This star system lacked unique portals or other ancient equipment that they’d found behind the Barrier to slingshot them home. He didn’t have Ludendorff or Andros Crank to help, nor were there hyper-intelligent engineers around, at least as far as he knew. It was he and a clone of him. Dravek wasn’t even a good clone in the sense that he was a perfect copy of him. This clone had strange ideas and lacked honor.

  Maddox turned his head within the helmet, looking at Dravek floating beside him. They had the short-range comm but neither had spoken to the other for the past several minutes. They drifted high above the ice moon.

  Dravek finally opened channels. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Not a thing.”

  “You’ve gone quiet. Have you been watching the Gnostic ship?”

  “No. I’ve been thinking.”

  With squirts of side-jet power, Dravek turned his suit toward Maddox.

  Maddox watched the man carefully, wondering if he’d raise the flamer. Dravek had offered to carry the heavy portable and Maddox had agreed. Dravek did not raise any weapon system, however, not even a sleeve-gun.

  “Have you lost your will?” Dravek asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The scientist told me about many interesting things before he died.”

  Before you killed him, you mean, Maddox told himself. Was the scientist like a surrogate father for you? Dravek talked about the scientist enough for that to be the case. What had it done to the clone to kill the scientist?

  “The scientist told me special commandos often mentally struggle against the loneliness of space,” Dravek said. “That’s especially true during commando assignments like ours.”

  Maddox said nothing.

  “I’d asked him about the commando equipment,” Dravek added. “The scientist said a commando needed a method to shield himself against the loneliness. Otherwise, the enormity of space could overpower his will.”

  “My will’s just fine,” Maddox said.

  “Is it?” Dravek asked. “The Soldiers or cybers of Leviathan sometimes go blank when they’re in a situation such as ours. The vastness of space dwarfs the psyche. For all the Leviathan modifications, the cyber brains are much like ours: susceptible to awe.”

  Maddox frowned. Did Dravek know too much about cybers? Was the man trying to escape from Leviathan or was he a deep agent, a secret agent for Leviathan?

  Maddox kept playing with the idea. Was this all some elaborate Leviathan ploy then? Were the cybers using him in a well-crafted plan? Maddox had no idea because he really didn’t know how the rulers of Leviathan thought. He didn’t even know what they looked like.

  The Soldiers had always struck him as strict and literal. He’d spoken to a Strategist once. That one had been quite different from the Soldiers. Were the highest-level operators of Leviathan even that much different and more cunning than a Strategist? Were the rulers of Leviathan more like the Mastermind?

  Maddox had seen strange things on the planet Kregen. He’d learned there was a connection between the Mastermind, the Cosmic Computer and Leviathan. He hadn’t connected all the dots in that yet, nor had he really tried.

  Maddox exhaled. He was floating in space like a speck of minutia. Would he ever see Meta and Jewel again? He’d asked himself that many times on different missions, so he knew he longed to find them. What had happened to them? Were they safe or in danger?

  Maddox shook his head. This was getting to be too much. The loneliness of existence, the vastness of space—

  “Excuse me, Dravek. I’m closing the comm-link for a moment. I need to think.”

  “Wait—” Dravek said.

  After a second, Maddox didn’t hear him anymore. Sweet silence cocooned him, leaving him with his thoughts as he drifted high above the ice moon. The loneliness of existence, the vastness of the universe—

  Maddox blinked suddenly. This was exactly what Dravek had been talking about. He was like a special-commando cyber of Leviathan, losing his grip on reality.

  I’m the di-far. I’m Captain Maddox. I’ve been in worse places.

  He dragged a dry tongue across his lips. He had to get a grip. He had to get his mind in gear.

  Maddox stared at the commando suit floating apart from him.

