by Ralph Kern
“Priority. Defend Atlantica!”
***
Blue light washed through the CIC. Petty Officer Santiago stared intently at his console and interpreted Slater’s orders.
With lightning speed, he tapped his finger four times on the touch screen, overriding the ship’s automatic response and dictating the order Ignatius’s self-defense systems would attempt to defeat the incoming missiles.
Now Ignatius knew what to do, she reacted faster than any human could, deciding the optimal mix of defenses to use.
A VLS cell sprang open, revealing a pack of four RIM 7 evolved SeaSparrow missiles. The barrels of the CIWS began spinning and the decoy launch system armed two tiny Mark 234 “Nulka” rockets.
***
Kendricks gripped his armrests. The four blazing points of light spread into two distinct pairs. One pair coming at his ship. The other at Ignatius.
Time slowed. He wanted to close his eyes. Wanted to ignore what was coming. Instead, he punched the PA system on his console. “Everyone down!”
Ignatius, still surrounded by billowing clouds of smoke from her own brutal salvos, erupted into life again.
A missile raced out of Ignatius’s vertical launch cells, slamming into one of the incoming even as the destroyer heeled around with surprising agility, presenting the Gatling gun of her close-in weapon system to the enemy.
Two more rockets sprang from Ignatius’s flank, soaring above Atlantica, then hovered, balanced on flickering plumes of fire.
One of the incoming missiles twisted toward the hovering rockets—A decoy system—blasting past them and lanced inland. A dull crack came from it a moment later as it exploded beyond them.
Another point of light grew, then a stream of tracer fire reached out from Ignatius and found it. The missile detonated fifty yards ahead of the cruise ship. The momentum of the disintegrating weapon’s travel created an expanding fan of debris.
The spread of red-hot wreckage smashed into the bow of Atlantica. The forward windows blew in. A blizzard of glass scythed through the bridge as Kendricks covered his head and twisted down behind his console. He felt pain slashing across his forearms.
Through the ringing in his ears he heard the cries of the injured coming from all around him. He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs and funk which filled it.
He lifted his head, seeing his shirt sliced to bloody ribbons, but feeling no pain. Yet.
“Kelly. Full emergency dash!” Kendricks shouted. “Get us the hell out of here. Any direction as long as it’s away from that ship.”
He heard no acknowledgement. He looked over at his helmswoman. He could only see the back of her chair. And beneath it, a huge pool of blood spreading over the deck.
Another booming explosion echoed across the bay.
Goddamn it, just stop! He wanted to scream. Then realized he hadn’t felt any impact. Whatever had been hit hadn’t been them.
He looked through the gap where the window had been, the fresh sea air overwhelmed by the acrid smell of explosives and propellant.
“Oh my god,” he whispered.
A fireball rolled up from the flank of Ignatius. A huge bite was torn into the hull of the ship. Already he could see the flicker of fire in the ship’s savage wound.
And worse, he could see the ship settling at an unnatural angle. She was taking on water.
And if she was already angling over, then she was taking it on fast.
He stabbed the console. “Heather? Heather, talk to me. Give me your status.”
Silence met his call.
Chapter Forty-Four – The Present
Bautista ran up the stairwell and entered the Titan’s bridge, not even acknowledging the crew present within. He gripped the railing running beneath the window and watched the brutal exchange of fire.
Missiles and cannon fire erupted from Ignatius. Explosions popped in the night sky and dull cracks echoed across the bay.
He gave a sharp intake of breath as he watched a missile spear toward Atlantica. A fraction of a second before it struck, a stream of tracer fire erupted from Ignatius, destroying it, but not before riddling the side of the cruise ship with friendly fire.
A huge section of the pristine liner’s bow flayed away from the superstructure by the ball of red-hot debris striking it.
Then he watched a missile lance toward Ignatius, somehow slipping through her defenses, and slammed into the warship. An explosion erupted on her hull, leaving an ugly wound in her flank. A wound which could kill the powerful vessel if they didn’t act fast.
“Prepare for rescue operations!” he shouted back to his crew. “All available hands not immediately engaged with the evacuation efforts, I want you in boats and give any help you can to Ignatius and Atlantica.
“Boss, everyone’s trying to get everything we can off the coast. If we—”
“I said I want you to help.” Bautista slapped the railing to punctuate his sentence. “Get some ships over there now!”
“Aye aye,” came the reluctant response.
Bautista turned his head and looked at the departing Osiris, already little more than tinker toy-sized and shrinking fast.
The ship had done more harm in a few seconds than the entire conflict between his community and the Ignatius.
***
Even subdued by decks and hull plating—and dimmed by decades of time—he recognized the sound of that roar and then crunching noise. It had been the same as he’d heard on HMS Sheffield when she’d been mortally wounded by an Exocet missile in the Falklands.
Reynolds stood up from his bunk and began beating on the solid metal cell door with the base of his fist.
“What has he done?” Reynolds shouted in impotent rage. “What the hell has he done?”
***
Bradley watched the bay receding in their wake. She’d never felt as useless as she did right now. Someone was out there dying, even as she observed from this luxurious prison. And now she was going further away from any kind of aid.
