across the deck in pairs, filing into the transports. The matte black zephyrs were little more than exaggerated suits of combat armor, and just small enough to traipse through most parts of the Valiant without getting stuck.

  The level of noise and activity in the hangar was overwhelming. Alara struggled to hear herself think above the thudding of mechanized footsteps, and the booming of loading ramps op
ening and closing. Adding to that was a near-constant crackle of announcements, blaring over the intercom to be heard over everything else.

  Abruptly, Commander Donali held up a hand for them to stop as a mechanized load lifter stomped across their path carrying a big plastiform crate. Alara watched the mech pass, craning her neck to look up at it. Once it was gone, Commander Donali started forward again, leading them across the deck to one of the smaller ships on the flight deck. Slightly shorter and much sleeker than the assault transports, it was a seraphim-class corvette. That ship sat on a landing pad close to the blue fuzz of the hangar’s shielded opening to space, as if the pilot had been in a hurry to set down or was just about to leave again.

  Standing at the foot of the boarding ramp was a squad of Zephyr light assault mechs with their bulky black helmets off and cradled in their hands. Slung across their backs were oversized plasma rifles and tanks of oxygen. Admiral Heston stood in front of the squad looking small beside their mechs, but somehow still intimidating as he ordered one of them to kneel before him. Alara frowned, wondering what was happening. When they stopped just a few paces away from the admiral, she heard what he was saying, and she recognized the man he was speaking with.

  “Repeat after me, if I step out of line you will kill me with the push of a button, sir.”

  The mech pilot repeated that phrase and Alara shook her head. It can’t be. . . . She listened to him repeat after the admiral, and she realized that his voice was a match, too. Alara studied that soldier’s face and downcast eyes more carefully, and suddenly her heart began thudding in her chest.

  “Good!” the admiral said. Turning to another mech pilot whose breastplate was decorated with more colorful bars than the others, he said, “Sergeant Dorian, if Private Ortane gets out of line, don’t hesitate to shoot him. You don’t need to wait for me to give the order.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, chip him!”

  “Wait!” Alara screamed.

  Commander Donali turned and gave Alara an incredulous look.

  “Who said that?” Admiral Heston boomed.

  “Second Lieutenant Alara Vastra, sir,” Donali answered with his brow furrowed all the way up to his receding hairline. “She’s one of the survivors from the Defiant. A pilot.”

  “I see,” the admiral said as he walked up to her. “Atten-tion!” Alara straightened, but the admiral frowned. “Forgotten how to salute? How in the netherworld did you get to lieutenant?”

  Alara gave a sloppy salute now that she was prompted. “Sorry, sir. I was drafted in a hurry, so I’m not used to fleet protocols.” Her gaze skipped to Ethan just in time to see him look up at her.

  “That’s no excuse. You’ve been aboard the Defiant for at least a week, so you should have learned by now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Care to explain your outburst, Lieutenant?”

  “I overheard you say you were going to chip that man over there.” Alara’s gaze turned to Ethan once more.

  “And what is that to you?”

  “I used to be his copilot, sir.”

  “Indeed? Are you aware that he’s a criminal?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know what he is being charged with?”

  “High treason, I believe, sir.”

  “That’s correct, so we have no choice but to have him chipped if he’s going to join the assault teams boarding the Valiant.”

  “Why would you let a prisoner fight for you?”

  “Because I believe in letting people make amends, and because I’d rather he die than one of my own men. A man with nothing to lose is a powerful adversary, and he tells me he has a score to settle with Alec Brondi, so that makes him even more dangerous. Now, I’m going to ask you again—what is it to you that Ethan Ortane be chipped?”

  “I . . .” Alara’s eyes found Ethan’s once more. “I have feelings for him, sir.”

  “Romantic feelings?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “And does he return your sentiments?”

  “Leave the girl alone, Hoff,” Ethan said.

  The admiral turned to glare over his shoulder. “Shut up or I’ll put you back in the brig where you belong.” Turning back to Alara, he pressed, “Well?”

  “I don’t know, sir . . .” Alara replied, confused by the inquisition. “He told me he can’t return my feelings because he still loves his wife.”

  Hoff held her gaze for a long, uncomfortable moment until at last he began to nod. Turning back to Ethan and the assembled squad of mechs, he said, “Well, Private Ortane, it seems you weren’t lying about her at least. As for the rest of your story, we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”

  Ethan glared stonily back at the admiral, but said nothing.

  “Good. You’re learning the value of silence. It’s less incriminating. Chip him! I don’t have any more time to waste here.” With that, the squad medic stepped forward and raised an implanter to Ethan’s neck. Alara winced as it went in.