  What motivated Dravek? How did the clone fight against the feeling of futility as they drifted up here? It didn’t matter, none of that mattered. Getting his own head in the game—

  Through sheer force of will and determination, Maddox shifted mental gears. It seemed as if he opened a different drawer in his mind. This drawer had the needed tools to deal with direct problems. There. He used the suit’s passive sensors, focusing on the Gnostic ship out there.

  The spaceship of girders, pods and struts descended toward the moon. The jets of fire were bright. Maybe that helped to bring him around. Living beings, humans, were inside the ship. Maddox used the suit sensors, looking beyond the vessel and to the murky surface. What he saw—

  Maddox opened channels with Dravek. “Do you see the base down there?”

  “You’re back online. That’s good, very good. Look, I was going to tell you about the base before. I think it is a mining operation. Do you see the free-trader ships parked down there?”

  “Free traders?” Maddox asked. “You never told me they were called free traders.”

  “Why are you so suspicious of me all the time?”

  “Well, let’s see. You hid meds. You tried to zap me with a hidden device on the knife you returned. You only dole out critical information bits at a time. You also seem to know an awful lot from this lone scientist you murdered.”

  “Firstly,” Dravek said, “it wasn’t just one scientist. I say it that way—I don’t know why. He was the chief scientist. I did learn a lot from him. The time—you ought to know that you’ve been under cryogenic stasis for longer than you think.”

  Fear surged in Maddox to such a degree that he couldn’t speak. He should have seen this sooner. Had he been in cryogenic stasis for years? Certainly, that was a possibility. If it was years, could Meta and Jewel be old, dead, what?

  Horrible panic gripped Maddox as pain flared in his chest. He didn’t think it was a heart attack, but he checked the bio monitors just the same.

  “What’s the matter over there?” Dravek said. “Are you still coherent or what?”

  “How long was I in cryogenic stasis?” Maddox asked in a harsh voice. “And you better give me the right answer.”

  “Do you mean ‘right’ as in truthful, or just what you want to hear?”

  “The truth, man, I want the truth.”

  “You’ve been under for a year, maybe a little longer.”

  Maddox felt a jolt. He’d been gone a year from his family, possibly longer. All right, get a grip, old man. Put your head in the game and do this right.

  Maddox shivered. This was too much to accept at once. He shelved the thought and realized he’d been silent for too long.

  “Fine,” Maddox said. “I’m fine.”

  “Ah,” Dravek said, “I finally hear some steel in your voice. Good. I think you’re finally getting your mental faculties together. Is that true?”

  “Don’t question me. I’m running the operation.”

  “Is that so? Tell me, what do you know about the base down there?”

  Instead of answering, Maddox focused the passive sensors, using a zoom function. It was a large base with buildings. Near the grounded trader-ships were atmospheric flyers or flitters. There were some crawlers, too. Farther from the base camp were dark openings into the surface.

  “What are they mining?” Maddox asked.

  “Fissionables,” Dravek said. “Don’t you study your readings?”

  “What?”

  “I suspect you’re using your sensors. That was what I meant about studying your readings.”

  Did Dravek have a hidden link to his suit? Would he have revealed that by a slip of the tongue, though?

  Maddox studied his HUD. He saw it soon. It was fissionables, the mother lode of them. That had to be it: uranium and thorium to feed hungry reactors somewhere. Would the Gnostics trade the fissionables to the people on the terrestrial planet near the dwarf star?

  “What can you tell me about the planet near the star, the planet with a city?” Maddox asked.

  “It’s called Gath.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I don’t know much,” Dravek said. “It has very little metal. I don’t think it has much of a technological civilization except around the spaceport.”

  “Why do ships land on Gath if there’s nothing to trade?”

  “There are furs, a unique honey—”

  “Honey?” asked Maddox, interrupting. “Is that what you said?”

  “One that helps to prolong life,” Dravek said.

  “Longevity honey?” asked Maddox.

  “That, furs and a unique hardwood,” Dravek said. “From my understanding, factors collect the goods throughout the year. Hired free-traders haul the goods to more civilized planets in the cloud.”