She turned to gaze at a mirror fixed to the wall of the crowded lounge. There was no play of words across it. No sign it was anything more than a reflective surface.
Whoever you are, I hope you have a plan.
***
Solberg ran up the stairs, two at a time, and barreled through the door leading onto the once luxurious promenade. The most glorious space in the whole of the Crystal Oceans lines.
Now reduced to a refugee center.
The space was filled with passengers and crew, a medley of noise, crying, shouting, and screams. Some ran aimlessly in confusion past the shops and bars. Others were frozen in fear.
He took it in, feeling sympathy pain coursing through his body. Not for the people within, but for his beautiful vessel. The one he’d shed blood, sweat, and tears over.
My ship.
The pain changed to anger, then fury.
My fucking ship!
***
Laurie pressed herself against the window, desperate to know what was happening. The once indestructible-seeming Ignatius wallowed in the water. A thick plume of black smoke rose toward the full moon, obscuring it. She pushed her cheek against the cold glass, trying to see up toward the bow of Atlantica, to see what had hit them.
Instead, she could only see the receding lights of the Osiris, dwindling as she pulled further away and out to open water.
She didn’t know where Jack was, but she was bloody sure he was in the thick of whatever the hell was going on.
Chapter Forty-Five – The Present
“Jesus,” Hogarth muttered as he shook his head at the devastation they had just unleashed on the fleet.
Wakefield felt for the chair behind him with a hand. Finding the armrest, he slumped down into it. Sure, he’d done a lot in his life. Cut many a deal. Been instrumental in getting the Locus project up and running.
But to be so directly responsible for killing people the old-fashioned way? No, that was a first, even for him. It had alway
s been someone else. He’d always been a position removed.
He finally addressed the screen where the face of the boy gazed at him impassively. “What the hell was that?”
“You asked for me to defend the Osiris at all costs. I have done so.”
“Yeah. Yeah you sure did,” Wakefield said. He felt like he was outside his own body looking in. The rush of adrenaline from the frantic combat dissipating, leaving him feeling bone-weary. “Ignatius. Is she still there?”
“I believe that she has been neutralized.”
“Fuck,” Wakefield said simply. He rallied himself and stood again. “Richard, set a course for the nearest cache. I want to grab what we can then we’re going to find the others.”
“Aye aye,” Hogarth responded as he tapped at his console. A map appeared on his screen and focused down on a small island to their pre-event east, back in the direction they had come from all those weeks ago. The island where the beached container ship had run aground. The island which Bautista’s pirates had, until so recently, called home. “It’s gotta be that one.”
“Yeah. Probably for the best they’ve been ‘neutralized’,” Wakefield murmured. “They’d be real pissed if they knew what they’d been sitting on for all the years they’ve been trapped here.”
“I’ve done what you asked,” the boy said. “Now you will help me find the others. This is no longer a request.”
The lights flickered, then switched off. The only illumination came from the moon shining through the cracked windows and a single active screen with the boy’s face on it. The throbbing of the engines reduced to an idle murmur, then drifted into silence.
“Am I understood?” the boy continued.
“Are you threatening me?” Wakefield asked incredulously.
“No. This is cause and effect. You will recover the Skywave from the cache Captain Hogarth has indicated. If you do not, then I will irreversibly damage every system on this boat and leave you adrift. When the survivors of our escape find you. I doubt they will be merciful.”
No, this ain’t happening. I’m the one in charge here.
“You’re bluffing. When they find out what you just did, they will destroy you too.”
“I do not bluff, nor am I lying. I am now willing to accept destruction over any further delays.” Wakefield knew there was little point in trying to read how resolute the boy was from his facial expression, but he tried. And it told him the boy was committed.
“Goddammit,” Wakefield growled. “Fine. We’ll go find your ‘others’ wherever the hell they might be. If they exist at all, that is.
The lights flickered back to life. The hum of the engines began to permeate through the ship.
“Excellent.” The boy nodded. “When we locate the Skywave, I will be reunited.”
“Sonvabitch,” Wakefield muttered. “You’ve been watching too many 80s films about computers taking over the world, you know that?”
The boy didn’t reply. Instead, the screen blinked off as the rest of the bridge’s systems continued booting to life.
Wakefield glared at the tiny innocuous black dome of the CCTV camera in the corner.
“I think,” Wakefield growled. “ECHELON may have been playing us like a fucking violin all along.”
Epilogue
He was the last human alive.
Not just here on this dusty red world. But anywhere.
Commander Ollie Pearson gently patted the ochre-colored sandy regolith firm with his shovel. He could feel the sweat from the effort of burying the second-to-last human’s grave trickling down his face. He gave his head a shake, trying to dislodge a bead which threatened to dribble into his eye.
It had been ten long years since the last communication from Earth. Ten years since that final message when the haggard-looking CAPCOM had said those five words to the crew of thirty-seven people who were up here or in transit.
“You guys. You’re it now.”
