5
“Sir, incoming transmission,” said Schraeve. “Patching through.”
Half the screens now showed a white-haired woman whose face pinched in fury at this disturbance to her impending demise. “What little prick is…? Oh, it’s you, Acualla. I might have guessed.”
“Can’t chat right now,” I told the Governor of Haven-Three. “I’m a little busy.”
“Power down! Now!”
I ignored her and checked the main status board. With the help of Parker and the kids, the Spirit’s main thrust engines were already active, and the displacement drive was spooling up.
“I command all UEF craft in the system. I order you to desist, Acualla.”
Displacement drive would be online in thirteen minutes… Thirty seconds after the Blight hit. I shut down every safety protocol I could find, and shaved fifty-five seconds off the jump preparations. It was gonna be hellishly tight, but we could do this.
“You’re nothing better than a pirate,” ranted the governor. “To think I argued against your execution. And this is how you betray the uniform you once wore.”
The governor’s words didn’t bother me, but her contempt stung. I glared at her face. “I don’t answer to you. I’m an officer in the First Contact Fleet. I report to the senior FCF officer in this system. Not to you.”
“You’re nothing but an administrative oversight. Who is this FCF officer you think you report to, anyway?”
“Me. I answer to myself. I’m in command of the Haven Mission fleet now, and I say the Spirit of Endurance is flying out of here, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Now get the hell off this channel. Acualla out.”
6
Without needing my guidance, Schraeve cut the connection and the governor’s features were replaced by the countdown, but it was no longer the countdown to our deaths. I couldn’t help but grin. As dramatic farewells went, I thought mine had rated pretty high.
I was growing to like Schraeve. She reminded me of myself, thirty years younger. I could teach her to become a fine ship’s officer.
“The wormhole, Dad. The wormhole.”
I almost did as my daughter asked and changed course for the wormhole. I’d never been permitted to be a father – never even been allowed to see her or know her name – but just the way she said Dad sliced me to the core. It took the familiar hum of the spooling displacement drive to bring me to my senses.
“No,” I told her. “We’ll displace out, then you’ll have plenty of time to analyze your data. We have enough fuel to return here later.”
The problem with dramatic farewells, is the embarrassment when you realize it isn’t goodbye after all.
Even before ship systems reported what was happening, I felt the displacement drive die.
“You little prick.” The governor’s face filled the big CIC screens once again. “Did you really think we hadn’t thought of that?”
“Parker!” I said calmly. “Can we regain our drive?”
“No, sir. I’m seeing overrides surfacing at multiple levels. It would take days to free us.”
“Change course,” I ordered. “Make for the wormhole. Check you’re strapped in tight, kids, because I’m about to bring this old crate to life.”
Powerful attitude thrusters responded to my command gestures and brought the Spirit’s nose around. Then I opened up the main engines, shaking the ship with a throb of urgency and sending someone tumbling across the deck to slam into a bulkhead. I ignored them and concentrated on the burn that would give us the vector we needed to thread through the wormhole.
Then our main engines also shut down.
“In your own way, you’re almost admirable,” said the governor. “But I can’t let you go. Our colony made a pact that binds all of us. Your duty is to die with us, and I’ll make damned sure you perform your duty this time.”
Parker sighed in defeat. “She’s right, sir. We are not getting main engines back this side of the Blight shockwave.”
I ignored both of them. I was too busy running flight vector analysis in my head.
“Your outfit calls itself HOPE,” I accused Parker. “Live up to your name! Attention, shuttle pilots in our hangar bay! Report your status.”
“There’s just one pilot, Dad. Me. I slaved the other boat to mine.”
“Damn. Then I’ll have to come down in person.”
“What… what are you going to do?”
“Do? You’re flying a GP-13 and you have to ask? I spent years flying one of those, towing endless Kuiper objects to supply the construction of Haven-Two.”
“But what…? Oh, I see. Running diagnostics on towing systems now.”
“Don’t bother. If the towlines aren’t working, we’re dead anyway. We’ll only get one chance at this. Prep both boats for flight and then disable the slave control. I’m coming down to pilot the other GP-13. Parker, I need your thruster pack. Now!”
7
I wasn’t as mad as my daughter feared. The Spirit of Endurance’s subassemblies had been moved around the construction dock by an attendant fleet of tugs. And the Spirit had been pulled out of the yards by tugs before its first shakedown flight. Giving the old girl a tow wasn’t strange at all. But to redirect an existing course and thread her through a wormhole with just a pair of GP-13s… I guess you could call that a little challenging.
Me? I call it desperate.
The Spirit wasn’t far off course. All she needed was a little nudging, but powerful though the GP-13s were, the Spirit carried a lot of momentum. To swing her around, we needed to constantly adjust our position, so we could maximize the change to her vector while keeping the towlines taut.
Burn.
Turn.
Burn.
Turn.
We repeated the procedure many times until I realized we’d overcooked it, and the Spirit was in danger of hitting the wormhole side on – which meant she would have such limited clearance that I didn’t think we would get through.
As we shifted our GP-13s to counter the Spirit’s spin, I finally found time to ask the question I’d been burning to ask my daughter. “What’s your name?”
