by Amy Spahn
On one of the two screens suspended from the ceiling above the line of viewports, a plainly dressed man appeared, filling the frame. Gloomy lighting behind him threw a grainy haze over the message, which appeared to have been recorded on a cheap pocket computer.
“Ivanokoff,” said Okoro, “I need your help.”
No scathing remarks came from Matthias’s two companions. The engineer’s heart began to race, and from the corner of his eye he saw the captain and Ivanokoff stiffen. Every one of them saw the same thing in that moment. Though the dim setting made it hard to distinguish details, Okoro’s wide eyes were haunted by desperation.
He spoke quickly, but in an undertone, his voice trying to tiptoe its way through a sprint. “I know you don’t trust me. But I swear, I thought the Uprising was only bluffing about wanting to send a message to the Haxozin. The threat wasn’t supposed to be real.
“But they sent the message, Viktor. They contacted the Haxozin. They told them how to find Earth. I found out yesterday, when they received a reply.”
Matthias’s skin turned to ice.
Okoro’s next words confirmed what they had all feared for the better part of a year: “The Haxozin are coming.”
Captain Withers jabbed a finger at Matthias’s console. “Forward this to Dispatch, now.”
“On it, Cap.”
The message kept playing as Matthias sent the decrypted data on a priority channel toward Earth. On the screen, Okoro shook his head. “I can’t risk sending this intelligence to Dispatch; anything aimed at Earth would be intercepted. But you’re way out there at Neptune. The Uprising signal scrubbers will let it through.” He paused and checked something on the pocket computer. “It’s still broadcasting, so I know you’ll receive this much. Ivanokoff, you have to find a way to stop them. These Uprising loons don’t understand what they’ve done. They think the Haxozin will ally with them. I tried to stop them, to make them turn themselves in and share the information the Haxozin sent, but they won’t listen to me. You have to—”
Okoro jerked and straightened up, his head disappearing off the screen. A muffled voice shouted, “Hey, bad cop, what are you doing in there?”
Then Okoro’s face filled the screen again, his eyes scanning something on the computer. “Shit! They detected the broadcast.” He tapped several buttons, shaking the recording as he did so. Something heavy thumped off screen, the sound of a body ramming a door. Okoro looked directly into the camera, and his face went through a subtle hardening, a draining of emotion that left him looking nearly lifeless. “At least I reached you,” he murmured. “At least you know.”
He stood, his torso almost swallowed by the shadows in the room. His left hand moved to his waist, drew a standard-issue UELE projectile gun, and aimed it off screen.
A crash sounded, then a thunderous bang as Okoro fired. A man screamed. Okoro chambered another round.
Shouts. A second bang.
Okoro jerked, his body convulsing inward, shoulders caving in and arms clutching at his chest. His gun tumbled from his hand and clattered onto a tile floor.
A third bang.
He spun as if pushed and collapsed with a thud. Then multiple bodies in dark attire crowded the frame.
One bent to where Okoro had fallen. “Dead.”
“His computer’s on,” said another.
“The signal?”
“Already sent.”
“Shit!”
“Turn it off!”
“Do we have anyone to interce—”
Playback stopped. The screen went dark, and the computer flashed the options to replay, save, or reply.
Matthias swallowed and pushed his stool back to the console. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s all there was.”
Captain Withers cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Ivanokoff. I know he was your friend.”
Ivanokoff stared at the black screen. “‘He gave his honours to the world again, his blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace.’” He closed his eyes for a moment, then faced the captain. “He regained his honor. We have warning of the attack to come.”
Matthias churned over the information contained in the message. Some detail was prickling his mind, but he couldn’t yet articulate what it was. Some word, some phrase had given him a deep uneasiness. Memories floated across his mind, disparate pieces of information. He let them drift, watched them bump against one another until they coalesced, atoms joining to form a molecule with a name.
