A Sword Into Darkness

by Mays, Thomas A.

  But that would not happen, not now.

  He shook his head and turned back to Kris. Her anger had ebbed enough that she could see how deeply he hurt. He could see the compassion rising in her eyes. Nathan took a step closer. His voice dropped to a near whisper. “We lost it, Kris. It happened just like Gordon warned it would, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do to stop it.”

  “What—”

  “They nationalized us,” he said in a louder, grimmer tone. “Sykes must have been planning for this from the very moment the government began bankrolling the program. Now that the ship is done and the mission is no longer political suicide, he made his move. It’s not just you who’s lost your access. It’s all of us. As of this afternoon, the Sword of Liberty and the entire Special Projects division of Windward Technologies Inc. are wholly-owned properties of the United States government, managed by the Department of Defense.”

  Anger colored her face again, almost making it match the glowing crimson of her hair, but this time her ire was not aimed at him. “They can’t do that! You said Gordon had agreements, contracts that clearly laid out the boundaries of who owned what!”

  He nodded sadly. “That’s right, but you’ll find that contracts are hard to enforce when the things they concern are classified at a higher level than any court that’s authorized to work out disputes. We relied on the magnanimity of the Beltway, which goes completely by the wayside when you start edging up on national security issues. And when Congress found out we had our own unregulated nuclear arsenal, and that a bunch of non-military eggheads were going to be negotiating with an advanced alien race for the fate of the planet … well, they were only too happy to back up the SECDEF in his power grab.”

  Kris looked like she was about to scream, but then her face just fell, her fury shorted out. He could see all the emotions she had built up through hours of wild speculation and worry over betrayal simply vanish, leaving behind a numb, empty shell, another soul hollowed out by the bureaucracy. To Nathan, it was a recognizable moment, that realization of defeat.

  She turned and sat down on the couch, moving slowly as her mind tried to sort things out. Nathan was grateful. His fatigue and his own drained emotions conspired to sap him of whatever energy still kept him standing. He walked over and flopped down on the plump tan couch next to her. The cushions were bliss. He laid his head back.

  Kris leaned over, her elbows on her knees, her hands massaging her temples. “What happens now? Are we out-out? Or are we just out for the moment?”

  He looked over at her. He was so tired, but he had worked through all of this hours ago and he did not want her to rack her mind through all the permutations he himself had turned to and discarded, one by dismal one. “Yes, we’re out-out. Apparently, we’re national assets, you more than me. We’re needed down here, to oversee and guide the construction of the fleet, assuming of course that they even decide to build one.”

  “A monkey could do that now,” she snarled, some anger still alive within her. “The ship is designed! Anyone could take our specs and build another. I’m not needed for that. I’m needed where the damn first contact team might run into something we never planned on!”

  Nathan shook his head. “Be that as it may, your new place is here. A combined Navy-Air Force crew will take up Liberty, and they’ll make first contact. They’re dependable. They’re expendable. They’re not us.”

  “So I build their damn starship, and I don’t even get a ride? That’s complete BS!”

  He shrugged. “I know, but Lydia and I were able to get a couple of concessions, at least. We will get to go up. We’ll launch the ship, carry out the test trials with the military crew, and then we’ll return to Earth. One ticket, one joyride, but no mission.”

  She slumped back on the couch, to slouch as he was. She looked over at him. “And what about the mission? What about the whole reason we built the ship in the first place?”

  Nathan smiled tightly. “The ship will stay in orbit while they re-evaluate the mission plan, and train on the operational systems. When the DOD decides they’re ready, they’ll go. I’m sure we’ll get a nice mission patch or something, but as of this afternoon, the fate of the world no longer rests on our shoulders.”

  Kris turned her head and stared at the ceiling. “Good god, this sucks.”

  “Yeah.” He looked at her in profile, smiling softly to himself despite how horribly the day had turned out. Kristene was here, and for some reason that seemed to make everything all right. He watched her stare ahead, working furiously and hopelessly through all the angles of their new reality for as long as he could. But after a few moments, his eyelids drooped, the world fell away, and he slept, admitting defeat at last.

