A Sword Into Darkness

by Mays, Thomas A.

  Tomlinson looked at Lydia’s stern expression and then turned to the Defense Secretary. “Carl?”

  Sykes faced her. “Yes, Madame President?”

  “Shut the hell up and get out of my office. Your services are no longer required by my administration.”

  Sykes’ features turned darker in outrage. “What?”

  Tomlinson stood, glaring at him. “You said that ‘her team’ was killed. What you’re forgetting is that every single one of them was a sworn volunteer of the United States Armed Forces. They were our soldiers, my soldiers. It wasn’t her team on that ship, it was the US Aerospace Navy and the United States of America in proxy. We have been attacked by an alien threat, a threat which encompasses this entire planet, and as President I’m going to see their sacrifice made worthwhile.”

  Sykes held up his hands. “Madame President, they were drafted as a ploy. Surely—”

  “No. You’re done. If you value the bureaucracy you’ve built up more than the lives of the people in our military, then you’re not the soldier you used to be.” Tomlinson turned to Lydia. “Ms. Russ, you have my deepest apologies for the failure of my administration to keep up our end of the bargain, but you have my pledge that that all ends today.

  “Our nation is from this moment on a war footing. We will immediately contact our allies and fulfill our agreements for technology transfer, as we should have done long ago. We will indeed analyze the battle and ensure that any necessary design changes are implemented in both the destroyer plans as well as the astrodynamic cruiser version. Also, tomorrow, we will begin completion of the Swords of Justice, Independence, and Freedom. Their crews will be fast-tracked to full readiness, and we will launch all three by year’s end. I guarantee it.

  “And in light of what has occurred, it is my intention before the week is out to lay down the hull of our next destroyer … DA-5, the Sword of Vengeance.”

  16: “PATRONS”

  Date Unknown; USS Sword of Liberty (DA-1), location unknown; Mission Day ???

  Nathan Kelley screamed.

  Despite the anti-nausea meds, his stomach flopped about, churning with anxious bile, threatening to disgorge its bitter acid up his throat and into his helmet. Cocooned within his Charlie Station pod, he spun chaotically about with the forward half of the ship, but the sickness that prepared to overcome him was only partly due to the motion. There was instead something that concerned him far, far more.

  He screamed again. “Kris!!”

  She—and ten others—had been aft in the engineering spaces, spaces which were now cut free of the mission hull and whatever remained of the flayed apart radiator spine. He had no hope whatsoever that she could hear him on the general net, but it did not stop his anguished cries.

  “Kris! Talk to me, Kris!”

  Nathan’s helmet telltales flickered without any sense of order. The battle VR was filled with static, intermittent status bars, and multiple “blue screens of death” from systems cut off from their power source, their networks, and any semblance of connectivity. He could tell nothing about anything. For all he knew, he was the only one left alive aboard either half of the destroyer.

  “Damn it, someone answer me! Kris!!”

  A piercing whine shot through his ears. He winced and then froze as he heard an acerbic voice reply. “Jesus, Nathan. Would you just shut the fuck up for one minute?”

  Nathan smiled desperately. It was Edwards. “COB! It’s damn good to hear your voice. Listen, have you got any data? I lost everything after that beam cut through the ship’s spine. Do you know what’s going on with Engineering?”

  “No, Skipper, I don’t, but if you don’t mind me saying it, you need to chill the fuck out. When I got my comms back, all I could hear was your heart bleeding over the damn net, and while I understand it, it’s the last friggin’ thing any of us need right now.”

  Nathan said nothing, chastened into silence.

  Edwards continued. “I know you’re worried about Kris—and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re worried about the rest of us too—but she and the other engineers are like concern number twenty-seven on the list I’ve got running through my head. I need you to start with concern one and work your way down it, not the other way around. So, are you gonna captain, Captain, or do I need to cut your air off and let our happy-go-lucky XO take over?”

