by Alan, Craig
The bridge stations were arranged in a circle around the edge of the cylinder. The four duty officers were strapped tightly into place, each equipped with three touchscreens, two control sticks, and an acceleration chair, which was a piece of technology about as sophisticated as a water bed. They sat facing the center of the bridge, and Telescope 35. The image was the recording made by her visor, magnified and enhanced by the holographic projectors which ringed the room.
The man on duty at the flight commander’s station had a neat black mustache and soft brown eyes, and his skin and hair were exactly the same shade as hers, though they’d been born half a world apart. As Elena approached he unstrapped himself and came to attention.
“Chief Officer, I relieve you,” she said.
Vijay Nishtha saluted.
“Captain, I stand relieved. Officer Lamentov, please return to Forward Control.”
Vijay spoke with the Received Pronunciation of an English public school, though he’d never set foot on the British Isles in all his life. Elena would have guessed that he’d grown up in London or Cairo, instead of a refugee camp. The replacement officer at Elena’s station shut down her control panel, and then rose to drift silently out of the bridge. Vijay remained in his seat—it was standard procedure for the second-in-command to act as officer of the watch when the captain was on the bridge. When she was gone, Vijay spoke again.
“No coffee?”
Elena slid into her chair, and stared directly at the center screen. The microphones inside her desk had already read her voiceprint, and now the cameras scanned her face and retinas, and triple confirmed her identity. The flight station activated and loaded her control panel template. Each of her three touchscreens lit up with graphics and text, arranged in her preferred layout—communications on the left, navigation on the right, and watch in the middle, with its endless sensor displays.
“Business before pleasure. Okay, for the log. Let’s get this over with.”
She cleared her throat once, a tic that had never left her, even though she knew that all Control would see or hear would be the transcription of her voice.
“1135 hours, 2 April 2153, GSA-1138, Gabriel, Captain Gonzalez commanding and speaking. At approximately 1045 hours today, Telescope 35 ceased transmitting telemetry. Prior performance had been nominal. Remote diagnostics were unresponsive, and pursuant to regulation Captain Gonzalez performed an extravehicular excursion from 1100 to 1130 in order to personally observe and, if practicable, manually repair Telescope 35. Upon visual inspection, the telescope had suffered catastrophic damage and was irreparable. Presumed cause of loss is a high-velocity micrometeoroid impact. Outsider activity is not suspected at this time.”
Elena had been speaking for only thirty seconds, and already felt the urge to cough.
“Telescope 35 performed wide-band, long-exposure spectral analysis for ninety degrees of sky off the starboard beam. The Officer of the Watch has already adjusted the reconnaissance schedule to accommodate its absence. Estimated coverage loss is one percent, and not considered mission-critical. Will proceed, pending confirmation from Mission Control. This concludes this incident report. Captain Gonzales out.”
Elena put a hand to her mouth, took a breath, and waited a beat. Then she coughed.
“Technomierda.”
The crew smiled quietly. None of them were native Spanish speakers, but they all knew what that meant.
“Captain?”
“Yes, Vijay?”
“You said ‘this’ twice in one sentence.”
“If they would let me transmit reports en espanol then this shit wouldn’t happen. Hassoun, get all that?”
“The part about the shit, Cap’n?”
Second Officer Hassoun Masri manned the communications desk, directly across from Vijay, who sat at her right hand. Hassoun’s boyish face fit his quick smile and thirty years.
“Before that.”
“Yes Cap’n, log is ready to transmit at the next window.”
Strict radio discipline was observed on the outside. All messages to Mission Control were sent by microburst, and at this distance they had to be aimed with meticulous care lest, they miss the recipient by a few hundred kilometers. Communications would only grow more difficult as Gabriel drew closer to Jupiter—the titanic lightning storms in the atmosphere blanketed the entire region with electromagnetic interference.
Elena’s eyes swept the computer screens, as they did every five seconds or so.
“Anything interesting happen while I was out?”
“There was a brief discussion of when it is appropriate for the commanding officer to perform a routine spacewalk,” Vijay said.
“And the consensus?” It was too dim inside the bridge for the black deposits on her suit to be visible.
“We have decided that your blatant disregard for standard operating procedure forces us to relieve you of command of this vessel.”
“You’ll die trying. Demyan, did you have any part of this mutiny?”
Her navigator, Second Officer Demyan Yukovych, answered from the helm station.
“I fought, ma’am, but I was outnumbered.”
He spoke without taking his blue eyes off his screens. Gabriel was now traveling at over thirty kilometers per second, or about one hundred times the speed of sound in air, yet the massive rocket engines at the stern were ice cold. They’d done their hot, noisy work months ago and then gone into hibernation. With no actual propulsion to busy them, Elena’s navigators spent their shift monitoring Gabriel’s flight path and making minute adjustments with the dozen tiny thrusters that spotted the hull.
“You’ll be spared. How’s the avram?”
“Nominal.”
“ETA?”
“Eighteen hundred.”
Gabriel would cross the border in a little more than six hours. If she crossed at all.
