by Nancy Fulda
“It wasn’t inside the containment field until you pushed me!” Nigel shot a glare over his shoulder.
“Shut it down,” Emily cried. “Pull the power, yank the field generator coils, pull the control switches, shut down the whole ship, whatever it takes!”
Jack backed from the engine room, a strange glint in his eye. Words poured through his mind, snippets of poetry, some of it even rhymed. He had to capture it, preserve it. For one brief moment, he would BE a poet. He would spite his mother with his dying breath. His feet thundered down the shuddering, pulsing hallway. Golden light flickered and danced across the ship’s electrical grid, sparking from the walls and conduits. Jack released a maniacal cackle.
“Mad, I’m going mad.” He skidded to a stop. He stared at the crackle of energy playing over his ship. A smile burst over his face, one of pure joy. “A sure sign of poetic genius. All good poets are mad!”
He laughed again, dancing and skipping and singing his way through the ship to the control room and its enormous windows.
“How far now?” Nigel’s voice cracked.
Emily shook her head. Her bun bobbed. Stray hairs wafted loose around her face. “The equipment can’t calculate that quickly. We could be as far as the Andromeda Galaxy, maybe farther.” Her voice was flat with despair. Jack had been smiling as he slipped away, but it hadn’t been a sane smile. She wasn’t sure a raving lunatic was a proper father for her future children. If she ever had any. Her little white cottage by the sea seemed farther than ever at this moment.
“I should have used more gold. That necklace you gave me was not as pure as you thought. It shouldn’t be reacting like this. The field is expanding too fast. It’s too much like a foam, not a solid.” Nigel’s words were lost in muttering as he squirmed around the far side of the gracefully flapping duck.
A spark of gold flickered across the control boards. Emily pulled her hands back. Nigel’s invention may have saved them from Neptune, but had he doomed them to an even worse fate? Only his feet were visible under the engine housing. His duck continued her maiden flight, wings creaking as they flexed up and down.
Emily stretched her hands wide. She was useless here. She brushed her hands down her dress uniform. This was her family’s heritage, their calling. “Not mine,” she whispered. She wanted a garden and children. She wanted to wear pretty dresses and go dancing.
And have her husband smile at her.
In her imagination, he wore Jack’s face. Not the crazy one she’d glimpsed, but the thoughtful and kind one he wore when he was at dinner with her in the wardroom. She would find him and change his face back to the one she loved if it was her last dying act.
She couldn’t save them; that task was in Nigel’s incapable hands.
She whirled and ran from the engine room, through the creaking hallways of the ship, towards the bridge. Jack would be there, in his captain’s chair, watching.
The ship groaned, lurching to one side. The walls flexed with a horrible cracking noise. Their doom might come much sooner than she’d thought. She ran faster.
She burst into the control room amid a chorus of ship creaks.
“Yes?” Jack spoke without looking up from his notebook.
She hurried to his side. He wrote, My tortured yearning, crossed it out and wrote instead, My doomed yearning. The windows showed a crackling, twisting tunnel of golden sparks.
“Jack,” she started, but emotion closed up her throat, stole her words.
“Emily.” He wrote another phrase, frowned, then nodded. “Better. Almost a rhyme that time.”
His hair was thinning on top. His forehead wrinkled. He was short, slightly pudgy, with a haunted look in his eyes most of the time. And she loved him, not because he commanded the ship, but because he guided it with a gentle, if somewhat vague, touch. He was not military to the bone. He was like her. He put on the uniform as a costume to cover the softness inside. She rested her hand on his sleeve.
“You want something?” He blinked his watery eyes up at her, then back to his notebook. “I need a word that rhymes with wretched.”
“I love you.” The words slipped out before she could stop them.
He shook his head. “Not even close. You are not much of a poet.”
She worked her mouth soundlessly. Hadn’t he understood? “Jack, I love you. I’ve loved you since I first met you. But protocol—”
“Protocol be damned. We’re on a doomed ship, flying forever between the stars. Say what you please.” He stopped writing his loopy words and looked up, focusing on her. “You love me?”