  Nathan opened his mouth to bite back, but he closed it again with an audible snap and allowed himself to think instead of simply reacting. A few moments later, he keyed his mike again. “No, COB, you can keep me breathing. I’m sorry.”

  “S’all right, Skipper. Next time we’re half a light-year from home and aliens chop my ship in half, with my sweetie in the wrong half, it’ll be my turn to freak out.”

  Nathan chuffed a laugh, despite everything. “Can I at least hope that your little counseling session was on a private channel?”

  Edwards’ voice was full of good humor. “Hey, who’s the Master Chief around here? Of course it was. Fact is, all the nets are down. I only heard you after I opened a pod-to-pod channel.

  Nathan nodded to himself. “Okay. I don’t know what you had as concern one on that list, but my first proper concern is situational awareness. I’ve got nothing on my VR, and we need to know where we are and what’s going on before we can even start handling things.”

  “Roger that, sir. I’m in the same boat.”

  “Fine. If the nets are down and pod-to-pod comms are the only thing up, then we need to work through that. Kill the circuit with me and try to raise the XO, have him raise Damage Control Central, then CIC, then Weps, and so on. Work out a phone tree between the pair of you and see who’s still with us and if anything’s still working.”

  “And what will you be doing, sir?”

  “I’m going to crack my pod and see what’s up firsthand.”

  “Whoa there, Cap’n Kirk. You need to let somebody else boldly go first. There’s no telling if we’re open to space, irradiated, or hip deep in nano-machines, not to mention this wicked spin we’ve got going on at the moment. All you can say right now is that your pod is safe, so that’s where you should stay.”

  “Negative, COB. I wish this spin was gone too, but—”

 

  whiteness pervaded

  shining in incandescence

  nathan moved his arms freely

  no longer encumbered

  no longer restrained

 

  Nathan started and jerked, but now was held fast by the pod’s gel once more. The momentary bright glow was gone as well. After images filled his vision, negatives of whatever the source of light had been, as if he had looked into a bank of spotlights or the sun.

  A mike clicked in his ears and Edwards’ voice spoke. “What … the hell … was that?”

  Nathan shook his head. “I haven’t got a clue, but we don’t have time to keep arguing about it. Our visitors are still out there, doing whatever they want with us. Get started on contacting everyone. I’m leaving the pod to figure out what’s going on.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Do you feel it, though?”

  “Feel what?”

  “The spin. It’s gone. The Deltans steadied us up somehow during that weird … moment. Right after you wished for it.”

  Nathan grunted. “I doubt my wishes had anything to do with it. They probably steadied us up to examine us, if we’re lucky.”

  Edwards finished his thought. “Or they steadied us up in order to flay us more precisely, if we’re unlucky.”

  “Yep. I’m out.” Nathan cut off the circuit and reached methodically through the force-dampening gel to the pod’s emergency release. He pulled the lever and the whole pod vibrated. The gel cleared away, sucked back into its own reservoirs. The VR screen over his faceplate pulled away and the shell opened. His chair slid up and forward, returning to its usual position in the bridge. A thin layer of the alcohol-based gel that had clung to him boiled away in the near vacuum of the co
mpartment.

  Other than the lack of air, and the absence of the other acceleration couches, everything looked normal on the bridge. No aliens lay in wait for them. He reached over and drew his screens and control panels toward him. Unlike the ones they duplicated in the battle VR, these worked.

  Every system was offline. Power was gone and both the screens and the space’s lights ran on battery back-ups only. Along with the aft half of the ship, the reactor and propulsion were cut off. The weapon system and auxiliary propulsion capacitor banks were fully charged, though. Without the reactor, they were the only sources of power the mission hull had once the battery back-ups ran out in a few hours. Nathan considered the situation. If he shut down the systems they usually powered and isolated the banks, they could conceivably keep life support and the auxiliary systems running for a few days.

