Authors: Jasper T Scott
“This marks the tenth group of runaways to be shot down since the occupation began. The Sythians’ message is clear—if you run, we
will
catch you. As a fellow citizen of the former Imperium and a fellow human being, this reporter urges you, do
not
resist, and do
not
run. We—”
Ethan heard the bedroom door open and he waved his hand to turn off the holoscreen just seconds before Alara breezed in with a wan smile on her face. “Did you have a nice nap, darling?” she asked. Then her smile faded to a frown as she noticed his expression. “What’s wrong?”
Ethan shook his head and forced a smile of his own. “Nothing, sweetheart.”
Alara had spent the past day basking in denial. Humanity had lost its freedom and the war, and she appeared to be welcoming their Sythian masters with open arms. Ethan wasn’t sure when she was going to snap out of it, but he couldn’t sit around waiting for that to happen. He had to act before it was too late.
Until just five minutes ago, he’d been planning to lure Alara aboard their corvette and then lock her in a storeroom while he attempted to run through the Sythian blockade, but that plan was looking more and more hopeless as time went by. In the last day there had already been almost a hundred ships that had tried to flee, and not one of them had actually escaped. Ethan considered himself a good pilot—far better than the average with his 5A rating—but no one was good enough to run through an entire Sythian fleet all by themselves. Enemy ships could be cloaked and hiding anywhere in orbit, or even in the atmosphere. Anyone blasting off from the surface without a cloaking shield would be spotted and intercepted by Sythian forces immediately.
Alara held Ethan’s gaze for a long moment before turning to look at the holoscreen sitting opposite the bed. Then she turned back to him with one eyebrow raised. “You’ve been watching the newscasts.”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“I thought we agreed not to watch them anymore. We agreed we were going to lie low up here and try to enjoy our honeymoon, because there’s nothing we can do about anything that’s going on.”
“I agreed
we
would stop watching the news. I said nothing about watching it on my own.”
Alara’s violet eyes narrowed. “Fine. Any new developments you’d like to share?”
Ethan shook his head. “Just more of the same. Nothing you need to worry about.”
She held his gaze a moment longer before her expression softened and she turned away with a shrug. “All right.”
Ethan watched her walk into the bathroom and shut the door behind her. How could she be so blasé about everything that was happening? She should have been glued to the holoscreen, just like him. A moment later he heard the shower running, and he waved the holoscreen back on. Images swirled out of the screen. Karpathia One was still showing live footage of the burning capital. Then it switched to an earlier recording of a transport fleeing for orbit only to get struck down seconds after liftoff by a squadron of Shell Fighters which came swooping down out of the clouds. Those Shells flew past the holocam with a stuttering blast of
sonic booms
that rattled through the suite’s sound system. Ethan raised his hand and snapped it shut, imitating a mouth closing with his hand. The volume of the newscast dropped swiftly, and he turned to eye the bathroom door, expecting Alara to burst out and see what the noise was about, but the shower stayed on, and the door stayed closed.
Oblivious,
he thought, shaking his head. Alara’s attitude was infuriating, but in some ways she was right. He’d just finished watching what happened to people like him—people who refused to give up. Those people got sent straight to the netherworld.
Ethan got up from the bed and walked over to the wall of windows on the far side of the suite. He stopped there and stood beside the suite’s whirlpool tub to peer down through the breaks in the clouds to the town of Ostin far below. The city lights were dim and bleached of color by the thick blanket of smoke which hung over the town. Here and there, bright patches of orange peeked through the smoke. Ostin was on fire. Ethan knew from watching the news that most of the damage was from looters and rioters rather than crashed starships. The Sythians had a zero tolerance for disorderly conduct, but that didn’t stop people from panicking and running away with whatever supplies they could find or steal.
People kept running, and the Sythians kept chasing. Planet- and space-bound runaways alike were all greeted with the same ruthless efficiency, and the same inevitable result.