The ship gave a horrendous cacophony of noises. The window cleared to show a vast starfield twined through with ribbons of gas.
Emily gasped. “I know where we are. That nebula, it must be!”
“Thousands of light years or millions, it makes no difference.” Jack turned back to his writing. “We’re not going home again. Welcome to the Flying Dutchman, the lost ship of legend. I shall be playing the part of the cursed captain, and you, the part of the doomed crew.”
Emily straightened, her body snapping to attention as it had for most of her life. “I have an idea. We can go home again.”
Jack rose to his feet. He set his notebook and pen carefully in his chair, then turned to her. He took both of her hands in his. “Say it again.”
“We can go home.” She smiled.
“Not that, the other. You said before.”
She let her fingers curl into his, her gaze meet his. “Jack, I—”
“I did it!” Nigel burst into the room, rushing up to the conn where they stood. He held a contraption trailing wires and connectors in one fist. “I had to recalculate for the reduced mass of gold, but after pulling the concatenator and readjusting the plasma flow, I shut down the drive. I can control it now.”
Emily felt her cheeks flushing. She pulled her hands from Jack’s. Her military indoctrination was still too deep. “If we turn the ship one hundred and eighty degrees—”
“And reactivate the drive,” Nigel interrupted, “we can shoot for home again. We’ll have to guess on the duration, but we should be able to get close. I’ve reworked the numbers adjusting for the new configuration.”
“We’re going home?” Jack’s face fell.
Emily’s first flush of excitement died in a rush of sorrow. Her dream was fading, turning into a nightmare of a lonely career in the Navy, dying alone far from her perfect seaside cottage. She drew in a long breath, straightening to something beyond military posture, drawing herself up into a woman fighting for her dream.
“Nigel, go back to the engine room. Prepare to activate the drive on my signal.” Her voice snapped, crisp and commanding. Her dream did not include the weaselly engineering assistant.
It did include Jack. She turned to the navigation console.
“Mark!”
Nigel gingerly pulled the switch, now located halfway to the door and well outside the radius of the containment field.
The quantum duck flexed its wings once again. Golden light pulsed and grew. This time the field stabilized quickly. The ship shivered less than before. The wings lifted high, swept low, repeated in a smooth motion.
“Yes!” He pumped his fist, though no one was near to share his triumph. He knew, and that was enough for now. Soon, the whole world would know. He, Nigel Jones, had invented a faster-than-light space drive. The Jonesian Quantum Tunnel Drive. He liked the ring of that.
He punched the big red button he’d installed. “Flight duration countdown initiated.”
“Acknowledged.” Emily’s voice answered from the speakers.
He relaxed, lounging in the chief engineer’s seat as he watched his bird fly. Not a duck, never a duck. Ungraceful, waddling, nasty bottom-feeders. He’d grown up with ducks and hated them. They stank. They stared with their beady dark eyes and narrow heads. They attacked any chance they got. No, his drive was not a duck but a swan. He nodded. Yes, the Swan Drive. Wait, the Jonesian Swan. Much better.
He started, fell out of the chair at Emily’s urgent command. He scrambled back to his feet. “We shouldn’t be. I adjusted for the levels of transducer flux.”
“We’ve overshot the sun, if I’m reading the scans right. Shut it down!”
He mashed the red button without thinking, his body responding to her authoritative command. He hated her in that moment as his swan died, turned inert once again.
“We pushed too far,” Emily’s voice crackled from the speakers again. “We’re almost to Vega. Let me turn the ship around and we’ll try again. Reset the drive.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He hated the snap in his voice. He should be the one giving the orders. He should be the one in command. It was his drive that saved them. He muttered and cursed as he reset his beautiful bird.
“Ready?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then activate it, but only for a count of five.”
He mashed the button, watched his swan flap her wings, once, twice, raise them for a third. He jammed his thumb into the red button. The bird froze.