That message had taken eight minutes to cross the two hundred and twenty-five million kilometers between Earth and Mars. In that time, the comet Perses had struck, killing the man who’d spoken; his only legacy, a last radio wave speeding toward them at the speed of light.
In itself, Perses had been cataclysmic. It would have driven humanity back to the Stone Age, it was that fast and that big. Even the mysterious Great Tsunamis of the Deluge which had smashed the coasts of every major landmass at once in 2024 were nothing in comparison in terms of what the death toll would have been.
But then the super-volcano under Yellowstone Park had erupted in savage response to the impact.
Two extinction events in as many hours had killed humanity. Now, when he looked at Earth through the base’s high-powered telescope, all he could see was a yellow diseased circle. The atmosphere filled with poisonous ash.
He drove his shovel in low-gravity-induced slow motion into the dusty surface next to the grave. The last grave, because there would be no one to dig his.
“So long, buddy.” Pearson brought his hand to touch the visor of his helmet in a salute. No one had ever been as lonely as he felt right now.
Alone. The last.
Slowly, he turned toward the rock and regolith-covered cluster of habitat domes which had been their home for the fifteen years they’d been on Mars. Next to them sat the huge cylinders of the Interplanetary Transport System rockets which had brought the colonists and their payload to Gusav crater.
All this effort. Crossing that empty void in one last-ditch effort to save an enclave of humanity had come to naught. They’d had the best technology, the best of everything. And they’d failed, killed by radiation, accident, wear and tear.
Suddenly, the effort of crossing the one hundred yards back to the airlock seemed even more impossible than coming to this dead world in the first place.
Should I do it now? Just lift my visor? Feel the freezing cold of Mars’s thin atmosphere on my face. Let the air erupt from my lungs.
What do I have to live for?
“Please come in now.” The voice sounded young, like that of a boy.
“I’m just having a moment, Etch.” Pearson heard his voice tremble. It would only take a few seconds. And it’d probably be painful, but when the alternative was a slow, lingering, lonely death, it seemed a good call right now. He felt the adrenaline course through his body, readying it for action. It felt like the times he had gone into combat. “I just need...”
What do I need?
“I’m showing your heart rate has risen to over ninety BPM. That is high for you, Ollie.”
“I just...” Pearson reached for an excuse. “I just exerted myself digging.”
“I do not believe that is the case,” Etch replied. “Your heart rate calmed then rose again, suggesting a high level of anxiety.”
“Fine,” Pearson muttered. The spell was broken. The last thing he wanted was for his final moments to be filled with incessant chatter from the boy. “I’m coming in.”
“Good. I have begun cycling the lock in anticipation.”
He trudged his lonely way back to the lock. Maybe it would have been better to die on Earth with everyone else? Instead of here, the last pallbearer of a dead species? But his course had been set ever since that fateful day when Etch had manipulated him into destroying those ships.
After he and Lexi Cormac had landed from that mission, they’d been immediately detained pending an enquiry. There had been the whirlwind of being put on a plane to Washington for the start of what would have been a long and protracted investigation. He still remembered the guilt of what he’d done, the fear his future was in ruins, that he was some kind of criminal as he’d buckled up his harness.
Except, by the time the plane had landed, the mysterious Deluge had hit. Tsunamis had wiped away vast tracts of the coastline. Not just in America, but all over the world. The enquiry was a thing of the past. Instead, every able-bodied woman and man had been drafted into the Herculean relief effort.
It was only after th
ose chaotic years of recovery—where the world had banded together as one in a vast effort to rebuild—that he’d been approached by the mysterious boy. He didn’t know why Etch had chosen him to become part of this project. He had the skills, he guessed, thanks to his flight training. Or maybe it was some semblance of conscience, wanting to give the aviator some element of closure around the events which had tortured him for years.
Whatever the reason had been, he’d found himself recruited and trained, for the first colony on Mars.
And then he’d been told why it was necessary.
The airlock hatch silently opened and he entered. He felt air buffeting him as it pumped into the chamber. After an age, the pressure gauges showed the atmosphere was breathable.
He was a man of habit, and there was no point breaking it now. He pulled a vacuum hose from the bulkhead and sucked up the dust which covered his suit. The dust which had the potential to cause such havoc to the inner workings of the habitat and his lungs. Martian Mesothelioma had been responsible for more than one death in the years they’d been here.
“Please come into the control center, Ollie.”
Pearson nodded at the camera in the airlock as he finished vacuuming and began shedding the hardened plates of his red-stained suit. That Etch was smart was beyond doubt. Even constrained, as it was, to the relatively small amount of processors they had brought with them. But what he wasn’t, was personable.
The dark control center was claustrophobic, although far less so now that he was the only person in the whole base. He ducked under the piping and wiring hanging from the ceiling and sat in one of the spindly chairs. A disembodied head of a young boy filled the primary control screen.
“Ollie, I understand you may be distressed now that you are alone.”
Pearson grunted in response.
“That you are the last human alive.”
Pearson scratched his wire-wool beard and frowned at the screen. Etch had the sympathetic nature of a Vortex torture party.
“You many think,” the boy continued, “you have no purpose or reason to live.”