Leviathan: Book 8 of the Legacy Fleet Series

by Nick Webb

  “I mean, you’re still running, right?”

  “Of course I’m running.”

  “Except now Cooper’s the incumbent.” Zivic smiled. He couldn’t help needling the man.

  “I—” Sepulveda caught himself. It wasn’t common knowledge that Sepulveda and Cooper were in on this charade together, much less that Sepulveda was even alive. The bridge crew was probably best not knowing. “Your point?”

  “She’ll have the advantage of incumbency. Worth a few points, at least. Polling was tight beforehand—any idea what it’ll be like after this is all over?”

  “You have a remarkable depth of political knowledge for someone who performs ill-advised death-defying atmospheric stunts for a living.”

  That bastard. How did he know about his . . . incident? When he accidentally killed his mother and step-father all those years ago. The event that made him break off his first engagement with Jerusha.

  “You’ll find I’m full of surprises,” was all he could manage.

  “Like the Bern battle. Very surprising. Admiral Proctor talked up your genius at tactics. Nice to see they were put to good use.” Sepulveda smiled lopsidedly. He knew he’d turned the tables on Zivic, and was enjoying every second of it.

  Before he could manage a cutting retort, Ensign Nagin glanced back. “Sir, we’re a thousand kilometers from the station.”

  “Good. Maneuver us into a parallel orbit. Tactical?” He glanced back at Commander Rice, who had joined the tactical officer. “Full passive scans. Let’s see what we can learn.”

  It wasn’t a minute into the scanning when Rice mumbled something. “Holy shit.”

  “Mr. Rice?”

  Rice looked up. “I think we’ve found Interstellar Two.”

  Zivic’s eyes shot down to the command console to watch them parse through the incoming data. “Former President Avery’s ship?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Sepulveda mumbled something. “The same one that brought back that Swarm ship.”

  “Where?” said Zivic.

  “Docked somewhere inside the station. Its transponder is inactive, but every ship gives off a characteristic blend of EM radiation, between its power plant, engine, and all its other systems, that’s almost like a fingerprint. This particular fingerprint definitely matches what we have on file for Interstellar Two.”

  President Sepulveda had stood up. His eyes were wide and his mouth half open as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “Scan it and see who’s onboard.”

  “No,” said Zivic. “That’ll give us away. Still plenty we can pick up with passive scans, Mr. President.”

  Sepulveda bristled at being contradicted, and Zivic could imagine what was going on in his head: If I were still president . . . !

  “Well we need to do something! That ship, presumably with former President Avery on it, brought back the Swarm! It’s absolutely vital that—”

  “I’m aware of that, Mr. President.” Zivic was enjoying this too much. “Mr. Rice. Interstellar Two is a former IDF starship, is it not?”

  “It is, sir.”

  “And every IDF starship has its own internal comms channel, do they not?”

  “They do, sir.”

  “And through the internal comm system you could, theoretically, establish a data connection to the ship’s central computer?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Rice. “I see where you’re going. Let me see what we can come up with.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rice.” Zivic glanced over at Sepulveda, who’d sat back down in the captain’s chair but was gripping the armrests impatiently. He walked over to him and lowered his voice. “I know it’s a big deal, Mr. President. Don’t worry, we’ll figure out why it’s here, how it got here, who’s been on it. Everything.”

  “Mmm. Yes, thank you,” said Sepulveda dismissively.

  Asshole. Zivic rolled his eyes.

  Sepulveda noticed. He waved Zivic in closer. “It’s not just the Swarm ship that Interstellar Two can help explain, Mr. Zivic. Just days ago, right before the kidnapping attempt that nearly killed me, right before we learned that former President Avery might not, in fact, be dead, I found an anonymous note left on my desk. Want to know what it said?”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “It said, Barbara Avery is alive. And she wants what’s hers. No idea who left it.”

  “Well shit,” said Zivic.