  “Factors belong to corporations?”

  “I know what you mean by corporations. It doesn’t work the same out here.”

  “Out here in the Heydell Cloud or out here in Leviathan Space?”

  “Both, neither,” Dravek said.

  Maddox processed that. Dravek knew a lot, a lot more than he’d realized. “What’s your plan exactly?”

  “It’s pretty basic,” Dravek said. “I want to be free and make sure I stay that way. That means money, the more the better. I want fissionables to sell, a spacecraft with a crew willing to follow me and a lifelong supply of Gath honey.”

  “This crew,” Maddox said. “They can’t be Gnostics, right?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “That only leaves the captured free traders, the ones from the ship the Gnostics impounded. You think they captured the free-trader crew?”

  “I do.”

  “What kind of people are these free traders?”

  “An independent and hardy lot,” Dravek said. “They must be to travel the Heydell Cloud, going from planet to planet with their minuscule cargos and slender profits. But the fissionables is the mother lode. If we do this, we fill all the ships to the brim.”

  “Then what?” asked Maddox.

  “After picking up a cargo of Gath honey, we take our bonanza to a rich planet in the Heydell Cloud and sell it, keeping everything. If you want to buy a spaceship and start back to the Commonwealth after that, be my guest.”

  Maddox considered the idea. The closest Commonwealth system would be Omicron 9, possibly 8,000 light years away. Without Starship Victory, that would be more than a lifetime of travel, even if the ship used wormholes. He needed a better answer.

  He probably wasn’t going to get the answer floating up here. With Dravek’s plan, he’d have possibilities and the money to pursue them.

  Maddox stared down at the moon base, the mining camp. “How many Gnostics do you think control the mine?”

  “I’d say less than fifty.”

  “Let’s figure on fifty then. Can we take them out?”

  “You mean just us two?”

  “Yes,” Maddox said.

  “At best, we could nail half before the rest get their act together and kill us.”

  “We need to free some traders then.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Do you really think the Gnostics enslaved the traders?”

  “I would.”

  “Why?” asked Maddox.

  “To send them into the radiation pits to do the mining,” Dravek said.

  That made sense. “How do you propose we do this?”

  “We need to come down on the other side of the moon. Then, we can skim the surface so the Gnostics don't spot us on their sensors.”

  “That will expend a lot of fuel,” Maddox said.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, we have a lot of fuel to expend.”

  “You’ve been thinking about this for more than a few days.”

  Dravek said nothing to that.

  “You’re thinking a fifty-fifty split between us?” Maddox asked.

  “Exactly,” Dravek said.

  “Then I agree.”

  “Excellent. It’s time we started then. Follow me.”

  The two applied thrust, heading in the opposite direction the pirate vessel had gone. At the same time, they slowly descended into the nitrogen atmosphere as they headed for the surface of the moon.

  -13-

  Maddox and Dravek entered the thin nitrogen atmosphere to come within two hundred meters of the surface.

  It was an eerie landscape to say the least. The suit’s sensors gave Maddox the reading of -290 degrees Fahrenheit, making it colder than anything on Earth. The suit regulated his body temperature, ensuring he didn’t freeze in the cold.

  Maddox and Dravek banked to the right.

  Even at this height, the hazy atmosphere clouded their vision. It was an opaque orange soup, a mix of nitrogen and methane. The ground was a mishmash of rocky terrain, vast sheets of water ice and liquid lakes of methane and ethane. Not unsurprisingly, the suit informed Maddox the lakes were warmer than the surrounding ice and rock.

  As they flew, Maddox observed rugged water-ice mountains marked by the occasional methane rains. In other areas were shifting dunes of sand.

  It was weird, the ice moon was alien and yet with its atmosphere, mountains, dunes and lakes had an Earth feel.

  “Over there,” Dravek said over the short-range comm. “Do you see that?”

