The Fortress at the End of Time

by Joe M. McDermott

  Of course, Obasanjo was rolling his eyes. He had his own daily ritual, and after the confrontation with the admiral, he continued to step into the chow line with the enlisted, gather his nutritional gruel, and duck off to the office where he maintained the entire command structure of the station in the absence of the admiral’s efforts. The rest of us waited for the enlisted to get their gruel before going in line, ourselves, with the quartermaster second-to-last, and the admiral at the end.

  Breakfast was often an amaranth gruel supplemented with dried red fruit paste, and various vitamins and minerals. It often tasted like something between oatmeal and limestone. After breakfast, our task lists for the day populated out to our tablets, with whatever changes were made by our commanding officers, and we were beholden of what was scheduled there.

  As officers, we could create our own tasks, and schedule them, with weekly sign-offs from our direct commander. Enlisted were mostly unable to do so, outside of the biotechs, who seemed to have their own little kingdom inside the quartermaster’s loosely held fiefdom. Regardless, we were primarily ruled by a calendar of actions that preceded all of us on the station by nearly ninety years. The maintenance routine was meticulously plotted. The schedule of the year was absolute. Only the rare expansion of duties merited any change. My day was mostly spent working with the quartermaster, preparing ships, testing myself for flying the ships, and—for a few brief, glorious moments—flying in open space. Beyond that, I explored near and distant navigation routes in the huge gap where our stellar system’s Oort cloud ended, and the deep void began.

  Lunch break was a brief respite from the various forms and figures that kept me occupied, reviewing safety data and double-checking the handful of space-worthy vessels. Lunch was often something resembling a burrito with protein paste and vitamin supplements mixed into a mixture of amaranth and leafy greens held together with a grainy, seedy flatbread of sprouted amaranth flattened and emulsified with gooey, gritty chia. The afternoons were devoted to paperwork, and such meaningless meetings, where the tiniest things were debated ad infinitum. I recall with some horror an entire afternoon with Wong and Obasanjo and Nguyen, and two sergeants, discussing how many bits of ansible data was permitted for the sending of personal letters back to the Terran solar system. The sergeants were negotiating enlisted ansible time, while Nguyen was angling for some kind of give in exchange and Obasanjo and Wong and I couldn’t care less about Nguyen’s O/S updates or the enlisted letters. We just wanted to set fire to the room and walk out.

  Commanding officers were expected to be walking around, patrolling the halls to observe the enlisted who efficiently and thoroughly maintained the station with or without our help. They did good work, and nobody was a shirker. Death was too close to allow for that. Nominally, I had the flight crew under my command, but the admiral monopolized them, and I was shunted off to a side. When I did my rounds, I was often looked at like a child getting in the way of the work, and would I please move along?

  Sergeant Hobarth retired before I could fly with him. He was as old as the admiral, and as indifferent to me. His crewmen followed his lead, not mine.

  After a few months, I felt like I was only an inconvenience to everyone, that my very presence slowed everything down. I was embarrassed to say anything to them. They were so industrious and I spent my days in meetings, checking ships that were still in excellent repair, and training for a flight into the darkness beyond the galaxy that never came. I hid behind star charts and astral projections, and collated reports from the probes, naming and predicting the pathways of all the strange stray bits of rock and debris that were big enough to get a readout. Much of what was there was ship debris, leftover from the battle and tumbling away into the night. I flagged some of it for drone salvage, if we ever had a drone capable of getting out and back in a timely fashion. Very few pieces were larger than a human hand, after all. What little chunks were of any size were nearly all human in origin, or else just bits of stray meteor lost and looking for an orbit.

  I dreamed of stars, and the huge, black sky. What does the faith of the monastery teach about dreams? I know some mystic sects still interpret them, but I am uncertain what our order here teaches. I dreamed of stars and darkness, and objects floating in space, more than I dreamed of the faces of men.

  At night, after a dinner of steamed vegetables and more amaranth gruel, officers retired to their rooms to file more forms and paperwork, writing up everything that happened in the day, and everything that would happen tomorrow or next week. From there, when we finished, we were free to engage in our own pursuits. There was usually a game of cards, unless there was a meeting. The officers only played once a week. The little decks of cards were so bruised and broken, handed around every night by some small group. There was very little else to do. Imagine knowing the day every day for twenty years, and feeling the cycle of it and the heft and weight of days, an alarm that rings exactly the same, and the people and days that are all the same. As an officer, I was expected to maintain morale. I was supposed to smile and salute and click my heels and shout and bellow my commands, if I had any commands, and I had not even the pleasure of pretending to be in charge of others. I was in charge of a skeleton fleet. Seventeen vessels had passed through these walls since the station was stabilized after the battle, but only six remained, constructed from the recycled parts of all the other vessels that had worn down and been replaced, and of these only three were kept spaceworthy at any one time to preserve resources. And there were certifications, simulations on holographic screens lacking the heft and haw of true flight, lacking the gravitational shifts in zero-g when thrusters burst to life and swirl.

