Trapped

by Scott Bartlett

  “So we can’t jump out of here thanks to the structure of this pocket universe, but they can jump in and out of space with impunity because of it?” Shota shook his head. “I wouldn’t exactly call that a breakthrough.”

  Had the man forgotten that he was addressing an admiral? It was one thing for Husher to eschew proper forms of address, in private—Iver invited that kind of open, honest communication from him—but he drew the line at some uppity commander still wet behind the ears.

  “I wasn’t asking you to characterize the information for me, Commander. In fact, I was informing you. That’s the typical relationship between admirals and commanders. I inform, you obey.”

  Shota frowned, but seemed otherwise unfazed.

  Husher seemed to ignore the exchange entirely. “So we’ve still made no progress toward returning home. We’re still trapped.”

  Iver nodded. “Seems that way.”

  “Where are we going, then?”

  “Damned if I know,” Iver said. “As far as we can get from these things.”

  “But you just said they can jump through space to find us. Sure, we can keep warping from system to system to evade them, but eventually our capacitors will be depleted. They’ll have us cornered, then.”

  “True…except, there’s something we haven’t discussed yet.”

  Husher raised his eyebrows.

  Iver’s smile widened. “It looks like we got that ally we were looking for.” He looked up from his console, which displayed Husher’s and Shota’s likenesses, at the CIC’s main viewscreen, where a number of yellow neutral icons were following the green friendlies. In the last few minutes, the distance between the two groups had been closing. It seemed their new alien friends were deciding they could trust humans enough to come a little closer.

  “Have they communicated with us yet?” Husher asked.

  “Yes, but we still can’t understand their language very well. We are making progress—enough that we have a name for them, at least: Scions. Even so, we don’t yet know enough to have a normal conversation. We’ve given them the coordinates we’re jumping to, in mathematical format. All we can do is hope they can process them.”

  Husher fell silent, his eyes narrowed in thought.

  “How are you doing, Husher? With what we just did?”

  As he so often did, the man instantly grasped what Iver was talking about. “I did it, sir. Sending that bastard in my place was my idea.”

  “It was on my watch. And it was ultimately my call.”

  Husher’s shoulders fell almost imperceptibly. “Let’s hope it was the right one.”

  “It was. His hands weren’t just red with blood. They were soaked in it. He bathed in that blood. There’s no reason for us to feel sorry for him.”

  “Even so. We turned a prisoner under our watch over to his death.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.” Iver decided not to share that the remote link with the bastard’s pressure suit had gone dead, which didn’t suggest good things about his survival prospects.

  Iver worried about Husher. The events in the Progenitor system had hardened him, but Iver sensed there was a fragility underneath—something waiting to break. The shock of what his double had done, and then of what he’d done to stop him: those things were weighing on his mind. They could even be affecting his judgment.

  Iver had ordered the doctor on the Relentless to investigate that question, but so far he’d been unable to get Husher to commit to a session. Perhaps it was time to tell Guzman to stop being so nice about it. He didn’t need him to carry out a full psych evaluation; he just needed to know his best man was still his best.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Husher. How are you doing with sending that monster over?”

  “If I’m being honest with myself, I have a bad feeling about it.”

  That made Iver blink, as he strove to maintain a neutral expression. Despite his words, he shared Husher’s foreboding. He couldn’t quite pin it down, but there it was.

  Chapter 33

  Medical Services Bay

  UHC Relentless

  “That wasn’t as terrible as I thought it would be,” Fesky said.

  Husher grinned. “I’ll pass your ringing endorsement on to Doctor Guzman.”

  “What did you think of it?” Fesky gave him a sideways glance. The Winger’s feathers made a soft hiss as they walked down the corridor of the Relentless toward the lift at the far end of the level.

  “It wasn’t the worst way to spend an hour.”

  Fesky snorted. “Sounds like we both have nothing but fine things to say about the doc.”

  The two of them had just had their first joint session with Doctor Guzman. The doctor had said the session wouldn’t delve into anything too deeply, and Fesky had made sure of that. Husher wondered how the doc could ever come to change his mind if she didn’t open up. It was hard to make a psych evaluation on someone who didn’t speak.”

  “You weren’t terribly forthcoming.”

  Fesky shrugged. “You don’t really think he’s going to clear me to fly based on anything I say in there, do you?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I think that’s the whole point of these sessions, Fesky. If you want to get back in the cockpit of a Python, you need to convince Guzman to clear you for duty.”

  Fesky didn’t say anything for several seconds. “It’s hard, Captain.” She didn’t look at him as she said it, just stared straight ahead down the empty corridor. “You don’t understand what happened out there.”

  Husher nodded, but said nothing, not wanting to break whatever spell Fesky was under out here. This was more than she’d said in the last hour, in front of the doc. Maybe he could pass along some of this to Guzman. Husher desperately wanted his friend to be well enough to fly. It would be good for her.

  And better for the Relentless.

  She clacked her beak as she took in a ragged breath. “It’s not just what the Progenitors did to me. Not even what your…twin…did to me.”