“Perfect. We’re home.”
He waited until he’d shut off the comm system before he pumped his fist. “Yes!” Now they’d see his genius, they’d know how brilliant he was. He’d show them all.
Emily reached for Jack’s hand. It rested limp on his notebook. He stared at the familiar glow of Sol with a sad, sick resignation.
“We’re home,” Emily whispered.
“Yes, we are.” His voice was flat, devoid of everything except an overwhelming despair.
Emily twined her fingers through his cold, flaccid ones. “Jack, I’m resigning my commission. I’m quitting the military.”
“They won’t let you.” He yanked his hand free then jumped to his feet. His notebook tumbled to the floor. He rounded on her with an angry glare. “We’re heroes now. They’ll parade us around in front of everyone. Us and that rat with his ungainly duck he built out of my ship!”
She took a step back. Her chin trembled. This wasn’t the Jack she loved. “We can still be together.”
“They won’t let you resign. Ever!” He slashed his hand through the air. “There is no ‘we.’ There never will be. We’re officers together and we can never be together any other way.”
She dropped her gaze. The words he’d written in his notebook caught her eye. Jack + Emily? Roses are red— She raised her eyes, new hope blossoming in her heart. “Jack, do you love me?”
“It doesn’t matter. It never will. Haven’t you been listening to me?”
She stood in full command. “Jack, do you love me? Do you want a future together?” An idea grew with her hope, an awful, glorious, impossible idea.
“It doesn’t matter what I want. My mother has won. I’ll die doing what she wants. Never what I want.” He snatched up his notebook, held it as if he would tear it in two.
She grasped his hands, gentled their wildness. “Jack.” Just his name, filled with all the love she’d been hiding in her heart. “I know how we can be together. How we can escape.”
He stilled. His gaze met hers, locked with hers. And slowly his smile grew to match hers.
“Why are we meeting in the docking bay?” Nigel’s nasal voice didn’t disturb Jack in the least, not today. “They’ll be here in ten days. We can just ride it out. We’ll be heroes.”
“You’ll be a hero.” Jack’s voice was mild.
“Put on the suit, Nigel.” Emily’s was cold and commanding.
“Why?”
“Because the hull of the lifeboat leaks. I’ve left you several patch kits and spare air canisters. The engine is completely gone, but you should be fine. The emergency beacon is rigged up for you. They’ll find you without any trouble.” Emily’s smile was cruel and terrible. Jack loved her all the more for it. She was strong where he was weak.
“This is what you’ve been doing for the past hour while I’ve been fixing the drive?” Nigel’s voice cracked with anger.
“We thank you for that,” Jack said.
“And for the lesson in how to fix it if it should break again,” Emily added. “Now get in the lifeboat. Unless you want to wander the stars with us.”
“You’re bonkers, complete raving lunatics!”
He struggled as Emily pushed the spacesuit into his arms. She was stronger, and more determined.
“You can’t steal my Quantum Swan!”
“Quantum Duck,” she corrected. “All of your schematics and notes are uploaded on the lifeboat’s recording system. You can build it again.”
He flailed his arms and shouted protests as Emily shoved him into the airlock.
“We’ll wait five minutes for you to suit up,” Emily said as the door slid shut.
Jack watched Nigel’s lips move in vehement curses as he struggled into the suit. “Are you certain this is what you want?”
Emily threaded her fingers through his. “Absolutely. You and I are going to find a perfect world, with an ocean and flowers, and we are going to build ourselves a little white cottage on the seashore where we will raise our children.”
She turned to face him as the airlock hissed.
“And maybe someday,” she continued as Nigel rushed into the lifeboat before it launched, “they’ll find our paradise.”
“Until then?” He smiled as the lifeboat drifted away.
She gently laid her hand on his cheek, turned him to face her. Her smile was answer enough.
“Computer,” he spoke with more authority than he had during his entire command previously. This time it was for him, not his mother. “Computer, activate Quantum Duck Drive. And play the overture from The Flying Dutchman.”