A cold weight of despair settled in Ethan’s gut, and suddenly he felt far older than his 46 years. He watched the fires of Ostin burn between dark puffs of cloud. From where he stood, high above the town at the top of White Cap Mountain, those fires looked like candles, flickering feebly against the night. As he watched, a new candle flared to life, marking some other patch of resistance. Ethan shook his head, thinking about all the trillions of lives lost in the original invasion. He thought about the last few million humans in Dark Space, now throwing their lives away again in a stubborn bid for independence that they could never win. From up here it all seemed so pointless, and so futile. His thoughts turned to his son, Atton, and Ethan hoped that he’d had the sense to stand down when the order to surrender had come. He hoped that Atton was somewhere safe, biding his time until the resistance died down and everyone accepted the new status quo. And with those thoughts, Ethan realized that even he had given up. There was nothing any of them could do. Even if a lucky few made it as far as the entrance of Dark Space, they would just encounter more Sythians there and be intercepted before they could jump out.
Alara’s right,
Ethan thought, his eyes widening with the realization. His wife wasn’t deluding herself the way he thought. She wasn’t in denial, and she hadn’t lost her mind. He was the one who’d been in denial—denying that the war was over, denying that the Sythians had won.
Alara’s not happy about any of this; she’s just smart enough not to fight a battle that can’t be won . . . smart enough to make the best of a bad situation.
It wasn’t as though the Sythians were promising death to everyone. They wanted loyal, trained soldiers and crews for their fleets. Humanity was going to give them that, just like the Gors once had. The Sythians would have their endless supply of officers. Humanity would give them their children until the end of time, because anyone who refused to serve them would be killed, and when faced with death, a life of servitude didn’t look so bad.
Except that it was.
What’s life without freedom?
Ethan wondered.
Is that what we’ve come to? Living life for the sake of living it just one more day? Better to die fighting to be free than to live life in a cage.
Ethan had learned all about cages during his stay on the prison world of Etaris. The planet had no prison cells. It was run by criminals and populated by criminals. Certain trade restrictions applied, and no one was allowed to leave, but otherwise the prisoners there were free. During his sentence there, Ethan had learned that sometimes the strongest cages are the ones people build for themselves.
The strongest of those was despair.
Ethan began nodding slowly, his eyes narrowing on the smoke-clouded pinpricks of firelight raging through the town of Ostin below.
You want to clip my wings? You’ll have to cut them off.
His jaw muscles bunched as he ground his teeth together.
Come and get me, Skull Faces.
Chapter 16
A
tton blinked his eyes open and stared up at a shiny white ceiling. Med bay. He tried to sit up, but his head began pounding mercilessly, like someone was practicing on a battery of drums inside his head. What was he doing in med bay? Then he remembered the fight with Gina.
That explains the drums.
A minute later, the ship’s doctor came striding in and greeted him with a tight smile. “You’re awake,” he said, stopping beside Atton’s bed with a holo pad and stylus at the ready. “How do you feel?”
Atton frowned, trying to remember the man’s name.
Belerus. Fontane. Bell for short.
“Feel like I’m still asleep . . .” Atton replied slowly. “How long have I been out?”
“A day and a half.”
“What?” Atton sat up suddenly, and immediately regretted it as the pounding in his head found a faster tempo.
“Relax,” Doctor Bell soothed. “You took some hard hits to the head. You’re lucky you woke up so soon. Besides, if you’ve heard the news, you know there’s no rush. Now that you’re awake it won’t be long before you’re cycled off into stasis for a different type of sleep.”
Atton’s brow furrowed as he tried to remember what the doctor was talking about. Then he recalled—the
Intrepid
was on a four to five year journey through real space to escape the gravity well which had plucked it out of SLS.
Frek
, Atton thought as the bad news hit him for the second time. “Right. Well, thanks, Doc,” he said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.
“Hold on—” Doctor Bell laid a hand on Atton’s shoulder to stop him. “—I still have to run a few tests before I discharge you. Lie down please.”