  Husher didn’t like the way she said ‘twin.’ She made it sound like he and that evil bastard from the Progenitor universe were just two sides of the same coin. But he let it pass.

  “You know how Wingers evolved on Spire?” she asked.

  Husher was taken aback by the abrupt change in topic. Spire was the homeworld of the Wingers, or had been, before it was destroyed by the Gok in the First Galactic War. “I can’t say that I know the details, no. Unless there’s something specifically to do—”

  “The Fins. We evolved with them. They were our sister species, in every sense of the word. We grew dependent on them, which probably sounds funny to you. Humans have nothing like it in their history. Hell, I can’t think of another species that does And on top of that, for a bird species and a fish species to be so intertwined in their evolution is…strange.”

  Husher shrugged. “Evolution is often strange.”

  She continued like he hadn’t said anything. “It was bad enough to lose Spire and the Fins. But after what—” Her voice broke. “—after what happened with your twin, I…I.…” She stopped walking.

  Husher stopped beside her, unsure of what he should say, if anything. He chose to say nothing.

  “It wasn’t just the torture. It’s that afterward, I lost touch with Ek.”

  Husher frowned. This was the first he’d heard of that. Ek and Fesky had once been inseparable, intertwined by friendship as much as evolution, at least as far as Husher could tell.

  “I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t look at her again after all that. She tried. She came to visit when she could, but she had her own family to care for. We lived so far apart. The systems aren’t as easy to travel now as they were before the war.”

  “How long has it been?”

  Fesky shook her head. Again, she drew a ragged breath. “Years. It’s been years since I saw her, and somehow that makes my memories of the torture that much worse. I can barely stand it.”

  Husher understood now. F
esky had been dealing with all of this on her own. She’d been trying to hold it together, trying to come to terms with what had happened to her, but the one creature in the universe that she needed to be with, the one creature who could fill the void after that experience, wasn’t there. And the impact was so much the worse for it.

  “It’s not your fault,” Husher said. “None of it. Not the torture. Not the pain. Not the separation from Ek. None of that is your fault.”

  Fesky nodded and started moving forward again, like Husher had said exactly what she’d expected. He couldn’t help but feel it had also been exactly the wrong thing to say.

  “I was always filling that void before by fighting enemies in my fighter,” she said as they finally reached the lift.

  “I’m not sure that’s the healthiest reason for you to be in a starfighter. But for the record, I do want you back in one. We need you out there fighting these things as much as you need to be doing it.”

  Fesky nodded. “But?”

  “But we need to get you cleared by Doctor Guzman.” The conversation had come full circle, in a frustrating way. He had more information, but precious little he could do with it.

  “That’s a bit of a catch-22, isn’t it?”

  He took a deep breath. “We’ll keep trying.”

  The lift doors slid aside, and Fesky stepped in. She reached across the doorway, blocking Husher as she reached for the control pad. “I don’t think we’re going the same way, Captain.”

  Before he could think of anything to say, the doors closed.

  Chapter 34

  Combat Information Center

  UHC Relentless

  “Down transit in five…four...three...two…one.”

  The CIC viewscreen snapped to life, full of stars. A pair of planets forming a tight orbit around a small gas giant took up a portion of the viewscreen. Like the rest of this universe, and the galaxy that seemed to define the edges of it, this system seemed inordinately tight. He could almost feel the entire battle group experiencing claustrophobia as the ships arrived around the Relentless one by one, dropping out of warp.

  “Nearspace contacts,” Winterton reported, his voice clipped but clear. “It’s our new allies, sir. The Scions.”

  Husher felt his heart rate drop just a tad. “And our other out-of-town friends?”

  “No sign of the Brood.”

  Husher glanced at his XO. “Gotta have something go our way.”

  “Do we?” Shota asked.

  “Good point.”

  “We’re getting a transmission,” said the Coms officer.

  “From the Scion?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How long until the admiral’s ship transits out of warp?”

  “The Providence should be here in two minutes,” Fontaine said.

  “Very well. Patch the Scion message through.”

  “It’s repeating,” Long said.

  The sound that greeted them wasn’t words. It was a series of sounds of different lengths and pitches that repeated in a pattern.

  “What are we listening to, Lieutenant?” But Husher realized the answer even before he’d finished talking. “It’s a pattern. That’s numerical.”

  Shota nodded. “Math seems to be a language we can all agree on.” Shota said.

  Fontaine had a pure math background, and she was already using her console to manipulate the computer’s transcription of the message. “Sir, these are coordinates.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The main message is a star map. But the map is encoded in the message. The sounds we’re hearing are the coordinates. Except, there are two overlapping sets of coordinates. One points to our current location, and the other to another location on the star map.”

  Husher glanced at Shota. “Pretty efficient.”

  The XO nodded. “I’m guessing the other coordinates point to where they’d like us to go.”

  “Winterton, what are sensors telling us about that Scion group?”

  “They’re moving away from us, sir.”

