Dark Space: Origin by Jasper T. Scott Page A

the Gors’ strange grammar. They had a habit of speaking in the present tense for everything. “You mean he has already sabotaged the ship?” she asked.
    “The ship is damaged.”
    “Do they have power?” Caldin asked.
    “They do not.”
    “Good! Thank you, Tova. Well—” Caldin sighed, turning back to Alara and Delayn. “Hopefully we’ve at least bought some time for the admiral to find out the truth.”
    *  *  *

    Admiral Heston stood waiting inside the arrival lounge of Fortress Station’s main hangar. The station was operated by the Fifth Fleet Remnant (FFR), not the ISSF, so it was a safe place to receive the Interloper with its precious cargo.
    The station was their staging point and rendezvous to coordinate joint operations with the ISSF. It lay on the far side of Ritan to hide it from any Sythian passersby on the space lane between Roka and Advistine, but Heston was less concerned that they’d be detected by passing Sythian ships than he was that the Imperium’s telepathic Gor “allies” on the surface of Ritan would start broadcasting their location to any Sythians close enough to hear.
    The question of whether or not the Gors could be trusted was an even greater concern for Dark Space. That isolated sector was home to a large human remnant, and the overlord was relying on the Gors to be an early warning system in case the Sythians ever found them and came boiling into Dark Space with a fleet of cloaked ships. That early warning system wouldn’t have been necessary if they’d had the sense to stay hidden. Now they could detect cloaked Sythian warships, but only if the Gors deigned to tell them the enemy was coming. That placed far too much power in the Gors’ hands for Heston’s liking. The overlord had left all of Dark Space at their mercy, and there was something badly off about them. They didn’t act like slaves—absent were the obeisant attitude and broken will that he would have expected from a race of slaves. For all anyone really knew, the Gors were their own masters and the Sythians didn’t exist. Where was any proof to the contrary? One would think a slave ship full of Gors would have at least one Sythian taskmaster to keep them in line, but no, the Sythians were supposedly all hiding on gigantic command ships which stayed cloaked behind the lines, directing battles from a distance.
    The only Sythian anyone had ever seen was High Lord Kaon of the Sythian First Fleet, and as for their command control ships—the 30-kilometer-long behemoth-class cruisers—those had never even been glimpsed by human eyes. Images of them came straight from the Gors.
    It was all too circular for Heston’s liking. Everything began and ended with the Gors, including Kaon. He had been captured and delivered to the overlord as a gesture of good will, a way to cement the alliance between humans and Gors, but Dominic had taken that bait far too easily. Heston had met Kaon on multiple occasions, and like the Gors, there was something suspicious about him. During the year that Kaon had been held captive at Obsidian Station, the alien had revealed precious little about anything—and not for want of torture or interrogation. Kaon could recite the Gors’ story well enough, but he shut right up when pressed on certain topics—like why the Sythians had invaded, or what they had against humanity.
    Either Kaon was particularly strong-willed, or else he only knew what he had been told . The overlord’s interrogators had cut off Kaon’s cranial fins, severed his tail, broken his webbed hands and feet—all of that and not a peep. Oh, he’d made plenty of noise, but he’d refused to answer the really important questions. He’d just become violent and incoherent.
    Heston had asked the overlord to subject Kaon to a mind probe, but Overlord Dominic insisted that the risk outweighed the gain. Early probes of the Gors had killed them almost immediately, and Dominic assumed the same would be true of a Sythian. Kaon’s