“Weapons check, Vijay.”
“Marco’s people have just finished, Captain. They visually inspected every gun, every missile, and every drum of ammunition on the ship.”
“Bueno. That’s good practice for when they do it again two hours from now.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“From the moment I give the word, how long to fire up the ballista?”
“Yesterday’s simulation was five minutes, six seconds,” Vijay said.
“Hassoun, tell Officer Okoye I want that down to five minutes flat.”
Hassoun clicked away at his keysticks with both thumbs. The desk beneath the screens could arrange itself into an old-fashioned keyboard in any layout he liked, but typing with the keysticks—squeezing the triggers and rotating the thumb pads—was much faster.
“Are we expecting word from Control?”
“Good timing,” Hassoun said. “Incoming now. Lots of junk in here.”
Elena waited briefly. Transmissions from the Space Agency’s outposts in the Asteroid Belt were encoded, enciphered, and encrypted, and packed with gibberish to disguise their contents as white noise. It always took the computers several minutes to unlock and unravel the message.
“Bullet points?”
“A solar flare hit Earth.” The moment froze and hung there. “Minor, looks like. Well, relatively. No outages, nothing to worry about.“
Elena breathed out.
“When should we expect it?”
Hassoun tapped his screen, and a map of the solar system appeared on the holo. In false color, the surge of radiation that had struck the Earth hours before looked like a tidal wave crashing against a mountain.
“Ten days, more or less.”
“What were you saying about good timing?” Elena ran her fingers through her hair. “Bueno. It’s fine. Que otra cosa?”
“Control is pleased to report that Michael was fully pressurized yesterday, and she’s taken on crew.”
A
round of applause swept the bridge. The first of Gabriel’s sister ships was due to be commissioned in a few months, with Raphael following another few months after that. It would be just the three of them—Archangel, the pathfinder, had been lost with all hands on her maiden voyage to the outside, thirty months earlier. Elena knew that there were technically four more units of the class on order, but the new government at Cairo had put the contract on hold, unwilling to commit to the troubled Archangel Project any further. Yet another scandal was the last thing anyone needed.
“I do not suppose anyone remembered to bring cigars,” Vijay said. Elena smiled and waved at Hassoun to continue.
“We’ve got the latest political report. Looks like that Cantonese thing is going to get worse before it gets any better,” he said.
“Security’s problem, not ours,” Elena said.
That was technically correct, and substantially untrue. The Space Agency didn’t operate on Earth, not even during the Nuclear Crisis five years earlier. But if not for the Cantonese civil war, or the border clashes with Brazil and Nigeria, or the riots in Britain, Gabriel would already be home right now, instead of deep outside.
“Another battle over Australia.”
“Who won this time?”
“We say we did. The independents say they did.”
“And when the report is declassified in fifty years, we’ll find out who’s lying. Is there anything in there we actually need to know?”
“Looks like that’s it.”
Even though she knew she had no reason to expect more, Elena bit her lip. Personal messages for the crew were common on most ships, but not on Gabriel. All non-official communications were forbidden while on the outside.
“Wait…Uh, no. A video.”
“Video?” Elena turned to Hassoun. “Sure about that?”
“Yes, Cap’n.” The gloom of the bridge hid Hassoun’s reddened face. “Sorry, I thought it was more garbage. Control never sends video.”
“Captain’s eyes only?”
“It’s unrestricted,” Hassoun said.
“On the holo.”
Telescope 35 shimmered and twisted in midair, and then blinked out of existence.
Poised at the center of the bridge was an elegant man, dressed warmly and topped by a bare head of silver hair, standing alone in a field of snow. Anonymous gray towers rose to the white sky behind his head, but everyone on the bridge recognized the scene immediately. This was the most photographed place on Earth, though Avramovich Square looked nothing like it had during its namesake’s time, over a century before. The laboratory at its edge, where Moishe Avramovich had built the device which had made him first the world’s most famous man, and then its wealthiest, was long gone, crushed by the glacier that had once buried St. Petersburg.
And Elena certainly didn’t need to be told who this man was. A light snow began to fell as Jacob Erasmus, the Prime Minister of the Global Union, began to speak.
“Two generations ago, delegates from sixty two nations gathered here, the birthplace of human space colonization, and vowed that the great project which we had begun would not die in its infancy. It was here in St. Petersburg that Moishe Avramovich had first dreamed of a new home for humanity among the heavens, free of tyranny and empty of hatred. It was his inspiration that carried us into space, but it was his aspiration that drove us there. His vision of a better world has been our lantern, always there to guide us in the night. Even the Storm, and the dark days that followed, could not extinguish that light.”
He began to walk forward, slowly, one deliberate step at a time.
“The Solstice, and her journey into the unknown, was to be a new dawn for humanity. We would send an emissary to the king of planets, and take our rightful place in the solar system once more. But the hand we reached out to the heavens was cut down, by an invader who had claimed our birthright for his own. The sunrise was stolen from us, and the night sky which once held so much promise now brought only fear.”