When the last pieces came together and he was able to articulate that name, the bottom dropped from his stomach. He sprang from his chair, hands flapping. “Captain, it’s too late!”
“What?” Withers took a step back, his face contorted in the wary incredulousness Matthias had come to expect from others when he made a breakthrough.
He made an effort to calm himself and speak slowly enough for understanding. “They said the Haxozin sent the Uprising a message. A message they received yesterday.”
“Right,” said the captain. “So?”
“So the Haxozin don’t use multidimensional travel like we do,” said Matthias. “Their interstellar engines are based on gravitational manipulation, and that means they can’t send messages while in transit. Their ships’ own gravity would prevent it.”
“What’s your point, Lieutenant?”
Matthias paced the bridge, pounding a fist against the opposite palm. “If they’d sent their message to the Uprising from their homeworld, it would take years to arrive, and there’s no reason they’d stop midway just to broadcast their approach.” He stopped, whirled, and brought his fist against his palm one last time. “Cap, they have to have sent that message after dropping into normal space at the end of the trip.”
Withers inhaled a sharp breath. “Are you saying—”
“Yup. Wish I wasn’t, but I am. We’re too late. The Haxozin are already here.”
While Matthias found the silver on every cloud, even he couldn’t muster a smile now.
* * *
Captain Thomas Withers stared at his chief engineer and wished he could disbelieve what he’d been told. “How close?” he asked.
Matthias shrugged. “Hours. Days. No more than that.”
Ivanokoff folded his arms. “It takes three and a half hours for lightcoms to reach here from Phobos.”
“And four to make it to Earth from us.” Thomas pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s too much time.”
“We have no other option,” said Ivanokoff. “Even with gravitational assists, we would need four days to return to Earth. The message we sent is the fastest way.”
“If the Haxozin are at our front door, it’s not enough. You saw the devastation they created on Thassis. They could commit the same atrocities on Earth if they show up with no warning.” Thomas’s heart fluttered with concern for his girlfriend, currently employed in Lunar Dome Three. Far too close to the coming catastrophe. He whirled on Matthias, who had sunk back onto his stool, his bouncy ball personality flatlined for once. “Lieutenant, there has to be a way to contact Earth right away.”
“Not through communications, Cap.”
“Can’t you create something that will warn them?”
“That’s not really how inventing works. We’re limited by the speed of light.”
“But the D Drive lets us go faster than—”
“No, it doesn’t. It lets us travel through a higher physical dimension and bypass parts of three-dimensional space. We travel at the same speed we always do.”
Thomas gritted his teeth. “Can’t you use that to somehow send a message to Earth?”
“Sorry, Cap. Dimensional travel only works for the ship.”
A thought crystallized in Thomas’s head. “The ship,” he said. “We have to use the D Drive to jump to Earth.”
A multitude of expressions rippled over Matthias’s face, finally settling on bemusement. “Cap, like I told Dispatch, D Drive only works over long distances. The engine can’t turn on and off fast enough to make
a jump that short.”
“There has to be a way,” said Thomas. “You’re a genius. Think of something!”
Matthias opened his mouth, and Thomas was sure he was about to hear another reason why the futility he felt was inescapable.
But then the engineer’s eyes took on a faraway look, and he sat there, mouth hanging, for several seconds. His fingers tapped his thighs like a keyboard, and his gaze darted about in space as if reading invisible messages in the air.
When he refocused on Thomas, his signature grin had returned. “This is kinda dumb, Cap, but I think it’ll work.”
* * *
It was more than kind of dumb. Thomas sat in his chair, surrounded by Ivanokoff and two other officers manning the bridge’s front consoles. A screen hanging from the ceiling over the viewports showed one of the interior security camera feeds. On it, they watched the security chief’s progress. Areva Praphasat was dwarfed by her spacesuit, yet somehow she still moved with serpentine grace.
She stood in the center of the Endurance’s main loading ramp, anchored by tethers affixed to hooks in the bulkheads. The airlock between her and the rest of the ship was sealed, her progress only visible through the visual feeds from the ship’s security system.