  “Overlay the coordinates that Fontaine has extracted. See if their current path will take them near that other location.”

  Husher was pretty sure he knew the answer, but he waited patiently for his officers to work. Just as Winterton confirmed that the Scion were heading toward the coordinates, the Coms officer swiveled in his chair.

  “Sir,” Long said. “Transmission from the Providence. She just dropped out of warp.”

  “The admiral’s not going to like this,” Shota said.

  “You never know. Long, brief the admiral on the message, then patch him through to the main viewscreen.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “So they just want us to follow them?” Iver said once he was up to speed. “And we don’t know anything about where they want to go?”

  “To be fair,” Husher said, “there aren’t many locations they could direct us to in this universe that we would know anything about.”

  Iver shook his head. “I don’t like it one damn bit.”

  “I’m with you, sir. Unfortunately, I’m struggling to see a better course of action.”

  “Are you? Because not following them seems like a better course of action to me.”

  Husher shook his head, again surprised by Iver’s short-sightedness. Had he simply been spending too much time pushing pencils? Had he forgotten how to properly evaluate risk?

  Of course this was risky But there were good risk and bad risks. Trying to save the Scion to make friends was a good risk. Attacking the Brood without knowing anything about them was a bad risk. And yet in both scenarios, Iver had been on exactly the wrong side of the equation.

  Husher had a feeling his math on this one wasn’t going to be any better. “If we stay here and don’t follow them, then all our efforts to save them were in vain. The point of saving them was to try and make an ally here.”

  “But we don’t know if we’ve made an ally or just another enemy,” said Iver. “You’re assuming that just because they didn’t attack us like the Brood, they’re our friends. But it’s just as possible that if they’d encountered us before the Brood had, they would have attacked us too.”

  “Sir,” Shota broke in. “That distress signal that we got. It was clearly from the Scion. They were the ones looking for help.”

  “And look where that got us,” Iver snapped. “We tracked the signal to its origin, and we were ambushed.”

  Shota sat back, frowning. “You think they were colluding?”

  “I’m not drawing conclusions, only pointing out that we shouldn’t just blindly follow them.”

  “I agree,” Husher said. “We’ll want to exercise caution. But I don’t think not following them is an option we can afford to explore, sir.”

  Iver seemed to mull it over. “Very well, but we don’t warp. I don’t care how long it takes us, I don’t want the fleet dropping out of transit right on top of that location. It’s too easy to set a trap for us that way.”

  Husher turned to his helmsman. “Can we reach those coordinates without warp?”

  Moens shrugged. “Sure. This system is so small, it’ll only take about twelve hours. We could shave a couple of hours if we hustle.”

  Husher nodded, refocusing on the main screen. “Sir, I understand the concerns you have, and I share them. But I don’t think we have a choice in this. We have to go to those coordinates, and see what the Scion can offer us. If we run into the Brood again, and they realize we sent the wrong Husher…well, they’ll probably be even less friendly than before.”

  Husher had been trying not to think about the swap with the Brood. He hated everything about it, and just mentioning it seemed to create an uncomfortable and awkward silence on the com. They still didn’t understand why the Brood had asked for Husher. He had no idea how they’d known he was here, let alone to ask for him.

  Then there was the fact that they’d sentenced a man to a fate worse than death. The Husher from the Progenitor system was
evil. He’d been the one that had tortured Fesky to within an inch of her life. He’d ordered the deaths of thousands of Husher’s friends and fellow soldiers, and he’d promised to kill millions more. He didn’t deserve mercy. But Husher wasn’t sure he deserved whatever they’d done to him.

  Husher also couldn’t shake a nagging feeling of cowardice, for sending his double instead of himself. It would have been idiocy to abandon his command, his battle group—it would have hurt humanity far more than it would have helped. But the feeling nagged him still.

  “If the Brood figure out what we did,” Iver said, “then they’ll realize we did nothing wrong. Like it or not, Vin, that was you. And if they knew so much about us to ask for you by name, they should have known enough to know that we had two of you onboard.”

  Husher felt something about that sentence tug at his mind. The Brood should have known there were two Hushers onboard. Did they? Had Husher played right into the Brood’s hands? Had he done exactly what they’d expected him to do?

  Before he could travel farther with that train of thought, Iver stood. “I’ve made a decision. We’ll follow them at standard speed. And in twelve hours, we’ll see what there is to see.”

  Chapter 35

  Main DFAC

  UHC Relentless

  Zed was nervous. He shouldn’t be. Things were going great with Claire. But for some reason, he felt sick. He’d thrown up twice. And now that he was here in the mess, he could feel the sweat on his face.

  He was gross. That was all there was to it. There was no reason someone like Claire should be interested in him, and now he was going to show her. Show her his true, awkward, stupid self. He was going to blow it.

  “Hi,” he said, trying to plop down nonchalantly next to Claire. After the date last week had ended in Claire’s quarters, he’d been sucked into the stupid quarantine mess down in Engineering. He hadn’t seen her for four days. He couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d simply forget who he was, or pretend things had never happened between them.