A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Stapleton’s face was a map of pain, sheet-white in the glow of the transmission.

  “I’d . . . ike to tell my husband . . . omething . . . He . . . eds to . . . pl . . . fo . . . him . . . To li . . . Please . . .”

  The hiss drowned out the world. The face melted, shifted, bled into digital snow, white noise. End transmission. The projector darkened, the shadows deepened.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Twenty years of pain and loneliness—living like a damn alien, a hermit. Another twenty of actual life—love, joy, beauty. And then it ends, not holding each other’s hands and leaping into the dark together. It ends thousands of light years apart, with her final words to me hidden, hidden behind a damn curtain. I can’t hear what she wanted her last thoughts, her last words to me, to be. I can’t hear it over the universe laughing at me.”

  “You know what she wanted to say. You were together for twenty years; surely you don’t have to actually hear the words to . . .”

  “Spare me your damned clichéd sailor’s wisdom!” he barked. His face was hidden in the dark but there was a wet sound in his voice. “She was the only person I ever gave a damn about; the only one who gave a damn about me. Don’t presume to know my pain.” He looked at the clock on one of the holosheets. “I’ve sent the new coordinates to your navigation station. Now either take my money and get under way in the next one hour, twenty-four minutes, or leave me alone to end my damn life. Either way, get the hell out.”

  The hatch snapped open.

  “You didn’t catch the message with this pass?”

  “Not all of it. No. It’s badly degraded.”

  “You may never be able to catch it all.”

  “Yes,” he croaked. “I know.”

  “I’m older than I look,” I said. “Most of the people I ever loved died while I was in cold sleep moving out into the Black.”

  I left him. We jumped in less than an hour.

  The next jump took us another eight hundred light years deeper into Big Empty. We reappeared about a half-parsec from an F-class star. I named it after someone I used to know on Halyca. She’s dead now. It doesn’t matter—you’ve never heard of the star anyway.

  We stood, silent and dark. Stapleton once again cast out his electromagnetic net and, once again, he caught part of the signal. A few hours later, a new set of coordinates and a new deadline were flashed to Khoa’s navigation station. The crew looked to me. When I said to prepare to jump, I saw the doubt begin to drift across their faces.

  We jumped, again and again. By the ship clock, we were about two months out. It was closer to six months, when you counted the time stolen from us in O-space. We were deeper out than I had ever been—than I know of anyone ever going, even to this day. We were chasing ghost-fire across the ether, and its path was taking us further and further away from home.

  Stapleton kept to himself. He stopped taking meals, as far as I could tell. I spoke to him a few times through the intercom beside his cabin’s hatch.

  “Soon,” he always said. “I almost have it all. Just a few more captures, a few more jumps.”

  “Is it the message you expected to get?” I asked. The intercom was silent for almost a minute.

  “No,” he said. “There’s more to it. Things I needed to hear. Thank you, Captain.”

  I asked him another question, but he was already gone, lost in his electronic séance again.

  After we had been out for a few months, real time, I found him in the observation corridor that ran along the upper spine of the Annabel Lee. He was staring out through ferroglass at the burning night. His arms were covered in bruises from pressure hypos. His hair now fell to his shoulders, a tangled mane.

  “Doctor?” I said approaching him slowly.

  “There,” he said and pointed, squinting to a distant star. “That’s where she’s headed. That’s where it ends.”

  “The signal? It’s headed for that system? Doctor, those stars are over a . . .”

  He walked away, back toward his cabin muttering.

  “That’s where it ends . . .”

  Another jump, another. Six months our time had passed now, almost a year and a half to the rest of the universe. The jumps were so complex now, so far off the Commonwealth navigation grid, our logics were taking longer and longer to develop course corrections, often seeming to lock up with the amount of computation we were demanding from them. More and more of the data they were being fed was extrapolated from rough sensor information, Stapleton’s increasingly disjointed calculations and Khoa’s own math. It was getting too dangerous to jump further. We were already well past our safety margin and any faith or luck we might have, we had used up.