The bulkhead to space was open. Far beneath the edge of the ramp, Neptune’s gas oceans glowed with ethereal light, the planet’s reflection of the sun unblocked by the satellite rings and space lanes seen in settled regions of the solar system.
Thomas tried to ignore the enormous projectile gun in Areva’s hands and instead focused on the bridge’s other hanging monitor, which currently showed a feed from the reactor room. He tapped his ear-mounted intercom interface. “Habassa, time?”
The engineer spun and waved at the camera before tapping his own interface. “Thirty seconds, Cap. We’ve got the main reactor feeds offline. The D Drive will start up all on her own.”
“You’re sure this won’t blow up the ship?”
“Mostly.”
“Habassa ...”
“Yes, Cap. I can’t scientifically guarantee everything will be fine, but the statistical chance of implosion or explosion is very small.”
“Good. Praphasat, you catch that?”
The spacesuited figure in the airlock flinched at her name before answering over her own open intercom line. “Yes, sir. Am I still on the monitor?”
Thomas managed not to sigh. “Yes, Lieutenant. It’s a necessary precaution.”
Areva Praphasat didn’t like being watched. Or seen at all, if possible.
Thirty seconds ticked by. Thomas watched the stars through the viewports and tried not to think about how distorted they were about to become.
His earpiece buzzed. “Ready, Cap,” said Matthias.
Thomas leaned forward, hands folded to stop them from shaking. “All right. Fire it up.”
Energy thrummed through the deck plates, vibrating up Thomas’s legs. Bulkheads rattled, and unsecured equipment crashed to the floor. One unoccupied stool at the front of the bridge began stuttering its way toward the rear hatch.
This was such a bad idea.
At the same time, the stars warped and twisted, dissolving into spirals that rotated both directions at once, and simultaneously rushed forward to swallow the ship and charged away to leave it alone in darkness. Black space itself rippled, bunching up like carpet in impossible contortions, shapes that only existed in theoretical math and nightmares.
Thomas tore his eyes from the chaos happening outside the ship and swallowed the nausea that crawled up his throat.
Matthias spoke again. “We’re four-dimensional, Cap.”
“I see it.”
“We can start moving any time.”
Thomas focused on the non-distorted floorplates and said, “Praphasat, one shot. Now.”
He didn’t watch the monitor, but he heard Areva’s grunt as she discharged the rifle.
Ivanokoff gave a grudging humph. “I should have done it.”
“This is her job,” said Thomas.
“It is my gun.”
“And it’s my ship. My orders.”
Ivanokoff gave up, though he muttered, “I wanted to test the vacuum firing feature.”
Thomas chanced a glance at the viewports. Space was still misbehaving outside, refusing to abide by any patterns his brain could follow. Instead he looked up at the monitors.
Neptune was gone. More writhing stars filled the view outside the open airlock.
“Habassa,” Thomas said, “it’s working.”
“I see it on scanners, Cap,” said Matthias. “The shot gave us a push, but we’re still drifting too slow.” Someone in the background screamed, and Matthias hushed them. “Sorry, Cap. Officer Lee got scared.”
“Why?”
“We just passed through some space debris. Boy, imagine if we returned to 3D space with that inside our hull!”
Thomas ignored his own surge of panic at the thought. “Praphasat, fire again.”
The spacesuited body on the screen hefted the gun and pulled the trigger. Another small grunt from Areva’s comm line.
“That’s it!” shouted Matthias. “We’re going a fraction of a kilometer per hour. At this rate, we’ll reach Earth in ... three minutes.”
“Don’t bring us out inside a satellite,” Thomas said.
“We’ll stop outside the ring, Cap. It’ll be fine.”
Thomas focused on his breathing, in and out. It would be fine.
“Praphasat,” he said, “close the hatch and get back inside.”