  “Exactly. There’s some shit brewing. Someone knew Avery was still alive—assuming she really is. And that someone wanted to . . . I don’t know . . . get in my head, or maybe even warn me, and they somehow got into the office of the most powerful man in the galaxy undetected and left a note on his desk. That’s the mystery I’m interested in. And I think this ship will have some clues as to the answer.”

  Commander Rice cleared his throat and looked over at them. “Well, you’re not going to like this, sir,” he began. “Whoever at Shovik-Orion is responsible for this ship being here wasn’t stupid. They’ve wiped most of the central computer. All records, logs, internal sensors, and camera data for the past month is gone.”

  Sepulveda dropped his head into his hand.

  “What Shovik-Orion giveth, Shovik-Orion taketh away,” quipped Zivic. “Okay, fine. I want earlier than that. Go through the logs from over a month ago. Two months ago. I want to know what was going on in that ship. Everything for the past year.”

  Rice hesitated. “That’s . . . a lot of data, sir.”

  Zivic glanced at the tactical display to make sure they were still undetected. No surviving Bellarus Defense Fleet ship had made any moves since they’d arrived near the station. And the expected United Earth and Russian Confederation delegations had not arrived yet. “Okay, well let’s narrow it down. See if Interstellar Two has been here before.”

  Rice turned his face toward the console and scrolled through data. Eventually, he nodded. “Once, in the past year.”

  Sepulveda’s head snapped back up. “Oh?”

  “About three months ago. They stayed about forty-two hours, then left. Back to Britannia, where it came from, though it stopped at Earth before arriving here.”

  “Crew manifest?” said Zivic.

  “The captain, various crew members you’d expect on a ship the size of Interstellar Two. And Former President Avery. Her assistant Conner Davenport. And . . . oh.”

  “Oh?” said Sepulveda.

  “Senator Cooper.”

  Zivic whistled. “Daaaaamn.”

  Sepulveda’s face had gone stone white. Zivic couldn’t tell if he was angry, or confused, or just surprised. “I want internal video logs. Now.”

  Rice dove into the files. The man was a wiz, Zivic would give him that. It wasn’t two minutes later that Rice waved a file up to the view screen. “This is her debarking when they arrived.”

  Zivic turned to the screen and watched. Two Secret Service officers led the way—President Avery’s security team—followed by Avery herself in a powered wheelchair. Then followed by Conner Davenport, holding the arm of a woman. “My god, she looks awful. Where’s her hair?”

  Sepulveda nodded. “Senator Cooper had stage four cancer at this point. Incurable, they said. I thought she was going to retire. But then, mysteriously, she recovers about three months ago. I think we’ve at least pieced together the where of that mystery. Now let’s get to the how.” He turned to Rice. “Anything else? Show me when Cooper returns to the ship.”

  Rice shook his head. “Sorry, sir. I’ve cross referenced all the video logs with the internal vital scan logs. There aren’t any more videos of Senator Cooper after this.”

  Sepulveda waved a hand impatiently. “Well show me when Avery came back on board then.”

  “You got it, sir.”

  Rice waved the file over and it played on the screen. Two Secret Service officers led the way as before, followed by Conner Davenport, followed by . . .

  “Oh my god. She’s walking,” said Zivic.

  “Indeed,” said Sepulveda. President
Avery ambled along behind the two officers. Slowly, but surely. No wheelchair in sight. And behind her, two more men followed, pushing a cart with what looked like a body bag laying on top.

  Zivic pointed. “Is that . . . ?”

  “Commander Rice,” began Sepulveda. “What do the internal vital signs say about what is in that bag?”

  Rice shook his head. “No vital signs, sir.”

  “Any scan? Is it . . . organic?”

  Rice waved through a few files, then nodded. “Yeah.” He looked back up. “It’s organic. Can’t tell anything beyond that, though.”

  Zivic paced back and forth. “Okay, look at the inertial mass of Interstellar Two. Before and after this event. Did it change? And by how much?”

  Rice went through the numbers. “It did not change significantly, sir. Whatever is in the bag weighed about the same as a woman of Senator Cooper’s size.”

  Zivic turned to Sepulveda. “So a living Senator Cooper and a rolling President Avery leave the ship, but a dead Cooper and a walking Avery return to the ship. What to make of that?”