Atton subsided with a frown. The tests were routine—brain scan, memory test, coordination test. He passed them all without a hitch. Less than an hour later he was riding the nearest lift tube down to the flight deck. Once there, he made his way down a deserted corridor and around the corner to the pilots’ quarters. He waved his wrist over the door scanner and walked down another deserted corridor, this one lined with doors on both sides. He walked past those doors with a frown. Was everyone in stasis already?
He passed Ceyla’s room and then Gina’s. Finally he came to his quarters and hurried inside. As the Squadron Commander, his room wasn’t shared with anyone else, and it had some extra space along the far wall. There, beneath a simulated viewport sat his desk, comm suite, and a holo projector. Atton headed there, his gaze fixed upon the starless void beyond the viewport.
Four years of this . . .
he thought, wondering how he was going to keep sane.
There were stories, from the old colonial days of the Imperium, of explorers travelling for years to chart the galaxy, and then getting lost between the stars and going mad. Many years later, those ships were found, drifting and full of holes, as if some unknown enemy had found them. Then the ship’s logbox would be read to find out what had happened. The story was always the same; the crewmen ended up killing each other in a fight for limited supplies. The last man standing usually ended up killing himself.
Would that be the
Intrepid’s
fate?
Atton took a seat behind his desk and waved the holo projector to life. Using his command control implant he mentally called up a star map to see where the
Intrepid
was in relation to the rest of the known galaxy. Zooming out, he found they were little more than a light year from the Enclave and Ikara, where a Sythian fleet had recently ambushed them.
Zooming out again, this time by several orders of magnitude, Atton found that in relation to the rest of the Adventa Galaxy they were near the end of the spiral arm closest to the Sythians and the neighboring Getties Cluster. That put the
Intrepid
nearly a thousand light years from Dark Space, and more than two thousand light years from the heart of the old Imperium. The civilized galaxy had once spanned over 25,000 light years, but most of that hadn’t been colonized, with the farthest-flung settlements being little more than outposts for research. Now the human race was down to just two sectors—Dark Space, which was blockaded by Sythians, and Avilon, made up of immortal humans who were as insular as they were numerous.
Atton swallowed thickly. He knew that even if the
Intrepid
returned with reinforcements, they would be too late to save anyone in Dark Space. Trying not to think about what that meant for his family he switched his focus to the problem at hand. If they couldn’t go back to Dark Space, then the
Intrepid
would have to go to Avilon.
But how would the Avilonians react to the intrusion of over a hundred refugees? The admiral had said they wouldn’t kill him when he arrived, and he remembered that the Avilonians had been sending aid to the Enclave before the Sythians had found it and enslaved everyone there. Based on those facts, Atton hoped the Avilonians would be sympathetic enough to take them in.
On a whim, he decided to check how far they were from Avilon. Thinking about the coordinates he’d been given brought them out of memory in his command control implant, and a sequence of numbers and letters flashed into his mind’s eye.
Calling up a holographic control panel, he began typing in the coordinates. As soon as he’d finished, a green diamond appeared hovering inside the star map. Atton was shocked to find it right on top of the glowing blue icon which represented the
Intrepid’s
current location.
It can’t be . . .
Hope soared in his chest, and he zoomed in until the scale of the map was just a few light years across.
His hopes died there. The
Intrepid
and the green diamond which represented Avilon’s forward base were now sitting at opposite sides of the map, over two and a half light years apart—close on a galactic scale, but still very far away as long as they were stuck travelling through real space at one tenth the speed of light.
Atton slumped back in his chair and stared into the glowing blue star map until the grid lines became blurry and his eyes burned with the need to blink. A few minutes later his comm piece trilled, interrupting his despondent stupor—
incoming call from Captain Caldin.
Atton touched his ear to answer the call.
“I hear you’re awake.”
“I suppose I am.”
“Good. You’re just in time to go to sleep with the rest of the crew.”
“The rest of the crew? How many of us are you putting in stasis?”