  Day after day, all this movement and activity and talking and preparation for a war that never came, and we didn’t even believe it would ever come. No one talked about war or defending the station. No one spent their nights gazing into the AstroNav charts and planning assaults, except the admiral and me. Both of us did this, I think, because we didn’t know what else to do. Stare out into the black ribbon darkness. Study the gap between galaxies, and wonder which direction hides the enemy’s ships. Prepare, always searching, always wondering. If they come, the colony will fall as surely as stars burning out into singularities. We have no great battleships here. To call one up would take months of construction and staffing up. To call enough to turn the tide of war would take years, and what would they eat? Where would the water come from? We know, out here, that if they do truly come, when they come, all our human activity is for nothing. Our only true hope is to be the warning bell that rings alarm, and the enemy will slow long enough to let the other colonies rise to the alarm. Thinking about this alarm, I believe my plan was slowly sinking into my mind.

  I saw the enemy ships at night in my dreams, their sleek silver obelisks and altered asteroids and reticulated hammerheads crushing into our hull, like metal fish, but without a reason or a soul.

  Always death, somewhere in the gap. Always our death just beyond the darkness between the galaxies like a black star creeping toward us against the expanding tides of the cosmos. In the ansible, in transcendence upon promotion, a rebirth somewhere new, a hope against the dark that consumes us, and the only material salvation visible where all our descendants will be but a bump on the road to war. This vanguard at the edge of the galaxies lives under the cloud of the abyss beyond the gravity well. Stare into the dark at the Laika’s edge. It is as black as blinking.

  Oh, my confessor, I have sinned against my duty, truly, but I cannot bear to feel sorry for my sinfully born sons. I cannot bring myself to it. Imagine anything else for this world. I cannot. The quartermaster says we should believe the enemy will come, at last, and the colonies will have new warships, new ramming rail guns and atomic might, and ansible mines that convert hull matter itself into the bombs that destroy the ships, but the enemy has seen our weapons, and they, too, will be evolving at the edge of some distant galaxy, or perhaps they reside in the darkness itself, so alien to us we
cannot even imagine the manner and scope of their way of life, at all.

  Admiral Diego said, every day, that he prayed to be ready, to fight this war. It seems un-Christian, but he laughed to call the enemy’s return a glory. Hear the beating drums of war? It is a kind of annihilation that grants a release of death without a loss of face or sinful suicide. I understand his chosen delusion. It kept him alive for a while.

  * * *

  The planet called to me after my fateful journey to the gas giant and the nebulous clouds there. I hear it now, even in my cell, a calling to live in peace, as far from the miserable station and the sudden death of space as I can get—to be free of this weight of lost days, joyless, meaningless work and the vast chasm of routine yawning before me, so many wasted years. I confess that I truly felt alive only in my transgression in the end. To stand out, to achieve promotion to other colonies, I needed something to change. The only true change I ever saw was an abject failure, and so early in my career, it marked me forever. With no more changes, even after Admiral Diego died, what could I do, but manufacture my own? Oh, I get ahead of myself in my confession. Let me describe my flight to the gas giant, and the bad luck that has plagued me since that night in the restaurant where I offended my friends forever.

  Flight came, at last, into the slip of darkness we called the void, for me and for a humble tech sergeant who lost the toss of a dice and was forced to ride along with the newly made pilot. It was the worst assignment, if only because the destination was a gas giant and a nebulous cloud of vapors that drones would harvest while we did nothing but float and feel our bones loosening, crawling on ladders around the hull to watch the gases separate and compress into storage, all automated and we only observers of the machine, repairing parts as needed.

  I was not allowed to fly solo. My tech, Corporal Jamila Xavier, was one of the four women on the station, an experienced tech nearly old enough to be my mother. She was calm and bored, and uninterested in dealing with a brazen ensign. She spent much of the voyage out quietly running drones along the interior, scanning for any problems, and sweeping to keep the biotics clean in our shared chamber. It was a couple weeks out to the cloud, and we remained together in the can, about fifteen feet away from each other at all times. During shift, we had to keep the curtains open, but if one of us was scheduled for sleep cycle, we could pull a curtain shut, and tie down into a sleeping bag. We had separate bathrooms, which made no sense, but officers always had separate bathrooms, for some reason, even on this tiny vessel. I expressed my displeasure at the waste of resources over such a ceremonial luxury.

  “You may think that sounds egalitarian, but it doesn’t,” she said. “I don’t want to share a bathroom with you. It’s the only privacy I have.”

  “I just mean that . . . Look, it’s ceremonial, though. It wouldn’t materially change your privacy because you could close the door, and my bathroom is larger than yours for no reason.”

  “You want to trade?”

  “We can. Do you prefer the larger one?”

  “It doesn’t win you any points with me to pretend to be on my side.”

  “I’m not trying to win points, Corporal.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “This assignment is stupid. This is just a supply run. Sergeant Anderson should have done this, by himself. I’m here to hold your little hand.”