  “Fuck me,” was all Sepulveda could manage.

  Zivic sat down in the chair across the command console from Sepulveda. “I’d say you’ve got a genuine mystery on your hands, Mr. President. Not least of which is, who the hell is in control of United Earth?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Veracruz Sector

  Chantana III

  ISS Tyler S. Volz

  Bridge

  “That’s the last of them, sir,” said Ace from the CAG’s station. “All shuttles and transports have offloaded the passengers and are now in a holding pattern in our orbit.

  “Excellent, Lieutenant. Ensign, get us over to the Eru’s ship. Let’s offload our guests, and then rinse and repeat,” said Commander Shin-Wentworth. He yawned. How many loads of refugees had they brought on board and taken to the Eru ship? Had it been ten yet? Whether it was ten or fifty or a hundred, it felt like he hadn’t slept in ages.

  “Sir, Captain Whitehorse is calling from her quarters and wants a status update,” said the officer from the comm station.

  “Looks like someone else isn’t sleeping either.” He glanced at the command station readout. The number had been ticking slowly downward. It had started at close to a hundred thousand, and now hovered just under seventy-two thousand. “Tell her we’ve moved over twenty-eight thousand Itharan refugees in eight hours. At this rate, assuming we work around the clock, we’ll be done in under twenty-four hours.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “And Ensign, tell her as well that engines and power plant are operating within normal parameters. All extraneous power draws on the system have been shut down to make for plenty of reserve power should we need it in a hurry.”

  It was mostly true. He and Director Wiggum had made as much progress as they could on the next stage of the experiments without actually diverting power from the plant. And when the shuttles and transports were offloading the passengers to the Eru ship, the Volz certainly wasn’t operating at full power capacity, and wouldn’t miss a twenty-percent draw for a few minutes.

  “Aye, sir,” said the ensign.

  He drummed his fingers on the command station impatiently. The journey over to the Eru ship wouldn’t take longer than ten minutes, but it went achingly slow. Once there, it would take at least an hour to offload the passengers and prep the ship for its next run. A job that the operations officer on duty could certainly perform alone, seeing how he’d done it eight times now under Shin-Wentworth’s direction.

  “Ms. Brady, you have the bridge. Carry out the refugee transfer just like we’ve done the other eight times, and when the last Trit has debarked, let me know.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Ace.

  The trek down to the physics lab took another four minutes, and by the time he arrived, he figured he had about two minutes to get things ready before he could use the ship’s power plant and not be noticed. He’d already had a little chat with the chief engineer, who’d agreed to keep it on the down-low in exchange for an agreement to let him take an extra shift off next time they docked at a station.

  “You certainly took your time,” said Wiggum.

  “You try moving thirty thousand Trits from their underground homes to the Eru starship and then tell me how slow I was. Are we ready?”

  “As ready as we’ll ever be. All the q-field emitters are charged up and I’ve calculated what I think should be an appropriate matrix of phase variances that we can dial in as the singularities develop.”

  Shin-Wentworth approached the instrument panel near the old chamber. This time they didn’t need the chamber as they were forming the singularities in open air—an apparent advantage of the two-dimensional variety of singularity. He glanced over the preparations Wiggum had made. “Very good. It’s time. We’ve got about half an hour, and then we’ve got to shut it down and wait for the next refugee run.”

  “Oh!” Wiggum smacked his head.

  “What is it?”

  “The CO2 detectors. There’s no way we’re going to get an accurate reading in open air like this. The measurement will be thrown off by the ambient CO2 in the air.”

  Shin-Wentworth smiled. “Way ahead of you, Doc.” He held up his fist and pointed at the watch around his wrist. “We’re going old-school.”

  “You’re throwing your watch into a black hole?”

  “I’m throwing my watch into a black hole.”

  Wiggum shrugged. “Knock yourself out. It’s not a family heirloom or anything, is it?”