  Another request came, another deadline, less than an hour this time and more sloppy calculations. It was third watch and most of the crew was asleep. Khoa, Layman and I sat mute for a few moments when they appeared on the navigation screen with a heralded chime. Koha spun his chair to face me.

  “Sir,” he said, “This jump will take us to the edge of The Spur, almost into the Central Bulge. Once we get into that mess, all bets are off as to if we can even make our way back out. The calculations would be a nightmare.”

  “Cap’n, I agree,” Layman said. “The Logics are close to a nervous breakdown, and I think our passenger’s already had one. We’re a freighter, sir, not an exploratory ship. If any significant system breaks down out here, we’re dead—no one will ever find us. Ever.”

  I stared at the main monitor. Two stars, one small and golden, the other massive, bloated and red, dominated the view. It was as beautiful as it was lethal. I’d stopped naming the stars a few months back.

  “You’re right,” I said finally, rising from my station. “I’ll go tell the Doctor we’re heading home. Set us as safe and as quick a return course as you can, Khoa.”

  “Sir,” Layman said. “You want me to go with you? He might be . . .”

  “Agitated? Yeah, I’m sure he will be. But it’s okay, I’ve got it covered.”

  I really thought I did. I was a lot younger, back then. A lot stupider.

  When I reached Stapleton’s cabin, the hatch was already open. I peered inside, but the doctor wasn’t there. When I stepped in, I saw the ghostly face of his wife, Lise, hovering over the main holo-emitter.

  Much of the static was gone and I could make out her features now. She was a pretty woman, not beautiful, but she had a soft strength to her features. I liked her almost at once. She had black hair that fell to her shoulders and brown eyes. The expression frozen on her face was clear—she was a captain, the one it all fell on, and she had just run out of time. These were her last minutes, her last words, to the man she loved.

  Just looking at her, I almost felt like taking Stapleton the rest of the way, but I simply couldn’t. He said he had captured most of the message. It would have to be enough.

  I looked for an access screen, but saw only readouts.

  “Logic, what is the holographic recording presently being displayed?” I asked the machines. “And what is its status?”

  “Recording is a modified copy of samplings from an eighty-three per cent degraded hyperwave transmission capture,” the logic replied in a voice that seemed eerily familiar. Stapleton hadn’t secured his work with a voice-lock; the logic would answer to anyone. “Original signal content is greatly diminished and many of the transmission packets are indecipherable. Linguistic analysis and bridging program initiated.”

  “Progress on piecing the message together?” I asked.

  “There are currently four thousand five hundred seventy-three variations on the message content. Would you like me to play either the highest statistical match to accurate content or the most repeated?”

  “They aren’t the same?”

  “They are not.”

  “Play the most repeated,” I said focusing on the dead woman’s frozen face. It blurred for a moment and then came to life, regarding me with eyes full of love and fear, but mostly sadness. When she spoke, it
was with the same voice as Stapleton’s logic.

  “I’d . . . like to tell my husband . . . something . . . He needs to please . . . forgo his life. Please destroy them, love. Please. I live in your machines, my darling. I am immortal, my love. Kill them all. A billion lifetimes apart, I plead with you to be with me, in my star. Be with me; move on, past your life. I and you.”

  I turned to reach the intercom outside the hatch. Stapleton was standing there, naked and covered in blood. It dripped from his hair and painted his face. He had an ion-welder in his hand.

  Numbing fire ran up my spine, through my fingers and eyes. My scrotum and my stomach felt like they had been kicked by a mule. I fell forward and smelled my own burning skin. Everything was dark and distant and didn’t matter. I thought I heard Stapleton say something.

  It sounded like: “Soon.”

  I wasn’t down long. My eyes focused on empty plastic hypo caps littered across the cabin floor. Zomazine, Ampitine, others I didn’t even recognize. I wondered how long Stapleton’s brain had been filled with chemical snakes. I pulled myself to my feet and lurched against the bulkhead by the open hatch. I noticed that the holo-emitter now displayed an unbloodied Stapleton, his hair unkempt, but not yet wild. I pegged the recording as being from a few months ago.