“Hope.”
“No, not your organization. You. What are you called?”
“That’s my name too.”
“You named yourself after their organization?”
“No. They named themselves after me.”
I grinned. This girl would do me proud. “Let’s pray you’re named well, Hope, because we’re going through. Detach towlines now!”
We broke free and looped back behind the larger ship, following the Spirit of Endurance through the swirling vortex of the wormhole.
The rip in space-time had hung, ignored, in the Beacon system for so long that I had forgotten how beautiful it was. And how deadly.
Flecks of light from the spontaneous creation of exotic matter punctuated the vortex, which appeared so deeply violet in my simple camera feed that it was barely visible against the darkness of space. And there, at the central aperture, was the endless tunnel, a darkness so profound that more than one wormhole-worshipping cult had declared them to be the divine portals God had reached through to touch the mortal universe.
Colony ships were the biggest ships ever constructed. Spirit wouldn’t have much clearance, and she was coasting now.
This was going to be close.
Spirit’s hull suddenly flared and I flung up my arms to shield my eyes. But the ship didn’t blow. It was a reflection, I realized. The orbit of Beacon-Four’s moon had taken it closer to the dying sun than its parent, and the Blight had caught it. Vaporized it.
We had just moments left to pass through.
Hope lit her main engines and flew her shuttle beneath the big ship. A heartbeat later, I followed her course. No good in the Spirit leaving without us.
We were in. The GP-13 seemed to stretch like rubber before snapping back to common sense and shooting down an endless tunnel that reached out before us. The walls of
the tunnel were slightly translucent, enough for me to see heavily blue-shifted stars appearing to flee away from us, as if we were an abhorrence.
I swapped to the aft camera and saw the Spirit follow us down the tunnel. Saw its spin sending its nose on a slow collision course with the tunnel wall. Saw the coruscation as the ship brushed against the tunnel’s sheath and bent like a demonic hound’s chew toy.
I hailed my old ship, but I knew there would never be a response.
8
Captain. Captain? Are you still with us? You have a duty to fulfill.
I’m here. But I’m not a damned machine. You can’t understand how these memories still gut me to the core. You can’t know what it was like when we emerged out the end of the tunnel and boarded the Spirit of Endurance. We found it awash with floating corpses. There wasn’t a mark on their bodies, not so much as a look of surprise. Hope and I conjectured that exotic ionizing radiation had wiped out many of the ship’s primary automated systems. But the old colony ship was designed from the beginning with many levels of redundancy. Its crew was not.
It sounds so stupid now, but I kept thinking that if I poked the floating people, then they would crease up with laughter and reveal that it was all a prank. They looked frozen in the act of living, not like any corpses I had ever seen.
But I didn’t dare touch them, because then I would know for sure that we were truly alone.
Eventually, numb with loss, we respectfully secured the dead in the cryo stores.
The ship drifted on.
With the colonists gone, and Haven-Three consumed in a fiery death, I wished away the universe outside the Spirit’s hull. To even look upon the destination the ship had chanced across would have been a despicable act of disrespect, as if the death of everyone could ever be something from which we might move beyond.
On occasion my daughter and I spoke to each other, but we said nothing.
I spent most of my time in my old captain’s stateroom, gazing into the stash of Earthlight I found there, probably recorded during Earth Death, the moment when, in a desperate act of rebellion, Katrine and I had brought a doomed life into a galaxy that wished humanity dead.
9
Captain? Who was Katrine?
All right! I’m getting there. My story didn’t play out in strict chronological order, so I don’t see why my telling of it should fit your linear straitjacket. Damned machine. You want the first Death Day. Earth Death. I’ll give you that.
We’d fled the Earth’s destruction at faster-than-light speeds.
But then we settled down to establish the Haven colonies, and the light from distant Earth began to catch us up.
Everyone on Haven-Three knew how to train a telescope back along our path to see the light Sol had sent out when she was still alive. Many were trapped by the sight, unable to do much else but stare endlessly at the dot of light. The Atlantic Ocean, the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, flocks of flamingos, elderly couples doing the crossword together over morning coffee, and the hopeful orbiting ships before the war came: all of these were encoded in a handful of photons buried within that dot. Those infinitesimal messengers connected us to an Earth that was still alive, still dreamed of a future.
Earthlight jewels were constructed to capture these precious final rays of light: gleaming translucent orbs with impenetrable black polyhedra at their centers in which the photons were suspended by a cunning mechanism I never fully understood – and please, God, let that not be a lie. To view the captured photons would be to destroy the jewel, but the knowledge that they held the light from distant Earth was all we needed.
The most ornate of the light jewels were reserved for the end. Earth Death. The moment when the messenger photons carrying the news of Sol’s death would finally reach us on the edge of the Orion Spur, and Sol’s light would die. Or so the ritual suggested. In fact, the human eye couldn’t detect any change in the quality of Sol’s light on the day it died. But seen through more sophisticated devices, the light betrayed the move to fusing helium, to the inevitable swelling of the sun into a red giant that would burn the Earth to an airless cinder and possibly swallow it whole.
