04 Dark Space Read Free Page A

safe way in or out, which was hidden by a sensor-disrupting nebula. No one except for a few high-ranking officers had even known where it was. Officially, Dark Space didn’t exist, and for ten long years, that had been enough to keep it safe.
    During that time, Hoff had been almost 1,000 light years away, having been cut off from the retreat. He’d used the remnants of his Fifth Fleet to rescue survivors from the war and bring them to his Enclave. Much later, he’d found out about the survivors hiding in Dark Space, and he’d learned that the sector had suffered a criminal revolt. The criminals had come to him with a stolen warship—none other than the overlord’s flagship, the Valiant herself—and Hoff had chased them back to Dark Space, thinking he would defeat the rebellion with just one captured Sythian cruiser and his own flagship, the Tauron. That plan would have worked flawlessly, too, were it not for the fact that he’d unwittingly brought a Sythian tracking device with him.
    “Hangar bay controllers have a grav lock on the Intrepid,” Lieutenant Hanz said from the comm station, interrupting Hoff’s reverie.
    Hoff acknowledged that with a nod. “Bring them in.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Waiting on board that cruiser was Hoff’s XO, Master Commander Lenon Donali. He’d missed a lot in the week that he’d been away. When they’d parted ways, Donali had been leaving to take the alien tracking device they’d found with him, hoping to lead the Sythians away from Dark Space. Before that tracking device had been found, Hoff had suspected that the Gors had betrayed them. In retaliation for that, he’d broken the alliance and had thousands of them slaughtered at a human-run Gor training facility on Ritan. Not long after that they’d found the alien tracking device and realized that the Gors had been innocent all along, but by then it had been too late. Thanks to the tracking device, the Sythians knew where Dark Space was, and they had ignored Commander Donali’s diversion to rather follow Hoff into Dark Space with an entire fleet.
    Suddenly it had no longer mattered whether the legitimate government or a gang of criminals would be in control of the sector. There was no way that a dozen human starships were going to fight off several hundred Sythian ones. There wasn’t going to be a Dark Space.
    Yet when all had seemed lost, Hoff had found a way to detect the Sythians’ cloaked command ship. . . .
    And destroy it.
    His eyes turned from the approaching Intrepid to the drifting ruins of the Sythians’ thirty-kilometer-long behemoth-class cruiser. The red eye of the Firean System’s sun glinted brightly off the distant halves of the giant alien warship. The dark speck beside it was what was left of Hoff’s flagship, the Tauron . He’d crashed his kilometer-long battleship into the Sythians’ command cruiser, slicing it in half before they could raise their shields. With that killing blow, the Gors had shown their true colors—
    And stopped fighting.
    With the command ship disabled, the Gors were no longer afraid of what their Sythian masters would do to them if they disobeyed, and like that, the battle was over.
    Hiding behind the cloaking shields of a captured Sythian warship, Hoff’s men snuck aboard the Valiant and took it back from the criminal insurrectionists. The remainder of the outlaw fleet surrendered, and the Gors agreed to maintain the alliance in exchange for mutual asylum in Dark Space.
    The legitimate government was still shattered, however. As the last surviving admiral from the ISSF, Hoff was the closest thing they had to a legitimate leader, and as such, he had assumed the title of supreme overlord. His first act as overlord had been to offer a onetime, unconditional pardon for all of the criminals in Dark Space if they would agree to work with the fleet defending the sector. Most of them had welcomed that opportunity, though whether they would actually mend their ways remained to be