The opening chords crashed through the ship as their lips met.
Neo Nihon
Paul Genesse
Six years behind schedule, a fleet of heavily armed colony ships with a large escort of military vessels appeared within striking distance of Neo Nihon. First Minister Sachiko Okura suppressed the mind-numbing fear of a global apocalypse and calmly assembled her entire cabinet with a class red nine alert message.
None of her ministers arrived bleary-eyed or disheveled as they entered the brightly lit command center with banks of screens deep below the parliament building at the heart of Neo Kyoto. The nine women and eight men all came within twenty minutes or less and showed few signs of alarm, which was a testament to their exceptional professionalism as the urgent summons had never been used before and was reserved for the threat of an in-progress extra-planetary attack.
Sachiko wasted no time and made a gesture to begin recording the proceedings. She noted it was 3:34 AM. As she stood, everyone present followed her lead. The Prime Minister held a polite bow for two breaths with her eyes on the floor. The ancient ritual of presenting one’s neck, and head as a sign of trust, had never made her feel so vulnerable as it did now. The enemy fleet surrounding Neo Nihon made her feel like the sharpest sword ever made was about to cut off her head.
The ministers bowed in return, then sat on the silver and black chairs with sophisticated glowing user interfaces on the armrests and headrests.
Sachiko made fleeting eye contact with each person. “Honored Ministers,” she said in formal Japanese, “I regret to inform you of the arrival of hundreds of armed spacecraft. Scans indicate that most of them are the long-overdue colony ships manufactured by our Neo Nihon Corporation. This fact was verified before we lost contact with our spaceport and satellite network.
“The force appears hostile. They are our ships, designed and manufactured because of Japanese ingenuity, but our countrymen are not in command. If our people still live, they are most likely trapped on Earth.
“This is what we know for certain: the fleet came through a Wheeler-Bridge forty-nine minutes ago, suppressed communications, and are now in a high orbit around Neo Nihon. The ships have not answered any of our hails, and have arrayed themselves to allow orbital bombardment of every
region of the planet or rapid combat drone deployment.”
Frowns and worried expressions flashed across the ministers’ faces as they realized the entire fledgling colony might be destroyed at any moment.
Sachiko’s confidence wavered and she leaned on the table. She permitted her dark eyes to meet those of Infrastructure Minister Takeshi Okura, her husband of thirty-one years, and the only non-military person present who knew as much as she did about the crisis. Takeshi nodded at her, and she stiffened her posture, regaining her famously serene composure. Takeshi had always been able to give her courage with only a glance. It had been this way ever since they met and married before leaving Japan and Earth forever.
“Our planetary defenses have been activated,” Sachiko said, “but we do not have the ability to counter the number of ships facing us. We must seek other solutions.” She bowed to Defense Minister Kiyoshi Hinato, whose eyes narrowed. Only Hinato knew the full scope of what she hinted at. His two predecessors had some knowledge, but they had been out of the defense ministry for a decade or more and the secret defensive plans of Neo Nihon had evolved into several unexpected directions, partially because of Sachiko’s leadership.
“We will trust in our preparations,” Sachiko said, “and after incorporating the new information about the enemy fleet into our models, Defense Minister Hinato and I believe it is as we feared all this time. The Chinese Military Corporation has seized control of the colony program on Earth and now threatens us here. They have used the transport ships meant for our own people to send soldiers and possibly their own colonists. The large number of CMC Jiangdao Class drone carriers confirms our conclusion.” Sachiko bowed to Hinato.
“With your permission, Prime Minister Okura,” the Defense Minister said, “I will present the probability of an attack and our chances of survival.”
Sachiko sat down as Hinato spoke. He displayed real-time images on the table and wall screens, sampling from shots of the five-hundred ninety-seven ships arrayed against them. “I estimate the number of soldiers and navy personnel at no more than 600,000. Between 1.5 and 1.8 million combat drones of various models are also with their fleet.”