  Nathan shook his head in dismay. A few days. There was little point to stretching their survival time to a few days when it would take years for the alien formation to reach Earth, but perhaps in that time, they might learn something about the Deltans, something they could still transmit back home.

  He shut down the missile sub-systems, the railgun, and diode laser banks, then did the same for the photonic reaction thruster pylons, conserving their precious energy, Finally, he tripped the breakers to the banks themselves. To re-route the power, they would have to cut out some main bus diodes and reverse some connections. It was a task Kris would relish.

  Or one she would have relished.

  Nathan stopped himself from thinking down that path, and refocused on the tasks at hand. All sensors and comms were down as well, but while the radar needed a level of power that he did not have, and could not have afforded to waste anyway, he did have backup power on the passive sensor systems. He reset the hull cameras and took a look around.

  The tactical computer was still offline, so his view lacked the smooth, easy sweep of their combined picture, as well as the false color vector data that usually helped make sense of the vastness around them, but he could see a few things. They drifted over the drive-star, with the Control Ship just visible above the star’s horizon, pretty much where she had been during the final moments of the battle. Had they been just a bit fleeter, just slightly quicker, they could have escaped.

  He shook his head and switched cameras. Many of the small, hull-mounted sensors were broken or still offline, but others were blocked. By what, he could not tell, but as he switched from camera to camera he finally found the engineering hull.

  Tattered pieces of the radiator spine remained, fitfully spraying clouds of vapor and coolant from shorn lines and shafts. The reactor and the drive itself looked battle scarred but intact.

  Nathan breathed a sigh of relief.

  Kris’s broken half of the ship drifted steadily several miles from the mission hull, its spin also halted. Bracketing the aft hull was a silvery cage or framework that had presumably been put together by the Deltans, perhaps sent out from the Control Ship or even constructed in place by the nano-machines fired by the silvery beam Kris had overcome. He had no idea what its purpose was, but a similar cage was probably what blocked several of his own cameras.

  He reached for a communications icon, to try and call the aft hull or the re-trans pod when—

 

  bright flash again

  all is lost in a haze of white

  sense of motion

  nathan flails

 

  His arms swung wildly and he smacked his forearm painfully on one of his screens. “Damn it!” he complained, cradling his forearm in sharp self-reproach. He took a look at the camera view again. The aft hull was gone.

  Nathan frantically searched through the cameras until he found it again. It had jumped, now directly behind them and close. In addition, the Control Ship lay immediately in front of them, big enough and near enough to fill the views of several cameras at once. Whether it had moved or they had moved in that brief moment of bright nothingness, he could not say.

  He considered putting the weapons back online, but the alien ship was so massive relative to their remaining firepower that it would do little good. However, as he watched in mounting horror, the overlapping plates of the lobster-like Control Ship began to slide apart and open up, revealing a dark interior, an interior into which they were undoubtedly about to be drawn.

  Nathan reached for the lasers—

 

  bright white again

  nathan’s fingers blindly grope

  skitter across the panel

  nothing happens

 

  The Bridge returned to dim normality. Nathan struggled to understand. The glow that filled his vision during those terrifying moments of nothingness was not source-less. The glow’s brightest spots were analogous to the actual recessed lights on the bridge. It was as if all their light became thousands of times more powerful, as if the photons had become physical things themselves, drifting around him like a fog of light.

  That was significant somehow, but he had no idea what it meant. Nathan shook his head, and scrolled through the cameras. The scene had changed again. The aft hull was nowhere to be seen, and the mission hull was surrounded on all sides, locked into place by brackets, spars, and webs of material.

  They were inside the Control Ship.

  Nathan shifted panels and frantically closed the breakers to the laser capacitor banks, trying to bring the lasers back online. Where they had been operational but useless before, though, now all he saw were red status icons. During the moment of discontinuity, not only had the ship been captured and secured, but the lasers had been either physically disabled or removed.