  After some unknown time, as quick as an eye blink, or as long as hours, the world came back. He awoke refreshed, renewed, and unreasonably content. The worries of his long day did not seem to matter as much. Something was different, with either himself or the world, but the difference was a welcome one.

  As he rose further from the comforting depths of sleep, he realized that something indeed was changed about the world, a world defined at the moment by just his senses of touch and smell. Now, before he dared to open his eyes, the limits of his existence were bounded by the pleasant warmth and the reassuring pressure of someone by his side, by the fresh, indescribable scent of a woman’s hair.

  Nathan opened his eyes and looked over to see Kris’ head lying against his shoulder. She looked back at him with red-rimmed eyes, unspent tears gathered at their corners.

  She said nothing, gave him no explanation for why she was there, for why she might have been crying. There was nothing that needed to be said, however. For her, things between them had never really changed, only delayed. For him, the only thing that had changed was the realization that his stoicism and his denials had been for nothing. His rejections had not saved the project. They had only put off what they both wanted, what they both knew was the right and necessary thing.

  His reasons for doing what he had done had been valid and objectively wise, but they also no longer applied. They did not need to hold him back anymore.

  Nathan circled his arms around Kris and leaned toward her. She reached up and drew him into a kiss, gentle and slow, the fulfillment of an unspoken promise that had been made in his office one night nearly two years before. Over time, time that passed unnoticed and unheeded, their kiss grew more heated, more insistent.

  The pleasant warmth that lay between them became an unbearable heat. Lying on the couch together, they each quickly shed their encumbering clothing and yielded to the pull of unrealized needs, to the weight of years spent orbiting about one another, waiting for this moment.

  Later still, so late that it was early, Nathan lay back in his bed, holding her close to him, reveling in the sensation of her skin in contact with his own. His hands roamed aimlessly across her back, tracing the colorful tattoos that extended up from her left arm and across half her back, massaging or idly stroking with no rhythm or regularity. It was just something to do, something he had always wanted to do, but which he had never admitted to himself before. He enjoyed the slight shivers that went through her when his touch was lightest.

  They looked at each other and, seemingly on cue, they both started giggling, laughing over nothing but new-found joy. It was as if they were two children who had discovered the hidden wonder and magic in the everyday world, like suddenly finding the rainbow spun off a crystal in sunlight.

  Kris rolled over and lay next to him on her back, in contact, but not so close now that he could feel every heartbeat. She pulled the sheet down, carrying nothing for modesty and happy for a chance to cool off. She looked at him. “You know, I’ve been thinking … .”

  “You can still think?” he asked, smiling. “Wow. That’s one up on me.”

  Kris smiled back. “Stop it. I’ve been thinking, is the SECDEF a bad guy, someone who just wants the tech for himself, under his control? Or is he right, that we shou
ldn’t be trusted with something this big, that just because we thought it up and we built it, we aren’t necessarily the right choice to actually go?”

  Nathan frowned and reached for her hand, entwining her fingers with his own and kissing them gently. He brought their arms down between their prone forms, still holding her hand lightly. “I don’t know. I don’t know him well enough to say. Just because someone didn’t get along with Gordon or Lydia, doesn’t automatically mean they’re evil or wrong.”

  “But it’s not exactly a vote in his favor, either.”

  “No, definitely not. Still, Gordon had his quirks, and not everybody appreciated them. I guess I’d have to hope that Carl Sykes did what he did out of a genuine sense of duty and concern for the nation. But I was there. I saw him and the way he operates. He may have nothing but altruistic motives, but how he gets his way is nothing short of criminal.”

  Kris rose up on one elbow and turned toward him, making it difficult for him to concentrate suddenly. “Eyes up here, fearless leader.” He locked gazes with her and they both smiled. She nodded. “Tell me, is what Sykes doing the right thing or not? Is this mission delay and crew swap a better plan in the end, objectively? Or do you stand by the crew you picked out, the mission you’ve been planning?”

