Read Online Dark Space by Jasper T. Scott - Free Book Online

nice break from the real action, but no one stays here long before old Dominic sends us out on another scavenger hunt.
    Ethan felt like he was missing something important. Scavenger hunt? “The last hunt find anything special?”
    “Well, we won’t know until they come back through the gate, but I’m sure it’ll just be more of the same—survivors, equipment, ships.”
    The pieces of the puzzle began to gel in Ethan’s brain— survivors, equipment, and ships coming back through the gate? Realization dawned, and suddenly Ethan’s eyes lost focus on the roiling red nebula around them.
    “Five, tighten up, you’re drifting!”
    “Sorry . . . got distracted,” Ethan replied. He couldn’t believe it! The overlord had reopened the gate, and he was sending hunting parties to go scouring the ruins of the ISS on the other side of the galaxy—the Sythian-infested side. It would only be a matter of time before someone got careless and was followed back to Dark Space. The overlord was putting them all at risk! Suddenly, Brondi’s scheme to wipe out the fleet looked like a necessary evil.
    Chapter 8
     

    T he sentinels came, landed on the asteroid where the pirates had made their base, and spent an hour clearing it to retrieve all the useful equipment before setting charges and blowing it to space dust. After that, they all jetted through the Chorlis-Firean gate and left the Firebelt Nebula behind.
    Now, Ethan watched as the timer to real space counted down on his nav. As soon as it hit zero, the bright streaks and star lines of SLS faded to black, and Ethan saw the mottled white and blue ice world of Firea in the distance. Orbiting high above that, lying directly in front of the gate, was the Valiant —a massive, five-kilometer-long gladiator-class carrier. It was the largest surviving warship of the fleet, and the sole guardian of the Dark Space gate, since the other smaller cruisers and destroyers of the ISSF were scattered around Dark Space on patrol. The Valiant also carried a pair of 280-meter-long venture-class cruisers which had at the start of the Sythian War been the mainstay of the Imperial Fleet. There had once been more than five thousand of them, but now there were only five.
    The Valiant glittered darkly against the icy night side of Firea. The carrier’s reinforced, high-refraction index duranium hull caught and reflected the first rays of the system’s red sun as it peeked feebly over the dawning edge of Firea. The planet’s rocky moon lay as a dark silhouette behind the Valiant , and to one side of that, was the Dark Space gate, supposedly deactivated and sealed.
    Ethan pressed his lips into a thin, determined line as he stared at the Valiant . This was his target. Somehow, he had to destroy that carrier. If not to serve Brondi’s ends, then to keep the rest of Dark Space safe from Overlord Dominic’s reaching. The overlord was sending ships through the gate! Surely he had to know the danger of that. They wouldn’t even know if they were followed. Sythians had used cloaking devices to sneak their warships through the space gates before, and they would do it again.
    “Tighten up, Five. . . .” Guardian Three said. He was beginning to get on Ethan’s nerves. Ethan wasn’t used to flying in formations, true, but did the man have to pick on him every time he wandered a few meters out of line?
    Ethan clicked his comms as a trite way of acknowledging the order, and then he adjusted his nova’s heading by a few degrees in order to appease his flight leader. A quick look at the interrogation file Brondi had given him revealed that Guardian Three was First Lieutenant Ithicus “Firestarter” Adari. The man was characterized as a rigid, by the book pilot with a wicked temper and a habit for picking fights that had earned him his call sign.
    They drew near the amidships hangar of the Valiant , and soon the carrier began to loom over them, blocking out Ethan’s view of everything else. He picked out a