  “Play,” I mumbled.

  “I am truly thankful to you and your crew,” the projection said. “And truly sorry for what must come.”

  I jammed the intercom buttons outside the hatch.

  “Layton, what’s your status?”

  No answer.

  “You see I made a most severe miscalculation,” the Stapleton projection said calmly. “It’s Lise, you see. She isn’t dead. Somehow her conscience, her soul, has been preserved in the hyperwave beam.”

  “Layton, Khoa! Damn it, what’s going on up there!”

  “She’s been talking to me, explaining what happened to her, what is going to happen to us,” Stapleton said calmly. His face was wet with tears. “I must change, as she has, to be with her, inside that sun. It’s our heaven. Everyone gets a heaven, Captain. Isn’t that wonderful? We all get a heaven.”

  An instant of vertigo. Falling a million miles while standing still. The ship had jumped. There had been no ready announcements, no claxons.

  I cursed and tried to run, stumbled under my numb legs and the fake gravity, and fought my way to my feet again. The recording continued talking to the empty room, its voice diminishing as I staggered down the hall to the ladder tube.

  “For me to change, I’m afraid you must all die. Your ship must die. Lise explained it to me. I wish I could explain it as well, but it has made more and more sense as all the noise of that ghost life has diminished. You can really think out in the Black, Captain. You can hear all kinds of truths, if you aren’t afraid to listen.”

  It’s expensive to maintain fake gravity. We had it in the central hub—for the quarters and a few other decks. The ladder tube was kept in micro-gravity, so when I reached it, I slammed myself against the indestructible softness of the polyfoam ladder, grabbed a rung, and pulled up with all my might. I launched upward like a bullet.

  “The sun,” was the last thing I heard Stapleton’s doppelganger say. “We must go into the sun.”

  I found Layman dead, floating in the tube outside the open bridge hatch. She was burned; smoke still drifting from the body. Her ubiquitous fighting knife, the one she had carried since our navy days, orbited her body, as did Stapleton’s ion welder.

  I had known her forever. Friend was too pale a word, too bloodless and small to define the space she took up in my world.

  One night, on some mud-ball we had gotten drunk enough to almost get married, until we realized we were already closer than that. I still miss her. It still hurts.

  But in that second, in that horrible sliver of time, I was filled with such fear. Fear for the crew, for my ship, but mostly for me. Selfish, stumbling fear. Tight, claustrophobic, clawing at the back of my eyes, making me a numb passenger in my own skin. Images of drifting in unknown space, gasping for air, burning up in the unforgiving light of an alien sun or entombed forever in the merciless Black in a wrecked, dead ship. Buried alive. The kind of fear that makes animals of us all drove the loss of my friend from me. For that, I have always been ashamed.

  I pushed past her death orbit into the hatch. Clouds of blood drifted lazily around the bridge. It was Khoa’s. The navigator hung near his station, ribbons of scarlet trailing from the jagged rift in his throat. His console was unsecured, blinking the announcement of our arrival. Proximity alarms chirped as the great red star filled the totality of the console’s holographic display. We had arrived far too close to Stapleton’s heaven.

  The communications station was a wall of demanding, flashing light. Crew members shouting to be released from their cabins. I wiped the blood from the console, unsealed the hatches Stapleton had locked and replied to all their chatter.

  “Stapleton’s gone crazy. He’s killed Khoa and . . . and Layman. Find him and keep him from wrecking the ship.”

  I glanced at the navigation console. We were not moving under our own power: the pull of the red giant was slowly dragging us toward it. I tapped the pilot’s console, Layman’s console, to life and found it completely locked down with an executive command code. She always was the best damn officer I’d ever flown with. Even in the middle of watching her navigator get his throat cut and a madman launch them into O-space, she had the presence of mind to limit the damage he could do to the ship by locking him out of the other systems.

  I overrode her lock and gave the ship a gentle tumble then fired the full engine and thruster array. I felt the ship groan under the crushing grip of the old red star. The giant didn’t want to give up its prize, but for the moment our forward momentum stopped.