  “Nah, just a regular old watch that tells us the exact date and not just the time of day. Plus it’s small enough that it won’t suffer any of the, uh, catastrophic effects of the spatial distortion at the singularity’s edges. Anything bigger than this, and it would be ripped apart.” He glanced at the time on the watch. “Okay, time’s a wastin’.”

  They dialed in a few more parameters, and initiated the field emitters. Sure enough, in the corner of the lab he heard a vague crackling sound, and soon after that, a bright flashing white light. In the other corner, an identical light began flashing. A very small point, about a meter off the floor. And he knew, hundreds of lightyears away, two other singularities would be forming in a tight orbit around the Penumbra black hole.

  “It’s working,” said Wiggum. He studied the instrument panel. “Right now it’s a three-dimensional sphere, enclosed of course by a two-dimensional spherical shell of a singularity.”

  “Good. Now let’s deform it. We want to make a geometry exactly like what the Findiri ships do around their ships. Deform it so the sphere becomes nearly flat, and then fold that nearly-flat circle up and around so that the edges touch such that we make another spherical shell, this one with two layers and a tiny hole that we then squeeze down to nothing.”

  They worked the controls, now having worked together for long enough that they were a fairly effective team, almost able to read each others’ minds as they progressed in the experiment.

  “I’ve really gotta go,” said Wiggum.

  Shin-Wentworth glanced at him. “Wait, what?”

  “You know.”

  “Seriously? Now? You can’t wait?”

  “Hey! I was sitting here for almost eight hours setting this up and guarding it in case anyone walked in! A man’s gotta go when he gotta go!”

  Shin-Wentworth sighed. “Fine. Do hurry, we’ve only got the survival of human civilization on the line here. But by all means, go relieve your walnut bladder.”

  Wiggum left and the door closed behind him. Shin-Wentworth made some final adjustments to the phase variance of the emitters in preparation for sending his watch through.

  The door opened again.

  “That was fast. Did you just piss in the hallway? Is your bladder really just a hollow pistachio shell that—”

  “Mr. Shin-Wentworth, I’m disappointed in you.”

  He stood bolt upright and spun around. “Captain!”

  Whitehorse
strode into the lab. “Did you think I wouldn’t know that you were resuming the experiments? Did you think I wouldn’t easily notice a twenty-percent power draw? That’s kind of hard to hide.”

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t really trying to hide it. Hiding it would imply I thought I was doing something wrong.”

  “And yet you instructed the chief engineer behind my back to keep this hush hush. You disobeyed a direct order. I told you the consequences. And now you need to choose. Are you going to come to the brig in a dignified manner? Or do I need to call security?”

  She had approached the entire time, and now stood near one of the instrument panels next to a glowing singularity. “Ma’am, I strongly encourage you to step back. It’s not safe that close to it.”

  “Then I’ll shut it down for you.” She reached for the control panel and began entering in abort commands.

  “No!” he yelled.

  She turned to face him. Her eyes were like fire. “Mr. Shin-Wentworth, have you lost your mind? Get a hold of yourself.” She raised her voice to the ceiling. “Security to the physics lab, immediately.”

  “On our way, ma’am,” came the reply from a speaker. She entered a few more commands on the instrument panel, and the singularity began to pulse and flicker.

  “I said, NO!” he ran toward her and shoved her away from the controls. He wasn’t large, but neither was she, and she flew out of the way, trying to catch herself on the old experimental chamber.

  She missed.

  When she fell backward, it was directly into the pulsing light. As her body descended in the air, it was like he was watching an animation it was so unreal. At first she was just falling.

  And then the center of her chest disappeared. She kept falling, and he heard a horrible ripping sound, and the center of her chest just … wasn’t there anymore.

  Her body collapsed to the floor. A gaping, bloody hole the size of a fist was centered right where her heart would have been.

  He heard a solid thud from the other corner. When he looked, he saw that his experiment had at least partially worked.

  There on the ground, underneath the second singularity, was the part of Whitehorse’s chest that had been sucked into the singularity. Her heart, part of her lung, two ribs, skin, breast, muscle, and fat, all remarkably intact if not grotesquely bloody.