by Samuel Best
He sighed. “Go find a comm tech, then. There’s something I’d like to try. Something that could save us.”
She looked up at him, the barest hint of suspicion in her eyes.
“Go,” urged Williams. “I don’t trust the system to send the message.”
“But…” she said, hesitating, “the elevators will be out, sir.”
“You’ll have to run. I’ll be fine until you get back.”
Korinne pulled her headphones from around her neck and set them on her console. Williams picked them up and prepared to put them over his ears.
“Go!” he repeated.
After a last, hesitant look, Korinne ran from the bridge.
Williams tossed the headphones on the console and went to the door. He tapped his personal command override sequence into the door’s control panel, locking himself in the bridge.
Someone pounded from the other side of the door.
Williams sat at Korinne’s station and swiped her headphones to the floor. Tapping quickly, he pulled up information about every escape pod on the ship. So far, only two percent of them had launched, half from the red ticket section of pods, half from the officer’s.
On a full cruise, Williams knew, there wouldn’t be enough pods for everyone. It was an unspoken fact he prayed never made it to the public’s ear. The operational record of the starliner series of ships was exemplary, justifying the savings during construction.
Another red pod launched.
The captain pulled up a schematic for the blue pod section — Deck 2, aft. The entire chamber was flooded with radiation. Its doors were sealed.
Williams leaned back slowly. He looked up at the ceiling, for the first time seeing the ship as an adversary instead of an ally. He had put his faith in the Halcyon, and it had betrayed him, the crew, and the passengers. It wasn’t that the warning signs had escaped his vigilant watch, it was that they had never been reported by the ship’s systems in the first place.
He wheeled his chair close to the console and bypassed the crew interface. He checked the time, then performed a quick calculation in his head. The security code to activate the commanding officer’s console interface required the input of a morphing password based on the current time and that officer’s personal identification number.
After the screen popped up, he immediately navigated to the emergency display screen and fired off a distress call. No signals pierced the Rip, but perhaps it would be picked up by the nav beacon near Aegea and relayed to the next passing vessel.
Williams confirmed the ship’s multiple distress beacons were active, then navigated to the interface for escape pod control. Tapping each screen that popped up in rapid succession, he removed the red ticket requirement from all pods. They were now available to all passengers, no matter their class.
He tapped the button to transmit a ship-wide message.
“This is the captain. All restrictions for escape pod use have been removed. All passengers and crew report to Decks 3, 4, and 6 forward.”
Williams walked to his command chair. He took a long look around the bridge, bathed in deep red light, searing the sight into his memory. Then he sat and tapped a command into his armrest console.
The wall screen went black, and the glowing orb of Galena faded into view, its brilliance dulling the red warning lights.
Aside from a gentle beeping off to the captain’s left, the bridge was silent, just the way he liked it.
Williams settled into his chair, staring at the screen.
Galena stared back, a single, giant eye, wide open against a black sheet that extended to infinity.
The ship lurched, as if something had struck one of the outer hulls. Gravity failed. The captain slowly rose from his chair, drifting up in the sudden zero gravity. He grabbed an armrest and pulled himself back down, then secured himself to the chair with its built-in safety harness.
After tightening the straps almost to the point of cutting off circulation to his limbs, he stared once more at Galena, and he waited.
MERRITT
Movement near the entrance of the stasis room caught his eye.
Two crew members hovered just inside the door, looking up at the ceiling in horror.
Merritt glanced at the countdown timer: 45 seconds left.
“Hurry!” he yelled, his voice painfully loud within his helmet.
The two men noticed him for the first time, waving at them like a madman. They pushed off the wall, heading down the row of tanks.
A voice spoke over the ship’s intercom, coming through a small speaker inside Merritt’s helmet.
“This is the captain. All restrictions for escape pod use have been removed. All passengers and crew report to Decks 3, 4, and 6 forward.”
Merritt froze in place, his train of thought leaping a gorge and missing the track on the far side.
All he could think of was Gavin’s face, twisted in fear, as the escape pod door slid down.
A pipe burst from the wall behind him in a cloud of steam and smacked his back, pushing him against the main control console.
Merritt snapped out of his momentary shock and went to the nearest empty tank. He entered the command to open it, but nothing happened. A red error screen flashed on the console.
“Come on come on,” he said as he drifted to the previous tank right next to Ivan’s.
This one opened up, the process seeming to take a hundred times longer than usual.
Merritt stepped onto the lip of the hypergel tank and stuck one arm in.
The orange glow in the ceiling blinked out, and Merritt looked up to see the last tendrils of flame being sucked into a network of deep cracks.
He jumped into the tank and spun around in the pink gel as the ceiling of the stasis room ripped away in broken pieces, sucked upward in a sudden vacuum.
The two crew members were sucked up along with all the loose debris in the room, vanishing into the jagged-edged mouth that had opened at the top of the room.
The surface of the hypergel rippled like a lake in a strong breeze as the vacuum tried to pull it from the tank. As the plexi doors hinged shut, the gel sealed around Merritt’s suit, cementing in place.