Sol’s doom sounded the death knell for Haven-Three. I thought the UEF was mad. Earth Death should have been an alarm, a call to action, not a signal to give up and wait for the end. But the UEF grip was strong, and in the minds of the colonists, I was the one afflicted with madness. And a dangerous form of psychosis that threatened to blow the colony apart. No one could be allowed to dream of hope.
Perhaps they were right, but I couldn’t give up – just wasn’t made that way – and I wasn’t alone. While the rest of my crew and self-invited dignitaries watched Sol’s climactic death throes play out in real-time, holding hands in silence while sipping the early results of Haven-Three’s viniculture, I was in the ammunition store on Deck 13c, expressing a mutual form of personal defiance at the galaxy with Ensign Katrine Thornsen. Nine months later, our daughter was born, but by then I was in jail, and so was Katrine. Haven-Three’s two most reviled criminals. I still don’t know whether Katrine died or went into hiding, but I could never find her again.
Those Earthlight jewels held a fragment of Sol and Earth within. After we passed through the wormhole, and stored away the dead, I lost track of time, captured by what lay inside the jewels. A few days passed, maybe more, until my daughter roused me. “It’s time, Dad. We need to decide what we do next.”
I expect I looked at her blankly. I don’t recall.
“I’ve been working though the data from the probes we sent to analyze the Blight. Dad, we can beat it!”
I came out of my funk.
The cold patches the astronomy team on Haven-One had discovered turned out to be machines replicating across the coronal surface. The engines that triggered the helium flash were themselves triggered by a simple radio signal. Machines could be destroyed. Signals jammed. The Blight could be defeated. We couldn’t yet strike at whoever had sent the deadly machines, but their first attack could be deflected. Maybe traced back to its source, to a target against which humanity could unleash its full capacity for destruction.
This new information wasn’t salvation.
But it was hope.
“Dad, they’re still there,” said my Hope. “The people of Earth are still alive. Help them. Look!”
I glanced at the screen she was holding in position above my head. It was a dot, a G-Type main-sequence star.
“It’s a real-time view of Sol,” she said. “The wormhole has taken us back in time.”
“I know.” And I did, but I had been too numb to see the possibilities in this amazing journey.
“We’ve emerged 621 years in the past, still around Beacon, where in the future we will build Haven-Three.”
“Earth’s too distant. They won’t be listening, can’t hear us.”
“We need to teach them about the Blight, warn them so they can prepare. Persuade them to come here.”
I looked up my daughter’s face, filled with an optimism that I couldn’t share. “You mean, to lure them in with a tempting signal?”
“Exactly!”
“Like the one that drew us in from Haven-Two?”
I couldn’t face those bright young eyes, so bewildered by my words. I looked away and confessed to the great secret that I had helped to keep. Haven-Three had been built on a lie. We had chased a signal, hoping for salvation, but found nothing but ghostly echoes.
“What did they use to broadcast this signal?” Hope asked.
I shrugged. “An ICT-7A comm unit. It’s a standard FCF model optimized for interplanetary transmission, but can also be deployed as an interstellar relay.”
“Do we have any on board?”
“Yes, I replied, my words slowing as my brain spooled up to process the implications. “We’ve got scores of them.”
Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Did we send that message, Dad?”
“No!” I slapped the halo of Earthlight jewels from around
my head. “Maybe there’s a version of us down there right now, but it’s not me and not you.”
“Right!” she said. “We don’t send that message, we’ll send one that will work this time.”
A pang of loss hit me without warning when I recognized that fierce determination in her eyes: that belief that she could take on the galaxy and win… and that I could, too. She was so much like her mother.
We gazed open mouthed into each other’s eyes, and although no words were spoken, I had no doubt that we were communicating at a deep level, building upon the implications of what we had said.
“And to work, we need to warn Earth in good time,” she said, grinning.
“Which we could do by lashing the ICT-7As together into a huge virtual array,” I said with a smile that echoed hers. “We would push a clear message, narrow-beam it back to Earth.”
“But before that we need to go through the wormhole again.”
We both laughed, and added in unison. “And again.”
10
Fuel and life support were not in short supply. We were, after all circling through a hoop if you saw our journeys through the wormhole in three-dimensional space.
But how far back should we go?
The question was taken out of our hands after our third transition through the wormhole. We emerged into a younger version of the Beacon system, but the wormhole no longer existed. Perhaps it hadn’t been built yet. The mechanics didn’t matter. We had ended up where we had started, 1,863 years in the past. It was time.
Time.
Time…
Captain? Captain! Captain Acualla! You have to finish.
Time. Oh, God, it’s almost time. It hurts!
We built another colony for you. For you who find our signal and come here. Safe Haven, we called it. And you’d better be human, damn you, or I’ll return from the afterlife and kick your butts.
Oh, we didn’t build cities, floating agri-arcologies, hydropower generators or delicatessens. You’ll have to do all that yourselves, but the terraformers and seed banks are doing their job. Over a hundred light years from Earth and you should find a lush Eden with a clean atmosphere, filled with things you can eat, but nothing that’s going to eat you.
Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four) Page 27