by Richard Fox
“Oh shit!” Matthew yelled. “Incoming!”
Six roared something unintelligible and picked up the empty champagne bulb that was still on his countertop and threw it, hitting Matthew between the shoulder blades. The man didn’t notice.
“Four—no—five landers coming in very low from the east. ETA ten minutes,” he said. “Hostile ship back above us, same orbit as the Path.”
Matthew shunted a new tactical plot up to the main holodisplay, showing a top-down view of Erebos Base’s location and the surrounding three hundred kilometers, a mostly flat region of ice and rock, split by the massive canyon system that ran north-south for thousands of kilometers. Five red triangles, flying just over the surface, headed toward them in a wedge formation.
Six looked from the holo showing Fazion drifting toward the aperture to the one showing Khan joining Rob and Garza on the landing field, ready to rush the kid inside, then back up at the main display showing the enemy ship and the five landing shuttles heading straight for them. He had no idea what the aliens’ ground capability was going to be. If they got lucky, the bastards would be as inept in ground combat as they were in space. Other than that, he was completely out of options.
“Commander Bergman,” Aadesh 49 said, “it is highly likely that the hostile warship will open fire on No Logical Path now that the wormhole is not protecting it.”
“Do whatever you need to do to bring Fazion back to us, Addy.”
“Yes, Commander.”
***
Liberated by Fazion’s wriggling out of the damaged module, a small piece of the Path moved across the gulf between the starship and the aperture slightly ahead of Fazion, but at a much different angle. The little piece of twisted metal, massing a mere 16.5 grams, hit the boundary zone, instantly converting into 1.4 gigajoules of energy in the form of a gamma ray pulse that struck the landing field in between Rob, Garza, and Khan with the equivalent energy of 361 thousand tons of TNT. Aadesh 49 reacted a hundredth of a second later, seizing control of Ichabod’s console and immediately shifting the terminus to the test chamber. Just before Fazion reached the aperture, the egapocid warship opened fire, breaking No Logical Path into several parts that rippled with secondary explosions. The vicinity of space near Fazion became a sphere of expanding starship debris. One of the smallest and fastest, massing only 1.8 milligrams, hit the boundary zone as the wormhole closed. The resulting gamma ray burst sliced Fazion’s left leg off just above the knee.
***
Six, still disoriented and trying to figure out what had just happened, took Stephane’s offered hand up. “Come on!” she said, tugging on his arm. She let go and turned, running down the steps to the test chamber. Six looked over the top of his console as he stood, banishing the holodisplays with a wave so he could see where she was going. Fazion’s spacesuit lay crumpled on the floor in the test chamber and the science team was rushing to his side.
Matthew was still at his console, flipping through all the optical sensors they had around Erebos Base. Most were blank.
“What happened?” Six said, coming up and looking over Matthew’s shoulder. “Where are Rob and Garza? Where’s Khan?”
Matthew turned to look at his boss, and Six saw for the first time that there were tears streaming down the man’s face. He flipped to a view that was supposed to show the horseshoe of above-ground buildings at the end of the base’s cavern. Six frowned as he saw that none of the buildings were still standing. Matthew flipped to another sensor, this one aimed into the cavern from just outside. The landing field was gone, replaced by a tumble of huge, ragged boulders.
Six looked the question to Matthew, who closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Six!” Stephane’s voice called from the test chamber.
He ran, arriving as Harrison rolled Fazion over on his back. The little ventilation bot they used as Fazion’s eyes was there, jumping up and down on top of the young man’s unconscious form. Was it gesturing for them to hurry?
“Gently now,” Stephane said, dropping to her knees next to Fazion and taking his hand in hers.
“Let’s get his helmet off,” Harrison said, pulling out a first aid kit. All of them looked in wonder at the huge crack in the visor, filled in with emergency sealant.
“Got some puncture wounds here,” Ichabod said. “Shit, his fucking leg is gone!”
“Open that bag and get a full med-package on that,” Six ordered.
Harrison, being very careful, unsealed the helmet and started lifting it off. Fazion’s body spasmed and his eyes flew open. He struggled for a moment, clearly not sure where he was or why his helmet was off.
“Fazion,” Stephane said softly, reaching to lay a reassuring hand on his brow. “Oh, mon pauvre petit bébé. Fazion, can you hear me?”
The young man looked around without seeing. “Six! SIX!”
“I’m right here, kid!” Six yelled back. “Calm down!”
Fazion reached blindly in the direction of Six’s voice, who leaned in, unsure what to do. Fazion’s hands brushed the front of Six’s environmental suit and then he latched on, jerking Six in close, their noses only centimeters apart.
“Six! Fail-safe…you’ve got to…aperture underneath…it’s the only way. Can’t let…those assholes…have it.” And with that Fazion slumped, unconscious.
Six stood. He put a hand on Ichabod’s shoulder. “Icky, please come with me.”
When they stood together at Matthew’s station, Six told them what they were going to do when the alien shuttles arrived.
***
“There’s no other way?” Stephane asked, her lovely eyes wet, the sadness of her face making Six’s chest tight.