His fast breaths were loud inside his helmet. He turned his head to look down the row of tanks, but could only see Ivan’s right next to his.
It disappeared, sucked up its tube.
Merritt braced himself for launch, but there was no need. Cushioned within the gel, he felt nothing as his pod shot up its tube. The stasis room blinked out of sight, and all was dark. Strobes of light pulsed like a heartbeat and he shot from the outermost hull, into space.
He squinted against a piercing glare of light. At first, he thought it was Phobis, the nearest star, but it was one of the ship’s engines.
Engine 3 emitted the concentrated light of a hybrid antimatter drive caught in a feedback loop, generating so much of its own internal energy that it could no longer be shut down.
Small explosions bloomed from the hull of the Halcyon, like sand falling through water. A massive scar, like a black lightning bolt, crawled across the hull from the back of the ship to a point near its center, half a mile away.
As Merritt’s escape pod turned, Galena came into view, dull in comparison to the burning effulgence of the Halcyon’s overloading engine.
Through a gauze of pink gel, he could still see the details on its surface. Many of its small continents were connected by narrow land bridges, surrounded by vast oceans. He assumed a broad patch of white to be one of the planet’s poles.
The pod shifted direction, turning him toward a view of endless space as it sent him on an undeniable impact course with Galena.
There were a few silent moments where Merritt had time enough to worry about his son.
He searched the distant stars for familiar constellations, knowing he would find none. They formed alien patterns in the black, sparkling brilliantly even through the pink hypergel.
Dancing fingers of flame extended along th
e surface of the pod, starting above Merritt’s head. Soon his entire field of view was bright orange, and he knew he was falling through Galena’s atmosphere.
For the first time since entering the hypergel, he began to worry about his landing.
There was no way to manually control the tank from the inside. Even if there was, the occupant was usually under the effects of stasis. Merritt wiggled his fingers within the gloves of his emergency space suit, but couldn’t move them deeper into the gel, which had hardened to a barely-pliable state.
The orange light vanished, and Merritt burst into blue sky.
A field of white mammatus cloud-cover extended toward the horizon, its surface fluffed up like a blanket made of cotton balls.
Bile rose in his throat as the pod leveled out, rotating until Merritt faced the sky.
An impact rocked the pod and debris flew past the doors, but the pod kept flying. Tall cylindrical poles, like naked tree trunks, zipped past his field of view.
The pod hit something else and turned sideways, spinning like a top. It slammed into the ground and bounced back into the air, pieces of its metal shell flying in every direction. It hit again, cracked like an egg, and bounced up, sending the remains of the outer shell spinning away in ragged strips.
All that remained was the formed mass of gel as it tumbled end-over-end through the air, Merritt suspended within.
It splatted against a large lead-colored boulder half-buried in the ground, and stuck there.
Merritt’s back was to the boulder. He hadn’t felt a thing.
The gel slowly lost its firmness, sagging against the rock. Merritt slipped down from the mass and hit the hard ground on his side. He rolled away from the dripping goop and got to his knees, breathing hard.
He pulled off his helmet and took his first lungful of Galena air as salty wind blasted his face.
There was a noise behind him and he quickly scrambled to his feet.
Ivan stumbled out from behind a large boulder the color of dull silver and fell on his hands and knees, coughing pink gel from his mouth. The viscous fluid streamed in thick strands from his clothes. He crawled past Merritt, toward the ocean.
Merritt turned and noticed it for the first time.
The boulder against which he’d come to a crashing halt was on the shore of a long beach of glimmering black sand. Lead deposits, some as large as houses, dotted the shore in both directions.
Towering waves rose from the gray surface of the water as far as he could see, their twenty-meter faces slashed with white in the strong wind. They seemed suspended in time, like permanent fixtures in Galena’s landscape.
Merritt walked across the black sand, sinking in up to his ankles, drawn toward them as if by magnetism. The fine sand felt warm, even through his emergency suit.
Ivan reached the water’s edge and splashed his hand in the surf, testing. He looked at his palm, then at the back of his hand. Merritt stood next to him as he rolled into the shallow water, sputtering in the wind as he washed pink gel from the arms of his jacket.
The sound of a distant explosion reached down from the sky.
Through a break in the clouds, Merritt saw the Halcyon in orbit — a ship in miniature, roughly two inches long.
A flower of fire erupted from its hull to join the several already growing, and the ship’s nose dipped, angling down toward the planet.
Merritt started in fright when another person silently appeared next to him on the beach, his broad, smooth face turned skyward.
He stood barefoot in the sand, wearing one of the black-and-white neoprene body suits. His long black hair was slicked back with gel.
The constant rumble from the ocean grew louder as the wind changed directions to blow off-shore.
The water’s edge rapidly retreated from the shore, sucked back as it rushed over sand and rocks to leave Ivan sprawled out on the wet shore, exclaiming his confusion in agitated Russian.
A wall of water rose from the ocean, a stone’s throw from shore, reaching up to block the sky.
“Run!” Merritt yelled.
He turned away from the water, moving painfully slow in the black sand. The barefoot man ran past him, sand flinging up from his feet.
