some piece of tech?”
Atton shook his head. “Did you see her wearing one?”
“Point.”
“For that reason, and a few others, I’ve asked Tova and Roan to keep their presence aboard my ships a secret for now, and in exchange for keeping them cooped up, I’ve made a very comfortable home for them, or crèche as they call it—you should see the one I was constructing aboard the Valiant .”
“Okay,” Ethan said. “That brings me to my next question. Why bother? Why go to all that trouble to keep a few aliens aboard? I get that you need crewmen for the ships that you’re salvaging, but Tova is obviously not there to fill out your crew.”
Atton smiled. “First of all, she and Roan are our liaison to the Gors. And second, they actually are a part of the crew.”
Ethan cocked his head. “Oh?”
“We have a cloak detector aboard all of our ships. It feeds data directly to our gravidar systems, and it tells us both when there are cloaked Sythian ships present, and roughly where they are located.”
Ethan’s eyebrows rose. “That must come in handy.”
“It does. It’s turning the tide of the war for us—that in conjunction with our own cloaking devices. What most people don’t realize, however, is that the detector is not some new piece of tech. It’s built in to every living Gor.”
Ethan blinked. “What?”
“Gors can communicate with members of their species telepathically, and via the same medium they can sense their fellows at a distance.”
Ethan was taken aback. “Kavaar . . .”
“The Gors’ telepathy is apparently also how Sythian ships track and communicate with each other while cloaked. To the Gors, it’s second nature.”
“And the Sythians? Do they have this telepathy?”
Atton shook his head. “The Gors say they don’t. That’s why Sythian ships still have comm systems.”
“Okay, so we’re dependent on Tova to be our eyes in space. What about our ships’ cloaking devices? Is that a Gor thing, too?”
“No, those are tech. We reverse-engineered a Sythian cloaking device over five years ago, back when we first met the Gors. Until then it had been impossible for us to capture a Sythian vessel and study it, since the Sythians were always on the winning side of every fight, but the Gors have delivered such vessels to us freely. Most Sythian systems are an enigma to us still, but the Gors showed us how to build cloaking devices with a hybridized version of Sythian tech and ours. Our cloaking devices are not nearly as efficient as Sythian ones, so we don’t have miniature versions, but anything destroyer-sized and up is easy enough for us to cloak as long as we have the right components.”
Ethan shook his head, incredulous. Then he froze as something else occurred to him. “Wait—you said the Gors are helping you fight the Sythians to free their people, but the Sythian ships are crewed with Gors, not Sythians, so they’re helping you fight their own kind. Don’t you find that suspicious?”
“We only disable the Sythian ships. After that, we send our Gors aboard to free their fellows. The newly-freed slaves join our ranks, and everyone’s better off. If we were killing them left and right, of course they wouldn’t agree to help us. It’s enough that they’re surrendering to us without a fight and allowing us to capture and even destroy their ships. We don’t need to kill the slave army if we can corrupt it to our side.”
“Hmmm . . .” Ethan sat back with a thoughtful frown.
“What is it?”
“I still feel like there’s something the Gors aren’t telling you. What if they’re just using us to free themselves?”
Atton shrugged. “It’s still a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
“Right up until the slaves become the masters.”
“Hopefully they’ll show some gratitude when that happens.”
Ethan snorted. “Let’s not be naïve.”
“Now you’re starting to sound like Admiral Heston.”
“Who?” Ethan asked.
“The leader of the
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