The spacesuit waved an acknowledgement, and then Areva began pulling herself along one of the tethers toward the airlock controls.
At two minutes to go, she triggered the outside door closed.
At one minute, she repressurized the airlock and clomped back through the hatch into the ship proper.
At thirty seconds, the sickening view through the bridge viewports flashed from black space to earthen brown for the blink of an eye.
That was an asteroid, Thomas thought. We just flew through solid rock.
This was such a bad idea.
At ten seconds, he gripped the arms of his chair and forced himself to focus out the viewports.
At five seconds, one of the other officers covered her mouth and gagged. Thomas pushed down his own wave of nausea triggered by the sound.
At one second, he crept forward to the end of his seat. The chair creaked under his weight.
Zero.
The rattling in the bulkheads ceased.
The view through the ports resolved, the stars spinning back into points of light, space flattening to its proper texture. Yet something was still off. The sky was too full.
At minus one second, Thomas stared through a haze of laser fire crowding the space between a ragged handful of UELE vessels and a hundred five-pointed star ships encroaching on his homeworld.
* * *
A jolt threw Thomas back against his chair and threatened to make his already upset stomach empty itself. A moment later his equilibrium returned.
“Sorry, sir,” said the woman at the helm. “The gravity plating couldn’t compensate in time. I had to swerve to avoid that ... that ...”
Thomas needed no explanation. The viewports and overhead screens displayed swaths of destruction. A UELE ship burned atmosphere on the right screen, and on the left the mangled wreckage of something—a police satellite, a civilian transport, who knew—careened through the battle zone.
The remaining UELE vessels peppered the attackers with guided rockets, energy bursts, and EMP discharges, but they were outnumbered. Another ship lost a stabilizing engine and had to retreat toward the atmosphere. A dozen Haxozin stars swooped in, nipping the flank now left undefended.
Thomas pointed, though the gesture wouldn’t help. “Over there, fill that hole!” He glanced at the data streaming across the screens on either side of his chair. “Relative coordinates 189 by 236 by 47.” He slapped his intercom. “Habassa, I need regular engin
es operational five minutes ago!”
“Ten seconds, Cap.”
Those ten seconds crawled past in fire and debris. Haxozin ships assaulted the opening in the grid, rotating around their central spires, able to travel in any direction indicated by their five points. The smaller UELE craft had an edge on maneuverability, but not by much.
Endurance finally surged forward, gaining momentum beyond the pitiful crawl that had been inching her toward the combat. They dove behind the defensive grid and surged upward into the spot vacated by the crippled ship.
“Let’s get ‘em!” whooped Matthias over the comm. “The reinforcements are here!”
Thomas doubted anybody was cheering on the other UELE ships. Endurance had been around the sun a few more times than any other cruiser. Her carpet outdated most of the vessels fighting alongside them. Her crew wouldn’t inspire much confidence either.
Nevertheless, this was their job. They were protectors, and they would do their damnedest to defend Earth from this invasion.
Viktor Ivanokoff swiveled his stool to face the captain. “Ten rockets.”
Thomas knew their limited stock. Self-guided missiles served little purpose around Neptune. He’d have to make them count. “Save them for now. Try to hit the biggest ships with EMPs.”
When he tore his gaze from the havoc and looked toward the defensives station, Areva Praphasat had appeared there without his notice. She’d removed the spacesuit and sat in her uniform blues, rank and certification patches black on her shoulder, short dark hair curling around her ears and framing her olive-skinned face.
Thomas couldn’t remember the last time his chief of security had willingly seated herself out in the open. “Praphasat?”
“The EMPs aren’t working; the ships’ hulls are shielded. We need to strip some of the exterior to expose the circuitry. Recommend a precision rocket strike to blast through.” Areva’s hands flew over the controls, preparing the commands she had just recommended.
Beside her, Ivanokoff supported her preparations with his own. “The EMP must follow exactly behind the rocket, otherwise the Haxozin ship will move.”