  In the distance, land rippled and shook. A rumble sounded they could hear and then a cryovolcano spewed. It didn’t spew molten rock. Instead, a geyser of super-chilled volatiles—water, methane and ammonia—erupted.

  The low gravity meant the plume shot high into the orange-tinged sky. Particles caught the distant starlight and glittered like gems. Almost immediately, however, the cryomagma began to freeze in the frigid air, turning into and falling as solid chunks. Most of it fell back and built up the cryovolcano’s icy cone. The rest hit other areas.

  “That’s crazy cool,” Maddox said.

  “Thought you might like it. Let’s go that way.” Dravek pointed and headed lower.

  Maddox followed.

  They aimed at a long ice crevice with strange plumes of frozen water ice along the sides.

  Where did the heat come from to create cryovolcanoes? Perhaps with the Jupiter-like gas giant up there tugging in one direction and the other moons tugging in others caused gravitational friction within. That would create heat.

  “I think we’re low enough,” Dravek said. They flew fifty meters above the icy surface. “Any hidden Gnostic sensors out here should be aimed at space.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Maddox said.

  Time passed until they’d been traveling for hours since leaving the shuttle. They continued to head for the Gnostic moon base, the mining operation. Could they achieve surprise this way? Or would they have to take out the enemy with their micro-missile launchers and flamers? If that happened, they’d probably die under enemy return fire. If they had to start fighting, at best they could rush to a grounded spaceship, commandeer it and take off. That would be iffy, though. The best bet was to sneak onto the base in a stealthy manner as they were trying to do.

  “We may be doing this too fast,” Maddox said.

  “I’ve been thinking the same.”

  “The problem is that if we go too slowly it’ll be hours, maybe a day before we reach the base.”

  “Agreed,” said Dravek.

  “If we go too slowly,” Maddox said, “we’ll use up most of our air supply. I don’t like such a narrow margin in case of problems or errors. But I don’t see how it would work if we blaze in fast. The problem is that I’m already sick of the suit, even though it is extremely functional.”

  “So, we slow down, then, right?”

  “Right,” Maddox said.

  Each man rotated and expelled white hydrogen propellant.

  They had big, bulky tanks, making them five times their normal size. Each man used up two tanks of hydrogen propellant, ejecting the tanks afterward. The four empty tanks tumbled toward the icy surface. Each man now had a smaller sensor signature and less mass. Therefore, each needed less propellant to move their mass.

  They glided just above the desolate surface, the icy walls of the crevasse at their sides.

  What a strange fate. Maddox shook his head, squeezed his eyelids and opened them wide. He needed to focus and remain alert. The passing hours were making him sleepy.

  “There’s trouble,” Dravek said.

  That cut through Maddox’s reverie. “What is it?”

  “Look up and to your left thirty degrees.”

  Maddox did so. “Three skimmers are headed straight for us. Do you think they see us?”

  The skimmers were sleek one-man craft. They had swept-back wings, were jet propelled and had a bubble canopy in the overhead front section. The three approaching skimmers each carried a complement of missiles under their wings.

  “They must see us,” Dravek said. “Slowing down was a mistake. Hidden Gnostic sensors must have spotted our expelled propellant. This is the response to that.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Maddox said. “We decided, right or wrong. We’re stuck with our decision.”

  “We need to scratch all three skimmers then.”

  Maddox saw the logic in that. One escaping skimmer would report about them. “Maybe the better thing is to land on the surface and hide under the ice.”

  “And if the skimmers already have sensor lock on us?”

  “Wouldn’t our suits have told us that?”

  “Right,” Dravek said. “I think they’re using teleoptics. That’s as passive as you can get. Our suits would never be able to tell that.”

  “Let’s get a little separation between us,” Maddox said. “That way, one of their missiles can’t take us both out at once.”

  “Damn it,” Dravek said. “I’d hoped—it doesn’t matter like you said. We have to go with what is.”