  “Pearson,” I called into the intercom. “Get up here. I need you to start plotting an O-Space slide. It won’t be easy, but we don’t have a choice any more. It might not kill us but staying here sure as hell will.”

  I grabbed Layman’s knife on my way down the tube.

  Engineering was a symphony of alarms, override claxons and the hoarse growl of over-stressed engines. The ship shuddered as it struggled to free itself from the oppressive finality of gravity. Hault and Brixxom, their genetically engineered dermal chitin glistening from the heat of the reactors, were trying to keep it all under control.

  “He’s here, Captain,” Hault shouted over the din. “He tried to cut control to the N-space engines, but I stopped him before he could finish. He’s in the O-drive core!”

  The core was a massive pit filled with row upon row of super-cooled two hundred ton electromagnets that helped stabilize the 11-D tunneling field. The forces in there, when the drive was hot, were enough to degrade any biological process, from brains to DNA. I staggered down the ramp.

  “Be careful,” the engineer called after me, “He’s got a valence knife!”

  I moved through the dark rows, Layman’s combat knife slippery in my sweaty palm. I switched the blade from hand to hand and tried to catch my breath. I began to work my way toward the rear of the core. The air was full of electrical ants gnawing on my nerves.

  I tried to listen for Stapleton over the howls of the stressed engines and thrusters, but it was useless. I wished I had a gun, but I didn’t allow them on my boat, most captains didn’t. There were too many things a twenty-angstrom nanoshell could tear up on a spaceship. Still, I had no desire to get opened up by the tool Stapleton was using. A valence knife could carve the electrons on an atom. I remembered Khoa’s throat and clenched the puny steel in my hand tighter.

  Stapleton lunged at me from the darkness. I had surprised him trying to pry an access panel off one of the magnet towers in order to scuttle the O-drive. He turned and slashed at me with the knife. I brought up Layman’s blade. The valence knife flashed acetylene blue and my knife’s blade clattered to the deck. It had saved me, but now I was holding a useless hilt.

  I
drove my fist into Stapleton’s jaw and felt a sharp crunch. He was no fighter, but his madness and the drugs he had been living on were driving him. He was trying to pivot to stab me, but before he could do it, I drove my knee into his solar plexus and followed it up with a solid uppercut to his face. I grabbed his hair as he doubled over. The valence knife dropped to the deck; Stapleton followed.

  I dragged him out of the core, out of engineering and threw him into the airlock outside the maintenance deck and shut it down with a command override. I ducked back into engineering and shouted to Hault.

  “The engines, how long?”

  “Maybe another twenty minutes, tops!”

  “Get the O-drive ready; make sure he didn’t damage it!”

  On the climb back to the bridge, I discovered a hot, steady pain in my side and discovered Stapleton had managed to slice me after all.

  Pearson was on the bridge. He looked sick, and sweat covered his normally calm, broad face.

  “This is not so much coordinates as an educated guess, Captain,” he said with his soft, melodic accent. “I’m nowhere near the navigator Khoa is . . . was. I don’t need to tell you, we are way too close to that star to even try a jump.”

  “Just do the best you can. We have about ten minutes of counter-thrust against that red giant. The jump might kill us; the star will definitely do the job.”

  “O-drive reads ready,” he said. His hands were covered with Khoa’s blood. They were shaking. “Navigation logic is processing slide coordinates. It’s having some trouble with the additional variables and the distance—override?”

  I nodded.

  “Stand by,” he said.

  An alarm squealed. I glanced down at my console. It was Stapleton. Somehow, he was cycling the outer door. Maybe he’d hidden another tool on him; maybe his dead wife opened the door for him. I don’t know, to this day, how he did it, but I do know that if a man intends to die, he will find a way, and if he intends to die for love, nothing can stop him.

  I called out to him through the intercom, over the scream of escaping air. “Doctor, you need to stop! Your wife wouldn’t want this, you know she wouldn’t. Please, don’t!”