Merritt looked back as the wall of water rose higher. Its top curled forward as the wall leaned toward the shore. Ivan swiped water from his face and scrambled up the shore.
The world darkened before Merritt’s eyes as the wall of water pitched forward, reaching out over the shore.
“Here!” shouted the other passenger.
Merritt whipped around, searching for him. He crouched with his back to a large boulder, chest heaving. Merritt ran to the boulder and jumped behind it just as the massive wave crashed down. Water rushed around the boulder as if it were poised on the edge of a waterfall, battering his shoulders and legs and knocking his head back against the rock.
In its wake, he heard only the howl of the wind. After he wiped water from his eyes, he saw Ivan pinned against another rock several meters away. He was looking up toward the sky in horror.
Merritt leaned around the side of his boulder to see that another wave had already formed.
“Get to the other side!” he shouted at Ivan.
Too late.
The next wave hit, stronger than the first, pushing Merritt and the other passenger away from their feeble shelter in a torrent of water that carried them away from shore.
Merritt’s stomach hit something hard and his body buckled around it as water beat against his back.
As the flow of water subsided, he slumped back down to the ground on his back, looking up at a towering tree trunk without bark. Three fat, leafless branches protruded from the top. He groaned as he turned his throbbing head to look inland.
An entire forest of the bare trunks bordered the shore, blanketing the land toward the horizon. Merritt pictured Gavin alone, out there in that strange wilderness.
“I think the swell is over,” said the other passenger. He walked over to Merritt on unsteady legs and helped him up from the sand. “I’m Niku.”
Merritt unwrapped a snaking length of purple seaweed from around his leg and threw it aside. He winced in pain as he straightened his back. “I’m Merritt,” he said.
Ivan walked past them, half of his face covered in blood from a gash on his scalp, muttering in Russian as he stared up at the sky.
Merritt and Niku turned around to look up.
The Halcyon was headed for Galena. It approached head-on, a small, growing, sand-colored rectangle spitting fire against a cloudy blue sky.
“Here she comes,” said Niku.
Ivan shaded his eyes with a bloody hand. His stream of Russian mumbles trailed off, but his jaw kept shivering.
“They send another,” he said with a thick accent. He turned quickly to look at Merritt and Niku with wide, terrified eyes, searching for confirmation. “Another ship, yes?”
“There are no more,” said Niku. “None that can travel the Rip.”
Ivan shook his head and looked up. “Nyet. They build another.”
Merritt peeled off his wet emergency suit and instinctively patted the chest of his coveralls. For one heart-stopping moment, he thought he’d lost the seed pouch. Then he remembered giving it to Gavin.
Without his helmet, water had flooded into his suit at the neck, thoroughly soaking his coveralls. Merritt rolled up the sleeve concealing his wristpad to find the screen cracked and the circuits drowned. He unstrapped it from his arm and dropped it to the sand.
“Look,” said Niku, pointing out to sea.
Between the towering, stationary waves floated a hypergel tank. A bald man clung to the side like a shipwrecked sailor, his pale face a mask of terror even at a distance.
“Who is that?” Merritt asked.
“That’s Mick,” said Niku. “The bar’s doorman.” He looked over his shoulder, then back out to sea. “We were lucky.”
“Something,” Ivan said, pointing excitedly at the water. “Som
ething!”
Behind the floating escape pod, a wide circular section of the surface flattened out to a smooth pad, contrasting the tumultuous water surrounding it. Bubbles boiled from below.
Ivan screamed in Russian, waving his arms at the stranded passenger, beckoning him ashore.
The water beneath the floating hypergel tank erupted violently, sending it spinning into the air. The passenger’s high-pitched screams carried across the wind, to the shore, where they sounded like little more than the calling of gulls.
A massive bulk emerged from the surface, rising like a swelling mountain, its flesh slick and shining. The tank and its former occupant fell against the mass — fell into it — and vanished. Thrashing the surface madly, the bulk rolled below the surface and disappeared.
Ivan stumbled backward, farther from the water.
As the surface smoothed out, Merritt’s stomach dropped when he saw a line of hypergel tanks floating in the water farther off shore, extending all the way to the horizon.
He turned away from the ocean and promptly threw up on the sand.
Niku stood next to him, surveying the dense forest of bare trees that bordered the shore.
Merritt wiped his mouth and spat. “We need to get to the ship. There are nav beacons that point to the colony.”
Niku nodded. “It’s a start.”
Merritt stood up straight and cracked his back. “Do you have any idea where we are?”
“Galena,” replied Niku. He walked up a black dune and stood at the edge of the forest. “Welcome home.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LEERA
Earth, she thought when she opened her eyes.
She had never seen a more beautiful blue sky, streaked with pure white clouds limned by a beaming sun that warmed her skin.
Leera lay on her back atop a broad, jagged boulder of mineral lead sulfide, every part of her body resting at a slightly different elevation. The remains of her hypergel tank fanned out in a firework of shards around her, stuck in the flattened glob of pink goop.
She squinted at the sun, confused. It was closer than it should be — larger in the sky.
First things first, she thought.