“I don’t see how there can be. We’ve got nothing left and we can’t let this tech fall into a hostile alien’s hands. Being able to cross huge distances in a split second is great, but I think you might have underestimated its destructive capacity.”
“We didn’t underestimate it, Sixten,” she said, “we knew exactly what we were doing and didn’t care because we wanted to prove that we were right, that all the accepted theories were wrong. Do you know that the only thing more dogmatic than religion is science?”
Six raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, I don’t mean science in the sense of empirical evidence, experimentation, developing hypothesis and the rest. No, I’m talking about the institutions, the cults of personality, and all the rest of it. Ah, well, it’s no excuse, but there you have it.”
Stephane took a long drag on what she claimed was her very last cigarette, then turned it around in her fingers and offered it to him.
“So,” she said, “what do we need to do?”
***
Five minutes later, everyone gathered on the main floor of the control center and looked up at the main holodisplay, which showed a view out over what had once been the landing field. Alessio and Konrad, forever stuck in the bowels of the base’s generator chambers, came up to join them, with Alessio passing around the last of the champagne bulbs. Fazion sat on Harrison’s console with Prem and Stephane on each side, awake and lucid, though he opted for a large bottle of water rather than champagne. A medical package in the shape of an eyepatch was over his right eye and Harrison had found a telescopic crutch for him to lean on.
All of the dust had settled quickly after the gravity cables there failed, and now there was no visible proof that the tumble of boulders and wrecked human machinery hadn’t been there for a thousand years.
A shadow shifted near where the cavern opened out into the canyon. Then another. Seconds later, there were dozens of large scuttling shapes, moving quickly in the cavern and fanning out. They wore some sort of reddish-green combat armor—powered, judging by the ease with which they moved. The rifles they carried were massive.
“I’m glad we didn’t have to go toe to toe with them,” Six said.
“But we did,” Fazion said. Everyone turned to look at the battered young man, who smiled right back at them.
&nb
sp; “Think that’s all of them?” Matthew said. “They might be holding some in reserve.”
“I doubt it,” Six said. “I get the impression these guys are pretty much frontal assault types.” He turned to Ichabod and nodded. The wormhole tech keyed in the prepared sequence and held a finger over the holographic INITIATE key hovering in the air over his console. The floor vibrated as the generators below them spun up to their maximum output.
Fazion held his hand out to Stephane, who took it, wrapping an arm around his and smiling. All around the room, hands were held out and grasped, an unbroken circle of human contact.
Six let the dark shapes get to the middle of the former landing field before he told Ichabod to open the aperture to its maximum, untested sixty-meter diameter. It appeared over the landing field, the entrance facing upward toward the cavern’s ceiling. The aliens froze when they saw the purple and blue vortex unfold above them, but Six didn’t give them a chance to react. With a code sent into the datanet, he triggered the fusion warhead they had drilled into the ceiling their second day on Erebos.
Hundreds of millions of metric tons of rock and ice crashed down on the landing field, crushing the aliens and sealing the cavern forever. Of the total collapse, three million tons fell into the aperture, moving downward with the speed of four gravities. The massive avalanche exited the terminus, which Ichabod had opened two hundred meters from the egapocidian ship. That much mass moving that quickly might have battered the alien warship’s shields aside and pounded it to dust, but Fazion considered debris going through the aperture insignificant. Twelve million tons fell into the boundary zone and were instantly converted into a massive gamma ray burst fourteen hundred times brighter than Sol. The energy flowed into and through ProudRock Aptor’s ship, vaporizing it totally.
***
Throughout his long career as first a soldier and then a corporate security specialist, Six had regained consciousness after explosions enough times to know better than to start off by moving. His wetware implants pulsed physiological damage reports directly into his mind. A mild concussion, but no spine or skull damage. An icon representing his right knee strobed red. Heavily damaged from blunt impact, most likely from a chunk of ceiling similar to the one that had knocked him out. His implants flushed his system with combat analgesics, numbing pain receptors without dulling reaction speed. Someone below the command dais coughed, but he couldn’t tell who it was by sound alone, and with dismay he realized his connection to the base datanet was gone. He opened his eyes, grabbed a countertop and slowly pulled himself upright, favoring his injured leg. He didn’t weigh four times his normal weight, so the gravity system was still functioning.
Dim emergency lights spaced evenly along the wall cast pools of dusty light across the ruined control center. Ragged strips of rubberized insulation hung down like scraps of torn flesh where rock and ice from the ceiling had ripped through and crashed down onto their consoles. Ichabod and Harrison were slowing pulling themselves up, apparently unharmed, but Six saw a booted foot sticking up at a sickening angle from beneath a flat rock the size of a dining room table. The boulder had pancaked Prem’s station and Six remembered that Prem had been standing there with Alessio and Konrad at the end.
Light from an active console flickered from Matthew’s station, bright among the emergency lights. Six leaned forward and looked over his own control panel to see the only other surviving member of the operations team, cradling his left arm against his chest while flying through holographic status displays with his right.
Six started to ask for status, but the words turned into a cough. Matthew glanced up over his shoulder at the sound. Blood, almost black in the murky light, covered the left side of the man’s face.