  Nathan checked the railgun, and found much the same story. He shook his head and secured their capacitor banks once more.

  Following that, he reset the internal comms system and called Edwards’ pod. “COB, Captain. I’ve got us stable for the moment, but we’ve got some work to do if we’re going to last beyond a few hours. And the situation up here is … unsettling.”

  Edwards’ voice crackled back into his ear. “Roger that, Skipper. Hey, I had a couple more of those whiteout moments. Any idea what’s going on with them?”

  Nathan frowned. “Yeah, I’ve got an idea, but I don’t like it. It plays into our situation up here. How many of the crew do we have?”

  “The XO’s still touching base with his half, but pod-to-pod works for everyone I called, and the general net came online right before you called me.”

  “Right,” Nathan said. “I reset the comm system from my regular panel. Those are still working. In fact, why don’t you have everyone crack their pods, and we’ll go back to standard ops. Or as standard as it’s going to get with the current situation.”

  “Aye aye. I’ll see you in a second.”

  Nathan continued checking out the status of the ship, and scrolling through the cameras out to the interior of the alien vessel. No Deltans presented themselves, at least not in any sort of recognizable form. The amber-glowing interior of the Control Ship was made up of silvery braces, gossamer webs of fine wire, articulated cables, black humps, and strangely shaped protrusions of multicolored, glossy material, blinking lights, and a thousand other things of unknown function, purpose, or design. He shook his head in wonder, still fascinated with the idea of their first contact, even though the reality of it had proved less than ideal.

  Pods began to open, returning everyone’s acceleration couches to their usual positions. Nathan released his straps and pulled himself up and over to Christopher Wright, whose suit and helmet steamed with evaporating gel. He reached out and clasped hands with his XO.

  Wright smiled tightly at him, his eyes full of concern. “Captain, any sign of the engineering hull?”

  “Yes, I saw it. It looked intact, but where it is now, I have no idea. We seem to be inside the Control Ship, so I imagine Kris and the others are inside here somewhere as well.”

  “I
nside? Have the aliens made any attempt at communicating with us?”

  “No, not that I’ve been aware of. They put some sort of framework around the two halves of the ship, and then they moved us in during those weird breaks in reality, but I haven’t seen or heard from anyone or anything.”

  Wright grimaced. “Yes, I’d noticed those, but I didn’t know what to make of them.”

  Nathan was about to respond when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Edwards floated at his side, having returned from checking on the other Bridge watchstanders. Nathan smiled and shook his Master Chief’s hand.

  He turned back to Wright and then went on. “I think the Deltans can manipulate our sense of time somehow. When each of those discontinuities occurs, things change up or shift all of a sudden. I have no idea how it’s done, but I think they’re putting us into some sort of stasis, freezing us in place while they move us around. Maybe the light gets brighter because even though we’re moving at a much slower rate, the light is still being emitted normally, so it looks brighter to us.”

  Wright frowned. “Or it’s being slowed down as well, but we’re seeing all the wavelengths at once, even the ones outside our normal visual spectrum. Blue shifting thermal radiation into our visible range?”

  Edwards shook his head. “Hey, yeah, or maybe we’re seeing all the dust sprinkled by the Sandman. Listen, those sorts of details aren’t really our primary concern at the moment, sirs. What matters is, if what you’re saying is right, the Deltans can freeze us and do whatever they want at their leisure. How do we defend against that?”

  Nathan shrugged. “I haven’t a clue, but I know the Deltans are mindful of our defenses.” He told them about the disabled weapon systems, and what he planned to do with their capacitor banks in order to keep the ship running for a while.

  Wright nodded. “All right, Captain. That could work. But, if we’re going to have to rewire the power system and re-air the ship, we need to begin immediately, before our suit air runs out.”

  “And patch up any breaches from the battle,” Edwards added. “Not only do we not want our atmo venting out, we don’t want any of whatever the Deltan’s breathe getting in.”