  There was no hesitation on his part. “Getting out to the Deltans sooner rather than later is a better plan. Going out there with the people we trust and who we’ve worked with for so long is the right plan.” Nathan sighed. “But it’s out of our hands now. Why ask?

  She leaned in to him, her lips brushing his earlobe, whispering, “Because if we only get one chance to be on that ship, we’d better make it count for something.”

  11: “TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS”

  March 6, 2045; USS Sword of Liberty (DA-1), aboard RLV Cauldron; Pacific Ocean, 400 nautical miles off the California coast

  Miles and miles from any shipping lane, and barren of any unauthorized traffic, a very unusual naval exercise was underway. The carriers, cruisers, and destroyers of the US Pacific Fleet had scoured the waves for days, working in concert with satellites, aircraft, towed-array sonar surveillance ships, and submarines to ensure not one person was within weapons or sensory range of that particular spot in the ocean.

  Having cleared the seas, the naval assets withdrew to a safe distance of 100 nautical miles and formed a defensive ring, allowing no man, boat, sub, plane, or leviathan to cross their barrier.

  At the center of this ring, a very unusual ship sat alone, doing a very unusual thing.

  The Reconfigurable Launch Vessel Cauldron had served as the womb of mankind’s first true spaceship. Within this strange, boxy vessel, the ship that would change the world had been assembled, in pieces, under the shadowy oversight of the US government at the innocuous Ingmar Rammstahl Shipbuilding Company in Santa Clara, California.

  For the last two and a half years, the Cauldron had floated high in the water, with her vast, enclosed bay’s floor well above the ocean’s surface. But as the child of the future grew in her belly, her draft had slowly grown deeper. This mothership was more of floating drydock than a ship in her own right, but she could do things that no respectable drydock would ever be caught doing.

  Now, alone at the center of the US Navy’s costly ring of solitude, the Cauldron appeared to be sinking. Over the span of hours, her bow lifted into the air while her stern dipped below the waves. Yet, she was not the victim of some random, tragic casualty. This was by design, through the careful pumping of ballast from one tank to another.

  The angle of her hull increased steadily as her bow lifted up and up into the salt-laden sea air. Eventually, the drydock vessel became less of a ship and more of a tower—a tall, stable, enclosed gantry, floating isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And once the tower was finally erected, the bow blossomed open to reveal another, very different bow hidden inside.

  For a brief moment, the wind and the sea gave pause, becoming calm and glassy, as if the sight of this strange ship/tower about to give birth to another ship were enough to shock nature itself into stillness. Then, silence and calm vanished as the Cauldron exploded in light and sound. Here, a new force of nature was unleashed upon the planet.

  Blue-white energy stabbed down into the ocean, instantly boiling tons of seawater, producing superheated clouds of steam that pushed outward with the force and the speed of a nuclear detonation. The hollow bulkheads and frame of the Cauldron came apart like kindling and the Sword of Liberty was revealed for the first time, balanced upon her hexagonal stern, riding atop a lance of pure energy in the center of an expanding crater in the ocean.

  The enormous, wedge-topped tower of the spacecraft fell slightly as her thrust built—but then the fall reversed itself and she began to rise, faster and faster, driven by a force equivalent to firecracker strings of nuke, after nuke, after nuke. The ship rocketed upwards at ever climbing Mach values, wind tearing at the thin aeroshells that protected her bow, antennas, and radiator panels.

  The drive effect pulled away from the surface of the ocean and floods of seawater rushed in to fill the steamy, conical depression carved out in the ocean by the launch. Water geysered up hundreds of feet into the air, a final, petulant slap at the ship from Mother Earth, for having stricken her so deeply.

  The attending ships, their crews gawking in awe at the spectacular launch, were unfortunately forced to turn away from the show by the simple need to survive. Atmospheric shockwaves from the continuous torch of energy were bad enough, throwing out hurricane-level gust fronts to set the ships heeling over, but the tidal wave was worse.