Erasmus stopped, and brought forth the hands had clasped behind his back.
“Today, we take the sky back. These world are our worlds, and they shall not be taken. Commander Azzam and the brave men and women who died with him aboard the Solstice that day had fallen, but they were not forgotten. And it is in their name that we send you outside the walls to meet the adversary. We do not send you to begin a war, because it was waged against us, without declaration and without warning. And we do not send you to end a war, because a struggle for the ages cannot be won in mere days. We send you, finally, to fight this war.”
The wind picked up and drove the snow into his face, but his words never faltered.
“The archangel Gabriel was a divine messenger, bearing with him the will of God. You too carry a message. It is much more humble, but no less noble. You are the messenger of humanity, and it is our will, and our wrath, that you carry with you. For decades we have hidden in the light from those who strike at us from the darkness. Those days end now. No more will we bow to those who would keep us from our rightful place in the sun, and no longer shall we be our own worst enemy. Today, all of humanity speaks with one voice, and raises one fist. But today is only the beginning. In the hours and days ahead, you will fight a battle in the Solstice’s name. And in the years to come, we will fight a war in yours.”
Erasmus paused. He stared at the camera, head back and mouth parted slightly, as if he were trying to decide what to say. He squinted through the flurries.
“Men and women of the vessel Gabriel, we do not ask you to give us victory. We ask you to bring us hope, and the promise of a future free from fear. Good luck, and good hunting.”
Erasmus was silent. There was no cheering, and no applause. There was just an old man, standing alone in the cold. And then he was gone.
The distance from the Belt to Jupiter was nearly as great as that between the Belt and the sun. It had been almost four months since Gabriel had left behind Pallas, the last human outpost, buried deep within its asteroid. She was now traveling at a speed that had never been matched in human history—and she still wasn’t quite there. To most, the gulf was almost incomprehensibly vast. The Pacific Ocean covers an entire hemisphere, but on a map all the eye sees are the tiny continents that float on either side of it.
Humanity had many names for the sheer space that lay beyond the Belt—the red zone, deep heaven, the black. But to the men and women of the Agency it would always be the outside. Elena called up a map of the region on the holo. The image of Gabriel fell away and receded into a dot, and then disappeared entirely as Jupiter rose into view. The scale of the image was so huge that Elena could see every one of its six dozen moons, and even the trojan asteroids, which preceded and followed Jupiter in its orbit like an honor guard at a distance of almost one billion kilometers.
She adjusted the holo and displayed the local gravitational fields. A few tens of thousand kilometers ahead of Gabriel, the lines of force surrounding the planet met and coiled around an invisible knot in space. This was the lagrange point, where the gravities of Jupiter and the Sun meshed and canceled each other out. Anything that entered a buffer like this one could hover almost indefinitely, pinned between the two giants. It was the perfect place for the first line of defense, and the unofficial border marking outsider territory. It was also where the Solstice and her seven person crew, Earth’s first manned mission to Jupiter, had been lost forty years before.
Humanity hadn’t been back since. Elena was trying very hard to forget that Gabriel had never been intended to do this alone. But she wasn’t alone—not quite.
“Contact.” Vijay’s voice was steady, as if this weren’t only his second time in combat. “Cherub reports contact.”
“Alert stations, warning yellow,” Elena said. “Vijay, arm missiles. Weapons hold.”
Gabriel carried eight of these, twenty tonnes of heavy metal and high explosive. Up
until recently, they had been the most powerful weapons in the Space Agency’s arsenal—every one of Earth’s nuclear warheads had been hunted down and destroyed pursuant to the Treaty of Jerusalem, which every officer was sworn to uphold.
“Hassoun, tell the engine room we’re going cold. Keep the avram online, but switch over to batteries, vital systems only.”
At the very aft of the ship, the chief engineer shut off the fuel cells, and Gabriel began to rapidly cool. Battery power was more than enough to keep the basic life support and sensor systems running, and even the avram at the center of the ship. But everything else went into hibernation, even the guns arrayed on every side of the hull against missile attacks.
“Auxiliaries only. Rockets and thrusters cold,” Demyan said.
The ship’s speed hadn’t changed at all. In fact, Gabriel hadn’t fired either rockets or thrusters in months. With no gravity or friction to hold her back she continued to hurtle forth towards the border under her own momentum. By dashing at the enemy headfirst Gabriel had kept the thin edges of the sails facing outwards, rather than their broad faces, and running cold could buy her a few more precious hours. But if the outsiders detected her now, she’d be defenseless, unable to fight back or even to run. Gabriel had long since passed the point of no return.
“Firing solution?”
“Not yet,” Vijay said. “All we have is bearing.”
“How did Cherub find him?”
“Short burn. Probably a course adjustment.”
Vijay brought it up on the holo. Gabriel still shone with a faint gleam of waste heat, but the blaze of a rocket flare could be seen for millions of kilometers. Even magnified and projected in sharp three dimensions, the exhaust flame was little more than a red smear of infrared light. Elena supposed that a nearsighted man saw a candle in a darkened room in much the same way.