  Almost as an afterthought, the admiral turned to her. “Don’t worry, I’m only implanting him with a tracker. It’s not dangerous so long as he doesn’t do anything stupid that might endanger this mission or his squad.”

  Alara nodded mutely, and the admiral smiled thinly back before he turned and stalked away. She heard him and the XO begin speaking in hushed tones, but she wasn’t paying attention. Her focus was on Ethan as he rose from the deck and rolled his shoulders. Alara crossed the space between them as his squad began filing into an adjacent transport. She stopped in front of Ethan, looking tiny beside his zephyr. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at him.

  “For what?”

  “That they’re treating you this way. I know you’re not guilty.”

  Ethan smiled. “Alara, I was an ex-con when you met me, and I’m not innocent now, either.”

  Alara’s eyes flashed. “Shhh!”

  “It’s all right; it’s no secret.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to shout it from the rooftops!”

  “I’m not. I just want you to know that—”

  “Hoi!” someone called out. Alara turned to see Ethan’s sergeant standing and waving from the boarding ramp of a nearby transport. “Private, you need to get aboard now, or you’re going to be left behind! Double time!”

  “I’ll be right there, Sergeant,” Ethan called back. “Alara, I have to go.”

  “Don’t! They want you to die out there, Ethan. The admiral said so! No one is going to have your back.”

  “Maybe not, but someone’s got to have yours.”

  Alara frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Brondi’s on that ship, Alara. He’s the only one who can give us the code to deactivate your slave chip. Without that, you’ll be Angel the playgirl forever.”

  “I don’t care!” she said. “I’m not even sure I want my memory back.”

  Ethan shook his head. “There’s no use trying to talk me out of it.”

  “Damn you, you hard-headed . . . skriff! I love you! That’s one thing I can still remember. You can’t get yourself killed.”

  “If it brings you back, it’ll be worth it.”

  “Why? So I can remember you better, and mourn you more?”

  “Alara . . .”

  “Ethan!”

  “I love you, too, Kiddie. I know it’s not fair to say this to you now, but I think I’ve always loved you. . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I found her, Alara.”

  “Found who?” Alara’s thoughts ran in confusing circles—He loves me! He’s leaving! He’s going to die! He loves me! He’s leaving me?

  “My wife. She’s on the Tauron right now.”

  “What?” Alara blinked. She felt suddenly light-headed and she stumbled back a step. “How . . . when?”

  “It’s a long story. She’s been missing ever since the exodus, but I just found out that she’s been with Hoff all this time. She’s his wife now, Alara, and she’s pro
bably the only reason I haven’t already been jettisoned out the nearest airlock with the rest of the garbage.”

  Alara shook her head. “I don’t understand; I thought—”

  “Private! I’m raising this ramp! Don’t make me go into combat without my laser bait.”

  “On my way, sir!” Ethan called back. Speaking to Alara, he said, “You don’t have to understand, just remember this: I’m sorry, and if I ever had the chance to make a life with you again, I wouldn’t waste it. Take care of yourself, Kiddie.” With that, he turned and sprinted up to the transport where his sergeant stood waiting.

  Alara stood numb and speechless, watching as Ethan jumped up to the top of the boarding ramp and turned to wave goodbye. She couldn’t even bring herself to wave back. The last thing she saw before the ramp closed was him turning and putting his helmet on.

  “Frek you, Ethan!” she finally managed, but he couldn’t hear. He wasn’t going to leave her like that. She would make him eat that heart-wrenching goodbye! She’d make sure he had that chance to make a life with her if it was the last thing she did, and then they’d see if he was telling the truth or not. Alara turned to look around the milling flight deck. “Gina! Where the frek are you?”

  “He doesn’t deserve you,” she said.

  Alara whirled around to see Gina standing behind her. “You were listening the whole time?”

  “Waiting for you,” she clarified. “We’ve got a bird to fly, remember?” Gina pointed to the side of another transport. “The XO doesn’t like the idea of a brevet flying solo, so he’s got you assigned as my copilot—always the copilot, never the pilot, hoi?” Gina winked.

  Alara shook her head. “I need your help.”

  “We don’t have time for any favors, Kiddie.”

  “I want us to fly that transport.” Alara turned and pointed to the one Ethan had disappeared into.

  Gina frowned. “That’s Assault Trans One. See the emblem on the side?”

  Alara noted the badge-shaped emblem, black with a jagged gold lightning bolt cutting through a glittering field of stars. She shook her head, not comprehending. “So? What’s that mean?”

  “They’re vanguards—the sentinels’ elite. They’re the first ones in and the last ones out.”