“Not much left, skipper, but it looks like we got ‘em,” the systems generalist said glumly.
Six saw Fazion and Stephane, both motionless, lying prone on the floor. Somehow in the few seconds before detonation, Fazion had thrown his body over hers. Six smiled at that. As beat up and battered as the kid was, his only thought was to protect someone else. Six made his way to them, picking his way over piles of debris.
“Icky. Harry. You guys okay?” he said, his throat dry and scratchy with the dust.
“All things considered,” Harrison said, “I’m good.”
“Just a couple of bumps, Six,” Ichabod said.
“Help me out down here,” Six said, gesturing toward Fazion and Stephane. “My datanet’s down, Matt. Have you got a connection to the AI?”
“Negative, Six. Mine’s down too.” He was echoed likewise by Ichabod and Harrison.
“Hardline?” Six asked.
“Nothing,” Matthew said. “The entire datacore is gone, along with just about everything else.”
Six stopped halfway across the test chamber floor and turned back. “‘Gone’?”
“Chamber collapses over ninety percent of the base. Life support is about all we’ve got left. There’s still a couple of bots up on the surface, but the only link we have with them is radio. The sky’s clear, if that makes you feel better.”
“What about the generator chamber?”
Matthew closed his eyes and shook his head. “That whole area is buried, Six. We’re on emergency power.”
A groan from Stephane spun Six around, and he hobbled over to where the two scientists were helping each other sit up. Stephane looked uninjured, but Fazion looked like someone had run him through a food processor. The little ventilation repair bot that had come through the wormhole with him was still clinging to the young man’s arm. As he sat up, it stretched its elasteel legs and crawled up to perch on Fazion’s shoulder. It looked up at Six and chirped at him.
Six offered Stephane an arm up.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said, waving him away. She rose to her knees and turned to face Fazion, who was trying to leverage his large torso off the deck. “You lie right back down, young man. And merci. Merci beaucoup. You were right.”
Fazion smiled, but let himself fall back down to lie on his back, the smile turning to a grimace from his injuries. The kid really did look like hell. Harrison appeared with Khan’s medical kit. He opened it and got to work on Fazion’s injuries.
Stephane stood up and looked at Six with tired resignation. “Do you have any options left, Commander Bergman?”
“Well, I was wrong about starving,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Oh, yeah,” Six said. “The power we have left won’t last long. We’ll be crushed by Erebos’ gravity and then suffocate a long time before we starve. The only option left is how we want to die, I’m afrai—”
“What the hell…?”
All of them looked at Ichabod, standing at his station with only about half of his holos functioning.
“What?” Six shouted.
“The wormhole terminus…it’s opening!”
“How can that be?” Stephane asked. “If there’s no power from the fusion generators, then—”
“Yes, I know that,” Ichabod said. “No energy for the vortex initiator. No energy for the toroids. But there it is!”
Six and Stephane hurried to stand on either side of Ichabod.
“Where?” Six asked.
“It’s still right where I left it, about seventy thousand kilometers up. But it’s stable.”
“Matt, do you have anything left that can give us eyes on that?”
“Working on it!” the tech yelled back.
Six thought he could hear a thread of hope in the man’s tone, and realized he felt it as well, but then realized what Stephane had said earlier about the two ends of the wormhole being linked. “Where’s the aperture?”
“That’s the thing. It’s gone,” Ichabod replied, his voice cracking as if he were about to start crying.
“Impossible,” Stephane said. “One cannot exist without the other. If the terminus is where we left it, that means the aperture is as well, and that’s in the middle of a giant pile of rubble. It would have compl
etely collapsed the throat. The entire wormhole should be gone!”
“Oh, shit,” Ichabod said. “It’s growing.”
“But how?” Stephane yelled. “We have no power to focus and direct the emitters, let alone generators to feed it energy!”
“It’s non-local,” Fazion said, wheezing with the effort, startling all of them. There was a fresh medical package over his damaged right eye and face, and the kid leaned heavily on the crutch Harrison had found for him.
“You guys keep using that term, but I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” Six said, not really sure if he wanted to know.
“I mean the aperture is nowhere near Erebos,” Fazion said. “Maybe not even in this universe.”
“But—” Stephane started, but stopped, her eyes darting back and forth, reading files scrolling across the insides of her retinas. “A full pilot-wave reversal?”
Fazion nodded.
“And what the hell does that mean?” Six asked, completely unaccustomed to being so far out of his depth.
“We tease the wormhole open locally and direct it, but we’ve always known that the power that keeps it open is from a self-organizing non-local source. We call that source hyperspace, but that’s just a placeholder term for something we don’t really understand, like aether or quintessence or dark matter used to be. When the nuke dropped all that mass into the boundary zone, the energy released was enough to completely reverse the wormhole.” Fazion smiled. “Sort of like reaching into your sock and turning it inside out. Except afterwards, you cut off the top of your sock and send it into another dimension.”
“Mon Dieu,” Stephane said, eyes wide, “but that would mean that—”
“Incoming!” Matthew yelled.
“Oh, what the fuck now?” Six yelled back.