  The transition of that much water to steam, and the accompanying inrushing flood and geyser were enough to set the whole ocean ringing like a bell. Solid bands of physical force expanded out from the launch point at the speed of sound through water, many times that of sound through air. The height of the ring fell steadily, but the energy remained, undissipated. The surface shockwave crossed the safety buffer of 100 kilometers in a few short moments and struck the warships with the abruptness of a hammer-fall.

  Smaller ships were nearly tossed out of the water, lifted up high by the front of the wave and then left hanging as its sharp tail receded in a flash. Steel frames warped and cracked to such a degree that it would be years before all the ships would have a chance to go to drydock for repairs. Then the tidal wave vanished over the horizon to spread its influence around the globe, leaving the dazed sailors behind.

  It would strike the California coast with the greatest ferocity, crunching a few seaside homes which had long staved off the creep of the Pacific, “safe” upon stilts. Wrecked too were several ocean-view roads, and an older pier or two, but no one died, having been mysteriously pre-warned by NOAA and the USGS who had uncannily predicted the likelihood of a small tidal wave in the immediate future. Elsewhere, the wave would strike limply, causing no real damage. It simply spread out, distributing its energy uniformly, bouncing and rebounding off of coastlines and seamounts, passing back through the ocean over and over, becoming less and less pronounced, until its presence was indistinguishable from the normal ebb and flow of the seas.

  High above, and becoming higher still, the Sword of Liberty pierced the atmosphere and left the confines of the Earth. The blue skies of the western hemisphere faded to black, and the roar of air molecules rushing by the hull faded away, leaving the ship to pass on in silence. The drive effect made no real sound when it was not burning air or water to plasma. However, if it could have been possible, an observer pressed against the hull might still have heard one thing—a singular voice crying out into the darkness.

  “Yeeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaaaa!!!”

  Lying on his acceleration couch in the bridge/control room of the Sword of Liberty, Colonel Calvin Henson, USAF, NASA, winced and keyed his microphone. “Ms. Muñoz, can you please refrain from doing that?”

  Her emphatic cry cut off in mid-Haaaaa and she cleared her throat. Kris smiled despite the two gravities of acceleratio
n pushing her down in her own couch in Engineering and answered in her most demure and respectful tone. “I’m sorry, Colonel, I really don’t think I can. If I only get one ride on this tub, I plan to make the most of it. Now then, Wooooooooo Hooo—”

  Her voice vanished as the new Commanding Officer of the United States’ first space destroyer cut off the intercom circuit to Engineering. He muttered to himself and tried to keep up with the massive streams of data inundating him from his displays and automated status boards. Nathan risked turning his head to look at the frustrated veteran astronaut seated next to him and tried not to smile too broadly.

  Henson made some adjustments to the data he frantically monitored on his personal screen, and mirrored on the main screen. He keyed into the now silent command circuit again. “Pilot—I mean XO, standby to cut thrust. Stable orbit in five, four, three, two, one, and shutdown.”

  Before the Executive Officer, Commander Daniel Torrance, USN, could touch the control to cut off the drive, the computer did it for him, having completed its programmed launch flawlessly. All sense of weight disappeared and the XO jumped slightly as he began to feel like he was falling. The former submariner stayed his hand from the superfluous shutoff command and keyed into the command circuit instead. “Captain,” he said, feeling unnatural addressing a non-Navy officer as such, “shutdown completed on schedule, stable orbit … achieved.” As he finished, another unnatural feeling began to overwhelm him.

  Henson recognized the XO’s hesitation for what it was and keyed into the general announcing circuit, overriding all of the other comms circuits. “All personnel, this is your CO. We have reached orbit and are en route to rendezvous with the International Space Station. We’re finished with the scary, exciting part, so all we have to look forward to at the moment is the hard part, the actual work of space. There’s a lot to be tested and verified before we move on to the tactical phase, so I urge you to focus on your task list and try not to spend all your time doing somersaults and bouncing off the bulkheads.