  “I did not assign you to this mission, and I agree with you that your presence is likely unnecessary. I am not in command of staffing the mission. Do you have any complaints about my actual proficiency, Corporal?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Okay, Corporal. I was only trying to make conversation. That was my mistake. Do you need something to do?”

  “I’ve got plenty to do, Ensign. You were keeping me from my duties.”

  “I release you, then, with my apologies for the distraction.”

  I watched the dials, and their green hope, all things copacetic, within normal range. Truly, and this is no boast, but experienced pilots at HR pored over my records and found no wrongdoing on my part.

  I seeded navigation beacon data, taking in all the data and passing it on to a simulation computer, even though I knew that likely nothing would come of it. I simulated basic evasion procedures of this vessel, in case of attack. No piracy out this far, I could only dream of war and police actions that were likely to never come. Corporal Xavier discouraged my barrel rolls and twists and loops. She said this wasn’t a battleship.

  “Every ship of the line is a battleship,” I said. Gas storage vessels had been rigged into giant bombs, before, and hurtled at the enemy hull, full of drilling drones. Pilots ejected into space before impact and continued to fire sidearms during the battle until they were killed. The corporal was not really interested in war history from the academy. “Each ship has tactics and must be ready to fight.” It was drilled into me in the academy.

  “Ensign, a word of advice: Don’t believe that crap. The war was invented to fund the colonies. There are no aliens in this galaxy to compete with us. Most of space is dead zone, with minerals and gases we can use. There’s some single-celled life, but hardly anything more complex. We’ve never found an alien microbe large enough to see without a microscope. We are the only sentient life. If there are aliens, they aren’t even in radio range.”

  “You sound like Captain Obasanjo.”

  “He’s got some interesting theories,” she said. “I don’t make trouble, Ensign. I do my duty, but I understand it’s mostly an act. If it wasn’t, the enemy would have returned by now. Have you been to the planet surface?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Flying is what I wanted. I am a pilot.”

  “We get leave once every three years. You should visit the monastery. You could use some perspective. There are descendants of the veterans, still, among the monks. Talk to them about the war. There are still survivors planetside. The last battle wasn’t so long ago, way out here.”

  “Do they believe it was fake?”

  “No, but their stories are ridiculous. Shooting militarized ansibles out and constructing warships on the other side of wormholes? I am an engineering physicist and it doesn’t even make sense to do that when the supposed enemy could just fly past us to the next system, the next star. Look out there into the bottomless sky. Can you even imagine the kind of scarcity that drives a war? There is no scarcity. Once intergalactic travel opens, there is no scarcity for any civilization. Just fly on to the next star if there’s resistance. The violence we face will be intersolar only. There’s no reason to fight over territories when there’s so much free space. Even Obasanjo will tell you that. So, what the hell were the aliens doing fighting? What was anyone doing fighting? We could just push the wormhole out, build another ansible ship on the other side, and keep pushing until we’ve got all the resources in the universe. They fought . . . something. I don’t know what. It was probably just us, constructed simultaneous to the warships. We are the enemy; the enemy is us, giving humanity an excuse in the blood of clones to push into the sky.”

  I am glad that the last thing she said was meaningful to her. The black void of space all around us did not hear her. We were still a day away from the nebula. We ate in silence on either side of the screen, cleaned our mouths and did our ablutions to the little gods of flesh in our separated bathrooms. We did not even say goodnight to each other. I was sleeping first, while she watched the console. She would wake me in four hours and I would take my turn there while she slept. We would then repeat this four-hour shift again, and spend twelve hours awake, and call it the day. The computer console did all the work for us until morning, and I was responsible for checking flight systems while Corporal Xavier checked the inner hull.

  I do not recall if she was beautiful or not. I know it is a trivial detail, and matters little for her or me, but I wish to recall whether she was beautiful. I remember her as a grumpy woman, un
doubtedly exhausted from all the pressures of living and working in the station, and impatient with the new ensign who might have been flirting with her, but I know that I was not flirting with her. I was younger than her, and at night, when I dreamed of the fairer sex, it was Shui Mien with her long, black hair humming to herself while bent over her console in her work, or Corporal Adebayo Anderson arriving in darkness and smiling at me. When I woke up and took the console, Xavier was strapping hooks to her boots to do a manual check of the interior.

  “Something doesn’t look right in the drone cam,” she said. “Be right back.” She had her zero-g emergency kit on her waist; we both did. Space is tremendously dangerous. Microfractures in the pressurized hull can crackle and pop and take whole ships down. Broken shielding can flood our cockpit with stellar radiation we don’t even notice, and we die weeks later with painful tumors all through our flesh. Microbiotic revolutions can become toxic plagues. We check. We double-check. We check and check. We clean and check. Disaster always comes for us, eventually.

  I pushed the sleep from my eye, and I pulled awake, a bad feeling in my gut. “What is it?”

  “Probably a broken drone. It banged into something. They’re old. They break. I’ll be back.”

  I nodded. “Check in check in, this is supply line zero zero one,” I said, into the communicator. Obasanjo grunted at me through the com. “Good morning, sunshine,” I said.